by Various
‘We were the foremost of the Emperor’s Legions,’ says Severian. ‘None could match our tally of compliance. I am a Luna Wolf, and my loyalty is beyond question.’
‘A lot can happen in two centuries,’ said Nagasena. ‘Hearts can change.’
‘Mortal hearts, not Legion hearts,’ spits Severian, looking him right in the eye. ‘So if you’re going to kill me, get on with it.’
‘Goodbye, Severian,’ says Nagasena, pulling the trigger.
The volkite pistol is an artificer-crafted relic of a bygone age, a weapon that has never once failed. Its workings are a mystery to him, but its lethality is beyond question, as is its reliability.
But this time, the pistol does not fire.
Before either Nagasena or Severian can react to the misfire, the arc-lights of the villa are snuffed out and a shriek of jets sounds overhead. A host of aircraft descend on columns of stab-lights. Nagasena shields his eyes as a score of grey-armoured soldiers descend through billowing winds on zip lines. Nagasena does not recognise them, for the firelight illuminates no insignia or rank markings upon their uniforms.
Their equipment is high-end tech, powerful hellguns, ablative shock-armour and full-visored helms with integral combat-augmetics. They quickly surround the downed tiltjet with their guns aimed squarely at Severian’s head and heart.
None of the soldiers speak, and Nagasena slides down the buckled fuselage of the flyer as the last of his strength bleeds out of him. Movement draws his eye, and he lifts his weary head. Through the burning gateway walks a dark man, clad in a hooded robe and flanked by a dozen slender women in gold, form-fitting armour. The red and ivory of their helm-plumes twist in the thermal vortices.
They are the Sisters of Silence, and there can be only one reason they are here.
The dark man pulls back his hood, revealing a tense, patrician face, framed by long white hair pulled in a scalp-lock. His eyes are old, perhaps the oldest Nagasena has ever seen, and a pale light dances in them like snow falling through moonbeams.
‘Lord Malcador?’ asks Nagasena.
The Regent of Terra nods and says, ‘Your pistol, Yasu. Point it in the air if you please.’
Nagasena does so, and as soon as it is vertical a thin beam of incandescent energy cuts the night. The tension in Malcador’s face visibly relaxes and colour returns to his features.
‘The mechanisms of the volkite are complex and require a great deal of effort to confound,’ says Malcador. ‘Even for one such as I.’
‘You prevented my gun from firing?’
‘I did, for I have need of the Luna Wolf,’ says Malcador as a group of the grey soldiers carry Vadok Singh from the wreckage and into the villa. Another group free Severian with cutting gear and las-torches. His weight is enormous, and it takes six of them to lift him clear. His genhanced physique will be dulling the agony of his broken legs, but the pallor of his skin is testament to his pain. The Sisters of Silence surround Severian, and his face betrays a strange revulsion at the presence of the mute order.
Between them, they bear the wounded Space Marine up to the landing platform, where a black aircraft with a non-reflective hull descends from the darkness. The craft hovers just above the platform, and an assault ramp extends from its centre section. The silent sisterhood take Severian aboard, the assault ramp is retracted and the black ship rises on a near-silent repulsor field.
Nagasena groans and Malcador waves a pair of soldiers to his side. They have no markings, but bind his wounds with the expertise of battlefield medicae. One man readies a hypo of pain balm, but Nagasena shakes his head.
‘Lord Dorn wanted Severian dead,’ he says. ‘Why do you need him alive?’
Malcador turns, and the firelight from the burning flyer gives his features a harsh, calculating appearance: a regicide grandmaster whose pieces are living beings and who knows full well the cost of the decisions he takes.
‘We are at war, Yasu, a war for our very survival,’ says Malcador. ‘Lord Dorn fights his battles with guns and warriors. I wage a war of greater subtlety – a silent war, if you will, and I require men of singular talents to fight it.’
‘What talent does Severian have that brings the Sigillite looking for him?’
‘The Luna Wolf is a unique individual,’ says Malcador. ‘A latent psyker whose powers are so instinctual he does not even realise he has them.’
‘A psyker?’
Malcador nods. ‘One whose powers were only truly awakened when Magnus the Red sent his, shall we say, ill-advised message to Terra. In the years since then, Severian’s innate abilities have grown into something quite special, oh yes, quite special indeed.’
‘Years?’ asks Nagasena. ‘It was the Crimson King’s psychic attack that allowed the prisoners to escape from Khangba Marwu. That was only a few days ago.’
Malcador nods, then sees Nagasena’s confusion. ‘Ah, yes, I can see how it would appear that way from the outside, but Magnus sent his warning about Horus to Terra two years ago. It almost ripped the Palace apart, but the Emperor’s wards were able to contain it from escaping. A host of psykers from the Hollow Mountain attempted to dissipate that enormous reservoir of power before it broke the psychic levees, but the energies Magnus unleashed eventually overcame them. And the entire world felt the results of that. But mark my words, it could have been worse, a lot worse.’
Nagasena tries to process this information, but the pain from his wounds is overwhelming his thought processes. He feels a jab in his thigh and calming warmth spreads through him.
‘Lord Dorn will want to know of my hunt,’ he says. ‘What will I tell him?’
‘Leave me to worry about Rogal,’ chuckles Malcador.
‘And Singh? What will he tell of this night’s events?’
‘Vadok Singh has an impressionable psyche,’ says Malcador. ‘He will remember what I need him to remember.’
‘You would lie to Lord Dorn?’ asks Nagasena.
Malcador shakes his head and says, ‘Rogal and I have somewhat differing views on the means by which we must fight Horus. He has his knights, and I will soon have mine. Where his will blaze with fire and fury, my grey angels will move unseen through the Imperium. Severian will be part of that.’
Malcador’s eyes bore into Nagasena, and he hears the Sigillite’s next words echoing in the farthest reaches of his mind.
‘And so will you.’
Severian faces his pursuer
Army Of One
Rob Sanders
Through the super-chilled methalon mist – a face.
It burns into my brain through the neural link. That face. A face I know…
I blunder through my nightmares. The realm of the half-remembered, a labyrinth of nonsensical gloom.
I am at once alone, a shanty urchin shivering in the squalor and shadow of the mighty primus hive. The chemical stench of the drosshill stings my nostrils, as once it did.
I snort and find myself a bag-of-bones youth, trampled in the crush of the Imperial Army recruitment drive amid whispers of a great war coming to Proxima Apocryphis. The Apocryphadi Hort will play its noble part. I wait three days in an unruly line, however, just to hear the caustic laughter of the subaltern and his watchdog sergeant. I turn to walk away.
I storm straight into the cacophony of gunfire. The underhive, running with the Thunderbloods. I taste the copper thrill of a firefight, the stub rounds flying and stiletto blades flashing amongst the rust-choked palisades. This is Tritus Falls. We’re in Gundog territory – and by we I mean me and Fluke. I remember the hot passage of the betrayer’s shot through my back-flesh and the scrape of his fleeing footsteps as he left me for dead. Left me to the Gundogs. To the brutality of Marshal Corquoran and his hive enforcers. To the solitary madness of a two-by-two standing-cell in the cramped incarcetoria. To bicep-building hard labour on the spire construction chain-crews.
From the nosebleed heights I am bagged, bought and dragged to a cell once more. A slave-cage. A holding pen for one of primus hive’s many gladiatorial pits. I am an animal that lives only to bring death to others. An animal that catches the eye of one Baron Chravius Blumolotov – bloated nephew of the equally bloated primus and planetary Lord-Governor. He attends my cell at night – when my bloody work is done – and runs his fat fingers through my gore-clotted hair. An inbred’s thanks. A fiend’s mercy.
‘My loyal subject,’ he soothes.
But once more my blood finds its price. An offworlder’s offer even the broken baron can’t refuse.
A long, long darkness away, I rediscover my dread in agonies and desecrations of the flesh no pit fighter or ganger could ever dream of inflicting. I find… the Clade and their torturous gift of a new existence. My body becomes their work of dark art: a surgical sculpture of genetic and cybernetic augmentation. Hypertrophic muscular barbarism, draped across a broken, restructured, then reinforced endoskeletal frame. I become for them a torrent of chemical warfare. My blood curdles and my veins broil with combat drugs and infusions of such enslaving potency that I am doomed never to know life without them. Psycho-indoctrination shatters whatever is left of me hiding within the Clade’s monstrous creation. I am catastrophe. I am cold rage. I am wanton destruction – distilled and directed. A living weapon to be deployed.
I am Eversor.
Only then do I meet the architect of my deadly design. The one they call the Sigillite. He instils in my multi-hearts the depths of an Emperor’s love and the abyssal hatred I must hold for his enemies. From his lips I hear my name spoken for the first time in a seeming eternity.
‘Ganimus…’
Through the neurolink he shows me that face. The face I know. ‘Ganimus…’ the Sigillite says. ‘This man is now counted amongst our enemies. He is the Warmaster’s pawn. A faithless heretic. You must end this man, Ganimus – and all who stand with him.’
The super-chilled methalon mist clears.
Cryo-suspension is itself suspended. I hear the howl of atmospheric descent tearing at the pod plating as I drop like a bomb, like a thunderbolt, like the Emperor’s vengeance through the lead-scorched skies. Impact jolts me from my mission-nightmare. The cortex downlink is complete. My assignment is a mind-crippling master that must be obeyed. My target is everything – he draws me with the irresistible gravity of a star. The unquenchable rage is all my own.
I rip my way out of the pod’s plating as if it were a metal womb. My midnight bodyglove barely contains my gruesome potential. Pumped to monstrosity – a grotesque, hewn from flesh and hate – I step once more out onto the ash of Proxima Apocryphis. Out into the shadow of the primus hive and the chill gloom I once called home. I draw my executioner pistol from my belt and extend the hypodermic fingertips of my toxin-primed neuro-gauntlet.
Through the optics of my skull helmet I see the Horusian banners flying from the palace spire. The Warmaster’s single eye, watching my assassin’s approach. One boot in front of the other – each stride growing with speed and fury – up through the drosshill slums. And then the killing begins. And it doesn’t stop.
I feed on death. Hivers, factory menials and warring gangers – all die before my bloody path. I sate my appetite for destruction. Smoke stacks fall, factories collapse, infernos rage. Like a beast, I tear through the enforcers despatched to drop me before bringing battle to the traitor hortmen of the Apocryphadi Third. In the habs I become the great war they’ve got coming to them, slaughtering simple soldiers in their droves before ripping the heart out of their heretic command. I leave the Warmaster naught but dumbfounded youth and the craven dead. I explode up through the spire palaces like a rising monster of the deep. Awash with the blue blood of my betters, I tear the rich and powerful limb from limb, until finally I am granted a rare audience with the primus Lord-Governor.
That face. The face I know.
‘I am the Emperor’s loyal subject,’ Chravius Blumolotov blubs, baron no more.
‘No,’ I whisper. ‘But I am.’
My voice trembles. I am beyond words now. I can no longer contain the carnage I am about to wreak. I am Eversor. And I become vengeance.
The Gates of Terra
Nick Kyme
‘We have not always seen eye to eye, you and I,’ said one. He had a cultured voice, ageing but redolent with power. The cadence of a statesman or a political negotiator. In the ancient days of Old Earth, the Romanii Empire would have employed such men as spymasters. ‘But here we stand fighting a war on two fronts, our purpose aligned at last.’
‘Our purpose has ever been the same,’ said the other. His timbre was much deeper and it put the first speaker in mind, as it always did, of a stone-clad vault. There was no compromise in his tone. It, like him, was solid and unyielding. And yet, the other was asking for just that. Compromise. ‘It is our methods that differ.’ There was power here too, but martial rather than esoteric. He exuded strength, this one; strength and intimidation.
‘Immediacy versus longevity, the two need not be mutually exclusive. Wars are won with more than bolters and blades.’ He was just a man, the first speaker, a lesser being than the titan towering over him, but his presence was the equal of the other’s physical stature. ‘But we are in agreement?’ he asked, ensuring the warrior understood the precise nature of their compact. To do anything other could potentially undermine everything they sought to achieve in the breaking of their Father’s law. ‘Since Nikaea, things have changed.’
The warrior’s silence suggested his discomfort at the plan, but he slowly nodded.
‘We do this for the new Imperium,’ said the first speaker. ‘The ends justify the means. We are talking about survival.’
Again silence, then the slightest frown cracked the warrior’s craggy countenance. He wanted to be away from this place, to be back at the walls where his unique gifts could be best employed. This praetorian was not one given to skulking in shadows and talking in whispers.
‘Our first priority must be stopping the fleet from breaching our atmosphere. If we can halt them there, we can defeat them. Horus Lupercal might never reach the walls.’ The first speaker narrowed his eyes, suggesting they both knew that was a very unlikely scenario.
‘My brother…’ It was hard to say, and the warrior’s lips curled when he used the word. Atrocities beyond comprehension, fratricide on a terrible scale had soured respect and killed any bonds of brotherhood between them. Barely daring to admit it even to himself, the praetorian wanted Horus to breach the cordon so he could crush him against the gates. Gauntleted hands became fists, the jaw locked and words slipped through a portcullis of clenched teeth. ‘He will reach the wall.’
‘Then we must use every weapon at our disposal. To do anything else would result in defeat for mankind.’
The warrior exhaled, long and deep, as if all his misgivings and reservations could be expelled with a single breath. ‘I am uncomfortable with this.’
‘Of course you are. This is why I need your confidence. This is why it had to be only you that knew about it. We do not tread lightly over our Father’s edicts.’
‘He is not your father.’
‘He is Father to all of us, lord praetorian, is He not?’
Meeting the statesman’s gaze, the warrior’s voice sank to an abyssal whisper.
‘He must never know.’
Something was seeping from his ear. It ran down the lobe and across his cheek until it touched the hard floor underneath him. Twisting and coiling inside his mind, faint echoes of its intrusion lingered in his psyche like the shreds of a half-remembered dream. Serpentine and insidious, it left a cooling trail in its wake. It was warm at first, and carried a metallic stink.
Like armoured shutters, Arcadese’s eyes snapped open. Blood was seeping from his ear.
I am wounded.
But he could not recall any battle where he had sustained injury.
Clad in pitted battleplate, he knew he was a warrior, felt it in the slow returning strength of his arm, the martial instincts flooding his brain with action and counter-action, the pulse of adrenaline urging him to move.
Legiones…
Pushing up onto his knees, the split ceramite of his armour shrieked a warning and he felt the pain of his injuries anew. Agony flared down his side, white-hot and angry. He crushed it down, wiped the blood from his scarred face with a gauntleted hand and rose to his feet.
‘Report.’ His voice sounded alien, cracked and rasping from lack of use. Instinct compelled the word. It was all Arcadese had to go on. Stone walls, buttressed and adamantium-reinforced, enfolded him. This place was strange and yet familiar.
‘Holding, lord-captain,’ a warrior in cobalt-blue power armour replied. He carried the Ultima upon his left pauldron; the mark of Guilliman’s Legion, the same as Arcadese. This warrior was his company brother, but he could not remember his name.
‘Lieutenant…’ he managed, recognising the rank markings on his battleplate. ‘Help me to my station.’
‘At once, lord-captain.’
Thunder sounded within the confines of the fortress, booming from the two pairs of macro-cannons emplaced in the fortress’ walls far to the left and right of Arcadese’s command throne. Each was manned by a company brother, Ultramarines whom Arcadese should know but did not recognise.
Sitting down, the control ports of the throne jacking in to his armour, he tried to capture some sense of the reality around him, but it was indistinct. The ‘now’ of the moment was visceral, tangible, but possessed no context. Like pieces of an image resolving through a haze, Arcadese began to assemble the disparate elements of his situation.
I have been wounded, he knew. A head injury.
Through a broad vertical slit directly in front of him, a distant battle was being fought. Massed ranks of infantry and armoured columns ploughed across a killing field on a collision course with a slew of drop pods, descending to earth on contrails of fire. Even with the limited view afforded through the vision slit, Arcadese had never seen so many.