Shadows of Treachery

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Shadows of Treachery Page 13

by Edited by Christian Dunn


  ‘Will you walk with me, Rogal Dorn?’

  ‘Are there not matters of state that require your attention, even at this hour, sir? The Council will bemoan your absence from the debating table.’

  ‘The Council can manage for a while without me,’ Malcador replied. ‘I like to take the air at this time of night. The Imperium never rests, but at night, up here in the thin air of the old Himalazia, I find there is at least an illusion of rest, a time to think and free the mind. I walk. I close my eyes. The stars do not go out because I am not looking at them.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Dorn.

  Malcador laughed. ‘No, not yet.’

  They said little at first. They left the Investiary and walked along the beige stones of the Precinct’s highest terraces, between the weeping fountains. They walked as far as Lion’s Gate, onto the platforms that overlooked the docking rings and landing fields of the Brahmaputra Plateau. The Gate had once been a thing of magnificence, two gilded beasts rising up to lock claws in a feral dispute. Dorn’s order of works had replaced them with giant grey donjons stippled with casemates and macro-gun ports. A curtain wall of bleak rockcrete encircled the gate, its edge fletched with void field vanes like the spines of some prehistoric reptile.

  They stood and considered it for a long time.

  ‘I am not a subtle man,’ Malcador said, at length.

  Dorn raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Malcador, ‘perhaps I am. Guile comes easily to a politician. I know I am considered cunning.’

  ‘An old word, with no more meaning than “wise”,’ Dorn replied.

  ‘Indeed. I will accept that as a compliment. All I meant to say was, I will not attempt to be subtle now.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘The Emperor has expressed his concerns.’

  ‘Meaning?’ Dorn asked.

  Malcador answered with a slight sigh. ‘He understands you are filled with misgivings.’

  ‘Only natural, I would think, given the circumstances,’ said Dorn.

  The Sigillite nodded. ‘He trusts you to undertake the defence. He counts on you. Terra must not fall, no matter what Horus brings. This palace must not fall. If it is to end here, then it must end in our triumph. But he knows, and I know, and you know, that any defence is only as strong as its weakest part: faith, belief, trust.’

  ‘What are you telling me?’

  ‘If there is doubt in your heart, then that is our weakness.’

  Dorn looked away. ‘My heart is sad because of what I have been made to do to this place. That’s all it is.’

  ‘Is it? I don’t think so. What are you really afraid of?’

  Malcador raised his hand and the lights in his chambers came on. Dorn looked around. He had never entered the Sigillite’s private apartments before. Ancient images hung on the walls: flaking, fragile things of wood, canvas and decomposing pigments, preserved in thin, blue fields of stasis; the smoke-pale portrait of a woman with the most curious smile; garish yellow flowers rendered in thick paint; the unflinching, rheumy gaze of an old fleshy man, cast in shadow, tobacco brown.

  Along another wall hung old tattered banners showing the thunderbolt and lightning strike sigil of the Pre-Unity armies. Suits of armour – perfect, glinting thunder armour – were mounted in shimmering suspension zones.

  Malcador offered Dorn wine, which he refused, and a seat, which he accepted.

  ‘I have made a certain peace with myself,’ Dorn said. ‘I understand what I am afraid of.’

  Malcador nodded. He had pulled back his cowl and the light shone on his long white hair. He sipped from his glass. ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘I do not fear anyone. Not Horus, not Fulgrim, none of them. I fear the cause. I fear the root of their enmity.’

  ‘You fear what you don’t understand.’

  ‘Exactly. I am at a loss to know what drives the Warmaster and his cohorts. It is an alien thing to me, quite defying translation. A strong defence relies on knowing what you are defending against. I can raise all the bulwarks and curtain walls and cannon-bastions I like, and I still won’t know what it is I’m fighting.’

  ‘Perceptive,’ said Malcador, ‘and true of us all. I fancy even the Emperor doesn’t fully understand what it is that drives Horus against us so furiously. Do you know what I think?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  Malcador shrugged. ‘I believe it is better that we don’t know. To understand it would be to understand insanity. Horus is quite mad. Chaos is inside him.’

  ‘You say that as if Chaos is a… thing.’

  ‘It is. Does that surprise you? You’ve known the warp and seen its corrupting touch, that’s Chaos. It has touched humanity now, twisted our brightest and best. All we can do is remain true to ourselves and fend it off, deny it. Trying to understand it is a fool’s errand. It would claim us too.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Don’t see, Rogal Dorn, and you will live longer. All you can do is acknowledge your fear. That’s all any of us can do. Recognise it for what it is: your pure, human sanity rocked by the sight of the warp’s infecting, suffocating madness.’

  ‘Is this what the Emperor believes?’ asked Dorn.

  ‘It’s what he knows. It’s what he knows he doesn’t know. Sometimes, my friend, there is salvation in ignorance.’

  Dorn sat still for a while. Malcador watched him, occasionally sipping from his glass.

  ‘Well, I thank you for your time, sir,’ said Dorn eventually. ‘Your candour too. I should–’

  ‘There is one other thing,’ said Malcador, setting his glass down and rising to his feet. ‘Something I want to show you.’

  Malcador crossed the chamber, and took something from a drawer in an old bureau. He walked back to Dorn, and spread that something out on the low table between them.

  Dorn opened his mouth but no sound issued. Fear gripped him.

  ‘You recognise these, of course.’

  Old cards, worn and fraying, discoloured and liver-spotted with time. One by one, Malcador laid them out.

  ‘The Lesser Arcanoi, just gaming trinkets really, but used widely before the coming of Old Night for divination. This deck was made on Nostramo Quintus.’

  ‘He used them,’ Dorn breathed.

  ‘Yes, he did. He relied on them. He believed in cartomancy. He dealt his fate out, night after haunted night, and watched how the cards fell.’

  ‘Oh, Holy Terra…’

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’ Malcador asked, looking up. ‘You are quite pale.’

  Dorn nodded. ‘Curze.’

  ‘Yes, Curze. Had you forgotten him, or simply blocked him out? You have bickered and sparred with many of your brothers over the years, but only Konrad Curze ever hurt you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He nearly killed you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On Cheraut, long ago,’

  ‘I remember it well enough!’

  Malcador looked up at Dorn. The primarch had risen to his feet. ‘Then sit back down and tell me, because I wasn’t there.’

  Dorn sat. ‘This is so long ago or like another life. We had brought the Cheraut system to compliance. It was hard fought. The Emperor’s Children, the Night Lords and my Fists, we affected compliance. But Curze didn’t know when to stop. He never knew when to stop.’

  ‘And you rebuked him?’

  ‘He was an animal. Yes, I rebuked him. Then Fulgrim told me.’

  ‘Told you what?’

  Dorn closed his eyes. ‘The Phoenician told me what Curze had told him: the fits, the seizures that had plagued Curze since his childhood on Nostramo, the visions. Curze said he had seen the galaxy in flames, the Emperor’s legacy overthrown, legionaries turning on legionaries. It was all lies, an insult to our creed!’

  ‘You confronted Curze?’

>   ‘And he attacked me. He would have killed me, I think. He is insane. That’s why we drove him out, sick of his bloodletting. That’s why he burned his home world and took his Night Lords off into the darkest parts of the stars.’

  Malcador nodded, and continued to deal the cards. ‘Rogal, he is what you are truly afraid of, because he is fear incarnate. No other primarch uses terror as a weapon like Curze does. You are not afraid of Horus and his sallow heretics. You are afraid of the fear that sides with him, the night terror that advances alongside the traitors.’

  Dorn sat back and breathed out. ‘He has haunted me, I confess. All this time, he has haunted me.’

  ‘Because he was right. His visions were true. He saw this Heresy coming in his visions. That is the truth you fear. You wish you had listened.’

  Dorn looked down at the cards laid out on the table before him. ‘Do you believe in this divination, Sigillite?’

  ‘Let’s see,’ said Malcador, turning the cards over one by one: the Moon, the Martyr and the Monster, the Dark King askew across the Emperor.

  One other card, the Lightning Tower.

  Dorn groaned. ‘A bastion, blown out by lightning. A palace brought to ruin by fire. I’ve seen enough.’

  ‘The card has many meanings,’ said Malcador. ‘Like the Death card, it is not as obvious as it seems. In the hives of Nord Merica, it symbolised a change in fortune, an overturning of fate. To the tribes of Franc and Tali, it signified knowledge or achievement obtained through sacrifice. A flash of inspiration, if you will, one that tumbles the world you know down, but leaves you with a greater gift.’

  ‘The Dark King lies across the Emperor,’ said Dorn, pointing.

  Malcador sniffed. ‘It’s not exactly a science, my friend.’

  They had blown their way through the massive earthwork defences at Haldwani and Xigaze. The sky at the top of the world was on fire. Despite the bombardments of the orbital platforms and the constant sorties of the Stormbirds and the Hawkwings, the Traitor Legions advanced, up through the Brahmaputra, along the delta of the Karnali. Continental firestoms raged across Gangetic Plain.

  As they entered the rampart outworks of the palace, the streaming, screaming multitudes and the striding war machines were greeted by monsoons of firepower. Every emplacement along the Dhawalagiri Prospect committed its weapons. Las reached out in neon slashes, annihilating everything it touched. Shells fell like sleet. Titans exploded, caught fire, collapsed on their faces and crushed the warriors swarming around their heels. Still they came. Lancing beams struck the armour-reinforced walls like lightning, like lighting smiting a tower.

  The walls fell. They collapsed like slumping glaciers. Gold-cased bodies spilled out, tumbling down in the deluge.

  The palace began to burn. Primus Gate fell; Lion’s Gate, subjected to attack from the north; Annapurna Gate. At the Ultimate Gate, the Traitors finally sliced into the palace, slaughtering everyone they found inside. Around every broken gate, the corpses of Titans piled up in vast, jumbled heaps where they had fallen over each other in their desire to break in. The heretic host clambered across their carcasses, pouring into the palace, yelling out the name of their–

  ‘End simulation,’ said Dorn.

  He gazed down at the hololithic table. At his command, the forces of the enemy withdrew, unit by unit, and the palace rebuilt itself. The smoke cleared.

  ‘Reset parameters to Horus, Perturabo, Angron and Curze.’

  ‘Opposition?’ the table queried.

  ‘Imperial Fists, Blood Angels, White Scars. Resume and replay scenario.’

  The map flickered. Armies advanced. The palace began to burn again.

  ‘Play it out, simulation after simulation, if you like,’ said the voice behind him. ‘Simulations are just simulations. I know you won’t fail me when the time comes.’

  Dorn turned. ‘I would never knowingly fail you, Father,’ he said.

  ‘Then don’t be afraid. Don’t let fear get in your way.’

  What are you afraid of? What are you really afraid of?

  The Lightning Tower, thought Rogal Dorn. I understand its meaning: achievement obtained through sacrifice. I’m just afraid of what that sacrifice might be.

  Two microns to the left. Now four down. There… Adept Third Class Pallas Ravachol adjusted the fine callipers that slid from his fingertips, watching with smug satisfaction as the hardwired doctrina wafer slid smoothly through the cerebral cortex of the servitor’s brain (or at least what the lobotomisation process had left of its brain) and into the medulla oblongata.

  ‘No one knows servitors like me,’ he said as fibrous tendrils wormed their way from the wafer and into the grey matter of the brain. With the new doctrina wafer meshing nicely, he rotated the servitor’s gleaming alloy cranial cap back and lifted a portable cutter to snap the bolts into place that protected the servitor’s brain from harm. He placed the damaged wafer into the pouch that hung from his tool belt, careful to ensure he didn’t mix it up it with the functioning ones. He shuddered as he imagined the consequences of placing a damaged wafer in the brain of a battle robot or implanting a combat sequence into the mind of a loader servitor.

  ‘There you go,’ he said as he pushed the last bolt into place and the servitor stood from the surgical recliner, its grey flesh pallid and unhealthy. Half human, half machine, the servitor’s arms had been replaced with pneumatic lifters and what little of its head remained had been augmented by the addition of visual mass readers. ‘Now be off with you. Go back and rejoin Adept Zeth’s loading crews. The 63rd Expedition needs her weapons and shells if the Warmaster is to pacify Isstvan.’

  Of course, the servitor didn’t answer, simply turning on the spot and marching from the chamber, in which half a dozen more damaged servitors awaited Ravachol’s ministrations or the removal of any mechanical parts worthy of reclamation from the flesh that housed them.

  Such work was beneath an adept of Ravachol’s skill, but he knew he had only himself to blame for his current situation, and in any case, such work was what had brought him to the attention of his new master, High Adept Lukas Chrom of the Martian forges.

  Having seen that the servitors coming back from Ravachol’s workshops were working faster, more efficiently and with greater precision, Chrom had inquired after him. Within the week, he had found himself packing his meagre possessions and taking his leave from his former master, Adept Urtzi Malevolus, and making his way towards the Mondus Gamma facility of Mars for immediate reassignment.

  Most of the Martian adepts cared little for cranial engineering where servitors were concerned, but Ravachol enjoyed such work. After all, only by knowing the mechanics of a human brain inside out could a man hope to understand the mechanics of a robot brain.

  Such ruminations inevitably led his guilty thoughts to the Kaban Project itself…

  He pushed such thoughts aside and tried to concentrate on the work before him, a Praetorian battle servitor whose weapon had malfunctioned and exploded on a test range. The weapon was beyond repair, but the augmetics grafted to its chest and the targeting mechanisms that formed the bulk of its skull were by no means lost.

  As he stared at the scorched metal of the servitor’s skull, he scratched idly at his own skin with the gently waving mechadendrites of his hand. Unusually for an adept of Mars, Ravachol was largely composed of flesh and blood, with the exception of his left hand, which had been replaced with a bionic one on his sixteenth year.

  His thoughts kept returning to the Kaban machine, and he guiltily turned from the damaged Praetorian to make his way from the workshop and into the steel corridors of the forge temple. He knew he’d have to work another double shift to get the servitors online again, but decided it would be worth it to spend some more time in the presence of the Kaban machine.

  Ravachol knew that he had a natural affinity with robots and their programming, but whoever had a
uthored the code on the doctrina wafers that comprised the Kaban machine’s systems was an order of magnitude beyond him. He doubted it was Adept Chrom, who, though brilliant in other regards, appeared to have little or no interest in the field of integrated battle wetware.

  The corridors of the forge temple were dimly lit, the lumen globes floating above him kept at a level that blurred the passage of time so that no matter where you were or what time of day your body told you it was, you could have no external reference. But as an adept rose through the ranks of the Mechanicum, such concerns as day and night became largely irrelevant.

  Hissing spigots and thick bundles of pipes and cables threaded the corridors, each one filled with bustle as servitors and messenger robots on wheels, tracks and spindly legs moved to and fro. He nodded to robed adepts who passed him, ignoring their looks of pity or revulsion at the flesh of his face and hand. Some of these adepts had lived for centuries, their lives extended by cybernetics grafted to their bodies in service of the Blessed Omnissiah – the Machine-God of the Martian Priesthood. As he passed each adept, he noted how they had been blessed and vowed that one day he too would be similarly favoured by the Machine-God, despite the Emperor’s avowed distaste for such things.

  He passed the Temple of the Frictionless Piston, where Adept Herysto developed technologies plundered from the Yndonesic Bloc a hundred years ago, when Mars had been at war with Terra.

  Droning, mechanical prayers poured from the Shrine of Velrersk, where row upon row of red-robed adepts knelt bowing in perfect unison before the burnished chrome statue of the long dead discoverer of the Ceramite Press STC.

  Ravachol nodded his head respectfully in the direction of the temple before heading deeper into an altogether more secure area of the forge temple. Silver-skinned skitarii in red cloaks stood sentinel over temples where more secretive work was undertaken, their armour gleaming and bonded to their flesh with bionic enhancements that boosted their strength and endurance.

 

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