by Nick Kyme
Horus was coming, so the wind said, and the wind reeked of oil and death.
Cartur glanced behind him, but couldn’t see his pursuer any more. He wasn’t entirely sure he had seen it the first time but he knew someone was after him. He had felt it, and he had learned in his inordinately long life to trust his feelings.
He looked up, hoping to catch a glimpse of the sky and reaffirm his bearings. It had been a long time since he had come this low, hoping now the obscurity of the place would keep him safe.
Through parting clouds of greasy smog, he caught a glimpse of an ugly cadaver-yellow sky. He saw flags too.
Banners still flew from the higher spires professing allegiance to Terra and the Throne. The slogans in the lower sinks, the truly foetid underbelly, were less defiant. They prophesied an ending, a cessation of all things and a slow degeneration into despair.
From this angle, it was easier to guess which side might have the right of it.
Heart hammering, his rebreather mask almost spent, Cartur hurried on. He checked his sidearm first, the ammo gauge flashing green, reassuring him he had a maxed-out clip and another round ready in the breech.
He was running again when he flipped a hexagonal orientation-lens over his right eye to review the lower-quadrant Tartus map schematic.
‘Nearly there,’ he gasped, and baulked at how terrified his voice sounded, and how much it echoed.
He took the tightest alleyways, the most circuitous route, and was beginning to think he might have escaped when he heard the thud of heavy boots. The dirty, mechanised growl of armour servos carried on the throbbing air.
Cartur risked another glance behind him, but failed to see the shadow skipping across the rooftops giving chase. He felt it though, a monstrous psychic presence that eclipsed Cartur’s meagre abilities.
There were two of them.
The other one, the hound he had come to think of him as, for he was tenacious and bled brutality like sweat from his pores, followed more overtly but the night was dark and the hound still far enough away that Cartur could not see him either. The mind of the hound felt very different. It hurt behind the eyes to try to touch it, a pain that grew to nausea-inducing agony when Cartur had tried to delve deeper into its subconscious, where he might extend some subtle influence.
He had always been gifted, he knew this even as a child. It manifested as a kind of profound luck, a second sight almost, that had kept him from harm. A pity, Cartur thought ruefully, that it had not warned him about the man who had come seeking him. Recruitment followed, into an order Cartur did not truly understand, but one he joined willingly, for he trusted the man and would go on to think of him as a friend. It had led to a long, long life. For Cartur had not always been who he was now. He had needed to change. A beggar, an artist, a mercenary, he had played the roles, adopted the personas. He had kept ahead of his own immortality. How curious, then, that it felt as if that supposedly endless existence was coming to a finale at last.
He needed to reach the man now, though not in person, for Cartur had no idea where he might be or what mission he might be engaged in for them. A message would have to suffice, cast out into the ether like a ship in a bottle.
Ahead, at last, the safe haven.
It loomed at the end of a wide, paved esplanade, a fortress of stone and steel. A short flight of steps led up to the esplanade from street level.
Cartur leapt the steps two at a time, his fear lending him urgency and strength.
As he reached a broad iron gate, the turret guns embedded in the paired watchtowers either side of the entrance tracked his movement. Flickering red targeting arrays painted his body.
Cartur delved into his uniform jacket, a black leather duster with a clenched fist holding a set of scales rendered in gold and patched over the left breast. He quickly pulled out his lock-stave and held it up to the tracking beams.
A few seconds lapsed that felt much longer, though he resisted the urge to look back again. They were coming, he knew, both of them – but now they would have to penetrate metre-thick rockcrete, face a pair of fully loaded autocannon turrets and overwhelm a precinct house’s entire garrison before they got to him.
A chime sounded, dull, resonant. As the gate slowly slid open, Cartur hoped these defences would give him enough time to reach the man he knew as John.
Slipping through a crack in the gate the moment it was wide enough to admit him, Cartur plunged inside the fortress precinct to immediately be met by his chief-proctor.
The man was broader than Cartur and a head taller in his grey combat armour. He clutched a shotgun across his chest, the icon of the fist and scales emblazoned proudly across his chest. A shock maul hung loosely from his belt, deactivated but fully charged.
‘Judge Umenedies,’ said the chief-proctor, an invitation to be given orders.
‘Seal the gate, Rench,’ replied Cartur, shucking off his black duster and reaching for a proffered carapace breastplate from one of the other troopers present.
Proctor Rench had assembled twenty men in full combat armour, all bar two of them armed with shotguns. The odd men out carried heavy-grade plasma guns, the stub-nosed Brutas-pattern variant common to hive law enforcement on this world.
The gate sequence reversed, locking bolts slamming into place with a dull metallic thud that boomed loudly in the draughty entrance hall.
‘Use burners, Rench – melt the damn thing shut.’
A slight tilt of the head suggested the chief-proctor wanted to know why, but discipline had been ingrained to such a degree that he obeyed without question, and snapped curt commands at two of his men to grab the necessary equipment and set to it.
‘You hold here. Do you understand, Rench?’
Rench nodded, grim, resigned.
Cartur had voxed ahead as soon as he realised he was being followed. He had given Rench a story about what was coming. Civil disobedience had become rife over the last few weeks, as if a fever had overtaken the populace and buried in them a root of such discord that it prompted mass acts of madness and insurrection. Privately, Cartur had wondered if there was something more than just mania stoking these fanatical flames. He had planned on leaving his current life and ‘retiring’ Cartur Umenedies. He had been here long enough and sometimes overheard comments about his ‘surprising youthfulness’. Comments led to investigation, which led to discovery. That could not be allowed to happen. He had decided that Cartur would be posted off-world. He would play the part, the fond farewell, the grateful peace after his many years of service. Once aboard the shuttle, it would be easy. Change attire, accent, subtle facial expressions. He would become someone else, and then he would return and the entire cycle would begin anew.
City-wide disorder, possibly country or even planetary-wide, had put paid to that. He had overstayed, become trapped, and now someone had come for him. At last.
The two troopers returned with the burners and started on the gate. Cartur was already moving by then, holstering his sidearm and taking a modified Phobos-pattern bolter handed to him by one of Rench’s men.
The chief-proctor was still shouting at his men, organising them into position as Cartur left the entrance hall and another reinforced door slammed shut and sealed behind him. He nodded to the ten troopers in the next room, an armoury, their brandished riot shields parting to let Cartur through.
A third door, also then sealed behind him, led Cartur to a vox-chamber, small enough to be cramped even for a man alone. Cartur sat down in the only chair and engaged the device on the desk in front of him. It looked like an old gramophone, the long tubular neck of the vox-corder leading all the way to a flaring receiver horn. Cartur leaned in, the low crackle of the vox-corder familiar but of little comfort. Outside an explosion sounded, muffled but close. The walls shook, dislodging a train of dust.
Then the lights died, and a red glow washed over everything as the em
ergency generatorium activated. Then the glow died too, and the darkness came.
Then men began to die.
Cartur heard gunfire. Relayed through two sealed doors, it sounded indistinct, distant. The shouts of dying men did not. That easily penetrated his aegis. Bringing the bolter had been foolish. It was of no use to him here, not any more. He had taken it out of fear and some misguided belief that he could live through this. He would not live through this, so Cartur leaned in again and started to speak.
Rench saw the doors blow off, a plosive charge tearing through their fixings with a roar, followed by a resonant clang of iron as they hit the ground.
He didn’t move. His men didn’t move. They held steady.
‘Targeters,’ he said, trying to sound commanding.
Twenty red beams flashed out into the darkness, sweeping and intersecting. A grenade bounced in from outside and every man tensed before smoke began to fill the entrance hall, turning the targeting beams grainy.
Respirators were slipped on, and Rench’s slow unsteady breathing filled his ears, magnified by his mask.
‘Hold position,’ he said, trying to sound confident across the vox-feed. Interrogatives from the sergeant in the next room flickered up on his flash-visor but he ignored them.
The smoke had crept to every nook and cranny, the room engulfed and the excess spilling outside. Something moved within it, too fast to see, too veiled to even feel. But this was not Rench’s killer. No, he came a moment later and made no attempt to hide.
The gunfire ended quickly. It ended with the resistance of his men, Cartur knew. He thought he had heard a rifle snap amongst the booming retorts of combat shotguns and the whine of plasma guns. Now it was over, and the air grew still again. The vox-corder crackled, dead air reigning for a few seconds. Using a dusty old keypad, Cartur punched in the transmit codes and was about to send the message when he felt a presence. Reaching for a pistol, an antique of alien-origin that he always kept in this room with the other anachronistic items, Cartur suddenly felt the knife at his neck. He half turned.
He would have begged for mercy, but the deed was ignoble and would do no good anyway. Instead, his eyes widened as he came face-to-face with his killer.
‘I did not think it would be you. I thought you–’
Cartur stopped talking. He was drowning in his own blood, a red cascade issuing from the gash in his throat, an over-wide smile that kept on growing until it bled him white.
Eldrad Ulthran stood over the man’s corpse. He did not know him, he had not been privy to all of the Cabal’s many operatives, but this one had been functionally immortal. At least, his life was long-lived. He had suspected the man would have had many in order to hide his gift. The others would be harder to kill, the ones who could regenerate tissue, but that was for another time. Even immortality had its shades. At least this one would not return and the skein of fate would be all the clearer for his absence.
Operating the vox-corder, marvelling at the crude, ancient and yet surprisingly functional apparatus, he listened to the man’s message.
It was a warning, to John. This one Eldrad did know. He had approached Grammaticus before and would need to do so again.
‘I can’t let him warn you, John,’ he murmured, and stretched out his hand. Lightning coursed through the apparatus, serpentine, pervasive, until all that remained was a smoking ruin and the last vestiges of dissipating corposant. And then even that was gone.
The door opened, his mind providing the impetus, and Eldrad smelled hot copper.
Then he stepped from the room to see what Narek had wrought.
Fourteen
A long-held truth, at last revealed
The Iron Fathers were not alone when Meduson met them.
The gathering took place in the shell of a large auditorium, its roof lost to age and war. Broken columns of the gothic style lay heaped about, appended by rumble and obscured by thick layers of dust.
Evidently, it had been abandoned for some time and whatever games had once played out inside its curving and artistically rendered walls had since faded to echoes of memory. Another lost culture had faded with it. Another world languishing in ruins like so many others, insignificant, unwatched. Meduson did not know its name. Some he knew, but not this one. It had a designation – ‘grey forge’. There had been ‘black forge’, ‘dark anvil’, ‘silver hand’. They had spent them all, for each place would only be used once before it was discarded.
If the galaxy keeps burning, all hidden places shall eventually run out.
As he walked across the arena floor, his war council, the primarch and his warriors in tow, Meduson wondered if perhaps the auditorium would see one last game played to its empty, dilapidated stands.
Kuleg Rawt and the other Fraters had brought a small army.
Medusan Immortals flanked their iron lords as still as statues, armed with breacher shields and sheathed chainblades. Depowered, dull-eyed servitors slumped at rest behind them, their weapon arms currently dormant. Even in the low light of standing sodium-lamps, which flared and buzzed irritatedly, Meduson could make out volkite culverins and heavy bolters amongst the cyborganics’ armaments.
Without needing to be ordered, Lumak and Mechosa moved either side of their Warleader as he came to a halt.
‘This feels mildly portentous,’ remarked Lumak quietly, hand resting on the hilt of his nameless sword.
For once, Nuros didn’t chide him about it.
The Salamander stood nearby, distracted by the presence of the primarch, who graciously waited in Meduson’s shadow, his own warriors as close to him as armour.
Dalcoth kept his distance, seeing more from afar than he did up close.
Aug stood with Meduson and took it upon himself to begin proceedings, though even he appeared to be surprised at the demonstration of force.
‘Fraters, you have come to this gathering well protected.’
‘Yes,’ said Meduson, stepping forward of Aug, ‘why is that?’
Rawt answered, not wearing his helmet this time, allowing Meduson to see his face. It looked cold, resolved, which led Meduson to wonder what might be coming.
‘To meet again so soon after the attack,’ said Rawt. ‘It was prudent to bring protection.’
Meduson gestured to the numerous vox-baffles, signal-dampeners and blockers set up around the meeting place.
‘You do not trust our technology to keep us anonymous and out of harm’s way?’
‘You have put us in harm’s way,’ replied Norsson. ‘Indulging in a feud against the renegade Tybalt Marr.’
‘You won a great victory,’ said Kernag, conceding the point with a shallow nod of the head, ‘but it is obvious that Marr goaded you. Can you say, without any doubt, that your judgement is not impaired for this very reason? I cannot.’
‘We cannot,’ added Rawt, and went on further. ‘Our position becomes increasingly perilous, hence the retinues you see before you. I accept that. Peril is a fact of war, and our unfortunate decline.’
‘And to think,’ said Meduson, a wry smile on his face, ‘I summoned you all here to challenge your commitment to this cause.’
‘We follow it,’ said Kernag, his answer natural, without doubt. ‘The Iron Tenth shall have purpose again – but not to serve the personal ends of any Warleader.’
Meduson felt his teeth clench.
They have been planning this, a way to remove me.
He looked to Aug, but the Iron Father remained impassive and only listened.
Rawt revealed the truth of it at last, although, judging by the frequency of his mechanised tics, Arkborne desperately wanted to speak. Meduson wondered if the others had ordered his silence after his mildly deranged comments on the Iron Heart’s bridge.
‘Our purpose is to serve the will of the Gorgon,’ uttered Rawt.
‘You have said as m
uch before.’ Meduson glanced at the Iron Father of Clan Felg. ‘Or at least one of your order has.’ He stepped forwards again, clear of his council, a deliberate move to show his dominance. Only then did he notice the tracked weapon-mounts quietly following his every move. Meduson remained undaunted, but wondered again where all of this was leading. ‘I hoped then that the venerable Iron Father of Clan Felg had let his injuries affect his good sense. Or that he spoke in reference to the fact that we shall always serve the Gorgon’s will, by dint of being his sons.’ He looked around at the automata in his midst and the cold eyes of the Immortals, death-sworn to their Iron Fathers by binding oaths of penance. His gaze alighted last on the four Fraters, those who stood in apparent judgement of him, Meduson now realised. It had all the makings of a trial, this meeting, or worse, a gladiatorial engagement.
‘Ferrus Manus is dead,’ said Meduson, surprised at the faint tremor of emotion in his voice.
And then Arkborne did speak, and Meduson knew the words he had said on the bridge of the Iron Heart had not been false, not to the Frater. Worse, Meduson realised the other Iron Fathers believed them too.
‘The Gorgon lives.’
Meduson stared a moment at Arkborne, incredulous, then frowned, dismissing the madness that had just spilled from the Iron Father’s mouth.
‘Kuleg,’ he began, ‘you cannot believe this…’
Rawt smiled. He actually smiled, and the expression churned Meduson’s insides with the realisation of just how far this insanity went.
‘Our father has come back to us, Meduson. And he shall lead the Iron Tenth once more.’
‘You are delusional, Kuleg. All of you,’ Meduson said, aghast, regarding the four but still acutely aware of the warriors they commanded. He gestured to Vulkan, who drew back his drakescale hood as he stepped into the harsh sodium light. ‘I bring a primarch. Here. Look upon him. You speak of…’ He shook his head, dismayed. ‘I don’t know. It is madness to think–’