‘Skandmark,’ said Haren.
‘Good,’ said Jemulan. ‘Hard country. I know it. Show me.’
Haren bared his left cheek. The cut had been made just a few weeks earlier by his own hand and was still tender. He had pushed the blade deep, keen that the results would be worthy of a Chogorian’s approval.
Jemulan nodded, satisfied, and reached behind him. An adjutant delivered up the chosen weapon – a power sword in the V Legion’s tulwar styling. Jemulan held it before Haren as an executioner might, poised to swing.
‘You were Haren of the Skandmark,’ he said. His voice sounded flat in the humid air. ‘Now you are of the ordu of Jaghatai and your old life is no more. What name do you take to mark your Ascension?’
Haren had struggled for a long time to think of one. He had taken advice from his instructors and had spent hours poring over Khorchin almanacs and lexicons. In the end he had chosen a name from Talskar mythology – a servant of an ancient khan who had returned from a hundred years in the wilderness looking as young as the day he had left. The symbolism seemed appropriate.
‘Torghun,’ he said.
Jemulan handed him the tulwar. ‘You are one with the ordu, Torghun. You are of the brotherhood. You will not leave it except in death – may it be long in coming, and may glory accompany your deeds until that day.’
Torghun took the tulwar. He would need time to get used to it; he was still more proficient with straighter blades.
‘For the Great Khan,’ he said, bowing respectfully and trying to banish, for the final time, the residual memory of a white-armoured giant in the rain, looking down on him with the wolf-moon icon on his shoulder-guard.
It was possible to remember too much.
Ilya Ravallion had taken a long time to learn that. For a long time she had assumed that most lessons were behind her, mastered in her youth or not at all, back when she had the quickness of mind and body to change as circumstances demanded. It had turned out, though, that she was still capable of evolving, even after her hair had turned grey and her face was creased with lines like the folds of sun-dried fruit.
Chondax had changed everything. The White World, the Scars called it. They liked giving things interesting names. Imperial cartographers labelled it Chondax Primus EX5,776 NC-X-S. The ‘NC’ meant non-compliant, the ‘X’ meant xenos occupation, the ‘S’ meant scheduled for visitation by an expeditionary fleet. All of those labels would have to change now: the xenos had been exterminated, and what remained on the surface was as compliant as anything ever could be. The fleet would soon muster at the jump-points, seeking new assignments, and the cartographers and planetary cataloguers would get to work.
Until then, she preferred the White World.
In her old life she would have found it fanciful. Then again, in her old life she would have found most things fanciful. The Departmento Munitorum was not an institution that rewarded creativity – the logistical arm of the Great Crusade demanded officers with a command of detail, with perfect recall, with a love of statistics and the kind of mind that could manipulate them accurately, quickly, carefully.
That had been her. She had started out at the signals facility on Palamar Secundus as a cypher breaker. The work had been demanding, particularly when it came to xenos codes that skirted the borders of insanity to decrypt. After an initial phase of excitement, she had not enjoyed it – the mathematics were frighteningly intense, as were the colleagues she worked with.
Only when her other aptitudes had come to light did things change for the better. On that day it had been hot and the section chief’s office was sweltering. He was in a bad mood: they were behind on their targets and field commanders in six theatres were getting impatient.
He’d rubbed his tired eyes, staring miserably at the piles of data-slates on his desk.
‘Now they want figures from the Irax campaign,’ he’d said, his voice hollow.
‘I remember them,’ she had said.
He’d stared at her. ‘It was a year ago.’
‘I know. I can recite them.’
She still could. The first entries sat in her voluminous mind, ready for access.
Relay point Aleph: Six transports, nine landers, twelve regiments.
Relay point Varl: Three transports, two landers, three regiments.
Relay point Thek…
And on, and on.
That had got her out of cyphers. She left Palamar and transferred closer to the core. Her life became a matter of getting soldiers from one place to another, on time, with ammunition, with food, with support, without confusion. It was repetitive. It was laborious. It was lonely.
She loved it. She climbed the ranks, each promotion getting her a warp-stage or two nearer to Terra. Once the Departmento was folded fully into the Imperial war administration it adopted military ranks. She became lieutenant, then colonel, then, finally, general. She enjoyed the respect that earned her from those in the regular army. They knew what a general was, and what she could do to them if they ever forgot it.
So the campaigns passed, one after the other. The numbers started to boggle even her capacious mind. Thousands of carriers, billions of troops, trillions of lasguns with quadrillions of charger packs. At times she would lie awake at night, tracing the patterns of the Crusade in a giant imaginary web. She would see the expeditionary fleets crawling out along invisible lines towards their destinations, each one bearing statistical tags denoting deployment types and complements. She liked doing that. Parts of that web were her doing. No one would ever know it, let alone record her contribution, but it made her smile nonetheless.
For a long time, that was all she wished for. It gave her purpose and a healthy share of fulfilment. The fact that it was an isolated fulfilment seldom occurred to her. She never missed the presence of a companion, male or otherwise, which in any case would have been an intrusion upon the sense of order that she had created around herself. There was no room for another soul in her life, no room for mess or uncertainty or compromise.
By the time she had begun to question that doctrine she was nearing retirement. Her short hair had been grey for a decade. Her neat, trim uniform bore decorations from a generation ago, and her most junior subordinates seemed to treat her like a relic from a forgotten age.
So these are the choices I have made, she thought. She supposed they were not choices many others would have made, but that was fine – the galaxy was a big place, and the Emperor found tasks for all sorts. It had been a good life, one she could be proud of and satisfied within.
In the end, though, it had taken Chondax to open her eyes.
What had she known about the White Scars? As little as anyone else. They were the elusive ones, the Legion who roamed too far, the ones who had almost broken away entirely, rampaging outwards from the thrust of the Crusade and angling off into the deep void. Prodigal, her superior had called them.
It had been a surprising final assignment for her, an unlikely marriage of very un-likes. From Ullanor, in a whirl, then on to the Scars’ next campaign, given a service rank and charged with organising the unorganisable, imposing some sense of discipline upon a Legion that treated warfare like a kind of carefree, joy-filled art form. She wouldn’t have predicted it.
Halji, at least, had been kind to her. Her assigned adjutant was as diligent and cheerful as anyone she had ever met. It was still easy to be exasperated with the rest – not least the Khan himself – and they clearly found her as amusing as they had from the start, but some progress had been made.
They called her szu-Ilya. The sage Ilya. For all its idiosyncrasy, it was hard not to enjoy that.
She missed Yesugei, though. From the start, the Stormseer had been the one to treat her seriously. He was a master of elemental forces beyond her limited imagination, but he had always been courteous, always respectful. Yesugei had seen something in her that she hadn’t noticed herself, and it was that, in the end, that had dragged her into the Scars’ perilous orbit. It was a shame that he had n
ot accompanied the fleet to Chondax, but such was war.
So it was that she had ended up with her own quarters on the huge Legion flagship Swordstorm and had begun the long process of cataloguing assets and rationalising deployment patterns. They didn’t always listen, but sometimes they did. They made an effort. They were aware of their shortcomings, and wished to improve.
She liked that. It acted as a challenge to her. She tried to loosen some of the rigours of her past life. She tried to forget a few things, or at least not to hang on to them too closely. An eidetic life, she found, risked being an arid one. They learned from her, she learned from them, and so she discovered that it was possible to care too much, to insist upon too much. To remember too much.
‘I will try to let things go,’ she told herself, particularly when tempted by the urge to reorganise some typically scattergun requisition plan. ‘In all things, there is a happy medium. Compromise. An open mind.’
She heard a low chime at her doorway.
‘Come,’ she said, raising her head from her console.
Halji entered, bowing politely.
Ilya still found it odd that they bowed to her. Halji was a third taller than her in armour, hugely powerful and with a warrior’s prowess that almost defied belief. Like all Chogorians, though, he wore his genhancement lightly. A certain kind of self-effacing courtesy seemed to come naturally to them.
‘Forgive intrusion, szu,’ he said. ‘You wished to be informed of progress in Choir.’
Ilya leaned back in her chair. ‘I did. Anything to report?’
‘No,’ said Halji, smiling awkwardly. ‘They cannot receive, cannot send. Everything tried has failed. Master of Astropaths sends you his apologies.’
‘It’s not his fault,’ said Ilya, her heart sinking. ‘How long has it been?’
‘Since arrival in Chondax.’
‘We have been here a long time, Halji.’
‘Master says blackouts are not uncommon. He says warp is fickle place. Once we were on campaign in Kleimoran and Choir heard nothing for two years. He is not concerned.’
Ilya frowned. The White Scars were cavalier about losing touch with the rest of the Imperium. They liked it. She did not – it made her nervous, as though suddenly deprived of gravity or oxygen.
‘Please tell him to keep trying. Perhaps some locations in the system are free of the effect.’
Halji shrugged. ‘I will. But he says nothing sent or received for some time.’
Ilya glanced back down at her desk. A schematic of the fleet distribution glowed softly on the glassy surface showing battle-groups spread out widely, running down the last elements of enemy forces that still lingered in far-flung corners of the system. Resistance across the Chondax cluster was coming to an end, and with every standard reporting period came a slew of kill-tallies and compliance certifications. Soon their work would be done here and the next assignment would come. The White Scars would be on the move again, just as they always were.
‘We’re reaching an end-point here,’ she said, half to herself. ‘How am I supposed to receive fresh orders from Terra? What will our next move be?’
Halji smiled. ‘Do not worry, szu,’ he said, as calm as ever. ‘Something will come.’
‘Khan, you will wish to see this.’
Shiban stiffened. Jochi’s voice was strained over the comm. That was unusual; Jochi was usually in good temper, even when the bolt-rounds were flying.
But then Phemus was the kind of place that got under your skin. There was nothing good to say about Phemus – blisteringly hot, creeping with black-crusted magma and riven with electrical storms. It was like a vision of the underworld given gruesome, uncomfortable form.
‘Hold position,’ voxed Shiban, noting his brother’s location on his helm display and pulling his jetbike round in a wide curve. ‘With you in a moment.’
He gunned the drive, sending his mount sweeping across scabs of charred rock. Above him the burned-orange sky sent flickers of forked lighting dancing across the horizon. A bank of chemical-lurid cloud glowered in the magnetic west, underlit with a pall of dull red. Vast plains of jet extended in all directions, ringed by hunchbacked mountains and streaked with the vomit of an unquiet world.
Shiban crouched low, feeling the intermittent hum and growl of his mount’s engines working. The bikes struggled in the smoggy filth. He’d had to change his twice already in a deployment lasting less than a month. That was an irritant. In all the time he’d fought on Chondax he’d never had to submit a mount for maintenance.
The White World had been kind to them. It had been the crucible of the whole campaign, the heart of the greenskin defences. Warfare on that world had been of the most glorious, the most agreeable, kind. Shiban remembered the wide, cold skies; the touch of the salt-like earth under his fingers; the three suns, whose light blended and melded in a soft melange of green and blue and yellow.
He could have fought on that world for an eternity and never grown weary of it. In the end, though, they had killed all there was to kill. The xenos had been exterminated, their bodies burned and their crude structures melted down. When the Legion had left it for orbit, Chondax had looked pristine – a ball of translucent crystal in the heavens, scoured clean of infection.
Now the outlying worlds were the target. Epihelikon, Teras, Honderal, Laerteax; all of them flung far out into the void, all of them infested with the residual taint of greenskin occupation.
Phemus was the furthest out, the last to have its fire-licked tectonic plates certified free of the enemy. Every time it looked as if the greenskins were gone, though, another nest would be uncovered, teeming with life and hatred, requiring kill-teams to be deployed and burn-teams to follow them.
Shiban was weary of it. The Legion needed a new challenge, something grand to aspire to. The dregs of a campaign were the worst time.
I hate this world, he thought. I wrote verse about Chondax. No words shall be written about this place. It deserves none.
The Khan would move them on soon. Shiban had seen him fight, and so knew the order would come swiftly. He had seen the dao sword wielded with such casual expertise that it made his eyes shine to remember. The primarch was less a mortal warrior, more an expression of the elements. He would be restless too, like all predators when the prey was exhausted.
They said that Horus Lupercal was the finest commander in the galaxy. They said that the Angel Sanguinius was the mightiest in combat, or maybe Russ of Fenris, or maybe poor tortured Angron. They said Guilliman was the greatest tactician, the Lion the most imaginative, Alpharius the subtlest.
None of them gave the Khan a second thought. But then, they hadn’t seen him.
A long time ago, before Ascension, Shiban remembered asking Yesugei why they made aspirants learn the Noble Pursuits when their destiny was for warfare. Now, so many years later, he understood the answer he had been given.
Killing is nothing without beauty, and it may only be beautiful if it is necessary.
He smiled as he rode. The memory lifted some of his torpor.
When the Khan kills, it is beautiful.
He caught sight of Jochi’s outline ahead of him, dark against tumescent slag-piles of flickering magma. The light, such as it was on Phemus, was fading to a deep, resentful umber. Distant thunderheads were grinding closer across the plain.
He skidded his bike round and cut the engine, dismounting in a single movement.
‘What, then?’ he asked, walking over to his second-in-command.
Jochi had kept his helm on, as they all did in that foul place, so Shiban caught nothing of his expression. ‘Bodies,’ he said.
Shiban glanced at the magma piles. They rose up in bulbous lumps, heaped in steadily accumulating mounds like folds of carbonised fat. Phemus was littered with such sites, some as large as starships, produced by the myriad despoliations that the world inflicted on itself at regular intervals. The hills of slag crept across the cracked surface of the world as if alive, crushing anything th
ey came across.
Three bodies lay at the foot of the pile, one of them still partially enveloped. Each one was encased in coal-black armour, cracked by pressure.
Shiban knelt beside the nearest. He ran his finger along the curve of an arm-guard, watching sooty residue smear away to reveal a line of ivory underneath.
‘Which brotherhood?’ he asked.
‘Of the Talon,’ said Jochi. ‘Posted here six months ago.’
Shiban looked over the dead White Scars legionary. Many of his brothers had died on Phemus, and some of their corpses had been swallowed by the voracious magma. Even so, it was never pleasant to find another. ‘Gene-seed?’
‘Not yet,’ said Jochi. ‘Sangjai is on his way.’
Shiban leaned closer, wiping more of the grime from the battered armour. He smelt none of the putrescence normally found with corpses, just the acrid stink of long-burned material. ‘How did they die?’
‘Blades,’ said Jochi grimly. ‘Two at the throat. The other, torso-wounds.’
Shiban noticed a deep cut through the seals at the corpse’s neck. He gently prised the edges apart, seeing the segments pull cleanly away. The edge of the wound was as black as everything else, blistered where thick blood had boiled away.
He took a deep breath. He wondered what the fallen warriors’ stories were, how they had been bested, how many greenskins they had fought off before the finish. It was a shame that no tales would be told of their ending.
He looked up and around him. The black land glared back, void-dark and fissured, lit with the ghostly flickers of orange fire. ‘Where are the xenos bodies?’
Jochi shook his head. ‘No signs. Unless, perhaps, buried deeply.’
Shiban felt uncomfortable. Something nagged at him. ‘Odd,’ he said.
‘Khan?’
Shiban considered it for a little while longer. He brushed more filth clear of the legionary’s breastplate, exposing Chogorian glyphs engraved in the ceramite. He let his eyes wander over the broken outline of the cadaver, watching, absorbing, thinking. Eventually, he rose to his feet.
‘Three dead sons of the ordu,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘No hain beside them.’
Horus Heresy: Scars Page 3