by Paul Kearney
‘Very good,’ he said at last, as the loading operation went on.
‘When shall Mortai embark?’ Fornix asked him.
‘Not until tomorrow. What is to be disembarked last must go on first. Space Marines are always the final element.’
‘It will give me a chance to beg and borrow some more wargear. Who knows what we’ll need when we finally make planetfall?’
‘You were ever profligate with equipment, Fornix. I recall with regret some of the holy instruments of destruction my servitors laboured over for years, only to see them reduced to battered scrap in your hands in the space of a day.’
‘Ah, but what a day,’ Fornix said. ‘How better for a sacred weapon to end its days than–’
‘Buried in the forehead of an ork?’
‘Needs must, my lord Forge-Master. I had no time to change magazines, and the ork was Grazmach Ghar of the Long Bleed. A worthy opponent in many ways. He fought on for a full minute after I had battered his skull into pieces.’
‘Your advancing years have not dimmed your recklessness, Fornix.’
‘I am reckless with everything except my brothers’ lives. ‘Twas always thus.’
‘Indeed. I have heard it said that the Emperor smiles on certain fools who amuse him – but only for a time.’
‘You think my time is running out, Breughal?’
The Dreadnought clenched and unclenched one immense fist. In the heart of its mechanical palm the pilot-light of the flamer buried therein leapt up blue and bright, and then sank down again.
‘Nothing burns forever.’
‘Except faith, and glory,’ Fornix said. ‘Better to burn bright for a day than live a long life in twilight. Here on Phobian the Hunters have been husbanding their strength for a century and a half. Our name has been forgotten, brother. And in other sectors of the galaxy our brethren of other Chapters have won imperishable renown.’
‘We serve,’ Breughal Paine said. ‘That is our duty and our honour. I have seen a millennium come and go, Fornix, and watched the birth and death of legends. I have been alive and awake for all that time – unlike our brethren inside the other Dreadnoughts, I have never slept. It is because of that I believe I have held on to my…’ An instant’s hesitation.
‘My humanity, if you will. With great age comes wisdom, of a sort, or at least the endless cataloguing of experience. I have seen untold follies and disasters, and great victories also, all of them won with blood. The blood of those like ourselves, and that of lesser men. I have seen rivers of it.
‘And through it all, like the Chapter which I serve and love, the Imperium endures. And our task is to see it does so. No more.
‘I watched Lukullus die. I have battled Titans. I have seen the Great Enemy erupt from the warp in numbers almost impossible to grasp – as have you. We cannot afford glory if it diminishes our ability to protect the Imperium we serve. To seek individual renown at the expense of that ultimate mission – that way Chaos lies.’
‘And yet the sword grows dull in the scabbard,’ Fornix muttered, all humour fled from his face.
‘Brother, I would not dwell on it. We are warriors of the Adeptus Astartes, whose lives belong to the service of mankind. So long as man exists amid the stars, so shall we. And in the end, for us, for man – for the universe we have created – there is only war.’
‘Which brings us back to the matter in hand. You did not answer my question, Forge-Master.’
Breughal stood stolid and immense, a dark shadow under the stars with glints of flame for eyes. The snow sizzled as it landed on the hot exhaust stacks at his back.
‘Very well then. Fornix, I do not believe that this is a mere raid. The Punishers are our nemesis, and they have been gone from this sector for what some would consider a long time. They will have used that time. If they were intent on raiding our territories, they would have done so sooner than this.
‘No, it is my belief that this is more likely to be another attempt at all-out invasion.’
Fornix considered the Dreadnought’s words, his head cocked to one side. For a second, what looked like sheer happiness crossed his face.
‘They will know this, Jonah and the Kharne,’ Breughal went on. ‘But they cannot risk Phobian by sending out the main strength of the Chapter. This may be a feint to draw us out.’
‘Mortai are a reconnaissance force then.’
‘No. It is more than that. If I know anything, I think that the Kharne means to fight the main battle as far from our home world as possible. Mortai’s job will be to pin the enemy in place, hold them, and gain intelligence. Then, perhaps, the bulk of the Chapter will become involved.’
There was a rumble deep in the heart of the towering Dreadnought, a kind of restlessness.
‘Your job, Fornix, is the same as it has always been. Your job is to bleed.’
Elijah Kass knelt before the statue of Lukullus in the Reclusiam, his head bowed within his hood. Even in here, the thunder of the embarkation could be heard, and he could feel along the electrodes embedded in his skull the tingle of expectation and speculation that now ran through Mors Angnar, as though the vast fortress and everyone in it were somehow more alive than they had been the day before.
It was unsettling and exhilarating at the same time.
‘We all have our heroes, our mentors, alive and dead,’ a voice said behind him. ‘We come here to reconnect with who we are, to remind ourselves that the greatest heroes are in some sense immortal. We think on them every day, though they are gone to dust and ashes in the passing centuries of history.’
Elijah tugged back his hood. A tall figure in bright blue, the colour of the Librarium, stood looking up at Lukullus Nogai, the man who had saved the Chapter all those years ago, and brought it back from the brink. An old face, broad, bony, with a nose like a flattened mushroom, and on either side of it two eyes as black as obsidian. The high-boned skull was implanted with psionic receivers like his own, though they seemed to have sunk into the wrinkled ivory flesh around them, becoming part of the man.
‘Lord Vennan. I was praying.’
‘Yes. To Lukullus. I would have thought someone else more fitting for one of your calling, Elijah.’
Here Vennan gestured across the chamber to another shadow-shrouded figure. It wore the metal cowl of a psychic hood, and the eyes within it glowed with a blue light, blue as the open sky on a bright day on Phobian. The name on its pedestal read Astanius.
‘He was Lukullus Nogai’s greatest friend, and he saved the legend and lore of the Chapter when all was lost. There were three of them: Lukullus Nogai, Astanius Tor and Breughal Paine. These three champions refounded the Dark Hunters. They saved us from abject degeneration.
‘Paine is still with us, our immortal Forge-Master. Nogai is a legend now, some say a Saint of the Imperium. And Astanius?’ Here Vennan opened his arms in a gesture of futility.
‘He is forgotten by all but a few. We of the Librarium revere his memory, but our brethren of the battle companies barely know his name. And yet without him, we would scarcely know who we are or from what we came.’
The anger came through now in Vennan’s voice.
‘And here you are, a Codicier of my own staff, praying with your back to him.’
Elijah rose. He was half a metre taller than the Chief Librarian, but he bowed his head, chastened.
‘I do not forget our forebear, or what he did, my lord.’
‘Perhaps you would prefer to wield a bolter in the line companies.’
‘No, my lord. I know who I am, and I am eternally grateful for your tutelage.’
Vennan’s eyes glittered. They were entirely black, the legacy of battling the warp for decades.
You will always be different to your brethren, and they will always see that difference, Elijah. Never forget that.
The voice crawled across Elijah’s mind, as bright and painful as the lash of a whip. He knelt once more.
‘You taught me well, lord. I shall not forget what I am �
� or who made me.’
Vennan glided closer. He set one gnarled hand on his inferior’s head. For a moment, blue light leapt up in infinitesimal sparks from the implants which ringed the bone, and Elijah flinched minutely.
‘You seek promotion to Epistolary, I am told.’
‘I do not seek promotion, but it is true that I have made application through Brother Greiff to join Mortai, yes.’
‘You have a high opinion of your abilities, it would seem. Epistolaries are usually veterans of many wars. What fighting have you seen, Elijah?’
Elijah wiped blood from his upper lip. It was trickling out of his nose in a thin stream.
‘Border skirmishes with the orks, as you know. Boarding actions off Perreken, when we destroyed the Gulbec pirates.’
Vennan lifted his hand. The blood from Elijah’s nose slowed to a drip, then stopped as his body systems repaired the damage. But there was still a shrill ache in his head that needled his mind every time the Chief Librarian spoke.
‘You have known battle, with blade and bolter, it is true. And you have acquitted yourself well – too well perhaps. I have heard it said in the Librarium that you would be well suited as a battle-brother, were it not for your Gift.’
Vennan bent low. ‘And that Gift cannot be denied, or ignored. It must either be trained and utilised, or its bearer must be destroyed. You understand that, do you not, Elijah Kass?’
‘I understand. A psyker is a double-edged sword.’
‘The warp is always there, waiting for us, as tireless as stone, its hunger never sated. You have never known the full extent of its evil and its majesty, Elijah, and yet you lobby to be sent on Captain Kerne’s expedition, where you will meet the Great Enemy at last, and you will experience the true terror of the warp, not diffused among the child-brains of orks or reflected in the intellect of common men, but raw and full-flowered in the psyches of our bitterest foes.
‘Stand up.’
Elijah did so. Vennan looked up at him, as though measuring his bulk.
‘The warp will shrivel you, as it did me. It will attempt to seduce you. It will play on love, Elijah. The love you have for the Emperor, for your Chapter, for your brethren. How do you know you can withstand that form of assault?’
‘I will withstand it, or I will die trying. I will never betray my brothers,’ Elijah said, and his face twisted with anger, eyes growing hot as he looked down on the Chief Librarian.
Strangely, Vennan smiled.
I believe you.
‘There is strength in you, brother. I know that.’ He set a hand on the younger man’s arm. ‘There are only eleven of us left in the Librarium, eleven true Adeptus Astartes with the Gift, or the Curse as some think it. The Dark Hunters have been unfortunate. In my time I have seen some two hundred aspiring psykers fail the tests. Some came all the way through the screening and became Neophytes, before the warp sensed their fledgling minds and consumed them.’
He looked down at his hands. Wide, big-boned, with knuckles white in the pale flesh. ‘I killed them myself, and felt the relief in their souls as they passed into the Emperor’s Peace, out of the reach of the warp forever.’
‘I have felt the warp,’ Elijah said quietly. ‘I have sensed its approach more than once. I have heard the whispers of daemons in my sleep.’
‘Imagine them shouting, screaming, shrieking, laughing in your mind without surcease, day after day, for months on end. The hood helps, but it cannot shield you entirely.
‘In battle with the Great Enemy, Elijah, your torment will be unceasing. You will never know rest, and cannot ever let down your guard. It will come at you even in rare moments of silence, as welcome as a cold drink of water to a parched mouth. It is legion, and can take any form it wishes. Are you ready for that?’
‘I must be ready, some day,’ Elijah said. ‘Whether I stand or fall, there will come a time when I must confront the warp – even as you did, and all the members of the Librarium before me. That is the nature of our calling. You told me that, Brother-Librarian. And, lord, you taught me well.’
Vennan’s stone-dark eyes softened.
‘Know this then, Brother Kass. I am punishing you for your presumption. I will indeed accede to your request, and make you Epistolary Librarian for this expedition. But it is a probationary rank. With you shall go some of our human auxilia, monks of the Lexicanium whom I trust and esteem. They shall counsel you in my absence. And they shall monitor your behaviour. All that you do and say will be reported back to me. What say you to that?’
Elijah bowed, eyes bright.
‘I say thank you, lord, for giving me a chance to prove my faith and serve my Chapter.’
‘Save your gratitude. I send you because my place is here with the Kharne, and your other brethren in the Librarium are even less ready for this than you are. The expedition must have one of us with it. Captain Kerne will need counsel in his dealings with the Great Enemy, and you are well versed in the history of our dealings with them. Also–’ He paused. ‘Captain Kerne himself looks with favour upon your application, and Mortai’s commander is not a man to cross lightly.’
Despite himself, Eijah smiled. At once, a lance of white-cold pain speared through his temples, wrenching a groan from his lips.
You have the strengths and the weaknesses of the young. The worst of those weaknesses is arrogance. Be humble. Among normal humanity you are as a god. To the denizens of the warp you are an insect, to be plucked into the void for their amusement.
Elijah nodded, contrite.
‘Forgive me my pride, lord,’ he whispered.
One last thing, my young Epistolary-to-be. A piece of advice from one who has wrestled with the warp for longer than most.
At the last gasp, when euphoria or despair overcome you, and the warp is as warm and welcoming as the love of your brethren, remember this:
Death is your friend.
They stared at one another, one as bent and gnarled as a wind-warped tree, the other tall and straight with eyes of blazing cobalt, shining with life.
‘I will remember,’ Elijah Kass said.
THREE
Benedictio
The final blessing had been intoned by the Chief Reclusiarch, and the brothers of the Dark Hunters were filing out of the chapel. Almost the entire complement of the Chapter was present, close on six hundred Adeptus Astartes in the midnight-blue robes with the Axe of Justice stark upon the breast.
They filed out in silence, the final notes of the Te Deum hanging in the cavernous air above their heads. Banners and flags from a hundred different campaigns hung from the cantilevered stone beams that supported the chapel’s immense roof, and power-glims dialled low caught the faded colours that swayed back and forth as the Hunters passed beneath.
Jonah Kerne looked up as he passed down the nave. There was a tattered banner hung high inside the west transept of the immense building. Not much more than a rag, even his augmented eyesight could barely make out the device upon it.
Mortai’s Cerebrum et Haliaetum, Skull and Scales, hacked and pierced and burned, and stained with old blood. His blood, and Fornix’s, and Kharne Al Murzim’s. They had stood together under that banner at the Last Stand of the Third Company, and had held their ground in the ruins of this very chapel, until their brethren in the Brazen Fists had landed. They had started the day with sixty Adeptus Astartes, and by evening there were eighteen of them still standing.
How glorious it had been.
He entered the side-chapel, exchanging wordless nods with the faces that lifted to him as they passed.
There was Finn March of Primus, steady as a stone; Orsus, sergeant of Tertius Squad, the strongest Space Marine he had ever known. Nureddin of Secundus, his scalp-lock grey as hoar-frost, who had lost an arm in the Border battles two years before. Apothecary Passarion, his blue robe edged with saffron, the twisted snake-staff of his calling tattooed on his massive face. If there was a reason why Mortai had not missed having a Chaplain these last years, it was becaus
e of Passarion, whose piety went hand in hand with the skills of his calling.
And lastly there was Fornix, who smiled at Jonah as he brought up the rear of Third Company.
Mortai Company, the Fated Ones.
‘I will see you tonight,’ Kerne told his first sergeant, ‘after the Orders Conclave. We arm at sunrise, and embark straight after.’
‘It’s all in hand, captain,’ Fornix said.
‘Ambros’s new recruits?’
‘Distributed through the squads. We’ll shake down the company on the voyage.’
Kerne took Fornix by the arm, his pale face stern. ‘You spoke to the Forge-Master?’
‘Breughal will see the thing done handsomely. He is even seconding us some of his gun-servitors. And there is a small manufactorium on the Ogadai which he assures me is up and running.’
Kerne nodded, and was about to turn away when Fornix caught his eye.
‘What is it?’
‘Captain, Breughal is willing to embark a detachment of heavy armour if the Kharne will allow it.’
Kerne raised an eyebrow. ‘Generosity indeed. But it should not be necessary.’
‘Are we so sure of that, Jonah?’
‘The Kharne’s manifest has already been implemented, and Castellan Rubio carried it out to perfection. Besides that, the Chapter is so short of vehicles that it has been decided to conserve their use for emergencies.’
Fornix frowned. ‘The Kharne’s caution is–’
‘It is wisdom, Fornix. Phobian must retain the ability for a strong counter-strike after we depart.’
‘You think history is about to repeat itself?’
‘I think you need not worry about the Kharne’s strategic reasoning. Concentrate on Mortai.’
Fornix’s mouth twisted in a rueful grin. ‘At times like these I am glad to be a mere sergeant.’ He bowed his head and walked on.
The side-chapel was octagonal, and in the middle of its stone floor a raised plinth stood, intricately carved and run through and through with the sinuous snake of insulated cabling.
Pockmarks in the stone spoke of the long-ago battle for Phobian which had passed through here like a gale, and higher up in the vaulted ceiling the acid scars shone pale. They riddled certain flagstones of the floor in rounded depressions, as though the stone had been showered with molten tears.