“No,” said Sturm. “Not those rags. I can’t abide them. Find me something suitable to wear, or I’ll go naked.”
Desolane turned and barked orders to the footmen at the door of the hall. They vanished in a hurry.
“I take it the Plenipotentiary has been informed,” Sturm asked, idly inspecting some of the bladed chrome tools laid out on a nearby trolley.
“He has. He is making arrangements to come here as soon as possible. Command echelon leaders, strategists and other key ordinals have also been summoned. After the transcoding, you will need to rest well. The next few days will be demanding.”
Sturm nodded. “I want a better room. With a proper bed in it. And no more shackles.”
“Sir, I—” Desolane began.
“I want a better room, a proper bed and no more shackles. Is that clear?”
“Yes,” said Desolane.
The footmen returned with a uniform. It was the dress garb of a sirdar of the Occupation force, though all rank pins and badges had been removed. Black boots and shirt, green breeches and a long green jacket. Sturm dressed quietly and then admired his reflection in a looking glass hanging on the wall of the fysik hall.
He stared at his image for some time. He’d seen his own face in mirrors several times since entering custody, indeed the transcoders had often shown him his reflection in the hope that it might aid the loosening of his memory. That had been frightening. The face he’d seen had been unknown to him, an alien thing.
Now it was like an old friend. Every line and fold and crease had a comfortable familiarity. He scratched at his stubbled chin.
“I want to shave,” he told the life-ward. This is unacceptable.”
“Yes, sir,” said Desolane. “But first, the psykers.”
They walked together along the echoing halls and galleries of the bastion, passing hurrying servants, patient soldiers, lean excubitors and chattering gangs of ordinals. Desolane noticed that the pheguth no longer shuffled. He marched, back straight.
An impish little creature was waiting for them at the door of the loathsome transcoding chamber. He was little more than a metre tall, his bent, simian frame shrouded in a red velvet robe with gold-thread decoration. The hem of the robe spread out over the flagstones. He wore a mechanical harness around his torso, the front of which formed a lectern that was braced against his chest. Fastened to this was a black metal printing machine, with rows of wiry letter levers and a thick roll of parchment wound into the spindle-lock. The little man had the lever section hinged up as they approached, and was carefully applying ink to the back of the letter press using a suede paddle. He looked up. His eyes were beady and he had nothing in the way of a nose, but his mouth was a lipless grimace of exposed gums and discoloured, spade-like teeth. In place of ears, he had augmetic microphones sutured into his flesh, and a wire armature from each secured flared brass ear trumpets to either side of his head.
His name was Humiliti, and Desolane had summoned him.
“What for?” Sturm asked.
“He is a lexigrapher. He will accompany you at all times, and record your comments so that nothing can be lost.”
Humiliti closed his machine’s lever section with a sharp metallic clatter, put the suede paddle back in a pouch at his side, and flexed his long bony fingers for a moment. Then he began to type on the keys, a jangling sound, and the parchment roll began to turn.
Desolane opened the door, and Sturm entered. The little lexigrapher waddled after him. Sturm sat down on the seat and the electric cuffs immediately closed over his wrists and ankles.
“They will not be necessary,” he said, and heard the lexigrapher record the words. After a moment’s pause, the cuffs disengaged. The chair tilted back until he was looking at the arched roof.
“Pheguth,” a voice whispered.
“Not this time,” he replied.
“Again, we begin.”
Sturm heard the shuffling, and felt the chamber go chill. Foetid fingers picked the rubber plugs from the holes in his skull. Then, making their distinctive high pitched squeal, the psi-probe needles swung in and slipped into the holes.
Sturm grunted slightly in discomfort.
“Let us start again at the beginning,” the psi-voice commanded.” Your rank?”
“Lord militant general.”
“Your name?”
“Noches Sturm.”
“How do you come to be here?”
Sturm cleared his throat. Over the murmuring acoustics of the warp filling his head, he could hear the damned lexigrapher jabbing away at his machine. “As I understand it,” he replied, “I was a prisoner aboard a military transport ship that was caught in an ambush near Tarnagua. When the attackers realised they had captured a senior branch officer of the Imperial Guard, I was taken directly to a safe world for interrogation. That was where the mindlock was discovered. I was then sent here to Gereon, away from the front line, so that the mindlock could be undone.”
“What do you understand of the mindlock, Noches?” another psi-voice asked. This one sounded distressingly like a small child.
“It is a standard provision. In cases where a subject knows sensitive information. The guild can blank a man’s mind entirely, but that does not allow for any future recovery of his memory.”
“Your mind is full of secrets, Noches,” the male voice said. “Intelligence of the highest level of confidentiality. Why would they not have just blanked you?”
“I’ve no idea,” Sturm said. Chatter chatter went the lexi-graph machine.
“That is not true,” an old, female voice asked. “Is it? Think about it. This is a memory you can reach.”
Sturm closed his eyes. He realised he could remember now. It felt amazing. “I was being prepared for trial. Court martial. The Commissariate did not want my mind wiped, because I would not be able to face their cross-examination. But until the trial date, it was considered too risky to leave me… accessible. The Guild Astropathicus placed the mindlock on me, securing my secrets. They intended to remove it at the time of the trial.”
“You didn’t like that much, did you, Noches?” the child-voice asked.
“I hated it. I implored them not to do it. But they did it anyway. It was monstrous. Numbing. Afterwards, I had no idea what they’d done. Just the nagging memory that something barbaric had been accomplished in my mind. It took everything away. I’m only now just understanding quite how much was stolen.”
“Your memories are returning rapidly.”
“Yes, but I’m not just talking about facts and figures, names and dates. I’m not talking about the empirical data they shut away. I had forgotten myself. My character. My nature. My soul. They had taken my personality. The man you have been transcoding these last few months was just a shell. He was not Noches Sturm. I’d forgotten even how to be myself.”
There was a pause. The acoustic murmur circled around him.
“Hello?” Sturm called.
“Why were you in custody, Noches?” asked the male voice. Why were you facing trial?”
“It was a mistake. I was betrayed.”
“Explain.”
“I was serving in the defence of Vervunhive, on the planet Verghast. It was a bitter fight, and for a while it seemed we would be overrun. But my worst enemy was a commissar in the Guard. Our paths had crossed before, and there was some animosity between us. I was prepared to let it go—we had a war to win, no time for petty squabbles. But he manipulated the situation and accused me of forsaking my post. Trumped up charges. But he was a commissar, and enjoyed some popularity in that dark time. He made the charges stick, and, with the backing of his superiors in the Commissariate, kept me incarcerated and forced me to trial.”
“Doesn’t the Commissariate ordinarily perform summary executions?” the child-voice asked.
“On low-lifes and dog-troops. Not on lord militant generals. My family has powerful connections to the High Lords. There would have been uproar if he’d taken my life.”
&n
bsp; “What was his name?”
Sturm smiled. The one thing that the mindlock had never closed off was that name. “Ibram Gaunt. May he burn in hell.”
The voices swooped and whispered around him.
“Are we done?” Sturm asked.
“We are pleased with the state of your mind, Noches. Your memory has almost entirely returned. The last tatters of the mindlock are falling away from your psyche. Our work is all but finished.”
“And I thank you for it,” said Sturm. “Even on the days you made me scream. I’m glad to have myself back.”
“There is one last question,” the female voice asked.
“Ask it.”
They asked it together, all three voices as one chorus. “When you first came to us, you swore allegiance to the Anarch. You promised that once we had unlocked your mind, you would renounce the cause of the False Emperor and fight with us against his forces.”
“I did.”
“But today you have admitted that you are a different person now. You have told us that the pitiful wretch who swore that oath was not Noches Sturm. So, we ask you… have you changed your mind?”
“You have changed my mind,” Sturm said. “If I’m lying, you’ll read this in my head. So listen well. I served the Imperium loyally, and devoted my life to the Throne. But the Imperium turned on me, and kicked me down like a dog. There is no going back. The Imperium has made me its enemy, and it will live to wish it hadn’t.”
Behind the chair, Humiliti’s type-levers were clattering almost frantically.
“I swear allegiance to the Anarch, whose word drowns out all others,” said Sturm. “Does that answer your question?”
The Sleepwalker led them up through the great basin of the Untill, through the steaming glades of the Niht. They skirted vast thickets of crimson thorn, so dense that there was no way through. They waded through green water, through stinking amber bogs. When the water level finally began to drop, where the land shelved up and away, the world became a mire of thick, grey mud. White globe fungus clustered on the black bark of the gnawed trees. Some of it was photoluminous, and created clearings of frosty blue-white radiance that the moths flocked to in their millions. Blizzards of them swirled through the air. There was still no sunlight. The canopy above was an impenetrable black roof.
The team pushed on. It had taken them two full days’ march from the partisan camp to reach these upland marshes. The temperature had dropped by several degrees, and the humidity was less. Consequently, they felt chilled. Their clothes, soaked from hours in the thigh-deep water, clung to them. They were hungry and they were exhausted. They had regular rest-breaks, but it was almost impossible to find a place to sleep in the liquid mud.
However, some spirit had returned to them. Feygor was alive. His health was still poor, and he was by far the weakest member of the team. But he was conscious, lucid and walking. The infection in his throat was less angry. Eszrah ap Niht’s poison paste may have nearly killed him, but it had saved his life too. Neither Rawne nor Gaunt spoke of how close they’d come to the mercy killing.
Their route led on through the thick grey sludge and the rank trees. These higher marshes were the haunt of lizards: bright tree scurriers, and balloon-eyed amphibians that lurked under stones and fallen logs and took moths out of the air with whipping, adhesive tongues. A bladdery, burping chorus of amphibian voices bubbled and popped all around them as they walked.
Their rations were all gone, and hunger would have long since killed them all, leaving their picked bones forgotten in an Untill glade. But Eszrah provided. He showed the scouts some basic tricks for finding game, and taught them what was edible and what should be shunned. The Sleepwalker made most kills himself, using his mag-bow. He allowed each scout in turn to try his hand with it. Mkvenner took to it best.
Curth used the remnants of her medical kit to analyse the partisan’s poison pastes, and also scrutinise the prey that was brought in. Some things, she ruled, only Eszrah’s immunity could deal with. But there were certain types of mud-eel, and a rat-like tree lizard that they could all ingest, provided they were carefully roasted or boiled. Brostin’s flamer, still misfiring, at last had a use as a cooking tool. Gaunt had considered ordering Brostin to ditch the weapon. It was a Chaos thing. But in the circumstances, given the taint inside them all, it had seemed ridiculous to worry. He was glad now he hadn’t. Without it, they would not have eaten.
On one occasion, Gaunt sat with Eszrah as they finished a meal. The partisan allowed him to examine his weapon.
“Preyathee, soule,” Gaunt asked, tapping the bow. “Hwat yclept beyit?”
“Reynbow, beyit,” Eszrah replied. He was delicately picking meat from a spindly frog-bone with his small, white teeth.
“Reyn-bow, seythee?” Gaunt repeated.
Eszrah nodded. “Thissen brande sowithe yitt we shalle reyn yron dartes thereon the heddes of otheren kinde, who gan harm makeyit on us.”
A rain-bow, to rain quarrels on the heads of the enemy. Gaunt smiled. He’d seen that. Emperor bless the nightwalkers.
The trail looped north-west now, following the lip of another deep miasmal basin. They kept to the upper ground, the piled mud, slithering along the edges of the frog territory, their legs caked with clay. They passed another forest of crimson thorns, this one the largest they had yet seen, and then wandered the fringes of an eerily silent woodland, crisp with leaf mulch, where the trees were straight and tall and thin, like spears planted into the ground. Beyond that, reed beds furred a quagmire where flies billowed, then rose onto a crusty black slope of forest that stretched for several kilometres.
The trees here were ancient and gnarled, twisted into grotesque shapes and leprous deformations. There was a constant creaking sound, and Gaunt realised it was the canopy in motion. The trees were moving in the wind. He was painfully tired, but this roused him. That was a good sign, surely?
A little further on, Eszrah hushed them down into cover. Higher up the slope from them, something wandered past in the gloom. No one saw it clearly, but they all felt its footfalls shake the ground and heard its snorting breath. The drier uplands of the Untill were evidently the hunting grounds of the marshland’s most massive predators.
Three hours later, Bonin was the first of them to see the light. He was scouting ahead through the mossy groves, and at first he thought it was a strange, white-barked tree, perfectly straight and branchless. Then he realised it was a single shaft of daylight spearing down through the interminable dark canopy.
He walked under it, and turned his face upwards, circling slowly, smiling, as the precious light flooded into his eyes.
“This way!” he called. The others quickly joined him, several cheering the sight. They gathered around it for a short while, some of them just daring to reach their fingertips out into the beam, others doing what Bonin had done and basking under it. Even Cirk touched the beam, as if for luck.
Only Eszrah ap Niht kept well away.
Uplifted, they pressed on, making better time. They found other shafts of light, then they became commonplace as the tree cover finally began to thin. The Niht reduced to a pale twilight. The ground became firmer.
Surely, we’ve begun to reach the far edge of the Untill now, Gaunt thought. Many of the Ghosts were laughing and joking about their trek being at an end.
“Ask him,” Gaunt said to Mkvenner. “Ask him how much further before we reach the end of this place.”
Mkvenner nodded, and phrased the question to Eszrah. He frowned at the answer.
“Well?” asked Gaunt.
“He doesn’t know, sir,” said Mkvenner. “He’s never been this far before.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Day was breaking over the Lectica heartlands, revealing the misty patchwork of the endless bocage in soft russets, greens and yellows. This vast territory was the breadbasket of Gereon, the most productive of all its agricultural provinces. In the distance, like a blue mark against the horizon, lay the heartland massif, an
upthrust of mountains crowned with cloud. So far away and yet, at last, in sight.
The early sky was glassy, and threaded with ropes of jumbled clouds like twists of cotton. Rawne lay in the long grass and watched them. Every damn one had a discernable shape. There, a woman on a horse. There, a larisel. That one was a bird, or maybe a pair of narrowed eyes. That one, a hand holding a knife.
He was going mad. He knew that now. He rolled over onto his back and closed his eyes, not wishing to see any more. The frail sunlight fell on his dirty face. It felt hot after their days in the sunless Niht.
They were all sick. All of them. Some, like Feygor, physically infected. Some, like Curth, emotionally disturbed. They’d been warned about it, by the medicae and the priests, before they’d embarked, but a warning is only ever a warning. There was no way they could have prepared for the reality.
Rawne was seeing symbols everywhere he looked. He knew it was the taint doing it to his mind, but that didn’t make it any easier. He saw images in clouds, in leaf-patterns, in shadows, in the grass, in the shape of stones. Every one was specific and could be given a name. Every one had a specific meaning.
Even now, with his eyelids closed, he could see symbols made by the spots and shapes drifting against the red. An eel, a ploin, a full-breasted woman. A stigma.
He opened his eyes.
Everywhere, he saw the obscene mark Cirk wore on her cheek. There it was again, in that clump of grass. There, in the dried grey clay adhering to his toecap. There, in the lines of his palm, the whorls of his fingerpads.
“Rawne!”
He looked up. “What?”
Gaunt was calling. Rawne got to his feet and went over to the others. The way they were grouped around Gaunt made the shape of the mark too. Except one part was missing. And by stepping up to join with them, he would make the shape complete.
It had taken another full day’s march to travel between that first shaft of light Bonin had found to this, the edge of the heartland proper. The way had led through miserable woodland and deep gulches of caked earth where weeds grew in thickets, waist-deep. They had been drawn on to the light, to the promise of actual day behind the thinning trees.
[Gaunt's Ghosts 08] - Traitor General Page 27