by Paul Kearney
‘Lucius, be careful, I beg you. You are playing with fire when you so much as mention the Lord of Macragge’s name on the vox. It makes ears prick up. You might garner the sort of attention we could do without. Lord Joule, for one, would be incandescent at the thought of a backwater like Zalidar hosting the Lord of Ultramar.’
‘You’re talking like a politician, Boros,’ Fennick said with a grim smile. ‘I didn’t know you had it in you.’
Boros shrugged. ‘It is all one. You will be lucky to receive a bare acknowledgement of the request – you know that. The chances of it actually happening are close to nothing.’
Fennick’s fey mood dampened somewhat. He set a hand on Boros’ shoulder. ‘Of course I know that, my friend. But it will be something to have tried, at least.’ He smiled again. ‘And if it should be let slip amid the officers of the militia that Macragge may be coming to Zalidar, then what’s the harm? It will do amazing things for their discipline.’
‘For a while. And then when he does not turn up–’
‘Trust me on this, Boros. The mere fact that they knew he was asked will be a cold shock to every man-jack of the army, not to mention Vanaheim’s agitators. You think they’ll dare foment another strike when they hear the rumour? They’ll be quaking in their boots.’
‘You are the governor,’ Boros said ruefully. ‘I’m glad my meat and drink is the army, nothing more. I just kill things, and I don’t have to issue invitations first.’
It took most of the day for Fennick to get the wording of the communication right. He sent it to Iax, to Espandor, and even managed to get it relayed to Macragge itself, via a tenuous link-up with Parmenio, the Ultramarines’ training world. By the time he was done Lieutenant Yeager was thoroughly frazzled and they were both trying to blink away the after-images of the bright scrolling text from their eyes.
For good or ill, it was out there now. The Lord of Macragge had been officially invited to land on Zalidar.
It remained to be seen whether Marneus Calgar thought it worth his attention.
Fennick hosted a dinner a week later in the Governor’s Mansion at which all those who mattered in Zalathras were present – even Rear Admiral Glenck did not refuse the last-minute invitation, for word of Fennick’s doings had travelled fast, Lieutenant Yeager having been told to be as indiscreet as he liked with it.
They trooped into the great chamber, several score of the richest and most influential people on the planet, their clothing agleam with gold and silver, adorned with gems that had cost the lives of dozens to mine from the western ranges of the Morcault Mountains.
They were preceded by three preachers of the Missionaria Galaxia who walked slowly into the banqueting hall with their bare feet slapping on the stone, swinging incense holders as they came that lent a blue smoke to the humid atmosphere.
On either side of the entering throng were lines of serfs in the livery of the Administratum; shaven-headed, collared and anonymous, they were indentured servants, petty criminals and the irredeemably poor. All had undergone rigorous conditioning, and they hung their heads in apprehension, forbidden to so much as glance at the guests.
The blessing of the Emperor was invoked by a preacher, and they all stood for a moment in silence before the places set at the immensely long table that ran down almost the entire length of the banqueting hall. Zalidar was not an especially rich world, but Fennick had made an effort for the evening, and the tabletop was a blaze of silverware. Melted down, it could have bought a starship.
They took their places, the serfs sliding the heavy chairs in behind every guest, scurrying back and forth to the kitchens on the level below, pouring blood-warm liquor into glasses and goblets of stone-crystal. From a gallery above, a blind choir sang quietly. Their song was so soft it was almost one with the drifting fragrance of the incense.
Rich people watching each other, smiling with their mouths, clinking glasses, eating careful bites of food that had taken days to source and prepare. Along this table were arrayed friends and enemies, co-conspirators, business partners, bitter foes. All of them stuffed to bursting with ambition and egotism, the driving engines of every society. Outside the battlefield, this was the other kind of war. It spilled less blood, but often had as profound a consequence for the future of a world as any meeting of armies.
Fennick sat at the head of the table in his scarlet sash with the Thrax medal on his breast. He had made sure that a couple of empty-headed ladies of no consequence were to his immediate right and left, so as not to show favouritism to any of the important families present. The real movers and shakers of his world were farther down the table, with Boros planted in their midst to listen in to what was going on.
The choir sang, sightless children with voices pure as the dawn. The courses came and went in a blaze of silver and spice. The glasses were filled and emptied. The room grew hot, the glims a stuttering of yellow glows.
Fennick studied his guests. Many rich families sat at that table, but only three really mattered.
The Vanaheims, father and sons, were the richest conglomerate on the planet. They had financed the building of Kalgatt Spire, on the condition that they should have a veritable palace of their own on the top of it. The head of the family, Kurt Vanaheim, was a capable, black-haired man very like Boros, only paler. He had been many things in his youth, it was rumoured, not all of them legal, and he had moved to Zalidar lock, stock and barrel to get ahead of angry creditors, and even, it was rumoured, the Adeptus Arbites themselves.
Setting up a logging operation deep in the Tagus, and then diversifying into the Ballansyr Quarries, he had amassed a vast fortune, an ugly wife and three ambitious sons who hated each other almost as much as their father despised them.
They had grown up soft, handed life on a plate, and Kurt Vanaheim was anything but soft. But he indulged them, for he wanted them to be gentlemen, part of a caste he had been struggling to enter all his life.
And yet, for all his riches, he had no title to pass down to them – that was what he craved, above all else. Were Zalidar to move into full Imperial compliance, then the Administratum would surely award his industry and power with some bauble. It might mean little to other men, but for Vanaheim it would be the crown of his career. The coming of the Adeptus Astartes to Zalidar might mean many things to different people, but to Kurt Vanaheim it would be seen as an opportunity, first and foremost. Men like him grew fat on war and all that came with it. They created industries that fed it, and in return, the Imperium protected them. In the galaxy that mankind struggled to survive within, everything must ultimately oil the cogs of the great machine, the monster that consumed them all. War was the natural state of things. Just because it had not yet visited Zalidar did not mean that the planet could remain untouched by it. Imperial compliance would mean a whole gear change in the way the Administratum operated. Fennick was prepared for that eventuality. He knew that the industrialist was, too.
Vanaheim raised his glass to Fennick now, and sipped at the blood-warm wine, the glim-lights shining through it. Fennick answered him. They were competitors, in a way. Fennick had authority, Vanaheim money, and sometimes it was hard to tell which mattered most.
Fifteen years before, Fennick had ordered the chief businessmen and landowners of the planet to turn over their private armies to the militia for Boros to command, and Vanaheim had done so without a murmur – five thousand men, just like that.
He had been counting on retaining their loyalty, and hence a power base in the army itself. But Boros had worked hard and long, and eventually won them over – they were his now, body and soul, proud to serve in the First Zalidari Regiment, the most senior formation in the armed forces. Vanaheim had miscalculated, and neither he nor the other kingpins of Zalathras could now hold the threat of armed insurrection over the Administratum of the planet.
The Vanaheims worked in other ways after that, through the labour organisatio
ns, always three steps removed from the angry workers their agents incited to riot. Their aim was not to destabilise the Administratum, but to remind it of their power, to be called upon to mediate. It was an open secret that Vanaheim aimed at the governorship for one of his sons one day, Fennick being unmarried and childless. He had links leading all the way to Ultramar itself, it was rumoured, and was already greasing the process.
But at the height of the labour disputes, Fennick had beaten Vanaheim’s striking malcontents with the swift efficiency that the Astra Militarum had taught him. After a dozen of the ringleaders had been taken out and shot, the strikers had faded quickly away, and Vanaheim’s schemes had gone back into the shadows.
In the meantime, Vanaheim’s companies had bought everything he could lay his hands on, and he went into construction with every asset he possessed. Rosquin’s bank – the old man was here now, and Fennick raised a glass to him also – and Vanaheim’s construction gangs had built the city walls. The main southern entrance to Zalathras was called Vanaheim Gate in recognition of this, and, as if to do justice to his namesake, Vanaheim had fortified it with looming towers and a huge barbican – old-fashioned, but immensely strong.
And now Kurt Vanaheim was entirely respectable, a senior member of the Council, a politician and grandee. The gangster who had first come to Zalidar was no more.
Everyone gets something named after them except me, Fennick thought with a tinge of self-mockery. Well, if the Lord of Macragge turns up by some happy chance, I will be remembered as the man who brought him here. That will last longer even than a name carved in stone. It will be worth more than riches, or a palace on a spire.
Vanaheim and Rosquin – these were the two richest families on Zalidar, and the most influential. Ferdia Rosquin must be seventy years old now, but he had a mind like a steel trap, and his bank had branches in half a dozen systems in the Fringe.
Why he had transferred his headquarters here was still something of a mystery to Fennick, unless he saw in the jungle-clad planet some of the potential that Fennick himself saw.
Zalidar was young. There was land here for the taking, billions of hectares of it for those who were hardy enough and brave enough to claim it. Rosquin financed new settlers and in return they mortgaged their claims to him. Already, he owned the equivalent of a small continent, the claims of those who had defaulted on their payments reverting to his bank. For many had died out there in the Tagus while fighting to clear the land and fend off the jungle beasts. Rosquin took the land of these dead pioneers and resold it. The gift that keeps on giving.
He too had sons, square, unimaginative bean-counting men, but he did not crave titles for them. He seemed to find money an end in itself. Fennick’s Administratum was hip deep in debt to the Rosquin bank, and the old man seemed to like it that way. Boros commanded the army, but it was Rosquin money that paid their wages.
The last of the triumvirate of powerful families on Zalidar were the Lascelles. Only ten years on the world, they owned a shipping company that dominated all trade between Zalidar and the other scattered planets of the Eastern Fringe. Their patriarch, Gram Lascelle, had only been seen on Zalidar once, back when the foundations of the spaceport had been laid. He was a flamboyant but shrewd man, flash and substance combined. Without his expertise and advice, Fennick doubted that the spaceport would have been built at all. Inevitably, it was going to be named after him. Lascelle’s Landing they called it down in the lower city, and the name had stuck.
He had left his son, Roman Lascelle, here to keep an eye on this branch of the company his own grandfather had founded, and the son had turned out to be a rake and a dandy, a fighter of duels, popular with women and loathed by their husbands. Not a man to cross lightly, even though he was not yet thirty. Perhaps Gram had thought the son could be kept out of trouble here on this frontier world. Or out of the way, at least.
Fennick raised a glass to Roman Lascelle, also, and the stunning courtesan he had brought to the table. Lascelle always had a hint of mockery in his eyes, and he grinned now as he raised a glass in answer – a feline young man who also delighted in hunting, and was a skilled pilot. He found Zalidari society to be something of a bore, and left the business side of his father’s company to the clerks and accountants while he spent as much money as he decently could and lived large on the generous stipend his family allotted him. Even so, his gambling debts were the stuff of open gossip, and the Rosquin bank had offered him loan after loan to keep him afloat, for his father was one of their chief investors.
Roman Lascelle was one of those gifted, cursed young men for whom life would always be a bore and a chore, who would squander their gifts for want of a proper outlet.
Well, he did, at least, lend a certain vitality to the table.
Fennick sighed, looking down that table at the finery and the chatter. His own meat – as fine a haunch of gruebuck as had ever been grilled – congealed on the plate before him. While he felt that he was building something lasting and worthwhile here on Zalidar, there were times when he thought he understood that old nomad, Ghent Morcault.
To be one’s own master, subject to no one – not the orders of the Administratum, or the intrigues of ambitious businessmen… Perhaps the old man was not such a fool after all.
But the feeling passed. He was governor of an Imperium world, an Imperium he had bled for, a system he believed in. If he were not here to politick with the Lascelles and Vanaheims and Rosquins of the world, someone else would take his place, and the lower orders, the little people who quarried stone and raised crops and fought in the militia – they would be the poorer for it.
He sat here for them as much as for himself. And he would never forget that, no more than he could forget the scars he carried, and the black memories of battle that haunted his dreams.
Let us see him here, just once, he thought. Marneus Calgar, that most puissant of lords – the greatest living of the Adeptus Astartes.
And then all the dealing and wheeling will have been worth it, and the poor people who built this city with their bare hands will have something to tell their grandchildren. A story that will endure down the generations.
Throne, let it be so.
Boros would have told him to be careful what he wished for.
It had been a long time since the destruction of Thrax, since Lieutenant Fennick had watched in awe and horror the immense power of the Adeptus Astartes ships laying waste to an entire planet. The wider Imperium was a place perpetually on the brink, consumed by the struggle for survival in an inimical universe where nightmares stalked the dark. Those on Zalidar thought they knew danger in the cries that echoed out of the Tagus, in the deadly fauna of the jungles. But these things were nothing compared to the horrors that flooded the space between the stars. Zalidar had been forgotten, even sheltered, in its brief history of human settlement. The Planetary Administratum had been largely benign, because it could afford to be so – there were no crippling tithes of men and materiel to be forwarded at rigidly stated intervals to Ultramar. Not yet.
That would no doubt change, if the Lord of Macragge ever set foot on the planet. Zalidar would be admitted as a full member of the Imperium, with all the prestige and hardship such a step entailed.
The reality of this black and bitter universe would then be brought home to these aristocrats and dilettantes. And Fennick for one looked forward to it.
‘My lord governor!’ Roman Lascelle called up from the middle part of the table. ‘Have you received back any word from Macragge about this invitation you have sent to the Ultramarines Chapter Master?’ The young man’s eyes danced with devilment.
‘That is a matter for the Administratum, for now,’ Fennick said, a smile easing the sharpness of his tone.
‘It has been all over the city for the past week. The Lord of Macragge himself, asked to set foot on humid little Zalidar! Was this a notion of your own, or did the Council agree
on it?’
Fennick’s smile curdled on his face. Two of the most powerful Council members, Kurt Vanaheim and Ferdia Rosquin, were seated not six feet from Lascelle, and were now watching the exchange with a less than discreet interest.
‘That is a matter for the Administratum,’ he repeated levelly.
‘Come, Fennick – the prime movers and shakers of the planet’s Administratum are all seated about this table! Why organise such a well-attended dinner if not to broach the good news to us. We are eager to hear – has Macragge responded to your gallant request?’
‘Not yet,’ Fennick said. His smile was now a rictus.
‘Ah, a pity.’ Roman Lascelle pursed his red lips and shook his head. ‘Still, what could one expect of such presumption? I applaud your initiative, Fennick, I truly do. But it would be something of a humiliation if not even a reply were forthcoming, would it not? No doubt Lord Joule will commiserate with you on the failure of such a brazen initiative.’
‘No doubt,’ Fennick said. He collected himself, raised a glass to Lascelle – though he would rather have thrown it at the handsome rake’s face. ‘But it is something to have tried, is it not?’
‘It is,’ Lascelle said. He smiled, and raising his glass in reply he bobbed it in a kind of salute. ‘It is good to know our governor is a man of such risk-taking enterprise.’
‘We are all risk-takers here,’ old Ferdia Rosquin spoke up unexpectedly. He looked up the table, his face as dry and lined as a withered apple. His eyes glittered like those of some nocturnal rodent. ‘Else we would not be out here, on the Fringe, in the first place. But to take a risk is one thing. To open oneself to humiliation is quite another.’