Tallarn

by John French

  He remembered all this, and lived it again, screaming mutely as the unsettled tides of sleep came up to meet him. He struggled for an instant then fell…

  And fell…

  The true world snapped back into being, sharp and unforgiving. He felt his nerves mesh with the machine again, felt the silence form around him.

  He was waking again, his fall into oblivion halted.

  A voice came to him out of the dark, crackling with static.

  ‘You rise again, Ironclad. The primarch has called you to him.’

  ‘The Fourth Primarch’s words were false-incomplete in truth-value,’

  Argonis did not bother to open his eyes to look at Sota-Nul. The servitors were peeling his armour from him, piece by piece, muttering in their machine voices as they moved around him. They did not like being near Sota-Nul, he could tell. They moved like curbed animals whenever she came close. He could not say he blamed them; he did not like being near her either.

  The room was large, its floor polished rockcrete, its walls brushed metal, and the light came from globes floating in bronze cages. Red fabric softened the hard lines of the walls, and hung over the straight-backed chairs. Statuary – a rare thing to see in the presence of the Iron Warriors – stood in the room’s recesses, the features of each sculpture bluntly stylised. The chamber was amongst the more luxurious living quarters he had seen aboard a IV Legion ship. The point was not lost on Argonis; he was honoured, but he was different, softer, not of the Iron.

  Argonis felt the cool air of the chamber touch his skin as the servitors released the plating from his torso. The armour was sea-green and black. Cthonian kill glyphs spidered across the plates in beaten gold wire. A burnished crest of wings spread across the chestplate, and enamelled laurels ringed the brows of his helm. A bolt pistol and gladius hung at his waist, the grips of both decorated by mirror coins.

  Black tattoos of wings and the geometric lines of Cthonian gang glyphs ran across the muscle beneath his armour shell. To anyone who had been born in the warrens of Cthonia, his skin would have shouted his past, from the kills he had made in his youth, to the honours he had won as a warrior of the XVI Legion. A killer, they would have read: nightwalker, oath taker, and one who has won loyalty through blood. Crescent wings spread across his neck and shoulders, a full moon set between their feathers. That last symbol told that he was Chieftain of the Isidis Flight, the pilot cadre oath bound to the First Company elite. Pale scars crossed the flesh of his arms, back and chest, the hair-fine lines hatching his skin. The Unscarred they called him, half in reference to the fact that his face was untouched by war, and partly in ironic reference to the years of knife bouts which had left their razor marks on his body. He flexed his shoulders and the inked feathers rippled.

  ‘Do you not concur with my truth-analysis?’ Sota-Nul asked, and a prickling of his skin told him that she was looking directly at him. ‘Perturabo lied about his war.’

  ‘A primarch’s reasons and motivations are their own,’ he said. ‘They are beyond truth and falsity.’

  ‘I have shut the ears of all who would listen to us. We can speak openly.’

  ‘I was. Perturabo speaks the truth, in part at least. Tallarn is important, or could be, and he has never failed to answer the Warmaster’s bidding before.’

  ‘That view does not match your actions. You have summoned the operative. Why, if all is as it seems?’

  The last plates of his armour came away and he felt the fabric of a tabard slip over his neck. Sota-Nul was looking at him. The cluster of nine lenses on the left side of her dead flesh face glowed green in the low light.

  ‘Nothing is as it seems,’ he said carefully.

  A sudden scratching made both turn. Prophesius was moving, each step a sinuous transition between instances of complete stillness. A blank mask covered his head in its entirety, the metal scored with symbols which Argonis did not understand and did not like to look at. A lock-like mechanism held the mask shut at the back of the head. The key from that mechanism hung around Argonis’s neck, its presence a promise he wondered if he would have to keep.

  Hands had appeared from beneath Prophesius’s green silk robes. The fingers on each were withered and twisted as though they had been broken and healed before they were set. His right hand clutched a tablet of wax set in a silver frame. A long metal spike capped the index finger of his left. After a pause he stabbed the spike down into the wax. His head was lolling back, his hands moving as though pulled by wires.

  he is marked

  The gouged letters showed clear on the pale wax. Prophesius paused, once again utterly still.

  Argonis stared at the astropath, and then at the words on the tablet. He had no idea what they might mean. Blood was oozing from the edge of Prophesius’s nails, running down onto the wax tablet.

  ‘You refer to the primarch, to Perturabo?’

  Prophesius’s hand jerked to life again, slashing words into the wax.

  the eye has seen him he has passed through it has seen him he has seen

  Argonis opened his mouth, a question forming on his tongue.

  Sota-Nul flinched, as though woken from sleep by a sudden noise. Argonis turned to her.

  ‘Return signal from Alpharius’s asset received…’ she began.

  ‘I thought this area was shrouded,’ he growled.

  ‘Signal confirms contact,’ she continued, shaking her head as though struggling to hear. Then she looked up at Argonis, the light in her nine-fold eyes hard and bright. ‘He will come to us.’

  She passed the time by breaking the Alpha Legion communication ciphers.

  It had been sixteen hours since Iaeo had folded herself into the crawl space, and she estimated that it would be another eight until she moved. Stillness was the key to invisibility. That truth was one of the first lessons taught in the Assassin Temples on Terra. Another strategy might have been to move continually, to make herself impossible to pin down. That strategy had merits, but most of them applied when you had somewhere to go. At present she had no location to reach, and getting out of the Crescent Shelter would be difficult, bordering on impossible. Not actually impossible, of course, but that was the way it might seem based on probabilities of detection/death. She was hunted, and she needed to stay alive if she was going to complete her mission.

  So she had scrambled down into the deep reaches of the shelter, where the tunnels were choked with cables and pipes, and the dust and grime told its own story of how many had made the journey before her. The feeds from the cordon of net-flies were showing nothing concerning. Air temperature, sound levels and vibration were all steady at background levels. The multifaceted eye of the swarm showed her nothing other than empty shafts, ducts and tunnels. Everything was quiet. There, folded into a space small enough that even a child would struggle to reach her, she waited, and ran codes through her partitioned mind.

  She needed to watch the swarm of net-flies – which currently watched every connection to her current location – but that only took half of her awareness. Cracking the Alpha Legion’s comms had seemed a good use of the rest of her mind.

  It had taken her a few awkward minutes to activate and expose the workings of the comms implants she had taken from the dead operatives. Two of her flies had bitten into the blood-slicked machine, and encrypted communications had begun to flood her awareness. The data was most likely low level, nothing big, nothing of critical importance, but she existed to make lethal situations from tiny fragments. Besides, cracking the ciphers gave her something to do.

  The Mechanicum of Mars now claimed the realm of technology and its mysteries as theirs and theirs alone, but the traditions and mysteries which would become the Assassin Temples had been born in Old Night, and they had secrets of their own. The Red Priests might claim dominion over the machine, logic and calculation, but Vanus were not machines, they were the powers of human reason refi
ned to a sharp point. And they lived for information. It was not just a skill, or training, or even the modifications made to their brains by razor, gene graft and alchemistry. It was a compulsion, a drive burned into her that she had to satisfy. There were sacred logic engines on Mars which could have cracked the ciphers, machines which would have creaked and wailed to the same solution, but they lacked the human component that the Vanus so treasured. They lacked obsession.

  The cipher was complex, even for covert communications. She enjoyed knowing that, it made watching it fall apart more satisfying. It took her five hours. When she cracked it at last she allowed herself a few moments for the data to wash around her senses. It felt like light, like fresh water, and warm air. The comms unit was not picking up transmissions any more, but fragments of what had passed through it still remained, scattered like shards of a shattered window. She dipped her mind into them, noting, collating and archiving. There was some valub–

  Her mind stopped dead. Then her heart began to hammer. Blood flushed into her brain, as lines of deduction and possibility began to form, combine and expand. She had to move, she had to get out of the shelter no matter how.

  She began to squeeze back out of her bolthole. Once able to crawl she began to move faster. Once she could run and climb, she was a blur of black synskin rising through the depths of the shelter. The lines of computation in her mind spun on, hungering for more data, promising conclusions. At the core of each accelerating thought the single fragment of Alpha Legion signal echoed and glowed, like a message written in fire.

  …THE EMISSARY HAS ARRIVED…

  War never ceased on Tallarn. In the face of victory and defeat, it ground on without pause.

  In the six hours after the retreat of the Third Assault of the Sightless Warren, a force of four hundred war machines set off from the Cobalack Shelter. Supposedly they were to link up with loyalist elements which had fled north after the attack, though no one would later be able to recall who had given the order. No trace of them was ever found.

  In the void, the ragged fleet carrying the Legio Krytos and the survivors of House Caesarean dropped from the warp, cutting its way through loyalist ships to drop its forces onto Tallarn’s southern pole. From above, the ships of both sides watched as the clouds above the southern landmass danced with flames as they, the traitor Titans and Knights, matched themselves against the maniples of the Legio Gryphonicus.

  In the Cassildian Mountains the loyalist bunker complex fell when decontamination measures failed. The complex’s last signal echoed across the planet’s electro-sphere for hours after the last of its inhabitants had died.

  In the command rooms of the loyalist shelters, and in the strategiums of the vessels circling in the void, the fractures in command split wide. Colonels, captains, praetors, generals, and others of countless vaunted ranks began to blame, insult, ignore and rebuke each other for a failure which all of them had had a hand in creating. It was Dellasarius, Governor Militant of Tallarn before its murder, and in name still commander of all forces on its surface, who silenced the squall of voices.

  ‘We will attack again,’ he said. ‘We attack again, and again, until there are no more of us who can. And then we find a way to do it again until we break them.’ Then, into the uneasy silence which followed, he added. ‘Remember where this is, and the price we have paid to reach this day. This is not just war, this is vengeance.’

  Four

  Quiet

  Father

  Lies

  ‘Did you see that, War Anvil?’

  ‘This is War Anvil. What are you seeing, Razor?’

  ‘Movement to the south. Visual only, nothing on the auspex. Might just be the wind.’

  Kord shifted the view on the cracked auspex screen. Nothing. They were ten hours out from the Crescent Shelter, running across the Tesilon Flats in a pair of staggered lines. There were twenty machines in his command, barely a company strength from the regiment as it had been. The battle tanks, a mix of Vanquishers and Executioners, rode in a box formation with War Anvil at their centre. The scouts were further out, running fast before going still to watch. Nothing usually came across the flats, not from either side, but caution was what kept you alive on Tallarn.

  Kord keyed the vox again.

  ‘You get a sense of what direction it was going?’ The static swallowed his words. Origo’s voice came back a second later.

  ‘South-east, but that’s just a feeling.’

  ‘Strength?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ replied Origo. ‘If it was real, more than one, less than a hundred.’

  ‘Just a patrol sweep,’ said Zade, across the local vox. The gunner had been listening in.

  ‘Could be one of ours,’ Sacha added.

  ‘Could be…’ Zade’s voice shrugged for him, without Kord needing to see him.

  ‘They don’t normally come through this way,’ said Kord softly. ‘Too far out, no targets.’ This could be it, he thought, one of the strange Iron Warriors patrols he had been mapping for the last months. His mind was ticking through the possibility of taking his machines to investigate the sighting. The least efficient machines in the group had air and fuel to last another sixteen hours of straight running, more if they stripped back the power taken by the tactical system. Command would not like it. No, command would hit the roof. He thought of Fask’s blotched face and the stain from his drink leeching from the lines and notes he had made on the maps.

  ‘Sir,’ Origo’s voice hissed in his ears again. ‘If we leave it much longer we might not be able to acquire them again. What do you want to do?’

  Kord stared at the key of the vox for a second, and then nodded to himself.

  ‘All units, this is War Anvil, hold formation on my position, heading south-east. Weapons cold, we have enemy in sight, so stay quiet.’

  His father came to him in the cavern beneath the earth. Hrend knelt as the Lord of Iron entered the chamber. The shield-bearing automatons of the Iron Circle formed a wall around them, facing outwards. The cavern had once been a muster area of a shelter which was now part of the Sightless Warren. The Mechanicum had filled the space with the devices of their art. The dark reaches of the cavern growled and sparked with the pulse of great machines. Here Hrend, and his Dreadnought brothers, slept and waited to be called to battle. All the tech-priests and adepts had left before Perturabo arrived, so that Hrend and his primarch were alone in a circle of cold light.

  ‘Lord.’ Hrend’s voice rumbled from his speakers. Perturabo stood in silence for a long moment, his metal-wrapped body seeming to breathe with him.

  ‘You were Sollos Hrendor,’ said Perturabo. ‘Master of the Seven Hundred and First Armoured Cohort.’

  ‘That was who I was, my master.’ Hrend felt his ghost limbs twitch.

  ‘I have need of you,’ said Perturabo, and his armour seemed to buzz in time with the words.

  ‘I obey.’

  The Lord of Iron paused again. In the silence Hrend heard his master’s armour creak, like dry bones. When he spoke again, his voice rolled through the air, as deep and dangerous as an ocean.

  ‘No, Sollos. No, this time I will not command you. Rise.’

  Hrend stood, extending to his full height with a hiss of oiled metal. Perturabo stood shorter than Hrend, though somehow seemed to be greater. The primarch’s exo-augmentation gleamed with oily reflections. Armour plates layered the frame, the machinery below visible through the gaps where the plates parted and overlapped. The primarch had changed since Hrend had last seen him. But then hadn’t they all? They had gone beyond reality and returned. They had been betrayed and offered up to otherworldly powers. Who could not be changed by that?

  ‘It is not enough for you to obey,’ said Perturabo. ‘You must know what I ask you to do, and why. You must believe.’

  The servos in Hrend’s head unit hissed as they tried to interpret the signal to bow
his head.

  ‘How may I serve?’

  Argonis stepped into the light of the hangar bay. Sota-Nul and Prophesius followed a step behind him, one gliding as though on polished ice, the other shuffling. His Storm Eagle sat in a pool of stab-lights. Her name was Sickle Blade, and her black and sea-green fuselage made her seem an interloper amongst the brushed iron skins of the Iron Warriors craft. Servitors moved over her. Thick trunks of fuel lines snaked away from her belly into the deck. Human serfs in tan overalls and blank faceplates moved amongst the servitors, performing rote maintenance too complicated for the half-machines. An enginseer in layered red robes stood to the side, utterly still apart from the light of scrolling data glowing in the darkness of its hood. A false wind blew through the hangar bay, stirred by the engines of the larger gunships. Parchment tapers fluttered from the catches on Sickle Blade’s open inspection plates.

  ‘Master.’ A serf, wearing a breath mask and with a senior rank code tattooed across his scalp, knelt at Argonis’s approach. Argonis did not pause or reply. His eyes were roaming over the gunship, noting the care the Iron Warriors had taken over readying the machine.

  Twelve days had passed since they had received the initial signal from the Alpha Legion operative, twelve days in which they had heard nothing more. Argonis had begun to wonder if the asset was real, or just another part of the Alpha Legion’s endless misdirection. That, or perhaps the asset could not reach them. Having an asset embedded in Perturabo’s forces was one thing, getting a clear, open channel signal onto his flagship without him noticing was another. Yet the assets had picked up Sota-Nul’s contact signal, and acknowledged in turn, which meant that they had the means to bypass the Iron Warriors countermeasures.