Tallarn

by John French

  Something caught his eye in the fog as he pulled his view back to the stranded tank. He did not know what he had seen, it had been so brief, an image caught as it vanished behind a curtain.

  He swept the gunsight back. The fog beyond the low dirt ridge had thickened again. His mouth opened.

  What had it been?

  Cold on his skin.

  Had it been… a figure…

  Grave Call was within ten metres of the stranded tank now.

  No, that could not be. Except…

  His hand found the vox.

  ‘Tolson,’ he said, trying to keep his voice steady. The vox crackled. ‘How long did it take the air to fail?’

  ‘Sir…?’ Tolson’s voice was ragged with relief.

  The Grave Call, had rotated its turret so that its gun pointed to its rear. The pistons holding its dozer blade extended, dropping it to the ground.

  ‘How long?’

  The fog parted along the ridge behind the stranded tank.

  A figure was standing there; still, graphite black, the dust of the drying earth falling from its joints and armour plates. It was not human, it was not even trans-human. It was a cyborg. A Thallaxi. And it was looking directly down at Kord.

  ‘All units!’ the shout roared from his throat.

  The stranded tank exploded. Jets of molten metal blasted from each face of its hull. The Grave Call blew apart as the jet cut through its hull. A sphere of plasma flew out from the dead machine, struck another tank, and flipped it onto its side like a toy slammed by a child.

  The cyborg brought its thick-barrelled meltagun up and fired. A red neon line split the fog, touched Abbas’s tank, and a second, brilliant white sphere blinked into being.

  Kord jerked his head back from the sight as white-bright light bored into his retina. War Anvil shook as overlapping blast waves broke over it. There were voices shouting all around him, shouting across the vox, through the pressed tight space of the tank. He tried to blink away the bright smudges burned into his sight. Beyond them he could see shapes moving on the auspex screen, red threat marks rising from the dead dust of the ground to close on him.

  The memory of Perturabo’s voice came to Hrend as he dreamed.

  ‘What are we?’ Perturabo asked.

  The question surprised Hrend, but the answer came without him thinking.

  ‘We are iron.’

  ‘And what is the purpose of iron?’

  ‘To endure. To cut.’

  ‘To be weapons of war.’ Perturabo nodded, and turned half away, the plates of his augmented frame flowing over each other. He raised an arm, and turned it over seeming to examine the weapon bonded to its back. Hrend did not know the exact design, but recognised volkite charge discs and energy feeds. ‘But we are fighting a war that is not like the wars of old. The edge has been taken from our blades, the strength from our shield. The universe we thought existed was a lie.’

  The dream ended, the lingering image of Perturabo crumbling into the static swirl of fog in his sensors.

  For a second the feeling of fading dreams and memory lingered, more real than unreal, even as they vanished. He shivered and his Dreadnought frame creaked in sympathy. He turned his head and looked around him, trying to remember where he was and what he was doing.

  A line of black jagged rocks rose through the thinning fog to his left, biting up into the air, and marching down a slope to a valley floor which waited somewhere out of sight. The assault group were lined up beside him, stationary on the crusted earth slope. The brick slab shape of Spartan 4171 loomed to his left. Orun and Gortun stood a short distance behind him, and the rest of the group’s war machines formed a diamond around them. All of them had their engines and systems wound down to minimum power. He remembered where they were now.

  A voice was talking, the last word it had spoken sliced off at his wakening.

  ‘–h out a specific target. We could meet resistance in either direction.’

  He still did not feel fully part of what was going on around him. Reflexively he checked the time lag since he had last been conscious. Less than a second had passed. He looked at the seconds click past, and felt his recent memories return.

  He and his group were halted in the lower foothills close to an area the humans of Tallarn had called Nedden. They had stopped to make the decision on the direction in which they should proceed.

  ‘East…’ A new voice trembled across the vox, draining down into a panting breath. The voice trailed off, and Hrend could feel the silence on the vox thicken uneasily.

  ‘You tell us to go east, Navigator?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes…’ said the rustling voice. The fingers of both Hrend’s fists clamped shut at the sound. Even from the vox it was like sand grating over glass. ‘The rift opens. Its scent calls. The taste of night is like sugar. East runs the water though there is no stream, only the eyes… eyes like the dark-bright moon…’

  ‘Silence,’ he growled, and the Navigator went quiet.

  Hrend had only seen the creature once as it was being loaded onto Spartan 4171. It was not an experience he wished to repeat. It had moved with an irregular grace, gliding, twitching and veering without discernible pattern. The exposed flesh of its head and hands was grey, and crazed with black veins which stood proud of the skin. A metal plate covered its forehead, keeping its third eye locked behind closed, plasteel leaves. The eyes beneath were blood-red from edge to edge, the irises a broken swirl at the heart of each. Hrend knew its name: Hes-Thal. He, for it had been a male, was one of the Navigators who had been at the tillers of Perturabo’s fleet as it had plunged into the black star at the heart of the Eye of Terror. They had still had their third eyes open when the ships fell into that other space. It had killed many of them, and altered the ones who remained. ‘Black Oculus Navigators’ was what the primarch had called them. Hrend had become one of the few that knew of their existence when he had accepted this quest. It was an honour he did not relish.

  Whenever he had to interact with the altered Navigator, he felt a hunger to be ignorant of their existence again. But without Hes-Thal their task was impossible; the Navigator could see, or sense what they sought, though that sense seemed as erratic as the creature himself.

  ‘We turn east,’ said Hrend, into the waiting vox. He began to walk. The tracks of the tanks began to turn.

  ‘Ironclad…’ the Navigator’s voice slid into his ear.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see you, Ironclad…’ Hrend heard the words, and suddenly was sure he could feel something inside his sarcophagus, something delicate tracing lines across the chewed remains of his skin, something with long, thin fingers. The Navigator’s voice returned. ‘I… see… you… a morsel of flesh pulled from the death father’s mouth… I see you curled in your tomb… I see you dream…’

  Hrend saw the land around him, but suddenly everything was different. The fog stripped back as if burned away by sunlight. Everything was brilliant and clear and bright. Everything was burning. His feet were moving, and beside him the block shapes of Sicarans, Predators and Venator hulls shimmered in pools of shadow. Sounds came to him as he looked at them, sounds like the snicker of blade edges and the rattle song of bullets feeding into a gun.

  ‘What?’ he began, but the word hung on its own because the Navigator’s voice came again.

  ‘I… see… you… I see the whole… I see the seed… and I…’ The voice trailed away. Hrend’s sight suddenly cleared, and the sensation of fingers stirring the fluid around his body vanished. He was striding over the ground, his sensors peeling back the fog not with light but with the stark stream of scrolling data. He knew without knowing why the Navigator within the Spartan had turned its gaze from him.

  ‘What?’ he said again, as though clearing it from a jammed thought.

  ‘I see you, and I…’ whispered Hes-Thal as though falling a
sleep. ‘…and I am sorry.’

  Hrend marched on, following a line into the east, trying not to hear the Navigator’s words scratch at the back of his thoughts.

  The Master of Core Reach I came to Argonis in his chamber complex.

  The rooms were three levels down, in a region of the Sightless Warren that had been the first to be assimilated into the buried fortress. The Sapphire City Shelter had been its name before, but the Iron Warriors had stripped it of that name when they had remade it. Core Reach I was its new title, and the blunt efficiency of the IV Legion now pervaded its every corner. Work details moved through its corridors in tight groups, hauling loads of shells, armour plates and provisions to the areas that would need them. Harsh light and fresh air billowed through the passages and chambers from repaired and carefully maintained lighting and ventilation systems. Every door and lift shaft had a guard. Most were from the human regiments bound to the Legion. The iron skull and bonded unit numbers marked their armour and skin. Legionaries watched over more vital areas, flanking doors or looking out into chambers, like worn steel statues.

  Argonis and his entourage had been given a cluster of sparse chambers close to the central command areas. They had been permitted to go wherever they pleased, and no one had questioned their presence anywhere. The Eye of Horus opened all doors. Even so they had learned nothing besides the manifest truth that Tallarn was a battlefield, which gave up victories sparingly and drank the blood of all who trod her surface. Argonis had walked the miles of the Sightless Warren, had reviewed battle plans, and seen caverns filled with troops and machines. None of it had told him anything besides the fact that the IV Legion were trying to win Tallarn the way they always won wars, by battering their enemies to ruin. He had found nothing: no suspicious facts, no concealment, nothing.

  Had his instinct been wrong? Was the truth they were hunting a ghost?

  It had been the tech-witch who had suggested that they change their approach. Argonis had resisted, but as the days became weeks, and the weeks clustered into months he had agreed that there was no alternative. If there was something hidden then looking at the surface of things was going to tell them nothing. They had to peel the skin off and look beneath, and that meant that they were about to do something that brought a taste of bile to his tongue when he thought about it.

  He turned when the chamber doors opened. The Iron Warrior who entered was a little shorter than most Space Marines, and the face was a flattened lump of scars and stitch marks. A blank silver ball stared out from where his left eye should have been, while the right met Argonis’s with pale green coldness. A crimson-and-yellow centurion plume rose from the plough-fronted helm held under the newcomer’s left arm, and his right rested on the pommel of a sheathed short sword. Bronze lightning bolts split the dirty iron of his breastplate and shoulder guard. Behind him stood two warriors in the chevroned bronze of the Legion elite. The Iron Warrior’s name was Volk, and he held command over much of the Sightless Warren, and he was there because Argonis had summoned him.

  Argonis waited.

  After a long second Volk spoke.

  ‘The Commander of Core Reach One gives honour and greetings to the emissary of the Warmaster of Mankind.’ Volk bowed his head, just enough to show respect, but not enough to imply deference.

  ‘The honour is ours, and we give you thanks for the efforts you have made to aid our mission.’ Argonis bowed his helmeted head, careful to make sure the gesture was not as deep as Volk’s. The relative depth of his bow told everyone present where the higher authority lay. Most importantly it told Volk. Behind him he heard a rustle as Sota-Nul bowed in turn. ‘It is pleasing to see that you have come in person to ensure that our latest request is met.’

  Volk’s expression flickered, his scarred features rippling.

  ‘We deny you nothing, emissary, but I do not understand how this request is relevant?’

  ‘He is not unintelligent, this one,’ said Sota-Nul, her voice a private whisper from his helm’s vox. ‘That could be problematic.’

  He ignored it.

  ‘Relevant?’ he let the word hang in the air. ‘Everything is relevant.’ He watched a muscle twitch under Volk’s metal eye.

  ‘If he will not comply there are other ways-methods that can be used,’ Sota-Nul said in his ear.

  ‘The primary armouries are yours to see. All seventy-two of them.’

  Argonis nodded, still not breaking eye contact.

  ‘The Lord of Iron has laid his preparations for war well.’

  ‘As always.’

  ‘A long war…’

  ‘For whatever might be needed.’

  ‘Need is decided by who is judging that need.’

  Volk laughed, the deep sound growling through the bare chamber. His armoured frame shook with the sound. Argonis saw broken stubs of teeth flash in the crooked line of Volk’s mouth.

  ‘Do you ever let an opportunity to sound like an arrogant cur pass?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Argonis reached up and unfastened his helm. He smiled himself then, stepped forward and clasped Volk’s extended fist in his own. ‘But you provide so many opportunities it would seem impolite.’

  ‘Does Cthonia only breed weaklings with sharp tongues, or is it just you?’

  ‘Does Olympia still just breed halfwits and siege dross?’

  ‘Only the best of both.’ Volk’s scars twisted into a smile again. ‘It is good to see you. Even in all of this, brother, it is good to see you.’

  ‘All this?’

  ‘This war. It is a long way from Carmeline, and the Reddus Cluster.’ Volk let a breath hiss from his nose, and shook his head. ‘A long way along a strange path.’

  ‘It is,’ said Argonis, holding his expression and head still. ‘And things change.’

  ‘Yes. They do.’ Volk said the words carefully, frowning. ‘You come from the Warmaster. In person. As the bearer of his presence. Somehow I never thought that kind of honour would be yours.’

  ‘Neither did I.’

  Volk raised an eyebrow, but did not press the point.

  ‘And as you can see I have had my wings clipped. A hawk on an iron perch.’ He grinned, and tapped the metal sphere of his left eye, and then pointed at Argonis. ‘But even with just one eye I could still tear you out of the sky.’

  ‘I doubt it. Unless half blindness has somehow improved your skill as a pilot.’

  ‘Oh-ho. So the high orbits of command have not taken your claws. Good. Do they still call you – what was that ridiculous title? The Unscarred – that was it wasn’t it?’

  Argonis smiled briefly, and then allowed his face to harden into seriousness

  ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘Since Isstvan, what happened to the Fourth?’

  ‘I went to the Cathian Gulf after the Massacre.’ Volk closed the fingers of his hand with a clack of ceramite on ceramite. ‘Broke the holdings around Selgar. But the primarch summoned us here, and so here I am. I am sure that all of our activities are fully known by the Warmaster.’ He shrugged, and did not look back at Argonis.

  ‘Things have changed, old friend,’ said Argonis.

  ‘Civil war will do that.’ Volk nodded, his mouth a hard line. Argonis thought of the squadron master he had known and fought with for almost a decade. The warrior in front of him was the same, still the combination of wit and brutality that seemed at odds with his Olympian birth. But there was a weight there now, as though thoughts he could not speak were churning within.

  ‘Why are you here? Why is your Legion fighting this battle?’

  ‘You have asked the primarch that?’

  Argonis nodded. ‘Then you have your answer.’ The Iron Warrior turned and made for the door. From far off a distant rumble shook the still air. A thin thread of dust fell from the ceiling. Everyone in the room looked upwards.

  ‘Surface bombardment,’ said Sota
-Nul. ‘They are attacking again, as predicted.’

  Volk’s eyes flicked to her then back to Argonis.

  ‘You have unusually poor timing on this occasion, brother. My attention will be needed soon, but the armouries are open to your inspection… Emissary.’ A hard note of formality had returned to his voice, and he gave an abrupt gesture to one of his two guards. ‘Taldak will be your guide.’

  ‘My thanks,’ said Argonis. Volk bowed in reply, and then he turned and was gone out of the door.

  Argonis looked at Taldak’s blank, masked face, and clamped his own helm over his head. Sota-Nul’s transmitted voice spoke to him as soon as the helmet’s connections closed.

  ‘That one is dangerous and clever.’

  ‘He always was,’ he replied, making for the door. Taldak fell in before him, his bolter held low in his hands.

  ‘His presence and the presence of this guide may cause us complications.’

  ‘I am not sure I will tolerate what you are implying.’

  They crossed the door out of the chamber and began to walk down the curving passage beyond. An alert alarm began to sound. Yellow lights began to strobe in the ceiling. Another tremor ran through the floor. Despite himself he felt adrenaline spiking his blood.

  ‘You should overcome your reluctance,’ purred Sota-Nul. ‘We might need to kill more than him.’

  ‘There will be no need.’

  ‘There may be every need,’ she said.

  Iaeo felt elation as she watched the emissary and heard the tech-witch’s words. The emotion washed through her, raw and burning. She had to slice it out of her awareness before it corrupted the calculations.

  Her primary phase manipulation had worked. It had worked. Even if she denied her emotions she could not deny that truth.