Praetorian of Dorn

by John French

  The scav gangers had noticed them getting ready and were already racking weapons, and plugging breath filters into their mouths. Those that had mouths.

  She pulled her own mask on and flicked the visor’s outer layer to black. Beside her, Incarnus flicked a hand at the triangulator.

  ‘On time,’ he said.

  Bhab Bastion

  The Imperial Palace, Terra

  Archamus woke and came off the stone of his bed in a single movement.

  ‘Threat report...’ The order began in his throat, and died on his tongue. His hearts were hammers inside his ribs.

  The cool gloom of his chamber answered him with silence.

  He looked around. The night sky looked back at him through a firing slit in the wall above him. Besides that the only light came from the candle which sat in a niche above the bed. Hours and minutes were marked as lines and numbers on the tallow. One hour remained between the flame and the midnight line. He had slept for thirty minutes. Just enough for dreams to begin, but not enough for him to remember them.

  His bolter was heavy in his hands, drawn and armed even as he woke. Slowly he tried to let his muscles relax. He could feel his blood fizzing. Behind his eyes he felt the static sensation as his mind caught up with his nerves. The bionics of his right leg clicked and hissed as his weight shifted.

  Thirty minutes. Thirty minutes in which the world had turned, and his eyes had been closed. His ears strained for the sound of running feet, of sirens.

  Nothing.

  Just the beat of blood in his hearts and the distant crackle of dust blowing into the void shields high above the bastion’s walls. The machine rack holding the pieces of his armour sat silent in the space before the door. Its readout lights blinked green. His arming servitors stood at the edges of the room.

  He let out a breath and lowered the gun. Aching weariness crawled back into his muscles.

  Thirty minutes. It had been the most sleep he had managed in months, a necessity rather than the luxury it felt like. The catalepsean node at the back of his brain let him defer the need to sleep, but he could not outrun fatigue forever. So, he had let himself sleep fully, and tried not to think of it as weakness.

  He took a step to the granite bowl of water on a shelf opposite the bed. The servos in his bionic arm clicked as he set the bolter down. A thread of cold air ran across his skin. Night stole what little heat clung to the air this high up, and the firing slit held no glass to keep it out. Ice had formed on the surface of the water in the bowl. He plunged his right hand through it, and scooped the liquid onto his face. The cold was reassuring in its sharpness. The water in the bowl settled, ripples stilling, pieces of ice knocking against the bowl’s lip.

  For a second he found himself looking down at fragments of his face reflected in the water. Time and service had left their marks on him, both within and without.

  Old and worn, he thought, as his eyes traced the tangle of lines and scars on his cheeks. His beard had been the grey of slate for four decades, but now there was a hint of chalk at the edges. He looked at the three studs bonded to the left of the brow. All of them were jet, black as the void, each a half-century of war in an unkind age.

  He scooped up another handful of water, and the reflection vanished in fresh ripples. He straightened.

  ‘Armour,’ he said.

  Three servitors stepped from the edge of the room. All were hunched, their backs bent beneath haloes of mechanical arms. Brass visors with cruciform holes for eyes covered their faces. Black robes hung over what remained of their flesh. They lifted the first pieces of armour from the armature, disconnecting power feeds and slotting components together.

  They clad him layer by layer, riveting each plate in place, connecting wires, sealing ports. At last they stepped back and he stood, burnished yellow gleaming in the candlelight. The star of Inwit sat on his chest, moulded from silver and gold, its rays clasped in a fist of jet. A black-and-red cloak trimmed with ice lion fur hung from his shoulder. His mono-eyed, Crusade-mark helmet was locked to his waist, leaving his face bare. He felt the usual twinge in his nerves as the connections to his bionic limbs asserted themselves fully.

  He took up his weapons from the rack, locking his bolter to one thigh, his bolt pistol to the other, and fastening a broad-bladed seax to his hip. Last of all, he lifted Oathword in his bionic hand, metal fingers clacking on its adamantium haft. Its head was fashioned from black stone that he had mined from the dead world of Stroma, and shaped over the course of a year. The ball of the pommel was half silver and half black iron, etched with the star constellations of Inwit. It was heavy but in his machine grasp its weight was nothing. He looked at it for a second, noting the crystal flecks shimmering beneath the stone’s surface. Unbreakable, almost unworkable: a stone that defied the universe by its existence. He nodded and touched the mace’s head to his scalp, then he locked it to his war-plate with a snap of magnetic force.

  He walked from the chamber into the gloom of the corridor outside. A gust of air ran past him and the light of the torches burning in the wall brackets billowed. He began to walk. The signals array in the collar of his armour started chiming, and vox transmissions began to fill his ears. He could hear every military signal in a sphere of space that extended ten kilometres in every direction, and up to the edge of Terra’s atmosphere. His mind sifted the information, building patterns of strength and weakness. The Huscarl squad assigned to the primarch’s person was in place. The second and third security cordons were spread throughout the bastion. Beyond that, forty-six Legion units moved through the Palace on carefully randomised patterns. Other forces were reporting nothing that gave him pause. Everything was as it needed to be.

  His eyes moved over the stones of the passages and stairwells as he climbed towards the command chamber. It was an ugly creation, both in intent and in execution. Chisel marks cut the faces of the granite walls, and its crenellations bit the air like bared teeth. It was a brutish, unrepentant creation in Archamus’ eyes. He had wondered, once, if perhaps its makers had not intended it to last, but simply to endure through the trials of some lost age. Endure it had. He could not deny that.

  What will endure of what we have made? he wondered, and walked on while a palace waiting for war whispered in his ears.

  Damocles Starport

  Terra

  Innis Nessegas hated the night, but it was all he got to see. The hours of his oversight had been allocated to his father when the old man – long dead now – had ascended to the position of third prefect of the Southern Transport Arterial Lock. There were two other prefects who watched over the system of doors, hoists and loading platforms: one of them for the day, one of them straddling the sunset. They, just like Nessegas, had inherited their positions, and their times of watch. Sometimes he wondered if either of the two envied him the night, but more often he was sure that they pitied him.

  Seen at a distance, the port was a jumbled mountain of metal. Landing platforms jutted from its sides, some large enough to take a macro-lander. Shuttle craft arrived and left without cease, buzzing like bees around a hive. Nessegas never saw them. His world was far beneath the landing platforms and the layers of storage chambers. But even down at the roots of Damocles, the patterns of activity were the same. Bulk haulers and caravans of cargo-crawlers came and went at every hour. The time they spent in the Southern Transport Arterial Lock belonged to Nessegas.

  Vehicles entered the lock through one set of doors – some fifty metres high – and entered its first cavern, where gangers off-loaded the cargo. Once that process was complete, the vehicles passed into a second cavern, and then out into the world again. Nessegas knew that the system was called a lock after an ancient method of allowing ships to pass between rivers of water. He did not know if the comparison was a good one. He had never seen a ship, or a river.

  Fifteen hundred men, women and servitors worked to cycle the cargo to
and from the vehicles. Fifty-one sub-prefects, seventy-four divisional sub-prefects and seven hundred overseers supervised those gangs, and all reported to Nessegas. From his cupola, suspended beneath the roof of the first cavern, he watched as vehicles came and went. Gangers and crew moved over and around them like insects over food. Blue data flicked across the retina of his left eye from the projector mounted on his cheekbone. His face twitched. The projector had never functioned properly and would regularly send a shock through the nerves of his face. But it was what the data was telling him that he really did not like.

  He reached out and depressed a key on the brass console in front of him. Static crackled in his ears.

  ‘Cohort thirty-three, you are five minutes and thirty-three seconds behind timetable,’ he said.

  ‘Apologies, worthy prefect,’ replied an overseer. ‘It’s the inspection crews. They want to go through this whole load. They can’t go any faster.’

  ‘That is not my problem, but it is increasingly yours. The loss margin on that freight is being deducted from the cohort’s wealth-ration and will continue to be until this blockage has cleared.’

  Another crackle of static. Nessegas could almost hear the invective it hid.

  ‘As you decree, worthy prefect.’

  He clicked the vox-link off and glanced around at the other figure in the cupola. She had heard the overseer’s words just like him, but if she cared she said nothing. Her face was just as bland and controlled as ever. She wore the red-and-black uniform of the Damocles Port Militia, and the silver swords pinned to her collar said she was an Ojuk-agha First Class. She had said her name was Sucreen. He had never seen her before, but that was not unusual; the security protocols put in place by the will of the Praetorian of Terra meant that there was always an officer of the militia with him in the lock-control, and two hundred militiamen were present in the caverns at all times. They were never the same unit, and the officer who watched him had only been the same ten times in the six years since the protocols came into force. The militia watched, checked and searched cargos at random. It was worse when they had one of the Imperial Fists with them. Then all latitude disappeared, along with any hope of him meeting his quotas. Not that Nessegas said a word in objection. Not when one of the sons of Dorn was present, at least.

  He glanced down to where a caravan was being dismantled under the eyes and guns of a dozen militiamen. Behind it a five-section crawler was just rolling through the doors. He recognised the heraldry of the Hysen Cartel and muttered a curse to himself. Even one of the crawler’s sections would hold close to a thousand tonnes of cargo. The chances of clearing it through the lock within the time contracted to the Hysen Cartel seemed remote. The flow rate for the night traffic was already the subject of acute personal embarrassment to Nessegas. If it carried on getting worse it would become a matter of censure.

  ‘Are you going to be searching with this degree of thoroughness from now on?’ he said, turning to Sucreen.

  She met his gaze, shrugged, but said nothing.

  Nessegas suppressed an urge to scream. He was considering what he could say, when Sucreen frowned.

  ‘What is that?’ she asked, looking over his shoulder. He turned back to his console. A light was flickering amber amongst the dots of green. Nessegas bent over it and allowed himself another muttered oath.

  ‘Air circulation fault,’ he replied. ‘Third time in the last division.’

  He began keying a request in to the console, the keys clacking down on their arms as he jabbed at them. It was pointless; the red priests would not respond to his summons, and if they did it would most likely be several hours later.

  ‘Is it severe?’ asked Sucreen.

  ‘We will still be able to breathe,’ he said, and then added to himself, ‘though if you were to suffocate, I would not complain.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s just a cold-drain, that’s all.’

  Sucreen nodded. Born and raised in the starport, she had grown up with the cold-drains. They were as much a factor of life as the taste of the water and the stink of machine oil. Sometimes a ventilation sluice connecting two volumes of the starport jammed open. Air flowed up and out of the deep areas, drawn into the rest of the port structure. In a deep area – like the Southern Transport Arterial Lock – that meant that the temperature would drop to near freezing. Uncomfortable, but nothing to worry about.

  Down in the cavern beneath the cupola, the Hysen Cartel crawler came to a halt. Behind it, the outer doors began to close.

  The Underworld

  Terra

  The dark at the root of the world was like no other. It pressed against the eyes and ate any light that tried to banish it. It stretched silence and made thunder of the smallest noise. It had a soul, and that soul was unkind. Of that the youth was certain.

  He waited, crouched on the edge of the fissure. It was best to wait. He had learned that quickly. The others had not. They were with the dark now. He alone remained.

  How long ago had that been? There were no days down here, and so perhaps there was no time. The darkness ate that too. How old was he now? He did not know that either. Certainly his father had called him young, and his father had been the last person he had spoken to, but how long ago he did not know. His father had not learned about the dark. It had taken him soon after they fled down to the root of the world.

  He let out a breath, very slow, quiet enough not to disturb the dark, and slid into the fissure. It would take him some time to reach the bottom. No matter how many times he came back, this last descent got no easier. The place he was going to had only one way to reach it: a climb down a sheer drop without light or stair to guide the way.

  There was endless dark piled above him, days and days of it, all the way up to the light and sky. In that realm he had touched and seen strange things: iron bridges crossing gorges without roads leading to or from them; glowing snakes swimming in lakes of water that went down and down, past drowned windows and doors. But nothing compared to what waited for him at the bottom of this climb. He had given it a name. He called the place the Revelation.

  The depths held the remains of the civilisations that had failed before He had come to save mankind from itself. The underworld was a borderland between the divine and the mundane. That was why they had fled here, because in the dark they could be safe, and close to their God. And the Revelation was a door into the sacred realm. It was the dream that had kept them alive as they fled the iconoclasts: that by going down into the dark they would find light.

  Light.

  There was a light below him, at the bottom of the fissure.

  He blinked. The light was dim, but to his eyes it was like a scream in a silent room. It was green and diffuse, as though he was only seeing its edge.

  He waited, trying to control his breathing, and the sudden racing of his heart.

  There had been no light before, but this meant that something else had found his secret. He knew it would happen eventually. As soon as he had made the Revelation his own, losing it became inevitable.

  He thought about climbing up the fissure, and running into the dark and never coming back. He thought about it while his blood beat in his ears, and the glow beneath him filled his eyes.

  The light vanished.

  He waited.

  It did not return.

  Perhaps it had not been there at all. Perhaps he was just so afraid of losing the Revelation that he had imagined it. Perhaps it had been a ghost in his eyes.

  Slowly, finger by finger, inch by inch, he began to descend again. At the bottom of the fissure he stopped. A gulf waited beneath him, just as it had the first time, just as it always did.

  He jumped.

  A brief rush of air, the silent scream of panic as he fell...

  And then smooth stone slammed into him as he landed and rolled. He came to his f
eet, eyes sweeping around him. There was no light, no waiting beast.

  Yes, it must have been his imagination: not a real light. He stood and edged forwards, feeling the seams in the stone floor with his feet. When he reached the wall, his hands found the missing block, and the handle within the space. A tug, a low grinding, and then the light. Not a phantom in the dark this time, but a narrow line of orange.

  He knelt. His fingers were trembling as he pulled the crack wider.

  He looked through.

  Fragments of light fell down to him, and he had to close his eyes. The sound of dripping water filled his ears, and the smell of rust and damp filled his nose. He waited for the blindness and stinging to fade, and then opened his eyes and looked into the realm of his God.

  A tangle of debris covered a stone floor on the other side of the door. Moulds covered every inch, some green, some white. Pools of liquid reflected the light that fell down the shaft above. Stairs and balconies marched up and up above him. All of those he could see were in the slow process of collapsing. Doorways opened off into other dark holes. But further up there was light – yellow, golden light.

  ‘The God-Emperor watches,’ he whispered, his eyes watering as he stared up at the light of the Revelation.

  This was what his father had wanted to be close to but had never seen. This was what kept him alive in the dark. Somewhere high up above him was the heart of the Imperial Palace. Up there – beyond the light – the chosen hands of the Emperor lived, and did His will.

  ‘The God-Emperor watches,’ he said again. The tears were rolling down his face.

  When he had first found the door he had thought it chance, but of course it was not. How could it be? A door from the dark into the fortress of a living god: how could such a thing exist by chance? No, this was not chance. It was a blessing, a gift to the faithful who could come this far. He had not found it. It had been given to him. He was never alone. He was never scared. He was blessed, for he could see the light of divinity.

  The rest of the prayer his father had taught him came to his lips.