Praetorian of Dorn

by John French

  Then Dorn swung. It was a simple movement: a step forwards and to the side, Storm’s Teeth rising, the nearest ork’s blow passing just in front of Dorn’s chest. So simple. So seamless, and utterly destructive.

  Storm’s Teeth struck the ork’s shoulder and ripped through its torso. Petals of armour plating and scraps of flesh sprayed out as the chainsword ripped free, and the next ork was already striking even as the body of the first hit the floor. The notched edge of its cleaver whistled as it cut. The blow was too close for Dorn to avoid. It struck home, just under the primarch’s left arm... and went no further. The ork froze in surprise. Dorn looped his left arm over the ork’s weapon as he battered the pommel of his sword into the creature’s head. Metal and bone shattered. Blood gushed over the ork’s shoulders. Dorn pivoted and threw the corpse into the blades of its kin. And then he was moving, shape blurring, striking and striking, each blow from a different angle. Storm’s Teeth was a bloody arc drawn in the air around him, and the orks were falling. Archamus felt himself shouting for his brothers to follow as he leapt beside his primarch.

  They drove forwards, a wedge of golden-yellow armour with a lord of war as its cutting edge. The world was a blur of movement, of shooting and stabbing, and feeling that he was just one part of a creature of many heads and one will; that he was part of a force greater than any single warrior: indomitable, wrathful, remorseless.

  The battle lasted two more hours. The end came suddenly. One second he was pulling his seax free from the neck of an ork, and the next there was nothing in front of them except smoke climbing into the sky above a plain of corpses. Gunfire chattered from one of the trench-lines and then fell silent. Archamus stood for a second, eyes and mind searching for the next threat. Tactical runes resolved in his helmet display, cooling from amber to blue.

  He looked around. Katafalque was at his shoulder, eyes scanning the ground. Ork blood and scraps of meat lacquered his armour, hiding the yellow beneath red. A jagged tear ran across the warrior’s helm from above his left eye to beneath his chin, and Archamus could see the clotted swelling of one socket through the cut. He looked down at himself, remembering blows that had struck him as they drove through the orks. There was blood inside his battleplate, and he could feel the cold numbness of suppressed pain. His bionics ground through caked gore and dust as he turned the other way, and looked at Dorn.

  The primarch’s armour was daubed in filth. Tatters of skin hung from Storm’s Teeth. He was still again, as though the figure who had strode through slaughter only a moment before had retreated behind a wall of control and calm.

  ‘Give orders for the fleet to come into close orbit,’ he said, looking down at Archamus. ‘Bring in heavy equipment and burner units. Make this plain a pyre. All other units are to rearm and prepare to disperse over the surface. No trace of the orks is to remain. You have twenty hours to see it done. After that I will see your plans for the fortification and garrisoning of this planet.’

  ‘It will be done, my lord,’ said Archamus, bringing his fist to his chest in salute.

  Dorn gave a curt nod and began to walk to where the Aetos Dios was settling onto the battlefield. The Huscarls went with him, their bloodstained cloaks hanging stiff from their shoulders. Archamus had stood and was about to turn to issue the first of a litany of orders, when Dorn turned back.

  ‘The future is not won in battle, but in the moments before battle begins and the time after battle is done. Remember that, and remember this day. This is the Imperium’s victory, but it is also yours, captain.’

  Archamus knelt, hearing the clogged gears of his bionics squeal. Beside him Katafalque and the rest of his squad followed suit, and then across the battlefield every legionary and human auxiliary was kneeling. Then Katafalque shouted the call that a second later echoed up through the drifting smoke like a promise made to unborn futures.

  ‘Imperium victor!’

  ‘Imperium victor!’

  ‘Imperium victor!’

  Rogal Dorn in battle against the orks on Rennimar

  Part Three

  The First Axiom

  One

  Scavenger vessel Wealth of Kings

  The solar void

  Silonius keyed the shutters to open. They clanked upwards from the viewport, and the light travelled up his chest until he could feel it on his face. He closed his eyes before the sunlight touched them. He waited and then opened his eyelids slowly. The sun sat beyond a circle of gold-tinted crystal. Its light was so bright that it seemed to be pushing out towards him, pulling him in, filling him up as he looked at it. His eyes adapted to the light, reducing the glare to a flat circle of brilliance.

  He could not remember the sun under which he had been born. He could remember snatches of the past now, pieces of a life lived in war, but the picture was incomplete and before a certain point... empty.

  Psychic reconstruction. He had spoken those words to Alpharius. He was what remained from that process. That knowledge had not been a kind revelation. If anything it left him feeling empty, a body waiting for blood to live. But that was just a fact, a consequence of what he needed to do, what he needed to be.

  One of the shard blades spun in his fingers as he looked at the sun. He had brought both blades with him from his hiding place beneath the Imperial Palace, and kept them even after he had shed most of his equipment from that phase of the mission. Like the habit he had developed in the last few days of coming to look at the sun from this deserted tower, the blades had remained with him.

  He blinked slowly at the sun, his mind calculating where they must be from its brightness and position, and that of the distant stars. The Wealth of Kings did not follow a course, so much as weave through the void between Terra and Sol. They had made a brief rendezvous with three other vessels and stopped at a scavenger station built into a scooped-out asteroid. On each occasion, the ship had lingered for only the briefest exchange, and every time Sork had come to Phocron with a new data-slate or archive device. Silonius knew what each of the devices contained, and he knew why they were important. That had been one of the gifts of his slowly assembling memory. He was not supposed to know; or rather Phocron did not know that he knew.

  He went suddenly still, the blade motionless in his fingers.

  He heard heartbeats, a paired rhythm.

  Transhuman.

  Then he heard a hiss of breath and the near-silent glide of movements so fluid that they merged into the rumble of the ship, and the pulse of air from the vents.

  He knew who it was before the legionnaire spoke.

  ‘We are supposed to confine ourselves to the hangar decks,’ said Phocron. Silonius turned. The Headhunter Prime was standing a pace away, hands clasped casually behind his back. Like Silonius he had shed his armour and wound himself in a tattered grey shift. A trailing length of fabric covered his head and the lower half of his face. Phocron stepped closer and looked through the viewport.

  ‘The day the Legion confines itself to anything is the day we die,’ said Silonius. Phocron gave a dry snort and then turned to look directly at Silonius.

  ‘We must talk, brother,’ he said.

  Silonius shrugged. He knew that this encounter would have to happen sooner or later. The Legion trained its warriors to never rely on any weapon or structure that could be changed or destroyed. In training and in battle they changed function, formation and even rank constantly. The fact that Silonius had joined Phocron’s team in mid operation should have meant nothing. But as with so much theory, and even practice, it failed in the face of realities.

  ‘If you think so, brother,’ Silonius said, and waited for a rebuke or challenge. Had he made a mistake? Had he allowed Phocron to realise more than he needed to?

  ‘Can you believe that it has come to this? That we are here, fighting this war?’ asked Phocron, nodding at the image of the sun beyond the porthole. Silonius kept the surprise from his
face and began to reply, but Phocron spoke before he could. ‘When I was sent to sleep beneath Terra’s soil, the galaxy was a different shape. This future was unborn – all the wars that might be were theory and contingency. Now they are reality.’

  Silonius met the stare and thought of all the mission parameters that must still exist in the mind behind those eyes, all the other shapes of war that a different word could have unlocked.

  Orpheus...

  Eurydice...

  Hades...

  ‘It was inevitable, brother,’ he said. ‘It was always going to come to this. A galaxy crowded with sons of war building a realm from dust, each different, yet each the same. How else could it have ended?’

  Phocron let out a breath.

  ‘Were you sent here before it began?’ he asked.

  Silonius paused, considering how to answer. He could sense the trap in the question. He had no doubt that Phocron was sincere in his struggle to assimilate the current context of his mission, but he was also using it as a cloak. Should he answer with part of the truth, or an outright lie?

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I was placed on Terra only a year ago.’

  ‘We must have expended a lot of assets to achieve that.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘I will be honest, brother. My original mission parameter did not include an addition to my team.’

  ‘The mission had to be augmented,’ replied Silonius. ‘The human operatives gave you that information at your waking.’

  ‘Their orders were updated with the rendezvous location by an emergency method hours before they came to wake us.’

  ‘Are you asking me why I am here?’

  Phocron nodded. ‘If you wish to frame it that way.’

  ‘I do not know. I knew what I had to do once I woke. Now I follow you.’

  They stared at each other in silence.

  ‘We cannot help it, can we?’ said Phocron after a long moment. ‘Nothing we do is drawn in straight lines. Nothing can be simple. No truth allowed to stand free.’

  ‘The simple is easy to subvert, brother. Look at what we have done here already and see that truth. The heart of the Imperium defended by the Seventh Legion should be inviolable, indomitable, but here we are.’

  ‘Yes, we are.’ Phocron shook his head. ‘Sometimes I envy them. The Fists, I mean.’

  ‘Truly?’ Silonius did not try and hide the surprise in his voice. Was this another test, another subtle probing of his nature and purpose?

  ‘They were always heaped with more honour than they deserved, rewarded for obviousness and laboured effort, but that is not what I am talking about. They have an identity, a culture. They know who they are, and what they are.’ He brought up his hand and pulled down the fabric that framed his face, and turned it fully towards Silonius. It was the image of Alpharius’ face, the mirror of Silonius’ own. ‘What are we? So many masks worn, so many names, so many secrets that the life beneath is forgotten.’

  ‘We are what we need to be,’ said Silonius. ‘To win, we are what we need to be.’ Phocron turned to look at the sun and nodded, as though to himself. Silonius waited and then spoke when no reply came. ‘You know what necessity is, brother. Everything is not about what it should be, but what it needs to be.’

  ‘You have nothing for me then? No extra orders, no clarification, no word?’

  ‘No,’ said Silonius.

  Phocron gave a slow nod. For several seconds neither of them moved. Then Phocron turned from the viewport so that his back was to it. His eyes began to flick across the shadow of the tower chamber. Silonius realised that while Phocron had spoken his habitual movements had stilled. Now that ceaseless movement was back, as though a switch had been flicked.

  ‘Your secrets are yours to keep, brother. They are not why I am here. I came to find you because the next component of the mission is ready to proceed. We need to prepare.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked Silonius.

  ‘There is a signal relay station, in the outer Mercurial Reaches. We will hit it and destroy it.’

  Silonius shook his head.

  ‘There are dozens of primary relay stations in the inner system reaches alone. Unless we are going to hit them all–’

  ‘Destruction is only a secondary effect, the confusion it will cause tertiary.’

  ‘What is the primary objective?’ asked Silonius, even as the answer whispered at the edge of his memory.

  ‘We need to light the beacon. A Harrowing is coming, and we are its heralds.’

  ‘What does “harrowing” mean?’ asked Incarnus. Myzmadra paused what she was doing and looked at the psyker. Silence and stillness formed as an answer.

  They were in a small chamber on the Wealth of Kings’ lower decks. Rust mottled its walls, and slowly rotating fans stirred the thick air. Hatches hung open in the three doorways leading off. Myzmadra had come there after the mission briefing, mainly to think, but also to strip and clean all of her gear. Pistols and ammunition lay on the top of an upturned crate, oiled components shining from repeated cleansing.

  There was a lot to think about. She had intended to be alone, but after a few moments had looked up to find that she had been joined in her solitude. What had surprised her was who it was. Hekaron – stripped of armour, tattooed and branded torso bare above a loose pair of black trews – sat on a crate opposite her. He had nodded at her, grinned and begun to disassemble his bolter. She had nodded back in acknowledgement. They had sat, the quiet broken only by the click, snap and slide of weapons coming apart.

  Then Incarnus had joined them. She had known it was him without looking up. There was just something in the sound of how he moved. He had sat down on a pile of chains against the wall. When neither she nor Hekaron spoke, Incarnus coughed and licked his lips. She felt her teeth clamp shut. Then he had asked the question.

  ‘Harrowing? You do not know the term?’ Hekaron said, glancing up from the piece of firing mechanism he was oiling with a cloth. There was a sneer to his grin. He shook his head. ‘Where did we find you?’

  Incarnus stiffened.

  ‘In the same place you find all the people of rare talent who are willing to fight the Emperor,’ snapped the psyker. ‘I know the meaning of the word harrowing. But unless our mission is to turn the ground with a plough, the connotations of despoilment and destruction are just vague enough that I find myself at a loss.’

  Hekaron laughed, the sound booming around the chamber. His bare shoulders shook, the tangled tattoos writhing across muscle.

  ‘You have courage, human, I will give you that. I almost like you enough to answer.’ He shrugged, placed a piece of the bolter down on the black sheet at his feet, picked up another and began to clean it. ‘But almost is not enough. You have a good grasp of the word. You have operated for the Legion, so you have seen how we do what we do. Use that rare talent to put the pieces together.’

  ‘Perhaps I should,’ hissed Incarnus, and Myzmadra felt heat spike the air. Frost formed around Incarnus’ eyes. Hekaron grunted. The piece of gun mechanism pinged out of his fingers. Myzmadra felt static wash up her arms, and she began to rise, reaching for her only assembled gun. Hekaron was trying to stand. She could see a flash of red at the edge of his ear. Incarnus was grinning, eyes black boreholes in thin circles of ice, as he wrapped his mind around Hekaron.

  A blur passed her, moving faster than she could track. Incarnus spun into the air, a yell of pain ripping out of his mouth. Her ears popped as a shock wave passed over her. She tasted burned sugar on her teeth. Hands caught Incarnus as he fell, spun him over and slammed him into the deck. Hekaron gasped from where he had struggled to rise, half fell and then launched himself across the room.

  ‘Peace, brother,’ said Silonius, his voice low and utterly calm. He was standing above the whimpering form of Incarnus, a foot on the psyker’s chest. He was looking at Hekaron, hand rai
sed. Myzmadra had not seen him enter the room. He was just there, as though blinked into being.

  ‘He was in my mind!’ growled Hekaron, a clotting drop of blood running down his right ear. ‘I could feel him.’

  ‘He is an asset, brother,’ said Silonius. ‘An imperfect tool, but one that we need.’

  Orn appeared at the door, drawn by the noise. Myzmadra saw him look from Incarnus, to Hekaron, and then to Silonius. She caught the briefest flicker of eyes, and Orn remained where he was. It was only then that she noticed the gun in Orn’s hands, held so casually it had somehow seemed less threatening than its bearer.

  Silonius tilted his head, focusing on Hekaron. The vein in the warrior’s neck was beating beneath the inked scales.

  ‘We need him,’ said Silonius, carefully. Hekaron clenched his teeth, silver glinting. Then he nodded and turned away.

  Silonius waited a second, then reached down and pulled Incarnus to his feet. He held him by the throat, casually, as though he were holding a bundle of rags, rather than a man. Myzmadra could see his fingers were relaxed, but that they were resting over vertebrae, arteries and trachea. Incarnus was whimpering, blood flowing from broken teeth and nose in a thick flow down his chin and cheeks. Silonius’ fingers did not seem to move, but the psyker suddenly became completely still. His pupils were wide in his iris-less eyes. Silonius brought Incarnus close, the movement almost gentle.

  She stared. It was the most delicately violent thing she had ever seen.

  ‘Do not do that again,’ said Silonius quietly to the psyker. He dropped Incarnus to the floor, without waiting for a response, and walked to where Orn stood. The two left, leaving Myzmadra the only person to hear Incarnus’ breath bubbling between his broken teeth.