Valdor: Birth of the Imperium

by Chris Wraight

  The Emperor was not visible to me, but I understood why. The entire structure of that place had been critically damaged, and He was holding it together. Though I could not determine His precise location, without Him the chambers would have by then have been nothing more than choked rubble. It was a strange sensation, moving through a physical volume of space entirely suffused by the Emperor’s presence. It was also a reminder to me of His power. Even I need reminders of that, from time to time.

  So. The more I saw, the more I felt dread reaching for me. You remember what I said about the sickness at Maulland Sen? The same sensation was there, only many times more concentrated. I saw seasoned soldiers vomiting blood, or dashing their heads against the rock. Every lumen was flickering, casting the bloodstains in patterns of failing light. It was hard to breathe, even with our physiology and armour protection.

  The deeper we went, the more horror we witnessed. It was far worse than Maulland Sen, for this was in a place we had carved out ourselves. It was deemed safe, as secure as any mortal power could make. That was another lesson for us – there are no safe places.

  [Where was this? What had happened to it?]

  I cannot tell you everything. You will understand more in due course.

  We hastened to recover what could be recovered. I directed those of my order to impose their control on the outer precincts, and this was slowly achieved. They were compelled to euthanise many whose minds had been turned by what they had seen. Those who might yet survive were taken to medical units. Emergency engineering teams were shuttled in to shore up the outer gates, lest we end up buried alive within as we laboured. Every one of them was accompanied by a Custodian, for there was still madness singing in the air, and I could only trust those of my own kind to remain resistant to it.

  I began to understand the true nature of what we were set against, then. The Priest-King was just a shard cut from this dark crystal, a mere sliver of a greater abomination. I could breathe it in, there. I could taste its essence, like wyrmwood on my tongue. On some days, even now, I can still taste it.

  The greatest of the many chambers was, by then, lost to us. Its interior was aflame, its great vials broken. I looked inside, just for a split second, and saw twenty vessels robbed of their contents, with lightning still snapping from vane to vane. There was nothing to be done there, and I almost turned away from the deeper vaults too. It was Astarte who pressed on, and I followed her. There was more to salvage, she said, and I instantly saw that she was correct.

  Further down, in long galleries cut from the living rock, were the secondary repositories. Imagine it – walls over fifty metres high, running back beyond sight into the heart of the darkness, all lined with vials in precisely categorised sections. The vaults were temperature controlled, though I could already feel the ambient climate rising rapidly. Some of the caddies looked badly damaged, with glass broken or electro-seals malfunctioning. If they had been left there much longer, they would all have burned.

  Astarte was invaluable in those moments. She knew which caches to retrieve and which would have to be left. I pressed every available member of my order into service, for all the technicians on that level were dead or missing. One by one, we extracted the caches and took them to places of safety. We kept records of all that we took, and made sure that none of those retrieved went missing. The two of us, Astarte and I, spent that desperate time working together. We did not speak much, for the need for haste was pressing, but I do remember her expression throughout – one of almost infinite horror. I am not always adept at deciphering human emotional signals, but I needed no assistance at that moment. We both knew that her life’s work – the work, you might say, of the entire Imperium – had come close to being wiped out.

  In the end, though, the worst did not transpire. The Emperor’s project was not entirely lost. All that we had learned over those long centuries of recovery did not disappear, though the body of it was gravely damaged. I carried vials from the flames myself, feeling the pulse of life within them through my gauntlets.

  When all was done, we were forced to withdraw. Many of the deeper caches were abandoned to the flames. The entire structure began to subside at last, and our remaining forces were ordered to the surface. I was the last to depart, along with Malcador. I recall running down the final corridor, the dust-plumes gathering at our heels, and reflecting that, for an old man, he could move fast when he wished to.

  And that was the end of it. A great work, destroyed, with only the smallest fragments retained.

  [Why are you telling me this?]

  You asked me about it.

  [I asked about leadership for the Thunder Legion.]

  I had thought my intent was obvious. We were labouring to eliminate genetic instability. Had it succeeded, we would have created subjects with far greater control over their powers. They would have been the ones to whom the tasks of leadership could be delegated. There will be greater battlefields ahead, once this world is fully secured. Thousands of them.

  [But it failed.]

  It did.

  [And the vials you retrieved were–]

  It failed, High Lord. There are no new generals for the Imperial armies.

  [Then, and I come to a difficult area, I have one more question.]

  I know.

  [There have been no reports of activity from the Thunder Legion for months. Silence, even in the High Council, where we used to be sent bulletins. Is their absence somehow related to this episode? Or has some security protocol changed that keeps their movements secret?]

  I have answered your questions.

  [You have. In greater detail than I could have hoped for. But not, so far, on the central matter. What happened on Mount Ararat, captain-general?]

  You are out of time.

  [I went there. I saw the remains. What happened to the Thunder Warriors?]

  -- Transcript ends --

  Nine

  The air was already getting thin.

  It had been cold for the entire journey, painfully so at the halts where the engines were allowed to gutter out to save fuel, but now the collapsing temperatures were becoming an issue. The transports were mostly old. Many of them had the Raptor Imperialis etched onto their sides, especially up in the vanguard where the really heavy armour was concentrated. Achilla wouldn’t have known much about that, though – his place was firmly in the expendable bracket, back where the pre-Imperial personnel carriers spluttered and rocked to climb the dusty mountain paths. Everything smelled of heavy fuel oils, even when the wind blew hard, which it seemed to do all the time.

  Achilla hung to the side of his unit’s carrier and peered up ahead. As it had been for as long as he could remember, the land was rising steeply. Burned-out forests with black, broken sticks for trees, the legacy of some old apocalypse, had given way to a hardscrabble landscape of frozen rubble. The sky was grey-black, as heavy a build-up of thunderheads as he’d ever seen, and it had been sleeting for hours without let-up. The earth roads under them were steadily subsiding into a soup of pale, loose gravel, and even the convoy’s halftracks were struggling to maintain speed.

  The ultimate destination was hidden from view by a serried screen of towering cliff-faces, each one more immense than the last. The convoy would have to climb much further before the great terraformed plateau around the Palace would make things easier. For the moment, they were seeing the mountains much as they had existed for all of humanity’s history – a bulwark against any kind of movement, impassable and magnificent. It was the Imperium’s great triumph to tame this unimaginably huge massif, to lay roads across it, to fill its valleys and level its most daunting summits. Ironically, of course, that was also what offered the possibility of approach.

  A ‘crusade’, the commanders had called it. Achilla didn’t like that term. It felt too close to what he’d been told when fighting among the zealots of Unity. He didn’t like t
o think too closely about the motivations for this at all, only that it was a chance to strike back at something that had already become complacent and authoritarian. There was always the chance that he was being used now by someone else, someone just as complacent and authoritarian, but what else was there to do, for such as he? Achilla had only ever been good at one thing, and at least this was a chance to demonstrate it one last time.

  ‘Going to be a big one,’ said Slak, standing next to him on the footplate, clinging to the transport’s side one-handed.

  ‘Aye,’ said Achilla, glancing up at the gathering storm. The air, though thinned, already felt charged, as if by static. The sleet was cascading down the transport’s flanks freely. ‘It’ll make this difficult.’

  ‘For them, too.’

  Slak was a big man, though all that old muscle was running to fat now. His beard was bedraggled in the downpour, and stuck in matted tufts across a riveted breast-plate. His thermal lance, strapped to his back, was covered in tarpaulin against the elements. Achilla thought it would have been wiser to keep it stowed in the crew-compartment, out of the weather, but Slak liked to have his weapon close at all times, and you didn’t argue with Slak about some things.

  After another two hours of hard slogging, passing the broken-down, weather-beaten wrecks of a dozen of their own transports, the piebald army reached the final charted settlement before hitting the high plateau. Achilla didn’t know the name of the place. It was a grim, grey kind of conurbation, all industrial complexes and refineries, belching columns of vapour into the high airs. There were no walls, no guard-towers, so the convoy just smashed its way along the central transitway, burning across reservations and gouging huge trails in the ice-crusted mud. Some of the residents came to watch. Most seemed to carry on with whatever jobs they had, heads bowed in the storm. Why wouldn’t they? They had no reason to think that this wasn’t just another Imperial regiment making its way up to the plateau for regular exercises. The world was at peace, now. All the raiders were gone, scoured from existence by the Emperor and His civilising virtues.

  ‘I came this way, once,’ said Slak, looking grimly out at the ranks of manufactoria and smokestacks.

  ‘Oh?’ said Achilla, not greatly interested.

  ‘Long time ago. Nothing here, then. Just the wind. A few goats. Now look at it.’

  Achilla hawked up spittle and sent a gobbet sailing into the freezing rain. ‘These places are everywhere now, brother. On the southern side of the range, there are many more. That’s why we came this way.’

  Slak wiped his visor, leaving a greasy smear across the armourglass rim. ‘It all changed too fast. That was the problem. You can’t make people change too fast.’

  Achilla didn’t know about that. He squinted into the murk, and saw a big Arbites station in the distance with a scaffold-wrapped comms tower. Beyond it was another large structure – possibly a garrison. ‘We should take that out,’ he said, sourly.

  ‘Why? He wants them to know we’re coming.’

  ‘I know. We should still take it out.’

  Slak laughed – a scratching husk of a sound. ‘Be patient,’ he said. ‘Plenty of that to come.’

  Soon after that they were out on the far side, having rattled through the entire place without a shot being fired. The road got better, no doubt used as a transport corridor between the industrial feeder-city and its central nexus. The sleet got worse, drumming against the armour-plating, and after a while even Slak had enough, ducking down through the hatch and taking his chances with the stink of mercenary inside.

  Achilla remained up top, grimacing against the wind’s bite. The kilometres passed in an uncomfortable, joint-shaking procession. He quite liked the silence of it. Every so often, he’d activate his augmetic targeter, cycling up to the maximum setting and peering far ahead.

  The sleet was turning to snow. The sky was deepening to an inky black, and lightning darted along the eastern horizon.

  It was a long time before he saw it. There was one last, difficult climb, in which he thought the old engines would finally blow out, and then they dipped over the final rise and onto the emptiness of the artificial plains. The wind howled even more strongly up there, screaming across snow-blown terrain under the shadow of curdled skies. Fresh snow had been gathered in the eddies and was now being vomited up by the gales, reducing the visibility to almost nothing.

  Achilla shivered. His bones ached badly. His knuckles, wrapped under layers of flaking synthleather, felt almost fused to the metal of the doorplate. Still he stayed up top, squeezing every millimetre of magnification from his augmetics. It felt important, somehow, to see it unfold from the start. He’d heard so many stories about this place, and some of them might even have been true.

  In the end, he only got a glimpse – the clouds were lowering all the time, the blizzard was getting worse. It was enough, though, to give him a shiver of another kind. He saw the ramparts for a split second, sweeping like a frozen wave into the tormented sky. He saw the towers ranked up against one another, hundreds of them, most still with the grip of ironwork supports on them. He saw the northern gates, carved from the mountain and then surmounted by glinting gold and alabaster. The Raptor Imperialis was there in all its battered glory, picked out in black and red and gold, as well as the spectre of its famous profile.

  Lion’s Gate.

  Was He there, this Emperor, somewhere beyond that high portal? Would that make a difference? His golden monsters would be, that was for certain, and no doubt other horrors of the New Age, but the architect Himself – that would be something.

  Achilla finally gave in, clambering down from the vantage and hauling the access hatch over his head. The interior of the carrier smelled as bad as every one of them always did, but at least it was warmer than outside. His boots sploshed in the dark slush across the floor, and he staggered to a berth next to Slak.

  ‘See anything?’ Slak asked.

  ‘The gate, for a moment.’

  ‘What did you think?’

  Achilla pondered that. He didn’t know. Something about the place had given him a strange feeling, as if the storms were a warning. Then again, the ones that led this thing were used to storms.

  ‘It’s a doorway,’ he said, reaching for a protein-strip. ‘They all look the same, before they’re kicked in.’

  He took a bite, and started to chew.

  ‘And, to be sure, it’ll get kicked in,’ he said.

  By the time Kandawire got back to her chambers, the entire complex was already fully mobilised. The security protocols had been enacted an hour previously following her pulsed command, and once she hove into view the external hangar doors were ringed with lines of lascannons and over-watched by airborne gunships. After landing she disembarked quickly and hurried to the rendezvous point. Armina met her en route, and the two went in haste towards the groundcar depots.

  ‘He did it,’ Kandawire said, her voice shaking.

  ‘You had any doubt?’ Armina asked, dryly.

  ‘I did. I genuinely did.’ Despite everything, she had a sick feeling in her stomach. She had wanted to avoid this so very much – anything would have done, any excuse or mitigation.

  ‘He told you, then? As you hoped he would?’

  Kandawire shot her a sour glance. ‘He shut me down, just like before.’ She shook her head in exasperation. ‘It was very strange. He talks, more than I could ever have hoped for, and then says nothing. In anyone else, I’d say some game is being played, but he does not play games. He would not even know how to play games.’

  Armina looked at her with concern on her thin face. ‘If what you suspect is confirmed, you are vindicated, High Lord. Imagine what it would have taken, imagine what it would have cost… to end all those–’

  ‘I don’t know how it happened, not in detail, but I looked into his eyes when I asked the question, and there was nothing there. No
evasion, no guilt. I do not think there is anything he would shrink from doing, if he believed it to be somehow in his interests.’

  ‘His own interests, or his master’s?’

  ‘His own. That is the issue. Just consider why this was done, for a moment. Consider what he has already told us.’

  All around them, bodies were in motion. Kandawire’s regular guards emerged from the rampart levels, thirty of them in full battle-gear, and fell in behind and alongside them. Menials were running from their stations, given the order to secure the High Lords’ several citadels and wondering just how to do it. Even now, more orders would be pumping out along the secure node-relays, activating protocols for the mobilisation of the standing security details. It was all unfolding exactly as it should do, and in normal times would have been a source of some comfort. Of course, such manoeuvrings were all more or less pointless, but only Kandawire understood precisely why.

  ‘Signals from the convoys, yet?’ she asked, reaching the groundcar level and smelling the promethium before the doors had even opened.

  ‘Nothing,’ Armina replied. ‘It’s the storm.’

  ‘How ironic,’ Kandawire said, activating the unlock cycle and summoning Ophar’s locator-bead. ‘You should get out now,’ she voxed to him. Ahead of her, the great adamantium blast-screens began to grind open. ‘As in, now.’

  ‘Giving me orders, kondedwa?’ came Ophar’s amused voice back over the link. ‘Fear not. We are used to running, both you and I.’

  ‘I’m not running this time. But you are. We’ll speak when all this is over.’

  Then they were through into the depot. Twelve groundcars were waiting for them, their big engines already revving in a chorus of growls. They were armour-plated, six-wheelers with chains on the tyres and smoke-darkened projectile weapons running down both flanks. On the far side of the depot, external doors were slowly rising, allowing hard flurries of snow and sleet to skip across the deck.