Hammer and Bolter Year One

by Christian Dunn

  ‘The end of the remembrancers?’ said Qruze, raising an eyebrow and looking up at Dorn. ‘You think that they should be allowed to wander through this war? Recording our shame in paintings and songs?’ There was a pause. Qruze expected another growl of rebuke but Dorn showed no emotion other than in the slow breath exhaling from his nose.

  ‘I had my doubts when the Council ratified the edict,’ said Dorn. ‘The position as presented at the time was perfectly logical. We are at war with ourselves; we do not know how far the treachery of my brother spreads. This is not a time to allow a menagerie of artists to walk freely amongst our forces. This is not a war to be reflected in poetry. I understand that...’

  ‘But beyond logic, you had doubts,’ said Qruze. He felt that he suddenly understood why Rogal Dorn, Praetorian of Terra, had come to see an old remembrancer in a prison cell.

  ‘Not doubts, sorrow.’ Dorn turned, pointing out at the stars beyond the crystal glass. ‘We went out into those stars to wage war for a future of enlightenment. We took the best artists with us so that they could reflect that truth. Now our battles go unremembered and unrecorded. What does that tell us?’ Dorn let his hand fall.

  ‘It is a practicality of the situation we face. The survival of the truth that we fought for makes demands that must be met,’ said Qruze.

  ‘Demands that must be wrapped in silence and shadow? Deeds done that must remain unremembered and unjudged?’ Dorn began to walk away from the glass, his steps raising dust from the floor.

  ‘Survival or obliteration: that will be history’s judgement on us,’ said the grey warrior.

  Dorn turned to stare at Qruze, the ghost of anger on his face. ‘And the only way is for the Imperium to become a cruel machine of iron, and blood?’ said the primarch in a hard-edged whisper.

  ‘The future will have a price,’ said Qruze, not moving from the viewport. Dorn was silent. For an instant Qruze thought he saw a flicker of despair in the primarch’s eyes. Behind him the planets of the Solar System glittered as cold points of light beyond the towers of the nameless fortress.

  ‘What will we become, Iacton Qruze? What will the future allow us to be?’ said Dorn, and walked away without looking back.

  ‘When we reached Isstvan V the massacre was complete,’ continued Voss. ‘I never got the chance to see the surface, but the void around it sparkled with debris. I watched it drift past the viewport of my stateroom, fragments still cooling, fires feeding on oxygen trapped in wrecks.’

  Dorn nodded, his face unreadable as he listened to the remembrancer’s story. Something had changed in the primarch after they returned from the observation deck. It was as if he had begun to wall something up inside him. It reminded Qruze of the gates of a citadel grinding shut before the advance of an enemy. If Voss noticed he did not show it.

  ‘They came for us, the Sons of Horus. It was not until I saw them that I began to think that I had misunderstood this civil war.’ Voss glanced at Qruze and the old warrior felt an ice-cold touch in his guts. ‘Metal, sea green metal, edged with bronze and covered with red slit eyes. Some had dried blood flaking from their armour. There were heads hanging on chains and by bunches of hair. They reeked of iron and blood. They said to come with them. Only one person asked why. I wish I could remember her name, but at the time I just wanted her to be quiet. One of them walked over to her and pulled her arms from her body, and left her screaming on the floor. We went with them after that.’ Voss paused, his eyes unfocused as if seeing the woman die again in her own blood.

  Qruze found his hands had clenched, angry questions surging through his mind. Which one had it been? Which one of his former brothers had done that deed? One that he knew? One he had liked? He thought of the moment when he had learnt the truth about the men he had called brothers. The past can still wound us, he thought. He let out a quiet breath, releasing the pain. He must listen. For now, that was what he was here to do.

  ‘There were many remembrancers with you?’ asked Dorn.

  ‘Yes,’ said Voss with a shiver. ‘I had persuaded a number of others to come with me. Other remembrancers who agreed we had a duty to show the truth of this darkening age. Twenty-one came with me. There were others too, taken from the ships of the Legions who had only just showed their allegiance.’ Voss licked his lips, his eyes wandering again.

  ‘What happened to them?’ said Dorn.

  ‘We were taken to the audience chamber on the Vengeful Spirit. I had seen it once before, a long time before.’ Voss made a small shake of his head. ‘It was not the same place. The viewport still looked out on the stars like a vast eye and the walls still tapered to darkness above. But things hung from the ceiling on chains, dried mutilated things, that I did not want to look at. Ragged banners, splattered with dark stains, covered the metal walls. It was hot, like the inside of a cave beside a fire pit. The air stank of hot metal and raw meat. I could see the Sons of Horus standing at the edge of the room, still, waiting. And at the centre of it all was Horus.

  ‘I think I still thought I would see the pearl-white armour, the ivory cloak and the face of a friend. I looked at him and he was looking at me, right at me. I wanted to run, but I could not, I could not move to breathe. I could only stare back at that face framed by armour the colour of an ocean storm. He pointed at me, and said “All but that one.” His sons did the rest.

  ‘Three seconds of thunder and blood. When it was quiet I was on the deck on my hands and knees. Blood was pooling around my fingers. There was just blood and pulped meat all around me. The only thing I could think of was that Askarid had been stood beside me. I felt her hand around mine just before the shooting started.’ Voss closed his eyes, his hands held together in his lap.

  Qruze found that he could not look away from those ink-stained hands, the skin wrinkled, the fingers gripped together as if clutching a memory.

  ‘But he kept you alive,’ said Dorn, his voice as flat and hard as a hammer falling on stone.

  Voss looked up, his eyes meeting the primarch’s. ‘Oh yes. Horus spared me. He walked to stand above me; I could feel his presence, that chained ferocity, like a furnace’s heat. “Look at me,” he said and I did. He smiled. “I remember you, Solomon Voss,” he said. “I have cleansed my fleets of your kind: all but you. You I will keep. No one will harm you. You will see everything.” He laughed. “You will be a remembrancer,” he said.’

  ‘And what did you do?’ asked Dorn.

  ‘I did the only thing I could. I was a remembrancer. I watched every bloody moment, heard the words of hate, smelt the stink of death and folly. I think for a time I went mad,’ Voss chuckled. ‘But then I realised what the truth of this age is. I found the truth I had come to see.’

  ‘What truth is that, remembrancer?’ said Dorn, and Qruze could hear the danger in the words like an edge on a blade.

  Voss gave a small laugh, as if at a child’s foolish question. ‘That the future is dead, Rogal Dorn. It is ashes running through our hands.’

  Dorn was on his feet before Qruze could blink. Rage radiated from him like the heat of a fire. Qruze had to steady himself as Dorn’s emotion filled the room like an expanding thundercloud.

  ‘You lie,’ roared the primarch in a voice that had cowed armies.

  Qruze waited for the blow to land, for the remembrancer to be nothing more than bloody flesh on the floor. No blow came. Voss shook his head. Qruze wondered at what the man must have seen to make this primarch’s rage blow over him as if it were a gust of wind.

  ‘I have seen what your brother has become,’ said Voss, carefully measuring his words. ‘I have looked your enemy in the eye. I know what must happen.’

  ‘Horus will be defeated,’ spat Dorn.

  ‘Yes. Yes, perhaps he will, but I still speak the truth. It is not Horus that will destroy the future of the Imperium. It is you, Rogal Dorn. You and those that stand with you.’ Voss nodded to Qruze.

  Dorn leant down so that he was looking the man in the eye.

  ‘We will rebuil
d the Imperium when this war is done.’

  ‘From what, Rogal Dorn? From what?’ sneered Voss, and Qruze saw the words hit Dorn like a blow. ‘The weapons of this age of darkness are silence and secrets. The enlightenment of Imperial truth, those were the ideals you fought for. But you cannot trust any more, and without trust those ideals will die, old friend.’

  ‘Why do you say this?’ hissed Dorn.

  ‘I say it because I am a remembrancer. I reflect the truth of the times. The truth is not something this new age wants to hear.’

  ‘I do not fear the truth.’

  ‘Then let my words,’ Voss tapped his parchment, ‘be heard by all. I have written it here, everything I saw, every dark and bloody moment.’

  Qruze thought of the words of Solomon Voss spreading through the Imperium, carried by the authority of their author and the power of their message. It would be like poison spreading through the soul of those resisting Horus.

  ‘You lie,’ said Dorn carefully, as if the words were a shield.

  ‘We sit in a secret fortress built on suspicion, with a sword over my head, and you say I lie?’ Voss gave a humourless laugh.

  Dorn let out a long breath and turned away from the remembrancer. ‘I say that you have condemned yourself.’ Dorn moved towards the door.

  Qruze made to follow but Voss spoke from behind them.

  ‘I think I understand now. Why your brother kept me and then let me fall into your hands.’ Dorn turned from the open cell door. Voss looked back at him, a weary smile on his face. ‘He knew that his brother would want to save me as a relic of the past. And he knew that I would never be allowed free after what I had seen.’ Voss nodded, the smile gone from his face. ‘He wanted you to feel the ideals of the past dying in your hands. He wanted you to look it in the eye as you killed it. He wanted you to realise that you two are much alike, still, Rogal Dorn.’

  ‘Bring me my armour,’ said Rogal Dorn, and red-robed serfs scuttled from the darkness. Each bore a section of gold battle-plate. Some pieces were so large and heavy that several had to carry them.

  Dorn and Qruze stood once more in the observation dome. The only light in the wide, circular chamber was from the starfield above. Rogal Dorn had not spoken since he had left Voss in his cell, and Qruze had for once not dared to speak. Voss’s words had shaken Qruze. No mad ranting or proclamation of Horus’s greatness. No, this was worse. The remembrancer’s words had spread through him like ice forming in water. Qruze had fought it, contained it within the walls of his will, but it still clawed at his mind. What if Voss had spoken the truth? He wondered if it was a poison strong enough to burn the mind of a primarch.

  Dorn had stood looking out at the stars for over an hour before he had asked for his armour. The serfs would normally have armoured Dorn, cladding him in his battle-plate piece by piece. This time he armoured himself, pulling a hard skin of adamantium over his flesh, framing his stone-set face in gold: a war god rebuilding himself with his own hands. Qruze thought that the primarch looked like a man preparing for his last battle.

  ‘He has been twisted, my lord,’ said Qruze softly and the primarch paused, his bare right hand about to slot into a gauntlet worked in silver with eagle feathers. ‘Horus sent him here to wound and weaken you. He said as much himself. He speaks lies.’

  ‘Lies?’ said the primarch.

  Qruze steeled himself and asked the question he had feared to ask since they had left Voss’s cell. ‘You fear that he is right? That the ideals of truth and illumination are dead?’ said Qruze, an edge of urgency to his voice.

  As soon as he spoke he did not want to know the answer. Dorn put his hand into the gauntlet, the seals snapping shut around the wrist. He flexed his metal-sheathed hand and looked at Qruze. There was a coldness in his eyes that made Qruze remember moonlight glinting from wolves’ eyes in the darkness of lost winter nights.

  ‘No, Iacton Qruze,’ said Dorn. ‘I fear that they never existed at all.’

  The door to the cell opened, spilling the shadows of Rogal Dorn and Iacton Qruze across the floor. Solomon Voss sat at his desk facing the door as if waiting for them, his last manuscript on the desk at his side. Rogal Dorn stepped in, the low light catching the edges of his armour. He looked, thought Qruze, like a walking statue of burnished metal. There were no sounds other than the steps of the primarch and the hum of the glow-globes.

  Qruze pulled the door shut behind them and moved to the side. Reaching behind his shoulder he gripped the hilt of the sword sheathed at his back. The blade slid out of its scabbard with a whisper sound of steel. Forged by the finest warsmiths at the command of Malcador the Sigillite, Regent of Terra, its double-edged blade was as tall as a mortal man. Its silvered surface was etched with screaming faces wreathed by serpents and weeping blood. It bore the name Tisiphone, in memory of a forgotten force of vengeance. Qruze rested the blade point down, his hands gripping the hilt level with his face.

  Voss looked up at the armoured figure of Rogal Dorn and nodded.

  ‘I am ready,’ said Voss and stood up, straightening his robe over his thin body, running a hand over his grey hair. He looked at Qruze. ‘Is this your moment, grey watcher? That sword has waited for me.’

  ‘No,’ came the voice of Dorn. ‘I will be your executioner.’ He turned to Qruze and held out his hand. ‘Your sword, Iacton Qruze.’

  Qruze looked into the face of the primarch. There was pain in Dorn’s eyes, unendurable pain locked behind walls of stone and iron, glimpsed for an instant through a crack.

  Qruze bowed his head so that he did not need to look at Dorn’s face, and held the sword out hilt first. Dorn took the sword with one hand, its size and weight seeming to shrink as he took it. He brought it up between him and Solomon Voss. The sword’s power field activated with a crackle of bound lightning. The twitching glow of the blade cast the faces of both man and primarch in death-pale light and folds of shadow.

  ‘Good luck, old friend,’ said Solomon Voss, and did not look away as the blade fell.

  Rogal Dorn stood for a moment, the blood pooling at his feet, the cell silent and still around him. He stepped towards the man’s makeshift desk where the heap of parchment lay neatly stacked. With a flick, the power wreathing the blade vanished. Slowly, as if goading a poisonous serpent, Dorn turned the page with the tip of the deactivated blade. He scanned one line of text. I have seen the future and it is dead, it read.

  He let the blade drop to the floor with a clang and walked to the cell door. As it opened he looked back at Qruze and pointed at the parchment and at the corpse on the floor.

  ‘Burn it,’ said Rogal Dorn. ‘Burn it all.’

  Enclosed with this issue of Hammer and Bolter is an audio version of The Last Remembrancer

  The Inquisition

  ++Open vox-net++

  My most esteemed Lord Inquisitor,

  We have travelled far, to worlds barely touched by the Emperor’s light, but he has slipped through our clutches for the last time! The one known as Darius Hinks is ours! We have prepared the most effective tools of torment for this most heinous of heretics, and shall proceed forthwith.

  Interrogator Kerstromm Ordo Malleus

  What are you working on at the moment?

  The revered, cheese-breathing overlord of this fine publication, Mr Christian Dunn, has recently asked me to contribute a novella to a forthcoming Space Marine Battles book. It was an honour to be asked, of course, and I imagine my fee will be some of that wonderful aged red Leicester he gave me last time, but before starting any writing I’ve decided to do a bit of homework. I haven’t tackled 40K’s most iconic characters before, so I’ve been spending the last few weeks researching the background and trying to get a handle on them. Since I started poring over the rulebooks, one particular Chapter has caught my eye: the Relictors. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do with them yet, but I like the cut of their bad boy jib. It makes perfect sense to me that if there were hordes of gibbering daemons clamouring to enter your gal
axy, you’d use whatever means necessary to stop them. Not much has been written about the Chapter so they will also give me quite a bit of leeway to flesh out a (slightly shady) corner of the 40K background. I’ve mainly written fantasy so far for BL, so I’m looking forward to getting my hands on some gun-toting superhuman SF characters.

  What are you working on next?

  As if that wasn’t enough to keep me occupied this summer, Christian has also asked me to write a short Warhammer story for the 2011 Games Day programme. I’m afraid the details for this are even more sketchy than my Relictors novella, but it will definitely involve humanoid rat-like beings with a penchant for unreliable steampunk weaponry.

  Are there any areas of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 that you haven’t yet explored that you’d like to in the future?

  There’s a Warhammer character called Orion that I think would make a fascinating protagonist. He’d have such an odd, inhuman perspective on his corner of the Old World, that any fiction based around him could be really otherworldly and nightmarish. I’ve mentioned the idea to a couple of the BL editors and they didn’t laugh me out of the building, so it might just happen…

  What are you reading at the moment? Who are your favourite authors?

  I realise this makes me sound like some kind of frock-wearing Edwardian child, but I’ve just re-read Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Kim. I suppose it’s a bit of a comfort read, and I really am too old and ugly to be reading children’s books, but I’ve read it a few times now and I always find it utterly gripping. It has some great boys’ own adventure story elements – a young orphan boy leads a holy man on a quest across British India, becoming a master spy along the way – but it’s the incredibly vivid descriptions of the Indian landscape and culture that I really love. The characters and settings are drawn straight from Kipling’s own childhood and the book is far more bizarre than most of the fantasy novels I’ve read. My favourite fantasy novel of recent years was a book called Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. It’s a weird cross between Charles Dickens, Neil Gaiman and Tolkien. It took over a decade to write and it features a huge, bewildering cast of scholarly, Napoleonic wizards and sinister, demonic fairies.