The Emperor's Gift

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘That is not possible,’ I said. ‘With our duty on Cheth complete, we are oathbound to serve Inquisitor Harul in the Cybele Reaches.’

  ‘I know it’s not customary,’ she confessed. ‘I also know he has seniority.’

  ‘You have your own team for your purges. We are the final weapon, brought to bear in times of absolute need. What is this duty, that it requires us at your side?’

  ‘I cannot say.’

  I laughed at the idea. Nothing was so secret that the Inquisition couldn’t reveal it to us. ‘That’s a lie,’ I told her, ‘and I do not need to read your thoughts to know it.’

  ‘A slip of the tongue,’ she amended with an arch air. ‘I could say, but I won’t. Not until I’m more certain of the operation’s exact details.’

  And just like that, I was suddenly curious. ‘What code is this undertaking?’

  ‘Code Regalia.’ Again, the glimmer of pride in her words. She was honoured and pleased to be summoned for such a vital matter. ‘So you cannot, in good conscience, refuse me.’

  Maybe so, but conscience had nothing to do with it. In our duty, it rarely did. ‘Where is this operation?’ I asked.

  ‘Valdasca.’

  ‘Given the empyrean’s tides, Valdasca could be as much as two months away under conventional warp flight. Inquisitor Harul’s summons still takes precedence. You can summon others of our order to meet you there.’

  She scowled, and looked surprisingly regal in doing so. In that moment, she looked very much the warchief’s daughter she would have become, had the Inquisition not reached down and plucked her away from Fenris, to serve a finer fate.

  ‘It is less than three weeks for the Karabela,’ she pointed out, as if I needed telling.

  ‘The Karabela is our vessel, inquisitor, not yours. And we are already overdue to serve Harul at Cybele.’

  Her thoughts curled, sharpened, growing edges. ‘This is not going the way I wished. I have this feeling… On my world, we call it anellsa. Do you know this word?’

  ‘I know its meaning. Nevertheless, we cannot remain with you simply because you have a sense of foreboding.’

  ‘Foreboding.’ She tasted the word. ‘Yes, that’s it. And I was right about Cheth, was I not?’

  ‘You also had a great deal of evidence supporting your prosecution of the Cheth aristocracy, not least the last missive of Inquisitor Kelman, three weeks of investigation on the planet’s surface, access to the planetary Administratum archives, and the auguries of our own Prognosticars.’

  Indeed, the last of those was the reason my brothers and I had been sent with her in the first place. The Prognosticars’ vision had been one of rare clarity, heralding a world going dark within the year if the source of the corruption was not ended before it could bloom.

  She gave me a look that showed just how little attention she paid to my assurances. ‘I trust you,’ she said. ‘I trust your pack. I want you with me for this.’

  I inclined my head in respect, hoping to remove the bite from my words. ‘I am honoured by your regard, inquisitor. All of Castian is honoured by the faith you have in us, and I hope we serve you again in the future. But to be blunt, the daemon spoken of in prophecy is banished. We have other duties, closer to other stars. You will come to trust and respect the other Grey Knights that attend you on your next undertaking.’

  She narrowed her eyes at me, as if I’d said something intentionally offensive.

  ‘Hyperion, are you always so formal?’

  She asked the strangest things, sometimes. ‘Yes, mistress. Always.’

  ‘It’s very aggravating, you know.’

  ‘I can only apologise.’

  I didn’t understand why she was being so obstinate. Anellsa? A sense of foreboding? Surely she was far above feeling any lingering acknowledgement of some infantile Fenrisian superstition.

  ‘I wish to journey with the five of you. I need a pack I can trust implicitly, and one I have worked with before. I feel it in my bones.’ She jabbed her finger at me accusingly. ‘I stood in that chamber with you, surrounded by the bodies of heretics slain with your sacred shells. I’ve shed blood alongside you many times in these last ten months. Before Cheth, it was Melaxis, and Julland before that. We work well together.’

  I decided to stop arguing. We weren’t getting anywhere.

  ‘If you are so desperate for our presence, why did you not go to Galeo? He leads us. I am the youngest of my brothers, and my word carries the least weight.’

  She bared her teeth in another smile. ‘As hard as it is to believe, you are actually the easiest to talk to.’

  I hadn’t considered that, nor did I see how it could possibly be true. Thankfully, she denied me the need to reply.

  ‘Will you come with me to speak with the others?’ she asked.

  I nodded and rose to my feet. ‘If you intend to ask them the same question you have asked me, you will receive the same answer. We are sworn to attend Harul immediately.’

  Annika’s eyes glinted. ‘We shall see.’

  II

  Malchadiel was first.

  He stood in the starboard docking bay, unhelmed, with his eyes closed. The air literally tremored with his concentration – a faint shiver of resistance met us, as if we waded through the thinnest liquid.

  The air was also populated by debris. It hung above the ground, orbiting Malchadiel with stellar serenity, making him the star at the heart of a system of scrap. Metal tubing turned in the slow aerial dance, along with focusing lenses, rivets, screws, bolts and slats of matt-black armour plating.

  Whatever he was working on, its component parts floated around him in conflicting directions without ever colliding. Annika weaved out of the way as a gun barrel drifted past her head.

  ‘What the…’ Her sentence ended in hushed Fenrisian invective.

  ‘I was not expecting a distraction.’ Malchadiel’s tone was dense and tight, showing just how much he was focusing. ‘Please give me a moment.’

  The servitors and loader crews gave him a wide berth. They laboured at the far end of the hangar, a population existing at our sufferance and in our service. In their red robes, adepts of the Palladium Kataphrakt went about their worship, soothing the machine-spirits of the cradled tanks and gunships. Even from this distance, I could smell the sanguine tang of their incense.

  The mess Malchadiel had made began to condense and twist together in the air, with only the faintest whisperings of metal against metal as each chunk of debris met. Screws rolled unerringly into place, turning of their own accord to spiral down and lock tight. I watched a series of focusing lenses drift into a piecemeal gun barrel, while unseen hands screwed each section together with patient care.

  Annika caught on at last, and the realisation narrowed her eyes. In less than a minute, a fully assembled, many-barrelled multilaser turret hovered in the air before Malchadiel. He lowered it to the decking with a gesture.

  ‘Practice goes well?’ I asked.

  ‘I am getting faster, but the greatest progress is in how much control I can exert over each piece in my grip. Yes, brother, it goes well. Thank you for asking.’

  Annika was still looking at the armoured turret with its gun barrels resting on the deck.

  ‘You took that from my tank,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ Malchadiel gave a small smile. ‘I did. And I will return it before you require the use of it. I needed a construct of sufficient complexity to remain challenging.’

  She exhaled something like a growl, seeming to dwell on just how best to reply. The two of them could argue for hours. I’d seen it happen several times, and decided to abort this argument before it could begin.

  ‘The inquisitor comes to us with a request,’ I said to Malchadiel.

  ‘Does she now?’ His pale eyes turned to Annika again. ‘Strange then, that she comes to us, not the justicar. How may we be of service, inquisitor?’

  ‘I wish to appeal to the Titan monastery to secure your presence at my side for another
undertaking. My demand takes equal precedence to your next duty with Inquisitor Harul in the Cybele Reaches.’

  Malchadiel turned to me. ‘Brother, please explain this performance of Fenrisian humour. If this is some witticism, it is beyond my grasp.’

  Annika snuffed a lock of hair from her face. ‘I’m quite serious.’

  ‘She’s quite serious,’ I said, scratching my cheek to hide my smile.

  ‘I see.’ Malchadiel gestured for two of the Palladium Kataphrakt adepts to come forwards.

  ‘Sire?’ they said in unison. I couldn’t see their faces beneath the hoods, but one voice was human, the other warbled through a vocabulator.

  Malchadiel gestured to the gun turret. ‘Please restore this to its rightful place. You have my thanks.’

  His manners set him apart from any other soul I knew. No one ever addressed a Machine Cult menial adept with quite the same needless politeness as Malchadiel. He even said please and my thanks to servitors, though the lobotomised cyborg slaves never acknowledged it.

  The two tech-priests set to their task, deploying several additional servo-arms from their robes in order to lift the turret. Malchadiel moved aside to let them work, and turned his eyes back to the inquisitor.

  ‘May I ask why you have not taken this unorthodox request to Justicar Galeo?’

  Annika shrugged. ‘This way felt right. To ask you all first, before going to the jarl. I’d hoped to enlist your agreement.’

  Malchadiel’s unscarred face showed none of his surprise. He was, as always, consummate at shielding his emotions.

  ‘And why would we agree to remain at your side, when such an act would require breaking an oath to another inquisitor? The Prognosticars’ vision has been averted with absolute finality. Cheth is cleansed. Castian is pledged to answer another lord’s summons.’

  ‘I knew you would say that.’ Annika gave her Fenrisian grin again. ‘I wish to speak with Sothis next. He will agree with me.’

  III

  Neither Sothis nor Malchadiel had served for much longer than I. They’d passed their trials and earned their armour only six years before I’d taken my final oaths and earned my own place in the Chapter.

  To me, they were already veterans. I felt as though an eternity separated us, for six years in sworn service was six years of harrowing, gruelling frontline purges I could scarcely imagine.

  Yet the two of them were still considered fresh blood by the Chapter. More than that, in an order that held no faith in notions of fortune and luck, these two represented the absolute pinnacle of improbability. Sothis and Malchadiel were a mathematical miracle, manifest in skin and bone.

  Our training scours the mind beyond simple lobotomy. All memory is flensed away, stripped and removed as a surgeon cuts cancer from healthy flesh. Sothis and Malchadiel were no different to any of us in that regard. They remembered nothing of their lives before coming to Titan as children.

  But one had only to look at them to see that they were twins, true twins, brothers by blood as well as by the bond of sworn oaths.

  I can’t accurately record the sheer number of infants harvested from the Imperium who fail in their training on Titan, to die forgotten and alone in the bowels of our fortress-monastery. I’ve seen archival evidence that for every million children stolen by our agents, a single one survives to become a Grey Knight. The rest are fated to end their lives as servitors, Chapter serfs, or more likely as names in the Archives of Failure.

  And yet, within our ranks were two sons of the same ovum. The odds against such an occurrence were beyond astronomical, deep into the realm of being laughable.

  Malchadiel bore little evidence of his half-decade as a knight of the fortress-monastery. The same couldn’t be said for Sothis. He wore his battles plainly, each of them written upon the re-stitched mask of his face. The structure of his visage still resembled his brother’s, but his face was a discoloured mesh of bare bionics, regrown flesh and synthetic skin. Most of his teeth were replacement metal pegs set into his gums, and the left side of his lips was pulled by overtight flesh into a permanent, crooked sneer.

  We found him in reverent meditation. His patchwork features softened as he ceased his chanting, but he didn’t rise from his knees at the centre of his small chamber.

  ‘Is something amiss?’ he asked.

  I gestured to Annika.

  ‘I wish to speak with you all,’ she said. ‘I have been issued a Regalia-code summons, and I require the presence of hunters from your order.’

  ‘Knights,’ all three of us said at once. ‘Not “hunters”,’ I amended.

  She breathed slowly, and again it was almost a growl. ‘You know what I meant.’

  Sothis never smiled, for his wounds denied the expression. However, his amusement reached his eyes. ‘I am intrigued. What is this undertaking?’

  Annika grunted in dismissal. ‘I will not speak of it until your agreement is secured.’

  ‘Is this a joke that I have failed to comprehend?’ Sothis glanced to me. Both of his eyes were still natural – practically the only part of his face that had escaped his grievous injuries.

  ‘Evidently not,’ I told him. ‘She hopes we might help her convince Galeo to remain at her side.’

  Sothis rose to his feet in a chorus of low snarls from his armour joints. ‘Inquisitor?’ he asked her.

  She nodded, just once. ‘Your brother Hyperion speaks the truth.’

  Sothis’s abused cheeks tightened again, hardening the ugly smear of his lips into a rictus. ‘Very well. Let us first find Dumenidon.’

  IV

  He was training, which was a surprise to none of us. He hadn’t even removed his helm.

  The blade in his hands was a blur of deactivated cerulean, moving fast enough to sing in sharp chimes as it sliced the unresisting air. I confess, it was always a pleasure to watch Dumenidon move. He had no equal among us with a sword, executing each cut and thrust to seamless perfection. Few warriors, even among our order, could claim such flawless control over a blade. He personally mentored Sothis, but even the mutilated twin scarcely came close to Dumenidon’s skill.

  In a great deal of human literature, it is a cliché to state that a fighter’s weapon is an extension of their body. Such a sentiment, thought trite, at least comes close to describing the reality. His mastery over the blade’s movements was more than post-human, it was consummate. I’d never once seen him make a mistake. Not one.

  I’d beaten him a handful of times in our sparring over the last year, though I had an advantage few of our order could claim. I didn’t use a blade.

  Dumenidon ended his whirling display before us, sheathing the sword as part of the final motion. Even coming to rest, he was an exemplar of grace. To my shame, I envied him his prowess.

  ‘Kindred,’ he greeted us. His helm regarded each of us with eye lenses of emotionless blue. ‘Inquisitor?’

  Annika stepped forwards. ‘I have something to ask of you.’

  The ceramite mask tilted slightly. ‘I am listening.’

  V

  We stood before Galeo soon after.

  The Karabela’s strategium was an orderly chamber, resembling a prayer room as much as a traditional warship bridge. Coal-burning braziers stood by command consoles, their rich, smoky fumes inhaled by the air filtration systems to be cleansed and recycled. Scrolls were draped across the walls, some penned in my hand, others written in the script of those who had come before me. Nine banners hung from the fresco-painted ceiling: each of them a great victory worthy of inclusion in the monastery’s own Hall of Valour, achieved since Justicar Castian founded the squad ten thousand years before.

  The most recent, depicting a lone knight, haloed in vibrant gold thread, was woven by the Chapter serfs in memory of the Ajanta Insurrection. This last knight stood in a circle of nine fallen brothers, his blade deep in the skull of a slain daemon. The creature itself was a stylised representation of something drawn from human legend – I recognised many of its features from the dev
ils and false gods of Hinduvian mythology. The serfs had never borne witness to the great beast itself, and thus could be forgiven for their embellishment.

  The scrollwork at the banner’s base reeled the names of the fallen, and the sole survivor. The latter was a single name in flowing Gothic script: Galeo.

  The warrior himself, now six years past the battle that killed his brothers and elevated him to leadership, stood unhelmed before the occulus screen. He watched the planet turn below, bearing witness to its infinitely slow dance in the void. His thoughts were unquiet, rumbling things that almost melted into the thrum of the idling drive engines. He was dwelling on something – the thoughts had the sepia quality of distant memories.

  Galeo turned at our approach, while the nearby serfs all bowed in a whisper of robes. The servitors ignored us, continuing their murmuring attention to their duties. Bionic limbs thudded on the deck as the mono-tasked cyborgs went about their business.

  Captain Talwyn Castor lounged in the command throne, reading a data-slate in his gloved hands. He offered us a faint nod upon entering, but it was clear he was busy. He wore his experience like a uniform – a man unashamed by the burn scarring that speckled and pockmarked his throat and the left side of his face. Rather than receive an augmetic implant, he kept his ruined eye masked behind an archaic patch of black cloth.

  Galeo greeted us with a bow.

  +Brothers,+ he pulsed into our minds. +Inquisitor. What brings you to the strategium?+

  Annika never bowed, not to anyone. Instead, as always, she tilted her head back slightly, baring her throat for a moment. I sensed from her thoughts just how she viewed the gesture of respect, performing it exactly the same way she would offer greeting to a tribal jarl on her home world.

  ‘Justicar Galeo. My astropath has received word of an immediate summons. With the principal purge of Cheth complete, I must make speed to the Valdasca Caul.’