‘Almost,’ I said. ‘You can command me to purge the guilt I feel, justicar, but not the shame.’
+Perhaps that is as it should be.+
‘Sothis made a mistake, as well,’ Dumenidon allowed. ‘Once I’d seen you could not be defended, I would have let you die.’
I searched his face for any sign he was joking. I found none.
+Malchadiel,+ prompted Galeo.
Malchadiel looked at me, but there was no hint of deeper emotion behind the glare. He wouldn’t lower his walls.
‘Mal,’ I started.
‘The others are right,’ he interrupted. ‘Sothis was a fool to disengage and reach for you. He should have let you die.’ Malchadiel gestured to my broken armour. ‘You nearly died countless times this night. Every mission, you charge ahead, again and again. Now, we’ve all paid for your careless soul. What trust I had in you died with my brother. Remember that, the next time you believe you can win this war alone.’
I nodded, almost a shallow bow. ‘I hear you,’ I told them. ‘I hear and obey.’
At last, Malchadiel’s mind meshed back with mine. He was in such pain, I almost bled with him. It throbbed within him, a blunt pounding so fresh that it defied easy description. Deeper than pain; this was grief. He was in mourning. I’d never felt it before, neither in my mind, nor inheriting it from my brothers.
I sent a drift of emotion towards him – a gentle thing shaped from regret and shame. At first he recoiled, and I feared he’d raise his walls to me again. After a moment, he accepted the pulsed emotion. He returned a faint, so very faint, nod. It wasn’t a healing of the wound between us, but it was a start.
‘May I ring the Bell for Sothis?’ I asked.
Dumenidon exhaled softly as he looked to Galeo. The justicar, in turn, glanced to Malchadiel. Mal was paralysed in hesitation. I saw him swallow with some difficulty.
+It is tradition for a justicar to ring the Bell,+ Galeo ventured, +but it would be appropriate in this case.+
‘I would like…’ Malchadiel trailed off. ‘Yes. I have no objection.’
‘Thank you, Mal,’ I said. Silently, I sent to him, and him alone, +They will hear the Bell toll across the Throneworld. I promise you that.+
He gave another barely perceptible nod.
As my brothers left the chamber, Galeo met my eyes for a moment. +No more mistakes, brother.+
I saluted, making the sign of the aquila over my chestplate.
Only Annika remained afterwards. She leaned back against the wall, her arms crossed over her chest.
‘A dark day, but a fine victory.’
‘That is one way of looking at it,’ I agreed.
She smiled. ‘Brother Grauvr is stable, not that you asked. He may not die, after all.’ Her crystal-blue eyes glinted in the reflected light. Before I could reply, she offered a melancholy smile. ‘I am sorry for what happened to Sothis. Was Clovon any comfort to you?’
‘You sent him to me?’
‘Not exactly. Vasilla and the Khatan both wished to speak to you, as did Clovon. I decided if only one was to be granted permission, it should be the one with a lesson to impart.’
I mused over that for a moment. Vasilla would have wanted to pray and discuss the state of my soul. The Khatan would have told bleak jokes and teased me for not joining in with her.
‘Thank you for not sending the others,’ I said.
‘To Titan, then. We must relay what happened here, and spread the word of Armageddon falling under siege.’ She paused, as if weighing her next words. ‘I know who Sothis was, Hyperion. I know who you all were.’
I looked at her for several seconds. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Before the Inquisition took you, I mean. The Ordo Malleus keeps the most meticulous archives. I know who you all were as children.’
I wasn’t sure where she was leading with this. ‘Such lore is irrelevant.’
‘It may be irrelevant to you, but I’m a curious woman. Sothis and Malchadiel were born into poverty on a miserable industrial world called Tereth. When the Black Ships came to take them, they were eleven standard years old, and already three years into indentured servitude as menials within a munitions manufactorum. They were fated to spend their lives working to build shell casings for Tereth’s defence militia.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Because it matters. Without the Inquisition, Sothis would be a wasted old manufactorum worker, or more likely dead decades ago in an industrial accident. The Grey Knights turned him into a weapon, and he served mankind with honour. Even if his service was brief, it was a life lived with more honour than most humans can ever imagine.’
She made the sign of the aquila, her hands pale against her bodyglove. ‘Remember that, Hyperion, when you ring the Bell of Lost Souls for your fallen brother.’
‘I will, inquisitor. Thank you.’
Her ice-crystal eyes flashed again. ‘Do you ever wonder who you were? Who you might have been?’
I didn’t even have to think about that. ‘No. I know I was close to rejecting the Emperor’s Gift because of my age. I believe I was halfway through my teenage years, and several implants almost failed to take. Sometimes I have weak dreams of what came before. Images. Feelings.’
‘Like what?’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Go on.’
‘The sound of rain on cheap metal rooftops. A sense of staring through windows, but seeing nothing beyond. A black throne. I recall that more than anything else: a black throne, cold and dark.’ I shrugged a shoulder. ‘Nothing is ever clear, but it doesn’t matter. As I said, it is irrelevant to me.’
She was smiling again. ‘I didn’t ask if it was relevant. I asked if you were ever curious about it.’
‘No.’
‘You’re an awful liar, Hyperion. It’s one of the things I like best about you.’
III
The voyage took eleven days. For a conventional ship, it would have taken several months.
The Karabela bolted through the turbulent void, warded against the unholy caress of the warp’s denizens. The journey of a Grey Knights vessel may be rapid, but it is also spiritually tectonic. Hexagrammic shielding and consecrated armour plating protects our warships beyond anything else humanity can create, but the Sea of Souls burns in response to such invasion. The endless, tireless shrieking of daemons dying against the hull is an unceasing erosion against patience.
In flight, the Karabela’s machine-spirit was as bright and alive as any member of the crew. She gained presence, almost a personality, in those hours. Her voice was the song of overcharged engines blaring into the void, and her face was haloed by the radiant burst of daemons immolated by her prow. I could feel her, a living soul, singing her tremulous rumble through the decks as well as within my mind. Her song was a hymn, and she sang it beautifully.
At random intervals, the deck would give a violent heave, signaling another diversion as we turned aside from the Astronomican. The ship would shake with greater force as we dived deeper into the aetheric ocean, slicing days from our journey as our Navigator trusted the ship’s resilience to hold while he guided us through darker seas.
To push one of our vessels so hard was hardly a rare occurrence, but we all knew the Karabela was earning herself a great deal of time in orbital dock for this. The damage inflicted upon the Grey Knights fleet from such travelling meant many of our ships lived housed in repair docks as often as they sailed out of them. Given the advantages, it was a price willingly paid.
On the seventh hour of the last day, we dropped from the warp at the edge of the Throne System. I’d been training alone for the entire journey, having made it clear I did not wish to be disturbed. Only when I felt the lurch of transition back into real space did I finally lower my stave in the middle of the sparring chamber.
I felt the overtaxed muscles in my arms and legs cramping taut, but it was nothing I couldn’t ignore. Sweat dusted my exposed skin in a fine sheen.
‘Hyperion,’ the inquisitor voxed
over the wall-mounted speakers. ‘We’re home.’
TEN
LAST WORDS
I
Wounded by her headlong rush through poisoned tides, the Karabela limped in-system. On the bridge around us, servitors and robed menials worked to interpret the influx of lore as the monastery fed the freshest stellar charts to our cogitators. Docking at Titan was never a fast process. Orbital charts depicted the gas giant’s moons and their current locations in the heavens as they drifted on their sedate journeys around the immense world, and catalogued the rapidly shifting data on all Imperial traffic nearby.
We drifted in from the far reaches, sailing along the Enceladus Strait. The Karabela came close enough to feel the moon’s pull, and I couldn’t help but watch the world’s jagged luminescence filling the command deck’s viewports.
I’d walked on Enceladus once, witnessing the geyser ice-bursts through the rune-thick red bleaching of a retinal display. Even years later, it was a memory I treasured. While the spraying plumes lacked the majesty of the cryovolcanoes on Titan, it was still a fine sight to see the ice particles blasting high into the void, merging with the outermost, haziest rings of Saturn. A moon’s breath, crystallising in the void, becoming one of its sire-world’s rings… The galaxy hated us, there was no doubt, but it still offered wonders to those strong enough to bear witness.
Vasilla came to the railing, standing next to me. ‘You smile,’ she said.
‘It is good to be home,’ I admitted. The sight of Saturn and its moons always did this to me: that great, ringed world, so monstrous in size, its skies forever rancid, concealing the poisonous nothingness beneath. I was a weapon, not a man, but moments like this always reminded me that I was a weapon born with a soul. It made all the difference.
We watched Enceladus turning away as the ship powered past. We’d reach Titan within the hour.
Vasilla watched the receding moon for several minutes, and turned to look up at me again. Her modest height left her reaching my waist. Just.
‘I have never set foot on Titan,’ she said. Something in her gentle voice almost made me hesitant to answer. Despite the lily tattoo on her cheek, never before had she seemed so young. ‘I would like to go down to the world this time.’
‘It is rare for any but my order to set foot on the world itself.’
She nodded, for she’d stayed on our orbiting void station before. ‘It may be uncommon, but we live in an uncommon age, Sir Knight.’
‘What do you mean?’
The girl stared out at the stars. In the far, far distance, the dull, grey eye of the moon Tethys stared back, showing its shadowed side.
‘We live in the Last Age of Man,’ Vasilla said softly. ‘This millennium hasn’t yet reached half its span, and it’s already the darkest ever faced by humanity. It will be the last one, Hyperion. The last, before everything finally falls black.’
And with those words, suddenly she’d never seemed older. I would never understand her. In a way, she was akin to one of Saturn’s moons – half-light; half-dark; cold in the deep void, with a buried core of warmth.
‘Mankind will never fall,’ I said. The words were instinctive, spoken by rote in place of passion.
Vasilla tilted her head, the mahogany bob of hair perfectly framing her youthful expression of curiosity.
‘From whence do those words come?’ she asked. ‘Your head, or your heart?’
‘A million worlds turn within the Emperor’s Light. Countless billions offer their lives for the Throne, while endless trillions live by His grace.’ I looked down at her, her dark robe another contrast against my armour. ‘Mankind will never fall,’ I said again.
She smiled with genuine affection, and touched her hand to my arm. ‘You truly believe that, don’t you?’
A sense of Galeo’s amusement reached me from across the chamber, a gentle wave of humour at what he was seeing: one of the Emperor’s sons – a warrior trained to wage war against daemons – being lectured by a child.
Before I could answer, Darford joined us at the railing. He wore a dress uniform, as he always did. In fact, he seemed to possess an inexhaustible supply of them. This one was a rich red with gold epaulettes, braids and lanyards. Knee-high black leather boots met the crisp white trousers, and the pompous effect was completed by three medals showing on his chest. They depicted whatever acts of valour he’d achieved in the regimental forces of his home world, before coming into Annika’s service. I wasn’t familiar with the trophies and awards given by the Imperial Guard institutions of Mordian, but the medals were almost certain to be for acts of marksmanship.
‘Looks cold,’ he nodded at the diminishing sphere of Enceladus.
I knew he was making a joke, but it was difficult to see the point of it. His humour often seemed to slip beneath my comprehension.
‘It is cold,’ I said. ‘The surface of Enceladus is–’
‘Throne aflame, don’t start that.’ Darford smoothed his trimmed moustache and beard with a thumb and forefinger. ‘You’re as bad as Malchadiel. It’s like talking to a bloody cogitator, sometimes.’
I looked down at him for several seconds. He slapped my armour in what I assumed was supposed to be a good-natured way. Vasilla gave a small shake of her head, no doubt knowing what was coming.
‘Happy to be home?’ Darford asked.
‘I have told you before about touching my armour,’ I replied.
He chuckled. ‘You’re as charming as always. I see eleven days of training alone didn’t help turn you into decent company.’
The rise of irritation was a petty response. I knew it, and I tried to swallow it back down. I was not entirely successful.
‘You didn’t miss much,’ he continued. ‘Clovon, the swine, cheating at cards. Our beloved mistress stalking the decks like a hungry wolf.’ He put an arm around Vasilla. ‘This little saint praying her heart out, because she didn’t trust the Geller field to keep us safe.’
The young Sororitas girl met my eyes. A human’s face is a palette of expression, and nothing says as much as a smile. That expressiveness is definitely something we lose when we accept the Emperor’s Gift. I think we internalise so much of ourselves in learning our new powers that even the effortless display of emotion becomes muted and unnatural.
For all its rarity, Vasilla’s smile was more expressive than most. It conveyed her sense of weariness at Darford’s insistence on treating her like a child – a little sister to be teased at her elder brother’s will.
Admittedly, I wasn’t gifted at reading facial expressions, but I could skim her surface thoughts to compensate. I often wondered how the warriors of other Adeptus Astartes Chapters managed without the same psychic gift. Understanding humans was difficult enough for me, even with the ability to read their minds.
‘If you touch my armour again,’ I said to Darford, ‘I shall kill you.’
‘Of course you will. Just like all the other times you’ve threatened that, hmm?’
‘You.’ I gestured to a nearby servitor. ‘Attend me.’
The augmented slave trudged over. One of its legs was a grinding limb of dark iron and false-muscle cables. Its skull was largely augmetic, as was the left side of its face, lost in a polished coating of ridged bronze. Emotionless eyes stared at me, past me, through me. Touching its mind betrayed only the dullest edge of sentience. It lacked enough awareness for me to make the most rudimentary connection; I couldn’t even see through its senses.
‘Your order, benevolent master?’ it asked, with a voice rendered harsh by cyborging. Spittle ran from the corner of its slack mouth, and I caught a glance of darkening teeth behind its lips. In a sense, lobotomy was a mercy: mind-scraping allowed it to live in ignorance of pain from its teeth rotting in its gums.
I turned to Darford. He was regarding the lobotomised slave with a slight curl to his lip. The servitor stared on, drooling, saying nothing.
‘I say,’ Darford muttered, ‘have we found your conversational equal, Hyperion?’
/> I shook my head. ‘No. This is the last man that kept slapping my armour the way you do. He was modified to serve humanity in a less irritating way.’
Darford blinked twice, and softened his voice to a conspiratorial whisper.
‘Blood of the Emperor, did you just make a joke? Is there actually a living, breathing man with a sense of humour inside all that silver?’ He touched my armour again, this time tapping it with his fingertips, as if testing to see if it was hollow.
It took no more than a moment’s concentration to let my senses slip free, drifting through his mind. A pinched blood vessel here, a flicker of tissue massage there…
Darford winced, holding the bridge of his nose. ‘Bitch of a headache,’ he muttered. Blood dripped from one nostril onto his lip. He sniffed slightly, then reached for a handkerchief, worried about getting stains on his immaculate uniform.
‘I know that was you,’ he said, still holding his nose.
Vasilla hid her smile by turning away.
‘I have no idea what you mean,’ I said.
‘Very childish,’ Darford’s murmuring continued. ‘Very childish indeed. Good one, though.’
II
Titan. Saturn’s largest moon.
Not my birth world, but still the only home I’d ever known. We drew nearer to the great glowing orb with its thick, sour skies. Here we would re-arm, restore our kinship with the warriors in our Eighth Brotherhood, and put Sothis to rest in the Dead Fields below the world’s surface. Here we would tell our brothers that Armageddon, a world of factories and industrial misery, was under Archenemy siege. The Wolves were already embattled there, and they needed us.
Perhaps our masters would send us in the crusade force. I hoped for such an order.
As I watched the cloudy orange sphere swell before us, Dumenidon’s strained voice brushed against my mind.
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