The Emperor's Gift

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  +Something amuses you, Hyperion?+

  I turned to Galeo, unable to keep the smile from my face. ‘I find it oddly comforting that the last voice we’ll hear is destined to be Inquisitor Jarlsdottyr, calling the foe’s parentage into question. I never thought I’d die like this.’

  Galeo’s lips never moved, but I saw the same humour reflected in his eyes. +The moment does rather lack a certain solemnity, doesn’t it?+

  Even Dumenidon gave a grunt that passed for laughter.

  We wore our Tactical Dreadnought plate, adding significant weight and mass to our armoured bulks. Castian rarely went into battle wearing our most precious heirloom wargear, and I already missed the reassurance offered by the warp-jump generator mounted on my power armour’s backpack. Terminator plate had an internalised power source – one of many reasons it was infinitely more durable than our standard warplate – but I’d have gladly traded the extra protection for familiarity and freedom.

  I felt slow, sluggish, despite the additional strength humming in the fibre-bundle machinery muscles insulating my body. When Captain Taremar had first ordered us into the suits, even Galeo objected.

  +My brothers and I would prefer to enter this battle in our traditional armour, captain.+

  Taremar had been unmoved. ‘We are descending into the jaws of hell, Galeo. Every second we remain alive down there is another second with which to banish this thing. Don your best armour, Justicar of the Eighth. That is an order.’

  So we obeyed.

  On the bridge, I lifted my helm into place, sealing it with a clicking crunch, and a hiss of air pressure.

  In the same moment, the strategium doors rumbled open. Axium stood in the doorway, his resplendent silver form flanked by several robed tech-priests.

  ‘It is time.’

  III

  The machines’ clanking made it hard to hear anything else. Mist was already curling around our boots as we made our way onto the teleportation platform. None of us said a word. There was nothing to say. We’d gone over the details, such as they were, a hundred times and more. Every squad on every ship knew what it was teleporting down into. Last-minute footage from the surface – choppy, tearing and static-laden as it was from the helms of the Wolves still fighting – showed the merest slices of what we’d be facing.

  Our forces were in a fighting withdrawal to their defensive bastions two kilometres back from the river’s edge. I watched the feed from one Wolf’s eye lenses as he held up the stump of his left arm, and heard his disbelieving curses.

  The first waves of Archenemy forces to crash against the Imperial lines had been outriders, scouts, and the rabble hosts in the foe’s vanguard. Even the advance elements of the horde fought hard enough to mire Armageddon’s armies in a deadlock.

  With the true threat making itself known at last, after hours of pitched battle, the Wolves ordered hundreds of thousands of men and women back, back, back. I’d paid little heed to the tactics at play. Few of us had; our role was to be the blade’s thrust to the heart. We were the hammer, not the hand that wielded it.

  It wasn’t the weapon’s place to question the general, nor to know the placement of every regiment in a war. It was the weapon’s place to fit the fist, and to taste the enemy’s blood.

  I suspected a colder, more pragmatic reason lay behind our distance from the overall battle plan, as well. We wouldn’t be surviving the next hour, so the ebb and flow of the entire campaign meant little to any of us. I knew the raw basics, the position and commanding officers of most regiments making up the Imperial force, yet couldn’t imagine what circumstances would give me cause to speak with any of them. Merely seeing me would mean a death sentence for them in most conditions. Admittedly, they were doomed to execution anyway, after having borne witness to the Lord of the Twelfth Legion and his armies.

  Such a reward, for unfailing valour. I found myself wondering for the first time if it were truly necessary to–

  Galeo sent a telekinetic nudge against my shoulder, to catch my attention. +Do not think such things,+ he warned. +Do not question our masters. That way lies heresy.+

  Axium inputted the codes and coordinates from his raised balcony overlooking the platform. Adepts began their chanting.

  +Castian stands ready,+ Galeo pulsed to Captain Taremar on his flagship.

  +Acknowledged, Castian.+

  +Remember,+ Galeo sent to us. +Remember what we must do.+

  ‘For the Emperor,’ the four of us replied as one.

  The others waited in silence for the final summons, watching the juddering helm image-feeds. On a whim, I lifted my hand as I watched Axium working.

  ‘Goodbye, Axium.’

  He looked up, his silver features perfectly composed in an expression of warmth. ‘Die well, Hyperion.’

  ‘I plan to.’

  The order, when it came, was a moment of absolutely perfect communion. One hundred and nine minds aligned in intent, in unity of purpose, and the bonds of brotherhood. Never in my life had I ever felt so secure, so vindicated, so righteous.

  Taremar’s voice rode the communion, ghosting along the invisible threads linking each of our consciousnesses.

  +Grey Knights of the Ragged Brotherhood…+

  I would never understand how Taremar managed it with such clarity, but the next sound we heard was Jarl Grimnar’s howl on the world below. Taremar pulled it from the Wolf’s mind, spreading the summons to all of us.

  My blood boiled at that sound. The mists closed in, the engines whined louder, and I roared my squad’s name into the cobweb of connected minds. I wasn’t alone in doing so. Every knight silently screamed into the communion, unifying us one last time before the world burst apart into madness.

  SIXTEEN

  THE SWORD FALLS

  I

  I do not wish to speak of Armageddon.

  I understand that for the purposes of this record, it’s my duty to illuminate others. However, not all duties can be approached with equal relish. That day on Armageddon stands as one of the darkest moments in the history of the Grey Knights Order, even before the following months became a blight on our code of honour. I didn’t know that then. I couldn’t have known. It changes nothing. It doesn’t diminish the sorrow that lingers, nor the shame that followed.

  You cannot imagine what Armageddon cost me. You cannot imagine what we saw, what we faced, and what we did. I can describe it, but what are one warrior’s words against the true picture?

  I was warned that the accounting would not be complete without it, so I will speak of Armageddon. I will speak of what we did that day, and frame the unimaginable truth into the limits of language, so mortal minds may comprehend what I saw.

  The last thing I saw aboard the Karabela was the gathering of misty light, obscuring all sight of Axium. The last thing I heard with my ears was the thunderclap of generators discharging their sacred duties. My mind was open to the brotherhood’s final defiant cry.

  Then came the warp. A controlled descent – we burst through it in a heartbeat. It was nothing. I scarcely even recall it.

  My boots kissed earth with a grinding smack. I could hear screaming. Nothing but screaming: outside my helmet, inside my mind, even leaving my own lips. My senses couldn’t interpret anything else.

  The Neverborn were screaming. Not because the warp flux drew their attention, though it would have done that as surely as it will have blinded any Imperial mortals looking at our arrival point. Neither was it because air displacement sent a peal of thunder across both sides of the river.

  No. They screamed even before we unleashed our powers.

  II

  I couldn’t accurately judge just how far the effect spread. Suffice to say, in the brief seconds I had to perceive my surroundings, the Aegis broke every single one of the Neverborn as far as I could see.

  The Emperor’s Gift makes us anathema to the daemons of the worlds behind the veil. That much is no secret. Many times in my first year of service, I’d seen Neverborn crumble
before our presence, recoiling from the sheer fact our souls were girded in gene-coded divinity. Castian’s presence – the Aegis of five knights wielding their psychic aura as a weapon – weakened daemonkind, sickened them, purified them against their will by sapping their ability to remain manifest in our reality.

  Five knights.

  The world burst back into existence. The shouting. The screaming. I’ve said these things happened. I’ve not said why.

  We appeared at the heart of the enemy’s forward ranks. All of us. I learned later that the bang of air displacement shattered the reinforced windows in hundreds of Guard troop transports on the far side of the Styx.

  The Aegis of one hundred and nine Grey Knights tore from our hearts in a tidal flood, hurling creatures of bronze, bone and bloody flesh from their cloven feet. Ivory horns cracked and limbs snapped in their sockets as the Neverborn were hurled back, physically and psychically, from our arrival in their midst.

  I had mere seconds to take this in. The poisoned smoke faded, leaving us standing tall among thousands of fallen Neverborn. I saw things with brass skin and diseased oil for blood; I saw spindly, spined things clutching blades that dripped broken souls; I saw daemon-breeds of the lesser and greater choirs, winged or unwinged, clawed or possessing hands that were grotesquely simian, unarmoured or clad in plate of bone, gold, brass and bronze.

  It would be a lie to claim every single daemon was blasted aside. The strongest of them, those of the greater choirs, stood strong against the Aegis even as their skin blistered and burned to be so near to us. We’d appeared as planned, in the formation Captain Taremar had arranged for maximum chance of success.

  We had him surrounded. The Lord of the Twelfth Legion, heart of the pack among his colossal praetorian-creatures, was contained within a ring of silver ceramite.

  I saw all of this in the time it would take to blink. We stood, knee-deep in thrashing daemonkind, weapons in hands and facing something that had no place in reality.

  First came its bodyguards, as if such a thing could ever require huscarls. Each of them was devilry incarnate, rivalling a gunship in height, drawn from the pages of human myth and given these most hateful, bloody forms. Wings of black smoke and bleeding leather beat the gore-stench of split bodies across the battlefield. Whips lashed with the feral intelligence of beast-tails, while tongues cracked from mulish, bullish, malformed visages with the same curling intent.

  One of these – one of them, the basest weakling among its choir – had killed Sothis and almost killed me.

  That day, we faced twelve. The Cruor Praetoria, the twelve strongest; the twelve daemons whose lives and deeds most pleased their wretched Blood God over forty thousand years of warfare. They came on, despite the Aegis. They came because of it. It was nothing to them, less than a joke – a mere irritant that pulled at their attention. Every one of them had thousands of heresies etched under its name in the great libraries of our monastery. We were looking at the history of warfare in physical form.

  These beasts spearheaded the main host, at their foul sire’s side.

  Angron. To think such a creature had ever borne a human name. Was this truly one of the Emperor’s own sons, infected by unholiness at the Imperium’s dawn? The passing of enough time will make all things myth. No one, even among our order, knew which ancient secrets were once fact, and which were misguided fiction.

  It rivalled a Warhound-class walker in size, standing even above the beast-lords that served as its bodyguards. Chains and cables dreadlocked from its saurian skull, and from the clawed tips of its dripping wings to the ridged, stinking red iron that served as its skin, it had long since surrendered any claims to humanity. When it roared, which it did the moment its army began to crumble and tumble about its booted feet, it made the strained, throaty whine of an enraged mammoth. The sound carried across the sky, curdling the clouds above.

  Lightning split the heavens. The storm began a second later. It was raining blood, making a ruin of the parchments and scrolls fixed to our armour; stealing the polished shine of our holy ceramite.

  The rain buzzed and fizzed along the powered edges of our weapons. Justicar Castian’s skull, enshrined in gold, seemed almost to chatter as my stave’s energy field superheated the red rain into steam.

  Six seconds had passed since our arrival. Just six seconds. We were already running, already closing the circle with a garrotte’s intent. One hundred and nine knights charged in perfect unity and in perfect silence. The sensation of our powers rising before release was no different from the way air turns cold and dense with ozone in the seconds before a storm.

  If the Wolves were obeying their own battle plan, they would be leading the human armies back into battle now. The sword had fallen, and the Archenemy’s princes were distracted by the threat in the midst.

  And surely enough, shells began to hammer down around us, throwing up avalanche sprays of sandy soil along with the bodies of dying daemons.

  Eight seconds. Nine. Ten. We still ran.

  The Lord of the Twelfth Legion roared again. It lowered itself, stared dead at us, and bellowed with all its strength, hard enough to make its wings rattle.

  +Force shield,+ came a voice across the Great Communion.

  I obeyed, just as I felt every brother nearby obey. It took no effort at all to bind our power together into a repelling wall of force. The wave of bestial sound crashed against us, rolled over us, and hurled hundreds of the beast’s own warriors into the air.

  Fifteen seconds. Sixteen. Seventeen.

  We were prepared for this. We’d meditated on our fate, and death held no mystery, no fear, no shame for any of us. Years of indoctrination and cognitive conditioning by the lords of our order meant we could be no other way.

  Yet I wasn’t prepared for the reality of war. This wasn’t some urban engagement in city ruins – a firefight between soldiers exchanging gunfire from the security of cover, where perhaps one side boasted greater weaponry than the other. That took bravery, patience, concentration… But this was open war, a pitched battle, demanding greater savagery, greater strength, greater courage, and calling upon greater depths of feeling. One couldn’t enter into such a battle between clashing armies without being certain of one’s death.

  Past experiences meant nothing that day. The conditioning broke. The indoctrinations were forgotten, left far behind. Brotherhood meant everything. I ran because my brothers were running, and they ran because I did. We were one. I’d sooner die than let them down. I felt the same appalling, addictive devotion emanating from Galeo, Dumenidon, Enceladus and Malchadiel in waves.

  It unlocked something primal within me, something unarguably human in my core. This was how humanity’s ancestors had fought, blade to blade on open battlefields, in the heathen centuries of Ancient Terra. To think unaugmented, frail mortal men and women battled like this was almost too much to bear. That was courage, and perhaps futility, on a scale my imagination couldn’t encompass.

  We were butchering the weakened daemons as they rose again. Every step meant another murder. I was already sweating; it ran into my eyes and made stinging tears. I couldn’t look away from the towering black form and its winged slave-generals. I couldn’t focus on anything else, neither could any of my kindred – we were slaughtering through muscle memory alone, sending bolts into the ocean of heaving flesh around us.

  And then… a lessening. A voice in the communion fell silent, and the song was irredeemably diminished.

  Harwen of the Second Brotherhood was the first to die. I’d learn that later, when the skies no longer wept blood onto a world gone mad. He was killed by a daemon ramming a brass runeblade through his belly, slowing him enough for other chittering, howling creatures to drag him down. At the time, I knew only that one of the voices in our perfect psychic chorus had fallen quiet.

  We had our orders. Those who fell behind were already dead.

  I felt a brief jab of painful curiosity – were that knight’s closest brothers wracked by his
loss? Was he just a voice lost in the furious song, or was it as sharp a loss as I’d felt when Sothis died?

  My bolter kicked and my stave crunched into meat. We were barely moving now, but that didn’t matter. The Neverborn of the Greater Choir were almost upon us. Their stinking wings cast great shadows, as if a sky turned black with blood-swollen clouds could be any darker. My automatic night-sight activated. It made no difference. I couldn’t see with the blood splashed across my eye lenses. Curses and psychic irritation told me my brothers were suffering the same.

  From nearby, I heard the crack of a whip, sharp as a snapping bone. The song quietened further; it’s difficult to describe how that felt, how it sounded, with the blood thundering in my ears. I mean no insult when I say it, but some sensations require six senses to understand.

  No time to think. Skill meant nothing, any more. That was the fiercest difference between this and the battles of the past. Skill with a blade and a dead-eye with a bolter no longer meant anything. This was warfare stripped to its bluntest purity, closer to wearying labour than a duel between equals. We killed and killed and killed without conception of time, knowing nothing beyond the ache of shaking limbs and the savage anger saturating the Great Communion.

  That anger was the greatest shock of all, how wrath in symbiosis overtook each of us. We were Grey Knights. We were born to go into battle with cold blood and cold hearts, protected from passion by our own sanctity. Yet my blood was aflame – both my hearts boiled it in their thundering chambers and pushed it back into my body for nourishment.

  Each of my brothers felt the same. Their anger crashed against me, just as I felt mine pressing against them. We felt it, reflected it, channelled it back into the cobweb of consciousness linking us all.

  The ground shook as one of the Cruor Praetoria landed among our advancing ranks. I didn’t care. I didn’t turn to see which of our brother-squads was engaging it, nor did I care what happened to them at the battle’s outcome. We pushed on, butchering our way step by step.