The Emperor's Gift

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  +Come closer,+ I sent to all of them at once. +I can’t kill you all, but some of you will never return to that freezing hell you call home. Who wants to be first?+

  This time, the flash of light and air displacement heralded the arrival of something truly huge. We all turned to regard what could possibly have joined the fight at this last stage.

  Every Wolf went to his knees. They knelt among the mutilated dead, bowing their heads to the towering war machine. I alone remained standing, and I confess, even I felt the temptation to kneel.

  ‘Enough,’ boomed Bjorn the Fell-Handed. ‘Enough of this madness.’

  ‘First Jarl,’ said Grimnar, pausing only to spit a gobbet of blood aside.

  ‘Enough. Enough. The Fang is aflame, burning hotter than it ever did under the black magic of Magnus One-Eye. Three Imperial ships have crashed into our walls, pulling them down and opening our hearth-halls to the Fenrisian winter.

  ‘Our orbital docks are wounded unto death. Our fleet is in ruins.’

  Logan Grimnar surged to his feet, aiming at me with his axe. ‘First Jarl–’

  ‘You will watch your tongue with me, young one.’

  Despite the fleets tearing each other apart beyond these burning walls, despite the ship itself shaking as it was still being fired upon, several of the Wolves laughed to hear their jarl being called young.

  ‘This is over. Grimnar, you have acted with all honour, but the time to bare our throats has come. Pride and righteousness will take us all to our graves. I know that better than any of you. Call off the attack. End the war howls.’

  The Dreadnought turned to face me, its waist axis grinding. ‘Who speaks for you?’

  ‘I… I am not sure, lord.’

  ‘I do.’ Annika Jarlsdottyr, her clothing wet with blood, moved to stand next to me. ‘I speak for the Holy Inquisition.’

  ‘Then remember these words, little maiden. Be sure that every soul to carry your order’s sigil hears these words. If an Inquisition ship ever darkens the skies above Fenris again, we will pull it from the sky and feast on its iron bones. Do you hear me?’

  She bowed her head. ‘I hear. As will others.’

  The ancient Dreadnought moved away from all of us, its stomping tread shaking the deck as much as the incoming fire.

  ‘I have never, in all my years, stepped into a teleporter until now. No wonder Russ hated it so much. If I had skin, it would be crawling.’

  He rotated back, his claw and assault cannon both aimed at me. ‘One last thing. You. Hyperion.’

  I swallowed at the way he said my name, as I crouched, tending to Malchadiel as best I could. After all this time – after months of hoping it would end – it now took all my strength not to ignore the awkward ceasefire and hurl myself back at Grimnar.

  I could see the same thing in his face. That same beast-at-bay anger in his eyes. We both knew he’d kill me in a heartbeat, but when has reason ever played a part in actions born of spite or rage?

  Reluctantly, I broke eye contact first, and looked over at the Dreadnought.

  ‘Sire?’ I asked him.

  ‘Before you are allowed to return to wherever it is you dwell, I want you to walk the halls of the Fang and speak of your order. The Wolves will never be scoured of this memory. No more secrets, Grey Knight. We know you, now. The Wolves will always know you, from this day forth.’

  To end a war, both Chapters would break their laws. But what choice?

  I went to one knee.

  ‘Aye, jarl. It will be so.’

  ‘And you both speak for the Inquisition? With authority?’

  Annika met my glance with her own. There was nothing of warmth there, not any more.

  ‘We can be convincing,’ she said.

  EPILOGUE

  ECHOES OF SURRENDER

  I

  I will end this account with a truth rarely told. Two, in fact.

  The first took place six hours after the guns fell silent. The second took place three weeks later, when only the Karabela remained in orbit, off-shore from the floating hulks of a warship graveyard.

  II

  We stood before the surviving inquisitors, those who boarded the crippled Corel’s Hope in order to hear the words spoken at the battle’s end.

  I waited in silence as Annika walked back and forth before them, relaying the words of a warrior who’d once waged war at the Emperor’s side. The war room aboard the ruined battleship was lit by infrequent flashes of the flawed hololithic projectors, and the white eye of Fenris rolling past the observation window every time the wounded, near-powerless ship completed another revolution in its drift.

  When Annika trailed off, her last words hung in the air between the gathered agents, nobles and officers, with no one replying right away. I scanned the crowd – the former enforcers of Imperial law now exalted to the hidden ordos; the spire nobles now draped in Inquisitorial panoply; the preening lordlings clad more in self-importance than righteousness; and the earthy, battered warriors who eschewed grand trappings in favour of the quieter, subtler work.

  Inquisitors, all. Not a single soul carrying anything in common with his or her kindred, but for the emblems they swore oaths to.

  ‘No,’ said one of them, at last.

  ‘The battle is over.’ Just speaking made them flinch back. I shook my head, taking a step forwards. ‘The battle is over, and before it could become a war.’

  But the inquisitors shared glances, and I knew they’d soon be sharing secrets.

  ‘We will explore alternate avenues against this Chapter,’ a bruised, dreadlocked man said through an augmetic vocaliser mounted in his epiglottis, replacing half of his throat like a torc.

  Several others nodded.

  ‘Perhaps the next time Fenris comes under siege by the Archenemy, Battlefleet Solar will be slow to react. What a shame that would be.’

  That earned a few murmurs of agreement, and even a chuckle.

  ‘What do we know,’ asked a robed biologis adept, ‘of Space Wolf gene-seed?’

  III

  There are some moments in life you will always regret witnessing. The insipid scheming of the Inquisition after the battle was one of them. The bitterness of the Wolves was another. Both sides were justified in their anger, but validation didn’t render it wholesome.

  We lingered in orbit, the Karabela’s guns adding to the Fang’s as we sank the wrecks too broken to serve as scrap iron. Each dead ship was sent to the surface of Fenris as an asteroid of burning metal. We’d stand on the bridge, Captain Castor and I, watching each one tumble into the black seas.

  With Annika gone, and Malchadiel taken aboard the Ruler of the Black Skies back to Titan, Talwyn and I were almost alone. We were barred from setting foot on Fenris, of course. I obeyed the letter of that command, while violating its spirit.

  Fascinating, to drift from mind to mind within the Fang’s bleak walls. I spent an hour as a thrall; a failed aspirant, physically enhanced but ruined by my own defeat, indentured to a dead warrior and now with no arms and armour to repair.

  I spent a whole evening as a servant – nearly blinded by the eternal gloom in which I lived – working in secret, sacred forges that had never seen the sun. I watched bolter shells being shaped, rune-carved and blessed. I watched muscled artisans beating iron and steel into blades. Only after several hours did I realise why I was having such trouble hearing anything: I was seeing through the eyes of a woman who’d been near-deafened by a lifetime of toils in the underforges.

  I will not lie. I touched the minds of a hundred and more Fenrisian servants, never allowing my presence to be detected, sharing their chores and pleasures through vicarious curiosity. I learned much, but cared little. There was something in particular I wanted to see.

  I found it, weeks after the void battle.

  From a raised gantry overlooking a stasis containment chamber, I watched through the red-tinted eye lenses of a cowled and heavily augmented thrall. In place of hands, coiling cable-tendrils rolled a
nd unrolled from my elbows. In place of legs, I moved on dense, slow tank treads, rumbling over the metal deck.

  Logan Grimnar, High King of Fenris, stood before a wide circular elevator, his axe in his hands. At his side, his remaining Wolf Guard mirrored his stance. I recognised Brand Rawthroat, but resisted the temptation to see the ritual through his eyes. This was enough of a trespass.

  The armoured form of Jarl Bjorn rotated its weaponised hands, rolled its bulky shoulders, shifted its immense weight – testing every point of locomotion one last time. Hundreds of cables and wires already linked to the Dreadnought’s coffin and hull, some from the machinery concealed beneath the elevator, others stringing up to the humming generators hanging from the ceiling.

  Everything was in readiness.

  ‘Sleep, First Jarl,’ said Logan Grimnar. The Wolf Guard raised their weapons in salute. ‘Until Fenris once more calls.’

  The Dreadnought fell still. Slowly, the elevator began to lower into the pit, with all its subterranean generators. Frost-mist made diamonds on the war machine’s blue-grey armour plating.

  ‘Fenris. Always. Calls.’

  ‘Always. But rest well, for now. Preserve this tale among the sagas, jarl.’ Grimnar’s voice was a measured counterpart to the dragging, weary drawl of the slumbering Dreadnought.

  ‘Remember. The Inquisition. Will not. Leave us. In peace.’

  Jarl Grimnar nodded, as solemn as I’d ever seen him. ‘I know.’

  ‘Watch. The. Skies. Brothers.’ The Dreadnought descended into the mist, and a bulkhead in the floor started to seal closed above it. ‘Howl for me. When. They. Come…’

  Chapter X

  LOST SOULS

  IMPERIAL DATE: M41.498

  I

  I met him at the Pinnacle-Seyta-V landing platform. The Thunderhawk gunship came in low, silver in the night, gleaming in the liquid methane rainfall. It touched down with almost ludicrous perfection, graceful from the height of its approach vector to the moment its landing claws rested on the rockcrete platform.

  As the gangramp descended, I stood straighter, letting my targeting reticule flicker across the gunship’s armoured panels.

  I didn’t know what to expect. In all honesty, I’d done my level best to banish any expectation. Fifty-five years was a long time, even for those of us destined to live for centuries.

  He descended the ramp, boots sending shivers through the plasteel. His armour was changed to a monumental degree. Layers and layers of densely packed ceramite girded his chest and limbs. The storm bolter on his arm beamed a permanent, thin beam of red-dot aiming light, as did a fist-sized targeting cogitator mounted on the side of his helm. Instead of an Interceptor teleportation backpack, he had an immense plasma cell generator on his back, with four thick, multi-jointed servo arms curled closed. Each of them ended in tight, packed industrial claws, doubtless capable of wrenching a tank’s armour apart, or lifting it completely off the ground.

  He looked to me, his helm tilted slightly. In curiosity? Surprise? I didn’t pry into his mind to find out for sure.

  I saw myself as I must look to him. Gone was the unadorned armour of a young knight. I stood clad in my ceremonial plate, the silver ceramite encrusted with myriad runes in Trecenti and High Gothic – meaningless in terms of pure language, but each one a sorcerous benediction of hope against the blackness behind the veil. A hood of riveted, consecrated gold reached over the back and sides of my helm, linked to my armour through dense black cabling.

  At my hip was a sheathed force sword. On my back, a mag-locked staff; the same weapon I’d carried through the two short years I’d served in Castian. I still carried a pistol to complement my storm bolter, though no one had called me Two-Guns in a long time.

  Our suits of armour held only two similarities now, and the first was simply that they both remained unpainted in the Grey Knights’ eternal tradition. The second was the inscription of a chained wolf on our left bracers – the mark of surviving that bloodstained dusk on the killing fields of Armageddon over half a century ago.

  When he walked closer, I offered my hand. He ignored it and embraced me. The contact lasted only a moment, though I heard his chuckle over the vox, and felt the warmth from his mind.

  ‘Hyperion,’ he said. ‘My brother. It is good to see you.’

  ‘Welcome home, Mal.’

  ‘You look… different.’

  I smiled at that. It was strange, speaking with my teeth and tongue for a change. I was so used to the effortless ease and instantaneous comprehension found in silent speech.

  ‘As do you. Come.’ I led him inside. The bulkhead whirled closed and locked behind us.

  ‘I cannot speak of Mars,’ he said, apropos of nothing. ‘So do not ask. Suffice to say, one can grow weary even of seeing a new wonder each day. Duty called, and I could no longer ignore its cry.’ He gestured to my armour, most notably to the psychic hood shielding the rear half of my helm. ‘Tell me of that,’ he bade me.

  ‘There are things I can’t speak of, either,’ I replied. ‘We keep more lore hidden within this monastery than you would ever believe, brother. Behind arcane locks, a thousand secrets lie untold.’

  He nodded, sanguine and unsurprised. ‘I would like to walk the Dead Fields before I am assigned back into duty.’

  ‘Of course.’ Sothis. He wanted to see Sothis, and our brothers sleeping beneath Titan’s surface. ‘We’ll go there now.’

  Serfs bowed and moved aside as we walked the monastery’s cold, quiet halls. I sensed he was building up to a question, but didn’t know how to frame it.

  +Just ask,+ I sent.

  ‘This promotion of yours,’ he said. ‘Prognosticar Hyperion. You serve with Torcrith now? Truly?’

  ‘Torcrith went to sleep within the Dead Fields nineteen years since. But we served together for a time.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  I shrugged a shoulder. ‘The same way we all die. In pain.’

  ‘And it’s your task to train others?’

  I nodded. ‘As Torcrith trained me. Hopefully, I’ll find it easier than he did. I wasn’t a quick student.’

  Malchadiel gave a muted smile. ‘I’m sorry to hear of your loss, though it pleases me to see your talents recognised, brother. So yours is the voice that advises captains and Grand Masters. Except now you stand alone.’

  ‘We both stand alone, Mal.’

  ‘True enough,’ he conceded. ‘It makes my eyes ache to look upon you, Hyperion. Your soul is so very bright. But I’ve missed the unity of purpose within a squad. Haven’t you?’

  There was no sense lying to him, of all souls. ‘I miss it still. But it’s better this way.’

  He knew of what I spoke, and it wasn’t pride at a promotion through the ranks. ‘I sense your guilt lingering behind those words, Hyperion.’

  ‘Time heals all wounds but those we most need tending. And it’s not just Sothis, Mal. I was always supposed to be alone in this. I think we both were.’

  He nodded to that. ‘What of the others?’

  He’d see Galeo and Dumenidon soon enough – they slept beneath the surface of Titan, next to Sothis. I knew he didn’t mean them.

  ‘Inquisitor Jarlsdottyr hasn’t filed a report with the ordos in seventeen years. She is believed lost during the Jaegra Ascension, slain by the Archenemy.’

  He glanced at me as we walked. ‘Jaegra?’

  ‘Cretacia’s largest moon. It’s a long story, brother.’

  ‘Did you ever see her again? After the Months of Shame, I mean.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I did.’ He sensed from my tone that the subject was best left alone.

  ‘Why did you meet me up there?’ he asked. ‘I’m glad you did, but I confess I’m surprised.’

  ‘Because we have unfinished business, you and I.’

  He looked at me, and I sensed his interest grow sharper, more hesitant. ‘Oh?’

  ‘It can wait until after the Dead Fields.’

  Malchadiel nodded. ‘As you wish.’r />
  When we reached the end of the steps descending down into the Dead Fields, we were greeted before reaching the first grave.

  ‘Look at you both,’ said a voice softened by age and infirmity. A man so thin he bordered on skeletal limped closer on smooth, silver bionics.

  ‘Enceladus,’ Malchadiel greeted him. ‘Still alive, old man?’

  His scarred face twisted into an elder’s smile – all wrinkles and time’s lines. ‘For a little while longer, I’m sure. How was Mars, my boy? And don’t hide behind secrets. I have enough of that these days from Hyperion.’

  II

  We left the Dead Fields after three hours. I will not share the words of regret and oaths to fallen kin we spoke there. Such things have no place in any archive outside the human heart.

  Worldrise, on Titan. We’d made our way to one of the monastery’s countless battlements, standing armoured in the poisonous, freezing air as the sphere of Saturn rose above the mountainous horizon.

  Malchadiel was quiet. He’d said little since we left the Dead Fields.

  ‘Brother,’ I said to him. ‘Come with me.’

  He looked around. The howling wind flapped at his tabard, and tore a scroll from my pauldron.

  ‘To where?’

  ‘To Terra.’

  ‘Hyperion, is this a jest?’

  +No. As I said, we have unfinished business. There’s something I still owe you.+

  III

  The Imperial Palace is a nation in itself, covering a significant portion of Holy Terra’s surface. Thousands of minarets, towers and spires rise from the golden skyline and breach the world’s ever-thinning cloud cover.

  One of these towers is black. One, and only one, standing out from its gold and marble kindred. They call it the Tower of Heroes.

  At the summit of this vast architectural spear is a bell tower. The belfry itself is the size of a cathedral, and houses a single bell of un-assuming, commonplace metals, given over to the stains and patinas of time’s eroding touch. This lone bell is the size of a Titan, and attended by hundreds of men, women and servitors whose existence is devoted to maintaining the instrument’s function.