The Emperor's Gift
Page 34
It rarely rings. When it does, all resident servants must be evacuated and sealed within reinforced shelters to prevent the annihilation of their eardrums – and subsequent death through lung rupture and embolism.
And when it does ring, the tolling can be heard across half of Terra. The rest of the world hears it anyway, as all communications fall silent, replaced by a channelled transmission of the sound.
This is the Bell of Lost Souls. Among its many legends is the holiest of all; that when the bell rings, the Emperor hears the sound even in his slumber upon the Golden Throne, and sheds a single tear.
As his genetic inheritors and mankind’s most valued protectors, the Bell of Lost Souls rings once each time a Grey Knight falls in battle. It’s said that this is our reward for the recognition we will never receive from a galaxy that must never know we exist. Galeo once stood at the base of the tower, when he was the last of his Castian brothers, and pulled the levers that set the great, arcane mechanisms to work. Minutes later, the bell tolled nine times – once for every fallen brother. All of Terra knew that the mighty had fallen, and the Imperium was a darker place because of it.
I’d stood there myself, in the very same place, in that sacrosanct control chamber surrounded by reverent slaves and burning incense. I’d tolled the bell twice: for Galeo and for Dumenidon.
But never for Sothis. When the time had come, I’d chosen to wait a little longer. Despite my desire, there were other, worthier hands than mine who deserved to ring that bell and speak Sothis’s name.
Malchadiel was with me now, though neither of us were there in the physical sense. Instead, I made our presence known through subtler means.
A robed slave looked up, and without hearing any order, began the laborious process of automated lockdown, broadcasting vox-transmissions to send the belfry attendants into their bunkers.
Another slave started working the controls to awaken the continental communications relays.
Another slave, this one an overseer, keyed in the one hundred and three ciphers to unlock the safeguards that would allow his menials to access the deeper systems.
Ah, the Imperium’s bureaucracy. A wondrously complex thing to behold.
This took me almost eight hours, with feather-light touches on almost ninety minds. At no point had anyone within the Palace given the order for the Bell of Lost Souls to be tolled.
When all was in readiness, Malchadiel and I shared the mind of a single servant. One hand rested on the ornate control console, the other on the lever that would activate the myriad mechanics within this monument to honour and misery.
+Do it, Mal.+
The serf gripped the lever, whispering a single name as two tears made a slow journey down his cheeks.
‘Sothis.’
The last lament of Sothis of Castian rang out across mankind’s birth world, ignored by none, heard by all – and humanity’s empire mourned another fallen hero.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to my editor Nick Kyme for having the patience of a funny-talking Northern saint, and to Rachel Docherty, Ead Brown, Graeme Lyon and Nikki Loftus for their invaluable opinions. A huge Ta to Liz and John French for the last-second, deadline-defying use of a laptop and their spare room.
Also, sincerest thanks to Marvin Minsky’s The Society of Mind; Cornell University’s ‘Curious About Astronomy’; the online resources of physicist and astronomer William Wheaton; NASA’s very detailed website; and BBC’s Wonders of the Solar System, Wonders of the Universe and Horizon for the information about space, temperature, physics in vacuum, eidetic memory – and (of course) Titan.
A portion of this book’s proceeds will go to Cancer Research UK and the SOS Children’s Villages charity, for orphans in Bangladesh.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aaron Dembski-Bowden is a British author with his beginnings in the videogame and RPG industries. He’s written several novels for the Black Library, including the Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Helsreach and the New York Times bestselling The First Heretic for the Horus Heresy. He lives and works in Northern Ireland with his wife Katie, hiding from the world in the middle of nowhere. His hobbies generally revolve around reading anything within reach, and helping people spell his surname.
An extract from Angel of Fire by William King
On sale July 2012
When you heard Macharius speak you knew that he believed utterly in what he was saying, and that you should too. There was something about his blazing conviction that forced you to push aside any doubts and reassess your own thoughts on the matter.
The man had an immense presence, an enormous authority, an aura that enveloped him and everything he touched and transformed if not the words themselves then your perception of those words. All around me, hardened soldiers strained to hear what he had to say, listened as if their hope of salvation depended on it. More than any priest, more than any commissar, Macharius made you believe, in him if nothing else.
‘Today we take the first step towards our greater goal. It is an important step. If we falter here, we will fail. If we do not harden our resolve, foreswear false mercy and carry ourselves with the firmness of purpose this great task deserves, we will condemn billions of our fellow humans to lives of squalid darkness and eternities of torment in the toils of the daemons who feast on the souls of the damned. Do not let your finger rest on the trigger of your weapon. Sparing our enemies merely extends their lives for a pitiful eye-blink in the Emperor’s sight and condemns their souls for all eternity. Show mercy to the heretic and you do the work of daemons yourself.’
We’ve all heard similar sermons preached before battles and on High Holy Days and I am damned if I can tell you what it was about Macharius that made his words different. Perhaps his lack of doubt communicated itself, but that could not be all. Many commissars I have known were every bit his equal in faith. No – it was something about the man. When Macharius spoke you could have been listening to the Emperor speaking to you from the depth of his Sacred Throne. I know it sounds like heresy, but that is what it felt like. Something had touched Macharius; maybe the light of the Emperor, maybe something else.
And then, in a moment, the whole mood of the thing changed. Macharius went from being a priest preaching a sermon to an officer talking to his men, telling them the plan, letting them know what they needed to know.
‘The way forwards is harsh. It carries us through lava seas and across great chasms where the jaws of the earth could swallow a Titan whole. It passes through sandstorms so powerful they can strip a man to the bloody bone in seconds. It takes us through clouds of poison so deadly that one breath is fatal.’
It should have sounded off-putting but he made it sound as if these were the sort of challenges that true men should expect to face and which it was their glory to overcome. His slight grim smile told you that he knew you, you personally, could overcome them. And he was letting us know that we were all in this together.
‘This is all to the good.’ He paused and smiled and as he had expected the whole army laughed at the joke, feeble as it was. Then his expression was grim again. ‘I am serious. It is all to the good. While we are doing this, the second part of our force will be assaulting Hive Irongrad from the south, along the easy route, the way they expect us to come. They will not expect a massive armoured assault from the north-west, and we shall hit them where we know the defences are weakest. We will have the pyrite refineries and the weapon factorums. We shall bring millions of lost souls into the Emperor’s Light.’
He paused again, to give what he had said time to sink in. We knew now where we were going, a hive city. He had even told us why.
If you have never had any experience of being a soldier in the Imperial Guard, you will probably not realise how unusual it was for a ranking general like Macharius to say things like this to an assembled army. He was telling us the plan – personally. He was letting us know that there was one and that it was a good one, that he and his officers knew
what they were doing, and that he personally was taking the time to communicate the details to you so that you understood your place in it, and you shared his faith in its efficacy.
He had the trick of pitching his voice and casting his eye over the crowd in such a way that you felt he was talking directly to you. You felt as though you mattered. As if you had a central role to play in this great scheme. Everyone present was as important as Macharius himself.
He spoke on, outlining the plan in broad strokes and making it clear where each major battlegroup was to move and strike. By the end of it, every man present must have felt as if they had as clear an idea of what was going to happen as Macharius himself and all of them shared his certainty of success.
When he vaulted down from the side of the Baneblade, you could probably have heard the cheers in Irongrad, hundreds of leagues away.
That was my first exposure to the legendary charisma of Macharius. It was not to be my last.
For Alexander Dembski-Bowden, Amber McNeill, Ben Wendig, Tinsley Leitner and Henry French. Babies… Babies, everywhere.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2012 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK
Cover illustration by Cheoljoo Lee
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