Sons of the Emperor

by Warhammer 40K

  His eyes were drawn by some strange volition to the cracked terrazzo of a once tiled thoroughfare, now revealed by the building of the archway. The tiles glistened with spots of gold in the wan sunlight of the dead world, and Vistario knelt to lift something.

  'What do you have there?' said Akhtar.

  Vistario turned the object over like a stage performer flipping a coin between his fingers.

  It had once been a tapered cylinder, but had been pressed flat by the weight of the blocks. He saw now that it was not gold, but brass, its surfaces striated with heat and a faded mark that told of its origin.

  Vistario stood and held out what he had found.

  'That's a bolter shell,' said Murshid, reaching out to touch it, but thinking better of it at the last second as he saw the armourer's mark upon it.

  Akhtar had no such reservations, and plucked the shell from Vistario's palm. He turned the round over and Vistario read the confusion in his aura as he too recognised the mark.

  'World Eaters,' he said, uncomprehending.

  The wind surged at his words, and once again they all heard it, a discordant, screeching psychic call. Stronger now, closer. They felt its grief, heard its fury, and most of all, they sensed its infinite patience.

  The Ancient awaits.

  Following the psychic scream to its source was not difficult.

  The surface of the planet seemed now to open up before them and previously obscured pathways ran arrow-straight through the blasted landscape like the great Romanii roads of old. Patterns that had been invisible before were now undeniable, and the city's original plan became clearer with every step they took towards its heart.

  Akhtar led the way like an eager bloodhound closing on its prey.

  Murshid walked alongside Vistario.

  'Akhtar's mind is blunt, but surely you must feel that we are not alone on this world?' he said.

  'I have felt… something,' agreed Vistario. 'Can you identify it?'

  'A powerful mind,' said Murshid. 'More than that I cannot say. Every time I try to focus on its thoughts it slithers from my perceptions.'

  'We are seeking something desired by the Crimson King,' said Vistario. 'We should have expected we would not be the only ones in search of it.'

  'True, but anything that seeks to thwart the designs of Magnus the Red is not to be taken lightly.'

  'Do what you can,' ordered Vistario.

  'I will, but whatever else has come to this world is not what concerns me most. It is that I believe who or whatever is sending out this howling missive is aware of us.'

  'Then it is not just me that feels we are being reeled in like a fish on a hook,' said Vistario.

  'No,' agreed Murshid. 'It is not just you.'

  The path led the three warriors of the Thousand Sons to a canyon-like gouge torn by something massive falling from the sky. It led to a blackened abyss, like the gate to some mythic underworld.

  'Not the best omen,' said Murshid.

  'Did we expect anything else?' replied Vistario. 'But a trap is not a trap if the prey is aware of the hunter.'

  Once again, Akhtar led the way.

  The darkness within was absolute, but easily penetrated by the senses of their baroque war-plate. The rock of this world was glossy and molten, rippled by unimaginable heat. It plunged downwards at a steep angle until it emerged into a deep, vaulted space of soaring arches, high, fluted pillars and shattered chambers.

  'Catacombs?' wondered Akhtar.

  Vistario's gaze followed the curve of a domed roof to where its structure had been ruptured. Dust drifted from above and thin spars of light speared into the darkness.

  'No,' he said. 'Parts were once open to the sky. This entire area was built both above and below ground.'

  'This was a city of secrets and lies,' said Murshid, taking a knee and placing his hand on the ground. 'One face presented, but it was a compliant mask. Its serpent face was hidden beneath.'

  Whispers drifted on the wind, a thousand muttering voices just beyond the threshold of hearing. Vistario sensed their anger, watching with a wary eye as dust devils swirled in his peripheral vision. His footsteps stirred the abrasive sands, and Vistario heard a scratching sound, as if he walked upon the ashen ghosts of this world's people.

  Who knows, perhaps I do, he thought.

  An angled roadway curved away into the darkness, and Vistario set off along it, picking a path through fallen rocks and skewed girders twisted by ferocious heat and pressure.

  'The fury of the bombardment was absolute,' said Akhtar. 'That this place has survived is nothing short of a miracle.'

  'No miracle,' said Vistario, pointing to where the stonework of the underground city revealed reinforced steel embedded within. 'This region of the city was designed to withstand attack.'

  'The world above was built by human hands,' said Murshid. 'A pre-Crusade culture, if I read the echoes of Old Night correctly. Why would they build their world to withstand the fury of a Legion?'

  'That is a mystery indeed,' said Vistario. 'Perhaps the one who has drawn us here can answer.'

  The roadway passed through a set of armoured blast doors, and from that point onwards, the rough and damaged stone of the city above took on the utilitarian character of an industrial facility. Its walls were layered plascrete and flakboard, its ceilings reinforced vaults of latticed steel.

  The walls were black, as though a firestorm had flash-burned through, and Vistario saw negative impressions on the wall where warriors had burned to death. The outlines were blurred by time, but disturbingly familiar.

  'You see them too?' said Murshid, his voice wavering.

  Vistario read the pain the Athanaean warrior was feeling.

  'I do,' he said, the muscles in his jaw taut.

  Deeper into the planet they travelled, along metal-decked passageways, down twisting screw-stairs and descending dormant embarkation elevator shafts. The presence they had felt on the surface lingered in Vistario's mind, like a distant pressure. Whatever it was, it remained beyond all their perceptions.

  'This was some form of military launch facility,' said Akhtar.

  'No,' said Vistario. 'It is too small for squadrons of attack craft.'

  'I know,' snapped Akhtar. 'More like a hidden, private facility such as a planetary governor might construct.'

  'Perhaps we are following the lost words of a long dead Imperial commander,' said Vistario. 'Ironic that it would be warriors he would consider traitors who finally heed his call.'

  'Traitor?' spat Akhtar. 'We betrayed no one. We were the ones betrayed.'

  Vistario raised a hand, as much to forestall any careless outburst from the Raptora adept as to call a halt to their long march.

  'We are here,' he said.

  For all that the infrastructure around the launch facility had survived the bombardment, the hangar itself had not endured as well as its builders had expected. A small, orbit-capable starship sat at the far end of the hangar, its hull smashed open by falling debris and one swept-forward wing sheared from the fuselage by a fallen beam. A portion of the cave at the rear of the ship gleamed like glass, vitrified by the craft's jetwash.

  'It was taking off when the roof collapsed,' said Vistario. 'Moments earlier and it might have escaped disaster.'

  'Whoever he was, he was abandoning his world to its doom,' replied Akhtar. 'He deserved to die with his world.'

  'We abandoned our world,' pointed out Murshid.

  Anger flared in Akhtar's aura. 'No, we were wrenched from it at the moment of its greatest need,' he said. 'The Crimson King denied us the chance to fight the Wolves and make them pay for their cowardly attack.'

  'We would have died,' said Vistario.

  'Better that than this pitiful existence, brother,' said Akhtar. 'Sent scurrying through the shadows like errand boys for a master who broods only on his failures.'

  Vistario rose into a more combative enumeration and fixed Akhtar with the steely gaze of one who has stared into the future.
/>   'Choose your next words carefully, brother,' he said. 'The fellowships may be broken, but what has been sundered may yet be renewed. You and I both read the prophecy of Temelucha.'

  Akhtar snorted derisively. 'The words of a madwoman.'

  'Since when have prophets not been driven mad by the things they have seen?' pointed out Murshid, slapping a gauntleted palm on Vistario's shoulder guards. 'Our Corvidae brother hasn't been sane since the retreat from Terra. We have dwelled so long in the Great Ocean that maybe we are all a little mad.'

  The tension between Akhtar and Vistario drained.

  'Forgive me, brother,' said Akhtar. 'The fires of the great war may have cooled, but mine still burn.'

  Vistario nodded. 'The great war may be spent, but the long war goes on. We are yet part of it and I believe the Crimson King has a plan for how it can be won.'

  'You really believe that?' said Akhtar.

  'I have to,' replied Vistario. 'It is all I have left.'

  Further discussion was ended by a clatter of stone from the front of the starship and a screech of twisting metal. All three of the Thousand Sons swung their bolters to their shoulders and rose into the war enumerations. Vistario stretched out his consciousness, searching for hostile minds.

  And cried out as the force of an ancient mind skewered his brain with a lance of white hot power. He staggered as he felt patient hatred stab into him, its force so potent and singular that his secondary heart kicked in as the main organ ruptured.

  'Vistario!' shouted Akhtar as his chest hiked with a sharp intake of breath.

  Vistario raised a hand, switching from enumerations of war to ones of defence. Piece by piece he built his mental fortress, a citadel from which his mind could operate while protected from psychic attack. The cacophonous roar diminished, and he blinked the dazzling lights away from the insides of his eyes.

  'I am fine,' he said, pushing himself to his feet.

  'What was that?' said Murshid, getting up off his knees, a viscous fluid leaking from his gorget. As much as Vistario had staggered under the psychic force of the assault on their senses, Murshid would have felt it far worse.

  Akhtar too, blunt as he was, had suffered. 'That was no psyker.'

  'No,' agreed Vistario. 'Fourth enumeration. Advance.'

  Dust and rubble fell from the roof of the cavern, dislodged by the force of the assault. An assault Vistario now realised had not just been psychic in nature, but sonic. Hideous aural trauma and dissonant harmonics combined to form a screeching howl that would have obliterated their hearing but for the cut-outs in their armour.

  'Careful, Vistario,' said Murshid. 'There is great hate here.'

  Vistario nodded as he rounded a promontory of fallen rock and steel, his bolter tracking to the source of the psycho-sonic assault.

  The prow of the craft had been split open in its abortive take-off, a six metre gash torn through to the pilot's compartment.

  At first he could not understand what he was seeing.

  A host of cables trailed from the starship like a writhing colony of snakes. They were coupled with an outlandish device, the function of which Vistario could not even begin to guess.

  But that was not the most surprising discovery.

  Lying on its side, partially crushed by a giant spar of steel fallen from above was the shattered outline of a Dreadnought. Dust and ash lay thick on its adamantium sarcophagus, the colour of its armour all but obscured. One leg had been sheared from its body, and its left side was buckled inwards so deeply that the flesh within was surely dead. Its weapon arms, a Kheres-pattern assault cannon and a splay-clawed power fist were aimed skywards, as if this ancient hero of the Legions had sought to vent his fury towards the heavens with the last of his existence.

  The Dreadnought lay upon something half buried in the rock of the cavern floor, its surface heat-burned and unrecognisable. More cables snaked from the wrecked starship and were hooked into the object's underside as well as to the war machine

  'A Dreadnought?' said Akhtar, lowering his weapon.

  'Keep it covered,' snapped Vistario, edging forwards to better examine the strange device. It appeared to be a monstrous hybrid of musical instrument and an apparatus of excruciation designed by a sadistic lunatic. Its colours were faded now, but once it had been vividly painted and elaborately ornamented. It thrummed with energy, ripe with potential, and Vistario looked for a way to disconnect it.

  An angry buzzing built as he reached to unhook the nearest cable, as if the machinery were alive and aware of his intent.

  'Do. Not.'

  Vistario flinched at the sound, a grating, wheezing vox-exhalation. He spun and brought his bolter up to aim at the not-so-dead-after-all Dreadnought. His finger tightened on the trigger, then eased off as he found himself staring down the multiple barrels of the Kheres assault cannon.

  'You. Are. Not Him,' said the Dreadnought.

  Vistario slowly lowered his weapon, lifting his free hand away.

  Murshid was held in the Dreadnought's fist, struggling in vain against strength that could tear open the hull of a Land Raider. Akhtar stood apart, his bolter trained unerringly on the Dreadnought's sarcophagus.

  A gesture of defiance only. Even if the mass-reactive penetrated a weak spot in the Dreadnought's body, Vistario and Murshid would be dead before Akhtar fired the first round.

  'So. Long. I. Have…waited,' said the Dreadnought. 'Forgot. Name. Forgot brothers. Only hate endured. Only vengeance sustained me.'

  The towering bio-machine's voice was redolent with power, its words halting at first, then growing in coherence, as if the very act of addressing the warriors before it was rekindling a memory of speech.

  Soft light built within the cracked augmetic orb that was all that remained of the war machine's sensorium. Could it see him, and what would it make of his war-plate's colour…?

  'What Legion are you?'

  'Fifteenth,' said Vistario.

  'The sons of Magnus the Red. The Cyclops. The Crimson King. Sorcerer Supreme, Master of Prospero. How fare the Fifteenth after so long? Tell me you did not fall into the same trap as my brothers. Tell me you endure and yet stand at our father's side.'

  He doesn't know, thought Vistario. All these years trapped below, and he doesn't know. How could he?

  'The Thousand Sons endure,' he said.

  'I may be smashed and clinging to life, but I know evasion when I hear it.'

  Vistario shrugged. 'You would not like the truth.'

  'My like or dislike for the truth is immaterial,' said the Dreadnought. 'Truth is all we have. It is our shield against falsehoods. When facts can be twisted to become weapons, nothing good can endure. The Emperor taught me that, but too few of us took the lesson to heart or understood how vital it was.'

  Vistario briefly considered pointing out the lie that lay at the heart of the Emperor's crusade, its corrosive effect like a poison pill slowly dissolving under the tongue. But he needed no Corvidae foresight to know the Dreadnought would kill him instantly for such an utterance.

  'What is your name?' asked the Dreadnought.

  'Malin Vistario, of the Corvidae Fellowship. What is yours?'

  'I am… he who remembers,' said the Dreadnought. 'Or I used to be. An ancient mystic once said that it is the doom of men that they forget but my memory is as broken now as my body. My purpose… I had one. It was to know. To remember. Examples of the past shape the present. Events of the future compel the past.'

  Vistario was acutely aware of how precarious was his position. The Dreadnought was clearly insane, after the long centuries spent in isolation without Techmarines to minister the complex bio-mechanical cycles of his existence and maintain his fugue state of slumber.

  'What were you to know?' he asked.

  'To know what, you ask?' growled the Dreadnought in irritation. Shells clattered as rusted auto-loaders slammed them into the assault cannon. 'Does not the Fifteenth retain one whose task it is to know? To see everything! I once knew all the t
hings that mattered - names, dates, places. Things of moment. The oaths taken. The oaths broken. The litanies of the faithless. I am he who remembers. I am the Ancient of Rites.'

  A sudden flash of prescience swept through Vistario, and he craned his neck to look around the chamber, his mind's eye racing back the way they had come to the surface. He saw the war-wracked world above as the bombs fell from orbit, shattering the city and laying waste to those who defended it.

  'I know this world's name,' he said, as its terrible legacy poured into him.

  'Yes,' said the Dreadnought. 'Of course you do. Horus cut it into the heart of every legionary, whether they were there or not.'

  'This is Isstvan III.'

  'Yes.'

  'And you…' said Vistario. 'You are—'

  'I am Ancient Rylanor,' said the Dreadnought.

  Ancient Rylanor.

  Vistario knew the name. How could he not?

  The tales spun around the betrayal at Isstvan III filled entire wings of the Gallery of Pergamum. This was where the canker at the heart of the Legions was first revealed, where the Legions had first spilled the blood of their brothers in open warfare. Magnus had despatched cabal after cabal seeking truths from those who had fought in that battle, desiring to unravel its root causes. It seemed to Vistario to be a thankless task, for every adept of the Corvidae knew that nothing ever really began. There could be no single moment from which this or any other event sprang; the threads could always be followed to some earlier moment and the actions that preceded them.

  To attempt to pin any event's origin to a single moment in time would drive a mind to insanity.

  Perhaps it already has, thought Vistario, thinking of the desperate need he pretended not to see in his primarch's gaze.

  Those who had fought through the virus-scoured hell-scapes of Isstvan III described loyalist warriors of the World Eaters, Death Guard, Sons of Horus and Emperor's Children fighting for months against their brothers, enduring unimaginable horrors in the face of inevitable extinction.

  The only mention of the Dreadnought's fate came from that most unreliable of narrators, Lucius the Swordsman, who claimed Saul Tarvitz spoke of an underground hangar the Dreadnought was rumoured to have found.