Lords and Tyrants

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Identify yourself,’ the corporal demanded.

  The stranger didn’t answer. He knelt, staring at Jarvan with dull eyes, unblinking. Jarvan thought he might be a soldier. He had the build and bearing of one, but no uniform. He wore a set of shapeless grey coveralls, singed, tattered and soiled.

  ‘Identify yourself,’ repeated Jarvan. ‘Name and rank?’

  ‘Don’t remember,’ said the stranger, the words catching in his throat.

  Drawing closer, Jarvan saw that the stranger’s head was cut. Blood had crusted around the wound and striped his cheek. He was probably concussed. The corporal motioned to the nearest of his labourers; he hadn’t bothered to remember their names or faces. He sent three of them to strip the stranger and search him.

  He didn’t resist.

  One labourer brought the stranger’s weapon to Jarvan. At a glance, he could see that it wasn’t Parius issue. He had seen enough like it in recent weeks, however. The lasgun was modified to fire a more powerful shot, but at a cost. Extra sink rings had been fitted around its barrel to bleed off excess heat. It bore the stamp of the Imperial forges on Lucius, which made it Krieg property.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  The stranger didn’t answer him. His eyes remained fixed upon Jarvan as the labourers ran calloused hands over him, searching for tattoos or mutations. They reported that the stranger was clean – and one of them had found his ident papers. At the corporal’s impatient urging, he read out the details haltingly.

  ‘His name is, uh, Arvo, sir. Registered to… this sector. He’s a menial, third-grade.’

  Jarvan was almost disappointed. So much fuss, he thought, for a maintenance drudge. He must have taken the lasgun from a fallen trooper. Likely had no idea how to use it. Jarvan was inclined to shoot him on the spot and save a medicae’s time and effort.

  He lowered his rifle instead, crouching to inspect the stranger’s eyes. Clear enough, he judged. He straightened up, beckoning to his labourers again. ‘Take him to the medicae and be swift about it. Back in twenty minutes or I’ll have you both flogged.’ More than enough time had been wasted on distractions. He had no intention of missing his end-of-shift quotas.

  The stranger was hauled out of Corporal Jarvan’s sight and, almost as quickly, faded from his thoughts.

  The medicae facility was no quieter than anywhere else. The air buzzed with urgent shouts, rushing footsteps and the howls and screams and dying gurgles of the untended wounded.

  In fact, the word ‘facility’ over-dignified this place: a makeshift camp strewn between the cranes and hoists of a broken-down factorum. A hundred drudges scrubbed the walls, only gradually eroding centuries of ingrained soot. Their mops swirled fresher vomit and blood around the floor. Haggard medics stumbled between them, red-eyed and dishevelled, urgent pleas pulling them in all directions.

  The man known as Arvo was dumped on a creaking gurney. He lay on his back and let the clamour wash over him. It merged with the ringing in his head to deny him the sleep he sorely needed. He breathed in the stench of infected and diseased bodies. Occasionally, he slipped into a fitful doze, to be woken by a gunshot. For many of his fellow patients, it appeared, a bullet to the brain was the most efficient treatment.

  For hours, only two people showed Arvo any attention. The first was an Administratum clerk who checked his papers, tapped his details into a data-slate, clicked his tongue to himself and moved away. The second was a middle-aged woman, dripping piously with religious symbols, who searched him as the labourers at the hab-block had searched him, for signs of Chaos corruption.

  In between these interruptions, his mind fled to the recent past.

  Hive Opus had been split open, its cannons silenced. The Death Korps had risen from their trenches and surged forwards. They were strafed with small-arms fire, to no avail. For every skull-masked figure cut down, two more appeared to replace him. Their advance continued, unstoppable. A tidal wave of screaming madness.

  Their enemies were worshippers of excess, wanton revellers in carnal pleasure. They possessed not a fraction of the Korpsmen’s iron discipline. In the face of the Emperor’s holy vengeance, they broke. Holes gaped open within the cultists’ masses, into which the Korpsmen poured and widened them with guns, combat knives and the strength of their own sinews.

  Arvo’s head rang to each beat of the battle. His ears had been deadened, his eyes flash-blinded by a bursting grenade. The stink of blood and fire, cordite and death assailed his nostrils. He lay on his stomach in the dirt, pinned down. Blood crawled, hot and sticky, down his right cheek.

  His vision was beginning to clear, though it was still blurred. Shapes shifted around him, through a thickening smoke haze. He must have briefly lost consciousness as the battlefront had passed over him. Death Korpsmen surrounded him, encased in flak armour and heavy greatcoats. Their boots pulverised the debris beside his head.

  How inhuman they looked, he thought, with their faces concealed behind rebreather masks so that even their eyes were hidden. From this lowly vantage point, he couldn’t tell one from another.

  They must have seen him, in turn, but no one came to help him. Why would they? He was nothing but a stranger to them too – and each Korpsman was looking for a clear shot at the enemy, through the crush of his comrades before him, following an imperative drilled into him from birth. Pushing forward, ever forward.

  Then, minutes, hours or days had passed, and they were gone.

  Arvo barely remembered dragging himself to his feet, throwing off the hunks of masonry that had piled up on his back. He found himself, for the very first time in his life, alone. He had clung to his lasgun throughout his ordeal, so hard the fingers of his right hand had seized up around its trigger guard.

  His mask had been knocked askew. The rebreather unit on his chest was dented and inoperative. He shucked off his coat and discarded his broken equipment. The air was unpleasant, but at least it wasn’t toxic, not like the air of his birth world. Not like Krieg.

  The man who would be known as Arvo held his mask in his gloved hands. He stared at the reflection of a face he didn’t recognise in its blank, skull-eye sockets and an unfamiliar thought, an unworthy thought, occurred to him.

  He was free.

  Arvo was yanked back to the present, and to his makeshift sickbed.

  A medicae squinted at him through an augmetic eyepiece. He clicked his fingers at a servitor, which trundled over. It brought up a heavy hypodermic arm, inside which serum-filled tubes cycled until one locked into place. The servitor thrust a huge needle into Arvo’s stomach and a chemical bolt dulled his pain and tiredness, sharpening his mind.

  ‘Discharged,’ the medicae grunted, turning away from him.

  Arvo called after him, ‘No, wait. Where do I go?’

  ‘No further treatment necessary. Discharged.’ The medicae hovered over another patient, presenting his back to Arvo. ‘Full recovery impossible. Termination advised,’ he pronounced in this case, and moved on.

  Arvo climbed off the gurney. The moment his feet touched the floor, a pair of drudges deposited an unconscious woman in his place. Their downcast eyes avoided his and he chose not to question them. He was wary of asking too many questions. He took his papers – rather, Arvo’s papers – from his pocket. He found an address on them. A hab? It wasn’t clear. He had never known such a thing.

  Other discharged patients were joining a line. It stretched from a desk at which a middle-aged man worked unhurriedly. Arvo followed the line out of the building, halfway around a city block. He eavesdropped as someone else asked what the line was for and was told ‘habitation and labour assignments.’

  He took his place at the back of the line and waited.

  He spoke only once, when someone behind him grumbled that his sprained ankle hadn’t been bandaged. ‘The Emperor gives us all we need,’ snapped Arvo, ‘and resources must be manage
d.’ He regretted abandoning his depleted medi-kit along with his uniform. He could have sterilised his head wound.

  ‘Name and ident number?’ asked the desk clerk, three hours later.

  He thumbed a data-slate, nodding occasionally to himself. Arvo waited, half-expecting the clerk to uncover his deception as soon as he looked up and saw his face.

  ‘Your hab-sector has been condemned, I see. I’m assigning you to a shelter and a labour gang.’ The clerk took the stub of a pencil to Arvo’s papers, made and initialled some amendments, and slid them back across the desk. He didn’t glance at Arvo at all. Checking his wrist chrono, he said, ‘Your first work shift begins at twenty-six-hundred hours. The time now is twenty-four-eighteen. Next!’

  Public vehicles were leaving the medicae camp all the time, dispersing ex-patients across the sprawling, multi-layered city. Now Arvo knew what was expected of him, he acted accordingly. Among the bleary-eyed crowd, he located six others bound for his sector and an Interior Guard groundcar and driver to take them there.

  Arvo rode on the fender as they snaked their way through burning industrial blocks and around impassable thoroughfares. He drank in the sounds, sights and smells of a world unlike any he had seen before, a world that few of his kind would ever see: a broken world, for sure, but a world – for the moment – at peace. Arvo’s new world.

  The girl watched Arvo for four days before she dared approach him.

  Her labour gang, now his gang too, was excavating a collapsed grain store. Their Interior Guard overseer had impressed upon them the import of this task. Emergency supplies had been requested from the closest agri world, but thousands could starve waiting for them.

  Arvo had one of the larger tools: a pickaxe. He was shattering the biggest, most intractable hunks of debris so that others could scoop them up with shovels. The girl had a shovel and had worked her way closer to him.

  As soon as she was allowed, she took a beaker of water to him.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘My name is Zanne.’

  He responded with a disinterested grunt. He swung his axe, shattered stone, hefted the axe again. He didn’t take the water from her. She had rarely seen Arvo talking to anyone else. This had been by choice to begin with. Having been rebuffed, however, his fellow labourers now tended to shun him.

  ‘Your name is Arvo,’ Zanne persisted. ‘I heard the overseer say so.’

  ‘Yes,’ he allowed. ‘My name is Arvo.’

  ‘And you’re from Hab-Sector Kappa-Two-Phi. I used to live there.’

  Arvo swung his axe, shattered stone, hefted the axe again.

  ‘How did you get so strong?’

  This question fazed him, just a little, interrupting his rhythm.

  ‘I think you’re the strongest in our gang,’ Zanne told him. He was, in fact, easily the best and most tireless worker among them. She didn’t think the servitors had ever had to whip him. The others often talked about him in resentful tones because he made them look idle, more deserving of the lash in comparison.

  ‘The work is good,’ Arvo grunted.

  Zanne was surprised. ‘You enjoy it?’

  ‘It is good to build, to improve things rather than destroy them.’

  She considered that statement, chewing on her lower lip. ‘Yes,’ she agreed at length, ‘I suppose it is.’

  A servitor wheeled its ponderous frame their way. Quickly, Zanne dropped to her knees and began to shovel again. She set Arvo’s beaker down beside him. ‘You should drink it,’ she insisted. ‘You don’t know when there’ll be more. This is good water too, hardly any slime in it. Some days, there is none at all.’

  Arvo looked at her for the first time. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Eleven,’ said Zanne proudly. ‘Ten and three-quarters, really, but I’ve been looking after myself since I was six.’

  ‘What happened to your…?’ He struggled to find the right word.

  ‘My parents? I don’t remember my dad. He died when I was a little girl. They said it was a monster that got loose in the mines. Then Mum was ill and I had to look after her. I had to work to earn food for us to eat. But she died too.’

  ‘The illness took her?’

  Zanne shook her head.

  ‘The cultists, then?’

  ‘She was in our hab-block when it collapsed. The blasphemers were hiding in there, you see, so the soldiers had to–’

  Arvo’s eyes narrowed. A muscle in his cheek twitched. ‘The soldiers killed her?’

  ‘They had no choice. They had to stop the blasphemers. For the Emperor.’ Zanne spoke in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone, as if relating something she had read in a book. Her life, she had always been taught, was what it was and there was no point being sad about that. Self-pity, in fact, was the very worst kind of ingratitude.

  She was almost grateful for the hard work too. It kept her mind busy.

  Arvo pushed his untouched beaker towards her. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘You drink it.’

  He didn’t have to offer twice. Zanne downed the quenching water in one gulp. The servitor, it transpired, was still watching her; she felt its lash across her shoulders for taking more than her share, but it was worth it. What was one more stripe to add to all the others? She wiped her lips on her filthy, ragged sleeve.

  ‘I did not mean to get you in trouble,’ Arvo mumbled, once the servitor’s attention was safely elsewhere again.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Zanne assured him.

  ‘We have our orders,’ said Arvo stiffly, ‘and we must follow them.’

  Between work shifts, they ate, slept and did little else, alongside a thousand others in a designated refugee shelter.

  The building had been a chapel, but was desecrated beyond hope of salvation. Wooden pews had been hacked to pieces, stained-glass windows shattered. Blood and faeces had been scrubbed from the walls but had left a lingering pungent scent – while the outlines of spray-painted blasphemies endured.

  Arvo collected his ration of gruel that night and, as always, consumed it sitting cross-legged on his blanket. Tonight, for the first time, someone joined him. He didn’t object to Zanne’s presence, though again it was left to her to break the silence.

  ‘Do you have any family?’ she asked him.

  Arvo shook his head.

  ‘What, never? But you must have. There must have been someone. Everyone has a mum and a dad, even if they never–’

  Arvo interrupted her angrily. ‘I had no one. Nothing. Just a…’ He checked himself, as if regretting his candour. He sighed. ‘I do not belong here.’

  Zanne longed to ask what he meant by that. She had had her first glimpse behind the stranger’s façade, however, and feared what else she might unleash. She summoned her courage anyway. She had never met anyone unlike herself before; she wanted to know everything about him. But as she opened her mouth, her moment was stolen.

  A howl of rage and panicked yelling emerged from one of the transepts.

  Arvo was on his feet before Zanne had seen him move. His bowl clattered to the tiled floor, spilling its contents. Zanne, too, was brushed aside. While others gaped and cowered, too weary and afraid to act, Arvo waded through them. Zanne began to follow him but stopped, suddenly afraid.

  A man burst from the transept: gangly, half-dressed and dirty, wild-eyed with a straggly, lice-infested beard. He screamed in a way that Zanne had seen few times before, like a man possessed, scattering those around him with the force of his insanity.

  A few braver souls tried to catch him, struggling for a grip on his sinewy arms and legs, tearing his once-white shift. They and many others shouted warnings, prayers or just shouted mindlessly, afraid. Their voices crashed into each other so that only their fear was communicated, spreading like wildfire.

  Arvo stepped confidently into the madman’s path. His hand lashed out like a python. There was a crack of b
one and the madman was abruptly silenced. He collapsed to the floor, his eyes rolling back into his head – and the fear subsided, though the crash of voices did not.

  Overseers in the chapel were only beginning to react to the disturbance, pushing through a newly energised crowd. The madman, though certainly dead, was punched and kicked and spat on.

  Everyone was keen to offer their version of events. Zanne made out some of the details therein: ‘–shirking his duties–’, ‘–more than his share of water–’, ‘–muttered something that sounded like–’, ‘–only mouthing the words of the prayer–’, ‘–hiding something on his shoulder, like a tattoo or–’

  Arvo shrank from the centre of attention, reappearing at Zanne’s side. No one appeared to notice him, for all he had just done for them. His part had been played in the blink of an eye and he retreated back into anonymity.

  The overseers swiftly concluded their investigations. They didn’t bother to inspect the madman’s body, but picked out two labourers at random and instructed them to dispose of it. Funeral pyres had been burning across the city for weeks. This was just a little more fuel for the closest of them.

  ‘How did you know?’ Zanne asked Arvo. ‘How did you know what to do?’

  ‘Decisive action was required,’ he stated flatly.

  ‘Yes, but how did you know – that what they were saying about that man was true? Did you hear or see something or…?’ Zanne turned to her newfound friend and saw the truth in his dull, grey eyes. Her voice tailed off.

  ‘Decisive action was required,’ he said.

  ‘I understand,’ Zanne told him.

  It was half an hour later and most of the lumen units had been shut off. Tired refugees hunkered down on the cold tiles, wrapped in their threadbare blankets. Some of them, exhausted by the day’s travails and needing to replenish their strength for tomorrow’s, were already snoring.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ said Zanne, keeping her voice low in deference to the slumbering mounds around her, ‘and I really do. I understand.’