Galaxy in Flames (3 page)

‘Not the only one?’ asked Loken. ‘Who else?’

‘Petronella Vivar, that insufferable documentarist woman. They say she got closer to the Warmaster than anyone, and now she’s gone too, and I don’t think it was back to Terra.’

‘I remember her, but you are on thin ice, Kyril. You need to be very clear what you are suggesting.’

Sindermann did not flinch from Loken’s gaze and said, ‘I believe that those who oppose the will of the Warmaster are being killed.’

The iterator was a frail man, but Mersadie had never been more proud to know him as he stood unbending before a warrior of the Astartes and told him something he didn’t want to hear.

Sindermann paused, giving Loken ample time to refute his claims and remind them all that the Emperor had chosen Horus as the Warmaster because he alone could be trusted to uphold the Imperial Truth. Horus was the man to whom every Son of Horus had pledged his life a hundred times over.

But Loken said nothing and Mersadie’s heart sank.

‘I have read of it more times than I can remember,’ continued Sindermann. ‘The
Uranan Chronicles
, for example. The first thing those tyrants did was to murder those who spoke out against their tyranny. The Overlords of the Yndonesic Dark Age did the same thing. Mark my words, the Age of Strife was made possible when the doubting voices fell silent, and now it is happening here.’

‘You have always taught temperance, Kyril,’ said Loken, ‘weighing up arguments and never leaping past them into guesswork. We’re at war and we have plenty of enemies already without you seeking to find new ones. It will be very dangerous for you and you may not like what you find. I do not wish to see you come to any harm, either of you.’

‘Ha! Now you lecture me, Garviel,’ sighed Sindermann. ‘So much has changed. You’re not just a warrior any more, are you?’

‘And you are not just an iterator?’

‘No, I suppose not,’ nodded Sindermann. ‘An iterator promulgates the Imperial Truth, does he not? He does not pick holes in it and spread rumours. But Karkasy is dead, and there are… other things.’

‘What things?’ asked Loken. ‘You mean Keeler?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Sindermann, shaking his head. ‘I don’t know, but I feel she is part of it.’

‘Part of what?’

‘You heard what happened in the Archive Chamber?’

‘With Euphrati? Yes, there was a fire and she was badly hurt. She ended up in a coma.’

‘I was there,’ said Sindermann.

‘Kyril,’ said Mersadie, a note of warning in her voice.

‘Please, Mersadie,’ said Sindermann. ‘I know what I saw.’

‘What did you see?’ asked Loken. ‘Lies,’ replied Sindermann, his voice hushed. ‘Lies made real: a creature, something from the warp. Somehow Keeler and I brought it through the gates of the Empyrean with the
Book of Lorgar
. My own damn fault, too. It was… it was sorcery, the one thing that all these years I’ve been preaching is a lie, but it was real and standing before me as surely as I stand before you now. It should have killed us, but Euphrati stood against it and lived.’

‘How?’ asked Loken.

‘That’s the part where I run out of rational explanations, Garviel,’ shrugged Sindermann.

‘Well, what do you think happened?’

Sindermann exchanged a glance with Mersadie and she willed him not to say anything more, but the venerable iterator continued. ‘When you destroyed poor Jubal, it was with your guns, but Euphrati was unarmed. All she had was her faith: her faith in the Emperor. I… I think it was the light of the Emperor that cast the horror back to the warp.’

Hearing Kyril Sindermann talk of faith and the light of the Emperor was too much for Mersadie.

‘But Kyril,’ she said, ‘there must be another explanation. Even what happened to Jubal wasn’t beyond physical possibilities. The Warmaster himself told Loken that the thing that took Jubal was some kind of xeno creature from the warp. I’ve listened to you teach about how minds have been twisted by magic and superstition and all the things that blind us to reality. That’s what the Imperial Truth is. I can’t believe that the Iterator Kyril Sindermann doesn’t believe the Imperial Truth any more.’

‘Believe, my dear?’ said Sindermann, smiling bleakly and shaking his head. ‘Maybe belief is the biggest lie. In ages past, the earliest philosophers tried to explain the stars in the sky and the world around them. One of them conceived of the notion that the universe was mounted on giant crystal spheres controlled by a giant machine, which explained the movements of the heavens. He was laughed at and told that such a machine would be so huge and noisy that everyone would hear it. He simply replied that we are born with that noise all around us, and that we are so used to hearing it that we cannot hear it at all.’

Mersadie sat beside the old man and wrapped her arms around him, surprised to find that he was shivering and his eyes were wet with tears.

‘I’m starting to hear it, Garviel,’ said Sindermann, his voice quavering. ‘I can hear the music of the spheres.’

Mersadie watched Loken’s face as he stared at Sindermann, seeing the quality of intelligence and integrity Sindermann had recognised in him. The Astartes had been taught that superstition was the death of the Empire and only the Imperial Truth was a reality worth fighting for.

Now, before her very eyes, that was unravelling.

‘Varvarus was killed,’ said Loken at last, ‘deliberately, by one of our bolts.’

‘
Hektor
Varvarus? The Army commander?’ asked Mersadie. ‘I thought that was the Auretians?’

‘No,’ said Loken, ‘it was one of ours.’

‘Why?’ she asked.

‘He wanted us… I don’t know… hauled before a court martial, brought to task for the… killings on the embarkation deck. Maloghurst wouldn’t agree. Varvarus wouldn’t back down and now he is dead.’

‘Then it’s true,’ sighed Sindermann. ‘The naysayers are being silenced.’

‘There are still a few of us left,’ said Loken, quiet steel in his voice.

‘Then we do something about it, Garviel,’ said Sindermann. ‘We must find out what has been brought into the Legion and stop it. We can fight it, Loken. We have you, we have the truth and there is no reason why we cannot—’

The sound that cut off Sindermann’s voice was the door to the practice deck slamming open, followed by heavy metal-on-metal footsteps. Mersadie knew it was an Astartes even before the impossibly huge shadow fell over her. She turned to see the cursive form of Maloghurst behind her, robed in a cream tunic edged in sea green trim. The Warmaster’s equerry, Maloghurst was known as ‘the Twisted’, as much for his labyrinthine mind as the horrible injuries that had broken his body and left him grotesquely malformed.

His face was thunder and anger seemed to bleed from him.

‘Loken,’ he said, ‘these are civilians.’

‘Kyril Sindermann and Mersadie Oliton are official rememberers of the Great Crusade and I can vouch for them,’ said Loken, standing to face Maloghurst as an equal.

Maloghurst spoke with Horus’s authority and Mersadie marvelled at what it must take to stand up to such a man.

‘Perhaps you are unaware of the Warmaster’s edict, captain,’ said Maloghurst, the pleasant neutrality of his tone completely at odds with the tension that crackled between the two Astartes. ‘These clerks and notaries have caused enough trouble; you of all people should understand that. There are to be no distractions, Loken, and no exceptions.’

Loken stood face-to-face with Maloghurst and for one sickening moment, Mersadie thought he was about to strike the equerry.

‘We are all doing the work of the Great Crusade, Mal,’ said Loken tightly. ‘Without these men and women, it cannot be completed.’

‘Civilians do not fight, captain, they only question and complain. They can record everything they desire once the war has been won and they can spread the Imperial Truth once we have conquered a population that needs to hear it. Until then, they are not a part of this Crusade.’

‘No, Maloghurst,’ said Loken. ‘You’re wrong and you know it. The Emperor did not create the primarchs and the Legions so they could fight on in ignorance. He did not set out to conquer the galaxy just for it to become another dictatorship.’

‘The Emperor,’ said Maloghurst, gesturing towards the door, ‘is a long way from here.’

A dozen soldiers marched into the training halls and Mersadie recognised uniforms of the Imperial Army, but saw that their badges of unit and rank had been removed. With a start, she also recognised one face – the icy, golden-eyed features of Petronella Vivar’s bodyguard. She recalled that his name was Maggard, and was amazed at the sheer size of the man, his physique bulky and muscled beyond that of the army soldiers who accompanied him. The exposed flesh of his muscles bore freshly healing scars and his face displayed a nascent gigantism similar to Loken’s. He stood out amongst the uniformed Army soldiers, and his presence only lent credence to Sindermann’s wild theory that Petronella Vivar’s disappearance had nothing to do with her returning to Terra.

‘Take the iterator and the remembrancer back to their quarters,’ said Maloghurst. ‘Post guards and ensure that there are no more breaches.’

Maggard nodded and stepped forwards. Mersadie tried to avoid him, but he was quick and strong, grabbing her by the scruff of her neck and hauling her towards the door. Sindermann stood of his own accord and allowed himself to be led away by the other soldiers.

Maloghurst stood between Loken and the door. If Loken wanted to stop Maggard and his men, he would have to go through Maloghurst.

‘Captain Loken,’ called Sindermann as he was marched off the practice deck, ‘if you wish to understand more, read the
Chronicles of Ursh
again. There you will find illumination.’

Mersadie tried to look back. She could see Loken beyond Maloghurst’s robed form, looking like a caged animal ready to attack.

The door slammed shut, and Mersadie stopped struggling as Maggard led her and Sindermann back towards their quarters.

TWO

Perfection

Iterator

What we do best

P
ERFECTION
. T
HE DEAD
greenskins were a testament to it. Deep Orbital DS191 had been conquered in a matchless display of combat, fields of fire overlapping like dancers’ fans, squads charging in to slaughter the orks that the guns could not finish. Squad by squad, room by room, the Emperor’s Children had killed their way through the xenos holding the space station with all the handsome perfection of combat that Fulgrim had taught his Legion.

As the warriors of his company despatched any surviving greenskins, Saul Tarvitz removed his helmet and immediately recoiled at the stench. The greenskins had inhabited the orbital for some time and it showed. Fungal growths pulsed on the dark metal struts of the main control centre and crude shrines of weapons, armour and tribal fetishes were piled against the command posts. Above him, the transparent dome of the control centre looked onto the void of space.

The Callinedes system, a collection of Imperial worlds under attack by the greenskins was visible amid the froth of stars. Capturing the orbital back from the orks was the first stage in the Imperial relief of Callinedes, and the Emperor’s Children and Iron Hands Legions would soon be storming into the enemy strongholds on Callinedes IV.

‘What a stink,’ said a voice behind Tarvitz, and he turned to see Captain Lucius, the finest swordsman of the Emperor’s Children. His compatriot’s armour was spattered black and his elegant sword still crackled with the blood sizzling on its blue-hot blade. ‘Damned animals, they don’t have the sense to roll over and die when you kill them.’

Lucius’s face had once been perfectly flawless, an echo of Fulgrim’s Legion itself, but now, after one too many jibes about how he looked more like a pampered boy than a warrior and the influence of Serena d’Angelus, Lucius had started to acquire scars, each one uniform and straight in a perfect grid across his face. No enemy blade had etched them into his face, for Lucius was far too sublime a warrior to allow a mere enemy to mark his features.

‘They’re tough, I’ll give them that,’ agreed Tarvitz.

‘They may be tough, but there’s no elegance to their fighting,’ said Lucius. ‘There’s no sport in killing them.’

‘You sound disappointed.’

‘Well of course I am. Aren’t you?’ asked Lucius, jabbing his sword through a dead greenskin and carving a curved pattern on its back. ‘How can we achieve ultimate perfection with such poor specimens to better ourselves against?’

‘Don’t underestimate the greenskins,’ said Tarvitz. ‘These animals invaded a compliant world and slaughtered all the troops we left to defend it. They have spaceships and weapons we don’t understand, and they attack as if war is some kind of religion to them.’

He turned over the closest corpse – a massive brute with skin as tough as gnarled bark, its violent red eyes open and its undershot maw still grimacing with rage. Only the spread of entrails beneath suggested it was dead at all. Tarvitz could almost feel the jarring of his broadsword as he had plunged it through the creature’s midriff and its tremendous strength as it had tried to force him onto his knees.

‘You talk about them as if we need to understand them before we can kill them. They’re just animals,’ said Lucius with a sardonic laugh. ‘You think about things too much. That’s always been your problem, Saul, and it’s why you’ll never reach the dizzying heights I will achieve. Come on, just revel in the kill.’

Tarvitz opened his mouth to respond, but he kept his thoughts to himself as Lord Commander Eidolon strode into the control centre

‘Fine work, Emperor’s Children!’ shouted Eidolon.

As one of Fulgrim’s chosen, Eidolon had the honour of being within the tight circle of officers who surrounded the primarch and represented the Legion’s finest artistry of war. Although it was not bred into him to dislike a fellow Astartes, Tarvitz had little respect for Eidolon. His arrogance did not befit a warrior of the Emperor’s Children and the antagonism between them had only grown on the fields of Murder in the war against the megarachnids.