Horus Rising (6 page)

‘I’ve had some success,’ Keeler said. ‘I was down on the assembly deck earlier, and captured some fine images. I’ve put in a request to be allowed transit to the surface. I want to see the war-zone first-hand.’

‘Good luck. They’ll probably deny you. Every request for access I’ve made has been turned down.’

‘They’re warriors, Ig. They’ve been warriors for a long time. They resent the likes of us. We’re just passengers, along for the ride, uninvited.’

‘You got your shots,’ he said.

Keeler nodded. ‘They don’t seem to mind me.’

‘That’s because you dress like a man,’ he smiled.

The hatch slid open and a figure joined them in the quiet mezzanine chamber. Mersadie Oliton went directly to the table where the decanter sat, poured herself a drink, and knocked it back. Then she stood, silently, gazing out at the drifting stars beyond the barge’s vast window ports.

‘What’s up with her now?’ Karkasy ventured.

‘Sadie?’ Keeler asked, getting to her feet and setting her glass down. ‘What happened?’

‘Apparently, I just offended someone,’ Oliton said quickly, pouring another drink.

‘Offended? Who?’ Keeler asked.

‘Some haughty Marine bastard called Loken. Bastard!’

‘You got time with Loken?’ Karkasy asked, sitting up rapidly and swinging his feet to the deck. ‘Loken?
Tenth Company Captain
Loken?’

‘Yes,’ Oliton said. ‘Why?’

‘I’ve been trying to get near him for a month now,’ Karkasy said. ‘Of all the captains, they say, he is the most steadfast, and he’s to take Sejanus’s place, according to the rumour mill. How did you get authorisation?’

‘I didn’t,’ Oliton said. ‘I was finally given credentials for a brief interview with Captain Torgaddon, which I counted as no small success in itself, given the days I’ve spent petitioning to meet him, but I don’t think he was in the mood to talk to me. When I went to see him at the appointed time, his equerry turned up instead and told me Torgaddon was busy. Torgaddon had sent the equerry to take me to see Loken. “Loken’s got a good story,” he said.’

‘Was it a good story?’ Keeler asked.

Mersadie nodded. ‘Best I’ve heard, but I said something he didn’t like, and he turned on me. Made me feel this small.’ She gestured with her hand, and then took another swig.

‘Did he smell of sweat?’ Karkasy asked.

‘No. No, not at all. He smelled of oils. Very sweet and clean.’

‘Can you get me an introduction?’ asked Ignace Karkasy.

H
E HEARD FOOTSTEPS
, then a voice called his name. ‘Garvi?’

Loken looked around from his sword drill and saw, through the bars of the cage, Nero Vipus framed in the doorway of the blade-school. Vipus was dressed in black breeches, boots and a loose vest, and his truncated arm was very evident. The missing hand had been bagged in sterile jelly, and nanotic serums injected to reform the wrist so it would accept an augmetic implant in a week or so. Loken could still see the scars where Vipus had used his chainsword to amputate his own hand.

‘What?’

‘Someone to see you,’ Vipus said.

‘If it’s another damn remembrancer—’ Loken began.

Vipus shook his head. ‘It’s not. It’s Captain Torgaddon.’

Loken lowered his blade and deactivated the practice cage as Vipus drew aside. The target dummies and armature blades went dead around him, and the upper hemisphere of the cage slid into the roof space as the lower hemisphere retracted into the deck beneath the mat. Tarik Torgaddon entered the blade-school chamber, dressed in fatigues and a long coat of silver mail. His features were saturnine, his hair black. He grinned at Vipus as the latter slipped out past him. Torgaddon’s grin was full of perfect white teeth.

‘Thanks, Vipus. How’s the hand?’

‘Mending, captain. Fit to be rebonded.’

‘That’s good,’ said Torgaddon. ‘Wipe your arse with the other one for a while, all right? Carry on.’

Vipus laughed and disappeared.

Torgaddon chuckled at his own quip and climbed the short steps to face Loken in the middle of the canvas mat. He paused at a blade rack outside the opened cage, selected a long-handled axe, and drew it out, hacking the air with it as he advanced.

‘Hello, Garviel,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard the rumour, I suppose?’

‘I’ve heard all sorts of rumours, sir.’

‘I mean the one about you. Take a guard.’

Loken tossed his practice blade onto the deck and quickly drew a tabar from the nearest rack. It was all-steel, blade and handle both, and the cutting edge of the axe head had a pronounced curve. He raised it in a hunting stance and took up position facing Torgaddon.

Torgaddon feinted, then smote in with two furious chops. Loken deflected Torgaddon’s axe-head with the haft of his tabar, and the blade-school rang with chiming echoes. The smile had not left Torgaddon’s face.

‘So, this rumour…’ he continued, circling.

‘This rumour,’ Loken nodded. ‘Is it true?’

‘No,’ said Torgaddon. Then he grinned impishly. ‘Of course it bloody is! Or maybe it’s not… No, it is.’ He laughed loudly at the mischief.

‘That’s funny,’ said Loken.

‘Oh, belt up and smile,’ Torgaddon hissed, and scythed in again, striking at Loken with two very nonstandard cross-swings that Loken had trouble dodging. He was forced to spin his body out of the way and land with his feet wide-braced.

‘Interesting work,’ Loken said, circling again, his tabar low and loose. ‘Are you, may I ask, just making these moves up?’

Torgaddon grinned. ‘Taught to me by the Warmaster himself,’ he said, pacing around and allowing the long axe to spin in his fingers. The blade flashed in the glow of the down lighters aimed on the canvas.

He halted suddenly, and aimed the head of the axe at Loken. ‘Don’t you want this, Garviel? Terra, I put you up for this myself.’

‘I’m honoured, sir. I thank you for that.’

‘And it was seconded by Ekaddon.’

Loken raised his eyebrows.

‘All right, no it wasn’t. Ekaddon hates your guts, my friend.’

‘The feeling is mutual.’

‘That’s the boy,’ Torgaddon roared, and lunged at Loken. Loken smashed the hack away, and counter-chopped, forcing Torgaddon to leap back onto the edges of the mat. ‘Ekaddon’s an arse,’ Torgaddon said, ‘and he feels cheated you got there first.’

‘I only—’ Loken began.

Torgaddon raised a finger for silence. ‘You got there first,’ he said quietly, not joking anymore, ‘and you saw the truth of it. Ekaddon can go hang, he’s just smarting. Abaddon seconded you for this.’

‘The first captain?’

Torgaddon nodded. ‘He was impressed. You beat him to the punch. Glory to Tenth. And the vote was decided by the Warmaster.’

Loken lowered his guard completely. ‘The Warmaster?’

‘He wants you in. Told me to tell you that himself. He appreciated your work. He admired your sense of honour. “Tarik,” he said to me, “if anyone’s going to take Sejanus’s place, it should be Loken.” That’s what he said.’

‘Did he?’

‘No.’

Loken looked up. Torgaddon was coming at him with his axe high and whirling. Loken ducked, side-stepped, and thumped the butt of his tabar’s haft into Torgaddon’s side, causing Torgaddon to misstep and stumble.

Torgaddon exploded in laughter. ‘Yes! Yes, he did. Terra, you’re too easy, Garvi. Too easy. The look on your face!’

Loken smiled thinly. Torgaddon looked at the axe in his hand, and then tossed it aside, as if suddenly bored with the whole thing. It landed with a clatter in the shadows off the mat.

‘So what do you say?’ Torgaddon asked. ‘What do I tell them? Are you in?’

‘Sir, it would be the finest honour of my life,’ Loken said.

Torgaddon nodded and smiled. ‘Yes, it would,’ he said, ‘and here’s your first lesson. You call me Tarik.’

I
T WAS SAID
that the iterators were selected via a process even more rigorous and scrupulous than the induction mechanisms of the Astartes. ‘One man in a thousand might become a Legion warrior,’ so the sentiment went, ‘but only one in a hundred thousand is fit to be an iterator.’

Loken could believe that. A prospective Astartes had to be sturdy, fit, genetically receptive, and ripe for enhancement. A chassis of meat and bone upon which a warrior could be built.

But to be an iterator, a person had to have certain rare gifts that belied enhancement. Insight, articulacy, political genius, keen intelligence. The latter could be boosted, either digitally or pharmaceutically, of course, and a mind could be tutored in history, ethic-politics and rhetoric. A person could be taught what to think, and how to express that line of thought, but he couldn’t be taught
how
to think.

Loken loved to watch the iterators at work. On occasions, he had delayed the withdrawal of his company so that he could follow their functionaries around conquered cities and watch as they addressed the crowds. It was like watching the sun come out across a field of wheat.

Kyril Sindermann was the finest iterator Loken had ever seen. Sindermann held the post of primary iterator in the 63rd Expedition, and was responsible for the shaping of the message. He had, it was well known, a deep and intimate friendship with the Warmaster, as well as the expedition master and the senior equerries. And his name was known by the Emperor himself.

Sindermann was finishing a briefing in the School of Iterators when Loken strayed into the audience hall, a long vault set deep in the belly of the
Vengeful Spirit.
Two thousand men and women, each dressed in the simple, beige robes of their office, sat in the banks of tiered seating, rapt by his every word.

‘To sum up, for I’ve been speaking far too long,’ Sindermann was saying, ‘this recent episode allows us to observe genuine blood and sinew beneath the wordy skin of our philosophy. The truth we convey is the truth, because we say it is the truth. Is that enough?’

He shrugged.

‘I don’t believe so. “My truth is better than your truth” is a school-yard squabble, not the basis of a culture. “I am right, so you are wrong” is a syllogism that collapses as soon as one applies any of a number of fundamental ethical tools. I am right, ergo, you are wrong. We can’t construct a constitution on that, and we cannot, should not, will not be persuaded to iterate on its basis. It would make us what?’

He looked out across his audience. A number of hands were raised.

‘There?’

‘Liars.’

Sindermann smiled. His words were being amplified by the array of vox mics set around his podium, and his face magnified by picter onto the hololithic wall behind him. On the wall, his smile was three metres wide.

‘I was thinking bullies, or demagogues, Memed, but “liars” is apt. In fact, it cuts deeper than my suggestions. Well done.
Liars.
That is the one thing we iterators can never allow ourselves to become.’

Sindermann took a sip of water before continuing. Loken, at the back of the hall, sat down in an empty seat. Sindermann was a tall man, tall for a non-Astartes at any rate, proudly upright, spare, his patrician head crowned by fine white hair. His eyebrows were black, like the chevron markings on a Luna Wolf shoulder plate. He had a commanding presence, but it was his voice that really mattered. Pitched deep, rounded, mellow, compassionate, it was the vocal tone that got every iterator candidate selected. A soft, delicious, clean voice that communicated reason and sincerity and trust. It was a voice worth searching through one hundred thousand people to find.

‘Truth and lies,’ Sindermann continued. ‘Truth and lies. I’m on my hobby-horse now, you realise? Your supper will be delayed.’

A ripple of amusement washed across the hall.

‘Great actions have shaped our society,’ Sindermann said. ‘The greatest of these, physically, has been the Emperor’s formal and complete unification of Terra, the outward sequel to which, this Great Crusade, we are now engaged upon. But the greatest, intellectually, has been our casting off of that heavy mantle called religion. Religion damned our species for thousands of years, from the lowest superstition to the highest conclaves of spiritual faith. It drove us to madness, to war, to murder, it hung upon us like a disease, like a shackle ball. I’ll tell you what religion was… No, you tell me. You, there?’

‘Ignorance, sir.’

‘Thank you, Khanna. Ignorance. Since the earliest times, our species has striven to understand the workings of the cosmos, and where that understanding has failed, or fallen short, we have filled in the gaps, plastered over the discrepancies, with blind faith. Why does the sun go round the sky? I don’t know, so I will attribute it to the efforts of a sun god with a golden chariot. Why do people die? I can’t say, but I will choose to believe it is the murky business of a reaper who carries souls to some afterworld.’

His audience laughed. Sindermann got down off his podium and walked to the front steps of the stage, beyond the range of the vox mics. Though he dropped his voice low, its trained pitch, that practiced tool of all iterators, carried his words with perfect clarity, unenhanced, throughout the chamber.

‘Religious faith. Belief in daemons, belief in spirits, belief in an afterlife and all the other trappings of a preternatural existence, simply existed to make us all more comfortable and content in the face of a measureless cosmos. They were sops, bolsters for the soul, crutches for the intellect, prayers and lucky charms to help us through the darkness. But we have witnessed the cosmos now, my friends. We have passed amongst it. We have learned and understood the fabric of reality. We have seen the stars from behind, and found they have no clockwork mechanisms, no golden chariots carrying them abroad. We have realised there is no need for god, or any gods, and by extension no use any longer for daemons or devils or spirits. The greatest thing mankind ever did was to reinvent itself as a secular culture.’

His audience applauded this wholeheartedly. There were a few cheers of approval. Iterators were not simply schooled in the art of public speaking. They were trained in both sides of the business. Seeded amongst a crowd, iterators could whip it into enthusiasm with a few well-timed responses, or equally turn a rabble against the speaker. Iterators often mingled with audiences to bolster the effectiveness of the colleague actually speaking.