Spear of the Emperor - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Page 19

  3

  Nothing would please me more than to write down the ways Tyberia survived and got her revenge. Describing some grand gesture that savaged the Venatrix from within, or how she led an uprising against our overseers that succeeded where so many before our arrival had surely failed.

  The truth is that on the sixty-second day, our overseers came for Tyberia. They approached us where we sat amidst our diminished pack of Nemetese companions, and one of the mutants uncoiled her whip. She didn’t lash it at us, she meant only to use it as a leash if Tyberia resisted.

  ‘You,’ the malformed woman said. ‘Leader.’

  It was true; Tyberia was our leader by then. She was the one that kept us sustained, ensuring everyone ate and drank. She was the one to listen to the stories of the other slaves’ lives, promising them revenge one day. It wasn’t only the Nemetese captives that heeded her – many of the other prisoners, those that had dwelled aboard the Venatrix for months or years, also listened to her words. Tyberia had even put a stop to the fights breaking out over food and water.

  When they came for her, she didn’t curse or scream. Every­one tensed under the guns trained upon them, and the shock-whips clutched with expert familiarity in mutated hands. The moment danced on the edge of a blade. If Tyberia gave the word, a hundred and more slaves would rise up with her.

  And die with her, too.

  Her gaze swept those closest to her. Empathetic. Understanding. Calming. Had she always been like this, and I’d just never seen it beneath her ambition as a helot? Or had desperation forced her hand, shaping her into this leader of men and women?

  Her eyes landed on mine last of all. ‘Survive, Ana,’ she said, as she rose to her feet. ‘And kill Kartash for me.’

  She went willingly, yet they leashed her with the whip anyway. Strange as it is to say, for all the deeds that I despise the Exilarchy for, few are as intimate and venomous to me as that needless gesture.

  Tyberia was gone two full days, the longest anyone had been taken for so far. They brought her back in the deep of night, and Lanis, one of the Spear thralls, woke me from a shallow sleep to nod in the direction of the opening bulkhead.

  The mutants brought Tyberia to us and dropped her before me. I went to her at once, and if the overseers said anything at all, I never heard it.

  I won’t recount what they did to her. Suffice to say they brought her back alive, and to this day, I wish they hadn’t. The fact she still breathed wasn’t a miracle, it was a curse. My studies of anatomy served me well enough to know there was no reason her heart still beat in the miserable form they’d reduced her to.

  As I held her that night, I was careful not to let my tears fall on her face, for fear they’d sting her wounds. She couldn’t speak. She was beyond that now.

  Tyberia tapped her spasming knuckles on the floor in a weak rhythm. I recognised what she was doing at once, spelling out something in our Chapter’s vox-click code. Two words.

  Amadeus.

  Alive.

  I told her I understood. I don’t know if she heard. I’m not sure what was left of her could hear any more, or if she could, she couldn’t process my words. She kept on repeating the code until I closed my remaining hand gently around hers.

  She died in my embrace, a hateful mirror image of how I’d almost died in hers. Once she was gone, I wouldn’t let her go. I was told later that it took three of the Nemetese serfs to unlock my arm from around my friend’s body.

  Of all those that are no longer with me in my old age, it’s Tyberia I miss the most. Not because of how close we were, but because of how close we might have become. I owed her so much, and repaid her so little.

  The overseers came for Tyberia’s body at dawn, but it was gone. We’d managed to take her to one of the work decks, lowering her into an incineratus engine. I didn’t care if the Exilarchy caught us doing it, nor did I care if they killed me for the effort. I wasn’t going to let them take her the way they took all the others. I wouldn’t let them grind her up for reprocessing, and feed her back to us as nutrient slime. While Tyberia burned, Lanis murmured a tribal funerary chant in her accented Nemetese. I could barely hear it over the furnace.

  As burials go it was hardly dignified, but it was still a victory. In my time aboard the Venatrix, we held tight to every victory we could.

  An hour later, they came for me.

  XVII

  NAR KEZAR, PRINCE OF THE PURE

  1

  It was one of the Pure. He stalked towards me as I laboured with Lanis in the foundry.

  First, though, he butchered one of our overseers in front of us, crippling the mutant with a chainsword swipe across the back of the wretch’s legs, then dragging the thrashing cripple to the closest furnace engine. A cauldron of molten metal bubbled on the production belt, ready to be chained and lifted clear.

  The overseer was a head taller than me, and densely packed with muscle. The Pure lifted the mutant by its throat as if it weighed nothing at all. When the overseer screamed in its master’s grip, pleading for mercy, the Pure’s reply was to dis­passionately hold the tainted wretch face down in the cauldron.

  The struggles, such as they were, ceased almost at once. The remains were cast to the deck, blessedly facing away from us. I didn’t need that screaming, half-melted skull haunting me. My nights were already bleak enough.

  The Pure approached us with his great clanking stride. Verdigris showed in the bronze ridges of his white plate, and old blood darkened the tips of the iron spikes either he, or the warp, had fused to the ceramite. His face was a scarred ruin, looking as if it’d been stitched back onto his skull with industrial tools. His mouth only partially aligned with his jaw and teeth.

  He beckoned to me with curling fingers. ‘You are the one I seek.’

  Around us, the banging and rattling and clattering of the foundry continued on, though I could feel the eyes of nearby slaves upon me. I jerked my chin towards the overseer’s corpse.

  ‘Why did you kill him?’

  I’d thought the warrior might backhand me for my temerity, or laugh at my brazenness. Instead he smiled.

  ‘His transgression was in allowing valuable slaves to come to harm. Now come, Mentor-thrall. Your master waits.’

  I felt the dangerous spectre of hope. ‘Amadeus needs me?’

  The Pure moved with a sudden snarl of armour joints, closing his hand around my throat and lifting me from the deck. He was done with my questions. He carried me effortlessly, my feet dangling above the iron floor.

  ‘The one you call Amadeus is no longer your master.’

  2

  ‘What is that on your face?’

  They were the first words Nar Kezar spoke to me. I saw no reason to lie.

  ‘The blood of my sister, Tyberia.’

  This amused him. His eyes glinted with delight. ‘In a pattern of Nemetese woad, no less. One might ask whether you were a slave to the Mentor Legion or to the Spears. Have you gone native, child?’

  With no desire to explain the symbolism of my defiance, I remained silent, biding my time. It didn’t deter him.

  ‘The Spears use woad as warpaint,’ he added, still smiling that kingly smile. ‘Are you going to war?’

  ‘Do not patronise me,’ I said quietly. ‘We’re already at war.’

  As if my words needed reinforcement, the ship trembled around us. The Venatrix was undergoing one of its periodic impact quakes, adding to the judder of warp flight. The Pure warrior paid this no mind at all. I was all that mattered to him for now, and the amusement my presence offered.

  Most of the archives pertaining to Traitor Space Marines that fell into webs of the Archenemy’s lies told tales of warped ­heretics and daemon-changed men wearing ceramite suits thousands of years old. Yet Nar Kezar, like several of the other Pure I’d seen, was little different to my master and the Spears. His armou
r wasn’t filthy. It didn’t leak oily blood or show the twisted ghost-faces of those he’d slain. True, it was more baroque in craft, and instead of honour badges and deed scrolls, it had patches of chainmail mesh and ornate edging, but there was nothing immediately more warlike or malicious than the towering crests and white fur cloaks of the Spears.

  As for his face – the only flesh he left uncovered – his skin was the same dusky shade as mine, and there the resemblance ended. He was unscarred, with close-cropped black hair, and his eyes were ringed with exquisite curls of kohl that curved down his cheeks in elegant crescents. His pale eyes were infinitely knowing and supremely kind. If the warp makes our foes wear their sins on their faces, then here was an angel on the wrong side of the war. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Had a face like this been beneath the helm of the Pure Tyberia and I cut down?

  ‘You are staring, child.’ He smiled as he met my gaze. His voice was a priest’s patient tone. His expression was a parent’s indulgence.

  ‘You are not what I expected,’ I said, omitting any title of respect. Perhaps he was a sorcerer, trying to wreathe me in some secret, charismatic spell.

  ‘Am I not?’ His tone suggested I was eminently unreasonable, but that somehow, through undeserved care, he would persevere. ‘I see.’

  ‘You see what?’ I asked. Pain and fear made me bold. I had little left to lose, after all.

  ‘I see the Spears have infected you with their hatred already. That is a shame, Anuradha. I won’t lie, it grieves me.’

  ‘Can you feel grief?’

  The question was honest, spoken in surprise as much as mockery. Amadeus seemed so removed from human feeling at times that I wondered if his training and indoctrination had diluted the intensity of emotion for him. I wondered the same of this traitor. I didn’t for a second believe his attempts at blithe charm were sincere.

  ‘But of course, child,’ he said, softening his voice. ‘Anything with a soul will grieve.’

  I had expected a monster, a warp-changed warlord, sat atop a throne of skulls and bones at the heart of a grand court. Beasts and mutants and Pure alike would stare at me as I was humbled and destroyed for their master’s amusement. I won’t pretend I wasn’t afraid of that fate, but I’d done what I could to steel myself for it.

  Instead, the Pure that slaughtered my overseer had dragged me through the Venatrix’s innards, finally bringing me to the private chambers of this warrior, Nar Kezar.

  The chamber was huge, overlooking the Venatrix’s spinal battle­ments, with wide cathedral windows offering a stark view of the warp’s swirling tides. I kept my gaze away from the poisoned ocean, scanning the rest of the suite. In truth it resembled any high officer’s chambers, with adjacent rooms that were likely armouries and sleeping quarters. It wasn’t the monstrousness of the place that unnerved me; it was the familiarity of it. The layout seemed no different to the chambers aboard a Mechanicus-mandated Imperial warship. I’d stood in the equivalent space aboard the Mentor strike cruiser Bodhisattva. Those halls had been the personal suites of a company captain I’d served on my seventh deployment.

  The smell was different, though. Gone was the stale tang of refiltered air so familiar to me from my time aboard the Hex, the Abjuration and other Mentor ships before that. The scent on the highest decks of the Huntress was reminiscent of some musky, burning toxin.

  ‘I don’t hate you because of the Spears,’ I said, too weary for deception. ‘I’ve seen your Exilarchy with my own eyes. I was on Kouris. I fought to defend the Hex from your men. I’ve survived for two months in your slave holds.’

  As regal as he was, when he chuckled at my words, I could happily have emptied my Engager into his guts.

  ‘Kouris was a skirmish,’ he said, shaking his head at my apparent naivety. ‘The world wished to join the Exilarchy, but we warned its rulers they weren’t ready. And look what their arrogance cost them. Reconquered most brutally, no? How many millions died in the uprisings across their world? How many hundreds of thousands died in the Spears’ campaign to bring peace to the world through fire and blood?’

  He shook his head at the tragedy of it all, even closing his eyes as if tears threatened. ‘Oh, Anuradha. If the rulers of Kouris had only waited until we could support them. If they’d only had the restraint to see there was a serene path to be taken.’

  He shrugged slowly, and his armour joints purred. In that moment, the ship juddered beneath us. Weapons fire, impacting on the hull. The Pure lord still didn’t acknowledge it.

  ‘Where’s my master?’ I asked. ‘Where are the Spears you took captive?’

  ‘My child, I am your master. My name is Nar Kezar.’

  ‘No.’ Tyberia would have been proud, for I was finding my backbone. ‘You are a heretic and a traitor. My master is Amadeus of the Mentor Legion.’

  Again, he smiled. A grin this time. ‘The Mentor Legion. How can you stand here, in these chambers, and not be struck by the bitter amusement of that Chapter’s existence?’

  Nothing in the Mentors’ existence struck me as amusing. On the contrary, despite the Chapter’s youth their record was a proud one, even among the exalted ranks of the Adeptus Astartes.

  ‘If you didn’t bring me here to see Amadeus, why did you have me dragged before you?’

  ‘I have questions, child. Questions about the Mentor Legion, which you will answer.’

  Not a chance. God-Emperor forgive me for foolishness, but I almost laughed.

  ‘I take it Lieutenant Commander Incarius has told you nothing,’ I said, unable to hide the smile at that small triumph.

  ‘He has been most excellently conditioned against both physical excruciation and psychic drilling.’ The warlord sounded intrigued by my master’s resistance. ‘He’ll break eventually, of course. But until then, as unlikely as it is that you know anything of worth, I thought you might serve to ease my curiosity.’

  The hell I will.

  I scanned the room, avoiding looking out into the warp’s seething winds. Old parchments lined the walls. Sandstone statues depicting Space Marine heroes stood proudly, raising their weapons high or standing in calm judgement. These had been defaced, their features cracked and erased. The hololithic table was dark in deactivation, and nothing on its surface would be of any use to me. I couldn’t use a datapad to strike down an Archenemy warlord. Nar Kezar either sensed my intent, or my desperation.

  ‘You will find no weapons here, my child. At least, none that would fit your hand.’

  I don’t know what made me speak the words I said next. Fear, most likely. Some mix of fear and hope, as the ship shuddered again.

  ‘The Hex will catch us.’

  Nar Kezar’s lips curled as he turned his eyes to the warp outside the ship’s walls. ‘You place a great deal of faith in Brêac and his pet cripple.’

  I gestured to the window, where madness boiled into infinity. ‘They’re hunting you even in the Sea of Souls. Even after you brought down our Geller Field. Even after you boarded us and raided for slaves.’

  ‘The Spears’ defiance has never been in question, child, and their hunt has made the last two months feel like an epoch. But the Hex will not bring us out of the warp, no matter how valiantly they chase.’

  ‘If their hunt is futile, why don’t they break off?’

  He clapped his gauntleted hands together with a single slam, delighted by my question. ‘You are greatly entertaining, Anuradha. I encourage you to keep holding on to hope if it amuses you.’

  My teeth clenched, and the infection in my head throbbed with fresh pain. ‘I fought one of your brothers on the Hex. You aren’t immortal.’

  ‘You fought several of my brothers,’ he replied indulgently. ‘That is how you were captured, no?’

  ‘I mean… I killed one of them. I killed one of your men myself.’ Tyberia, blessings upon her soul, would hopefully forgive me for that
lie. ‘I gunned him down and executed him while he crawled on the deck.’

  Nar Kezar exhaled slowly. ‘Did you now? How fascinating. Are you trying to make me angry, child? I assure you, it won’t work.’

  I licked my cracked lips and said nothing. Again, the ship shivered around us. I had to fight to keep my gaze from going to the shielded windows. Somewhere out there, the Hex trailed in our engine wake.

  ‘Are you so broken already, Anuradha, that you won’t even waste your breath with promises to kill me? I admit, I’d expected a more spirited meeting.’

  ‘I have no weapon.’

  I flinched back as he drew his blade in a blur of motion, moving with the same inhuman reflexes that had animated the Pure we’d killed; moving the same way my master and the Spears moved when they slaughtered their foes. He turned the curved bronze blade in the air before him, letting the soft light of his chambers play upon its rune-worked surface. Violet warp light danced across it, too. That felt more honest, like the truth behind all this beauty.

  ‘You know what this is, don’t you?’ he asked, looking at me with nothing but sincerity.

  ‘It’s a khopesh.’

  That earned another laugh. ‘How foolish of me not to be specific. No, Anuradha, I mean the blade itself. Look, child. You gaze upon one of the Fangs of the River Ghoul.’

  I didn’t reply. He tilted his head, curious at my silence. When I still didn’t say anything, and he adopted a sombre mien, his gaze drifting to the churning tides outside the great windows. ‘There were ten of them, in all. Four of them are lost now. Never, I suspect, to be found. We believe the Spears hold one of them in stasis, as a trophy. But we still possess five of them. Five of the finest relics ever to see sunlight.’

  He sighed, gripped by personal rapture.

  ‘Why are you telling me this? I care nothing for your traitorous customs.’

  His attention snapped back to me, his eyes slightly narrowed as if he sought to determine whether I lied.