Blood Games - Dan Abnett Read online

  The inner doors were heavy and older than the Palace, framed panels of ancient mountain oak, half a metre thick, worn and handmade, none of the angles quite true. He lifted the black iron latch, and pushed one of the doors open. Air hushed out at him. It smelled of cold stone.

  The immense Hall was starlight-dark and midnight-silent. Every now and then, a sound breathed through the black space, a sound that was almost the gust of a Himalazian wind and almost the crush of breakers on an ocean coast, but not in fact either of those things. Small orange sparks danced under the high roof, like fireflies, like ignis fatui.

  He watched them, adapting his eyes to darkness. He began to pick up the silver outlines of objects in the hall: columns, ancient statuary, and the assayers and binding apparatus set up by antiquarians of previous epochs and never removed. The devices stood like giant metal insects in the gloom, probe arms raised like mantis limbs, metal wingcases marked with arcane, abstruse symbols for settings and degrees. They were gathering dust.

  He slipped between them. Somewhere ahead of him, somewhere close by, a presence lingered. It was distracted, its mind detained by other things. It had not noticed him. It had not even felt him.

  He moved around a column, its cold flutes against his back, and set eyes on his prey.

  In the centre of the Hall’s broad, open floor, his prey was kneeling, engrossed, turning the pages of a massive leather-bound codex. The codex was open on the stone floor like a spread-eagled bird, its spine a metre and a half long. Beautiful hands slowly turned the pages. They were sculptor’s hands, artisan’s hands.

  His prey had his back to him. His prey was wearing a hooded white cloak. It would show the blood.

  A common assassin might creep forwards, to steal up on his target stealthily from behind, but this prey was far too dangerous and aware for such timid techniques. Now he was in striking distance, he had no option but to pounce. After ten months, one chance was all he was going to get.

  He surged forwards, his arm rising.

  Halfway there, with the tip of his punch-dagger just a moment away from the centre of his prey’s broad back, a shadow came the other way to meet him.

  Fluid darkness intercepted his blade. The punch-dagger was wrenched aside, and his strike was shorn of its momentum. He turned.

  He could barely see his assailant. Another falsehood was defying the light. The attacker drove in at him, a shadow against a shadow. He glimpsed the long, straight blade of a spatha.

  He deflected one sword-blow over-hand, and another under-hand, swinging the punch-dagger around. Each impact rang out with a sharp clang of metal on metal. Sparks flew. He backed hastily across the black tiles as the falsehooded swordsman moved against him.

  Their blades clashed again. The punch-dagger afforded him no reach. The advantage was entirely with the swordsman. The clatter of metal against metal seemed atrociously sharp in the breathy silence of the Hall.

  Despite the nuance of his grip, the spatha flicked the punch-dagger clean out of his hand. It embedded itself, quivering, in a nearby stone column. He went in with his bare hands, banging aside the rising sword blade with the back of his right hand and locking his fingers around the wrist of his attacker’s sword arm. He hooked his foot out to sweep the swordsman’s legs out from under him, but the swordsman leapt the sweeping calf and tried to snatch his wrist free.

  He smashed his left hand in, and caught the falsehooded swordsman across the side of the head. There was enough weight in the punch to stagger the man backwards. He blundered into one of the old assaying machines, scraping its metal feet across the stone tiles and buckling one of its insectile legs.

  The swordsman recovered his balance, and discovered he was no longer a swordsman. The spatha had been ripped from his hand.

  The Caucasian weighed the captured sword in his right hand. He snapped it around, and put the flat of it across his adversary’s cranium, knocking him down.

  The Caucasian turned from his fallen foe, the spatha in a low, defensive grip. Two more falsehooded opponents were oozing out of the Hall’s shadows to confront him.

  He blocked both their blades at once, and rallied against them in a series of dazzling, turning cuts and thrusts. The percussive clash of swords rang through the gloom. More sparks shot out, bright and brief, as if the three sword blades were made of flint.

  He wrong-footed one of his opponents, and clubbed him down to his knees with a blow of his spatha’s pommel. The other swordsman came at him, thrusting his blade, but he turned it aside deftly so that the stroke ran out harmlessly under his arm, and drove the heel of his left hand into the man’s face, cracking him backwards onto the floor.

  He started to run as the pair of them struggled to rise again. The game was done. Escape was the only acceptable conclusion remaining to him. He ran for the doors, threw them open and sprinted through the thick gloom of the portico towards the lawns outside the Hall.

  They were waiting for him. Five Custodes, fully armoured, their faces hidden by their golden, hawked visors, stood in a semicircle around the mouth of the portico. They had their Guardian spears, those great, gilded hybrids of halberd and firearm, aimed at his chest.

  ‘Yield!’ one of them ordered.

  He raised his stolen sword for the last time.

  He was not the first occupant of the cell, and he would not be the last. The stone walls, floor and ceiling of the cell had been painted in a bluish-white gloss, like the skin of a glacier. Fingernails and other sharp edges had scored away the paint over the years, inscribing the walls with scraped frescoes of men and eagles, of armoured giants and lightning bolts, of ancient victories and long shadows. They were simple, elemental marks that reminded him of primordial cave paintings showing hunters and bison.

  He added his own.

  After a night and a day, the cell door rumbled open. Constantin Valdor entered. The master of the Custodes wore a simple monastic robe of dark brown wool over a black bodyglove. He leaned his huge back against the cell wall, folded his mighty arms and regarded the prisoner on the cot.

  ‘Trust you, Amon,’ he said. ‘Trust you to get closer than anyone else.’

  ‘Amon’ was the start of his name, the earliest part of it. The second part was ‘Tauromachian’ and, together, these two words served most circumstances in which his name was used or spoken. He was Amon Tauromachian, Custodes, first circle.

  Violent obliteration notwithstanding, Custodes lived long lives, far longer than mortal men, and they accumulated long names in those lifetimes. Following ‘Tauromachian’, which was not a family name but at least one that described the occupation of the bloodline that had provided his gene-source, there came ‘Xigaze’, the site of his organic birth, then ‘Lepron’, the house of his formative study, and then ‘Cairn Hedrossa’, the place where he was first tutored in weapon use. ‘Pyrope’, seventeen words into his nomenclature sequence, remembered his first live combat, deployed on an orbital of that name. So on, and so on, each new piece of his name honouring an action or a life landmark. Each was awarded him formally, by the masters of the first circle. ‘Leng’ would now become part of his name, the latest ultimate part, recognising his feat in the blood game.

  A Custodian’s name was engraved inside the chest plate of his gold armour. The name began at the collar, on the right side, just the first element exposed, and then wound like a tight, secret snake around the inside of the plate. For some Custodes like Constantin, the oldest veterans, accumulated names had filled up the linings of their torso plates, and the tails of their snakes now ran out around the bellies of the plates, looping like incised belts through the abdominal decorations. Constantin Valdor’s name was nineteen hundred and thirty-two elements long.

  Amon’s Custodes armour and armaments had been stored in the House of Weapons during his absence. As he walked along the Southern Circuit with Constantin to reclaim them, he asked about the progress of
other blood games.

  ‘Zerin?’

  ‘Apprehended before he had even crossed into the Imperial Territories. He brushed a gene-sniffer in Irkutsk.’

  ‘Haedo?’

  ‘Detected by sweeps in the Papuan Deserts four months ago. He made it as far as Cebu City by dust yacht, but we had a scoop team waiting for him.’

  Amon nodded. ‘Brokur?’

  Constantin smiled. ‘He got into the Hegemon in the guise of a Panpacific delegate before he was spotted. An impressive feat, one that we did not expect to be bettered.’

  Amon shrugged. Blood games were a fundamental element of Palace security and a duty of the Custodes. It was a matter of honour for them to play blood games out to the very best of their abilities. Using their ingenuity and comprehensive inside knowledge of the Palace and, indeed, Terra itself, the Custodes volunteered to test and probe Imperial security, to expose any weakness or chink in Terran defences. They would play wolf to test the hounds. At any given time, at least half a dozen Custodes were loose, operating secretly and autonomously, devising and executing methods of penetrating the great Palace.

  There would be scrupulous debriefings and extensive interviews, examining Amon’s strategies and dismantling his techniques. Every scrap of information, every morsel of advantage, had to be extracted from the blood game. He had penetrated the Palace. He had got further than anyone else. He had come within striking distance.

  ‘I wonder if I have caused offence?’ he mentioned to Constantin. ‘I raised my hand against him.’

  Constantin shook his head. He was a giant of a man, bigger even than Amon, like one of the over-scaled statues in the Investiary brought to life. ‘He forgives you. Besides, you would not have hurt him.’

  ‘My blow was blocked.’

  ‘Even if it hadn’t been, he would have stopped you.’

  ‘He knew I was there.’

  Constantin scratched at his chin. ‘He won’t tell me how long he knew. He wanted to see how long it would take the rest of us to notice you.’

  Amon paused before replying. ‘In the past, he has not seen much sense in blood games. He considered them worthless.’

  ‘That was the past,’ Constantin replied. ‘Things have changed since you were last among us, Amon.’

  In the House of Weapons, he and Constantin armoured themselves. Amon felt the old familiarity of the handmade plate sections, the buckles and clasps and the magnetised seams. The weight settled on him reassuringly.

  In arming chambers on the lower levels of the House of Weapons, servitors and slaves were ritually plating a squad of proud Astartes of the Imperial Fists, anointing them with oils and whispers as they locked each piece of armour in place. The squad was preparing for a long patrol shift on the southern ramparts.

  Such was the custom of most Astartes: the ritual, the gloving, the blessing. They were beings wrought for war, their mindsets particular. Ritual aided their singularity of focus. It refined their purpose.

  They were not like Custodes at all. Like cousins, perhaps, like kin from the same bloodline, the Custodes and the Astartes were similar but distinct. The Custodes were the product of an older, formative process, a process, some said, that had been refined and simplified to produce the Astartes en masse. Generally, Custodes were larger and more powerful than Astartes, but the differences were only noticeably significant in a few specific cases. No one would be foolish enough to predict the outcome of a contest between an Astartes and a Custodian.

  The greatest differences lay in the mind. Though Custodes shared a familial bond through the circles of their order, it was nothing like the keen brotherhood that cemented the Legions of the Astartes. Custodes were far more solitary beings: sentinels, watchmen, destined to stand forever, alone.

  Custodes did not surround themselves with slaves and servitors, aides and handservants. They armoured themselves, alone, pragmatically, without ceremony.

  ‘Dorn armours the Palace for war,’ Amon said, as more of an observation than a question. Only a Custodes of the first circle would refer to a primarch so bluntly.

  ‘War is expected.’

  ‘Now it is expected,’ said Amon. ‘Before, it was not expected, never, not from ourselves.’

  Constantin did not reply.

  ‘How did this happen?’ Amon asked.

  ‘It is not possible to say,’ replied the master of the Custodes. ‘As one who knew the Warmaster well, I cannot believe it is overweening pride or ambition that has inspired this infamy, nor resentment. I believe–’

  ‘What?’ asked Amon, buckling his abdominal plates tight.

  ‘I believe Horus Lupercal is unsound,’ said Constantin. ‘Unsound of mind or of humour. Something has unseated his rational thought, and the good council of those around him.’

  ‘Are you suggesting Horus Lupercal is mad?’ asked Amon.

  ‘Perhaps. Mad, or sick, or both. Something has happened to him that cannot be explained by the scheme of the galaxy as we have come to understand it.’ Constantin looked out through the high windows of the House of Weapons, and studied the line of the Western Ramparts, newly reinforced and obese with additional shield plating and gun platforms. ‘We must prepare for the unthinkable. War will come to us, war from within. Sides are drawn, choices made.’

  ‘You make it sound matter-of-fact,’ Amon said.

  ‘It is,’ replied Constantin. ‘The Emperor is threatened. We are his protectors. We will stand against the threat. There is nothing else for us to speculate upon, not even the madness of those we once loved.’

  Amon nodded. ‘The Palace is becoming a fortress. I approve. Dorn has done superlative work.’

  ‘It was ever his skill, and the skill of his Astartes. Defence and protection. At this, the Imperial Fists excel.’

  ‘But we remain the last line,’ said Amon.

  ‘We do.’

  ‘This will require more than strong walls and battlements.’

  With their crested helmets held under their arms, they walked across the inner courts of the Palace from the House of Weapons to a tower of the Hegemon where the Custodes kept their office of watch.

  Custodes had gathered to greet Amon at the entrance of the tower. Heads bowed, they struck the shafts of their Guardian spears against the flagstones, a clattering murmur of welcome and approval.

  Haedo stepped forwards, his features hidden by the shadows of his visor. ‘Amon Tauromachian, good that you return,’ he said, clasping Amon’s right hand.

  ‘You have cut deeper than any of us,’ Emankon said.

  They entered the tower through high-arched rooms where the murals were so old and faded they looked like the pencil sketches and cartoons the artist had made in preparation for his work. Information streams from the vast data looms in the sub-levels of the Palace pulsed in the conduits under their feet. Cyber-drones floated under the high vaults, clusters of them moving like shoals of fish, dragged and gusted as if by the wafts of deep marine currents.

  The Watchroom was bathed in violet light from the vast overhead hololithic emitters. Data freckled and danced across this smoky dome of light. The comparison/contrast programs running in the central cogitation consoles speared beams of gold and red up into the violet gloom, and roped divergent data elements in lassos of light. The global data sea and the unified biometric verification system were being trawled and panned by the Watchroom’s codifier assembly, and disparate elements were being grouped together, connections made, traces followed. An anti-Unity cell in Baktria had been betrayed by some restricted treatise they had tried to access from a library in Delta Nilus. Pro-Panpacific terrorists had been eradicated in Archangelus, traced by a weapons-buy they had tried to pull off in some backwater Nordafrik shanty. Every day, a billion clues and a million secrets were analysed and examined by the Custodes watch, sifted with acute, painstaking precision through the ever-shifting, fluid
levels of Terra’s information sphere.

  ‘What is the chief matter of the hour?’ Constantin asked.

  Every sixty minutes, the Watchroom prioritised a dozen of the most sensitive findings for special attention.

  ‘Lord Sichar,’ replied the custodian of the watch.

  He had not hefted a guardian spear in ten months. He went to the practice chambers in the subterranean levels beneath the tower, and cued up a dozen blade-limbed servitors to oppose him. The spear swung and looped in his hands, his muscles remembering the old skills and training. When the exercise ended, and the servitors were broken and dismembered on the mat around him, he called up fresh units for a second round.

  How much of our lives are spent in rehearsal, he considered. The blood games, the training, all of it just pantomime coaching in preparation for the real thing.

  Amon hated himself for the tiny thrill of exhilaration that he felt. The real thing was coming. No matter the infamy and outrage of it, the Custodes would at last be called from rehearsal to perform the duty they had been created to perform.

  To relish the imminent war was unseemly. As he closed out the second round of practice, Amon focused his mind instead on the case of Lord Sichar.

  ‘The matter is already under inspection, Amon,’ Constantin had told him.

  ‘I have been out ten months,’ Amon had replied, ‘I am rusty and idle, and eager for a proper puzzle to divert me. I ask your favour.’

  Constantin had nodded. The matter of Lord Sichar had been passed to Amon Tauromachian for review.

  Lord Pherom Sichar had always been a person of interest to the Custodes. Hereditary lord of Hy Brasil, the most powerful of all the Sud Merican cantons, Sichar had often been vocal in his criticism of Imperial policies. His dynastic links, through bloodline and marriage, to the Navis Nobilite provided him with a considerable trade empire off Terra. Sichar was reckoned to be one of the fifty most powerful feudal lords of the colonies. Only the most careful political gamesmanship by Malcador the Sigillite had prevented Sichar’s elevation to the Council of Terra. Of greater concern was the fact that Sichar was a direct descendant of Dalmoth Kyn, one of the last tyrants to hold out against the Emperor’s forces in the dying days of the Unification Wars. It was understood that the Emperor tolerated Sichar’s rule of Hy Brasil – and his barracking and sniping in the Hegemon – in order to heal the old wounds left by the Wars of Unification and encourage ethnic settlement. Sichar was a powerful man, and an articulate, outspoken statesman. He often spoke tolerable sense, in Amon’s opinion, and his policies were pragmatic and robust.