Spear of the Emperor - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  ‘Helot Secundus.’

  He greeted me as calmly as if I’d sauntered into his chamber aboard the Hex, instead of crawling, one-eyed, one-armed, one-footed, through the spinal decks of an enemy warship. ‘Still alive, eh?’

  Book Three

  REGENERATION

  AND RUINATION

  ‘Though we are broken, our oaths yet bind us. We are the Lions of Elysium, and as long as a single warrior in our heraldry draws breath, we will uphold our vow to watch over Elara’s Veil. For the fallen Scorpions. For the Spears still fighting. For the Adeptus Vaelarii.’

  – Ekene Dubaku

  Chapter Master of the Celestial Lions

  Proem

  THE HISTORIAN: III

  Forgive me.

  My pen doesn’t falter this time because of the hand holding it, but the heart behind it.

  Some of what I could commit to this parchment would cross the boundaries of what my former master would consider acceptable. Some of it, honestly, I just have no wish to tell. Where is the line between what a storyteller must relay to those that read their words, and what is a pain so personal that it’s better never laid down for the eyes of others?

  Some memories are so vivid I fear they’ll be the last things I think in the seconds before death finally claims me. Would that be a grim reward for a life of loyal service, or would it be fair punishment for the things I’ve done?

  Once, I broke a mother’s face with the butt of my gun, so I could tear her child from her arms. History records this as a ­necessary act in a vile time, but…

  I think that will be the one. That will be the memory I summon with my last breath. I’ll see her wide eyes again, excoriated of human sentience, fear-shot through with animal panic. I’ll hear her wordless, bestial screams again, and I’ll deserve it. Yes, there’d be justice in that.

  If you’re reading these words, then you already know Amadeus lived, only to die later. What, then, should I write? The months of his regeneration? The gathering of the Armada at Elysium, to face the Storm Tide? Kartash’s truth?

  Vadhán asked the same question, in a different way. He came to me again a few days ago, to read through the pages already written. He remained here as he did so, in this very chamber, his face scarred and scabbed from his most recent battles, his eyes flicking over each parchment with ruthless speed. So many chronicles cite the war-gifts of the Adeptus Astartes without fully realising the mundane means in which they differ from us: such is Vadhán’s cognitive speed that in the time a human might read a single page, he’s scanned and comprehended ten of them.

  On several occasions, I saw him tense or give a bitter smile at the words on the vellum. I didn’t ask why. I just watched him read.

  ‘Those were dark days,’ he said at last. He looked at me curiously in the moments after reading. It was as if he didn’t know me at all, and hunted for some kind of insight into who I was and what I might be thinking. Strange, given that he’d just read my thoughts committed to parchment. He should know me better than ever before.

  ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘Amadeus.’ He said the name with a moment’s effort. ‘It’s strange to read, to know with clarity, just how you saw him.’

  ‘I didn’t hate him, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘I don’t know what I mean,’ he admitted.

  I smiled in the candlelit gloom, because I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard a member of the Adeptus Astartes honestly confess to a moment’s private doubt.

  ‘He was what his Chapter made him,’ I said. ‘Just as you’re what your Chapter made you. The Mentors demanded perfection, and he answered it by becoming a weapon instead of a warrior.’

  ‘Do you miss him?’ Vadhán asked suddenly.

  ‘No.’ I softened the truth by making my voice gentle. ‘No, I don’t.’

  He had nothing to say to that. Instead, he gestured to the parchments on the table.

  ‘Dark days,’ he repeated.

  ‘Are these days any brighter?’ I countered.

  ‘We will make them brighter.’ Such belief. Such casual defiance. But his newest scars, on skin and ceramite alike, were from Arikeus.

  ‘Is the Exilarchy coming?’ I asked, meeting him eye to eye. ‘Arikeus has fallen. I’ve seen the hololiths. I’ve seen the dispersal of our fleets, drawing close to the Ophion System in defensive blockades. Is Nemeton next?’

  ‘Just keep writing, old woman.’

  I ignored his fond tone. ‘Why not answer me? Do you respect me so little, after all this time?’

  He looked around the stone chamber in which I write all these words. Winter on Nemeton is cold, even down here. And it’s dark beneath the oceans, so indescribably dark. If power failed in this fortress, men and women would go mad in the absolute black.

  ‘Nemeton will never fall,’ said Vadhán.

  ‘I’m sure the Lions once said the same thing about Elysium.’

  Instead of chastising me, he nodded. ‘They did, aye, but they were wrong. I’m not. We’re mustering to break them before they reach the system’s edge. The light of Ophion will never shine on their warships’ corrupt hulls.’

  ‘You were never so poetic,’ I accused him. ‘They sound like the High King’s words.’

  Vadhán chuckled. ‘They are the High King’s words.’

  We sat together in the comfortable silence of two souls that knew one another well. I was the one to break it.

  ‘I’ll write the story you want, Vadhán, don’t worry. We’re close to the end of the first chapter now.’

  He ruminated on that, running an armoured palm over his bearded mouth. ‘How will you end this first part? With Amadeus’ regeneration? With the fall of Elysium?’

  ‘No. Throne of the God-Emperor, no. I’ll write about those days, but the chapter won’t end with either of them. Elysium must come later.’

  He grunted something that passed for agreement. ‘I suppose, in truth, there’s only one way to end it.’

  ‘Aye. With Ekene of the Lions.’

  XVIII

  DEVASTATION

  1

  I stared at my new hand. I closed the fingers. I opened them. It was my hand, but not yet mine. It belonged to me, but it was still new enough to be a tool, something grafted onto me instead of a part of myself.

  I closed my remaining eye, but it left me at the mercy of my fragmented memories, dragging me back to the screams and burning darkness aboard the Venatrix. I opened it again rather than trigger a reawakening of those scorched memories.

  Resisting the memories didn’t always work. It didn’t work then.

  The apothecarium aboard the Hex was richly appointed and suffused with a sterile, muted blue-white light that was tuned not to strain the eyes. Since waking, no one had told me anything of worth. We were in the warp, but what of the Venatrix? What of the Blade of the Seventh Son? Where were we headed now, and for what reason?

  What of Nar Kezar?

  Once, my ignorance had been a shield. I was the perfect thrall, raised among so many other perfect thralls. My masters among the Mentors made every decision in my life, and I expected no enlightenment as to their wishes and plans. I went where they bid, I did as they ordered.

  But slavery changes you. It strips you of every decision you can make, even down to eating and breathing and shitting. It flays you of agency. With no control over anything in your life, you are barely human at all.

  Now I wanted answers. I needed them, for the sake of my sanity.

  They’d told me Amadeus lived, but nothing of his condition. The medicae officer treating me was human, as were the staff working under his direction. They all bore Nemetese tattoos on their faces and forearms. My memory of those weeks is still fragmented from the damage to my cranial data-spools, but I was later told my first action in the apothecarium was to touch the
slave scar on my forehead and say, ‘Get this off me. Burn it off if you have to.’

  I asked several of the medicae labourers if they’d managed to exload the recordings from my cranial banks. Their answers were all grunted and negative, but for one that elaborated: ‘It’s not going to work. They’re useless. Fragmented. You’re lucky not to be brain damaged.’

  ‘But you could try again,’ I pressed him. It would be the eighth time, though. Desperation was making me foolish. ‘Please.’

  ‘There’s not enough unbroken data to even form a visual feed.’ He looked at me as if I were babbling in a tongue he struggled to understand. ‘Your skull was cracked in three places and the optical trauma from losing your terminus-eye rendered everything in your cranial banks unharvestable. You’re lucky you remember anything at all. You’re lucky to be alive.’

  ‘Yes, but–’

  ‘I’m not a servitor,’ he said harshly, as if I’d called him an idiot. ‘If you make us keep straining your cognition spools with repeated attempts, then at best you’re going to have memory problems for the rest of your life. At worst, that won’t be a problem, as you’ll be dead of a brain haemorrhage.’

  After that, I let it lie.

  A Spear stood sentry within the apothecarium at all times. It surprised me to see that it wasn’t merely a line warrior, but Morcant of the Arakanii. The battleguard remained on duty without a break, his crested helm panning left and right over the chamber, ever alert to threats.

  I could guess why he was there. His place was to execute any of the injured that showed signs of taint.

  Judgement was still out as to my potential corruption. Daily, they drained my blood into vials, scraped skin samples, subjected me to batteries of quick-response questions while monitoring the electrical patterns of my brain and the chemicals that carried thought. I knew I was passing these tests by the fact Morcant didn’t kill me.

  We didn’t all pass. Morcant executed one of the recovered thralls in our ward when she wouldn’t stop raving one night. It was merciful, at least in the way you can measure such things. He closed his hand around her throat as she writhed in her bed, and he twisted. Just once. She fell silent, and her heresies died on her lips.

  Morcant, on sentry duty, always ignored my repeated attempts to call to him in search of answers to any of my questions. The most responsive he was to one of my questions was when he shook his head in my direction.

  ‘Be quiet,’ he ordered me.

  ‘That thrall you killed last night. I knew her. Her name was Lanis.’

  ‘Be quiet, Anuradha.’

  I obeyed, for lack of anything else to say or do.

  In addition to refusing to answer any of my questions, the medicae staff also refused to let me see myself in any reflective surfaces. That didn’t bode well. They had replaced my arm with a cruder, simpler bionic limb than the beautiful piece I’d lost in the fight with Kartash. I kept lifting it and watching it move. It was like something an Imperial Guard officer might possess after a battlefield mutilation. Better than what most Imperial citizens could ever hope for, and I was accordingly grateful, but inwardly I looked at the dull metal plating and missed the consummate craftsmanship of my lost arm.

  As for my left leg, that was gone before I even had time to think of any sentiment. There was a period of drunkenness from pain-suppressant narcotics, and then I woke to find my leg was new from the knee down. The augmetic replacement wasn’t human in shape, like my new arm. This was a thinner, industrial pylon between a gearworked node that served as my knee, and a four-taloned claw in the shape of a cross that now made up my foot. It would take me months to get used to. Even once I did, I’d never walk without a hitch in my stride again.

  The ward’s chief medicae officer, Owyn, was a gaunt man deep into his sixth decade, with half-lidded eyes that missed nothing.

  ‘Yes, it’s ugly,’ he told me, with a Nemetese drawl, ‘but it’s what we’ve got.’

  ‘I’m not ungrateful,’ I told him, and I meant it. ‘I’ll get used to it.’

  ‘Good. I abhor patients that complain. Now, are you ready for your first visitor?’

  I can’t recall what I said, only that I was certain, against all the odds, that it would be my master.

  Of course, I was wrong.

  2

  I smelled him before I saw him. That pious, smoky scent of incense. He approached my bed in his familiar crouched gait, his eyes cast down, an expression of patent discomfort on his face. The monitoring machinery by my bedside beeped louder and faster in response to my escalating heartbeat. Owyn was gone, misguidedly believing I wanted privacy.

  ‘Hello, Anuradha,’ Kartash said.

  I drew in breath to call to Morcant, stationed across the chamber. Kartash pressed a finger to my lips, and I lost the shout I’d been building to, as I flinched away from his touch.

  ‘Anuradha, be calm, be calm.’ The instructive softness of his voice, after everything that had happened, was almost enough to make me scream.

  ‘Get away from me.’

  He jerked in surprise, which was the last reaction I’d expected. ‘What?’ he asked. His eyes shined with sudden hurt. ‘What’s wrong? You’re safe now.’

  I think I stammered his words back at him, unable to speak anything worthwhile in the wake of what he said. He reached out to stroke my hair, only stopping – and ­looking hurt once more –when the bed shivered with my force of my recoil.

  ‘You’re safe,’ he assured me. ‘You’re safe now. You’re back on the Hex.’

  ‘I… I know where I am. I’m not delirious.’ It came out in a rush, then. The aborted flight from the astropathic sector. The jade sword he’d used to slay one of the Pure. The way he’d downed Tyberia and hurled me back. The way he’d sealed us in with the animals from the Exilarchy.

  Kartash listened to all of it with mounting horror. By the end of my accusations, I was trying to lift myself from the bed while my new arm and leg rebelled and spasmed with nerve-ending misfires.

  ‘I’ll kill you,’ I said to him, the words a hissing capstone for my anger. ‘For what you did… I will kill you.’

  A medicae orderly came to my side, urging me to be calm. Kartash looked mortified, and worse, he looked confused. Morcant loomed over us, a vast presence in his cobalt cera­mite, though my relief died in my throat when instead of dragging Kartash away, he stood protectively in front of the hunchback, and glared down at me through red eye-lenses.

  ‘You will remain calm, thrall.’

  ‘Morcant, he… he tried to kill us. Me and Tyberia. Kartash tried to–’

  The Spear closed his hand great hand around my throat, without squeezing. It would take him no effort at all to end me.

  ‘Are you calm, Anuradha?’

  ‘He tried to kill us, Morcant. In the Battle of the Hex.’

  Morcant was immovable. ‘I will ask you one more time. Are you calm?’

  I wasn’t even close to calm. But I could feign it.

  ‘Yes, I’m calm. I’m calm now.’

  ‘See that you remain that way. You’ve shown no sign of taint,’ he said, not needing to add the Yet that lurked on the end of the sentence.

  ‘She’s confused and disorientated,’ Kartash volunteered. ‘My thanks for your concern, battleguard. She can’t help it, after what she’s been through.’

  ‘Don’t aggravate her,’ Morcant said to Kartash as he released me. The Spear and the orderly drifted away, leaving me alone with the man Tyberia had asked me to kill.

  For a few seconds, Kartash said nothing. He cautiously took his place at my bedside again, seeming to search for the right words.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Anuradha. I couldn’t even find you during the battle.’

  Throne, he looked heartbroken. His expression invited me to consider t
he horrors he’d seen after the Geller field failed, alone as he’d been, without Tyberia watching his back. At least I’d had company as I waded through hell, with the dead walking the halls of our warship.

  ‘I saw things,’ he said, whispering the words. ‘Things, in that battle, that couldn’t possibly have been real. Didn’t you see anything like that?’

  A thousand things, I thought.

  ‘I saw you, Kartash.’ God-Emperor, I hated the doubt creeping into my voice. ‘Tyberia saw you as well. I saw you with that blade. I know it was you, flooring us and leaving us for the Exilarchy.’

  He shook his head, in hopelessness rather than denial. ‘What blade? What are you talking about?’

  I had to admit the truth. ‘I didn’t see it clearly. A sword of jade. It was alien craftsmanship.’

  I sounded foolish even to myself. Again, he shook his head. ‘And did Tyberia see it?’

  My teeth were grinding now. ‘No,’ I confessed.

  He ran his palm down his mouth and chin, sighing quietly. ‘Anuradha… Have you asked yourself why I would abandon you like that? To what purpose?’

  I had no answer for him, and he sighed again. ‘Never have I wished so ardently for our masters to have granted me remembrance spools. Then you could see the truth through my eyes. I’d never abandon you, Anuradha.’

  Throne, he was so sincere. I felt the traitorous urge to break down, to sink back into his comforting tutorship, now the worst of my trials were behind me. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was safe again, at last.

  ‘Get away from me,’ I said. My voice was shaking.

  ‘You’ve been through a lot,’ he said softly. He nodded to himself, as if his own diagnosis was confirmed the moment he made it. ‘I’m glad you made it, though. You always showed much more promise than Tyberia.’

  My bionic hand snapped the iron bar that served as the bed’s edge. I hadn’t realised I’d been gripping it, let alone so hard.