Spear of the Emperor - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  Ducarius was the only one immune to Kartash’s presence. On the sixth day, when the hunchback let an untied vein slip in his weary hands and spurt blood into the chest cavity, Ducarius backhanded him away from the surgical table. Owyn was already working to tie off the spurting vein and arrange its rebind­ing, but Ducarius glared at Kartash through narrowed eyes.

  ‘Get out of here. You’re too clumsy right now to be any use, and I’m weary of your pious stink and miserable counsel. Go. Get some rest.’

  Kartash licked his dry lips, then bobbed his head in submission. He left without even a backwards look.

  ‘Useless bastard,’ Ducarius said, working again. One of the attendants was too slow with the sterilised cloth, and the druid cuffed his sweating forehead on the sleeve of his robe. ‘Who knew a man could whine so much…’

  Three tech-adepts assisted with the rebuilding, one of which was Deacon Vectragos, the Hex’s chief engineer. All twelve, stick-thin foot of him was concealed by robes cut in the traditional red of Sacred Mars and the black markings of Bellona. Mechadendrites snaked out from beneath these dark folds. When he moved, he walked on several curving metal ­tentacles, forgoing any pretence of humanity. When he aided in the surgeries, peering down with the seven mismatched eye-lenses in his dark hood, he deployed tendrils that ended in precision tools and metallic fingers capable of incredible digital dexterity. I never saw what remained of his humanity beneath the robe, but it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn there was nothing but a tangle of mechadendrites instead of a humanoid at all.

  With cloned organs, cultured tissue, rebound bones and reconstructed muscle, Ducarius remade my master. The scarring… Throne, the scarring was horrific even before we started. Between Nar Kezar’s torture and our frontier implementation of the Calgarian Rites, there wouldn’t be an inch of flesh left pure.

  The deacon did much of what he called ‘the work of osseous and fibrous connective tissue expansion’. Through his craft, Amadeus’ bones were sealed after the torture, tactically rebroken as needed, and lengthened with growth stimulators and skeletal infusers. His muscles, tendons and ligaments were rewoven as adeptly as possible, but the true healing could only begin once the Primaris Alpha and Beta phases had proceeded without rejection.

  It was the Primaris implants that gave us the most trouble. The Hex wasn’t equipped for harvesting and implantation to create new Adeptus Astartes warriors. It had the facilities but not the raw material; the creation of Spears always took place on Nemeton and Bellona, or in rare cases, aboard the Chapter’s flagship, the battle-barge Warrior Queen.

  The Calgarian Rites required three organs that couldn’t be manufactured aboard the Hex. For Amadeus to live, ­Ducarius not only took offerings of blood from living Spears, he also harvested from the dead. The druid unlocked the stasis vaults in the warship’s mortuary, and – alone, in his cere­monial robes – autopsied the necessary genetic material from the fallen.

  First was the Belisarian Furnace, a twist of muscled flesh fused between Amadeus’ two hearts. Vectragos was the one to seal the organ in place with his polished, multi-jointed metal fingers, several of which ended in scalpels and tissue-fusers. The implant, flush with chemicals, was supposed to stimulate a Space Marine’s hearts in moments of extreme duress. Inside Amadeus’ body, it secreted its stimulant fluids immediately, serving as a death-ward. More than once in the following days, the Furnace flooded his hearts with adrenal chemicals, staving off a fatal organ failure.

  Next were the Sinew Coils. Ducarius spent three days without ceasing in his work, threading durametallic coil-cables through Amadeus’ muscles while others misted the bloody flesh with sterilisers and infused them with stimulant serums to promote healing and growth. Ducarius burned through the Hex’s apothecarium supplies, while his attendants and servitors laboured to synthesise more.

  Implanting the Magnificat necessitated sawing open Amadeus’ brainpan and removing the crown of his skull. It was during the implantation of this tiny dextrophic lobe within the core of my master’s brain that Ducarius turned slightly, spitting to one side. A servitor immediately cleaned the spot on the deck.

  ‘Quite a secret to give up, isn’t it?’

  I was manning a surgical laser at the war-priest’s side, firing brief, cutting pulses into the grey meat of my master’s brain whenever Ducarius directed.

  ‘Sir?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not a sir,’ he said. ‘Druids are addressed by name, even formally. It’s tradition. Old, old law.’ He winced as he focused on what he was doing inside Amadeus’ skull. ‘Supposedly, it stops us becoming arrogant with all our authority.’

  Attendants wiped both of our brows. I was sweating far more than the druid. Ducarius had flecks of Amadeus’ blood on his talon-scar facial tattoos: red life spattered over blue ink.

  ‘Emperor’s balls,’ he hissed, ‘I wish Tolmach were here for this. Why’d that idiot have to get himself killed?’

  ‘He died well,’ I offered.

  ‘He was a Spear,’ Ducarius replied. ‘We all die well. Doesn’t matter in the end, though, does it? The only way to win is to stay alive.’

  He lapsed back into silence, until I prompted him about his question of secrets.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I admitted. ‘You mentioned I was giving up a secret?’

  ‘Here,’ said Ducarius. ‘All of this. You’re sworn to keep the Mentor Legion’s secrets, aye? But the only way any of this surgery will conceivably work is if we share a gene-source with Amadeus. He’s using our blood. Our implants. That makes the Mentors the same bloodline as the Spears. They’re born of Guilliman’s genetic code, like us.’

  I held my silence. This was my covenant to keep. True or not, I said nothing at all.

  ‘The Scorpions weren’t our blood-brothers, you know,’ Ducarius continued. ‘Oath-brothers, true, and that’s what matters at the end of the day, when the sun sets. Blood doesn’t mean a damn thing most of the time. The brothers you choose are the ones you really love, the ones you really trust. And their betrayals are the ones that really hurt.’

  I risked another glance to the side, where Ducarius’ features were set with effort. I still didn’t say anything. This was one of those rare times that bloodline mattered a great deal, and we both knew it.

  I wouldn’t confirm his suspicions either way. It wasn’t my place, and in the unlikely event any of my former masters among the Mentor Legion read these words, please know that I was true to my vows.

  On the tenth day, we completed the last of the rituals.

  2

  As time passed, my memory suffered fewer fits and starts. It was during the period Amadeus slumbered in his healing coma that I began to trust my eidetic recall again, which meant the damage had been biological or physiological rather than mechanical. There’s rarely a good result when cataloguing cranial trauma, and damage to my brain was no minor detail, but this at least meant I required no unfamiliar tech-adept tinkering inside my skull.

  My clearest memory of those long, convalescing days is from one night in Amadeus’ chamber, a night ostensibly like all the others. I was sat upon my own bed, my bionic leg stretched out before me, surrounded by tools as I worked on the inside of what would be my master’s new helm. The circuitry in the cerebellum interfaces was capable of intensely clear data-spurts, but I wanted to increase their capacity. Amadeus had been used to incoming streams of information beyond the warriors of any other Chapter. I worried he’d find his new wargear practically primeval unless I tuned it more to his senses.

  As I worked, something in the chamber kept creaking. Not my bed, moving beneath my weight and motions. Not the air filtrator on the wall. Not even my master’s bed, for he was motionless. All else was still. A mile away from where I sat the plasma engines were roaring, but here their eternal efforts were nothing but a low hum through the ship’s metal bones.

  There it was again. T
hat low creak, muted, barely audible. I doubted there was any wood on the entire ship, but the sound reminded of me overstretched lumber, close to breaking point.

  I scanned the room with my wrist-monitron. Nothing. Nothing at all.

  Amadeus grunted, twitching gently in his sleep. His fingers trembled. His face, which had escaped the destruction inflicted by the Exilarchy and was now subtly changed with his new skeletal structure, kept contorting in weak flickers of… of emotion? Of pain? I honestly wasn’t sure of the difference when it came to my master.

  I slipped from the bed, limping over to him. The twitches subsided, and for almost twenty minutes I stood there, watching and listening. Just as I turned back to my bed, I heard the muted creak again, and Amadeus growled in his sleep. He was sweating through his sheets, the salt of his perspiration reeking of the chemicals and stimulants doing their work inside his body.

  That was the creaking. I knew it for certain when I pressed my ear to his chest, listening to the dual drumming of his hearts. Beneath that heavy thud-thud, thud-thud, there was a sickly dry wrenching sound, quiet but constant. Bile stung the back of my throat.

  Throne of the God-Emperor, I could hear his bones growing. His muscle tissue was ripping and fusing, over and over, thickening and swelling. The pain must have been indescribable.

  The process was still due to take weeks. Amadeus spent all of it in a slumber that somehow wasn’t deep enough to hide from the pain as body realigned and reformed. I didn’t know if he’d remember it on waking, but I know he felt all of it as he slept.

  3

  The Third Warhost didn’t rest. While Amadeus convalesced, the Hex sailed and the Spears waged war. Days became weeks, and the weeks bled into the second month. Kartash was lending his services in thraldom to Battleguard Morcant, while I spent most of my hours working on Amadeus’ war-plate and weapons.

  The warriors of Brêac’s warhost granted Amadeus a suit of armour. It was my duty to prepare it for him, engineering it for his new height and bulk, should the surgery take and if he ever recovered. That occupied a great deal of my time, and Owyn frequently lectured me about my tools scattered across the ward floor along with ceramite plates and fibre-bundle cabling.

  I refused to leave the chamber unless necessary. It wasn’t just loyalty that kept me there, or even my own recovery. When I left the apothecarium, I made sure to keep my journeys as brief as possible before returning to Amadeus’ ward.

  Kartash caught me once, in a corridor between the apothe­carium and our old arming chambers. Both of us had sling-racks of tools over our shoulders. I tried to limp past him in the stark white light of the hallway, but he moved to block me. I had the ugliest feeling that, somehow, he could hear my racing heart.

  I want to paint him as a villain, even here. I want to say that a low hunger simmered in his eyes as he barred my path. How much simpler would it have been had he looked at me as if I were unfinished business? But his gaze was blandly indifferent. In the moments any emotion showed on his features, it was mild reproval.

  He moved back a step, barring my path.

  ‘Get out of my way, Kartash.’

  ‘I think not. You and I should talk, Anuradha.’

  ‘There’s nothing for us to say to each other.’

  ‘No? No more falsehoods regarding magical blades and baseless accusations of treachery?’

  I wouldn’t be baited. I couldn’t understand why he’d even want to bait me like this.

  ‘Are you trying to anger me into a fight?’

  ‘Why, Anuradha?’ He looked mournful now. ‘Why would I want such a thing?’

  I hoped none of the unease I felt was in my voice. Whatever this was, if it turned into a fight, he’d win it. I was only a few weeks out of surgery, still adapting to my new eye and limbs. ‘Let me past.’

  He stayed there, barring my path, fixing me with his kicked-pet look.

  That was when I suspected he was going to kill me.

  After a moment, his gaze flicked over my shoulder. Checking to see if we were truly alone.

  That was when I knew for sure.

  I drew my sidearm and aimed it at his face. ‘Move. Now.’

  Calculations flashed behind his eyes. He smiled slightly, sadly, nodding as he moved aside.

  ‘You’re deluded, Anuradha. This is so tragic to witness. You had such potential, you know.’

  I moved past him, careful to keep my distance, with my laspistol trained between his eyes. My hand was steady, still as cold stone. Thankfully, the infrequent tremor in my new bionic arm wasn’t making itself known right then.

  ‘You have no right to lecture me. You’ve abandoned our master. You should be helping me prepare and paint his new armour, not sniffing for scraps around Morcant’s boots.’

  ‘I have an eye towards the future, nothing more.’ He looked practically yearning as he reached for me. ‘Anuradha, please…’

  I fired. The las-bolt flashed, jaggedly bright, over his head. The air around us smelled of scorched steel and ionisation.

  ‘You only get one warning shot. Now stay the hell back from me. Come to me when I’m alone again, Kartash, and I will kill you.’

  He wasn’t going to back off. He was incredibly subtle, still speaking – pleading, really – distracting me as he contracted his muscles with micromovements. A full-body tension done in miniscule degrees, ready­ing himself to make a leap for me. Without my enhanced vision and cognition, I’d not have noticed it at all. It spoke of training or physical enhancements beyond anything I’d undergone.

  But the leap never came. He was perfectly composed again, leaving me doubting my senses.

  ‘Anuradha? What are you doing?’ The voice came from further down the corridor. The newcomer moved towards us with a hitched stride that sounded a little like mine. His just lacked the iron clang of a bionic claw for a foot.

  Kartash tried to answer for both of us. ‘Captain Serivahn, please forgive us for this unwelcome discord aboard your ship. As you can see, Anuradha is… still unwell.’

  What a picture we painted that day: the hunchback, the cripple and the maimed amputee, squaring off in the iron hallway. The dull white light above us cast shadows of sleeplessness across our faces.

  The limping captain gently cuffed saliva from the edge of his twisted mouth. I didn’t move, not even to lower my pistol. A witness, even a Space Marine, ruined as this one was, was no guarantee of Kartash’s behaviour.

  ‘Move away from her,’ Serivahn commanded.

  Surprise flickered in Kartash’s eyes. He’d expected the captain to take his side. ‘Captain, I fear that if I do as you order, she will shoot me.’

  ‘You fear no such thing,’ said Serivahn softly. ‘You aren’t afraid at all, right now. The pious reek of your skin and hair defeats my sense of smell, helot, but I can hear your heartbeat just fine. It’s as calm as a windless sea. Now move away from her.’

  Kartash obeyed, bowing as he did so, theatrically sincere. ‘As you command, captain.’ He wasn’t finished, though. He met my eyes with cringing earnestness, wringing his hands together.

  ‘Don’t,’ I cut him off. ‘I don’t want to hear it, Kartash.’

  ‘And yet,’ he replied, ‘I feel I must say it. On my oath and life, I never did the deeds you accuse me of doing. I swear it, by the fact we were once friends, and by the hope I hold that we shall be allies again.’

  ‘I… want to believe you,’ I confessed.

  Kill Kartash for me, Tyberia had said. Had she been wrong, too? Were we both deceived in the aftermath of the Geller Field’s failure?

  Kartash didn’t press me. His voice turned softer, rich with acceptance.

  ‘If you want to believe me, then that will do for now. We can build on that desire. I will stay away from you until you decide otherwise.’

  I hated the flush of gratitude that flowed through m
e, but I didn’t give it voice. I just nodded. He said one thing more, with kindly eyes and disarming verity.

  ‘I’m on your side, Anuradha.’

  ‘Enough.’ Serivahn jerked his chin back down the hallway. ‘Go.’

  Kartash went. I reholstered my sidearm. Irritatingly, the tremor was back in my bionic arm. I hoped Serivahn wouldn’t mistake it for nerves, even as I wasn’t sure of it myself.

  ‘Thank you, captain,’ I said in the awkward silence that followed.

  ‘It’s nothing.’ He indicated the corridor ahead. ‘I trust you’re on your way to the apothecarium.’

  I told him that I was. We walked together, as best we could. Even Serivahn chuckled at the graceless pair we made, limping together, out of time, down the corridor.

  ‘Did Kartash really try to kill you?’ he asked through that wry smile. ‘When we were boarded, I mean. I’ve heard the tale and read the report. I’d like to hear it from you, however.’

  So I told him what happened, just as I’d told Morcant, just as I’d told Brêac, just as I’d told Owyn, just as I’d told Amadeus during his rare moments of clarity before the Calgarian Rites.

  ‘No one believes me,’ I finished, without anger. Bitterness would solve nothing. I had to leave it behind.

  ‘Oh, I believe you,’ said Serivahn.

  I blinked. Blessedly, I wasn’t winking twice any more. ‘What?’

  ‘I believe you. I don’t pretend to understand the tensions between those of the serf caste. Spear thralls fight and duel over matters of import in their existences, all the time. Who can say why? It’s not for us to judge, even as their masters. Your lives are far removed from ours. But I believe you.’

  He spoke it as an easy, simple observation, despite the weight it carried. We lived on different planes of existence, he and I. He commanded a city in space and his whims decided the fate of wars. I repaired armour and served as a living targeting matrix for my master. But he believed me.