Spear of the Emperor - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  I almost shattered decorum by reaching for his withered arm, so fiercely did I wish for the tactility of showing my gratitude. But I knew better. I was trained better.

  ‘Thank you.’ I echoed his words back to him from all those months before, in the blackness of a Nemetese tomb.

  ‘Can you think why he would do that to you and Tyberia?’

  I couldn’t, and I admitted as much. ‘He has nothing to hide – nothing I’ve found, at least.’

  ‘You sound certain of that,’ Serivahn remarked.

  ‘I am. I’ve ransacked his belongings more than once since returning. Either he’s hiding nothing or he’s hiding it well.’

  Or he had nothing to hide, and he was telling the truth. Maybe I was delusional.

  ‘Why?’ I heard myself ask. ‘Why do you believe me?’

  Serivahn didn’t even give thought to the question. ‘You and I told each other the truth in the barrow when we had every reason to lie. I don’t see why you’d lie to me now. Besides, something in the way he swore he was your ally rang out of tune.’

  Serivahn cuffed the drooling side of his mouth as he smiled and continued, ‘Men only make promises that painfully sincere for two reasons. Either they’re about to die, or they’re about to lie.’

  I had no answer to that, except a weak smile. As we moved on, Serivahn asked, ‘What will you do, now Amadeus is awake?’

  I stopped dead in my tracks.

  ‘…he is awake?’

  ‘You didn’t know?’ the captain asked. ‘It came over the internal command vox almost half an hour ago. It’s why I was going to the apothecarium. I assumed you were headed there for the same reason.’

  ‘I’ve been gone from his side less than two hours. Throne of Terra…’

  This was the problem of not having Amadeus’ armour systems to use as an extension of my senses. Without seeing and hearing through his helmet’s display, I was just a human. I knew nothing outside what I could see and hear, and no one in authority felt the urgent need to tell me anything.

  I ran, and it was the first time I’d tried to run with my new leg. The iron claw-foot hammered on the deck with every step. I was almost as fast as I’d been before, but significantly louder.

  XXI

  AN UNRAVAGED FACE

  1

  In the days and weeks after Amadeus woke, the thing I remember most is that he kept missing. If you were expecting me to describe an emotional reunion or conversations of companionable insights stretching deep into the night, you’ve not grasped just who my master was. No, what sticks with me strongest of all, and what triggered the strongest reactions from Amadeus himself, was that his aim was off. He kept missing.

  Not by much. He still struck his targets, but the shots were off-mark. If they’d hit live targets, they would have mutilated and maimed, but not killed outright. He did not deal with this well.

  During one of his training exercises, when his final bolt took a training servitor in the shoulder, Amadeus tore his helmet off in disgust. Sweat sheened his skin. It dripped into his eyes. And in those eyes, anger danced with frustration. His near-death and subsequent recovery had broken the barriers that had walled away his emotions. I’d seen him furious in the many difficult hours since he rose from the surgical slab, but this was the first time I’d seen him on the edge of his self-control.

  He threw his helm to the floor. It hit with the dull clang of ceramite on iron, and rolled towards me. I picked it up carefully. Kartash offered to take it, but I leaned away from his reaching hands.

  ‘Master–’ I started to say.

  ‘You will be silent, Anuradha.’ He was looking across at the twitching servitor, where it lay downed and gushing its life out from the ruin of its torso. It would die from the trauma and blood loss, but it would take a long, imprecise span of seconds for the lobotomised creature to bleed out. I felt no remorse or sympathy for the dying servitor. We’d always been told they were mind-locked past feeling pain. I still like to hope that’s true.

  I held my tongue, as commanded.

  It wasn’t just Amadeus’ aim that had suffered. Everything about him was wrong now. He’d become a mass of aggressive, misplaced physicality. His movements were convulsive and overstrong. He was unbalanced, frequently dizzy, and his reflexes were ­spasmodic. Once, he couldn’t unlock his hands from fists for a full eight seconds. I knew what I was looking at for I shared some of his difficulties, but that didn’t make it any easier: I was dealing with the assimilation of a new arm, leg and eye – but Amadeus was living in a completely new body.

  Kartash and I were present for every training session, every duel, every practice bout, every hololithic simulation and live-fire test. The Helot Primus had left Morcant to return to Amadeus’ side, with no backlash that I could discern from either warrior. After all, Morcant seemed to care about nothing beyond his own glory, and Amadeus – in those early weeks after his recovery – cared for nothing but his own struggles. There was no misery in him, only anger at unfamiliar failure. The misery would’ve been easier to bear. Seeing my master in these dark rages was utterly surreal.

  More than once, I thought he might strike me. At the end of one training session, he tossed his bolt rifle to me as if I were a servitor with industrial limbs capable of easily catching it. I could have handled its weight, with warning, but the force of his throw sent me staggering backwards, tumbling to the deck. I managed to keep his new weapon, donated by one of the Spears, from falling from my grip.

  Previously, Amadeus would have either chastised me for my failure or watched with an analytical stare as I hauled myself to my feet. This time he stared, stunned by the fact I’d fallen. The frustrations of not knowing his own strength were boiling through him. Everything he did, he did too loudly, too heavily, too powerfully. Even his voice had deepened with the expansion of his chest.

  He didn’t apologise in a way an outsider might detect. He took a slow, calming breath and nodded to two of the nearby servitors, commanding them to aid me. A confession, subtle as it was, that it had been his mistake rather than my failure.

  The first time he crossed blades with one of the Spears in the practice cages, in full armour, Brêac laid him low in three blows. Amadeus struck the deck hard enough to scrape along the metal.

  Brêac was tactful enough to show no surprise. He offered a hand to help Amadeus rise – I knew my master would ignore it if he could control his newfound temper, or knock it aside if he couldn’t. Instead, after a telltale hesitation, he gripped Brêac’s arm, wrist to wrist, and let the other warrior haul him to his feet.

  ‘Say nothing,’ Amadeus warned him. ‘I already know how foolish I look.’

  Brêac had ascended to his enhanced form over the years of his adolescence. It was nothing like the abrupt ascension my master had gone through.

  ‘There’s nothing foolish in this,’ Brêac grinned. ‘But no, that wasn’t your proudest moment, I’m sure.’

  They began the next duel. This time, Amadeus fought defensively, clashing Brêac’s blade aside with focused precision. He looked almost like his former self in motion, though his face was set in sculpted concentration, utterly unlike his usual icy serenity.

  Brêac began to lean in with heavier blows, and their blades crashed louder with each parry. Amadeus’ teeth were clenched hard enough that veins pushed thickly under his temples, and cords stood out on his neck.

  He was hesitating. This wasn’t like missing the dead-centre of targets in live-fire exercises. This was hesitation. He was holding back from delivering any blows of his own.

  Brêac saw it, too. He lowered his spear.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked.

  Amadeus struggled to unclench his jaw. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Rains of Nemeton, you expect me to believe that? I’ve sparred before, you know. You could’ve had me five times in the last two minutes. I
left myself open to see if you’d try.’

  ‘If you do not wish to take these spars seriously,’ my master replied, ‘I will duel Morcant. He never restrains himself.’

  I watched, unable to join in, unsure what I’d say even if it were my place to speak. If Brêac offered sympathy in such a crucial moment, it would undo much of the cautious union he and my master had forged so far. Of that, I was sure.

  ‘What does it feel like?’ he asked.

  Amadeus met his eyes, taken off guard by the question. ‘What does what feel like?’ he asked, his tone neutral.

  ‘Your body. Your muscles. You. What does it feel like, since you awoke?’

  ‘The same,’ Amadeus replied, breaking eye contact. ‘Though my coordination is poorer. I feel like I did… Just more so. Does that make sense?’

  Jeers sounded out from the Spears watching at the bars of the training cage. Evidently his answer wasn’t good enough.

  ‘Spare us your shitty poetry!’ one of the watching Spears called.

  ‘You don’t feel stronger?’ called another. ‘Faster?’ called another.

  Amadeus confessed he was finding it difficult to tell.

  ‘Well, you’re still ugly as several sins,’ Brêac added. ‘That’s not changed at all. And your face is bare of tattoos, which is the sign of a child, so I assume you still need your arse wiped. I’m not doing that for you, though Morcant might if you ask nicely. But if none of that’s changed, what has?’

  Amadeus thought how to answer. He shocked everyone by laughing, and I could tell he hadn’t intended to. The thought just struck him as funny.

  ‘I feel taller.’

  Brêac and the other Spears shared smiles.

  ‘That was a noble attempt at a joke, I’ll give you that.’ The Vargantes champion grinned as he whirled his spear one-handed, then aimed it at his opponent. ‘Now come on, Mentor, let’s have at it. I’ll put you down again like the tattooless baby boy you are, and you can swear vengeance for next time.’

  2

  Time kept passing, leaving the three of us behind. Amadeus improved, but by his standards the rate of progress was slow, and by his expectations it was glacial.

  The Spears deployed to battle twice more, down onto worlds we learned nothing about except that the Hex left them after claiming victories for the Adeptus Vaelarii. Brêac refused to let Amadeus deploy with them, no matter how stridently my master first asked, then demanded, then begged. Each refusal only deepened my master’s fury.

  So much of Amadeus’ identity was bound up in a precision that bordered on perfection. With that gone, he was changing.

  Who was he becoming?

  Out of his armour, we bathed him and scrubbed his skin. Kartash dealt with massaging Amadeus’ muscles, I handled the duties of shaving his head and cleaning his scarred flesh. Around us, the ship thrummed with energy. The Hex sailed to link up with a force of Lions; this was Brêac’s third engagement in recent months, a brief warp shunt from the last.

  We flew in juddering bursts, stopping and starting, plunging into the Sea of Souls and crashing back to reality what felt like a thousand times. This was warp travel in Imperium Nihilus at the best of times, but Serivahn was pushing the Hex to her limits again, burning plasma and the lives of servants as he implored the ship’s machine-spirit to give them more speed. Word had reached us from the Blade of the Seventh Son in a nearby system. They wished us to link up with them, with all speed.

  I tried not to think of the Imperial souls dying down on the enginarium decks, lost to overworked, detonating machinery, as well as falling from simple exhaustion. Dwelling on their fates ripped me right back to my time aboard the Venatrix. Our worker caste wasn’t mistreated or tortured in the same ways, but no one could claim their brief lives were filled with joy. They were essential cogs in a great machine, and the machine had to keep running, no matter the cost.

  The Hex sailed hard. Serivahn and Brêac hailed her as the fastest ship not just in the Chapter fleet, but in the entire Elara’s Veil Armada. I never learned if that was anything more than boastful pride typical of soldiers and sailors, but I know many in the Veil shared the belief. Even now, years after the Hex was destroyed, she’s spoken of in awe for her savagery and speed. Throne of Terra, but I miss that ship. I thank the God-Emperor that I sailed aboard her in her heyday.

  Before we sailed to meet with a strike force of Celestial Lions, Amadeus had again been denied the chance to take part in the last surface assault. By now, my master could have forced the issue. I didn’t know why he hadn’t, but I had my suspicions. Maybe he didn’t want to commit to battle with the risk of humiliating himself, still ill at ease in his new form, but I believe it was far more prosaic than that. I suspected he didn’t want to fight because he was scared.

  Understand what I mean when I say this. He was a warrior of the ­Adeptus Astartes. As we all say, again and again, they know no fear. But to be alive is to know fear, one way or another. My master feared no foe, but with his annihilation and resurrection, I think he feared no longer being the warrior he once was.

  He feared to test himself, in case he was found wanting. If he wasn’t a perfect archangel of the Emperor, then what was he?

  Perhaps fear was the wrong word. At least, I doubted he’d agree with it. Those were my thoughts as we bathed and massaged him that day.

  ‘Nar Kezar,’ Amadeus said one day, apropos of nothing, while Kartash and I tended to him. He growled the name while I was shaving his head. I flinched, cutting the ­barest scratch on his scalp, which he either ignored or failed to notice. Kartash kept massaging the knotted muscles of Amadeus’ left shoulder.

  ‘Master?’ I asked.

  ‘Nar Kezar. Kartash tells me you have been visiting him in his cell.’

  This was no crime, but I felt guilty for admitting it. ‘Aye, I have.’

  ‘What is it that you and he speak of?’

  ‘Very little,’ I confessed. ‘I’m behind the blast shield. He doesn’t even know I’m there unless I speak. He recites poetic verse, mostly. Poetry from Khamun-Sen. I say nothing at all. I’m not there to speak to him. I go to watch him pace in his cell like a caged beast.’

  ‘Why?’ Amadeus asked, honestly confused. ‘What enjoyment do you derive from that?’

  ‘Enjoyment? None, master. But it soothes me.’

  Amadeus considered that for a moment, then said the last thing I expected.

  ‘I owe that traitor a debt of pain.’

  Never in my life had I heard one of the Mentor Legion speak of vengeance. Revenge was a base act, and the desire for it was an unworthy urge that a warrior must overcome in the pursuit of precision. They considered it beneath them, a barbarian indulgence, unmentioned even in the sacrosanct Litanies of Hate preached by their Chaplains.

  He seemed to sense his lapse the same moment we did.

  ‘Master–’ I started.

  He cut me off, steering the discussion elsewhere. ‘I feel there is still tension between the two of you. I trust it is not based on attraction, given what I assume is Kartash’s relative ugliness.’

  We glanced at each other, Kartash and I, before looking over at our master again.

  ‘It is just as before,’ said Kartash. ‘Anuradha believes I wronged her when the Geller field collapsed.’

  Amadeus hesitated. ‘You realise, Anuradha, that I have questioned Kartash regarding these accusations, and he showed no signs of deceit.’

  ‘Yes, master.’

  ‘And yet your belief persists?’

  ‘Yes, master.’ It sounded better than Honestly, master, I don’t know any more.

  Amadeus gave no sign of sympathy, of course, and even less sign of believing me. He didn’t reply that I’d seen my father in those bleak hours, or that I’d heard the voices of dead men over the vox trying to lure me closer, or any of the other three dozen delusions t
hat had gripped me just as they’d gripped everyone else. He didn’t need to say any of it. He implied it in two simple words.

  ‘I see.’

  Kartash chimed in, ‘I have tried to parlay with her, ­master. We’ve agreed for now that I will avoid her when we are other­wise alone. It’s my sincere hope she will come to accept the truth soon.’

  ‘I see,’ Amadeus repeated. Once he would have lectured us on our inefficiencies or expressed disappointment. Now, he let it pass. Was he becoming sloppy or were his priorities just shifting to more vital matters?

  I kept quiet, scraping the razor softly over his scalp.

  He grabbed my wrist without warning. Hard. Hard enough to bind me in place, hard enough that my mechanical wrist squeaked with the beginnings of compression. I grunted, trying to swallow my discomfort, knowing it was only a second or two away from becoming pain.

  Amadeus murmured an apology, loosening his grip without releasing me. He pulled my hand in front of his face, where he could see his reflection in the shaving blade. For a time he just stared at himself, at the flesh that had been scarred but not ruined by the Exilarchy. Yet he gazed upon himself as if he had no idea whom he saw.

  ‘You’re still you,’ I said quietly. I just wanted to set him at ease. I didn’t know the source of his anguish, and this was my best guess. ‘That’s still your face. You’re still you.’

  Amadeus looked into the reflection of his eyes.

  ‘Am I?’

  3

  After he was bathed and shaved, we walked through the ship’s barrow. Amadeus commanded us to come; it wasn’t the kind of journey I’d have made for any other reason. The Hex’s barrow deck was part mausoleum, part hall of honour – here were the Spears interred in temporary stasis before burial on Nemeton, or those that had wished to lie forever aboard their warship after death instead of being returned to their home world.

  It was unguarded. Any that wished to come were permitted to pay their respects and look upon the deeds achieved by warriors past. We walked along the quiet corridors, witnessing statues of Emperor’s Spears decades and centuries dead, their features and forms carved from plain black basalt. There was a simplicity to it, and an honesty. These were the kinds of statues that would be found on any world that hadn’t advanced beyond the Terran Bronze Epoch or Iron Era.