Spear of the Emperor - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Page 26

  I learned months later that these statues were carved by squad mates in honour of their fallen brothers, and it was a druid’s duty to bring the rough work to completion. Ducarius was an expert sculptor, though it was said Tolmach had been a masterworker. Certainly, several of the statues I saw that day looked to be shaped by hands capable of genius.

  We passed each likeness, several standing above stone coffins set into the iron floor, many more standing alone in remembrance while the warriors they depicted were long since reduced to bones on Nemeton. Each warrior depicted was present with honours earned in battle or mementos ­worthy of consideration, though the meaning of some eluded me. Honour badges lay in abundance, their parchment slowly rotting. Broken weapons and damaged pieces of armour, taken from the dead Spears themselves as well as their foes, were displayed with morbid relish. The barbarians of Nemeton didn’t shy away from death.

  On one of the relic tables, lying next to a shattered and irreparable boltgun, was a twist of golden-blond hair bound with twine. On another I saw a necklace of interlinked scales cast from poor-quality silver. These kinds of curios were every­where; were they mementos of family members left behind in the tribes? Trinkets taken from worlds where the Chapter had triumphed over the Exilarchy, or enemies even older still?

  Every statue had Nemetese runes engraved on its plinth. Amadeus paused by each one to read the tales they told. Most of them were the kind of straightforward, uncomplicated verse preferred by Nemetese bards: they stated deeds done and kept away from exaggeration. Nothing unusual, there. What surprised me was the wording beneath each brief verse: additional sentiments left by brother-warriors, much of it bordering on vandalism.

  I laughed at one of them, the sound slicing through the still­ness and silence. Kartash and Amadeus jerked their heads to me.

  ‘Anuradha?’ my master asked.

  I gestured down at the plinth of a statue depicting a Firstborn warrior by the name Davath.

  ‘There.’

  Amadeus read it and his eyes widened before, very subtly, he smiled. Kartash hadn’t studied Nemetese with the same focus as I had, and looked bemused until Amadeus translated it.

  ‘Here lies Davath, who was told to advance with caution and keep his head down.

  ‘He was a warrior to sail the stars with.

  ‘But it must be said: when he died, the Arakanii didn’t lose a great thinker.

  ‘Rest well, you stubborn bastard.’

  The helmet on the remembrance table was utterly destroyed, the faceplate holed through and the back of the skull cradle blown out. Whatever firepower had entered through the front hadn’t even slowed down on its way out the back.

  Most of the statues showed the same kind of sentiments from surviving brothers.

  ‘This is disgusting,’ observed Kartash. My master shook his head.

  ‘No, Kartash, this is brotherhood.’

  We reached Tolmach’s statue, standing opposite another one at the far end of a corridor. I hadn’t known Tolmach well, so I wasn’t certain what to expect. What we found was bittersweet: the statue had been carved by those who knew him best, and caught the druid in a moment of amusement, baring his teeth with a grin.

  I read the words beneath his stone boots.

  ‘This is Tolmach of the Novontei.

  ‘He once headbutted a planetary governor in front of an entire royal court.

  ‘We miss him.

  ‘We wish the Pure had missed him, too.’

  I couldn’t help it. I was laughing again, trying to hide it.

  ‘Who is this?’ Kartash asked from behind me.

  I turned, facing the opposite statue. It was a younger ­warrior, as beautiful in cold stone as any man could possibly be. His angelic countenance was turned away from us, leaving him in profile. Whoever had sculpted him had shaped his features into an expression of serene regard: a soulful young warrior looking to the next horizon.

  I glanced at the name on the plinth.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ I breathed the words in the holy gloom. ‘That’s Faelan.’

  And it was. The mutilated, faceless battleguard that we’d met in our first hours aboard the Hex and who’d died in the battle against the Pure – this was him as he’d been for most of his life.

  Amadeus left Tolmach’s likeness to come and stand next to us.

  ‘Here lies Faelan of the Kavalei.

  ‘When he became a Spear, men of every tribe breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘And women of every tribe had to settle for what was left on Nemeton.

  ‘He was ugly as a seadrake’s arsehole after losing his face in the Battle of Sythaur.

  ‘We were tempted to carve him that way…’

  Amadeus trailed off at the end of the words, looking up at Faelan’s features. He stepped back, letting his gaze take in both of these most recent statues. He didn’t need to say what he was thinking. You had to be blind not to realise it.

  Where else could my master’s new Primaris organs have come from? He was looking at the monuments of the two men whose deaths had allowed him to live.

  ‘Master?’ I asked, after the silence become unnerving.

  ‘You said I was still myself,’ he reminded me.

  ‘You are, master. Different, but still you.’

  ‘I would like to speak with Faelan now. He likely underwent something of what I am going through.’

  ‘His face was destroyed, master,’ Kartash pointed out. ‘Yours is practically untouched.’

  Amadeus ran his callused, scalpel-scarred fingertips down his face, over his briefly closed eyes and the contours of his features, larger than any natural human’s.

  ‘I was never this face, though. My face does not mean the same thing to me that it might mean to a human. Our faces are meaningless. Yet now I find it is the only thing familiar to me. Of everything I own, my face has changed the least.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow,’ I said carefully, unsure if he really wanted to speak of this or not. This new Amadeus drifted between formality and informality with what seemed to be random whims. ‘Contextualise this for me, master.’

  Amadeus gestured to his robed form, riven by the Exilarchy’s torture blades and enhanced by the Calgarian Rites. His bare arms were a cavalcade of scars, as was his throat and neck. Beneath the robes was far worse.

  ‘A warrior is his body. He is his armour. He is his ­weapons. I saw my helmet’s faceplate reflected back at me more often than my bare face. I saw my helm’s eye-lenses more often than I saw my own eyes. Now this body is a destroyed and remade shell. My armour is no longer the suit of plate I have worn in battle for almost a century. My weapons are no longer the blade and boltgun that were crafted specific­ally for my hands. Can you grasp what that means to me, Anuradha?’

  Another sliver of tickling unease. I was Anuradha most of the time now, no longer merely Helot Secundus. It didn’t ring of affection and familiarity though, and I hoped it wasn’t an erosion of sorts. Like a blade losing its edge.

  ‘I think so, master. I can imagine, if not fully comprehend.’

  ‘Nor does it end there,’ he said, distracted from us by the focus of his thoughts. His voice echoed around the tomb. ‘We are far past the time for naivety or stubbornness. Let us cut to the matter’s core. The Spears will never release In Devout Abjuration back to us. They need our warship to fight in their war, and they undoubtedly perceive their need as greater than ours.’

  Here he paused, amused at the path of his own thoughts. ‘Arguably, their need is greater.’

  I saw how it stung him to admit that. Neither of us commented on it.

  ‘I suspect,’ Amadeus continued, ‘that if I ask Brêac to return my ship to me, he’ll laugh and confess she was painted azure and white in the skies above Bellona the moment we boarded the Hex.’

  Kartash looked aghast at such a betrayal
. I tried not to smile.

  ‘That would be entirely in keeping with what we know of the Spears,’ I agreed.

  ‘Even if I demand it back,’ Amadeus mused, ‘and if they are inclined to give it back, what valour is there in sailing our surviving crew back into the Rift? The Spears aren’t lying. They’ve lost every vessel they cast into those tides. The futility of it made them stop trying. We saw none of those ships emerge into the true Imperium. Is it duty to try to return, or suicide by foolishness?’

  I’d thought the same for months. Even Tyberia had uneasily joked about it before our capture. We were here in Elara’s Veil, and here was where we’d stay. We’d live out our lives on this side of the Rift, unless we died trying to cross back through it.

  But still neither I nor Kartash said anything. Amadeus wasn’t looking at us, but at the Spears helmet in his hands, picked up from Faelan’s relic table. He laughed suddenly, a shotgun of sound, harsh and true.

  ‘I have no idea what I must do now. I have no idea who I am. The idea of even considering such things is strange to me. These are philosophies with answers beyond my reach. I have always been a soldier, an officer, a weapon.’

  ‘Are you so different now?’ I asked.

  It can be ugly, when pride dies at the hands of revelation. It can breed guilt. Shame can simmer inside a soul. Most often, it feeds resentment and anger, secretly or on the surface. Only rarely does revelation fuel nobility, since it almost always demands sacrifice. We aren’t a noble species, no matter what the God-Emperor’s texts try to tell us. I’ve met enough humans, in enough cultures, on enough worlds, to know just how rare real nobility is.

  I confess, I held no real hopes for Amadeus. Yet he didn’t seem defeated, he seemed amused, bleakly charmed by the unique strangeness of his situation. Hopelessness can be freeing. I prayed it would free him.

  Amadeus held up Faelan’s helmet, looking into its eye-lenses, considering the question.

  ‘Different, yes. As to how different? I do not yet know. I died. That much I know. I died, and yet I live. I have a new body, given to me by the Spears. The organs feeding life through me were harvested from dead men, from Tolmach and Faelan and others who died fighting for Elara’s Veil, and whose deaths staved off my own. My hearts beat with dead men’s blood. My bones are fused with dead men’s marrow. I have a rank I fought for a century to attain, a rank that means nothing here – and no warriors who will obey me. I have armour and weapons borrowed from the Spears’ armoury and painted in the colours of a Chapter I will surely never see again. Colours that are blasphemy in this region of space, worn with toxic pride by a warband of heretics calling themselves the Pure. Does that frame it in context for you, Anuradha?’

  ‘I daresay it does, master.’

  ‘You cannot change who you are.’ Kartash was ironclad. ‘That way lies weakness, master.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Amadeus admitted. ‘All I want is to do what I was born to do. I am a fighter. I want to fight. I want to serve my Emperor and His empire. I want to destroy the enemies of the Imperium.’

  ‘You want revenge,’ I interrupted him. He accepted the interruption without chastising me. Indeed, he nodded.

  ‘Is that so wrong?’

  I want revenge myself, I thought.

  ‘I don’t know, master,’ I said.

  Amadeus was reflective in the truest sense. His words weren’t softened with wonder, but they reflected the totality of all that had happened to him and were now tempered by the workings of his transhuman mind. Watching him come to terms with reality was like watching a cogitator solve a stochastic equation, parsing down probabilities and possibilities in a stream of thought.

  ‘Adaptation,’ my master continued, ‘is change. One changes for survival, not surrender. These are colours that cut at the Spears and the Lions, twisting old wounds by kicking at the dirt over old graves. Colours that proclaim my ignorance, and that Nar Kezar, that bastard Prince of the Pure, laughed at, as he peeled the plating from my skin. Colours, let us note, we of the Mentors would never have been granted had the Imperium known the truth of the Scorpions’ fate. They would never have cladded us in the colours of traitors. This heraldry shames me, Kartash. That is not weakness. It is awareness. It is the last gasp of pride within me, refusing to be extinguished.’

  Kartash clucked his tongue. ‘The desire for vengeance is unworthy, master. You know this. You must resist these changes.’

  Amadeus subtly raised a dark eyebrow, in his wry and inexpressively expressive way. I realised, when he spoke again, I’d heard his tone of voice before – on Nemeton. He spoke with the cadence of the witch as she’d woven her riddles.

  ‘I am an officer on a mission that can’t be completed. I am the heir to heraldry I should never have inherited. I am a warrior far from the war I thought I would be fighting. I am the son of a Chapter that should not exist, resurrected by a Chapter that had every right to let me die. I am indebted, not by sworn oath but my very life, to a horde of Nemetese barbarians who are likely to comprise the only brotherhood I ever see or feel for the rest of my days. So… Who am I?’

  Kartash’s tone was laden with solemnity. ‘These are dreadful thoughts, master. Dreadful, dreadful thoughts.’

  But I didn’t think they were. In my master’s words, I’d heard the rhythm of the riddles on Nemeton. As for the words themselves, I’d seen a similar revelation play out aboard the Venatrix; in a different voice, in a different way, but facing the same truth. Amadeus was speaking like Tyberia had, when her back was to the wall and she was forced to choose just how she was going to live the rest of her life.

  I’m certain he’d made his choice already. That was why we were down here among the dead. But I suspect he wanted to try his rhetoric on us first, using his captive audience.

  Kartash answered him first. ‘You are Lieutenant Commander Amadaeus Kaias Incarius of the Mentor Legion.’

  ‘A name given to me by parents I never really knew, and a rank granted by superiors I will never see again, to command armies I will never lead. Clinging to that is not clinging to what is, Kartash. It is clinging to what was. Does that not strike you as an incredibly petty way to live? Even a trifle pathetic? If I am not those things, then who am I?’

  ‘You’re a soldier,’ I said to him. ‘A warrior.’

  Another of those thoughtful, bleakly amused pauses. ‘Yes. But what kind of warrior? Fighting which war?’

  ‘I think, master, you have a chance to be whatever kind of warrior you want to be.’

  He looked at me for what felt like an age. ‘Choice,’ he said at length. ‘What a novel experience.’

  XXII

  THE LORD OF LIONS

  1

  Two days later I saw the Blade of the Seventh Son up close for the first time. She wasn’t the Hex, and I’ve made clear before now how I loved the Hex the second I first saw her, but what she lacked in the Hex’s lethal grace she more than made up for in blunt brutality. Her origins among the Black Templars were well documented, but she’d served for a century as the flagship of the Celestial Lions, granted as a gift from one brother-Chapter to another. The Lions had welcomed the gift, and added to her bulk in the ­decades since.

  She was fast, with those colossal and enhanced engines, though too bulky and armoured to be truly nimble. When it came to void manoeuvres, she’d be bloated and at the mercy of smaller vessels. In a chase, or as a battering ram to break enemy blockades, there was no finer warship in the Armada.

  I watched her as she drifted at anchor off our starboard bow. She was damaged, even more battered than the Hex, from her collision with the Venatrix several months ago, and all the battles she’d fought since. Fighter wings haloed her pitted battlements, leaving faint contrails from their streaking plasma drives.

  Even from this distance, the Blade shone in the dark. She was quite a sight, that ancient killer with her hull of scarred gold.
She kept drawing my eye as she turned slowly in the void, several thousand miles away and still clearly visible through the great bay windows of the Hex’s command deck. Behind her, the stars were stained red from a curling tendril of the Elara’s Veil nebula.

  I was nervous. Not because of the Blade, but because of who would be coming aboard from it. Brêac was the most powerful and influential figure I’d met among the Adeptus Vaelarii, and as one of the senior officers of the Emperor’s Spears, his rank couldn’t be ignored.

  There were only two souls that stood inarguably above Brêac in respect and authority. The first was Arucatas of the Kavalei, Master of the Emperor’s Spears, called Swordbearer by his brothers and foes alike, and the ruling High King of Nemeton. I would eventually meet the High King. Fate would have us meet at a mustering of the Armada, mere months after the conclusion of this part of my chronicle.

  The other soul, whose primacy eclipsed even that of Arucatas the Swordbearer, would be boarding the Hex soon. His name was Ekene Dubaku, called Kine-bane, Lord of Lions, the Claw of Dorn, and the unchallenged Warlord of the Adeptus Vaelarii.

  2

  We gathered on the bridge. Kartash and I were permitted to be present, though Kartash had chosen not to attend, citing sundry duties. I was delaying several of my own secondary duties by attending, but I was glad to be without his pious stink in my nostrils, and gladder still to be back on the command deck.

  Amadeus sent me ahead, to record anything of import that took place before his arrival. My new eye lacked many of the more exotic qualities of my lost and much-missed terminus-eye, but it suited for imprinting visual feeds onto my cranial data-spools.

  Every Spear on board had gathered on the command deck, many of them attended by their robed serfs, all of whom displayed tattoos on their arms and faces, hearkening to tribal bonds or newer deeds performed in the Chapter’s service. Brêac, Ducarius, Morcant and Serivahn held court on the bridge’s central platform, by the command throne and the primary tactical hololith table. They shared quiet words and grim, low laughter. The other Spears watched from gantries and platforms. I could hear the low buzz of conversation among each squad.