Lion El'Jonson- Lord of the First - David Guymer Read online

  Blackness took him.

  When he came to, moments later, he was propped against the bulkhead, staring up at the ceiling plates. He looked down. A pebbly intestinal smear spread across the deck plates towards a pair of dripping lumps of meat that might once have been legs.

  The legionary did not even break stride. Marking Norlev as dead, he trod in the puddle of viscera, semi-intact loops of intestine bursting under his enormous weight as he clumped past.

  'You can tell Trigaine, brother,' the warrior said, his deep voice doubled and distorted by the crackle of an open vox-link. 'It's not orks.'

  The legionary disappeared down the corridor, the rhythmic hiss-stamp of powered boots locking and releasing.

  Norlev blinked - suddenly, irresistibly drowsy. 'Legiones Astartes,' he muttered in answer to the urgent flicker of life from the deep void of his brain. He closed his eyes. The Emperor's Angels are here. They aren't supposed to be here.' For some reason, their presence over his world made him angry. 'Yes,' he murmured, eyelids flickering, the life ebbing from him despite the best efforts of a faraway power to stem its flow.

  'A new plan. I understand..'

  II

  Aravain came to a dead stop in the corridor.

  The Thunderhawk gunship had docked exactly forty-one minutes previously in the Obrin's old, long-rusted flight bay. From there. Squad Martlet had done what the Legiones Astartes had been engineered to do. and what the Dark Angels did better than any other. Kaye had moved swiftly to seize the destroyer's command deck, while Trigaine had single-handedly taken and held the enginarium. The remaining three knights had. simultaneously, set about dissecting the vessel's labyrinthine interior in an aggressive search pattern, flushing out and gunning down any and all suspect force they encountered. Their respective actions were carried through with such intensity and speed that would-be insurrectionists had little chance of melting back into the crew before the swift blade of the Emperor's retribution struck them down.

  Aravain, meanwhile, had followed his own hunter's instincts.

  His visor enhancements rinsed the gore-stricken rust of the passageway a deep, penumbral green. The rune markers in the subscreen above his left eye marked the positions of Squad Martlet as they carved up the old picket ship between them. The heavy percussion of bolter fire snarled from its deep and ancient bowels.

  And yet Aravain closed his eyes.

  He fell something. A psychic staining. The way the shadow of a world might betray it as it transited across its parent sun. He ran his fingers down the wall, gauntlet ceramite bumping on the gaps and rivets, the dents left in the metal by bolt shrapnel and flechette rounds.

  Withdrawing his hand slowly, he reached up to disengage his helmet's seals. The displays and the visual enhancements winked off, darkness and the stench of blood and fetor spilling under the broken seals. His nose wrinkled. It reminded him of a time when he had been a boy, playing at hunting in the copses beyond the walls of his father's castle. He had come upon a week-old corpse that some predator had left at the walls to rot. The last of the Great Beasts had been exterminated by the Lion's crusades decades before Aravain had been born, but there had always been monsters in the forests of Caliban and there always would be, even after the forests were no more - creatures that killed as much out of malice as from hunger.

  At the sound of retching, Aravain turned and looked down.

  The remembrancer, Savine, crouched over the remnants of a Muspellian fleet auxilia armsman. His navy-blue staff uniform was stained a dark purple with the volume of blood it had absorbed, bits of him were smeared across the passageway, walls and floor. A lot of it was on Aravain's boots.

  Savine had a lamp pack strapped to the side of her head, another around her wrist. The two beams framed a blanched face as her hand went to her open mouth.

  "I... I... I should have my imager.'

  Ignoring her, Aravain turned his attention to the eviscerated remains. Something in his mind niggled as he studied them, a whisper from across time and void. Undra-sul he murmured, he frowned, pushing the whisper of a foreign voice out of his thoughts, a cold mist rising off the weave of his psychic hood like a dawn fog.

  Stand away from it, remembrancer.'

  'Merciful Throne,' She reached out to touch the prominent black veins on the corpse's cheeks. 'What happened to his face?’

  'He has come into contact with a xenos contaminant of some kind.'

  Savine recoiled, wiping her palm on her flak vest. 'A xenos pathogen?'

  Subvocally activating the vox-unit in his gorget ring, Aravain opened a second, discrete channel to the Invincible Reason.

  ‘Cruciatum,' said the voice on the frequency, its identity masked by distortion, speaking the expected code phrase.

  'I have a body. Ensure that Chief Librarian Elikas and Firebringer Griffayn are appraised. Have them dispatch a medicae unit to collect it.' He turned to the remembrancer. She was staring at the corpse. 'You will await their arrival here, remembrancer, and return with them when they leave.'

  There was a split-second’s hesitation during which Aravain reaffixed his helmet before the remembrancer answered. 'You're leaving me here?'

  'You will be quite safe. This portion of the ship has been pacified and my brothers will be here momentarily. Other duties call me back to the flagship at once.'

  'I understand... There has been a...' Again, she hesitated, mouth working slowly as she stared at the ruined corpse in front of her. '...a new plan.'

  THREE

  I

  'Savine.’

  Her mind had been running at light speed since the medicae had bundled her aboard their Stormhawk gunship. Things she hadn't thought about in years. An itinerant childhood in the Hagriphone Sector. Her mother a concert flutist of some regional fame. Her father an armsman on a Chartist hauler. Her earliest memory was of curling up under the engine outlet feeds, comforted by the vibrations of the pipes. After that, settling down. A home in a new settlement prefab on Drellesdere. A brightly coloured house on a dusty, drably coloured world. The smell of amasec and obscura.

  Her father turning bitter. She remembered getting older, falling in with bad friends, a riot in the Imperial commercia in protest of another tax that she couldn't remember now. Two nights in a cold municipal enforcer's cell. Then more of the same.

  A funeral, the world still drab.

  The images skipped by and away from her almost as soon as she could glimpse them, as though someone sifted through the yellowed hard copy of her thoughts.

  'Savine.'

  She had calmed down after that, ditched the friends, applied to the art scholam in the principia. It was what her father would have wanted and her mother's connections made the interview process a formality. She had gone on to study imagery. An internship with the planetary newscast. A permanent secondment with Battlegroup Tarsius, a bucket corvette called Remorseless, the home she hadn't realised she'd missed, reporting to the sectoral offices of the War Council on the early skirmishes of what would soon escalate into the Ullanor Crusade.

  Hearing of the remembrancer corps for the first time.

  Something external to her own thoughts drilled deeper into the memory.

  Yes, her thoughts said. This one.

  A friend from the art scholam had contacted her while Tarsius was hunting down greenskin supply bases in the Vespion-Ultriedes intersystem gulfs. Her mind groped for the name, long ago forgotten. Bespell. Harriet Bespell. She had gone on to become a composer with the Imperial Symphonia, scoring the planetary anthems of more newly compliant worlds than most Expedition fleets had conquered in the two hundred years of the Great Crusade. In fulsome terms, her letter had detailed her latest posting as a remembrancer to the XV Legion.

  For all the rumours that Savine had heard around the various dry-docks and officers' mess-decks about the Thousand Sons' practice of inscrutability, she'd still envied Harriet Bespell her position. Emperor help her, she envied her more now. Harriet Bespell had had it easy.

/>   Yes.

  More.

  She felt her body - wherever it was now, far from any part in this - wince, but couldn't keep her mind from following that awful thought in its natural traitorous continuation.

  She admired the Dark Angels. Of course she did. Even Horus did, if you could believe everything you heard. What kind of a person would she be if she didn't?

  When, after months of petitioning, she had been invited aboard the Invincible Reason she had written to just about everyone she had ever known. Her mother. Her old commandant in the War Council news corps. Her handlers on the Remorseless. And, of course, Harriet bloody Bespell.

  As far as she knew, there were only a handful of remembrancers attached to the entire Legion. And she was one of them, right at the heart of it, the envy of everyone she had ever known and keen to let them know it.

  It hadn't lasted.

  The problem was, as far as she knew wasn't very far at all.

  No one talked aboard a Dark Angels ship. No one questioned. When legionaries did leave their cloisters to walk the halls they did so hooded and robed, so it was virtually impossible for any human to tell one from another. Even when she did manage to approach one they would tell her almost nothing: sometimes even getting their name and rank felt like prising the darkest secret in the Imperium from its sworn protectors. When they conferred amongst themselves they did so in code, their words steeped in metaphor and literary allusions which neither she, nor any library archive she had been granted access to, had been able to decipher.

  Not once had she laid eyes on the Lion.

  'Savine.'

  She hated them.

  The self-revelation chilled her, but it was the truth, and incontestable. She hated them.

  ‘Savine!’

  Corporal Domnil Vargha, a medicae detachment of the 24th Claristan Grenadiers, human auxilia to the recently formed 2003rd Expedition Fleet, shook her.

  'What?' she said, recognising the faint slur in her own voice.

  'Are you all right?'

  'Of course I'm all right,’ she snapped, irritable suddenly, as though an enforcer had just come up behind her and caught her in possession of a libertarian pamphlet. 'How long until we...' She trailed off as she looked up, past the corporal's barrel, flak-sheathed torso to the empty benches either side of the gunship’s lowered exit ramp. ’Dock?’ she finished.

  'You've been staring at the wall for about fifteen minutes.' said Domnil, lowering himself to one knee and fishing a penlight from his medicae satchel. He flashed it in her eyes.

  She grunted, twisted her head away.

  'Fifteen minutes?'

  'I counted.'

  The corporal took her wrist in a tight grip, silently counting her pulse while looking intently into her eyes. 'Your pulse is slightly elevated, your pupils dilated. Your skin feels a little warm. It’s possible you contracted something aboard the Obrin. Given what happened over there I think we should probably have a proper physicae check you over.'

  A recollection of the medical bay's tertiary and quaternary annexes swam through her mind. Her first day aboard, a bored-looking attending officer had escorted her for a full physical workup and a battery of vaccinations that had left her stricken with nausea and bedridden for a week.

  Go.

  She shook her head.

  An image of the corpse she had encountered aboard the Obrin formed in her mind like a constellation, along with a fathomless deSire to be there.

  'The primary medical bay is a secure area,' she murmured, to herself. 'It's off-limits to everyone except Legion officers and authorised medicae personnel.'

  'What do you want in the primary...' The corporal froze as Savine's pupils flicked up to snare his. His features slackened, as though all the mortal animus that was required to maintain his expression was leaching away. Savine felt something she could neither speak of nor name wriggle out from her eyes and into his. '...medical bay.' He blinked, confused. Then he stood, closing his medicae satchel, and turned on his heel.

  'Yes,' he said.

  II

  Jesrin Siri, administrator secundus, stumbled through the forest of subscreens and desks of his post at strongpoint 1025/lambda and pulled up a plastek frame chair.

  1025/lambda was not a name that inspired images of glory or alluded immodestly to its own importance but it was, he would often remind himself, a crucial location. Positioned centrally along the dorsoventral spine, the twenty-eight-kilometre-long grand processional ran from stern to bow, it was the main checkpoint for the passage of men and machines crossing from one half of the ship to the other. Legionary officers were beyond mortal curfew, but a million men and women served on the Invincible Reason and thousands of them crossed 1025/lambda every hour as they went about their respective duties. When they did, their transit authorizations, ident wafers, order papers and subdermal signum pips needed to be scanned and verified. This was largely automated. High-grade servitors encased in polished metal, outfitted with subtle First Legion devices bearing the manufactory stamp of the Ural forges, issued dozens of authorisations every second. To the men and women of 1025/lambda went the, he humbly conceded, critical work of aiding and supervising the marvelous First Legion machines.

  Drawing himself up to his desk, Jesrin pulled on a headset. He stared blankly at the screen for what the in-built work-chrono informed him was several minutes, wincing at the urgent scratching inside his head.

  'Are you all right, Jesrin?' Munrane sat in the next booth over. Only the moon-pale skin of her face was visible, the dark green Legion auxilia uniform and the wire tangle of her headset blending seamlessly into the gloom. 'The medicae liaison said you were going to be off-duty for two more days.'

  Jesrin's gaze drifted back to his screen. He could not remember when, how or why the urge to check himself out of the medicae wards had struck him, only that it had. It was only a touch of fever and a headache, after all.

  'Too much to do,' he muttered.

  'We'll cope without you for two days,' Munrane snorted.

  'Too much to do,' Jesrin repeated, staring into his screen, hypnotised by its pixelated buzz.

  Far too much to do.

  III

  The Arvus-B, IR-7755, wobbled through the magnetic shear. It was nothing the peri-orbital had not endured a thousand times before. Another man might have drawn pride from such selfless and repeated service to the Legion, but Pilot Tercio Raylan MqGan was not such a man. He sat at the co-pilot's controls with crossed arms and pouted lip, a billion-kilometre stare breaching the forward armourglass as their supply lighter crossed the coherence field and set down in its allotted berth.

  'Hangar control, this is IR-7755,'said Raylan. 'Requesting debarkation.'

  'Request received, IR-7755,' came the tinnily distant voice of the Forest Sepulchre. 'You may commence debarkation.'

  'Confirmed, Forest Sepulchre. Releasing debarkation crew now.'

  He felt a pressure against his arm.

  And again, harder.

  He blinked.

  'What,' he said.

  'You did it again,' said Vina, pilot primus.

  'Did what?'

  'Stare.'

  'What is there to stare at that I've not seen ten thousand times before?'

  'You tell me.'

  'Thee heavy, blast-reinforced plasteel of IR-7755's cockpit doors echoed the leaden tramp of the Forest Sepulchre's stevedores going about their business. The effect was almost hypnotic. Raylan felt his consciousness cut adrift.

  'What are you doing?' said Vina.

  He looked down to see that he had been pulling on the buckles securing him to the co-pilot's throne.

  'You can't leave the ship,' she said.

  He undid the clasp, stumbling on void legs to the blast door to to punch in the override locks.

  'It's against protocol!'

  The door irised open.

  In Raylan's mind, a close, black nebula cloud passed from the face of a bright, loving star. He felt purposeful. He felt g
ood. He took that feeling, and stumbled onto the Forest Sepulchre.

  IV

  Adjutant Marshal Solent Grymn of the Cerethgion Hobilars, an Army auxilia regiment tithed in perpetuity to the service of the Dark Angels, sat in the back of the Dracosan armoured transport, itself part of a convoy of armoured vehicles strapped onto the grav-beds of the service train running from the auxilia barracks on deck tertio to the mustering halls via strongpoint 1025/lambda.

  Large-scale redeployments of auxilia personnel such as this were not made without reason, but those reasons were seldom disseminated beyond the upper echelons of order and division command. Grymn stared at the mousy grey spall liner that coated the inside of the tank's passenger compartment, directly ahead of him. The glassine fibre's matrix was complex, multilayered, endlessly repeating. Grymn felt his eyes sinking deeper, deeper, deeper into the structure's pores, feeling as though it could captivate him for hours.

  He blinked, maybe a few minutes later, as a series of shudders and a final hard bang shook through the metal body of the tank. He was surprised, but curiously unperturbed, to find that the Dracosan had been unloaded from the grav-train and was now parked in a busy-looking mustering hall, the hatch down, a clipboard-wielding administratum official on the ramp. The other nineteen men of his squad were staring glassily at whatever happened to lie directly in front of them. This did not unduly trouble Grymn either.

  'Who died in here?' said the clerk.

  The adjutant-marshal worked his dry mouth. He blinked again, lizard-slow, as the question he needed to ask formed in his mind, prepared for him the way a valet would lay out uniform correct for the occasion.

  'Where are we going?'