Sons of the Emperor Read online

Praise was the last thing he had expected. 'I… thank you, first captain.'

  'Although you look like you were sewn back together with body parts from half a dozen men. Were you an attractive fellow before the crash, Ulatal?'

  The officer hesitated again. He could feel this confrontation slipping through his fingers. He opted to stick with truth over false modesty.

  'Yes, sir. I was.'

  Sevatar tilted his head, fluid and animal in his movement. The Space Marine studied the human as if trying to see the man Ulatal had been in the wreckage he'd become.

  'Well, at least they scraped you out of the cockpit, even if they left your looks behind.'

  Ulatal said nothing. Holding a conversation with the first captain of the VIII Legion was like trying to ward off an approaching grain thresher with nothing but prayer.

  'Well?' Sevatar prompted. 'You said you wished to speak to someone present for the Devastation of Zoah.' The Night Lord knocked his knuckles lightly against his breastplate. 'I was there. So speak.'

  Ulatal cleared his throat. 'I don't know if I should file these reports. The Thousand Sons cast our Legion in a… negative light.'

  Sevatar still hadn't relinquished the data-slate. 'That they do,' he agreed. 'Though it would hardly be the first report to do so. Who filed this miserable poetry?'

  'An officer listed as "Khayon of the Khenetai", who belongs to something called "The Order of the Jackal". He's cited as captain of the warship Tlaloc.'

  Sevatar shrugged, the barest movement of his shoulders. 'Never heard of him. I couldn't tell you if he was there or not. I paid little attention to the Thousand Sons junior officers at Zoah. They all tended to whine in the same way. They blurred in my memory after a while.'

  He paused, reflecting for a moment. ' "Order of the Jackal". "Khenetai". What amusing titles the other Legions use.'

  A strange insult, Ulatal thought, from a man known as the Prince of Crows.

  Sevatar's stare was sudden and bestial. Not aggressive, but undeniably animal. Something that might almost pass for a smile infected its way across those scarred lips, inch by inch.

  He hears me. Ulatal felt an icy prickle along his spine. Emperor's blood, he can hear me.

  But the Night Lord said nothing, did nothing, beyond gesturing for him to continue.

  'I can't file the final report in this form,' said Ulatal. 'It's judgemental, melancholic and reads like propaganda. And there's the risk to morale, as well. First, I need to confirm the report's veracity. After that, I can gather counterpoints that balance its biased tone.'

  Sevatar blinked at last, and his imitation of a smile faded. 'Here is what you may do. You may file this report as it is, leaving it in the archives for future generations to regard as a mild and anomalous curiosity. Or you can delete it, and no one will know or care. If you do either of those actions, you will leave these quarters, and then leave the Nightfall, returning to what remains of your life. You will never fly a Fury fighter again, but your mind is not broken. Only your body. You will almost certainly be promoted for your service, either to a frigate's command crew or to the rank of group captain overseeing a carrier vessel's fighter squadrons. Is that a good life? A bad life? I do not know. My standards are my own, and yours are yours. So humour me as we paint more of this grand picture. You will rise high, yes, of that I have no doubt. Yet you will always piss into medicae bags. You will always taste blood when you eat, from your false teeth and your ruptured insides. You will always labour to breathe with the single shredded lung that remains in your chest. Even if you are granted more vat-grown organs and accept cybernetic grafts, you will heal, but never really recover. Your body was destroyed in that crash, Orthos. You know that. I see the knowledge in your eyes. I may have no gift for reading human emotion, but I promise you, I read truth and lies as easily as other men read the words of a book.'

  Ulatal exhaled slowly. He said nothing, nothing at all.

  The Night Lord reached for one of his belt pouches and drew forth a fist-sized orb of polished brass. Ulatal raised an eyebrow at the sight of the antiquated holo-projector as Sevatar rested it in the centre of the low table between them. The warrior rose with purring armour joints as he spoke once more.

  'You can leave and live that life, Ulatal. Or you can watch this, and get the answers you've come for. Contained within are no vital records that will benefit the Great Crusade, no damning truths that will threaten either of the two Legions involved. Just the words of two brothers at odds. Words that neither brother wishes those outside their Legions to know. This…' he tapped the activation rune with his thumb but didn't push it down, '…is a matter for legionaries and primarchs. A family matter. Not something for mortal eyes and ears, and certainly not the Crusade's archives.'

  'Then why offer it to me?'

  Sevatar chuckled. 'Why indeed.' His tone made it rhetorical. 'Farewell, wing commander.'

  Ulatal watched as Sevatar reclaimed the immense war spear. 'This recording, first captain. If I watch it…'

  The Night Lord fixed his black eyes upon Ulatal's uplifted gaze. 'Are you asking if you will forfeit your life by learning the truth?'

  Ulatal nodded. Sevatar did not.

  'Let me ask you something, Orthos Ulatal. If you were to die tonight… would you really care?'

  The spire at the heart of the city was fashioned from an igneous blue stone quarried only on Zoah's easternmost landmass. Acknowledged by Zoah's population as the wonder of their world, it was a dizzying feat of architecture that pierced the clouds - a monument to mankind's hard work and its capacity to create beauty.

  Sevatar looked at the tower, his targeting reticule dancing here and there, tracking for structural weaknesses. Its beauty didn't figure into his thoughts, nor did the idea that other people would find it beautiful. His mind didn't work that way.

  In the parlance of Zoah's native culture, the building was called the Ivil'kuuh, translating into Gothic as the Tower of Serenity. The translation was inexact, for serenity in the Zoahn culture implied not peaceful enlightenment, but a condescending sense of noblesse oblige of an educated elite over the ignorant masses. He knew this because he'd read it in the mission data-feeds, and studying the operational data was what a good soldier had to do. Context was vital in a warzone.

  'It's beautiful, isn't it?' Shang's voice was a crackling purr across the vox.

  I don't know, thought Sevatar. How do you tell if something is beautiful?

  'Yes,' he said aloud, because he suspected that's what he was supposed to be thinking. 'Truly a marvel.'

  'It will be a shame to pull it down,' Shang added.

  'The law is the law,' Sevatar replied with the instinct of repetition. Shang's reply was a grunt of agreement.

  Sevatar looked at the tower's base, and the targeting crosshairs on his retinal display flashed across several far more tempting targets. The Thousand Sons ringing the tower stood in ordered ranks, bolters and blades clutched at parade rest. They waited - no, they stood guard - and the only thing that would change that fact would be the words of the primarchs currently in orbit.

  Sometimes the Thousand Sons' efforts were visible, sometimes they weren't. Every now and again, Sevatar saw a shimmer of the telekinetic barrier in the air. Each time, the tower wavered like a mirage behind the invisible wall of force that kept it unharmed.

  The Night Lords first captain crunched over the broken rock of the conquered city, boots grinding down on the dusty gravel of destroyed homes. He approached the nearest Thousand Sons officer - a dark-skinned man clad in the red and gold of his Legion, his eyes ringed with weariness and an artistic curl of kohl.

  'Ahzek,' he hailed the warrior.

  'Captain Sevatarion.' The Thousand Sons legionary gave a Nostraman hand gesture of greeting, palm open and out to show no violent intent, and Sevatar smiled at the courtesy because smiling was something people were supposed to do.

  'Has there been word?'

  Ahzek Ahriman shook his head. 'None.'

  B
oth warriors looked across their opposing ranks of men. Where the Thousand Sons stood in defiant vigil, as rigid as automatons, the Night Lords were grouped in loose flame-unit teams, speaking amongst themselves and eyeing the tower's defenders with a naked revulsion that curdled their white faces.

  The stalemate had stood for three hours so far. Packs of Night Lords occasionally spread apart so pairs of warriors could duel - over abused honour, avenging insults or mere boredom. The Thousand Sons allowed themselves no such laxity in discipline.

  'Is it worth all this?' Sevatar asked, nodding to the opposing forces. In the last hour, battle tanks had been drawn up on both sides.

  This close to the tower, he could feel the telekinetic barrier prickling at his skin. A maddening and unscratchable itch, a pressure that seeped inside his skull and expanded to plump up his brainflesh. He clenched his teeth and swallowed the desire to vomit. For a moment, he thought he could hear the chanting murmurs of the Thousand Sons over the other Legion's vox-links. They sounded ghostly, foreign, unbearably tired.

  'Yes,' Ahriman replied. 'The Emperor would weep if we allowed this knowledge to be destroyed.'

  Sevatar exhaled through closed teeth. Other people's delusions were such tiresome processes to deal with. 'If that were the case, my primarch would not be ordering us to burn it all to ash.'

  There was patience in Ahriman's expression - patience and sympathy. 'With the greatest respect, Captain Sevatarion, you speak in ignorance. We have sailed the tides of the Great Ocean in ways no other Legion can imagine, let alone comprehend. The lore within this tower pertains to the realm behind the Veil, and only we are qualified to judge its worth. The Crimson King's word is the only decree with any weight here. We will take this lore to Prospero and then, once it has been studied, we will take it on to Terra.'

  Sevatar managed to unclench his jaw. 'You have a way of treating brother-warriors like children, you know. The sugary treacle in your tone does not hide the fact you are a patronising Terran shithead.'

  Ahriman shook his head a second time, patient in the face of this tirade. 'It is not my intention to mock you, Jago.'

  Sevatar's features twitched. 'I am returning to orbit to see if our fathers are any closer to reaching a conclusion.'

  'I will accompany you,' Ahriman replied. 'But I would like your assurance that your forces will not open fire on the tower once we leave.'

  'But I've brought up all this artillery.' Sevatar swept a hand across the ruined city, where a battalion of VIII Legion armour rattled and growled on idling engines. 'It would be such a shame not to use it.'

  'I mean it. I want your word.'

  Sevatar stared at his counterpart. 'If I gave you that assurance, you would actually believe me. Wouldn't you?'

  'I would hope you would keep your word,' said Ahriman.

  Sevatar snorted, not in mockery but honest surprise. 'No one as naive as you has any right to be patronising, Ahzek.'

  'Knowledge is neither good nor evil, brother. It gains morality only in its use. If used with malice in mind, it becomes evil. If used to benefit others, it becomes good.'

  The two brothers had been speaking for some time, and it showed on their faces. The first of them was a red-skinned giant, armoured in Tizcan bronze and Prosperine gold, both metals possessing the very barest suggestion of scarlet in their metallic hues. Flowing sigils decorated the armour plating in patterns of arcane tracery. Where the giant's right eye should have been, a clenched slit marred the aristocratic beauty of his features. Of the eye that had once nestled within the closed socket, only speculation remained.

  The second brother was rangy where his kinsman was muscled, ragged where the other was grand, with skin the white of unclean ice and hair the dirty black of chiropteran wings. He sat while the other stood tall.

  This second brother looked down at his own gauntleted hands. He deployed and retracted a pair of great metal claws, over and over, with nasty hisses of adamantium grating against ceramite.

  'The law is the law,' said the pale brother. He didn't look up from his gauntlets. Twin metallic slashes accompanied the deployment of his claws again, flashing from their housings on his forearms.

  At the chamber's edges, several Space Marine warriors stood in silent vigil. Names and faces and helmets that were renowned across the emergent Imperium: each one a hero in his own right. Such a gathering would, in better circumstances, spell the annihilation or subjugation of a culture resistant to Imperial compliance. Now these worthies stood quietly, watching their fathers fight over the right to deliver the final blow to the world below, or to spare it from oblivion.

  One of the warriors clad in midnight war-plate, a man as morbidly pale as his primarch, with a blade-scar across his lips, shook his head as he spoke up at last.

  'Please spare us your moral relativism, uncle.'

  Several of the Thousand Sons, resplendent in their crimson plate, stiffened at the warrior's words. Magnus narrowed his left eye as he gazed upon his brother, refusing to look at the Night Lord that had spoken.

  'If your sons cannot keep from childish outbursts, brother, perhaps it's best if they leave us.'

  The ragged primarch retracted his claws once more. The sigh that ghosted through his sharp teeth was weighted by weariness. He said nothing. His posture of tired defiance spoke for him.

  Micromovements among the Thousand Sons officers betrayed them as they voxed to one another on private channels while standing at attention. The Night Lords commanders opposite them stood at ease, not bothering to mirror their counterparts. Ahriman, first captain of the XV Legion, held his staff straight as he stood at attention: a transhuman avatar of statuesque perfection.

  His dark reflection across the room, Sevatar, was leaning on his chainglaive. It was impossible for a transhuman warrior-murderer to look insouciant, but the first captain of the Night Lords came close.

  'We should—' Sevatar began.

  'Silence,' both primarchs said at once. And wonder of wonders, it worked. Sevatar went back to staring at Ahriman, perhaps wondering how skilled the other Legion commander was with his trinket-laden staff. Ahriman, in contrast, ignored Sevatar entirely. His focus was on the conversation unfolding in the centre of the chamber.

  Magnus the Red knelt before his brother, eye to eye. His voice softened. 'Pull your men back from the tower, Konrad. You think me too proud to compromise? I am not. Not over a matter so vital, for knowledge so critical. Give me two weeks to comb the depths of this trove, to separate the truth from the harmful lies. I will destroy anything that bears the stain of deceit, myself.'

  The claws slashed free. They slid back into their vambrace housings. They slashed back out again.

  'Do not do this,' Magnus pressed. 'Do not commit this lore to flame.'

  Konrad Curze lifted his dark eyes to meet his brother's halved gaze. 'I will brook no compromise. I will give no ground. The library will burn.'

  'Brother.' Magnus' voice was a strangled plea. 'Let me send word to our father first. Let his word be the judgement we seek. He would never wish this library destroyed, I promise you. And I will remain with you while we wait. Neither I, nor my sons, will enter the Tower of Serenity until the Emperor sends his blessing.'

  'How confident you are,' the Night Haunter replied. He had gone back to looking down at his hands. The claws slashed out yet again.

  'I am,' Magnus confessed, passion giving heart to his tone. 'I am, brother. For decades even before my rediscovery and Prospero's welcome into the Imperium, I spoke with father across the tides of the Great Ocean. Mind to mind, soul to soul.'

  'Soul.' Curze's chuckle was the rasp of a saw blade across bone. 'Soul. You talk such pretty nonsense, brother. Spirits and tutelaries and Great Oceans and souls.'

  Magnus rose to his feet. Gold flashed as he turned away in regret.

  Curze's anaemic visage settled into a miserable mask of indulgence. 'Do you believe you are the only one to have spoken with father? That you alone know his wishes and his secrets, and
what he desires us to achieve out here? Tell me truly, Magnus - do you honestly think we are all nothing but fools, capering in your shadow?'

  The Crimson King's features hardened, as did his voice. 'I speak of revelation and vision, and you speak petty words of bitterness. Brother, I'd hoped for so much more. Was your hunger to destroy not sated with the massacres you inflicted upon the people of this world?'

  'Massacres,' Curze murmured the words, 'that you did not stop. Massacres that spared ninety per cent of this world's population and reached compliance in half the time Guilliman had estimated. So do not object to my "massacres'", and do not speak the word as if it were some filthy sin.'

  Magnus would not be cowed. 'The campaign was yours to prosecute as you saw fit. But this library, this lore…'

  'That word again. Lore. You clutch at it, investing it with preciousness, holding it out before you as a talisman. What will you do with this lore, Magnus? Take it back to Prospero? Set it free for all to learn and know, believing you enrich their lives?'

  Magnus said nothing at first. He looked upon his brother, feeling the cold creep of unwelcome revelation.

  'Such hate,' he said, almost in disbelief. 'Such depths of selfish hate.'

  Curze grunted beneath that gaze, looking back down at his gauntlets. The claws retracted once more, then flashed free yet again.

  'It isn't spite that binds me to this course of action,' the Night Lords primarch said softly. 'The knowledge in that spire is the crown jewel of a corrupt culture. Their beliefs should be destroyed to aid compliance and prevent a backslide into heathenism. Obedience is what matters, Magnus. They will be taught to obey. Through obedience, they will become Imperial.'

  'No, Konrad.' Sensing a chance for unity, Magnus matched his tone to his brother's. 'You may be right about the people of this world, but not the knowledge they've accrued. Let me take it to the Emperor. That's all I ask.'

  'I've already told you. I will brook no compromise. I will give no ground. Drop the kine shield around the Tower of Serenity, for if your warriors seek to maintain the barrier once bombardment begins, I can't promise they will remain unharmed.'