Scions of the Emperor Read online

  An old woman bent over the altar, chanting harsh, slithering words. Strands of lank, grey hair hung from her. She was clad in rags, the patchwork worn with pride another symbol of the tyranny of superstition that clung so ferociously to humanity.

  There was no child in the room. As the woman chanted, stone flames flickered into being over the altar, wavered, then vanished. The cries came from the flames during their evanescent lives. The air pulsed with the possibilities of creation.

  A psyker, one given over to the madness her very existence made inevitable. Mortarion's jaw tightened in disgust.

  The woman finished her chant and looked up at Mortarion. She smiled. One eye was pale, covered in cataracts. The other was clear. It gazed at him with a sharp, knowing expression that Mortarion now realised he had seen in Cirkesce's eyes at the banquet.

  'Have you come to join me?' the woman asked with a whispering taunt. She showed no fear. She was violating the edicts of the compliance, and the commands of her queen. Perhaps she did not know about the new realities of Absyrtus, but Mortarion was sure she did. There was too much mockery in her gaze for her not to.

  This creature was everything he strove to purge from the galaxy. She distorted reality around her. It would be a mistake, though, simply to destroy her and leave. There was something here he must know.

  'I came to learn the truth of Absyrtus,' he said.

  'Then you have found it.'

  'What are you?'

  'The one who does not hide.'

  'There are others like you who hide.'

  'All others,' she said, and cackled. 'Do you believe in surrender, great lord?'

  'No,' he said. That was the easiest truth he had spoken in many hours.

  'No. Neither does Absyrtus. It believes in survival.'

  'Which you are dooming through your words.'

  The woman ran a clawed finger across the altar, and the stone flowed like water, spiralling into beckoning patterns. 'There is nothing here that you can end,' she said.

  'You are mistaken.'

  'I think not.' The woman smiled and smiled and smiled. Mortanon left, then. He did not kill her. Not yet. He needed to determine how deeply the infection she represented had spread. As he walked from her hovel, she whispered, 'Listen, Mortarion of Barbarus. Listen well.'

  Mortanon listened. He looked. He did both with renewed suspicion. He made his way slowly back to the royal palace, and Temnis was transformed. He had already made a new judgement before he stepped back into the alleyway. The path he had tried to walk was the wrong one. The attempt to do so had blinded him.

  No longer. There were psykers everywhere, consumed by the irrationality they had embraced. They infested this world like a plague. Mortarion heard now the fragments of whispers that crawled into the night from the windows of the hab complexes. He saw the strange patterns scratched into the soot in shadowed corners of buildings. When he passed celebrations in the distance and the participants did not see him, he saw the dances that were too frenzied. He saw the light of the fires bend unnaturally.

  And he heard, from the darkest streets, the child's cry of the flames.

  Typhon and the Deathshroud were waiting for him at the entrance to the palace when he returned. They saw what was written on his face. He did not have to say a word. They took up arms and marched with him, heading back to the Land Raiders that would return them to the space port and to the Fourth Horseman. Mortarion looked back once as they left the palace. On the top floor, lights blazed from the vast windows of the throne room. They silhouetted Cirkesce.

  You tried a different kind of sorcery. It won't save you either.

  He said nothing on the journey, except to issue a terse command recalling all troops to their landing ships and ordering a return to the orbiting fleet. The take-off of the Fourth Horseman turned night into day across Temnis, the fires of its rise even more terrible than those of its descent.

  Mortarion broke his silence at last when he and Typhon were on the bridge once more, watching the city diminish below, and then disappear beneath the clouds.

  'Ask me what you want to know,' he said.

  'What did you see? Are we abandoning a conquest?'

  'I saw the truth. I saw that you were right, Calas. The liberation we bring is death. There is nothing here to conquer. There is nothing to give to this world except death.'

  'The compliance was a sham?'

  'It was. The sorcery of this world is not the tool of its tyrants. It infects its society from top to bottom. There is nothing to be saved.' He paused, turning to the weapons officers. 'Ready cyclonic torpedoes.'

  'By your command, Lord Primarch.'

  'Humans must be freed from sorcery,' Mortarion said to Typhon. 'But they cannot be reasoned out of it. So we must purge it by whatever means possible. What cannot be saved, must be turned into an example.'

  'Will examples be enough?' Typhon asked.

  'Not on their own. The force that creates the examples must be known. And it must be without mercy.'

  The Fourth Horseman reached orbit. The sphere of Absyrtus turned slowly before Mortarion. Its clouds no longer concealed anything from him. He saw clearly. He saw the path that was his. It was the one that had always been his.

  'Cyclonic torpedoes standing by, Lord Primarch,' the officer reported.

  He had halted the swing of his scythe. He would complete the strike now, and he would never hesitate again.

  You must become Death.

  If he had to be the greater horror in order to save humanity from itself, then that would be the burden he would shoulder.

  'Launch torpedoes,' he said. 'Turn that planet into a cinder.' He watched the streak of the torpedoes burning into the atmosphere, and they were his hand too. He was reaching down to Absyrtus. With his scythe, he was bringing his verdict.

  It was, he now knew, the only verdict he would ever give.

  Confounding the foe is one sure way to victory. When this strategy is pursued, war becomes a game of opposites and expectations.

  At all times, present your enemy with the reverse of the truth. When you are vulnerable, appear strong, when you are strong, appear vulnerable. When close by your enemy, appear far from him, and when far away, appear close by. Weakness may thus be turned into strength.

  A cunning strategist will show the enemy a mirror image of the truth, but the master strategist will accord his lies with his enemy's expectations. Learn what your enemy believes of you. Present that image to him at all times. In using his intelligence as a cloak, you might hide your intentions, and strike as a thunderbolt from a cloudless sky.

  - Jaghatai Khan, Tenets of War

  The Storm Eagle hovered uncertainly over the mountainside. The site landing pad had been taken out in the attack, forcing the ship to put down directly onto the slope. Its engines whined, struggling to keep it over the flattest part of the terrain in the strong crosswind. After five minutes shifting from side to side, the Storm Eagle touched down awkwardly. Landing claws gouged white scratches into rock as they slipped. Engines howled again, pushing the ship back into position. Tentatively, the machine sank into its hydraulics. The engines cycled down and finally cut out. The craft sat unmoving a moment, wind screeching around its body.

  The front ramp opened slowly, as if the Storm Eagle feared knocking itself from its precarious perch. Red light spilled out into the dim afternoon. An angry voice, distorted by the vox-mitter of early pattern power armour, came with it.

  'Curse it all, can this landing sequence go any more slowly?'

  'The landing area is unsafe, Warsmith Xyrokles.' The second had the long-suffering air of a man often criticised.

  'Always got an answer, Phideark,' growled Xyrokles. 'It is one of your least attractive habits'

  'Yes, Warsmith.'

  'And stop agreeing with me when I insult you. A dignified silence is more becoming.'

  'Yes, Warsmith.'

  Within the ship a group of Iron Warriors waited for the ramp's cautious descent. T
he Warsmith stepped out as soon as the edge bit the mountainside. The slope was such that the ramp was angled awkwardly, and not all of the toothed lip made contact with the ground. The ship creaked ominously. Xyrokles looked up sharply at the tilted prow.

  'Steady, my brothers,' he said. 'It would be embarrassing if we lost our ship to heavy footsteps.'

  As lightly as a transhuman can move in power armour, the Iron Warriors disembarked, fanning out along the slope, guns ready. Xyrokles stomped ahead of them, his heavy boots slipping on the loose rock.

  'What are you doing?' he said, waving at his warriors impatiently. 'Quickly! If they are still up there we are all dead.' He looked up at the construction site. 'We are sitting targets here. Who trained you fools? Get up to the ridge, cover Phideark and me! Go!' He waved them forwards. The servo-arm mounted on his power plant half extended with his irritation. The warriors lumbered up the mountainside. Xyrokles and Phideark followed.

  'What a mess,' Xyrokles said when they crested the brow.

  'They have done a thorough job, my lord,' said Phideark.

  'Shut up, Phideark,' snapped Xyrokles. He stamped on. The level ground the construction teams had so painfully cut from the mountainside was cratered and fouled with construction machinery carefully positioned before being destroyed to prevent landing there.

  Xyrokles waited for his bodyguards to fan out further before venturing on. He stopped again, shaking his head at a collection of new buildings, now all in flames. Black smoke twisted sideways in the wind.

  'Everything, command centre, landing pad, comms arrays. All of it gone.'

  A massive turret, which had been close to completion, had been levelled with melta-charges. Bubbled flows of melted plascrete clung to the slopes, frozen quickly in the mountain chill.

  Fires from the construction site blew flat along the ground, only their ferocity keeping them from being blown out.

  'This happened recently,' said Xyrokles. 'What was the exact time contact was lost?'

  'Fifty-second segment, four hundredth millichron,' Phideark said faithfully.

  'A few hours ago at most. These fires are still burning.' Xyrokles looked up at the mountainside where fresh craters made white starbursts fringed in black on the reddish stone. 'Those bastards are probably still up there, watching us.'

  'I detect no power sources from active vehicles or war-plate.'

  'It means nothing.' Xyrokles moved on, skirting a burned out earth mover slumped into the remains of its tracks. 'All this work, all wrecked, a week away from the installation of the primary armament.'

  They spotted the first bodies near the outer defence lines. A firing line of Iron Warriors lay scattered by a missile hit. More were dead behind the short parapet guarding the principal blast doors, their wounds unmistakably inflicted by power weapons. 'There's one of theirs,' Phideark pointed.

  'Shut up, Phideark. Shut up, shut up now. I am trying to think,' said Xyrokles. He went over to the dead warrior anyway. 'Typical hit and run tactics.' He kicked the dead warrior's chest-plate. His gunmetal boot made a dull sound on the white ceramite 'White Scars! I knew it was too good to be true when Harkaton said he'd driven off their warfleet. That attack on the outer solar line was a distraction to allow the slippery cheminerikoi to sneak in here.' He used an Olympian profanity with no true parallel in Gothic. There were several near translations of varying levels of offensiveness. 'But if they snuck in, it means their strength will be low. A raiding party, come to make our lives difficult - well, they'll regret it.' He stared up at the fire gutting the command post and shook his head again. 'Have you alerted the other sites?'

  'Yes, Warsmith, as requested.' He paused. 'Site five has been hit. Similar timing to this.'

  Xyrokles swore. Phideark stood stoically by as his commander worked his way through five city-states'-worth of gutterspeak.

  'The same result?'

  'The same. Total destruction.'

  'Damn it all, Phideark!' He looked down to the Storm Eagle. 'What's that still doing there? Order the ship up. Do I have to do everything? It's vulnerable. Tell the men to start site recovery.'

  'Shall we begin reconstruction?'

  Xyrokles snorted. 'No. The enemy will keep knocking down every castella we put up. It's a wearying game. We need to deal with them before we can deal with that.' He pointed at the burning complex.

  'Then what are your orders, my lord? Shall I order patrols out around the site?'

  'Are you joking with me, Phideark?'

  'No, my lord.'

  'Then attempt more workable suggestions!'

  'Then, we defend.'

  'Also idiotic. They will hit us and hit us and hit us, that's what these savages do. We can build as many forts as we care to, it won't help. We don't have the manpower in-system to protect all our assets here, not while they are half-finished.'

  'Then your suggestions, Warsmith, so that I might act upon them.'

  'That's more like it, captain. We do not pursue, and we do not defend. We have to tempt them out get them to attack us, and box them in.' He nodded at his own suggestion. Lens glow glanced off the dull metallic armour plates. 'Yes. The only way to stop something that loves to move is to give it no opportunity to move at all. Order up our orbital fighters and gunships, standard search pattern.'

  'My lord, we have less than half a grand company at our disposal. The weather is closing in. We are unlikely to find them.'

  'Finding them is not the point,' said Xyrokles. 'They'll be expecting us to search. Let's not disappoint them.'

  Some six hundred metres above, five White Scars stood in guard around a rocky eminence. Four wore the insignia of clan lords, the bond-kin of a khan of the Ordu. The fifth was the Khan Ishigu of the Third Tempest. He was a warrior of high rank and renown, but at that moment he stood with his warriors as a common sentry, for he waited on the Khan of Khans, Jaghatai, primarch of the White Scars.

  The primarch knelt on a boulder above them, magnoculars to his eyes. He was leaning far out over the drop, thin air and a painful, fatal tumble down sharp rocks awaiting should he fall. Ishigu Khan and his men did not fear for their gene-father. He was the lord of all Khans, a son of the Emperor. Such a slip for him was unthinkable. A man might as well expect the sky to stumble.

  Runic notifiers blinked in Ishigu's helm. He evaluated them and, finding danger in the warning, addressed his lord.

  'My Khan,' he said. 'Two groups of enemy aircraft are moving in from the west and south on intersecting courses. Five lightning crows, a dozen gunships, mixed classes. They will be over our position within ten minutes.'

  The Khan of Khans lowered his magnoculars.

  'They begin their search for us, Ishigu.' He grinned back at his men. 'They will find nothing. We leave now.'

  Xyrokles' men engaged in constant searches to no effect. In the meantime, three more sites were attacked and badly damaged. All was as the Warsmith expected, and so he was not unduly concerned.

  'I know how this Legion thinks,' Xyrokles told his five line captains. 'We must behave as they expect, in order to hide our intentions.'

  'Why, lord?' asked Captain Melias, head of Xyrokles' armoured century.

  'Because it is what Jaghatai Khan would do,' said Xyrokles. 'Helpfully, their primarch has put down a number of his thoughts on the nature of strategy. Misdirection is a keystone of his tenets of war.'

  'They fight dirty,' said Captain Herakt.

  'Dishonestly,' corrected Xyrokles.

  Herakt picked up one of a number of slender pamphlets from the table. It was made of pounded grass paper, and written in hand-painted Chogorian ideograms. He held it open in his dull metal fists. His helm clicked as his suit cogitator attempted a translation.

  'Know one's self, know one's enemy. If you do not know your nature it cannot be honed, but remains blunt. If you do not know your enemy's nature your attack will likewise be blunted…' Herakt laughed. 'What gnomic nonsense is this?'

  'It is irritatingly composed, but taken togethe
r there is a certain poetry to it,' said Xyrokles.

  'He's not exactly a plain speaker, is he?' Herakt tossed the book back onto the table.

  'He is not. But the concepts expressed in these books are valid.' Xyrokles tapped a small stack of the pamphlets. 'They are a useful insight into his mind and the tactics of his Legion.'

  'You've been studying these texts, my lord?' said Herakt.

  'I have. There are more forms of war than ours alone. A mastery of sieges is of little use when your opponent scorns walls. I told you, I know this primarch.' He poked his finger into the tri-d map on the chart desk they stood around. The projection fizzed around his finger. 'Enough to know that station nine will be next.'

  'That's my site,' said Captain Carazhk, looking up from a book of logistical tables suddenly.

  'I am glad you are paying attention,' said Xyrokles.

  'Then I shall evacuate,' said Carazhk.

  'You will do no such thing,' said Xyrokles.

  'Stand easy, brother captain, there's only a few of them,' said Herakt mockingly.

  'Easy to say when it is not your men at risk,' said Garazhk, irritated easily by Herakt's baiting, as he always was. 'Why should we stand and die? Nobody else has had any luck against them. Warsmith, it makes no sense.'

  'It makes perfect sense,' said Xyrokles.

  'I protest, my lord,' said Garazhk. 'If you order me to fight, I shall, but I request reinforcements. Divided across the construction sites as we are, we have insufficient manpower at any one to stop them. We must meet them in force, and let them break themselves on the walls of our bodies. We have lost, how many?'

  'Fifty-nine of seven hundred men,' said Melias.

  'None of them yours,' said Captain Kyrix sourly.

  'There will be no reinforcements,' said Xyrokles.

  'Then… what?' said Garazhk. 'You want me to stand there and die?'

  'I want you and your line company to make a show of defying them. You know they are coming, make them pay. Those are your orders.'

  'We'll still be dead,' grumbled Garazhk.

  'That is up to you,' said Xyrokles. His captains looked at each other. Xyrokles was exhibiting a great deal of patience, and he was not a patient man. The only time he did not snap and berate his warriors was when he had some kind of clever strategy in mind. These were usually successful, but costly in blood. 'Some of us are going to die,' that's what the captains' shared glances said.