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

  If the clerk noticed the croak in Grymn's voice then he was loo harried to remark on it. 'Gerethgion Two Hundred and Fourteenth?' he asked.

  'Yes.'

  The clerk turned and pointed over the landmass-sized squadron of super-heavy landers that filled Grymn's view, the jetsam of men, tanks and mobile artillery platforms that tumbled about them. 'Then you're going to the Monarch Heavy Lander in bay nine.'

  'I meant after that.'

  The clerk shrugged.

  Grymn shrank into his padded overcoat, as though he had been honoured with a critical objective only to have failed. He felt his own disappointment as a crushing weight when the clerk added a notation to his clipboard and walked back down the ramp. Once he was back on the deck plates, he signalled for the Dracosan's driver to close up. The hatch clanged shut and locked, and Grymn was alone in his own mind again. Feeling desolate, Grymn turned his attention back to the fibres blanketing the walls. 'Stay,' he muttered, though to whom he could not say. 'We'll find out soon enough.' And something on the far side of space flickered, cold, but present, and Grymn smiled faintly as he felt his consciousness sink into the fibre puzzle once more.

  V

  No one challenged Enith Forsault as she entered the command deck from the subsidiary auxilia ramp and made her way down to the operations subdecks. Her authorisations were correct and her orders current. She was currently off-shift, but curiosity was discouraged amongst those in service to the Legion, and she was sufficiently well thought of her by her supervisors that none of them thought overmuch of her early arrival to duty.

  The equipment pit at the top of the ingress ramp was a nest of monochromatic pict screens and floating tri-D hololiths of the Muspel System. A dozen or so uniformed petty officers moved about and, occasionally, through the flickering displays.

  A recent recruit from the fleet scholam on Gravellax, she was a specialist in augury and auspectoriae. Prior to her transfer to the Fourth, and almost immediate retransfer to the 2003rd, Enith had imagined the formulation of the Invincible Reason's mortal crew to be a reflection of the Legion's: predominantly Calibanite but with a remnant core of veteran Terran officers in the senior ranks. What she'd singularly failed to appreciate was that Caliban, until about a hundred years ago, had been a pseudo-feudal death world. Most of its people couldn't jury-rig a recaff machine or interpret an augury to save their lives, and in any case, the Great Crusade had been going on for so long that the Invincible Reason hadn't had direct contact with Caliban in decades, and with Terra in approximately forever. Its crew came from everywhere. Only the liveries and a few adopted customs made them all look alike.

  Floating within her own mind, she watched as what appeared to be a mind within her mind sifted through knowledge and memories and subconscious biases and interrogated them all.

  A woman in the plain liveries and holo-visor cap of a midshipman walked towards her from her station at periscopy. Enith knew her. She dug out the name.

  Meredeth Halion.

  'What brings you to the bridge?' Meredeth said.

  'The Legion's preparing some kind of operation. Off-duty personnel have been recalled to their stations.'

  'This is news to me.'

  'You know how the Legion can be.'

  Meredeth smiled, about to turn away when a look of concern creased her eyes. She leant forwards, squinting in the dappled canopy lighting favoured by the Dark Angels. 'When was your last medicae clearance? You're looking pale.' She reached out, running a thumb over Enith's cheek. 'Throne, I can almost feel the veins in your..'

  The midshipman trailed off. Enith had the strange, wonderful, joining sensation of something unhooking from her own mind to seed itself in her friend's.

  'What are the Legion up to?' she asked.

  'I... don't know,' Meredeth mumbled, never once breaking eye contact. 'We don't ask. They never say.'

  An alert light pinged from the woman's booth and she shook herself as though she had just nodded off at her post. Blinking her eyes, she turned towards it, fingers sheathed in haptic gauntlets swiping through an augury of floating pixels and hololithic light. Enith moved to stand by her shoulder, feeling as though something too large and too, too cold was wearing a coal made of her skin. She had been on a lot of ships and attended the very best of schools. Unlike the average Calibanite she could interpret an augury.

  'What is it?' she asked, knowing full well, deep down, exactly what it was.

  It was a Mechanicum ark. It was a flotilla of military transports and their escort frigates. It was an armada, moving inbound from the system Mandeville point at the speed of the slowest cargo junker in its auspex shadow. And in the centre of the cloud... in the centre... She squinted at the analyticae tri-D. The ship's profile was starkly non-imperial, several kilometres in length, and so slender that only a once-in-a-billion side-on fluke from an augur sounding could have picked up on anything at all. It was a reptile, hidden amongst a shoal of insignificant prey, lurking at the frigid outer limits of sensor range.

  'It's nothing,' said Meredeth, quietly.

  And she cancelled the alert.

  FOUR

  I

  Aravain watched though a pane of darkened, sound-proofed glass as Apothecary Sathariel went about his labours, scalpel-tipped appendages glinting under the subdued lighting, saws whirring, white armour shrouded in bone dust and blood splatter. Purgative oils burned with a blue flame from silver bowls, suffusing what was left of the breathable air with smoke, the entire tableau performed for the watching Librarians in busy, insectile silence.

  'I am still in the dark as to why you summoned me from the Vehemence for this autopsy.' The Chief Librarian, Elikas, was clad in nightshade-blue armour shrouded with subtly off-white robes. They glittered with a purple metallic trim and embroidered sigils from the mystic night of old Caliban. The hood was drawn tight, the merest hint of an outline of a face within: a large, angular nose, the deep ridges of a frown. 'I can only assume that you suspect the touch of the witch, either upon this sorry individual himself or behind his actions aboard the Obrin.' He turned his shadowed hood back to the apothecarion screen. 'I perceive neither.'

  'Trust that I have my reasons, lord,' said Aravain.

  'Very well, but I have told you what I sense. You owe me at least as much in return. Your gift has always been in the divination of that which is hidden. That is why the Chaplains of the Firewing drew you into their brotherhood while most of the Librarius serves in the Dreadwing.' With a nod, barely perceptible, the Librarian gestured towards the cadaver on the apothecarion slab. 'Do you sense some hidden purpose in this corpse, brother? Something, perhaps, that has not yet come to be?'

  'The opposite, my lord.'

  Elikas turned to face Aravain, but no question was asked.

  Aravain frowned, looking not at the Chief Librarian but at his reflection in the darkened pane. His allegiances within the Legion were manifold, a spider's web rather than a clear and unbroken chain.

  'There was an element of premonition, yes,' he said, enunciating his words as carefully as a man would set his feet when walking on thin ice. 'But it was an echo of the past more than of a future yet unlived. It was after Carcasarn. The Lion had only recently divided the legion, scattered us to spread the Crusade and the victories of the First across his father's galaxy.'

  'I remember,' said Elikas. 'I voyaged with Captain Telial of the Twenty-First Order to Tau-Asperidine, and was not recalled to the primarch's side until the second xenocide of the rangdan. I could have wept then. To be denied the companionship of my gene-Sire and father, having sought him over so many years of conquest.'

  Aravain's gaze became distant. 'I was sent rimward with a battlegroup of the Ninth, towards the northern fringe of Segmentum Obscurus and the Ghoul Stars. My barge was with the flotilla that arrived to relieve the Nineteenth on Indra-Sul after the departure of the Raven Lord. What I saw there..'

  He did not need to close his eyes to picture the memory clearly. Humans. Billions of t
hem held like cattle, even after their liberation by the Raven Guard, an entire planetary population left functionally brain-dead by generations of intensive psychic harvesting by hungering xenos. To Aravain it was degradation of the worst imaginable kind, and the people of that world had lacked even the sentience to realise it. To the abhorrent xenos that had held the world captive for so long the humans had been little more than incubators for the psychic energies on which they fed. The iterators who had deployed alongside the Dark Angels Ninth Order had, in horror, declared the survivors beyond redemption and recommended them to the Mechanician for servitude imperpetuis as lobotomised servitor slaves.

  The Great Crusade had come too late to Indra-Sul.

  As far as Aravain was concerned, a final act of mercy for its people was the very least the Dark Angels could offer in penance.

  'What is it, brother?' Elikas prodded. 'What did you see?'

  'Forgive me, master,' said Aravain. 'My experience aboard the Obrin must have disturbed my humours. I have already revealed more than I should.'

  The Chief Librarian studied him from shadow. Elikas was a sufficiently powerful psyker to reach into his former pupil's mind and take whatever answers he sought, had curiosity compelled him to do so. He did not. However, instead turning his face back to the apothecarion glass.

  'I learned the importance of secrets at the close of the Unification Wars,' he said, his mien distant. 'Even then we were our father's sons. As he was His.'

  Aravain frowned, but before he could think whether it would be permissible to ask what the Terran meant, Sathariel gestured to them from beyond the darkened pane. Stepping back from the mutilated human corpse on the apothecarion slab, he pulled off his helmet. His hair was long, the colour of teak, his features angelically handsome, but with eyes as cold and sharp as the needles of winter pines. 'You've brought me a puzzle, Codicier,' he said, his voice transmitting tinnily through an augmitter system built into the antechamber's sound-proofed walls.'After a lengthy warp-voyage in the wrong direction from the glories being won on Ullanor you've my gratitude for that.'

  'Explain,' said Aravain, leaning into the vox embedded in the sill beneath the glass.

  'Cause of mortis is straightforward enough. Mass-reactive trauma to the gut, followed by massive external haemorrhaging. But time of mortis is where things become strange. I would say it occurred thirty minutes after Brother Peliath's helm logs record the shot being fired.'

  'Tenacious,' said Elikas.

  'A feat of endurance that you or I might be capable of in extremis,' said Sathariel. ‘But for a mortal human? Death should have been instantaneous.'

  'Could the helm logs have been in error?' said Aravain.

  'Possible, albeit unlikely. But time of mortis is not the strangest thing.'

  'It's not?'

  'No.'

  'Speak, Apothecary.'

  'This man was dead days before Peliath shot him.'

  'What?' said Elikas.

  'At least he should have been.' The Apothecary extended a bloodied claw towards the pinned-back wings of the mortal's cranium. 'He was suffering from extensive neural scarring. I have never seen anything quite like it. It is almost as if he experienced a dozen simultaneous aneurisms in almost every lobe of his brain. He would have needed intensive artificial support just to maintain his body's autonomous functions. As for running the decks until the arrival of Brother Peliath, well...' A distorted whine travelled through the augmitter pads as the armoured Apothecary shrugged.

  Elikas turned to Aravain. 'Does this mean something to you, brother?'

  Aravain's face remained a mask.

  'A puzzle, my lord,' he said, 'The Apothecary is right about that.'

  'It is as though something was eating his mind,' Elikas murmured, turning back to the glass, 'and keeping him alive. The Lion was wise to impound the Muspellian vessels pending further inquiry. I will confer with the primarch about dispatching a force from the Librarius with interemptor escort to scour the Obrin more thoroughly.'

  Aravain hesitated, unsure how to answer, before deciding that it was best, and safest, to let Elikas proceed with his investigations as he saw fit. It was almost certain that the Chief Librarian had access to lore and resources that he too could not share. At least not yet.

  Instead, he simply bowed his head.

  'I thank you for your assistance in this, master. If you will excuse me, I have other duties to perform.'

  Elikas also gave a moment to hesitation, then dipped his head in return.

  With a last glance at the ruined corpse beyond the glass, Aravain drew up his hood, becoming anonymous once more, before taking his leave.

  Aravain knelt before the carved sarcophagus, his rigid poleyns crunching into the coarse-grained flagstones.

  The sepulchre was a quiet place, a place of reflection, where a knight could pay respect to the fallen, or kneel in vigil under the gaze of those who had passed from duty before them. A knight who felt himself wanting would often absent himself from his brothers to meditate instead amongst this labyrinth of the fallen, the confidences of the dead invariably serving to temper a warrior's melancholia with the sanguine. Others came in penance, chastened by their superiors for a lapse in conviction or valour and sent before their heroes to meditate on their failings. It was a sacred space. No one within the Legion ever spoke of it in such anachronistic terms, but that was what it was. It was consecrated ground. Hallowed. No sentinels stood guard, but the sheer imposition of darkly dressed stone, its virginal spaces and flickering braziers, was enough to convince most mortals to direct their curiosity elsewhere.

  The sarcophagus to which Aravain gave his deference had been carved into the likeness of an armoured knight. The figure appeared to be a mortal warrior, lacking the gigantism, reinforced bone structure and heavier facial muscles of an altered legionary. The armour, too, was of an ancient pattern with which Aravain was unfamiliar. He held a chainsword across his chest, point down. The craftsmanship was exquisite. The Dark Angels as a Legion made little of their aesthetic sensibilities, but when driven to fashion objects of reverence their skill was bettered only by the warrior-artisans of the III or the IX, even if the Dark Angels' work tended more towards the morbid and the melancholic. The lapidary had even captured a look of irritation in the warrior's likeness, as though the entombed knight grew impatient with Aravain's obeisance. An austere plaque across the hilt of the knight's weapon bore a name in curling script. Sar Castis. It listed the date of his death as 869.M30.

  The reason given was stated simply: Service to the Emperor.

  Aravain had never known the warrior, nor why he had been honoured with a tomb in the sepulchre. He had fallen almost eighty years before Aravain's ascension to the Legion. His sarcophagus looked less frequently visited than others, diligently maintained by the sextons, of course, but lacking the occasional oath paper or folded-leaf charm that fluttered as tokens from the sarcophagi of jeremus or Melian or Hector Thrane.

  This was where the message had bidden him to wait. And so this was where he waited.

  'It is right that the deeds of past heroes be honoured, however dim in the memory their battles have become.'

  The voice came from the hall behind him. Aravain had heard no one approach. Not even a psychic inkling to forewarn him.

  'For while men are temporal and destined to be forgotten, their deeds are manifestations of their courage, and that lives on in all who follow.'

  'So long as one man remembers them,' said Aravain, completing the obscure quotation from the Meditations, as he turned to look over his shoulder.

  The other legionary was robed in white, impossible to identify with his hood fully drawn and his surcoat draped across his war-plate's identifiers. Even his voice was nondescript. The only identifying feature was a silver talisman, worn above the robes, a cluster of mistletoe berries worked in polished glass. Aravain had a similar device etched into his armour, green vines clambering up his cuisse before flowering into an identical motif where t
he rotator rings of his hip flexors met the base of his plackart plate. It was meaningless artistry to anyone not charged with the deadly knowledge it represented.

  'It is a brave man or an errant one to stand thus against the march of history,' he said.

  'Such is the duty of a knight,' the other returned

  Aravain drew the matching talisman from his robes.

  'Cruciatum,' he said, his signifier within the order.

  The other studied it.

  'Come with me, brother,' he said.

  II

  Dark heroes dragged by as Aravain and his mysterious guide walked through the sepulchre, the tombs recessed behind granite columns and cloth portieres or stunningly memorialised in caryatid form. There was no other sound but the hiss-stamp of powered boots on stone flags Beneath a soaring clerestory of mezzotinted glass and barrier fields, Aravain paused to look up. The windows were dark, simple patterns of white and grey, but in their hardened crystal structure was caught the glitter of stars, the lights of ships, the flare of orbital debris impacting on shields. This was an old galaxy, a crowded galaxy, pockmarked by the battlefields of ancient prehistory and overflowing with the corpses of failed empires. To stand here, somewhere in the Sagittarius Arm of the Ultima Segmentum, and to look back, in about this direction, towards the Orion Spur, was to dwell upon the star that had warmed the atmosphere of Old Earth a hundred thousand years before: a past far deeper and blacker than any prognostiseer would dare to probe.

  Muspel was not nearly so old, but it had its own dark secrets.

  Aravain could feel it.

  His guide turned off the clerestory onto a flight of stairs partially hidden behind a tapestry. Only short, the flight rose a half spiral towards a small chancel, one of the many discreet spaces for those knights whose deeds and modesty precluded them from internment in the principle promenades of the sepulchre.

  At the final turn, another anonymous hooded warrior barred Aravain's path. The legionary made half a sign in the air. Aravain completed it.