Spear of the Emperor - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Page 7

  The baby, in another woman’s hands, was silent and still. Its wet skin was mottled grey-white, its eyes closed.

  I said nothing because there was nothing to say. I didn’t even move for fear of disturbing this hostile serenity. My first breaths in the tent felt like an intrusion. Discord burned in the tribeswomen’s eyes, directed not at me but at the Space Marines I accompanied. Two of the attendant midwives threw handfuls of salt against Brêac’s armour, hissing at him for his intrusion. He ignored them both, but I noted that he came no closer. His restraint appeased the tribeswomen.

  An old woman was clearly the mistress of this ceremony. She wore nothing but her scars and tattoos, and the Nemetese runes inked across her filthy bare flesh were statements of grimy context, like splashes of gore laced with secret meaning. Trinkets and charms of wood and ivory clicked together in the snarled fall of her black hair. The scents of animal blood and fire-touched bronze haloed her in an aura.

  The old woman closed the baby’s nose with a pinch of her dirty fingertips, then sucked at the infant’s mouth. A heartbeat later, she repeated the motion by holding the baby’s lips together, sucking at the child’s nostrils, one after the other. She spat wet darkness onto the ground once, twice, thrice.

  The child still didn’t move. The old shaman didn’t cease her efforts, chanting jagged syllables over and over, murmuring them into the infant’s grey face. She sprinkled a chalky powder over the baby’s chest, then drizzled rainwater from the ends of her tangled hair over the baby’s closed eyes.

  The child uttered a strangled caw, crow-like and pained, and gave a weak kick before falling still again.

  ‘I am well versed in human biology,’ I said, not knowing if they would even understand me. ‘The child is hypoxic. I can help.’

  They understood. I saw it in their eyes, they understood enough of what I was saying to grasp the meaning of my offer, even if not the specifics of language. But the mother whispered a single word, ‘No,’ and looked to the filthy shaman that held her newborn.

  ‘Asta khi’kagh,’ the witch said to the weary woman, and clutched the child to her chest as she turned and fled the tent. The three of us followed. I’d scarcely begun to dry off in the seething heat before the rain’s chill washed over me anew.

  The ragged tribeswoman held the child above her head, shrieking to the dark, windy skies. Her howl – a piercing Iya-iya-iya! – ululated into the storm.

  As the rain bathed us, the child gave a liquid cough, ­beginning to squirm. A moment later it opened its mouth and shrieked its displeasure to the heavens.

  At my side, towering above me, the Adeptus Astartes ­warriors watched the baby’s restoration to life from behind their expressionless faceplates. Rainfall trickled down ceramite plating and dark eye-lenses. Neither of them said anything as the witch took the child back inside the tent. They were similarly unmoved as the sounds of the mother’s relief reached us outside.

  ‘Not long now,’ Brêac said. His attention was on me once more, in the mechanical way a security pict-feed would track for hidden weaponry. I suspected he was trying to assess the extent of my augmetics and, by extension, my potential lethality. When our eyes met, my gaze to his red crystal lenses, my terminus-eye itched and instinctively placed a targeting reticule in the centre of the Spear’s forehead.

  ‘Do you find fault with my helot?’ Amadeus asked. Brêac didn’t answer him. He kept his glare upon me.

  ‘I’ve never seen slaves like these. They’re weaponised far beyond any thrall I’ve ever seen.’

  Amadeus answered for me. ‘These are not mere thralls. My Chapter’s helots are significantly augmetic.’

  ‘So I see. And where are the others? The brokenback that stinks of desperate piety? The maiden with ambition in her eyes?’

  ‘Scouting, lord,’ I replied. ‘They’re watching and learning what they can of your culture.’

  Brêac looked back at my master. ‘You keep odd company, Mentor.’

  Amadeus made no effort to hide his derisive tone at that remark. ‘You have brought me to a mournful barbarian revel, where painted tribespeople ward themselves against us as if Space Marines are ghosts risen from the grave. I would argue, Brêac, that my Chapter-serfs are the only rational humans here. It is you who keeps curious company.’

  Brêac’s laughter was a dark chuckle. ‘Come, now,’ he said. ‘Let’s not fight.’

  But the night had been long, and my master’s patience was ebbing. ‘I believe I have seen enough of ritual and tradition this evening. We must discuss matters of war.’

  ‘Must we indeed? That sounds serious. Is there still a war to be fought on the Imperial side of the Rift, or did you run the Straits of Epona just so you could taste battle for the first time?’

  Amadeus returned the Spear’s stare. I was reminded of pict-footage I had seen years before, of predatory simian beasts sizing one another up, weighing the odds of a killing blow on the first attack. I could only guess what the two warriors’ facial expressions were behind their helms.

  ‘You seek to insult me, Spear.’

  Brêac laughed again. ‘Do I? This is a far warmer welcome than we could have given you. Do you bring us reinforcement? No. You bring us a shattered warship and a single warrior, and you stand before us clad in the Scorpions’ colours – colours your Chapter wears only because better men no longer can. So why are you here, Amadeus? Why did you sail the Straits? Were you sent to watch us bleeding alone out here, and report back to the creature that calls itself Guilliman?’

  ‘This hostility is unnecessary,’ my master said, ‘and your words are vile. I am here for the good of the Imperium. Speak ill of the Primarch Reborn again and I will be forced to note your heresy in my mission archives.’

  ‘Heresy.’ Brêac turned the word into a growl. ‘The Imperium doesn’t exist here, Mentor. There is our territory and nothing more. The people of Elara’s Veil call upon us for aid, not the Imperium. The worlds of this region stand or fall by the blood we shed. The Imperium is a place where the Astronomican still shines, and hordes of princelings like you fight safely at the side of the monster that calls itself a primarch.’

  A sterility filled Amadeus’ posture; a threat too cold to be called graceful. ‘He is the Primarch Reborn. You insult the Emperor’s own son.’

  Brêac’s demeanour remained one of solemn defiance. ‘I insult the creature that claims it is the Emperor’s son. Spare me your indignant purity, Amadeus. We have neither the time nor the patience for it, here.’

  Before my master could reply, Brêac turned to the warlord’s tent. ‘Cyk’eirahx!’ He barked the word in his harsh tongue. ‘Cyk’eirahx, gruach crovuh sei siilgh!’

  The tent flap opened and the naked, filthy witch-woman stepped out into the rain. Devoid of any respect whatsoever, she hissed at the two Space Marines. As if that weren’t enough to make her point, she spat onto the ground by their boots and rattled a collection of wooden charms at them. A stream of unintelligible Nemetese spilled from her scarred lips.

  Brêac gestured to her. ‘This is whom we seek.’

  Amadeus stared at her. He stared right at the wretched crone, shaking his head gently. ‘I pray this is a jest.’

  3

  The word geas exists in numerous Imperial cultures, spelled and pronounced hundreds of variant ways. In some it is a lifelong taboo or curse branded upon a person, becoming an icon of superstition, without evidence, that affects the way they live their lives. In others it’s nothing more than a historical bond granted by tribal shamans to make men and women follow the same virtues as their ancestors. Few cultures apply the term with any genuine psychic talent or supernatural imprint.

  The night we arrived on Nemeton, my master was given his geas.

  The witch’s tent had seemed large from the outside. Inside it, we were crushed together in the dirty heat. I was gently compressed against my master’s
side, my shoulder against the rain-slicked cold of his white ceramite. The great red eagle’s head of the Mentors Chapter, a symbol I’d been raised to serve, gazed down at me from his pauldron. The power pack on his back emitted a constant, vibrating drone that made my skin crawl and my gums itch. When he moved in the stillness, even the smallest motion was a gunshot of armoured joints.

  The witch crouched naked on a beast-hide rug, and we crouched around her, breathing in the foul air of her home. She was clean only where the rain had washed her, and she smiled in sardonic welcome as we took our places. I wished she hadn’t. Her teeth were a battlefield of competing decay. Those that weren’t black were yellow, and those that weren’t black or yellow were missing.

  Clay pots held the reagents for the crone’s heathenism: herbs, trinkets, powders. The skulls of small animals hung from the tent’s support beams, dangling in our faces. The entire skeleton of a bird of prey had been reconstructed and articulated with dirty string, splashed liberally with black ink and blue war paint, to what end I could only guess. One pot held leaves gone rancid with mould, in another was a substance with the viscosity of tar and the scent of digestive acids. In the corner, a wicker basket shivered with the movements of whatever living vermin was inside. I smelled human and animal dung. I smelled hair grease and sweat so ingrained in the air it had been absorbed into the cloth of the tent. A single crudely fashioned glass jar held a murky, separating fluid with round shapes floating in its depths. When I peered closer, I realised our hostess was fermenting several animal eyeballs in human piss.

  Rheumy grey eyes roamed over my facial bionics before she clicked her fingers in front of my nose, watching the movements of my eyes, testing to see how I would react. When I did nothing at all, she leaned closer, running blackened fingertips down my reconstructed cheek. Her nails scraped down the metal.

  I leaned away then, not from the contact, but the smell. The rain had cleaned some of the filth from her fingers, but her skin stank of ancient grime and the birth-fluids of the newborn she’d held up to the storm.

  My withdrawal must have amused her, for she bared the catastrophe of her smile again, before turning to regard my master.

  ‘Show me your face.’ Her voice was rustling parchment. It was the sound of treading on dead leaves.

  My master looked to Brêac, who nodded, but remained helmed. Collar seals sighed as Amadeus disengaged the locks and pulled his helmet clear. He was far too gifted at self-mastery to show any reaction to the stench of our surroundings. Such things are irrelevant to Space Marine senses.

  As the witch looked upon his bare face for the first time, she slipped from awe to cackling joy. Those filthy fingers caressed my master’s face with all the shamelessness of a merchant inspecting a slave at auction. Gone was her wide-eyed wonder. The simple revelation of his features delighted her.

  ‘The condemned men of other worlds are not so different to the condemned men of Nemeton.’

  ‘Condemned?’ asked Amadeus.

  ‘Condemned,’ the witch avowed, and scratched her nails down his ceramite shoulder guard. ‘Condemned to die in this armour, a walking ghost, instead of living as a man.’

  ‘To wear this armour is an honour, witch. An honour I fought long and hard for.’

  ‘Then you are foolish as well as condemned.’ She lifted her hand away. ‘Who were you, in your human life? A boy that dreamed? A child that hoped? Who was the youth torn from his parents’ arms and carried into the stars to die for the God-Emperor?’

  Amadeus allowed no emotion to show. ‘I am forbidden to speak of such things.’

  The crone pressed a fingertip against her own gums, doubtless at what was a morass of stinging infection. She didn’t beseech him for answers. Even his reluctance amused her.

  ‘Brêac of the Vargantes was a boy taken when my mother’s mother still lived and fought for our tribe. I read the story in his lifeblood when he returned. Now he brings you here for me to read the story in yours.’

  Again, Amadeus looked to Brêac, who nodded a second time.

  ‘I will consent to partaking of this heathen superstition,’ my master allowed. He looked down at the witch, a frail woman it would take him less than a second to kill. ‘Do you need to know my name? My rank?’

  ‘I care nothing for either.’ The witch licked the graveyard of her teeth. ‘Now hush. No more talk.’ She drew one of the bronze knives resting on a cloth stained red and brown. ‘Open your mouth, outworlder.’

  Amadeus didn’t hesitate. He didn’t fear this creature. My master leaned forward with another growl of servos and opened his mouth. The witch clattered her teeth in a gesture I took to be disapproval.

  ‘Show me your tongue.’

  Amadeus glanced to the blade in her hand, and offered his tongue forward. I tensed on his behalf, my digital weapons prickling, my terminus-eye itching, wanting to ignite in my master’s defence. For the first time since making planetfall, I felt the nakedness of a combat deployment without my armour or weapons.

  The witch stroked downwards with the blade, swift and shallow, a surprisingly elegant flick. Amadeus didn’t even blink. He kept his eyes on her as his blood trickled into her palm. The slice sealed within ten heartbeats, but it was enough.

  ‘Good,’ said the crone, ignoring the genetic wonder of my master’s regeneration. Staring, instead, into his leaked gore. ‘Good.’

  The blood spread in a wet cobweb, painting the creases of her withered hand. She tilted her gory palm towards the firelight to see better. Already the blood was drying, far faster than a human’s would clot, and she traced a cracked fingernail along the pathways of her palm, not with any particular sense of patience or care, but with a keenness that put me in mind of Tyberia when she focuses on her mission studies to the exclusion of everything else around her.

  All in all, it took no longer than fifteen beats of my heart. She used no trinkets, invoked no blessings, offered up no whispers or chants. She read the blood in her palm; the way it spilled and trickled and dried. The way it reflected the light. Then she looked up and met my master’s eyes.

  ‘You will be free on the day you laugh above your own grave.’

  Silence met her proclamation. In that silence, I wondered if she’d seek to preserve my master’s blood as a holy reagent for future rites. It was nothing less than the blood of the Emperor’s Chosen, after all, right there in her hand. Instead she wiped her palm on an already soiled rag and tossed it into the fire. The rag crackled as it burned away.

  Amadeus saw that Brêac wasn’t going to offer any enlightenment. ‘I do not understand,’ he said to the witch.

  ‘You will,’ she said with curious gentleness. ‘There will come a day when the words have meaning to you.’

  I was familiar with Space Marine expressiveness, and I could see the serenity my master wore was a lie. The dilation of his pupils and the brief, subtle tension in his zygomaticus tendons betrayed his discomfort. Amadeus wasn’t a man that enjoyed mysteries. I was learning more about him in a few minutes than I had during the many months of warp flight.

  ‘I had expected to find some insight in this prophecy,’ he said. ‘Why else would I be subjected to it?’

  She sighed with the weariness of the very old explaining something profoundly complex to the very young.

  ‘This is no prophecy. It is a geas. A geas may be guidance for the soul, or a law of the spirit that will see you dead if it is broken. In one warrior’s blood, I saw that he would die on the night he turned his back on a foe. And so that is what I told him. Did it mean that he must never run from a battle, even if all seems lost? Did it mean he must be aware of treachery even among those he considers his friends? I know not. I care not. That is his geas to live with. The meaning is his to find.’

  Amadeus’ eyes flicked to the rag in the flames, now reduced to ash. ‘And you saw this from a spatter of blood?’

  Th
e witch’s dark eyes locked upon my master’s own once more. She sucked in air through infected teeth. ‘In the dance of blood, I see the shape of a soul. Not events yet to come. Not the meaning of the feelings inside my skull. Just the geas, from the shapes. I looked into the wine of your veins and knew only one thing, carried on the whispers of the ancestors… You will be free on the day you laugh above your own grave.’

  ‘And if I do not... perform this act?’

  ‘Then perhaps you will live and never be free. Or perhaps you will die. I know not. I care not.’

  Amadeus relented at last. ‘I understand.’

  ‘No, you do not. But you will.’ She gave another wheeze that may or may not have been a laugh, then she turned in her brittle-bone crouch, sighing as she eased her old muscles. ‘And you then,’ she said to me. ‘No tongue blood, this time. You are not clad in holy metal like your master.’

  Ceramite was not metal, but I decided against correcting her. It wasn’t my place to educate the primitives of this planet.

  The shaman beckoned to me, and specifically to my real arm, rather than the bionic limb. ‘Give me your hand. Your real hand. Not the one made of steel and bronze.’

  Neither of those materials was used in the construction of my arm, but I let that pass, as well. I looked to my master for him to intervene – for surely I had no part to play in this ritual – but instead he granted permission with a curt nod. The shaman closed her grimy claw around my fingers, wetly exhaling.

  ‘Even in this hand, your bones are metal.’

  It was true. I stayed silent as she rested the edge of the bronze knife in my palm. I refused to twitch, vowing to show no weakness or hesitation in front of my master. The witch tapped the blade against my skin.

  ‘Is there true blood in this arm, flowing around your iron bones?’

  ‘There is.’

  The knife moved. Quick. Precise.