Honour Imperialis - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  The Hadris Rift 40th Armoured showed no such disorganisation. Ordered rows of tents stood in ranks a little way from the tank garages. Orbital landers had brought down the structures almost whole, leaving enginseers and servitors to reinforce the buildings with armour plating against the ashy wind.

  The camp of the Third Skarran Rangers was Guard standard. Billets and tents in an ordered spread around the few landers that remained, with regimental leaders stationed in the smaller staff tents away from the troops. Unlike the Kiridians, the Skarrans had left ample room for supply dropships in their formation, while the Irregulars were forced to land their supplies a kilometre from their camp and drive the crates in on cargo loaders and lifter Sentinels.

  Seth’s violet eyes drank in the scene, his gaze finally sweeping to the Cadian contingent. Tents in the black and grey of urban camouflage stood out stark against the dry grass of the plateau. A single lander punctuated the ordered ranks of tents – a behemoth of a craft with its swollen hold capable of holding over a hundred Chimeras. Patches of grass were quickly slabbed over with rockcrete for efficient supply drop landing sites. Each of the 88th’s three divisions were separated by a short distance, with the soldiers’ tents in rows near central communal mess buildings and officer barracks – the latter of which were landed from the troop ships in a matter similar to the garages of the Hadris Rift 40th. The Cadians used their great lander, Unyielding Defiance, as a fully-equipped garage for their vehicles.

  Seth blinked, bringing his focus back to the present. The great bronze bell in the hangar bay of Unyielding Defiance rang out in the distance, signalling muster for Major Crayce’s elements of the 88th. Wiping his lips with a bloodstained handkerchief, the psyker looked back at the tarot cards laid out on the small wooden table. A passing Chimera shook the tent and set the table rocking. Seth’s powers earned him distance from the rank and file, but a military camp was never a noiseless place. It took all the psyker’s meditative powers to focus sometimes. Blocking out the noise of rumbling tanks, clashing tools, marching boots, drilling men, live fire exercises… The very air tasted of iron and machine oil…

  His focus had drifted again. Seth retrained his attention on the tarot cards spread before him, seeing each at first with his natural eyes. They were simple, plain white pieces of durable card, devoid of decoration on the back, bare of art on the front. The sensitive nerves behind Seth’s eyes pulsed with the genesis of a migraine – a bad one, he could tell, it’d likely be one of the ones that left him almost blind for hours. Smiling skullishly, he whispered thanks to the Emperor. The pain was a message to pay heed to his duties, and it helped him focus on matters of the internal, not the chaos of the camp. A timely blessing.

  He touched the first naked card with an ungloved fingertip.

  A body, browned with age and blackened in death, sits locked within a great throne of gold, steel and brass. The corpse’s mouth is open, projecting a silent scream that echoes through the unseen layers of the universe. Before the howling cadaver, a legion of angels kneels, crying violet tears.

  The God-Emperor, Inversed

  Seth was gone from his body now, deep within the tarot reading, but maintained a faint connection to his physical form. He sensed its muscles lock tight, a rictus forming across his own lips that he could neither feel nor control. A warm tickle on his chin – he was drooling already, and that was bad – threatened to violate his immersion and drag him back to the world of flesh, blood and bone. A second’s refocusing; a twist of mental strength, like a contortionist escaping his bonds.

  The temperature in his skull lowered again. Soothing. Very soothing. A mercy.

  Unsurprisingly, the God-Emperor was an auspicious card in the Cadian Tarot. When drawn from the deck, it bespoke of warp travel, of discovery, of hope in the cold depths of space. Inversed, when drawn upside down, it foretold of the warp’s malign touch infecting the servants of the Imperium. A hopeless war. Death from the far reaches of space.

  Seth returned enough of his consciousness to touch the second card, unpleasantly racked by the fast-growing headache. He tasted blood. Was he bleeding from his nose? Already?

  An eye. The Eye. A wound in reality, an open scar in space where the bruise-purple and blood-red eye of Chaos leered into the galaxy. The stars die around the Eye: some fading into cold blackness, others bursting in white hot torment. The Eye stares dully, as it always does, a malicious glare with little emotion beyond distant hate.

  But the nebula flares, tendrils spreading across space.

  The Eye has opened.

  The Great Eye

  Seth lifted trembling fingers from the card, sparing himself the vision. An uncomfortable constriction in his throat coupled with the flood of bitter saliva in his mouth threatened a violent purge of his stomach soon.

  The Great Eye… The Archenemy’s heart and the bastion of his strength. To draw this card was to foretell of war against Chaos, or an amplification of a current conflict. Specifically, it foretold that the conflict would be familiar to those born on Cadia, for the Great Eye was something they lived with each day of their lives.

  Seth’s queasiness arose from where the card had been drawn. Directly after the God-Emperor inversed? The second and fourth cards were drawn as signifiers, bringing clarity to the ones preceding them. Dark, dark portents.

  Something will intensify this war. Something black and hateful from the warp.

  Seth touched the third card, unaware of the bloody drool pinking his teeth.

  The galaxy burns. A figure stands in ancient armour, wreathed in a billion screaming souls that encircle him like mist. In its right gauntlet, Holy Terra blackens and crumbles. A demigod’s blood drips from the talons. In the dim reaches of the vision, almost an afterthought, a distant howling light fades into darkness and silence. The figure smiles for the first time in ten thousand years.

  The Despoiler, Inversed

  The vision pained him, but Seth quenched the agony with cold logic. The card is inversed. The psychic resonance – the card’s ‘art’ – is not the vital factor here. He caught his breath, removing the fingertips from its gentle rest against the blank card.

  When drawn, the Despoiler card is the bane of life, the truest indicator of coming loss and unavoidable bloodshed for the Imperium of Man. But inversed? The psyker breathed deeply, trying to calm his aching heart as it pounded against his thin ribs. He’d never seen the card drawn inversed before. Indeed, he’d only drawn the Despoiler once in his life before this moment, in the weeks before the invasion of Cadia, three years before.

  Inversed… A rival for the Despoiler? Someone destined to stand against the Archenemy’s machinations? Seth’s fingertips hovered above the card. The clarity of the prophecy was clouded, ruined by his own unfamiliarity with the card he’d drawn. So tempting to touch it again and renew the fierce vision. Just a few moments of pain. He could take it.

  No.

  He couldn’t.

  A great portion of his training in the control of his wild, unreliable talent emphasised the limits of the mortal mind and the physical shell that carried it. To read the Emperor’s Tarot was to open oneself to the warp, and caution was not a virtue to be discarded on a whim. This reading was already devastatingly potent, which lent credence to its import and accuracy. Seth’s sight was blurred from the pulsing migraine and he smelled vomit, the scent thick and tangy, coupled with a lumpy warmth in his lap. Momentary blackouts. He’d not even felt the purging of his stomach.

  One card remained untouched. The signifier. The card that would put a frame of reference on The Despoiler Inversed. His hand stayed raised above it for a second, a minute, an hour – Seth had no idea of external time with his thoughts so adamantly turned inward. He could feel his own life ticking away in time to his body’s natural cycle, and felt the unnatural acceleration, the degeneration of his cells, from exerting his psychic strength day after day.

&n
bsp; He sensed his own smile but did not feel it. To expend one’s life in service to the Emperor was all he wished. He was Cadian Shock through and through, no matter if he was banned from marching and training alongside them.

  His mother’s eyes had been violet. She had died for the Imperium. He would die for the Imperium, too. The thought made his blood burn with pride. A life spent bringing death to the Emperor’s foes is a life lived in full. Those words were etched in the stone above the doors of every building in Kasr Poitane, where Seth was born.

  Now. Now was the time. What one soul would be the defiant fulcrum upon which the whole Reclamation spun? Who would be the bane of the Despoiler’s plans?

  Seth’s fingertips landed, trembling but tense with purpose.

  And he saw a face he had seen a thousand times before.

  Captain Thade made the sign of the aquila over a chestplate still smeared with the blood of the plague-slain. He’d been back at the command base for fifteen minutes, and while Seth had retired to his tent, the captain had seen his men billeted and taken his inner circle to the lord general’s tent.

  He’d been handed a message from an engineering servitor saying that Rax was ready at last, but no matter how keen he was to deal with it, Rax had to wait. Before anything else, Thade had to deal with the lord general. He’d said to Darrick only the week before that he’d rather lose his arm again than report to Lord General Maggrig once more. Darrick hadn’t laughed. He knew it wasn’t a joke. Maggrig bled pettiness. He exuded a smirking, preening condescension. It ran from his pores the way a fat man sweats.

  Lord General Maggrig was the wrong side of seventy, his long face characterised by age’s lines rather than war’s scars. While his rank and wage entitled him to partake of the youth-renewing juvenat drug process along with the accompanying surgery, Fineas Maggrig had chosen not to indulge. He believed in a man living out his natural span in service to the Emperor, and those who ‘stole days’ were wasting time in life when they could be beside the Emperor’s throne in the afterlife. Unshakeable faith made him a preferential candidate to lead this theatre, and the Hadris Rift 40th Armoured soaked up the glory of their commander bearing the title Overseer of the Reclamation.

  Thade had researched the lord general’s history prior to planetfall. He needn’t have bothered. Upon seeing Overseer Maggrig in the flesh he realised why using his clearance to study his new commanding officer’s record had been a waste of time. The lord general had arrived a week after the rest of the Hadris Rift 40th, freshly promoted from pacifying some minor heresy near his homeworld and bearing three rows of medals upon his chest. Thade had tried not to smile as he’d recognised them all one by one. Long service, long service, long service. There, a Corwin’s Cross for tactical genius. Another long service medal, then two more for tactical prowess in various theatres, and a Mechanicum Fellowship Skull for honourably defending a Forge World without the loss of any Adeptus Mechanicus hierarchs. Nice. Very nice.

  But worrying.

  Thade was smart enough not to judge the new lord general too harshly – he’d earned those medals for a reason, after all – but the captain was Cadian enough to secretly chafe at the thought of following the man’s orders. The lord general had spent his entire career leading Guardsmen safely from the back.

  It wasn’t the Cadian way. With the Great Eye staring eternally down at their world, Cadian doctrine favoured the bold: those men and women who stood on the front lines, seeing the enemy with their own eyes and ordering their allies into battle with their own raised voices.

  Thade’s breast was hardly beribboned in honour’s blazing colours, but the Ward of Cadia shone silver on his helmet. That counted. When he’d been awarded it only a handful of weeks before for his command in the Black Crusade, the captain had wanted to hide it away in his personal belongings. It had been Enginseer Osiron who’d advised him to affix it to the front of his combat helm.

  ‘Others do not see it as you see it, Parmenion.’ Osiron was one of the few members of the 88th to ever call Thade by his first name. ‘To you it’s something painful you fear you’ll never live up to. To others, it’s a symbol that even in defeat, their first defeat, heroism still thrives. It offers not just hope, but the hope for vengeance.’

  Vengeance. That was an ideal every soldier in the Cadian Shock could cling to, as the Thirteenth Black Crusade raged. Thade nodded.

  ‘I guess they had to hand one out to someone,’ Thade had said, turning the silver skull-and-gate medal over in his newly-implanted bionic hand. The implant was so fresh it didn’t even have synthetic skin grafted over it yet.

  ‘You earned it,’ Osiron breathed in his hissing way. ‘We all saw you earn it.’

  Thade said nothing to that. His gaze spoke volumes.

  He lowered his hands at the Overseer’s nod, dispersing his memories and returning all attention to the present. Lord General Maggrig’s tent was erected in the shadow of the Hadris Rift bulk lander Unity. The tent itself was a cube of leather-reinforced cloth, useful for keeping the wind out and the sound of voices in. Expensive chairs of pale oak ringed a circular table made from the same wood. Maps were spread across the table, as were several data-slates and pict-viewers evidently left over from the last meeting. The lord general was alone. That fact surprised Thade, leaving him on edge. He couldn’t think why Overseer Maggrig would need privacy to conduct a debriefing.

  ‘At ease, warden-captain,’ the lord general said in his usual clipped tones. Maggrig was the only man Thade had met who could make one of Cadia’s highest military honour titles sound like he was swallowing something that tasted foul. Warden-captain, he said. To rhyme with bastard.

  ‘Just “captain” is fine,’ Thade said, and not for the first time. If he had to hear the title he hadn’t gotten used to, he’d rather not hear it mangled. ‘I’ve come to make my report, sir.’

  ‘Then do it, soldier. But first, who are these men and why are they here?’

  Thade gestured left, then right. ‘Honoured Enginseer Bylam Osiron. Scout-Lieutenant Adar Vertain. They stand with me to bear witness and make their own reports. I assumed the lord general would prefer first-hand accounts of what happened the night Reclamation forces sighted primary-class threats.’

  ‘Of course. Proceed.’ Maggrig offered a magnanimous wave of a thin, vein-marked hand that sported three large rings. Thade caught himself wondering if those hands had held a lasgun once in the last forty years. What kind of soldier wore rings like that, anyway? Thade and Osiron shared a momentary glance, thinking the same thoughts. The rocks on the Overseer’s knuckles could bring in enough coin to keep the 88th refuelled for a month.

  Jewellery was another ostentation Cadians had little love for. When every scrap of metal on your home world went to the forge factories to be made into weaponry and almost all personal wealth was tied into military gear and property, displaying one’s wealth in flamboyant displays seemed wasteful and decadent. It was often said of the Cadians that they as a people had no eye for beauty.

  Thade had no idea if that was true or not. He found beauty in many things: alien landscapes, the weather patterns in the heavens of other worlds, slender women with dark hair… But self-awareness was one of his strengths. He knew he had no capacity to understand what was supposed to be attractive about wearing one’s wealth in such a pointless display.

  ‘I’m waiting, captain.’

  Throne, what a pompous ass. Thade drew breath to reply.

  ‘My Sentinel squadron first intercepted suspicious vox-chatter as they scouted ahead to plot a course to the monastery held by the Janus Sixth.’

  ‘You lost our beachhead within the city.’

  Once Thade had finished speaking, the lord general’s appraisal was blunt and – at least technically – correct.

  ‘My orders were to reinforce the Janus Sixth at dawn and hold the monastery if we could. The Janusians were annihilated before we
arrived, despite my men making for the monastery in the middle of the night.’ Thade narrowed his eyes, feeling his muscles tense. He didn’t mention the idiotic vainglory that sent the Janus 6th so far ahead of the main force. The lord general’s pursed lips twisted into a thin frown.

  ‘Your orders, warden-captain, were to hold the Reclamation’s most promising incursion point into Solthane. You lost our forward base.’

  ‘The Janus Sixth lost it when they were slaughtered.’

  ‘You were present after that event.’

  Osiron shook his head slightly, setting his crimson hood rustling in a soft hiss of silken material. It wasn’t a disagreement with the lord general; it was a warning to Thade not to lose his temper.

  ‘With the greatest respect, Overseer,’ Thade met the older man’s gaze, ‘I am Cadian Shock. We don’t forget our orders. My men were to reinforce the monastery if such a defence was viable.’

  ‘It was viable. You said so yourself.’

  Thade detested this petty conversational thrusting and parrying. It wasn’t in his blood to argue with an officer like this, but then again, he wasn’t used to serving under such a pathetic excuse for a lord general.

  No, that wasn’t quite true. Maggrig wasn’t pathetic. This was what Osiron was warning against. Don’t disrespect the lord general purely for his variant approach to command. In arrogance, lay self-deception. Now focus.

  Yet he wasn’t going to allow his men to take a mark of cowardice on their records just because the lord general needed someone to blame for overextending his forces.

  ‘Not at all, lord general. I said quite clearly the only way my available forces could have remained in the Shrine of the Emperor’s Undying Majesty would be if they sealed themselves in the undercroft network and awaited reinforcement.’

  ‘That would be holding, Thade.’

  ‘Hardly, sir,’ the captain laughed. It instantly set the lord general’s glare aflame.