‘Jubal? What have you done?’
‘Not Jubal. Samus. I am Samus. Samus is all around you. Samus is the man beside you.’
Jubal’s voice had a catch to it, a dry giggle. Loken knew he was about to fire again. The rest of Udon’s squad, quite as aghast as Loken, stumbled forward, but none raised their bolters. Even in the stark light of what Jubal had just done, not one of them could break the sworn code of the Astartes and fire upon one of their own.
Loken knew he certainly couldn’t. He threw his bolter aside and leapt at Jubal.
Xavyer Jubal, commander of Hellebore squad and one of the finest file officers in the company, had already begun to fire. Bolt rounds screeched out across the chamber and struck into the hesitating squad. Another helmet exploded in a welter of blood, bone chips and armour fragments, and another battle-brother crashed to the cave floor. Two more were knocked down beside him as bolt rounds detonated against their torso armour.
Loken smashed into Jubal, and staggered him backwards, trying to pin his arms. Jubal thrashed, sudden fury in his limbs.
‘Samus!’ he yelled. ‘It means the end and the death! Samus will gnaw upon your bones!’
They crashed against a rock wall together with numbing force, splintering stone. Jubal would not relinquish his grip on the murder weapon. Loken drove him backwards against the rock, the drizzle of meltwater spraying down across them both.
‘Jubal!’
Loken threw a punch that would have decapitated a mortal man. His fist cracked against Jubal’s helm and he repeated the action, driving his fist four or five times against the other’s face and chest. The ceramite visor chipped. Another punch, his full weight behind it, and Jubal stumbled. Each stroke of Loken’s fist resounded like a smith’s hammer in the echoing chamber, steel against steel.
As Jubal stumbled, Loken grabbed his bolter and tore it out of his hand. He hurled it away across the deep stone well.
But Jubal was not yet done. He seized Loken and slammed him sideways into the rock wall. Lumps of stone flew out from the jarring impact. Jubal slammed him again, swinging Loken bodily into the rock, like a man swinging a heavy sack. Pain flared through Loken’s head and he tasted blood in his mouth. He tried to pull away, but Jubal was throwing punches that ploughed into Loken’s visor and bounced the back of his head off the wall repeatedly.
The other men were upon them, shouting and grappling to separate them.
‘Hold him!’ Loken yelled. ‘Hold him down!’
They were Astartes, as strong as young gods in their power armour, but they could not do as Loken ordered. Jubal lashed out with a free fist and knocked one of them clean off his feet. Two of the remaining three clung to his back like wrestlers, like human cloaks, trying to pull him down, but he hoisted them up and twisted, throwing them off him.
Such strength. Such unthinkable strength that could shrug off Astartes like target dummies in a practice cage.
Jubal turned on the remaining brother, who launched himself forward to tackle the madman.
‘Look out!’ Jubal screamed with a cackle. ‘Samus is here!’
His lancing right hand met the brother head on. Jubal struck with an open hand, fingers extended, and those fingers drove clean in through the battle-brother’s gorget as surely as any speartip. Blood squirted out from the man’s throat, through the puncture in the armour. Jubal ripped his hand out, and the brother fell to his knees, choking and gurgling, blood pumping in profuse, pulsing surges from his ruptured throat.
Beyond any thought of reason now, Loken hurled himself at Jubal, but the berserker turned and smacked him away with a mighty back-hand slap.
The power of the blow was stupendous, far beyond anything even an Astartes should have been able to wield. The force was so great that the armour of Jubal’s gauntlet fractured, as did the plating of Loken’s shoulder, which took the brunt. Loken blacked out for a split-second, then was aware that he was flying. Jubal had struck him so hard that he was sailing across the stone well and out over the abyssal fault.
Loken struck the arching pier of stone steps. He almost bounced off it, but he managed to grab on, his fingers gouging the ancient stone, his feet swinging above the drop. Meltwater poured down in a thin rain across him, making the steps slick and oily with mineral wash. Loken’s fingers began to slide. He remembered dangling in a similar fashion over the tower lip in the ‘Emperor’s’ palace, and snarled in frustrated rage.
Fury pulled him up. Fury, and an intense passion that he would not fail the Warmaster. Not in this. Not in the face of this terrible wrong.
He hauled himself upright on to the pier. It was narrow, no wider than a single path where men could not pass if they met. The gulf, black as the outer void, yawned below him. His limbs were shaking with effort.
He saw Jubal. He was charging forward across the cavern to the foot of the steps, drawing his combat blade. The sword glowed as it powered into life.
Loken wrenched out his own sword. Falling meltwater hissed and sparked as it touched the active metal of the short, stabbing blade.
Jubal bounded up the steps to meet him, slashing with his sword. He was raving still, in a voice that was in no way his own any longer. He struck wildly at Loken, who hopped back up the steps, and then began to deflect the strikes with his own weapon. Sparks flashed, and the blades struck one another like the tolling of a discordant bell. Height was not an advantage in this fight, as Loken had to hunch low to maintain his guard.
Combat swords were not duelling weapons. Short and double-edged, they were made for stabbing, for battlefield onslaught. They had no reach or subtlety. Jubal hacked with his like an axe, forcing Loken to defend. Their blades cut falling water as they scythed, sizzling and billowing steam into the air.
Loken prided himself on maintaining a masterful discipline and practice of all weapons. He regularly clocked six or eight hours at a time in the flagship’s practice cages. He expected all of the men in his command to do likewise. Xavyer Jubal, he knew, was foremost a master with daggers and sparring axes, but no slouch with the sword.
Except today. Jubal had discarded all his skill, or had forgotten it in the flush of madness that had engulfed his mind. He attacked Loken like a maniac, in a frenzy of savage cuts and blows. Loken was likewise forced to dispense with much of his skill in an effort to block and parry. Three times, Loken managed to drive Jubal back down the pier a few steps, but always the other man retaliated and forced Loken higher up the arch. Once, Loken had to leap to avoid a low slice, and barely regained his footing as he landed. In the silver downpour, the steps were treacherous, and it was as much a fight to keep balance as to resist Jubal’s constant assault.
It ended suddenly, like a jolt. Jubal passed Loken’s guard and sunk the full edge of his blade into Loken’s left shoulder plate.
‘Samus is here!’ he cried in delight, but his blade, flaring with power, was wedged fast.
‘Samus is done,’ Loken replied, and drove the tip of his sword into Jubal’s exposed chest. The sword punched clean through, and the tip emerged through Jubal’s back.
Jubal wavered, letting go of his own weapon, which remained transfixed through Loken’s shoulder guard. With half-open, shuddering hands, he reached at Loken’s face, not violently, but gently as if imploring some mercy or even aid. Water splashed off them and streamed down their white plating.
‘Samus…’ he gasped. Loken wrenched his sword out.
Jubal staggered and swayed, the blood leaking out of the gash in his chest plate, diluting as soon as it appeared and mixing with the drizzle, covering his belly plate and thigh armour with a pink stain.
He toppled backwards, crashing over and over down the steps in a windmill of heavy, loose limbs. Five metres from the base of the pier, his headlong careen bounced him half-off the steps, and he came to a halt, legs dangling, partly hanging over the chasm, gradually sliding backwards under his own weight. Loken heard the slow squeal of armour scraping against slick stone.
He
leapt down the flight to reach Jubal’s side. He got there just moments before Jubal slid away into oblivion. Loken grabbed Jubal by the edge of his left shoulder plate and slowly began to heave him back onto the pier. It was almost impossible. Jubal seemed to weigh a billion tonnes.
The three surviving members of Brakespur squad stood at the foot of the steps, watching him struggle.
‘Help me!’ Loken yelled.
‘To save him?’ one asked.
‘Why?’ asked another. ‘Why would you want to?’
‘Help me!’ Loken snarled again. They didn’t move. In desperation, Loken raised his sword and stabbed it down, spearing Jubal’s right shoulder to the steps. So pinned, his slide was arrested. Loken hauled his body back onto the pier.
Panting, Loken dragged off his battered helm and spat out a mouthful of blood.
‘Get Vipus,’ he ordered. ‘Get him now.’
BY THE TIME they were conducted up to the plateau, there wasn’t much to see and the light was failing. Euphrati took a few random picts of the parked storm-birds and the cone of smoke lifting off the broken crag, but she didn’t expect much from any of them. It all seemed drab and lifeless up there. Even the vista of the mountains around them was insipid.
‘Can we see the combat area?’ she asked Sindermann.
‘We’ve been told to wait.’
‘Is there a problem?’
He shook his head. It was an ‘I don’t know’ kind of shake. Like all of them, he was strapped into his rebreather, but he looked frail and tired.
It was eerily quiet. Groups of Luna Wolves were trudging back to the stormbirds from the fastness, and army troops had secured the plateau itself. The remembrancers had been told that a solid victory had been achieved, but there was no sign of jubilation.
‘Oh, it’s a mechanical thing,’ Sindermann said when Euphrati questioned him. ‘This is just a routine exercise for the Legion. A low-key action, as I said before we set out. I’m sorry if you’re disappointed.’
‘I’m not,’ she said, but in truth there was a sense of anticlimax about it all. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but the rush of the drop, and the strange circumstance at Kasheri had begun to thrill her. Now everything was done, and she’d seen nothing.
‘Carnis wants to interview some of the returning warriors,’ Siman Sark said, ‘and he’s asked me to pict them while he does. Would that be permissible?’
‘I should think so,’ Sindermann sighed. He called out for an army officer to guide Carnis and Sark to the Astartes.
‘I think,’ said Tolemew Van Krasten aloud, ‘that a tone poem would be most appropriate. Full symphonic composition would overwhelm the atmosphere, I feel.’
Euphrati nodded, not really understanding.
‘A minor key, I think. E, or A perhaps. I’m taken with the title “The Spirits of the Whisperheads”, or perhaps, “The Voice of Samus”. What do you think?’
She stared at him.
‘I’m joking,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘I have no idea what I am supposed to respond to here, or how. It all seems so dour.’
Euphrati Keeler had supposed Van Krasten to be a pompous type, but now she warmed to him. As he turned away and gazed mournfully up at the smoking peak, she was seized by a thought and raised her picter.
‘Did you just take my likeness?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘Do you mind? You looking at the peak like that seemed to sum up how we all feel.’
‘But I’m a remembrancer,’ he said. ‘Should I be in your record?’
‘We’re all in this. Witnesses or not, we’re all here,’ she replied. ‘I take what I see. Who knows? Maybe you can return the favour? A little refrain of flutes in your next overture that represents Euphrati Keeler?’
They both laughed.
A Luna Wolf was approaching the huddle of them.
‘Nero Vipus,’ he said, making the sign of the aquila. ‘Captain Loken presents his respects and wishes the attention of Master Sindermann at once.’
‘I’m Sindermann,’ the elderly man replied. ‘Is there some problem, sir?’
‘I’ve been asked to conduct you to the captain,’ Vipus replied. ‘This way, please.’
The pair of them moved away, Sindermann scurrying to keep up with Vipus’s great strides.
‘What is going on?’ Van Krasten asked, his voice hushed.
‘I don’t know. Let’s find out,’ Keeler replied.
‘Follow them? Oh, I don’t think so.’
‘I’m game,’ said Borodin Flora. ‘We haven’t actually been told to stay here.’
They looked round. Twell had sat himself down beside the prow landing strut of a stormbird and was beginning to sketch with charcoal sticks on a small pad. Carnis and Sark were busy elsewhere.
‘Come on,’ said Euphrati Keeler.
VIPUS LED SINDERMANN up into the ruined fastness. The wind moaned and whistled through the grim tunnels and chambers. Army troopers were clearing the dead from the entry halls and casting them into the gorge, but still Vipus had to steer the iterator past many crumpled, exploded corpses. He kept saying such things as, ‘I’m sorry you had to see that, sir,’ and, ‘Look away to spare your sensibilities.’
Sindermann could not look away. He had iterated loyally for many years, but this was the first time he had walked across a fresh battlefield. The sights appalled him and burned themselves into his memory. The stench of blood and ordure assailed him. He saw human forms burst and brutalised, and burned beyond any measure he had imagined possible. He saw walls sticky with blood and brain-matter, fragments of exploded bone weeping marrow, body parts littering the blood-soaked floors.
‘Terra,’ he breathed, over and again. This was what the Astartes did. This was the reality of the Emperor’s crusade. Mortal hurt on a scale that passed belief.
‘Terra,’ he whispered to himself. By the time he was brought to Loken, who awaited him in one of the fortress’s upper chambers, the word had become ‘terror’ without him realising it.
Loken was standing in a wide, dark chamber beside some sort of pool. Water gurgled down one of the black-wet walls and the air smelled of damp and oxides.
A dozen solemn Luna Wolves attended Loken, including one giant fellow in glowering Terminator armour, but Loken himself was bareheaded. His face was smudged with bruises. He’d removed his left shoulder guard, which lay beside him on the ground, stuck through with a short sword.
‘You have done such a thing,’ Sindermann said, his voice small. ‘I don’t think I’d quite understood what you Astartes were capable of, but now I—’
‘Quiet,’ Loken said bluntly. He looked at the Luna Wolves around him and dismissed them with a nod. They filed out past Sindermann, ignoring him.
‘Stay close, Nero,’ Loken called. Stepping out through the chamber door, Vipus nodded.
Now the room was almost empty, Sindermann could see that a body lay beside the pool. It was the body of a Luna Wolf, limp and dead, his helm off, his white armour mottled with blood. His arms had been lashed to his trunk with climbing cable.
‘I don’t…’ Sindermann began. ‘I don’t understand, captain. I was told there had been no losses.’
Loken nodded slowly. ‘That’s what we’re going to say. That will be the official line. The Tenth took this fortress in a clean strike, with no losses, and that’s true enough. None of the insurgents scored any kills. Not even a wounding. We took a thousand of them to their deaths.’
‘But this man…?’
Loken looked at Sindermann. His face was troubled, more troubled than the iterator had ever seen before. ‘What is it, Garviel?’ he asked.
‘Something has happened,’ Loken said. ‘Something so… so unthinkable that I…’
He paused, and looked at Jubal’s bound corpse. ‘I have to make a report, but I don’t know what to say. I have no frame of reference. I’m glad you are here, Kyril, you of all people. You have steered me well over the years.’
‘I like to think that?
??’
‘I need your counsel now.’
Sindermann stepped forward and placed his hand on the giant warrior’s arm. ‘You may trust me with any matter, Garviel. I’m here to serve.’
Loken looked down at him. ‘This is confidential. Utterly confidential.’
‘I understand.’
‘There have been deaths today. Six brothers of Brakespur squad, including Udon. Another barely clinging to life. And Hellebore… Hellebore has vanished, and I fear they are dead too.’
‘This can’t be. The insurgents couldn’t have—’
‘They did nothing. This is Xavyer Jubal.’ Loken said, pointing towards the body on the floor. ‘He killed the men,’ he said simply.
Sindermann rocked back as if slapped. He blinked. ‘He what? I’m sorry, Garviel, I thought for a moment you said he—’
‘He killed the men. Jubal killed the men. He took his bolter and his fists and he killed six of Brakespur right in front of my eyes, and he would have killed me too, if I hadn’t run him through.’
Sindermann felt his legs tremble. He found a nearby rock and sat down abruptly. ‘Terra,’ he gasped.
‘Terror is right. Astartes do not fight Astartes. Astartes do not kill their own. It is against all the rules of nature and man. It is counter to the very gene-code the Emperor fused into us when he wrought us.’
‘There must be some mistake,’ Sindermann said.
‘No mistake. I saw him do it. He was a madman. He was possessed.’
‘What? Steady, now. You look to old terms, Garviel. Possession is a spiritualist word that—’
‘He was possessed. He claimed he was Samus.’
‘Oh.’
‘You’ve heard the name, then?’
‘I’ve heard the whisper. That was just enemy propaganda, wasn’t it? We were told to dismiss it as scare tactics.’
Loken touched the bruises on his face, feeling the ache of them. ‘So I thought. Iterator, I’m going to ask you this once. Are spirits real?’
‘No, sir. Absolutely not.’
‘So we are taught and thus we are liberated, but could they exist? This world is lousy with superstition and temple-fanes. Could they exist here?’