Loken shrugged. ‘The latter.’
‘What if he fights you off as you attempt to save him, because he is afraid of you? Because he doesn’t want to learn how to swim?’
‘I save him anyway.’
They had stopped walking. Sindermann pressed his hand to the key plate set into the brass frame of a huge door, and allowed his palm to be read by the scrolling light. The door opened, exhaling like a mouth, gusting out climate-controlled air and a background hint of dust.
They stepped into the vault of Archive Chamber Three. Scholars, sphragists and metaphrasts worked in silence at the reading desks, summoning servitors to select volumes from the sealed stacks.
‘What interests me about your concerns,’ Sindermann said, keeping his voice precisely low so that only Loken’s enhanced hearing could follow it, ‘is what they say about you. We have established you are a weapon, and that you don’t need to think about what you do because the thinking is done for you. Yet you allow the human spark in you to worry, to fret and empathise. You retain the ability to consider the cosmos as a man would, not as an instrument might.’
‘I see,’ Loken replied. ‘You’re saying I have forgotten my place. That I have overstepped the bounds of my function.’
‘Oh no.’ Sindermann smiled. ‘I’m saying you have found your place.’
‘How so?’ Loken asked.
Sindermann gestured to the stacks of books that rose, like towers, into the misty altitudes of the archive. High above, hovering servitors searched and retrieved ancient texts sealed in plastek carriers, swarming across the cliff-faces of the library like honey bees.
‘Regard the books,’ Sindermann said.
‘Are there some I should read? Will you prepare a list for me?’
‘Read them all. Read them again. Swallow the learning and ideas of our predecessors whole, for it can only improve you as a man, but if you do, you’ll find that none of them holds an answer to still your doubts.’
Loken laughed, puzzled. Some of the metaphrasts nearby looked up from their study, annoyed at the interruption. They quickly looked down again when they saw the noise had issued from an Astartes.
‘What is the Mournival, Garviel?’ Sindermann whispered.
‘You know very well…’
‘Humour me. Is it an official body? An organ of governance, formally ratified, a Legio rank?’
‘Of course not. It is an informal honour. It has no official weight. Since the earliest era of our Legion there has been a Mournival. Four captains, those regarded by their peers to be…’
He paused.
‘The best?’ Sindermann asked.
‘My modesty is ashamed to use that word. The most appropriate. At any time, the Legion, in an unofficial manner quite separate from the chain of command, composes a Mournival. A confratern of four captains, preferably ones of markedly different aspects and humours, who act as the soul of the Legion.’
‘And their job is to watch over the moral health of the Legion, isn’t that so? To guide and shape its philosophy? And, most important of all, to stand beside the commander and be the voices he listens to before any others. To be the comrades and friends he can turn to privately, and talk out his concerns and troubles with freely, before they ever become matters of state or Council.’
‘That is what the Mournival is supposed to do,’ Loken agreed.
‘Then it occurs to me, Garviel, that only a weapon which questions its use could be of any value in that role. To be a member of the Mournival, you need to have concerns. You need to have wit, and most certainly you need to have doubts. Do you know what a nay-smith is?’
‘No.’
‘In early Terran history, during the dominance of the Sumaturan dynasts, naysmiths were employed by the ruling classes. Their job was to disagree. To question everything. To consider any argument or policy and find fault with it, or articulate the counter position. They were highly valued.’
‘You want me to become a naysmith?’ Loken asked.
Sindermann shook his head. ‘I want you to be you, Garviel. The Mournival needs your common sense and clarity. Sejanus was always the voice of reason, the measured balance between Abaddon’s choler and Aximand’s melancholic disdain. The balance is gone, and the Warmaster needs that balance now more than ever. You came to me this morning because you wanted my blessing. You wanted to know if you should accept the honour. By your own admission, Garviel, by the merit of your own doubts, you have answered your own question.’
FOUR
Summoned
Ezekyle by name
A winning hand
SHE HAD ASKED what the planet was called, and the crew of the shuttle had answered her ‘Terra’, which was hardly useful. Mersadie Oliton had spent the first twenty-eight years of her twenty-nine-year life on Terra, and this wasn’t it.
The iterator sent to accompany her was of little better use. A modest, olive-skinned man in his late teens, the iterator’s name was Memed, and he was possessed of a fearsome intellect and precocious genius. But the violent sub-orbital passage of the shuttle disagreed with his constitution, and he spent most of the trip unable to answer her questions because he was too occupied retching into a plastek bag.
The shuttle set down on a stretch of formal lawn between rows of spayed and pollarded trees, eight kilometres west of the High City. It was early evening, and stars already glimmered in the violet smudge at the sky’s edges. At high altitude, ships passed over, their lights blinking. Mersadie stepped down the shuttle’s ramp onto the grass, breathing in the odd scents and slightly variant atmosphere of the world.
She stopped short. The air, oxygen rich, she imagined, was making her giddy, and that giddiness was further agitated by the thought of where she was. For the first time in her life she was standing on another soil, another world. It seemed to her quite momentous, as if a ceremonial band ought to be playing. She was, as far as she knew, one of the very first of the remembrancers to be granted access to the surface of the conquered world.
She turned to look at the distant city, taking in the panorama and committing it to her memory coils. She blink-clicked her eyes to store certain views digitally, noting that smoke still rose from the cityscape, though the fight had been over months ago.
‘We are calling it Sixty-Three Nineteen,’ the iterator said, coming down the ramp behind her. Apparently, his queasy constitution had been stabilised by planet-fall. She recoiled delicately from the stink of sick on his breath.
‘Sixty-Three Nineteen?’ she asked.
‘It being the nineteenth world the 63rd Expedition has brought to compliance,’ Memed said, ‘though, of course, full compliance is not yet established here. The charter is yet to be ratified. Lord Governor Elect Rakris is having trouble forming a consenting coalition parliament, but Sixty-Three Nineteen will do. The locals call this world Terra, and we can’t be having two of those, can we? As far as I see it, that was the root of the problem in the first place…’
‘I see,’ said Mersadie, moving away. She touched her hand against the bark of one of the pollarded trees. It felt… real. She smiled to herself and blink-clicked it. Already, the basis of her account, with visual keys, was formulating in her enhanced mind. A personal angle, that’s what she’d take. She’d use the novelty and unfamiliarity of her first planetfall as a theme around which her remembrance would hang.
‘It’s a beautiful evening,’ the iterator announced, coming to stand beside her. He’d left his sloshing bags of vomit at the foot of the ramp, as if he expected someone to dispose of them for him.
The four army troopers delegated to her protection certainly weren’t about to do it. Perspiring in their heavy velvet overcoats and shakos, their rifles slung over their shoulders, they closed up around her.
‘Mistress Oliton?’ the officer said. ‘He’s waiting.’
Mersadie nodded and followed them. Her heart was beating hard. This was going to be quite an occasion. A week before, her friend and fellow remembrancer Euphrati Ke
eler, who had emphatically achieved more than any of the remembrancers so far, had been on hand in the eastern city of Kaentz, observing crusader operations, when Maloghurst had been found alive.
The Warmaster’s equerry, believed lost when the ships of his embassy had been burned out of orbit, had survived, escaping via drop-pod. Badly injured, he had been nursed and protected by the family of a farmer in the territories outside Kaentz. Keeler had been right there, by chance, to pict record the equerry’s recovery from the farmstead. It had been a coup. Her picts, so beautifully composed, had been flashed around the expedition fleet, and savoured by the Imperial retinues. Suddenly, Euphrati Keeler was being talked about. Suddenly, remembrancers weren’t such a bad thing after all. With a few, brilliant clicks of her picter, Euphrati had advanced the cause of the remembrancers enormously.
Now Mersadie hoped she could do the same. She had been summoned. She still couldn’t quite get over that. She had been summoned to the surface. That fact alone would have been enough, but it was who had summoned her that really mattered. He had personally authorised her transit permit, and seen to the appointment of a bodyguard and one of Sindermann’s best iterators.
She couldn’t understand why. Last time they’d met, he’d been so brutal that she’d considered resigning and taking the first conveyance home.
He was standing on a gravel pathway between the tree rows, waiting for her. As she came up, the soldiers around her, she registered simple awe at the sight of him in his full plate. Gleaming white, with a trace of black around the edges. His helm, with its lateral horse-brush crest, was off, hung at his waist. He was a giant, two and a half metres tall.
She sensed the soldiers around her hesitating.
‘Wait here,’ she told them, and they dropped back, relieved. A soldier of the Imperial army could be as tough as old boots, but he didn’t want to tangle with an Astartes. Especially not one of the Luna Wolves, the mightiest of the mighty, the deadliest of all Legions.
‘You too,’ she said to the iterator.
‘Oh, right,’ Memed said, coming to a halt.
‘The summons was personal.’
‘I understand,’ he said.
Mersadie walked up to the Luna Wolves captain. He towered over her, so much she had to shield her eyes with her hand against the setting sun to look up at him.
‘Remembrancer,’ he said, his voice as deep as an oak-root.
‘Captain. Before we start, I’d like to apologise for any offence I may have caused the last time we—’
‘lf I’d taken offence, mistress, would I have summoned you here?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘You suppose right. You raised my hackles with your questions last time, but I admit I was too hard on you.’
‘I spoke with unnecessary temerity—’
‘It was that temerity that caused me to think of you,’ Loken replied. ‘I can’t explain further. I won’t, but you should know that it was your very speaking out of turn that brought me here. Which is why I decided to have you brought here too. If that’s what remembrancers do, you’ve done your job well.’
Mersadie wasn’t sure what to say. She lowered her hand. The last rays of sunlight were in her eyes. ‘Do you… do you want me to witness something? To remember something?’
‘No,’ he replied curtly. ‘What happens now happens privately, but I wanted you to know that, in part, it is because of you. When I return, if I feel it is appropriate, I will convey certain recollections to you. If that is acceptable.’
‘I’m honoured, captain. I will await your pleasure.’
Loken nodded.
‘Should I come with—’ Memed began.
‘No,’ said the Luna Wolf.
‘Right,’ Memed said quickly, backing off. He went away to study a tree bole.
‘You asked me the right questions, and so showed me I was asking the right questions too,’ Loken told Mersadie.
‘Did I? Did you answer them?’
‘No,’ he replied. ‘Wait here, please,’ he said, and walked away towards a box hedge trimmed by the finest topiarists into a thick, green bastion wall. He vanished from sight under a leafy arch.
Mersadie turned to the waiting soldiers.
‘Know any games?’ she asked.
They shrugged.
She plucked a deck of cards from her coat pocket. ‘I’ve got one to show you,’ she grinned, and sat down on the grass to deal.
The soldiers put down their rifles and grouped around her in the lengthening blue shadows.
‘Soldiers love cards,’ Ignace Karkasy had said to her before she left the flagship, right before he’d grinned and handed her the deck.
BEYOND THE HIGH hedge, an ornamental water garden lay in shadowy ruin. The height of the hedge and the neighbouring trees, just now becoming spiky black shapes against the rose sky, screened out what was left of the direct sunlight. The gloom upon the gardens was almost misty.
The garden had once been composed of rectangular ouslite slabs laid like giant flagstones, surrounding a series of square, shallow basins where lilies and bright water flowers had flourished in pebbly sinks fed by some spring or water source. Frail ghost ferns and weeping trees had edged the pools.
During the assault of the High City, shells or airborne munitions had bracketed the area, felling many of the plants and shattering a great number of the blocks. Many of the ouslite slabs had been dislodged, and several of the pools greatly increased in breadth and depth by the addition of deep, gouging craters.
But the hidden spring had continued to feed the place, filling the shell holes, and pouring overflow between dislodged stones.
The whole garden was a shimmering, flat pool in the gloom, out of which tangled branches, broken root balls and asymmetric shards of rock stuck up in miniature archipelagos.
Some of the intact blocks, slabs two metres long and half a metre thick, had been rearranged, and not randomly by the blasts. They had been levered out to form a walkway into the pool area, a stone jetty sunk almost flush with the water’s surface.
Loken stepped out onto the causeway and began to follow it. The air smelled damp, and he could hear the clack of amphibians and the hiss of evening flies. Water flowers, their fragile colours almost lost in the closing darkness, drifted on the still water either side of his path.
Loken felt no fear. He was not built to feel it, but he registered a trepidation, an anticipation that made his hearts beat. He was, he knew, about to pass a threshold in his life, and he held faith that what lay beyond that threshold would be provident. It also felt right that he was about to take a profound step forward in his career. His world, his life, had changed greatly of late, with the rise of the Warmaster and the consequent alteration of the crusade, and it was only proper that he changed with it. A new phase. A new time.
He paused and looked up at the stars that were beginning to light in the purpling sky. A new time, and a glorious new time at that. Like him, mankind was on a threshold, about to step forward into greatness.
He had gone deep into the ragged sprawl of the water garden, far beyond the lamps of the landing zone behind the hedge, far beyond the lights of the city. The sun had vanished. Blue shadows surrounded him.
The causeway path came to an end. Water gleamed beyond. Ahead, across thirty metres of still pond, a little bank of weeping trees rose up like an atoll, silhouetted against the sky.
He wondered if he should wait. Then he saw a flicker of light amongst the trees across the water, a flutter of yellow flame that went as quickly as it came.
Loken stepped off the causeway into the water. It was shin deep. Ripples, hard black circles, radiated out across the reflective pool. He began to wade out towards the islet, hoping that his feet wouldn’t suddenly encounter some unexpected depth of submerged crater and so lend comedy to this solemn moment.
He reached the bank of trees and stood in the shallows, gazing up into the tangled blackness.
‘Give us your name,’ a voice called o
ut of the darkness. It spoke the words in Chthonic, his home-tongue, the battle-argot of the Luna Wolves.
‘Garviel Loken is my name to give.’
‘And what is your honour?’
‘I am Captain of the Tenth Company of the Sixteenth Legio Astartes.’
‘And who is your sworn master?’
‘The Warmaster and the Emperor both.’
Silence followed, interrupted only by the splash of frogs and the noise of insects in the waterlogged thickets.
The voice spoke again. Two words. ‘Illuminate him.’
There was a brief metallic scrape as the slot of a lantern was pulled open, and yellow flame-light shone out across him. Three figures stood on the tree-lined bank above him, one holding the lantern up.
Aximand. Torgaddon, lifting the lantern. Abaddon.
Like him, they wore their warrior armour, the dancing light catching bright off the curves of the plate. All were bareheaded, their crested helmets hung at their waists.
‘Do you vouch that this soul is all he claims to be?’ Abaddon asked. It seemed a strange question, as all three of them knew him well enough. Loken understood it was part of the ceremony.
‘I so vouch,’ Torgaddon said. ‘Increase the light.’
Abaddon and Aximand stepped away, and began to open the slots of a dozen other lanterns hanging from the surrounding boughs. When they had finished, a golden light suffused them all. Torgaddon set his own lamp on the ground.
The trio stepped forward into the water to face Loken. Tarik Torgaddon was the tallest of them, his trickster grin never leaving his face. ‘Loosen up, Garvi,’ he chuckled. ‘We don’t bite.’
Loken flashed a smile back, but he felt unnerved. Partly, it was the high status of these three men, but he also hadn’t expected the induction to be so ritualistic.
Horus Aximand, Captain of Fifth Company, was the youngest and shortest of them, shorter than Loken. He was squat and robust, like a guard dog. His head was shaved smooth, and oiled, so that the lamp-light gleamed off it. Aximand, like many in the younger generations of the Legion, had been named in honour of the commander, but only he used the name openly. His noble face, with wide-set eyes and firm, straight nose, uncannily resembled the visage of the Warmaster, and this had earned him the affectionate name ‘Little Horus’. Little Horus Aximand, the devil-dog in war, the master strategist. He nodded greeting to Loken.