‘Even if Utopian goals are ultimately counterintuitive to species survival,’ Pech added quickly.
‘Any political ambition that is inherently impossible to achieve is ultimately corrupting,’ said Herzog.
‘You cannot engender, or force to be engendered, a state of perfection,’ said Pech. ‘That line of action leads only to disaster, because perfection is an absolute that cannot be attained by an imperfect species.’
‘Utopia is a dangerous myth,’ said Herzog, ‘and only a fool would chase it.’
‘It is better to manage and maintain the flaws of man on an ongoing basis,’ said Pech.
‘We say this only to recognise the blood debt of the Imperial Army, that suffers and dies, resolutely, in the pursuit of that goal,’ said Herzog.
There was a long silence, just as the blades began to batter the shields again, Alpharius said, ‘I encourage my men to explore the philosophy of bloodshed, lord. I like them to understand the intellectual structure that informs their killing. The Emperor, my love and my life, seeks to set mankind in place as the uppermost species of the galaxy. I will not dispute that ambition, neither will my captains. We simply recognise the pro-crustean methods with which he enforces that dream. A Utopian ideal is a fine thing to chase, and to measure one’s achievements against. But it cannot, ultimately, be achieved.’
‘Are you suggesting the Emperor’s design is… wrong?’ Namatjira asked.
‘Not in the slightest,’ replied Alpharius.
‘My Lord Alpharius,’ said Lord Wilde in his piercing, blade-keen voice, ‘how do we combat the Nurthene… magick?’
‘My Lord Wilde,’ said Alpharius, ‘we don’t. We extinguish it.’
THE TRAYS OF food were heavy. There was no telling how much longer they’d be forced to stand there in the tented wings of the main pavilion space. The worst of it was, he simply couldn’t hear. The voices in the main tent were muffled. Grammaticus realised he should have brought a listening aid.
He thought he’d be close enough to hear the proceedings for himself. He needed a revised plan quickly, or the significant risk he was taking would be for nothing.
‘Sir?’ he whispered.
One of the chamberlains came down the line to him.
‘What’s the matter, boy?’ the chamberlain asked. Some of the other platter-laden servants in the line looked around.
‘How much longer, sir?’ Grammaticus asked.
‘As long as it damn well takes,’ the chamberlain replied.
‘Sir,’ said Grammaticus, ‘this sauce is curdling. It needs to be set on the heat again, or it will spoil. I dare not, for my life, serve bad food to the Lord Commander and his guests.’
The liveried chamberlain nodded. ‘Back to the kitchens with it. Be quick. They’ll be calling for us soon.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Grammaticus, and left the line, running with his platter towards the back flap of the tent’s service entrance.
Outside, in the dark, he paused, and dumped the platter and its contents into a spoil bin.
No one noticed him. Outremar guards were distantly patrolling the edge of the pavilion’s perimeter. He slipped into the dark blue shadows of the desert night.
Grammaticus pulled off the servant’s tabard and discarded it. He hadn’t disguised himself as one of the feast servants in any detailed way, trusting his logokine to get him by. But knowing he would be under scrutiny for several minutes, he had stolen a tabard to wear over his tight, armoured bodyglove to reinforce his logokine disguise.
He took a pair of low-light goggles from his thigh pouch and put them on. The world around him was instantly rendered in fuzzy, caustic shades of red and ochre light. He read the rows of taut cables that stretched from the side of the pavilion like millipede legs, anchoring it to the ground. Between these physical lines, he made out the web of intangible ones: the sensor beams and harmonic tripwires that protected the skirts of the great tent. Invisible to the naked eye, these thin beams would set off a multitude of alarms if tripped. Grammaticus adjusted his goggles to pick them up, tuning them to a harmonic value he’d cribbed from Rukhsana’s code book without her knowledge or permission.
He skirted forwards, along the flank of the pavilion, looking for another way in, ducking under and stepping over the rigid cables and the ghost beams alike. In several places he had to stoop or even crawl to avoid breaking the luminous strands. Most projected diagonally down from small emitters attached to the lip of the tent’s roof, but others followed the ground, or ran parallel to the pavilion, snaking between emitters spiked in the sand. The goggles guided him. This endeavour was a great deal more demanding than evading the field security lattice on the kitchen block roof. The beams were active and live. Three times, he froze, realising he was about to interrupt a beam with a leg or a shoulder.
There was no obvious vent or egress. Grammaticus found an open spot and knelt down. He put his ear against the skin of the tent, using its taut acoustics to bring the voices inside to him.
He could hear voices in conference. Lord Namatjira’s tone was easy to detect, as was Lord Wilde’s. Grammaticus identified the voice that had to belong to Alpharius, and listened to the way it sounded for the first time. There was a quality to it that was quite distinctive.
They were talking about the Nurthene magick and how to combat it. It both amused and distressed Grammaticus to hear the condescension in the primarch’s tone as he explained the notion of Chaos to the Lord Commander and his retinue. What he was saying was such an over-simplification. The Alpha Legion barely understood the nature of Chaos, yet here was its leader presuming to teach even less well-informed souls about it. The Alpha Legion were the ones who had to learn, and soon.
Grammaticus was concentrating so hard on listening that he detected the Lucifer Black behind him with only seconds to spare.
Grammaticus stood up and turned. The Lucifer, who had come up behind him quite silently, was raising his sabre to strike.
‘Fool!’ Grammaticus hissed. ‘It’s me!’
The Lucifer stopped in his tracks, and quickly lowered his sword.
‘Chayne?’ he asked. ‘Sir?’
‘Yes!’ Grammaticus snapped. ‘Return to your patrol.’
Chayne. Grammaticus logged the name in his memory for future reference. ‘Apologies,’ the Lucifer replied. ‘I obey.’ The Lucifer turned to melt away into the night. He hesitated.
Shit, thought Grammaticus. His logokine skills had wrong-footed the Lucifer Black for a moment, but only a moment. Clearly, the elite companions possessed iron-willed, unsuggestible minds. The Lucifer had already questioned the encounter, and realised he had been tricked.
The Lucifer Black was armoured. Grammaticus was not. Grammaticus couldn’t count on landing a clean, quick kill-blow, nor could he risk using his digital ring-weapon. The energy flare would set off every alarm within ten metres.
As the Lucifer turned back, Grammaticus threw a wolf-paw jab that crushed the vox-hub bulge on the side of the Lucifer’s jet-black helmet, preventing him from signalling an alert. The Lucifer began to shout, but his voice was muffled by the helmet’s padded snout. Grammaticus rammed another jab in under the chin of the helm and crushed the man’s larynx, rendering him mute.
Grammaticus briefly hoped that the larynx punch might also prove to be a killing strike, but the Lucifer was made of stronger stuff. His sabre was still drawn, and he slashed at Grammaticus. Grammaticus blocked the blade with the adamantium strips woven into the forearm sleeves of his bodyglove, and drove the palm of his right hand flat into the Lucifer’s breastplate, a tension-reflexive strike that the eldar called the ilthrad-taic or breathless touch. The Lucifer lurched, his breastplate cracking. As he stumbled backwards, Grammaticus looped his left hand around the Lucifer’s right wrist, and whip-snapped it, forcing the sabre out of the man’s grip. It landed on the sand, a bare centimetre short of one of the ground level sensor beams.
The Lucifer was not yet done. Grammaticus had been forced to close t
ightly, and the Lucifer headbutted him. Grammaticus lurched backwards, pain engulfing the centre of his face as the helm crunched into him. He staggered, and barely avoided an overhead beam. The Lucifer fumbled and drew his sidearm, his broken right wrist forcing him to use his left hand, across his body. As soon as the laspistol came clear of its holster, Grammaticus threw a spin kick that sent it skidding away into the night beyond the tent. He flinched as the tumbling weapon passed between two strands of the invisible security web.
This had to end, fast, before something got tripped. They were so tightly boxed in it was like fighting inside a spider’s web, and any wrong move would bring the spider pouncing down on them.
The Lucifer threw a steel-shod fist at Grammaticus, who ducked left, and chopped a passing body-blow into the Lucifer’s ribs. Grammaticus’s hands, trained and subcutaneously strengthened though they were, were already sore and bloody from punching armour. Grammaticus tried to get behind the Lucifer, but the Lucifer caught him and clenched him in a choke hold. It would have finished the fight, except that the Lucifer was struggling with just one working hand.
Grammaticus grunted and corded his neck muscles to ward against the Lucifer’s choke. Training and experience told him there was one clean way out of the hold, a body throw that would hurl his opponent up and over him. But his goggles saw a sensor beam running right in front of them. If he threw the Lucifer, his opponent’s body would land across the beam.
He kicked back hard instead, and the back of the Lucifer’s head struck against one of the taut, diagonal guy wires of the pavilion. The impact snapped the Lucifer’s head forward, and he involuntarily butted the back of Grammaticus’s skull. Grammaticus winced, but the choke-hold broke. He swung around, dazed by the blow, and shot out a straight-fingered jab.
The middle and index fingers of John Grammaticus’s right hand punched through the left lens of the Lucifer’s helmet and popped the eye behind it. The Lucifer, gurgling through his useless throat, fell backwards against the tent side and slid down in a heap.
Grammaticus paused, crouching low, ready to sprint away if the impact raised an alarm.
No alarm came.
Grammaticus began to straighten up.
The Lucifer flopped forwards, matter dripping like glue from his ruptured eye socket, and began to crawl across the sand.
Grammaticus realised the Lucifer was dragging himself towards one of the ground level beams, his armoured hand clawing out to break it.
He threw himself onto the Lucifer’s back, grappling with him, trying to pull the arm back. The Lucifer was monstrously strong. He dragged Grammaticus with him as he crawled across the sand, straining to reach the harmonic tripwire.
Vicing an elbow around the reaching, straining arm of the man underneath him, forcing it to pull short, Grammaticus drove another jab into the man’s spine. Something cracked. Still, the Lucifer heaved himself forwards, ten centimetres from the beam, five, the outstretched fingers shaking as they groped for the invisible cord.
Grammaticus saw the Lucifer’s discarded sabre lying on the sand beside them. He grabbed it, simultaneously wrenching the man’s reaching arm back and up with all of his strength. He hacked with the sabre, and took the Lucifer’s limb off mid forearm.
The Lucifer convulsed under him. He reached out towards the beam with his stump, but he was well short of touching it. Grammaticus hastily clamped his left palm around the severed stump and compressed to stop the jetting arterial spray from hitting the beam and accomplishing what the Lucifer’s outstretched hand had not.
The armoured body under him went into spasm. Grammaticus pinned it down with his legs and kept the stump clenched tight. He felt the hot blood surging against his palm.
‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.
The Lucifer trembled. Grammaticus put the tip of the sabre against the nape of his neck, in the tiny gap between helmet lip and collar armour, and pushed. The blade slid clean through the neck and bit deep into the sand beneath.
The Lucifer went still. Grammaticus waited until the pressure pulse against his palm finally ebbed away, and then let go of the stump. The truncated arm flopped onto the sand.
Grammaticus rose to his feet. The stench of blood in the night air was overpowering. Some of it, a little of it, was his own. His fists were swollen and mangled. Blood seeped from his battered face, and pain made him see double. His skull throbbed from the blows it had taken. He was sure his nose was broken.
He tried to steady himself. He felt sick. There was no chance of him continuing with his surveillance now. The Lucifer would be missed soon enough. Grammaticus had to get away, fast.
He moved away from the body, stepping over the tracery of sensor beams his goggles revealed, and stumbled away into the desert and the enfolding night.
DINAS CHAYNE PAUSED. Alpharius was busy talking to Namatjira and the assembled lords about ‘warding countermeasures’. Chayne wasn’t listening any more. A signal light was flashing on the jet-black cuff of his suit.
He slipped back behind the gathering and made his exit through the service tent.
Outside, under the Nurthene stars, he put his helmet back on and triggered the vox.
‘Chayne. You signalled?’
‘Vital trace from Zeydus lost.’
‘Report his last position.’
‘West side of the pavilion, twenty metres north of the West Porch.’
‘Route two men to that position. From the reserve, not the ones stationed with the Lord Commander.’
‘I obey.’
Chayne moved off down the west side of the huge pavilion, carefully stepping over and around the light-beams his visor showed to him. He drew his sabre.
‘Trouble?’ a voice asked from behind him.
Chayne whirled. The tip of his blade made a tiny ching as it grazed against the chest plate of the Astartes who had appeared, miraculously, behind him.
The huge armoured warrior looked down at the sabre tip pressing against his chest armour.
‘Nice,’ he said. ‘Very quick. Dinas Chayne, isn’t it?’
‘You know me?’ Chayne asked.
‘The Legion likes to know everyone.’
‘You’re Omegon.’
The Alpha chuckled, his laughter carried oddly by his helmet speaker.
‘You’re good, Dinas Chayne. We heard this about you. Yes, I’m Omegon. I saw you leave the tent in a hurry.’
‘You saw me?’
‘I was watching you. You, you were watching me. Don’t pretend you weren’t now.’
‘I won’t.’
‘We love the same things, I think, Dinas.’
‘Such as?’
‘Caution. Secrecy. Stealth.’
‘How do you know my name?’ Chayne asked. ‘The names of the Lucifers are never published.’
‘Oh, come on, Dinas. Do we look like amateurs to you?’
‘No.’
‘You can put that away, I think,’ said Omegon.
Chayne withdrew his sabre. The tip had actually buried itself in the Astartes’s chest plate and it took a tug to remove it.
‘Any other man I’d have killed for less,’ said Omegon, looking down at the dent, ‘and, by the way, that’s all you get.’
Chayne shrugged.
‘Why did you leave the pavilion in such a hurry?’
‘One of my men is down.’
‘Let’s see, shall we?’
The Alpha legionnaire led the way. Chayne realised, with alarm, that the Astartes was cheerfully striding through the serried sensor beams, breaking them without setting any of them off. Chayne followed, hopping and stepping over the harmonic tags.
‘Something on your mind?’ Omegon called over his shoulder.
‘You are invisible to our security lattice,’ Chayne replied.
‘Like I said, Dinas, do we look like amateurs to you?’ He paused. Two men were approaching, the two Lucifers Chayne had sent for. Chayne raised a hand to indicate they should stay back.
Omegon
crouched down. ‘Is this your man?’ he asked.
Zeydus lay face down beside the tent wall in a patch of blood-stained sand. His left arm had been severed above the wrist, and he had been pinned to the ground with his own sword. The hilt of it was almost flat to the nape of Zeydus’s neck.
‘Yes,’ said Chayne. He bent down beside the Astartes.
‘Quite a fight,’ said Omegon, pointing idly. ‘His assailant crippled his vox to mute him. Right wrist is snapped, probably a disarming move.’
Omegon wrenched the sabre out and rolled the corpse. ‘Muted him too, larynx punch. The eye’s gone as well. Spine’s snapped, between the third and fourth vertebrae. See? Someone did a good job here.’
Chayne nodded. Zeydus had been one of his best.
‘I thought you Lucifers were meant to be tough?’
Chayne bridled.
The Astartes laughed. ‘Relax. I know you’re tough. I just meant, whoever did this, he did it with his bare hands.’
‘What?’
‘That blood there, on the vox bulge. That’s the assailant’s. He crushed it with his fist.’
‘You can read that?’
‘Rudimentary typing via optics. Yes, I can read that. We should take a sample for proper gene analysis. But on first look, I’d say your man was taken out by an unarmoured human.’
Chayne straightened up.
‘Tell me, Dinas,’ said Omegon, looking up at him, ‘who do you know that could do a thing like that?’
‘No one,’ Chayne replied. His reply was honest, but he had his suspicions.
ALL ALONG THE earthwork of the Imperial fortifications, huge watch fires crackled, and a million campfires twinkled between them. Overhead, a cloud-scudded night sky turned slowly, retrograde.
The night air was hot. Around their campfire, under their lank banner, the Carnivales were laughing, and passing the bottle.
‘So Lon made it?’ Kaido Pius asked.
Peto Soneka took a swig from the bottle that came by and nodded. ‘He did, like I said.’
‘Good old Lon,’ laughed Tinq, one of Pius’s bashaws. ‘Nothin’ll ever kill Lon.’
Soneka nodded, took another pull from the bottle, and handed it on. Behind him somewhere, men were playing loud Gnawa on hand drums and ghimbris. Someone had thrown incense flakes into the camp-fires, and sweetened the smoke.