“Go on, Bragg!” Mad Larkin chuckled at his side. “Do it again, you fething old drunk!”
Bragg chuckled and scooped up the dice.
This was the life, he thought. Far away from the warzone of Fortis, and the mayhem, and the death, here in a smoke-filled dome in the cold zone back-end of an ancient city, him and his few true friends, a good number of pretty girls and wager tables open all night.
Varl was suddenly at his side. His intended friendly slap was hard and stinging — Varl had still to get used to the cybernetic implant shoulder joint the medics had fitted him with on Fortis.
“The game can wait, Bragg. We’ve got business.”
Bragg and Larkin kissed their painted lady-friends goodbye and followed Varl out through the rear exit of the gaming dub onto the boarding ramp. Suth was there; Melyr, Meryn, Caffran, Curral, Coll, Baru, Mkoll, Raglon… almost twenty of the Ghosts.
“What’s going on?” Bragg asked.
Melyr jerked his thumb down to where Corbec, Rawne and Feygor were unloading booze and smokes from a battered six wheeler.
“Colonel’s got us some tasty stuff to share, bless his Tanith heart.”
“Very nice,” Bragg said, licking his lips, not entirely sure why Rawne and Feygor looked so annoyed. Corbec smiled up at them all.
“Get everyone out here! We’re having a party, boys! For Tanith! For us!”
There was cheering and dapping. Varl leapt down into the bay and opened a box with his Tanith knife. He threw bottles up to those clustered around.
“Hey!” Raglon said suddenly, pointing out into the snowy darkness beyond the club’s bay. “Incoming!”
The staff track slid into the bay behind Corbec’s truck and Gaunt leapt out. A cheer went up and somebody tossed him a bottle. Gaunt tore off the stopper and took a deep swig, before pointing back out into the darkness.
“Lads! I could do with a hand…” he began.
Major Brochuss leaned forward in the cab of his speeding staff-track and looked through the screen where the wiper was slapping snow away.
“Now we have him! He’s stopped at that place ahead!”
Brochuss flexed his hand and struck it with his baton.
Then he saw the crowds of jeering Ghosts around the drive-in bay. A hundred… two hundred.
“Oh balls,” he managed.
The bar was almost empty and it was nearly dawn. Ibram Gaunt sipped the last of his drink and eyed Vaynom Blenner who was asleep face down on the bar beside him.
Gaunt took out the crystal from the inside pocket where he had secreted it and tossed it up in his hand once, twice.
Corbec was suddenly beside him.
“A long night, eh, commissar?”
Gaunt looked at him, catching the crystal in a tight fist.
“Maybe the longest so far, Colm. I hear you had some fun.”
“Aye, and at Rawne’s expense, you’ll no doubt be pleased to hear. Do you want to tell me about what’s going on?”
Gaunt smiled. “I’d rather buy you a drink,” he said, motioning to the weary barkeep. “And yes, I’d love to tell you. And I will, when the time comes. Are you loyal, Colm Corbec?”
Corbec looked faintly hurt. “To the Emperor, I’d give my life,” he said, without hesitating.
Gaunt nodded. “Me too. The path ahead may be truly hard. As long as I can count on you.”
Corbec said nothing but held out his glass. Gaunt touched it with his own. There was a tiny chime.
“First and Last,” Corbec said.
Gaunt smiled softly. “First and Only,” he replied.
A MEMORY
MANZIPOR,
THIRTY YEARS EARLIER
They had a house on the summit of Mount Resyde, with long colonnades that overlooked the cataracts. The sky was golden, until sunset, when it caught fire. Light-bugs, heavy with pollenfibres, ambled through the warm air in the atrium each evening. Ibram imagined they were navigators, charting secret paths through the Empyrean, between the hidden torments of the Warp.
He played on the sundecks overlooking the mists of the deep cataract falls that thundered down into the eight kilometre chasms of the Northern Rift. Sometimes from there, you could see fighting ships and Imperium cutters lifting or making planetfall at the great landing silos at Lanatre Fields. From this distance they looked just like light-bugs in the dark evening sky.
Ibram would always point, and declare his father was on one.
His nurse, and the old tutor Benthlay, always corrected him. They had no imagination. Benthlay didn’t even have any arms. He would point to the lights with his buzzing prosthetic limbs and patiently explain that if Ibram’s father had been coming home, they would have had word in advance.
But Oric, the cook from the kitchen block, had a broader mind. He would lift the boy in his meaty arms and point his nose to the sky to catch a glimpse of every ship and every shuttle. Ibram had a toy dreadnought that his Uncle Dercius had carved for him from a hunk of plastene. Ibram would swoop it around in his hands as he hung from Oric’s arms, dog-fighting the lights in the sky.
One had a huge lightning flash tattoo on his left forearm that fascinated Ibram. “Imperial Guard,” he would say, in answer to the child’s questions. “Jantine Third for eight years. Mark of honour.”
He never said much else. Every time he put the boy down and returned to the kitchens, Ibram wondered about the buzzing noise that came from under his long chefs overalls. It sounded just like the noise his tutor’s arms made when they gestured.
The night Uncle Dercius visited, it was without advance word of his coming.
Oric had been playing with him on the sundecks, and had carved him a new frigate out of wood. When they heard Uncle Dercius’ voice, Ibram had leapt down and run into the parlour. He hit against Dercius’ uniformed legs like a meteor and hugged tight.
“Ibram, Ibram! Such a strong grip! Are you pleased to see your uncle, eh?”
Dercius looked a thousand metres tall in his mauve Jantine uniform. He smiled down at the boy but there was something sad in his eyes.
Oric entered the room behind them, making apologies. “I must get back to the kitchen,” he averred.
Uncle Dercius did a strange thing: he crossed directly to Oric and embraced him. “Good to see you, old friend.”
“And you, sir. Been a long time.”
“Have you brought me a toy, uncle?” Ibram interrupted, shaking off the hand of his concerned-looking nurse.
Dercius crossed back to him.
“Would I let you down?” he chuckled. He pulled a signet ring off his left little finger and hugged Ibram to his side. “Know what this is?”
“A ring!”
“Smart boy! But it’s more.” Dercius carefully turned the milled edge of the ring setting and it popped open. A thin, truncated beam of laser light stabbed out. “Do you know what this is?”
Ibram shook his head.
“It’s a key. Officers like me need a way to open certain secret dispatches. Secret orders. You know what they are?”
“My father told me! There are different codes… it’s called ‘security clearance’.”
Dercius and the others laughed at the precocity of the little boy. But there was a false note in it.
“You’re right! Codes like Panther, Esculis, Cryptox, or the old colour-code levels: cyan, scarlet, it goes up, magenta, obsidian and vermilion,” Dercius said, taking the ring off. “Generals like me are given these signet rings to open and decode them.”
“Does my father have one, uncle?”
A pause. “Of course.”
“Is my father coming home? Is he with you?”
“Listen to me, Ibram, there’s—”
Ibram took the ring and studied it. “Can really I have this, Uncle Dercius? Is it for me?”
Ibram looked up suddenly from the ring in his hands and found that everyone was staring at him intently.
“I didn’t steal it!” he announced.
“Of course you
can have it. It’s yours…” Dercius said, hunkering down by his side, looking as if he was preoccupied by something.
“Listen, Ibram: there’s something I have to tell you… About your father.”
PART FIVE
THE EMPYREAN
ONE
Gaunt had been talking to Fereyd. They had sat by a fuel-drum fire in the splintered shadows of a residence in the demilitarised zone of Pashen Nine-Sixty’s largest city. Fereyd was disguised as a farm boss, in the thick, red-wool robes common to many on Pashen, and he was talking obliquely about spy work, just the sort of half-complete, enticing remarks he liked to tease his Commissar friend with. An unlikely pair, the Commissar and the Imperial Spy; one tall and lean and blond, the other compact and dark. Thrown together by the circumstances of combat, they were bonded and loyal despite the differences of their backgrounds and duties.
Fereyd’s intelligence unit, working the city-farms of Pashen in deep cover, had revealed the foul Chaos cult — and the heretic Navy officers in their thrall. A disastrous fleet action, brought in too hastily in response to Fereyd’s discovery, had led to open war on the planet itself and the deployment of the Guard. Chance had led Gaunt’s Hyrkans to the raid which had rescued Fereyd from the hands of the Pashen traitors. Together, Gaunt and Fereyd had unveiled and executed the Traitor Baron Sylag.
They were talking about loyalty and treachery, and Fereyd was saying how the vigilance of the Emperor’s spy networks was the only thing that kept the private ambitions of various senior officers in check. But it was difficult for Gaunt to follow Fereyd’s words because his face kept changing. Sometimes he was Oktar, and then, in the flame-light, his face would become that of Dercius or Gaunt’s father.
With a grunt, Gaunt realised he was dreaming, bade his friend goodbye and, dissatisfied, he awoke.
The air was unpleasantly stuffy and stale. His room was small, with a low, curved ceiling and inset lighting plates that he had turned down to their lowest setting before retiring. He got up and pulled on his clothes, scattered where he had left them: breeches, dress shirt, boots, a short leather field-jacket with a high collar embossed with interlocked Imperial eagles. Firearm-screening fields meant there was no bolt pistol in his holster on the door hook, but he took his Tanith knife.
He opened the door-hatch and stepped out into the long, dark space of the companionway. The air here was hot and stifling too, but it moved, wafted by the circulation systems under the black metal grille of the floor.
A walk would do him good.
It was night cycle, and the deck lamps were low. There was the ever-present murmur of the vast power plants and the resulting micro-vibration in every metal surface, even the air itself.
Gaunt walked for fifteen minutes or more in the silent passageways of the great structure, meeting no one. At a confluence of passageways, he entered the main spinal lift and keyed his pass-code into the rune-pad on the wall. There was an electronic moan as cycles set, and a three-second chant sung by non-human throats to signal the start of the lift. The indicator light flicked slowly up twenty bas-relief glass runes on the polished brass board.
Another burst of that soft artificial choir. The doors opened.
Gaunt stepped out into the Glass Bay. A dome of transparent, hyper-dense silica a hundred metres in radius, it was the most serene place the structure offered. Beyond the glass, a magnificent, troubling vista swirled, filtered by special dampening fields. Darkness, striated light, blistering strands and filaments of colours he wasn’t sure he could put a name to, bands of light and dark shifting past at an inhuman rate.
The Empyrean. Warp Space. The dimension beyond reality through which this structure, the Mass Cargo Conveyance Absalom, now moved.
He had first seen the Absalom through the thick, tinted ports of the shuttle that had brought him up to meet it in orbit. He was in awe of it. One of the ancient transport-ships of the Adeptus Mechanicus, a veteran vessel. The Tech-Lords of Mars had sent a massive retinue to aid the disaster at Fortis, and now in gratitude for the liberation they subordinated their vessels to the Imperial Guard. It was an honour to travel on the Absalom, Gaunt well knew. To be conveyed by the mysterious, secret carriers of the God-Machine cult.
From the shuttle, he’d seen sixteen solid kilometres of grey architecture, like a raked, streamlined cathedral, with the tiny lights of the troop transports flickering in and out of its open belly-mouth. The crenellated surfaces and towers of the mighty Mechanicus ship were rich with bas-relief gargoyles, out of whose wide, fanged mouths the turrets of the sentry guns traversed and swung. Green interior light shone from the thousands of slit windows. The pilot tug, obese and blackened with the scorch marks of its multiple attitude thrusters, bellied in the slow solar tides ahead of the transport vessel.
Gaunt’s flagship, the great frigate Navarre, had been seconded for picket duties to the Nubila Reach so Gaunt had chosen to travel with his men on the Absalom. He missed the long, sleek, waspish lines of the Navarre, and he missed the crew, especially Executive Officer Kreff, who had tried so hard to accommodate the commissar and his unruly men.
The Absalom was a different breed of beast, a behemoth. Its echoing bulk capacity allowed it to carry nine full regiments, including the Tanith, four divisions of the Jantine Patricians, and at least three mechanised battalions, including their many tanks and armoured transport vehicles. Fat lift ships had hefted the numerous war machines up into the hold from the depots on Pyrites.
Now they were en route — a six-day jump to a cluster of war-worlds called the Menazoid Clasp, the next denned line of battle in the Sabbat Worlds campaign. Gaunt hoped for deployment with the Ghosts into the main assault on Menazoid Sigma, the capital planet, where a large force of Chaos was holding the line against a heavy Imperial advance.
But there was also Menazoid Epsilon, the remote, dark deathworld at the edge of the Clasp. Gaunt knew that Warmaster Macaroth’s planning staff were assessing the impact of that world. He knew some regimental units would be deployed to take it.
No one wanted Epsilon. No one wanted to die.
He looked up into the festering, fluctuating light of the Empyrean beyond the glass and uttered a silent prayer to the Most Blessed Emperor: spare us from Epsilon.
Other, even gloomier thoughts clouded his mind. Like the infernal, invaluable crystal that had come into his hands on Pyrites. Its very presence, its unlockable secret, burned in the back of his mind like a melta-gun wound. No further word had come from Fereyd, no signal, not even a hint of what was expected of him. Was he to be a courier — and if so, for how long? How would he know who to trust the precious jewel to when the time came? Was something else wanted from him? Had some further, vital instruction failed to reach him? Their long friendship aside, Gaunt cursed the memory of Fereyd. This kind of complication was unwelcome on top of the demands of his commissarial duties.
He resolved to guard the crystal. Carry it, until Fereyd told him otherwise. But still, he fretted that the matter was of the highest importance, and time was somehow slipping away.
He crossed to the knurled rail at the edge of the bay and leaned heavily on it. The enormity of the Warp shuffled and spasmed in front of him, milky tendrils of proto-matter licking like ribbons of fluid mist against the outside of the glass. The Glass Bay was one of three Immaterium Observatories on the Absalom, allowing the navigators and the clerics of the Astrographicus Division visual access to the void around. In the centre of the bay’s deck, on a vast platform mechanism of oiled cogs and toothed gears, giant sensorium scopes, aura-imagifiers and luminosity evaluators cycled and turned, regarding the maelstrom, charting, cogitating, assessing and transmitting the assembled data via chattering relays and humming crystal stacks to the main bridge eight kilometres away at the top of the Absalom’s tallest command spire.
The observatories were not forbidden areas, but their spaces were not recommended for those new to space crossings. It was said that if the glass wasn’t shielded, the view could deran
ge and twist the minds of even hardened astrographers. The elevator’s choral chime had been intended to warn Gaunt of this. But he had seen the Empyrean before, countless times on his voyages. It no longer scared him. And, filtered in this way, he found the fluctuations of the Warp somehow easeful, as if its cataclysmic turmoil allowed his own mind to rest. He could think here.
Around the edge of the dome, the names of militant commanders, lord-generals and master admirals were etched into the polished ironwork of the sill in a roll of honour. Under each name was a short legend indicating the theatres of their victories. Some names he knew, from the history texts and the required reading at the schola back on Ignatius. Some, their inscriptions old and faded, were unknown, ten centuries dead. He worked his way around the edge of the dome, reading the plaques. It took him almost half a circuit before he found the name of the one he had actually known personally: Warmaster Slaydo, Macaroth’s predecessor, dead at the infamous triumph of Balhaut in the tenth year of this crusade through the Sabbat Worlds.
Gaunt glanced around from his study. The elevator doors at the top of the transit shaft hissed open and he caught once more a snatch of the chanted warning chime. A figure stepped onto the deck: a navy rating, carrying a small instrument kit. The rating looked across at the lone figure by the rail for a moment and then turned away and disappeared from view behind the lift assembly. An inspection patrol, Gaunt decided absently.
He turned back to the inscriptions and read Slaydo’s plaque again. He remembered Balhaut, the firestorms that swept the night away and took the forces of Chaos with it. He and his beloved Hyrkans had been at the centre of it, in the mudlakes, struggling through the brimstone atmosphere under the weight of their heavy rebreathers. Slaydo had taken credit for that famous win, rightly enough as warmaster, but in sweat and blood it had been Gaunt’s. His finest hour, and he had Slaydo’s deathbed decoration to prove it.