Ashes of the imperium th.., p.6
Ashes of the Imperium: The Scouring, Book 1, page 6
All that was gone. More gods, newer gods, had arrived, streaming down from orbit in glistening landers and unmarked drop pods. The nightmare had been swept away, scrubbed clean, so that the entire horror might just have been a dream within that deep, fathomless sleep. It had taken him two days just to be able to speak again. Another day to recover the use of his hands, to take up that notched blade once more, to remember his name, his rank, his old function.
‘Kestros,’ he’d told them when they’d asked.
An hour later, that had changed.
‘No, Archamus. Archamus. Second of that name, the second one. Archamus. Master of Huscarls.’
And then, quietly, as if it might never have been true.
‘Commander of all forces, Terra.’
They hadn’t believed him, the ones who’d found him. They’d nodded politely behind their cobalt face masks, dutifully reported it up the chain, assumed it was a mistake.
But he remembered it. He was awake again. Awake, back into the world he had fought to save for so long. And it was changed. It was gone. What remained was like the old world, but not the same. Not underneath. It was like a smell dissipating, one that had been around for so long you no longer detected it while it persisted, but its absence was still jarring.
What had he saved? What had any of them saved?
He didn’t know yet. He suspected none of them did. Least of all the newcomers, who for all their terrible majesty seemed to him like children blundering through the halls of their fathers.
At times he thought he should be fighting them. The instinct was so slow to leave. This had been his place, his threshold to guard.
But that really had been a dream. The title was only ever temporary, thrust upon him when better candidates had all been killed or dispersed.
What was he now? What role did he have? What role did any of them have?
It wasn’t clear yet. Nothing was clear yet.
His eyes were open again, though. That was a start.
Some of the changes were physical. The Palace, even where it hadn’t been demolished or reduced to smouldering ruins, was not as it had been. Corridors went to places they had never done before, chambers were different sizes. The distortion was nothing like as bad as it had been at the height of the warp insanity, but peculiarities remained, solidified like driftwood cast out above a retreating tideline.
Archamus worked hard to remember the old layout, then to commit the altered one to memory. People would expect him to know, to guide them, so he had to be diligent. He couldn’t get close to the Sanctum. The Custodians, those few who had survived, had retreated to its inner halls and held the gates locked tight. His master was permitted entry, of course, as was Guilliman, but virtually no others. It was an insult, perhaps, to exclude those who had fought for so long, but then again he could understand the impulse. They were all in shock. All of them. Mortal, transhuman, demigod – stumbling from step to step in a fog of numbness. The Custodians, now pitifully reduced in numbers, had it perhaps worse than any others.
But he didn’t really know. Where was the Emperor? In the Sanctum somewhere, no doubt. Was He gravely wounded? Was He giving orders yet? Was He even dead – was all of this a sham? No one would tell him. Maybe no one knew. No one would even ask the question out loud, let alone him. Too much to do. Too much to organise. Get the supply convoys set up. Get food to the survivors. Get water sources cleaned up. Clamp down on the epidemics – the cholera, the scurvy. Keep the planet alive.
The Ultramarines were everywhere. They were doing the heavy lifting, their Astartes, striding around from station to station, bringing in ledgers and import dockets, their millions of baseline humans, swarming over the rubble, gauging it, measuring it, rumpling their brows in consternation at the devastation. Virtually every robe or uniform jerkin he saw was blue. An ocean swell of aliens, with strange ways and accents. He didn’t know where their orders came from. He wasn’t giving them. They were working to a plan, that was for sure. Steady, precise, efficient.
Throne, you could hate them. His own Legion were a rabble now, depleted to almost nothing, clad in cracked armour and reduced to borrowing bolters and gladius blades with the stamp of Armatura or Calth on them. The Imperial Fists had been here, in the heart of the inferno, while Guilliman’s scions had been taking their time in the warp, husbanding their strength, preparing to take it all over…
No, no. Cease that. That was unworthy.
‘Huscarl!’
The voice made him start. He turned around, squinting into the grey light of another dawn, or another dusk – you just couldn’t tell any more.
The man hurrying to catch up with him looked half-starved. His robes, once very fine, hung in dirty strips from his limbs. His bald head was dirty, his straggly beard unkempt. He’d been so neat, the diligent scholar, the template from which all the others of the order had been created.
Archamus watched him come. ‘Remembrancer,’ he said to Kyril Sindermann.
The two of them met in one of the many thousands of corridors that snaked between the old Bhab Bastion and the route towards the Blackstone Prison. The space had once been deep underground, but was now unroofed and thick with broken stonework underfoot. The toxic-tanged air of the wasteland skirled across it, snagging at pools of water, discarded weapons, tangles of human hair poking out of the heaped stone. The sky overhead was surly and turbulent, veined with milk-white lightning. When the wind gusted it felt ice cold; when it didn’t, the air was humid and clammy.
Sindermann came up close, breathing hard.
‘I have to see him,’ he demanded.
‘Who?’
‘You know who. Your master. The one I thought – stupidly enough – cared a damn for my counsel.’
In another age, Archamus might have cuffed him for that. ‘The primarch is within the Sanctum, I believe. I do not control access.’
‘You’re the damned commander.’
‘Of what?’ He smiled grimly. ‘You’ll have to try your luck with Valdor’s people.’
Sindermann exhaled, and it looked as if he’d deflated to nothing. He leaned against the remains of the corridor’s wall. ‘Hells. No chance of that, then.’ He looked up at Archamus, gave him a weary expression. ‘He’s avoiding me, you think? Scared of what I might tell him?’
‘I doubt that.’
‘Heh. He should listen anyway.’
‘You could tell me. I will have an audience with him soon.’ Archamus didn’t know that for sure. Such a thing should have been routine.
Sindermann raised an eyebrow, thought about it, then slumped a little further down the wall.
‘Ach,’ he said painfully. ‘What do I know? I can’t… process it yet.’ He looked up again. ‘You know what I mean? I can’t even remember half of it. And what I can remember is…’ He went paler. ‘But you saw the same things. I suppose you cope better, you Astartes.’
That was undeniably true. Archamus looked down at the man, and felt an uncharacteristic pang of empathy. How did they keep on going, the unaltered? They had none of his advantages, none of his physical or mental strength. Billions of them had died, but a surprising number had made it, skulking like rats in the shadows and only now coming back into the open. Those who’d endured must have been resilient beyond all expectation, he thought. Or perhaps just lucky.
‘I’ve seen too much,’ Sindermann went on. ‘Far too much. I think back to when all this started. How I was. What I thought.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think any of that any more. I still have to work out what to do. Because it’s beyond belief, you know? Beyond anything. What lies underneath all of this. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. And now that I do, I have no idea how any of us are meant to even live.’
He was rambling. He spoke a little too quickly. He wasn’t insane, but he was in shock.
‘It’s the other realm,’ Sindermann said, looking back up at Archamus. ‘That’s what this is all about. I thought it was armies and territories – the usual things. But it’s not. Not really. It’s about something much more profound, much more terrifying. I don’t think we’ve won. I don’t think people realise the danger. We’re still breathing, the Traitor is gone. So they’re cheering – the ones who made it. They shouldn’t be! They should be scared! They should be more scared than ever!’
Archamus reached out with one giant, chipped gauntlet and placed it gently on the man’s shoulder.
‘Terra is secured,’ he said firmly. ‘The Emperor will recover. All shall be as it was, before the insurrection.’
Sindermann laughed. ‘You think that? Or just trying to make me feel better?’ He shrugged off the hand. ‘That’s why I need to talk to your master. I don’t think he fully understands. I don’t think any of them do. We can’t just do it all again. We can’t just try the same things. We know too much now. I see why it failed.’ He shook his head as if in disbelief. ‘I wondered why He kept so much secret. Now I understand it. I think maybe we should have worked even harder. Suppressed it all. Can we do that still? We have to talk about it. Change tack. We can’t use it. Ever. The moment we try, that’s the moment it gets us.’
‘Calm yourself,’ Archamus said, wondering how much of this his master would ever agree to hearing. ‘Do you not sense the change? In everything around you?’
Sindermann gave him a quizzical look.
‘I am no judge,’ Archamus said, ‘but you must see the world is altered. The Traitor brought the sickness into being, and now he is destroyed. So do not assume that the mistakes of the past must be made again.’
‘You think the Traitor brought this into the world? You think he made it? Hah. No. It was in every atom long before he came along. It’s still there. It will always be there. That’s the problem. That’s the curse. We can’t kill it, we can’t end it. It waits, crouching, waiting for us, waiting for us to make a mistake.’
‘Anything living can be killed.’
‘But it does not live. It does not die. It has no form, it has no extension. It is…’ Sindermann trailed off. He suddenly looked exhausted. ‘Forgive me. I am babbling. But I must speak to your master. I must try to make him understand. I know him. I know his strengths, and I admire them. I know what he will want to do now. He will want to recreate. He will want to run things again, only properly this time. He will build up, because that is his nature, but the foundations are more rotten than he imagines.’ He smiled, almost apologetically. ‘I think he liked me, you know. As much as he’s capable of liking anyone. I think he’d listen, if I just had some time with him, alone.’
Archamus thought about how to let him down gently. The primarch was detained by huge new responsibilities, almost as heavy as those he had assumed during the war. Speculations on the nature of the universe would have to wait.
Just then two Ultramarines came into view, marching down the narrow corridor. They were clearly on urgent business, and the faint crackle of closed-channel comms came from their helms as they walked. They saw Archamus late. One of them saluted – a cursory gesture, it felt like. The other one just kept on going, barely acknowledging him at all. Neither of them had any battle damage on their armour.
Archamus watched them go. What business did they have in Bhab? What business did they have anywhere? Whose orders were they moving under? There would have been a time, not long ago at all, when he would have known the location of every Astartes within the Inner Palace, regardless of Legion designation. They would have saluted him then. They would have considered it an honour.
‘I will do what I can,’ Archamus said. ‘My lord has always cared about loyalty. The way things are going, we may need that now more than ever.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
What changed in us? In some respects it could be hard to tell. The war had been hard, and we had been a hard people even before those terrible years. In the aftermath, though, perhaps you could say that it was our imaginative faculty that was most severely altered. In the past, we could at least have conceived of such things as pity, even if in practice circumstances demanded that we often withheld it. Now, though, we could not even entertain the notion. It made no sense to us. So the Traitor’s greatest and most lasting wound on our psyche was this, I believe – that the proudest and most distinctive of all human responses had become not so much difficult as unintelligible.
– Shipmaster Alajo Dohel, Memoirs of the Final War
Prayto flew north-west, travelling without pause and making the best of his underpowered transport. The steady cloud movement petered out as the sub-Himalazian uplands dropped further and further behind, replaced by a blank screen of dirty grey. He was soon passing through flatter country – empty plains, blasted by the wind and the beating sun over the years, the grass now yellow-white and limp under the changed climate.
He saw cities on the horizon, and the cratered ribbons of long transitways linking them. Like all of Terra’s post-Unity surface, these places had been heavily populated, highly industrialised. Some of it had been impressive, some of it brutal. He saw the remains of great towers, the empty shells of grand manufactoria, the smashed routes of promethium pipelines standing over sodden mires where the fuel had been spilled. Very few animals skulked in the shadows. No people at all. Not living ones, anyway, though there were plenty of corpses, plenty of bleached skeletons. In places, the bones were heaped up ridiculously high, forming pyramids of interlocked ribs and hip joints. They must have taken huge amounts of work to construct. For what? Some ritual purpose? A display of triumph? Impossible to say now – those who had done it had moved on too. The landscape they left behind was one of emptiness, corrupted so deeply by the weapons unleashed on it that nothing would grow again.
Prayto had seen similar scenes on other worlds. Calth, of course – a planet so utterly damaged that life now only clung on underground. But it was worse here. This was the cradle of the species. They were all Terrans, one way or another, no matter what world you had actually been born on. If life failed here, if nothing ever prospered again, then they would be orphans. A disinherited race, rootless, disconnected from their own history. No wonder the defenders had fought so hard to hold it, and no wonder the Traitor had fought so hard to take it. In the final analysis, this was the place that mattered. It had to recover. It had to be made whole again.
He caught sight of the smoke, and checked his transport’s instruments. Locator runes blinked into life across his ranged display. Something was moving far ahead. In the past, he might have gently probed with his mind then, cast a discovery-net to determine what allegiance they had. Not any more.
He smiled to himself.
‘That is good for me, I think,’ he murmured. ‘To be in the same boat as everyone else.’
He flew lower, skimming across the shattered plains. More columns of smoke appeared, thick and smoggy, rolling up slowly from a distant line of hab-clusters. He heard the faint crack-thump of munitions, caught sight of scattered flashes in the gloom.
Ahead of that, just below him, he saw a collection of military vehicles drawn up in defensive formation. Most were Excertus cargo haulers and troop carriers, but there were some Legion tanks among them, all bearing the dark green livery of the XVIII Legion. It wasn’t much of a display, in all truth. So few vehicles had made it through the inferno, and those that remained were hastily patched-up and poorly functional. The Salamanders were as adept as anyone else at keeping machines going, of course, but even their forgesmiths struggled in such conditions.
He set the transport down in a flurry of foul-smelling dust, and shut the engines off. By the time he’d retrieved his staff and lumbered down the exit ramp, a welcoming committee of seven warriors had come up to greet him. Six were Excertus of some regiment or other. The seventh was Astartes.
Prayto bowed low to him. That was the least he could do – these were ones who’d been here throughout. It was an uncomfortable thought that whatever he himself had done, was doing, or would do throughout the rest of his service, it would never match that.
The Salamander regarded him warily. He went helmless, exposing a sweat-glossed head and dark red eyes. His skin was a charred black, contrasting with Prayto’s pale complexion – almost the image of his own primarch. His armour – exceptionally fine, like that of all his kind – was heavily pitted and scored. Scraps of some scaly matter hung from his shoulders, but whatever mantle or cloak they had once composed had been burned away. His bearing gave away a deep, deep weariness, though he was proud enough to fight against it, keeping his spine straight, his expression guarded.
‘Ultramarine,’ the Salamander said. ‘You are a long way from the Palace.’
‘As are we both,’ said Prayto. ‘May I know your name?’
‘Abidemi.’
He allowed himself a brief moment of satisfaction. The one he had sought. ‘I am honoured to meet you, Draaksward. Truly. Many are the stories I have–’
‘Tell me why you are here.’
They were so curt. It wasn’t intentional discourtesy, Prayto knew – just a little cultural difference. The Salamanders were makers of fine instruments, workers of bronze and steel, and had little interest in matters of procedure or precedence. In that, they were close to the norm among the Legions, not the exception – it was the Sons of Macragge who had always been the political animals, the ones who placed as high a value on manners as they did on more conventional weapons.
‘I seek your master,’ Prayto said. ‘Reports said he was in this region.’
‘On whose orders?’
‘My liege, in consultation with his brother the Praetorian. The Lord Vulkan is requested to return to the Palace as soon as he is able.’
