The Master of Mankind Read online

  A ragged dog growled as the boy passed, yet fled yelping when he gave it no more than a glance. A carrion bird, hunchbacked and evil of eye, cried out above the village. A pack of other ragged children moved aside when he drew near, their ball game fading away and their eyes lowering.

  His barefooted walk took him unerringly to the home of his father’s brother. The man, darkened and hardened by his years in the fields, was sat outside the mud-brick hut, threading beads onto a string for his youngest daughter.

  The boy’s uncle uttered the sound that meant the boy’s name. In response to this greeting, the boy held up his father’s skull.

  Many centuries after these events, citizens of even civilised and advanced cultures would often misunderstand exactly what a myocardial infarction was. The savage, constricting pain in the chest was due to blood no longer flowing cleanly through the heart’s passages, causing harm to the myocardium tissue of the heart itself. Put simply, the core of a human being runs dry, trying to function with no oxygenated lubricant.

  This happened to the boy’s uncle when he set eyes upon the skull of his murdered brother.

  The boy who would be king watched with neither remorse nor any particular hostility. He looked on as his uncle slid from his crouch onto the mud, clutching at his treacherous chest. He watched as his uncle’s sun-darkened features pinched closed, ugly and tight in supreme agony as the older man shook with the onset of convulsions. He saw the necklace slip from his uncle’s grip, the necklace that was being made for his young cousin, and would now never be finished.

  Others came running. They shouted. They cried. They made the noises of language that spoke of panic and sorrow in a proto-Indo-Europan tongue that would come to be known as an early precursor to the Hyttite dialect.

  The boy walked away, heading back towards his family’s hut. On the way, he turned to the figure – the giant – clad in gold who walked nearby. Nordafrik war-clan tattoos curled on the towering warrior’s face, curling from his temples to follow the curves of his cheekbones. The serpentine ink-curves, white against his dark flesh, ended upon his chin just beneath his mouth.

  ‘Hello, Ra,’ the boy said in a tongue that wouldn’t be spoken on this world for many thousands of years. The language was called High Gothic by those who would come to speak it.

  The golden warrior, Ra, went to one knee, dazed at the sight of a Terra that hadn’t existed for millennia, a clean and fertile place still untouched by war. This world wasn’t really Terra at all; it was still Earth.

  With the giant kneeling and the boy standing before him, it was far easier to meet each other’s eyes.

  ‘My Emperor,’ said the Custodian.

  The boy rested a hand on the giant’s chestplate, the fingers dark against the royal eagle. The boy’s farm-worked palm, already rough despite his youth, ran along one golden wing. His expression was reflective, if not entirely serene. He didn’t smile. The man that this boy would become never smiled either.

  ‘You have never shown me this memory before,’ Ra said.

  The boy stared at him. ‘No, I have not. This is where it all began, Ra. Here, on the banks of the Sakarya River.’ The boy turned his old eyes to the river itself. ‘So much water. So much life. If I have been disappointed by the galaxy’s wonders, it is only because we were fortunate enough to grow in such a cradle. There was so much to learn, Ra. So much to know. It pleases me for you to see what it once was.’

  Ra couldn’t help but smile at the boy’s distracted, contemplative tone. He had heard it many times before, in another man’s voice, as familiar to him as his own.

  ‘I’m honoured to see it, sire.’

  The boy looked at him, through him, and finally lifted his hand from the eagle sigil upon the Custodian’s breastplate. ‘I sense you have suffered a grave defeat. I cannot reach Kadai or Jasac.’

  ‘Kadai is three days dead, my king. Jasac fell two weeks before him. I am the last tribune.’

  The boy stared, unblinking. Ra noted the suggestion of a wince; the boy flinched at some unknowable pain.

  ‘Sire?’ the Custodian pressed.

  ‘The forces unleashed in the wake of Magnus’ misjudgement grow stronger. First a trickle, then a tide. Now, a storm’s wind, unremitting, unceasing.’

  ‘You will hold them back, sire.’

  ‘My loyal Custodian.’ The boy wheezed, soft and slow, his throat giving a tuberculosis rattle. For a moment his eyes unfocused. Blood ran from his nose, lining the curve of his lips.

  ‘Sire? Are you wounded?’

  The boy’s eyes cleared. He wiped the blood away on the back of his dirty hand. ‘No. I sense a new presence within the aetheric pressure. Something old. So very old. Drawing nearer.’

  Ra waited for an explanation, but the boy didn’t elaborate. ‘You must do something for me, Ra.’

  ‘Anything, my king.’

  ‘You must take word to Jenetia Krole. Tell her…’ The boy hesitated, taking a breath. ‘Tell her it is time to enact the Unspoken Sanction.’

  ‘It will be as you command, sire.’ The words meant nothing to Ra. Once more he waited for elaboration. Once more he was denied.

  ‘How did Kadai die?’ the child asked.

  ‘The outward tunnels are falling, my king. Kadai had advanced far from the Impossible City when the horde struck. I tried to reach his vanguard to aid their withdrawal.’ Ra exhaled softly. ‘Forgive me, sire. I tried.’

  ‘What of the enemy in the outward tunnels?’

  ‘Traitors from the Legiones Astartes have joined the Neverborn. The Eaters of Worlds, the Bearers of the Word, the Sons of Horus. Our outriders have witnessed Titans in the mist, and entities the size of Titans. They flood the main arterials and secondary capillaries.’

  Unimaginable thoughts dawned and died behind the child’s dark eyes. ‘It was inevitable. We knew they would gain access to the webway before the war’s end. You have Ignatum with you, Ra. You have the Scion of Vigilant Light. You will hold.’

  ‘I am withdrawing all remaining forces to the Impossible City. The outward tunnels are lost, my king. Overwhelmed beyond retaking.’

  ‘So be it,’ the child allowed. ‘Make a stand at Calastar. Sell every step as dearly as you are able. Is there more?’

  ‘I am sending Diocletian to the surface to requisition more warriors. Whatever he can muster. My king, the Ten Thousand bleeds and the Silent Sisterhood bleeds with us, but if you could leave the Throne for even a brief time, sire, we could press deep back into Magnus’ Folly. We could cleanse hundreds of tunnels.’

  ‘I cannot leave the Golden Throne,’ said the boy, curt, sharp. ‘That will not change.’

  ‘Sire…’

  ‘I cannot leave the Golden Throne. Every route between the Imperial Dungeon and the Impossible City would shatter and flood with warp-born. You would be alone, Ra. Alone and surrounded.’

  ‘But we could hold until you reached us.’

  ‘Kadai made the same demand, as did Jasac and Helios before him. Each one of the Ten Thousand represents genetic lore acquired over many lifetimes. Each one of you is unique. A work of art never to be repeated. I am miserly with your lives, when I spend so many others without a thought. I would not order the Ten Thousand into the fire if there was another way.’

  ‘I understand, sire.’

  ‘No. You do not.’ The boy closed his eyes. ‘The moment I rise from my place here, mankind’s dreams will die.’

  ‘As you say, my king.’

  The boy held a hand across his face, cradling his pained features. ‘What of the Mechanicum’s work? What of Mendel?’

  ‘The Adnector Primus is dead, sire. He fell when the outward tunnels began to collapse.’

  The boy met Ra’s stare, dark-eyed and cold. ‘Mendel has fallen?’

  ‘At a nexus junction in one of the primary arterials. He was part of Kadai�
��s vanguard. I fought my way through to recover his remains.’

  The boy’s eyes lost their focus. It was like looking at the shell of a child, the preserved cadaver of a boy lost too young.

  ‘My king?’ Ra pressed.

  ‘This is your war,’ said the distracted boy. ‘The Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood must hold the webway. If you fail me, you fail humanity.’

  ‘I will die before I fail you, Highness.’

  Again, the boy winced. A cringe this time, the revelation of pain – fearless but true – flashed in the child’s eyes. It drew him back to the present. ‘Malcador and the Seventh are losing the war for the Imperium,’ he said. ‘That is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy that can be undone as long as I draw breath. The Imperium is ultimately just an empire. Empires can be reconquered, whether saved from ignorance or pulled back from the clutches of traitors.’

  Ra’s grin was a crescent of weary misery. ‘We face a great many traitors, my king.’

  The edges of the boy’s mouth deepened. Not a smile. Never that. A twitch perhaps. Another wince. ‘There are always traitors, Ra. After the Ten Thousand performed the Asharik Silencing, I told you all that there was one sin far graver than betrayal.’

  ‘Failure.’

  ‘Failure,’ the boy concurred. ‘That holds true now, just as it did then, just as it always has. You cannot fail here, Ra. This is the war for humanity’s soul. The webway is its battleground.’

  Ra said nothing, for no words would do. He turned to look at this paradise of primitive humanity with their mud huts and their fields and their weaponless hands. Such innocence. Such unbelievable, terrifying innocence.

  ‘The Sixteenth sails for Terra to crown itself king,’ said the boy. ‘Can you imagine if I allowed that to happen? A weapon, held in the wrong hands, installing itself as the lord of a whole species. Terra would be in ashes before the first sunrise.’

  Ra swallowed at the sudden chill in the child’s words. ‘Sire, are you well?’

  The boy cast a slow gaze across their surroundings, across the rows of tall crops, around the village where every other man, woman and child was ignoring them as though they no longer existed. ‘This is where I spent my youth, working the soil and bringing life from the ground.’

  The Custodian inclined his head, causing the servos in his collar to purr. ‘I have given you my report, sire. Why do you keep me here?’

  ‘So I may illuminate you,’ the boy replied, speaking with a patience that bordered upon the preternatural. ‘You watched that man die, did you not?’

  Ra looked back over his shoulder, where the village folk were gathered around the fallen man, weeping and comforting in a loose, unwashed herd.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘That was my uncle. My father’s brother.’

  ‘You killed him,’ the Custodian said without judgement.

  ‘Yes. He struck my father from behind with a piece of sharpened bronze too poorly made to even be called a knife. Men had killed one another for generations before my birth, but this was the first slaying that had resonance to me, that changed my existence. It was illuminating.’

  He paused for a moment, following Ra’s gaze back to the noisy villagers. ‘The very first murder was also a fratricide,’ he said without emotion. ‘Thousands of years before this, when men and women still owed as much to apes as to the form we know now. But it is curious to me – brothers have always killed brothers. I wonder why that is? Some evolutionary flaw, some ingrained emotional fragility written into mankind’s core, perhaps.’

  Ra shook his head. ‘I have no way of knowing the emotions at hand, sire. I have no brothers.’

  ‘I was being rhetorical, Ra.’ The boy took a breath. ‘This night was significant not for the murder, but for the deliverance of justice. For my uncle’s deed, I stopped his heart’s function and forced him to die. In eras to come this will be called the lex talionis, the law of retaliation, or more simply “an eye for an eye”. It is justice itself. Hundreds of human cultures through time will embrace it. Some will do so out of brutality, others from ideals that they believe to be fair and enlightened, but it is a precept that runs through the marrow of our species.’

  Ra pulled his gaze away from the weeping humans. He heard his sire’s words, he knew the history and philosophy behind them, but the reason for them yet eluded him. His doubt plainly showed on his face, for the boy inclined his head in recognition.

  ‘I told you that this is where it all began,’ the boy said.

  ‘Culture?’ the warrior replied. ‘Civilisation?’

  The boy’s momentary silence told Ra that he had guessed wrong. ‘We are not far removed from those beginnings, Ra, either in distance or time. You could walk to the cradle of civilisation from here, where men and women made the very first city. When I leave this village, that is where I will go. That journey is coming soon. But no, that is not what I mean when I speak of beginnings.’

  The boy turned the skull over in his hands, just as he had done in the hut before. ‘This is where I first learned the truth behind our species. This very eve, as I held my father’s skull and considered how to restore his features according to our burial rites. When I learned of his murder, it was a revelation into the heart of all of mankind. This is a world that has no need of you yet, Ra. It has no need for Imperial bodyguards, for it is a world that knows nothing of emperors, or warlords, or conquerors. And therefore it knows nothing of unity. Nothing of law.’

  ‘You speak of leadership,’ the Custodian said.

  ‘Not quite. Every village already had leaders. Every family had patriarchs and matriarchs. I speak of kings. Givers of law, rulers of cultures. Not merely those who give orders, but those whose decisions keep a civilisation bound together. This was the night I realised that mankind must be ruled. It could not be trusted to thrive without a master. It needed to be guided and shaped, bound by laws and set to follow the course laid by its wisest minds.’

  Ra breathed in the humid air of a land that knew nothing of the ravages it would suffer in the centuries to come. He smelled the sweat of the workers and the minerals in the river water, feeling his blood sing at the sensation of a truly unspoiled world. He didn’t admire the crudeness of a people that lacked all but the rudiments of technology, but he felt awed at the species’ humble genesis. To think that the Emperor, revered above all, had risen from such beginnings.

  He looked the boy in the eyes, meeting that dark and knowing gaze, and spoke with a suspicion that curled the war-clan tattoos on his cheeks into a slight smile.

  ‘Did this truly happen, sire? Were you really born here?’

  The boy who would be king turned the skull over in his hands, his voice already distant with distraction. ‘I shall barter with the coastal traders that come at the high moon. I will use shells for my father’s eyes.’

  ‘My king?’

  The boy turned to him and spoke in the voice of the monarch he would one day become. He touched his fingertips to the Custodian’s forehead, delivering a jolt of force.

  Awaken, Ra.+

  Ra opened his eyes. He hadn’t slept, he had merely blinked. A half-second’s span, within which he saw back to the Emperor’s childhood in a time of almost primeval purity. He exhaled slowly as his senses returned to the here and now, among the monuments of a dead empire, within the necropolis of Calastar.

  The eldar cathedral was silent around him. Its shattered dome let in the realm’s ceaseless, sourceless light, casting shadows at inconsistent angles and reflecting oddly against the Custodian’s golden armour. Something like mist clung to the ground with a greasy tenacity, whispering when disturbed by the tread of intruders.

  And they were intruders here. Of that, there was no doubt.

  A statue of an alien maiden stared down at Ra as he trained. She stood in silent reverence, her streaming robes and features sculpted from the same pilla
r of songspun wraithbone. One of her slender hands was outstretched in pleading benediction, the other rested, palm against her chest, perhaps warding away some unknowable heartache, perhaps simply conveying some alien torment that had once mattered to her worthless, dying species.

  The spear in his hands, gifted to him by the Emperor, cast slashing silver reflections against the cathedral’s walls. Its blade showed the scratches and scrapes of endless use with the perfection of ceaseless repair. He ran his fingertips along the flat visage of his own reflection in its mirrored surface, seeing the unmasked image he so rarely presented to the world.

  Unease prickled at his flesh beneath the gold war-plate. He felt the weariness of the last five years clinging to him, the way cold wind slows the bones. Exhaustion wasn’t alien to the warriors of the Ten Thousand – their strength lay in enduring pain and weariness, not banishing it – but he felt as he had in his initiate days, when the trials had seen him drained of blood by the Emperor’s vitafurtam machines before subjecting him to the rigours of Custodian training.

  Disgusted with himself at his failure of focus, Ra resumed the sparring briefly interrupted by the Emperor. His spear spun and whirled, singing its bladed song in the cold air. He lashed out with fist, boot and elbow, losing himself in the harmony of emptying his mind of all else.

  Ra moved before the altar, forcing his muscles through the motions of the Fifty Forms, seeking the absolute focus that came through the alignment of body and mind. He shut out his surroundings, paying no heed to the pillared cathedral or the great altar, banishing the sound of his snarling armour joints and the thudding of his boots on the cracked wraithbone floor.

  Soon he was perspiring freely, rivulets of sweat painting his dark features, following the lines of his cheekbones and the tattoos that snaked from his temples to the edges of his mouth. His spear whistled and whined, cutting the misty air. Its high-pitched slicing passage joined the melody of his heaving breaths.

  Midway through the Third Form, the whirling spear slipped in his grip. The hesitation was miniscule, a fractional shift of the haft in his clutches, invisible to the observing eye. Ra clenched his teeth, leaning harder into the movements, chasing the elusive serenity.