The Emperor's Gift Read online

  An honour guard of marble statues lined the central red carpet, each one an armed and armoured rendition of a past ruler that had never raised a finger, let alone a blade, in the defence of their world. A dynasty etched in stone, looking down upon the gathered courtiers with expressions of dignified pride.

  The regent’s seat of rulership rivalled paintings I’d seen of the Emperor’s own Golden Throne. Ornate armrests led to a curved back, while the entire thing squatted heftily on twelve thick stumps. For a moment, I wondered what kind of mind could find such a thing beautiful. To my eyes, it resembled something flawed and half-digested. No amount of gold could save its grotesque architecture, though in ages past some maddened craftsman had certainly tried. The throne was a lesser planet’s annual wealth incarnated into something grotesque, flanked by royal guards and rising before an ocean of courtiers in forty shades of red.

  ‘My dear,’ the regent began. His silks strained to contain the fatty meat beneath. I’d always struggled to respect any soul that could allow the temple of its body to wither into corpulence. Perhaps you couldn’t fight age without money and the contacts for rejuvenat surgery – but one can fight sloth alone. A corrupt body is the result of a weak mind.

  ‘You will address me as Inquisitor Jarlsdottyr,’ Annika told him. More laughter from the lackeys.

  ‘Inquisitor Jarlsdottyr,’ the regent acquiesced with another smile. He wasn’t blind to how his smirk aggravated her. Even without touching his mind, I could see the perceptive gleam in his eyes. ‘We were overjoyed to learn of your arrival. I trust you have enjoyed your time on our world thus far? The harvest season is a time of great praise to the Emperor. Tell me, inquisitor, have you heard the chants rising from the temple district? Is it not a sound to soothe the very soul?’

  ‘I received Inquisitor Kelman’s final astropathic message.’ Annika slowly, purposefully, turned to take in the entire throne room. ‘I am here by the authority of His Holy Majesty, to do the work of His blessed Inquisition.’

  More laughter. Even the regent’s chins quivered as he heaved with suppressed chuckles. Without reading his mind, I couldn’t tell if it was a facade of feigned confidence, or if he genuinely believed things were going well.

  ‘We have welcomed you to our court, have we not?’ For a moment, his honeyed voice pushed my thoughts forwards, leading me to imagine the great speeches he gave at gatherings of the populace. Despite his appearance, his bio-record listed him as a powerful public speaker. I saw the first inklings of it in that moment.

  ‘Enough, regent.’ Annika still made no move to go for her weapon. She merely turned back to him. ‘I will not allow you to drag this world into sedition with you. Confess, and your execution will be swift. The people of your court will be imprisoned, to be released if they reveal no trace of heresy during interrogation.’

  The regent was no longer smiling. His courtiers still whispered and snorted, but the laughter had faded.

  ‘And if I resist?’

  Annika gave a Fenrisian smile, breathing through her bared teeth. ‘Resist, and no one leaves this room alive. Either way, the office of Imperial regent on Cheth will no longer exist come the hour of sunfall.’

  Sunfall. Another Fenrisian term. Annika always slipped back into instinctive habits when she was losing her temper. She’d probably be snarling soon.

  ‘You presume a great deal, girl,’ he told her. Something black moved behind his teeth.

  ‘A governor militant will be appointed to guide Cheth through the turbulent months ahead. Your little coven–’ she fairly spat the word, ‘–won’t even make it into the history scrolls.’

  The regent stood taller. And taller. And taller. I saw the veins in his face writhe under the skin like whips cracking against a barrier. The thing wearing his body was making itself known at last.

  Annika backed away, and a single thought lanced into my mind. My name. She silently said my name.

  ‘Hyperion.’

  IV

  A thousand kilometres above, I opened my eyes.

  ‘Now,’ I said to my brothers.

  The chamber’s lights fell to deep red as an engagement siren began to whine. Robed adepts worked clanking machines by the chamber’s edges.

  ‘Fifteen seconds,’ one of the tech-priests called in a blurt of tinny vox-voice.

  Each of my brothers was clad as I was. Each of us raised our weapons in unison.

  +Are you ready?+ Galeo asked in our minds. The white mist began to rise, clouding the air between us.

  ‘Ten seconds.’

  Dumenidon replied for all of us, as he always did. ‘For the Sigillite and the Emperor.’

  ‘Five seconds,’ called the tech-adept. ‘The machine-spirits sing. Initiating telep–’

  A blur of pain and fire. A storm of noise and cancerous colour. Liquid nothingness, yet with a spiteful sentience in its tides. It manifested enough solidity to grip at your arms and legs as you fell through it.

  Before I could focus my concentration enough to repel the sensation back, we–

  –appeared in perfect arrangement, all five of us ringing the regent’s throne. Our weapons were still raised: five wrist-mounted storm bolters aiming ten barrels at the convulsing ruler of Cheth. His robes rippled at the tidal mercies of the fleshcrafting beneath.

  The sonic boom of our arrival shattered almost all thirty of the great stained-glass windows, letting even more sunlight spill into the throne room. The white mist of teleportation, now poisoned to arterial crimson, lingered in coiling tendrils. Even as it dispersed, it stroked at our armour, dulling the polish.

  The regent actually managed to gasp at our appearance. He was flushed and mutable in his spasms, bleeding pus from his tear ducts, but stupefaction and fear halted his change.

  Galeo spoke without speaking. The weight of his psychic proclamation was enough to grind my teeth together.

  +In the name of the Emperor of Mankind, we do judge thee diabolus traitoris. The sentence is death.+

  We closed our hands into fists, and five storm bolters boomed in the harmony of absolute rhythmic unity.

  The regent’s physical form burst across the five of us, painting silver armour with vascular, stringy viscera. Bones shattered and crumbled, blasting apart, cracking off our helms and breastplates. A partially articulated ribcage crashed back onto the throne.

  +Peace.+

  On the justicar’s order, we ceased delivering sentence, but did not lower our weapons. Smoke rose from ten barrels, adding a powdery chemical scent to the surgical reek tainting the raised dais.

  Only the regent’s shadow remained. It twisted in the centre of the circle we had formed, writhing and clawing at nothing, straining to build a physical form from the air.

  +Dumenidon,+ pulsed the justicar.

  The named warrior drew his blade in a sharp pull. Each of us added our emotions – our disgust, our revulsion, our hatred – to his own, layering our surface thoughts around his clear, clean rage. The touch of our minds spurred his anger deeper, blacker, into a wrath intense enough to cause him physical pain.

  But he was strong. He let his own body and brain become the focus for our psychic force, channelling it along the length of his blade. Psychic lightning danced down the sacred steel, raining fragile hoarfrost to the marble floor.

  All of this, from our arrival to the focus of killing energy, happened in the span it took Annika’s heart to beat five times. I know that because I heard it. It formed a strangely calming drumbeat to the execution.

  Despite barely being able to see it, Dumenidon impaled the crippled shadow with a deep thrust. His blade instantly caught fire. This time, the burst of gore was ectoplasmic and ethereal in nature. Slime hissed against our warded aegis armour plating, failing to eat into the blessed ceramite. The creature’s shriek rang in our ears, shattering the few windows our teleportation arrival hadn’t.

  Thus ended the reign of Regent Kezidha the Eleventh.

  I turned to Inquisitor Jarlsdottyr, finding he
r in a canine crouch halfway down the steps leading up to the throne. A hundred silk-robed courtiers stared at us. Fifty armed palace guards did the same. None of them moved. Most of them didn’t even blink. This was not quite the gala ballroom event they had been expecting.

  ‘And them?’ I asked her. My voice was a rasp-edged growl from my helm’s vox-grille.

  ‘Skitnah,’ she said, her lips forming a Fenrisian snarl. Skitnah. I knew the word from her home world’s tongue. Dirty. Foul. Tainted.

  We raised our weapons again. That sent them running.

  ‘I will cage the vermin,’ said Malchadiel. He raised his arms as if pushing at the chamber’s great double doors, even from this distance. The rest of us opened fire, scything down those fleeing slowest, or who dared raised arms against us. Insignificant las-fire scorched my armour, too sporadic and panicked to be worthy of concern. A crosshaired targeting reticule leapt from robe to robe, flickering white with screeds of biological data.

  None of it mattered. These were vermin. I blanked my retinal display with a thought, preferring to fire free.

  The nobles of Cheth hammered on the throne room doors, crushing each other in their attempts to escape. Fists beat against the solid bronze, forming a revolting cacophony in their fear. As they wept and screamed, they burst like bloated sacks of blood under explosive bolter shells.

  I spared a glance for my brother Malchadiel. He stood rigid by the throne, facing the double doors, hands taloned by his efforts. Psy-frost rimed his splayed fingers, crackling into ice dust with each fractional movement. The doors held fast as the dying nobles surged against them, and I wondered if he was smiling behind his mask.

  Less than a minute later, all guns fell silent and blades slid back into sheaths. Malchadiel lowered his hands at last. The immense bronze doors creaked as they settled back onto their hinges, at the mercy of gravity and architecture once more, rather than my brother’s will.

  Stinking, opened bodies lay in ruptured repose along the carpet, and a world’s worth of aristocratic blood ran across the floor. Annika was toe-deep in a spreading lake of it, clutching her bolter in her hands. Red stains flecked her face in a careless impression of tribal tattoos.

  ‘It’s the smell I hate most,’ she said.

  They do say Fenris breeds cold souls.

  Darford’s uniform was drenched. There was no way of knowing where one stain ended and another began. His trimmed moustache was fairly trembling with irritation.

  ‘They always do this when you summon them,’ he said to Annika. ‘Every bloody time.’

  Vasilla was on her knees, pressing bloodied palms to her face as part of some pious ritual. She whispered voicelessly through lips that dripped with warm gore, praying to the distant Emperor.

  Merrick was distractedly reloading his shotgun, with the percussive snick, snick, snick of shells sliding home. The cyber-mastiff stalked around at the other side of the chamber, dipping its bloody iron jaws into the dead.

  ‘Get back here,’ Merrick called to it. It obeyed, red eye lenses gleaming.

  The Khatan poked a fat corpse with her spear, lifting a gold medallion from its throat. Her grin formed a marble crescent in her tan features. This was her favourite part: after justice came the looting.

  +We are returning to orbit,+ Galeo sent to the inquisitor.

  Annika inclined her head in gratitude. ‘My thanks. We will handle the rest.’

  But I turned away. I could hear a heart beating.

  ‘Hyperion?’ Annika called.

  +Hyperion?+ Galeo echoed inside my mind.

  I ignored them, scanning the bodies, letting my eyes follow my ears. The heartbeat was little more than a dull, wet pound, weak with arrhythmia.

  There. One of the palace guards – his burst body spread across the carpet – no longer existing from the stomach down. Somehow, he still lived. Loyal to the last, his rifle was in his shaking hands, aimed at the source of all this destruction.

  Darford saw the danger in the very same moment. He managed to say half of Annika’s name before the guard fired. The lasrifle cracked as it discharged. I lifted my left hand towards the inquisitor as the weapon spat.

  She had only half-turned when the energy beam whined aside at the last moment, deflecting to carve a groove in the gilded wall.

  A second later, I released my anger as flame. The violet fire ignited him, body and soul. He shrieked as he burned, dissolving to powdery bones in a lake of his own boiling blood. The smell would have been something formidable, but my helm’s olfaction filter negated much of its strength.

  Annika cleared her throat when nothing but a blackened skeleton leered up at us. Her eyes were fixed upon the burn slash in the white wall.

  ‘Which one of you should I thank for that?’ she asked.

  I lowered my hand, letting the shield of protective force fade from around her.

  ‘I live to serve, inquisitor.’

  TWO

  INSTINCT

  I

  She came to me just over thirteen hours later. The door chimed once before rising on grinding hydraulics. Curiously, she didn’t enter right away. She stood in the open doorway, her hands on the steel frame.

  ‘Mijagge kovness an?’

  ‘Yes, inquisitor, you may come in.’

  ‘Ah.’ She gave a knowing smile. ‘No Fenrisian today. You are angry with me.’

  Did I seem so? Strange to consider it. I wasn’t angry, exactly. She’d been careless in the palace, but no harm had come of it.

  ‘Not quite, inquisitor. I am eager to make speed from the system. That’s all.’

  Stripped of her wargear and symbols of authority, she was clad in high boots and a black bodyglove undersuit. It clung to her figure with a tension that approached tenacity. My training had torn away the capacity to feel biological desire, but it was still pleasant to watch the ruthlessly feminine grace in the play of her muscles. She was a healthy animal in her prime – a huntress clad in black, her long hair now loose about her shoulders.

  Alas, Fenrisians seldom pay heed to such notions as manners. Annika walked into my modest chamber, immediately letting her fingertips glide across the parchment scrolls hanging on the walls.

  ‘Please do not touch those,’ I said.

  ‘What are they?’

  They were my own writings: parchments detailing the deeds my brothers and I had achieved in the short year since I’d been appointed with honour to serve Justicar Galeo. The reason she couldn’t read them was because of the runic language used. I wrote everything of import to our Chapter in Trecenti, one of Titan’s encrypted tongues. It used three hundred separate letters in its core alphabet, and had no spoken equivalent.

  ‘They are a private archive,’ I told her.

  ‘The paper is beautiful. The texture…’ She hesitated, her fingers just shy of touching it again.

  ‘It is papyrus.’

  Annika raised an eyebrow. ‘Terran?’

  I tried not to laugh at the idea of trees on Terra. ‘Very amusing, Inquisitor Jarlsdottyr. Is there something I can help you with?’

  Annika sighed through her teeth, wolfish even when she didn’t mean to be. ‘I returned from Cheth not twenty minutes ago. A thorough investigation of the remaining Administratum tiers is now under way, but we have purged the hoggorm nest.’

  I said nothing. She looked at my raised eyebrow.

  ‘You do not have hoggorm on Titan, do you?’ she asked.

  Again, I didn’t answer. We had nothing on Titan; the surface of the world was hardly welcoming to life, indigenous or otherwise. She knew that as well as I.

  Annika smiled. ‘Then what of before Titan? Did you not have reptiles on your birth world?’

  This time, I couldn’t help but smile. ‘You should know better than to ask a Grey Knight about his past, inquisitor.’

  Her smile became a grin, all white teeth and bright eyes. ‘Perhaps I do know better. Perhaps I like this game, anyway. A hoggorm is a writhing serpent. Very venomous.’

>   ‘A snake. I’d guessed, thank you.’

  She chose to be oblivious to my dry tone. ‘When a new lord militant arrives, he will have to rebuild the infrastructure of planetary governance.’

  There was nothing unusual in that. Deep purges often required nothing less, and I didn’t understand why she was choosing to tell me all this. There were three inquisitors and their retinues on the surface, of which Annika was merely one. More than enough to deal with such matters. Darford would have called that overkill, in one of his dramatic turns of phrase.

  ‘Inquisitor, the particulars of your bureaucratic restructuring hold no interest for me. I presume you are here for a relevant reason?’

  Reading her mind took no effort at all. Irritation was turning each of her thoughts jagged, and her words were mired in hesitation. She knew what she wanted to say, but wasn’t sure how to phrase it.

  She also expected I would refuse her request once she’d made it. That had me curious.

  I withdrew the psychic caress, guiltless about the intrusion. Passionate souls were always the easiest to read. It actually took effort not to hear their thoughts much of the time, and Annika was a prime example of why. I’d conversed with relatively few humans outside the monastery’s walls, but Annika’s mind was distinctly among the loudest.

  ‘I have already received a summons to deal with another matter of great urgency. I must leave Cheth at once to deal with it.’ An informal sense of dignity buoyed her words. Whatever she had been called to do was something that granted her secret pride. Few tasks would be considered more important than retaining the loyalty of an entire world.

  ‘And?’ I prompted.

  ‘And I’m making a formal request to the Titan fortress-monastery to secure your presence for the upcoming operation.’

  I finally put down the helm I’d been cleaning. The sacred oils, thrice-blessed by the Purifiers, clinked in their glass jars as I set them aside. She was young. Perhaps she didn’t understand what she was asking.