The Master of Mankind Read online

  He wore weariness as a cloak, dulling his senses and pulling at his limbs. Exhaustion burned off him in an aura. The battle was over for now, yet still it leeched his strength. This weakness was new to him. He found that he loathed it.

  Here on the high walls, Diocletian scarcely recognised his surroundings. The curving, graceful spires of the Palace’s Ennara Towers were gone, replaced by a grey bastion of rockcrete and plasteel. Its minarets, once things of such stark wonder that pilgrims had been speechless upon seeing them, were ground down into rigid, armoured gun towers with rows of turrets and laser batteries aiming up at the sky. Crews of maintenance servitors, ant-small at this distance, worked under the guidance of robed tech-priests.

  It was a truth seen across the city-sized Palace. Walls had become ramparts, towers had been rendered down into battlements, and what had once been the most glorious celebration of human ingenuity now stood as a monument to the species’ capacity for betrayal.

  Rogal Dorn and his stone-hearted Imperial Fists had done their work well – the Imperial Palace had been broken apart and reborn as a fortress beyond reckoning. Exalted architecture constructed in dozens of styles over several generations had been ground down under Dorn’s cold gaze, reprocessed into something blunt and crude and inviolate.

  A pair of Imperial Fists sentries marched past Diocletian and Kaeria, bolters held at rest. They saluted the Custodian and the Oblivion Knight with the symbol of Unification, banging their fists to their breastplates. Kaeria returned the salute.

  Diocletian did not. He watched the two soldiers march on and felt discomfort at the sight of their pristine armour, the very same unease he’d felt upon first seeing the Palace’s horizon turned into an endless ocean of grey battlements.

  ‘How proud they look,’ Diocletian said. The words came out as a murmur. His voice was still suffering from the blow that had almost severed his head the day before. ‘Our noble cousins.’

  Cousins. It was true, if one employed a generous licence with the truth. The warriors of the Space Marine Legions were raised through a similar process to the Ten Thousand, albeit in the coldest and crudest imitation. Diocletian had been reshaped at the fundamental level, with perfection threaded through his blood and bred into his bones. In contrast, his lesser cousins among the eighteen Legions were cut open by knives and implanted with false organs, relying on surgical ingenuity and genetic rituals to mimic the end result of better, more painstaking, more complete, work.

  Kaeria said nothing. She shifted slightly, meeting his eyes with her own.

  ‘True,’ Diocletian allowed, replying as if she’d spoken. ‘They have the right to pride. They have never failed, after all. But there’s no honour in innocence.’

  She raised an eyebrow, tilting her head just so.

  ‘No,’ Diocletian replied at once. ‘Why would I?’

  Kaeria’s expression shifted to one of patient doubt.

  ‘I don’t envy them for their innocence,’ Diocletian admitted, ‘but I’m beginning to hate them for it.’

  Kaeria raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I know it’s petty,’ Diocletian snapped. ‘That’s enough of your judgement, if you please.’

  With their faces bared, the Terran melange of their heritage couldn’t be denied. Diocletian was a child of the Urshan Steppes, with the dusky skin and curiously light-brown eyes of that region’s males, the latter standing as evidence to pre-Unity programmes of genetic processing. In paler contrast, Kaeria had the sun-bronzed olive flesh of the Achaemenid region, light of eye and dark of hair. The high topknot atop her shaven head showed tawny streaks in the thin Terran daylight.

  Both bore the scabbed gashes and discolorations of recent battle. The walking wounded, returning to the surface with a grave tale to tell.

  Diocletian held a stolen relic in his hands, dirtied by the very fact he had to touch it. Once more he fought the urge to grind it beneath his boot – an urge he’d been resisting since the trophy first came into his possession. He left it on the battlements, relieved to be rid of it even temporarily. Soon he would leave it with the Captain-General. Let Valdor add it to whatever archives were being collected by those still on the surface.

  Mere years ago, it was forbidden for any to set foot here but the Ten Thousand, the Sisterhood and their mutual king. No others were permitted to walk where the Ennara Towers had risen into the polluted sky, for here the Emperor liked to contemplate the heavens, speaking to His most loyal warriors of His dreams among the stars. Now the battlements that had risen in the tower’s place were swarming with gun-servitors and Imperial Fists overseers. The stars were eclipsed by a forest of drifting searchlights, hundreds of them aimed skywards at the gently toxic clouds. Each stabbing beam of light hunted the sky for foes that couldn’t possibly be anywhere near Terra, but their readiness was unquestionable.

  ‘So much has changed,’ Diocletian said, looking across the vista of squat gun towers.

  Kaeria started, surprised at his tone.

  Diocletian fixed his companion with a neutral look. ‘Never that,’ he said. ‘I don’t mourn the loss of the Palace’s beauty. I mourn what all of this represents. Dorn and Malcador have both conceded that Horus will reach Terra no matter what stands in the Warmaster’s way. This is not precaution. This is making ready for war.’

  Kaeria turned to look across the newborn battlements once more.

  ‘What?’ Diocletian asked.

  She favoured him with a brief glance, the light of challenge in her eyes.

  ‘I have no time for your disapproval, Sister. The tribune is not here. I am. Let that be the end of it.’

  A low purr of servos and pistons cut into the silence that followed. Kaeria nodded towards a doorway in the nearby battlement tower. An archwright stood there, cowled by the cloak of her order. Three bronze-plated artificers with metalsmith tools rising from prehensile servo-arms linked to their hunched spines flanked the priest in silent vigil.

  ‘Golden One,’ came the tech-priest’s greeting. ‘Honoured Sister.’

  ‘Archwright,’ Diocletian replied. Many souls even among the Imperium’s hierarchs would greet such a consummate artisan with no small gravitas. Kaeria bowed out of simple respect, but no warrior of the Custodian Guard would bow to anyone but his sire.

  The archwright was an iron-boned elder, locked into a posture harness to keep her withered muscles upright, her cybernetics and bionics draped in a robe of Martian red and Terran gold. Whatever was left of her original face was surgically buried under reconstruction plating and an insect’s portion of ferrotic eye-lenses. She was female only insofar as her original biological template had been female. That is to say, in the mists of centuries past, she’d been born as a girl-child on Mars. The frail construct that approached both warriors now had evolved far beyond notions of gender.

  ‘I am Iosos,’ the decrepit genius stated. ‘I have been appointed to attend you before tomorrow’s war council.’

  ‘We need no attending,’ Diocletian replied at once. ‘We have artificers already deployed where we do battle.’

  ‘The Captain-General believes that the sight of one of the Omnissiah’s Custodians wounded and with his armour damaged will harm morale among the Palace’s pilgrims and defenders.’

  For a moment Diocletian couldn’t even frame a response. He would have laughed had the notion not been so impossibly tragic, as if the morale of the refugees sitting safe within the Palace’s new walls mattered one iota. The war was being fought and lost far from Terra, without any of those dregs even raising their weapons against the foe.

  ‘Their morale,’ he said with patience he didn’t feel, ‘is beyond irrelevant.’

  ‘That may be so,’ Iosos conceded, ‘but the Captain-General insisted, Golden One. As First of the Ten Thousand, his command takes primacy.’

  Kaeria gave her companion a sideways glance. Diocletian backed down, clenching
his teeth to prevent himself speaking the dismissal on the tip of his tongue. Kaeria was right: this wasn’t a fight worth having.

  ‘You may work,’ Diocletian said, his tone passionless in acquiescence.

  The archwright drew nearer, leading the three servitors. Diocletian held himself motionless as the archwright ran skeletal metal digits across his war-plate. The shaking of the tech-priest’s limbs ceased as liquid-pressure compensators in her arm supports adjusted for stability. Several of the struts in her harness vented tiny breaths of cryo-steam in a song of quiet hisses.

  ‘Golden One,’ she said again. ‘I wish you to note the honour I take in being appointed to your service.’ The vox-bleating that passed for her voice was entirely starved of emotion. Diocletian stood still as her black iron fingertips circled a ragged puncture in his breastplate. Machinery clicked in her sloping, elongated skull as she calculated the necessary repairs down to levels of exactitude far beyond the human eye. The scratching and scraping of her meticulous inspection made the Custodian’s teeth ache.

  ‘Such incredible brutality,’ said Iosos, ‘inflicted upon such fine work. Such distinctive signatures in the ruination. Each wound in the auramite is something singular, something unique.’

  A murmured hum filled the air around her augmented skull as its internal cogitators struggled to process the impossible findings.

  ‘Incredible,’ the archwright said at several intervals. And then once, ‘Do you see, here? These lacerations in the auramite layers are quite literally impossible. The carved segments at the manubrium bracing could only have been caused by something that violates the laws of physics. Something that moves in and out of corporeal reality, appearing inside the metal, dissipating matter rather than breaking it.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Diocletian replied, his tone dead.

  The archwright’s bestial allotment of eye-lenses cycled and refocused. ‘It is, isn’t it? And this, here, the metal itself is diseased. This isn’t damage, it’s infection. A contagion at the clavicle supports, taking root in the auramite layering as though it were flesh.’

  ‘How much longer will your inspection take?’

  ‘Impossible to calculate.’ Three of Iosos’ many hands reached for a particularly savage rent in Diocletian’s shoulder layering, their fingers quivering in fascination. She caressed the ripped plating with the sound of knives scraping over stone. ‘I understand you are forbidden to speak of what transpires in the Imperial Dungeon. But may I ask of the Omnissiah? How does the Machine-God fare since He exiled Himself to His sacred laboratory? What works of genius will He bring back to the surface when He once again deigns us worthy of His presence?’

  Diocletian and Kaeria shared another glance. ‘The Emperor is well,’ the Custodian replied.

  Iosos froze, her fingertips resting at the edges of the wound she’d been examining. The cogitators in her elongated skull whined as they struggled with what she had just heard. Before she could speak, she blurted a screed of mangled machine code.

  ‘Your voice patterns,’ she said, muted and low, ‘suggest you are deceiving me.’

  Diocletian bared his teeth in an expression that wasn’t a smile, nor a grimace; it was a flash of fangs, the expression a lion might wear as it was backed into a corner.

  ‘The Emperor lives and works on,’ the Custodian said. ‘Does that reassure you?’

  ‘It does.’

  When Diocletian picked up the war spoil from the battlements, three of Iosos’ many hands reached for the relic, the tech-priest’s inhuman fingers quivering in all-too-human awe. Diocletian pulled it back, refusing to let her steal it.

  ‘Where are your manners, Martian?’

  The archwright was respiring heavily. ‘Where did you come by this?’

  ‘I am forbidden from answering.’

  Kaeria interrupted with a curt hand gesture. Diocletian turned, as did Iosos.

  ‘You look exhausted unto death,’ came a cold voice from the arched door.

  Constantin Valdor, First of the Ten Thousand, strode towards them. The bitter Terran wind breathed against the side of his nationless features, carrying the scents of distant forges and the chemical tang of the great cannons lining the battlements. The Throneworld had always borne the alkali scent of history, from the dust of a million cultures waging war upon one another down the many millennia. The cycle was now mercilessly set to begin anew. For the first time in its long history, mankind’s cradle had known peace. The Emperor had conquered all, and the Pax Imperialis rose from the rubble. Rather than do battle upon the already-wasted soil, humanity had sent its greatest, mightiest armies into the void, to wage war far from their home world.

  And yet war was coming, against all reason. Terra’s peace had been nothing but an illusion, born of false and foolish hope.

  Kaeria greeted the Captain-General with a brief series of hand gestures. Diocletian saluted with the symbol of Unity, fist against his heart, a salute that Valdor returned.

  ‘Where is Jasaric?’ Valdor asked at once.

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘Kadai?’

  ‘Dead. He died with Adnector Primus Mendel.’

  Valdor hesitated. ‘Ra?’

  ‘Ra lives. He is overseeing the defences in the wake of Magnus’ ignorance,’ said Diocletian. ‘I am here in the tribune’s place.’

  ‘Ra, then,’ Valdor said at last, as if weighing the name and the consequences that came with it. ‘So be it.’

  Iosos and her artisan servitors worked on scanning, repairing and resealing Diocletian’s battered plate. Sparks sprayed from the acetylene-bright fusion tools in the tech-priest’s fingertips where she pressed them to the wounds. The servitor standing at his back had removed the auramite layering and now worked on reattaching the severed fibre bundle cabling around his right shoulder blade. Once glorious, Diocletian now looked closer to scorched, filthy bronze than Imperial gold.

  By contrast, Valdor stood resplendent in wargear that bordered on ceremonial. Although thousands of scratches and scars marked its surface, and although each one spoke of a battle won in the Emperor’s name, they were old wounds long healed. Artificers like Iosos had worked their arcane craft on each armour plate in the months since the Captain-General had last seen war, restoring it to a state of near perfection.

  ‘What has happened?’ asked Valdor. Hunger for knowledge of the Emperor’s fate was writ plainly across his stern features.

  Kaeria answered with a series of brief hand gestures.

  ‘Routed?’ Valdor shook his head at the madness of her explanation. ‘How can the Silent Sisterhood and the Ten Thousand not be enough to deal with this threat?’

  Kaeria repeated the gestures, a touch more emphatically.

  ‘That’s why we’re here,’ said Diocletian, adding his voice to her avowal. ‘We need more warriors to hold the Impossible City.’

  ‘What of the Ten Thousand?’

  Kaeria and Diocletian exchanged glances. Weary of formality, the Custodian shook his head. ‘There is much I can’t say. So much is forbidden to be spoken here on the surface, even where no disloyal ears might hear. The last few months have taken a brutal toll, moreso than any of the preceding years. The Ten Thousand is gravely depleted. The Silent Sisterhood fares little better.’

  He offered the trophy to Valdor. ‘And then there is this.’

  It was undeniably a Space Marine helmet. Which was, of course, impossible.

  Constantin Valdor turned the relic over in his golden hands, examining every inch of its construction. The helm belonged to no Legion that Valdor could name, and its battered, cracked ceramite was a red worn by none of the eighteen Legions on the battlefield. Sanguinius’ noble sons of the IX were clad in the rich red of arterial blood; Magnus’ traitorous dogs of the XV wore a paler, more austere shade of crimson.

  This helm was neither. Its ceramite was a proud scarlet, chi
pped away to reveal the gunmetal grey beneath and edged with a bronze-like metal so rife with impurities that it resembled brass.

  The faceplate was a Mark IV design with significant variation. Its mouthpiece was rendered into a snarling maw, with the respirator grille crafted into clenched iron teeth. The helm’s crests were a twin rise of rigid ceramite reminiscent of the angel wings of the First Legion’s officer elite and the high curves of XII Legion champions, yet these were cruder, straighter than either Legion’s crests, and emblazoned with brass bolts hammered into the red plating.

  Each of these elements was unusual but not unprecedented. There were as many variants in armour mark design as there were foundries and forge worlds producing the arsenals of the Legiones Astartes. In that vein the helmet was marked with its forge of origin, but the stylistically jagged rune imprinted behind the right aural receptor wasn’t one that had yet been seen in the Solar System.

  ‘Sarum,’ said Valdor at last. ‘This was forged on Sarum.’ He looked at Diocletian and Kaeria, though he didn’t hand the helmet back to either of them. ‘World Eaters.’ He breathed the name like the curse it was becoming.

  Diocletian nodded in agreement. ‘The dead legionary wore the devoured world on his pauldron, and the back of his head was wretched with the cybernetics so prized by the Twelfth Legion.’

  For a time, Valdor said nothing. What was there to say?

  ‘Tell me everything,’ he ordered at last.

  Kaeria’s hands wove a reply in the air.

  ‘Then tell me all you can.’ Valdor’s voice was cold. ‘Tell me whatever you can before we convene the war council.’

  Malcador the Sigillite, Regent of Terra, wore the unadorned robes of a Terran administrator. He led the war council, leaning on his eagle-topped staff as if he truly were the ageing councillor he appeared to be.