Treacheries of the Space Marines Read online

  Yes, Corvus thought, Gurges had done a good thing there. Over a decade ago, now. The Song was a hymn to the glory of the Emperor. Hardly unusual. But Regeat, Imperator was rare. It was the product of the special alchemy that, every so often, fused formal magnificence with populist appeal. The tune was magisterial enough to be blasted from a Titan’s combat horn, simple enough to be whistled by the lowliest trooper and catchy enough that, once heard, it was never forgotten. It kept up morale on a thousand besieged worlds, and fired up the valour of millions of troops charging to the rescue. Corvus had every right, every duty, to be proud of his brother’s accomplishment. It was a work of genius.

  So he’d been told. He would have to be satisfied with the word of others. Corvus had amusia. He was as deaf to music as Gurges was attuned to it. His twin’s work left him cold. He heard a clearer melody line in the squealing of a greenskin pinned beneath a Dreadnought’s foot.

  To Lady Ahala, Corvus said, ‘I couldn’t be more proud.’

  ‘Do you know what he’s offering us tonight?’ Elpidius asked. He settled his soft bulk more comfortably.

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Really?’ Ahala sounded surprised. ‘But you’re his twin.’

  ‘We haven’t seen each other for the best part of a year.’

  Elpidius frowned. ‘I didn’t think you’d been away.’

  Corvus fought back a humiliated wince. ‘Gurges was the one off-planet,’ he said. Searching the stars for inspiration, or some other pampered nonsense. Corvus didn’t know and didn’t care.

  Hanging from the vault of the hall were hundreds of glow-globes patterned into a celestial map of the Imperium. Now they faded, silencing the white noise of tens of thousands of conversations. Darkness embraced the audience, and only the stage was illuminated. From the wings came the choir. The singers wore black uniforms as razor-creased as any officer’s ceremonial garb. They marched in in their hundreds, until they filled the back half of the stage. They faced the audience. At first, Corvus thought they were wearing silver helmets, but then they reached up and pulled down the masks. Featureless, eyeless, the masks covered the top half of each man’s face.

  ‘How are they going to see him conduct?’ Elpidius wondered.

  Ahala giggled with excitement. ‘That’s nothing,’ she whispered. She placed a confiding hand on Corvus’s arm. ‘I’ve heard that there haven’t been any rehearsals. Not even the choir knows what is going to be performed.’

  Corvus blinked. ‘What?’

  ‘Isn’t it exciting?’ She turned back to the stage, happy and placid before the prospect of the impossible.

  The light continued to fade until there was only a narrow beam front and centre, a bare pinprick on the frozen night of stone. The silence was as thick and heavy as the stage. It was broken by the solemn, slow clop of boot heels. His pace steady as a ritual, as if he were awed by his own arrival, Gurges Parthamen, Emperor’s bard and Ligeta’s favourite son, walked into the light. He wore the same black uniform as the musicians, but no mask. Instead…

  ‘What’s wrong with his face?’ Ahala asked.

  Corvus leaned forwards. Something cold scuttled through his gut. His twin’s face was his own: the same severe planes, narrow chin and grey eyes, even the same cropped black hair. But now Corvus stared at a warped mirror. Gurges was wearing an appliance that flashed like gold but, even from this distance, displayed the unforgiving angles and rigidity of adamantium. It circled his head like a laurel wreath. At his face, it extended needle-thin claws that pierced his eyelids, pinning them open. Gurges gazed at his audience with a manic, implacable stare that was equal parts absolute knowledge and terminal fanaticism. His eyes were as much prisoners as those of his choir, but where the singers saw nothing, he saw too much, and revelled in the punishment. His smile was a peeling back of lips. His skin was too thin, his skull too close to the surface. When he spoke, Corvus heard the hollow sound of wind over rusted pipes. Insects rustled at the frayed corners of reality.

  ‘Fellow Ligetans,’ Gurges began. ‘Before we begin, it would be positively heretical of me not to say something about the role of the patron of the arts. The life of a musician is a difficult one. Because we do not produce a tangible product, there are many who regard us as superfluous, a pointless luxury the Imperium could happily do without. This fact makes those who value us even more important. Patrons are the blessed few who know the artist really can make a difference.’

  He paused for a moment. If he was expecting applause, he did not receive it; the knowledge and ice in his rigid gaze stilled the audience. Unperturbed, he carried on. ‘I have, over the course of my musical life, been privileged to have worked with more than my share of generous, committed, sensitive patrons. It is thanks to them that my music has been heard at all.’ He lowered his head, as if overcome by modesty.

  Corvus would have snorted at the conceit of the gesture, but he was too tense. He dreaded the words that might come from his brother’s rictus face.

  Gurges looked up, and now his eyes seemed to glow with a light the colour of dust and ash. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the generous patron is to be cherished. But even more precious, even more miraculous, even more worthy of celebration, is the patron who inspires. The patron who opens the door to new vistas of creation, and pushes the artist through. I stand before you as the servant of one such patron. I know that my humble tribute to the Emperor is held in high regard, but I can now see what a poor counterfeit of the truth that effort is. Tonight, so will you. I cannot tell you what my patron has unveiled for me. But I can show you.’

  The composer’s last words slithered out over the hall like a death rattle. Gurges turned to face the choir. He raised his arms. The singers remained unmoving. The last light went out. A terrible, far-too-late certainty hit Corvus; he must stop this.

  Then Gurges began to sing.

  For almost a minute, Corvus felt relief. No daemon burst from his brother’s mouth. His pulse slowed. He had fallen for the theatrics of a first-rate showman, that was all. The song didn’t sound any different to him than any other of Gurges’s efforts. It was another succession of notes, each as meaningless as the next. Then he noticed that he was wrong. He wasn’t hearing a simple succession. Even his thick ears could tell that Gurges was singing two notes at once. Then three. Then four. The song became impossible. Somehow still singing, Gurges drew a breath, and though Corvus heard no real change in the music, the breath seemed to mark the end of the refrain.

  It also marked the end of peace, because now the choir began to sing. To a man, they joined in, melding with Gurges’s voice. The song became a roar. The darkness began to withdraw as a glow spread across the stage. It seeped from the singers. It poured like radiation fog into the seating. It was a colour that made Corvus wince. It was a kind of green, if green could scream. It pulsed like taut flesh.

  It grinned like Chaos.

  Corvus leapt to his feet. So did the rest of the audience. For a crazy moment of hope, he thought of ordering the assembled people to fall upon the singers and silence them. But they weren’t rising, like him, in alarm. They were at one with the music, and they joined their voices to its glory, and their souls to its power. The roar became a wave. The glow filled the hall, and it showed Corvus nothing he wanted to see. Beside him, the governor and his wife stood motionless, their faces contorted with ecstasy. They sang as if the song were their birthright. They sang to bring down the sky. Their heads were thrown back, their jaws as wide as a snake’s, and their throats twitched and spasmed with the effort to produce inhuman chords. Corvus grabbed Elpidius by the shoulders and tried to shake him. The governor’s frame was rigid and grounded to the core of Ligeta. Corvus might have been wrestling with a pillar. But the man wasn’t cold like stone. He was burning up. His eyes were glassy. Corvus checked his pulse. Its rhythm was violent, rapid, irregular. Corvus yanked his hands away. They felt slick with disease. Something that lived in t
he song scrabbled at his mind like fingernails on plastek, but couldn’t find a purchase.

  He opened the flap of his shoulder holster and pulled out his laspistol. He leaned over the railing of the box, and sighted on his brother’s head. He felt no hesitation. He felt only necessity. He pulled the trigger.

  Gurges fell, the top of his skull seared away. The song didn’t care. It roared on, its joy unabated. Corvus fired six more times, each shot dropping a member of the choir. Finally, he stopped. The song wasn’t a spell and it wasn’t a mechanism. It was a plague, and killing individual vectors was worse than useless. It stole precious time from action that might make a difference.

  He ran from the box. In the vestibule, the ushers were now part of the choir, and the song pursued Corvus as he clattered down the marble steps to the mezzanine and thence to the ground floor. The foyer, as cavernous as the Performance Hall, led to the Great Gallery of Art. Its vaulted length stretched a full kilometre to the exit of the palace. Floor-to-ceiling glassaics of the primarchs gazed down on heroic bronzes. Warriors beyond counting trampled the Imperium’s enemies, smashing them into fragmented agony that sank into the pedestals. But the gallery was no longer a celebration of art and glory. It was a throat, and it howled the song after him. Though melody was a stranger to him, still he could feel the force of the music, intangible yet pushing him with the violence of a hurricane’s breath. The light was at his heels, flooding the throat with its mocking bile.

  He burst from the grand doorway onto the plaza. He stumbled to a halt, horrified.

  The concert had been broadcast.

  Palestrina, Ligeta’s capital and a city of thirty million, screamed. It convulsed.

  The late-evening glow of the city was stained with the Chaos non-light. In the plaza, in the streets, in the windows of Palestrina’s delicate and coruscating towers, the people stood and sang their demise. The roads had become a nightmare of twisted, flaming wreckage as drivers, possessed by art, slammed into each other. Victims of collisions, not quite dead, sang instead of screaming their last. Everywhere, the choir chanted to the sky, and the sky answered with flame and thunder. To the west, between the towers, the horizon strobed and rumbled as fireballs bloomed. He was looking at the space port, Corvus realised, and seeing the destruction caused by every landing and departing ship suddenly losing all guidance.

  There was a deafening roar overhead, and a cargo transport came in low and mad. Its engines burning blue, it ploughed into the side of a tower a few blocks away. The ship exploded, filling the sky with the light and sound of its death. Corvus ducked as pieces of shrapnel the size of meteors arced down, gouging impact craters into street and stone and flesh. The tower collapsed with lazy majesty, falling against its neighbours and spreading a domino celebration of destruction. Dust billowed up in a choking, racing cloud. It rushed over Corvus, hiding the sight of the dying city, but the chant went on.

  He coughed, gagging as grit filled his throat and lungs. He staggered, but started moving again. Though visibility was down to a few metres, and his eyes watered and stung, he felt that he could see clearly again. It was as if, by veiling the death of the city from his gaze, the dust had broken a spell. Palestrina was lost, but that didn’t absolve him of his duty to the Emperor. Only his own death could do that. As long as he drew breath, his duty was to fight for Ligeta, and save what he could.

  He had to find somewhere the song had not reached, find men who had not heard and been infected by the plague. Then he could mount a defence, perhaps even a counter-attack, even if that were nothing more than a scorched-earth purge. There would be glory in that. But first, a chance to regroup. First, a sanctuary. He had hopes that he knew where to go.

  He felt his way around the grey limbo of the plaza, a hand over his mouth, trying not to cough up his lungs. It took him the best part of an hour to reach the far side of the Palace of Culture. By that time, the worst of the dust had settled and the building’s intervening bulk further screened him. He could breathe again. His movements picked up speed and purpose. He needed a vehicle, one he could manoeuvre through the tangled chaos of the streets. Half a kilometre down from the plaza, he found what he wanted. A civilian was straddling his idling bike. He had been caught by the song just before pulling away. Corvus tried to push him off, but he was as rigid and locked down as the governor had been. Corvus shot him. As he hauled the corpse away from the bike, he told himself that the man had already been dead. If Corvus hadn’t granted him mercy, something else would have. A spreading fire. Falling debris. If nothing violent had happened, then…

  Corvus stared at the singing pedestrians, and thought through the implications of what he was seeing. Nothing, he was sure, could free the victims once the song took hold. So they would stand where they were struck and sing, and do nothing else. They wouldn’t sleep. They wouldn’t eat. They wouldn’t drink. Corvus saw the end result, and he also saw the first glimmer of salvation. With a renewed sense of mission, he climbed on the bike and drove off.

  It was an hour from dawn by the time he left the city behind. Beyond the hills of Palestrina, he picked up even more speed as he hit the parched mud flats. Once fertile, the land here had had its water table drained by the city’s thirst. At the horizon, the shadow of the Goreck Mesa blocked the stars. At the base of its bulk, he saw pinpricks of light. Those glimmers were his destination and his hope.

  The ground rose again as he reached the base. He approached the main gate, and he heard no singing. Before him, the wall was an adamantium shield fifty metres high – a sloping, pleated curtain of strength. A giant aquila was engraved every ten metres along the wall’s two-kilometre length. Beyond the wall, he heard the growl of promethium engines, the report of firing ranges, the march of boots. The sounds of discipline. Discipline that was visible from the moment he arrived. If the sentries were surprised to see him, dusty and exhausted, arriving on a civilian vehicle instead of in his staff transport, they showed no sign. They saluted, sharp as machines, and opened the gate for him. He passed through into Fort Goreck and the promise of salvation.

  On the other side of the wall was a zone free of art and music. A weight lifted from Corvus’s shoulders as he watched the pistoning, drumming rhythm of the military muscle. Strength perfected, and yet, by the Throne, it had been almost lost too. A request had come the day before from Jeronim Tarrant, the base’s captain. Given the momentous, planet-wide event that was a new composition by Gurges Parthamen, would the colonel authorise a break in the drills, long enough for the men to sit down and listen to the vox-cast of the concert? Corvus had not just rejected the request out of hand, he had forbidden any form of reception and transmission of the performance. He wanted soldiers, he had informed Jeronim. If he wanted dilettantes, he could find plenty in the boxes of the Palace of Culture.

  On his way to the concert, he had wondered about his motives in issuing that order. Jealousy? Was he really that petty? He knew now that he wasn’t, and that he’d been right. The purpose of a base such as this was to keep the Guard in a state of perpetual, instant readiness, because peace might become war in the passing of a second.

  As it had now.

  He crossed the parade field, making for the squat command tower at the rear of the base, where it nestled against the basalt wall of the mesa. He had barely dismounted the bike when Jeronim came pounding out of the tower. He was pale, borderline frantic, but remembered to salute. Discipline, Corvus thought. It had saved them so far. It would see them through to victory.

  ‘Sir,’ Jeronim said. ‘Do you know what’s going on? Are we under attack? We can’t get through to anyone.’

  ‘Yes, we are at war,’ Corvus answered. He strode briskly to the door. ‘No one in this base has been in contact with anyone outside it for the last ten hours?’

  Jeronim shook his head. ‘No, sir. Nothing that makes sense. Anyone transmitting is just sending what sounds like music–’

  Corvus cut
him off. ‘You listened?’

  ‘Only a couple of seconds. When we found the nonsense everywhere, we shut down the sound. No one was sending anything coherent. Not even the Scythe of Judgement.’

  So the Ligetan flagship had fallen. He wasn’t surprised, but Corvus discovered that he could still feel dismay. The fact that the base had survived the transmissions told him something. The infection didn’t take hold right away. He remembered that the choir and the audience hadn’t responded until Gurges had completed a full refrain. The song’s message had to be complete, it seemed, before it could sink in.

  ‘What actions have you taken?’ he asked Jeronim as they headed up the staircase to the command centre.

  ‘We’ve been sending out requests for acknowledgement on all frequencies. I’ve placed the base on heightened alert. And since we haven’t been hearing from anyone, I sent out a distress call.’

  ‘Fine,’ Corvus said. For whatever good that call will do, he thought. By the time the message was received and aid arrived, weeks or months could have elapsed. By that time, the battle for the soul of Ligeta would have been won or lost. The singers would have starved to death, and either there would be someone left to pick up the pieces, or there wouldn’t be.

  The communications officer looked up from the auspex as Corvus and Jeronim walked into the centre. ‘Colonel,’ he saluted. ‘A capital ship has just transitioned into our system.’

  ‘Really?’ That was fast. Improbably fast.

  ‘It’s hailing us,’ the master vox-operator announced.

  Corvus lunged across the room and yanked the headphones from the operator’s skull. ‘All messages to be received as text only until further notice,’ he ordered. ‘No exceptions. Am I clear?’