The Last Son of Dorn Read online

  ‘This is truth! No lie can diminish it. Only through facing a truth can we hope to make it good. Vulkan fell, but not in vain. In his name we build a new Imperium. In his name we fight for a new future for mankind, the future that the Emperor dreamed that you would one day have.’ He did not say we. For the Adeptus Astartes, there would always be war. ‘Free of threats from without. Free of lies spread from within.’ He turned towards the empty chair, and pointed at it. ‘It begins here.’ And back. ‘The Adeptus Ministorum will no longer be counted amongst the High Twelve. Their privileges are revoked, their holdings to be levied for men and materiel the same as any other ministry of mankind. We will rebuild!’

  Stunned silence made a vacuum in the shape of an ovation, a black hole of stilled incomprehension. He had expected…

  He had no idea what he had expected. But he had spoken the truth.

  He pushed himself from the lectern, as unaccountably furious as he had been when he had barged through those doors. As when he had executed Mesring. As when he had received the recording that, had he seen it a little earlier, might have saved a primarch’s life. The Lords looked up at him like chastened children, terrified of a suddenly violent, superhuman father.

  ‘You will join me in the Cerebrium in fifteen minutes. The High Twelve is overdue a change.’ He nodded to the empty chair, and then made his way towards the doors. ‘See that that banner is taken down. And someone summon Vangorich!’

  Seven

  Terra – the Imperial Palace

  Check 0, 03:55:16

  Drakan Vangorich eased his hands along the carved wooden armrests of his new chair with some considerable pleasure. It was a beautiful thing, all braids and shine, and little bits of gold where the wood met that outrageously forgiving cushioned back. Europan, if he wasn’t mistaken, somewhere around the middle third of M3. He sighed and sat back into it. The leather squeaked in a pleasing fashion.

  The window across from the sceptrewood table and antique marble handwash basin opened onto an acrid swirl of fortress spires, lighting twinkling in the smog layer like stars. The many faces of the Emperor looked on from marble walls, friezes carved in rare woods. Artworks hung in golden frames: portraits of women mostly, and not, to put it delicately, in a fit state of dress for their current altitude. Weird, black-skinned statuettes stood on pedestals.

  Vangorich studied one for a moment, its proportions artistically imprecise, only looking up when a serving girl, recruited, it seemed, on the grounds of aesthetic perfection, approached through the thick carpet bearing a refreshment tray. Vangorich held up a glass, she filled it with something pink and fragrant from a platinum ewer, and he idly swirled it as she left.

  He had visited Mesring’s apartments before, of course, but it felt different this time.

  He knocked back the oddly tasteless wine and let the enzyme grafts lining his mouth and throat do their work, cleansing the liquid of alcohol and other toxins before it hit his stomach. Then he set the glass neatly on the table.

  ‘How does it feel to be one of the Twelve, then, sir?’ asked Beast Krule.

  ‘Very much the same as before, actually. Power is less about what’s given to you than what you take. And besides, it’s only provisional.’

  Krule stood to one side of the table, between a statuette and a pedestal bearing a pottery fragment. A ripple of torso broke the cameleoline illusion of stillness and a data-slate slid across the table. The high varnish barely even whispered ‘friction’ until Vangorich trapped it under his fingers.

  He turned it over, face up, and took a long look at the seal.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  Krule shrugged.

  Vangorich picked up the slate. The Black Templars seal had already been bypassed.

  ‘A list of possible Ecclesiarchs,’ Krule said. ‘Drawn up by the Adeptus Ministorum at Bohemond’s request. Give me the night and I can whittle that list down for you. The High Marshal too, naturally.’

  ‘Eager for a little light exercise?’

  ‘The High Marshal’s going to be a problem, sir, in the long run. We both know it.’

  ‘And there I was thinking you wanted a contest with arguably the greatest warrior in the Adeptus Astartes. No.’ Vangorich tossed the slate back across the table. ‘No. I’m prepared to give the new Ecclesiarch the benefit of the doubt.’

  ‘Very… magnanimous, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, but I have enough here on Terra to deal with the entire Ecclesiarchy leadership a hundred times over without needing to call on my best. No.’ He leaned in, and Krule inched forwards. ‘The Twelve’s meeting with Koorland was about more than my investiture, overdue as it was. He’s gathering his assets for some kind of covert strike. To draw the Beast out, I presume. Inquisition, Militarum, Deathwatch, even the Mechanicus – he’s assembling an execution force for which he wants the deadliest men he can get, and so naturally I recommended you.’

  ‘Too kind, sir.’

  Vangorich flashed a modest grin and sat back. ‘I’d go myself, but I can’t oversee everything in person. I hope to get a message to the Culexus Temple, but it’s a long way away from here and who knows if they’ll receive it in time. I’d like to have something to offer Koorland on his return, something to keep Wienand and the Lady Brassanas on their toes. That temper of Koorland’s is the only thing keeping them all off each other’s backs right now, but seeing me across the table from now on might remind them of the knife at their throats.’

  ‘Metaphorically, of course.’

  Vangorich felt his smile subtly alter. He had a cultivated public image of urbanity, but the smile he wore now was of a man who spent every day in a mask, the sort of smile that no one wanted to see on the face of a Grand Master of the Officio Assassinorum. ‘Metaphorical knives, you’ll find, cut every bit as sharp. Mesring’s fate won’t be soon forgotten.’

  Krule nodded reluctantly.

  ‘Second thoughts?’

  ‘Koorland wasn’t the only one on Ullanor when the primarch died. A primarch, sir.’

  ‘Alcazar Remembered breaks orbit in an hour. Be on it.’ Vangorich slid a briefing packet back across the table. Krule scooped it up in his big hand and turned away. ‘Keep him alive, Krule, whatever his plan is. Right now, he is the Imperium. Oh, and one other thing–’ A shimmer against the portrait on the wall near the door betrayed the movement of Krule’s head. ‘Be sure Wienand keeps herself out of trouble.’

  Terra – the Imperial Palace

  Check 0, 04:13:39

  ‘You disapprove.’

  Wienand stood with hands clasped behind her back, watching the Inquisitorial gunboats that slowly crisscrossed the Palace skyline through the silvered tint of the armourglass. Their black, slab-hulled bodies patrolled the surrounding spires, weapon hardpoints twitching, the deceptively ponderous sweep of their rotors mirrored across plasteel and glass. She watched a moment longer, then looked over her shoulder when she got no reply.

  ‘You have a way of being silent when you disapprove.’

  Veritus nodded stiffly, the pallid skin of his neck creaking like old leather. ‘I can think of wiser places to be than on the Abhorrence in the middle of a new Crusade.’

  ‘It’s not exactly my first choice.’

  ‘Sigismund was a maniac. Even the Sigillite was overheard saying so. His successors are almost worse, striving to preserve a philosophy they lack the wit to inherit or the skill to prosecute. They will be at the forefront of any battle, and your protection will be far from their priority.’

  Wienand’s ghostly reflection in the glass smiled in amusement. It was not so very long ago that she and Veritus had been trying to kill one another. ‘Koorland has ceded control of the Deathwatch, but through gritted teeth, and the Deathwatch will know it. I will have to earn their respect before they will follow an order without first taking it to Koorland or Thane.’

  ‘Or
the new Watch Commander.’

  ‘Or him.’

  The armourglass rattled as a gunboat passed close, flak turrets smoothly tracking it until it was gone. ‘Koorland is charismatic but naïve. I don’t doubt that his first act after the current crisis ends will be to dissolve the Deathwatch as he has always claimed he will.’ She turned fully from the window, hands still clasped behind her. ‘I can’t let that happen.’

  ‘Why?’

  Wienand was pacing before she realised it. She could never sit while others stood, and Veritus almost never sat. Others assumed it good manners on her part, but that was only a front. A seated individual had further to move to react to a threat than a standing one. And she didn’t trust Veritus quite that much.

  ‘For the Imperium. The Inquisition is too important to fight amongst itself, or to depend on the resources of others, and our current arrangement seems to work well. You and those that think as you do attend to the Chaos threat, and I to that of the alien. Perhaps it’s time it was formalised into something permanent, so that an argument over who or what represents the greater threat to mankind will never again cripple us as it nearly did.’

  Veritus nodded, accepting the unspoken charge.

  ‘Consider the possibilities,’ Wienand went on. ‘An alien-hunting strike-force that pools the greatest talents of the Space Marine Chapters, one that can be deployed anywhere in the galaxy, to arenas too hostile even for an Inquisitorial rosette to provide safety.’

  ‘That is a tremendous amount of power for you to wield. Power that you promised the Lord Commander would be shared.’

  She took a deep breath and stopped pacing, turning to face Veritus fully. ‘Perhaps that power could be balanced by a force of Chaos hunters drawn along similar lines.’

  Veritus’ suit sucked and wheezed around his corpse neck like a ventilator. It blew out an odour of cinnamon-scented oils and formaldehyde, and made the cuneiformed papyrus strips hung from his armour flutter like spirits with secrets. His eyelids fluttered drily. It was a tic, the tired rattle of an ancient cogitator, one that Wienand had come to associate with the deep dredging of ancient memory. ‘There is a Space Marine Chapter, based on Titan, that might serve.’

  For a moment, Wienand found herself at a loss for words. She turned back to the window and looked out over the scarred, quake-blistered skyline.

  ‘An entire Chapter? Here? What in the name of the Throne were they doing while orks invaded Terra and Mars threatened outright rebellion?’

  ‘They have… special interests. Their existence is known only to a few.’

  Wienand was long resigned to the fact that Veritus specialised in things known only to a few.

  ‘I will make the necessary overtures,’ he said after a moment, his lips animating to peel open in something too cadaverous and black-centred to be called a smile. ‘And I will ensure that power does not rush too strongly to Vangorich’s head. Though he flatters himself to think so, Malcador he is not.’

  ‘Don’t worry about Drakan. It’s out there, with Koorland, that things hinge now. He’s been fixated on the High Lords’ problems for so long that I think the changing centre of gravity has passed him by.’

  The old inquisitor’s lips settled back into their corpselike repose. His eyes, now unblinking, found the reflection of hers. ‘Do not forget Krule. I doubt that Vangorich intends to be a complete bystander.’

  ‘I will have Raznick with me.’

  ‘Take more.’

  ‘There will be more waiting.’

  ‘You suspect. Koorland reveals nothing of your destination.’

  ‘Though it’s with a fleet of Inquisitorial barges that he intends to get there. I will be as safe as I can be.’

  For a long spell, Veritus was silent, and Wienand feared that she was the focus of another unspoken reprimand. ‘Look out for him. For better or worse, Koorland is the only thing that holds the Imperium together.’

  ‘You don’t sound convinced that it is better.’

  Veritus snorted, a crackling wheeze like the start of an old recording. ‘His diagnosis that the Imperium is not what it once was or was intended to be is correct, but, though it is not my place to question a primarch, Vulkan was missing for a thousand years. He lacked certain facts. The Emperor’s ambition for mankind was the product of an innocent time.’

  ‘Making this, what, a guilty one?’

  It was a joke, but Veritus just looked at her, eyes dead, a slight curl to his upper lip.

  ‘Emperor watch over you both,’ he said, when he was ready. ‘I will be here when you return.’

  Terra – orbital

  Check 0, 05:22:46

  Cold white vapour lay over the floor of the flight deck like a sub-zero froth, clinging to the thighs of the void-suited tech-serfs that hurried through it. The grinding closure of the anterior blast doors behind Thane’s back drew a ripple through the stew that lapped at the drab grey ceramite of his greaves.

  He crossed the length of the deck. The hard grey mullions between launch bay doors passed slowly on his right, the rust-swathe crescent of Terra’s southern hemisphere dominating the spaces. There were no clouds. Terra no longer had a water cycle to speak of, but he could see gun-blimps, sub-orbital platforms, rad-harvesters, drifting across the slow-turning world like something robotically similar.

  As he walked, a matt-grey Thunderhawk broke the coherence field in a squeal of spasming countervalencies and roared a few dozen metres over his head, turning tortuously on its axis before coming down in a marked bay in a blast of coolant vapours.

  Incoming transports disgorged armoured Space Marines, or serfs laden with gear and pushing pallets stacked with equipment crates. Others were in the process of take-off, ferrying visiting officials and liaison staff back to their own ships.

  Thane ignored the bustle, heading for the group of three gunships that were in the process of being unloaded at the far end of the deck. They were as devoid of Chapter icons and embellishment as any Fists Exemplar craft, but they were black. Quartermaster Heroth stood in the fountaining vapours with a clipboard tucked under one arm, glittering void suit made stiff with cold, and personally shook the hand of the more human of the disembarking passengers.

  Thane recognised the Assassin, Krule, his big hand currently crushing the wincing Quartermaster’s, a light kit bag slung over the same shoulder. The magi, Eldon Urquidex and Phaeton Laurentis, he knew also. The latter scuttled down the boarding ramp on his tripod assembly, accompanied by a servitor pushing a tracked cart containing a set of lead containers marked with the Cog Mechanicus and cautionary runes in Low Gothic and binharic. Urquidex moved serenely a short distance behind. His left arm had been replaced with a bulky augmetic. His head was bald, bar-stamped and still scarred from the aborted surgical process of lobotomisation. His telescopic optics and facial grafts made the magos’ emotions alien to Thane, but the periodic twitch of his digital bionics seemed to betray his nerves. The ranger alpha seconded from the Taghmata to safeguard Mars’ investment met Thane’s regard with hard lenses of machined glass. Steam hissed from the blue-glowing cells of the plasma caliver in his articulated hands.

  Kavalanera Brassanas and half a dozen of her Sisters gathered together, detached, parchment strips fluttering under the idling turbofans, in silent communion. About twice that number, Thane knew, would be distributed across Abhorrence, Punished, and the Anokrono. Six more hopefully waited at their separate rendezvous coordinates.

  Leaning against their depowering gunship were two more that Thane did not know.

  A pair of hugely muscular ogryn, their sloping brows almost level with the gunship roof, grunted at each other in their slow, sub-Gothic dialect. Their khaki vest tops hung open over slab-muscled chests and glittered with newly minted Ullanor campaign pins, Aquila Company patches, and numerous greatly loved honorifica for valour.

  This was Koorland’s kill-team: th
e thirty or so that would succeed where the Emperor’s millions had failed.

  ‘The Lord Commander ordered me to find quarters for this group,’ said Heroth, still massaging his hand as Thane approached.

  ‘So I’ve been informed. Any further orders?’

  ‘No, lord.’

  Thane grunted, somewhat disappointed, then looked up towards the tremendous metallic impact that rang against one of the gunship’s troop ramps.

  ‘Thane!’

  The welcome came as a feline snarl from the closest gunship’s open hatch. A Space Marine in Deathwatch black bedecked in skull tokens and animal pelts walked down the ramp with his helm in his hands and the easy, nonchalant stride of an alpha wolf. He looked from side to side, seemingly idly, as he descended, an apex carnivore sizing up these other beasts that grazed on its plain.

  Thane noted that even the skitarius looked away.

  The first ever Watch Commander of the Deathwatch swept off the ramp, and thumped Thane with an embrace that had his gyros whirring to compensate. Thane awkwardly returned the bear hug, overwhelmed by raw animal charisma and the damp scent of musk. Thumping his rerebrace violently, the Wolf Lord pulled back. He smiled. His look might have been described as thoughtful, considered even, were it not for the set of sharp, overly long fangs.

  ‘Well met, Asger. Warfist’

  ‘And you, cousin.’ He slid one long arm across Thane’s shoulders and crushed his pauldron to his chest, a purring growl rolling from the back of his throat. ‘I never thought I would need to shake the hand of so many I have never met in one day.’

  ‘You grow accustomed to it.’

  ‘See my gladness at being here for just this one day. My ship translated into system barely six hours ago and I am already wearied by it.’ He turned to show the new crest on his armour. Thane could still smell the paint. ‘Though some idea of what the role of Watch Commander entails would have been welcome.’