Saturnine Read online

  CONTENTS

  CONTENTS

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  HELL IS A CHAINSWORD DEEP

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  I AM THE FORTRESS NOW

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  FOUR VICTORIES (TO THE DEATH)

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  THE TWENTY-SIXTH OF QUINTUS

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  The Traitor Host of Warmaster Horus Lupercal

  Fulgrim – ‘The Phoenician’, Primarch of the III Legion, Emperor’s Children

  Perturabo – ‘The Lord of Iron’, Primarch of the IV Legion, Iron Worriors

  Angron – ‘The Red Angel’, Primarch of the XII Legion, World Eaters

  Mortarion – ‘The Pale King’, Primarch of the XIV Legion, Death Guard

  Magnus the Red – ‘The Crimson King’, Primarch of the XV Legion, Thousand Sons

  The IV Legion ‘Iron Warriors’

  Yzar Chroniates – Lord Captain of the Second Armored Century

  Ormon Gundar – Warsmith, Stor-Bezashk

  Bogdan Mortel – Warsmith, Stor Bezashk

  The XVI ‘Legion Sons of Horus’

  Kenor Argonis – Equerry to Warmaster Lupercal

  The Mournival

  Ezekyle Abaddon – First Captain

  Horus Aximand – ‘Little Horus’, Captain, Fifth Company

  Tormageddon

  Falkus Kibre – ‘Widowmaker’, Captain, Justaerin Terminator section

  Tybalt Marr – Captain of the 18th Company

  Lev Goshen – Captain of the 25th Company

  Serac Lukash – Line Captain, 5th Company, Haemora Destroyer Squad

  Urran Gauk – Line Captain of the Justaerin Terminator section

  Xan Ekosa – Assault Captain, Chtonae Reaver Squad, 18th Company

  DeRall – Line Captain of the Catulan Reaver section

  The XII Legion ‘World Eaters’

  Khârn – Captain, Eight Assault Company

  Ekelot – of the Devourers

  Kadag Yde – of VII Rampager

  Herhak – of the Caedere

  Skalder

  Bri Boret – Centurion

  Huk Manoux – Centurion

  Barbis Red Butcher

  Menekelen Burning Gaze

  Jurok – of the Devourers

  Uttara Khon – of III Destroyers

  Sahvakarus the Culler

  Drukuun

  Vorse

  Malmanov – of the Caedere

  Muratus Attvus

  Khat Khadda – of II Triarii

  Resulka Red Tatter

  Goret Foulmaw

  Cisara Warhand – Centurion

  Mahog Dearth – of VI Destroyers

  Haskor Blood Smoke

  Nurtot – of II Triarii

  Karakull White Butcher

  The XV ‘Legion Thousand Sons’

  Ahzek Ahriman – Chief Librarian

  The III Legion ‘Emperor’s Children’

  Eidolon – Lord Commander

  Von Kalda – Equerry to Eidolon

  Lecus Phodion – Vexillarius

  Quine Mylossar

  Nuno DeDonna

  Jarkon Darol

  Symmomus

  Zeneb Zenar

  Janvar Kell

  The Dark Mechanicum

  Eyet-One-Tag – Speaker of the Epsta War-Stead linked unity

  The Defenders of Terra

  Jaghatai Khan – ‘The Warhawk of Chogoris’, Primarch of the V Legion, White Scars

  Rogal Dorn – Praetorian of Terra, Primarch of the VII Legion, Imperial Fists

  Sanguinius – ‘The Great Angel’, Primarch of the IX Legion, Blood Angels

  Malcador the Sigillite – Regent of the Imperium

  The Talons of the Emperor

  Constantin Valdor – Captain-General of the Legio Custodes

  Amon Tauromachian – Custodian

  Tsutomu – Custodian, Prefect Warden

  Jenetia Krole – Vigil-Commander of the Silent Sisterhood

  Aphone – Raptor Guard, Silent Sisterhood

  Officers and Seniors Militant of the War Court

  Saul Niborran – High Primary Solar General

  Celement Brohn – Militant Colonel Auxilia

  Sandrine Icaro – Second Mistress Tacticae Terrestria

  Katarin Elg – Mistress Tacticae

  Niora Su-Kassen – Solar Commander Staff, former Admiral of the Jovian Fleets

  The VII Legion ‘Imperial Fists’

  Archamus – Master of Huscarls

  Diamantis – Huscarl

  Cadwalder – Huscarl

  Vorst – Veteran Captain

  Camba Diaz – Lord Castellan of the Forth Sphere, Siege Master

  Fafnir Rann – Lord Seneschal, Captain of the First Assault Cadre

  Fask Halen – Captain of the 19th Tactical Company

  Tarchos – Sergeant, 19th Tactical Company

  Maximus Thane – Captain, 22nd Company Exemplars

  Sigismund – First Captain, Marshal of the Templars

  Bohemond – Venerable Dreadnought

  Bleumel

  Theis Reus

  Madeus – Captain, Wall Master of Oanis

  Kask – Sergeant, Wallguard

  Leod Baldwin – Seconded to kill team duty

  Gercault – Seconded to kill team duty

  Mathane – Heavy weapons, seconded to kill team duty

  Orontes – Heavy weapons, seconded to kill team duty

  The V Legion ‘White Scars’

  Shiban Khan – called Tachseer

  Naranbatar – Stormseer

  Khetra Kal

  Yetto – of the Kharash

  Qin Fai – Noyan-Khan

  The IX Legion ‘Blood Angels’

  Raldoron – First Captain, First Chapter

  Dominion Zephon – ‘The bringer of Sorrows’, Captain

  Bel Sepatus – Captain-Paladin of the Keruvim host

  Satel Aimery

  Khoradal Furio

  Emhon Lus

  The Imperial Army (Excertus, Auxilia and others)

  Aldana Agathe – Marshal, Antioch Miles Vesperi

  Konas Burr – Militant General, Kienmerine Corps Bellum

  Ahlborn – Conroi-Captain, Host palatine (Command Prefectus Unit)

  Bastian Carlo – Colonel (33rd Pan-Pacific Mobile)

  Al-Nid Nazira – Captain, Auxilia

  Mads Tantane – Captain (16th Arctic Host)

  Willem Kordy – (33rd Pan-Pacific Mobile)

  Joseph Baako Monday – (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army)

  Ennie Carnet – (Fourth Australis Mechanized)

  Seezar Filipav – (Hiveguard Ischia)

  Jen Koder – (22nd Kantium Hort)

  Bailee Grosser – (3rd Helvet)

  Olly Piers – (105th Tercio Upland Grenadiers)

  Pasha Cavaner – (11th Heavy Janissaries)

  Lex Thornal – (77th Europa Max)

  Adele Gercault – (55th Midlantik)

  Oxana Pell – (Hort Borograd K)

  Getty Orheg – (16th Arctic Hort)

  And others

  Sinderman’s Order

  Kyril Sindermann – Historian

  Ceris Gunn – Historian

  Hari Harx – Historian

  Theraiomas Kanze – Historian

  Leea Tang – Historian

  Dinesh
– Historian

  Mandeep – Historian

  Serving the Adeptus Mechanicus

  Arkhan Land – Magos, Technoarchaeologist

  The Chosen of Malcador

  Garviel Loken – The Lone Wolf

  Heleg Gallor – Knight Errant

  Endryd Haar – ‘The Riven Hound’, Blackshield

  Nathaniel Garro – Knight Errant

  At Blackstone

  Vaskale Solar – Auxilia Veteran, Warden of the Watch

  Epuphrati Keeler – Former Remembrancer

  Edic Aarac – Inmate

  Basilio Fo – Inmate

  Gaines Burtok – Inmate

  Others

  John Grammaticus – Logokine

  Erda

  Leetu – Her Legionary

  Nerie – Pilot, Port Guild

  ‘The Earth has lost its youthfulness; it is gone, like a happy dream. Now every day brings us closer to destruction, to desert…’

  – Terran poet Vyasa, circa 850.M1

  ‘I need to fight whole armies alone; I have ten hearts; I have a hundred arms; I feel too strong to war with mortals -bring me gods!’

  – the dramaturge Rostand, circa 900.M2

  ‘Immortality, for us, is impossible.’

  – Horace, Odes, fl. Ml

  PART ONE

  HELL IS A CHAINSWORD DEEP

  Reiteration

  Who knows what He is thinking, or what He was ever thinking? He moves, Kyril Sindermann conceded to himself as he climbed the last of the steps, our beloved Emperor, He moves in mysterious ways.

  ‘Misterious,’ he said aloud, breathing the word like a sigh. The cold echo of the stairwell answered him, the patter of the rain. Sindermann was exhausted. He had come a long way; not just up the thousand step of the tower, but along the path before that, the long road that had once seemed so promising, but had led him – led them all – into unforgiving disaster.

  Kyril Sindermann had walked alongside history as it was being made’, and had been appointed to observe and record that process. But history, wilful and cruel, never leads where it is expected. It cannot be anticipated. Sindermann should have known that most base of professional principles – history only makes sense in hindsight.

  Did He know? The beloved Emperor? Did He read history backwardsand understand what the end of the book would be? If He did, could He have changed the words? Could He have warned us? Did He try?

  Did He know, all along, in His mysterious way, that this would be where it all led to?

  Here?

  Sindermann unlatched the door and pushed it open. Cold air met his face. The roof garden hissed with rain. Beyond, grey cloud sloped from the upper bastions of the Sanctum Imperialis, cloud-conjured ghosts of the mountains that had been levelled to make way for this citadel. It had once seemed a wonder, a great feat of man, the flattening of a mountain range to make the foundation stone of a city-palace. ‘No greater wonder can be imagined,’ some witness had written at the time.

  No longer. Greater wonders had come since to eclipse it: the war to pacify the heavens; the crusade to crush bestial species; the liberation of lost humanity; the unification of the cosmos.

  The revelation of unthinkable horror. The betrayal of all that was.

  Now this, here. Mountains had been shaved flat to build a palace, and from that palace, an empire was raised. All that would fail, and the palace would fall, and the rocks that had been planed away to hold it up forever would split, and so too the world beneath that rock.

  Sindermann wandered along the garden walk. The Katabat Terrace, a hanging garden, once a paradise. The beds had been left to grow wild, stone tubs and planters split by untended roots. Auto-irrigation and pesticide systems had been shut down to conserve power. The botanical servitors had long since been recoded to serve in the munition vaults. The garden staff had been conscripted to siege labour brigades or sent to the front lines. Other Palace gardens, and there were many, had been turned over to food cultivation.

  But not the Katabat. The highest, the loneliest, the Emperor’s favourite, near the top of old Widdershin’s Tower. It had simply

  been abandoned. Perhaps He, the beloved Emperor, hoped it could be opened again one day, the gardeners brought home, the precious specimens nurtured back into bloom.

  If that was so, thought Sindermann, then hope still existed.

  The Katabat had not withered. Rain drummed across its paths, beds and parapets, pooled on uneven flagstones, and overspilled from empty pots. The garden had turned feral, overcome with weeds, untamed creepers and unpruned saplings. Water dripped from the bowed and buds of chemically disfigured flowers. The symbolism was breathtaking.

  It wasn’t even rain, not natural rain. The entire Inner Palace, the Sanctum Imperialis, of itself a city bigger than old Konstantinopol, had been shut inside its dome of void shields since before the start of Secundus. The shields had never been designed to stay up for so long. All air was recirculated, processed, breathed a trillion times, and artificial weather systems had built under the dome, breeding stained cloud, acid rain and pocket storms that churned and festered beneath the crackling fields. This rain was recycled sweat, body moisture, piss, blood.

  It was worse, he had been told, outside the inner voids: toxic smogs and bacterial clouds lifting from the burning sectors and the battle fronts, or artificially engineered; searing firestorms; ash blizzards; epileptic convulsions of lightning spasming from the aftershock of orbital strikes; shrieking tornados, propagated by the concussion of incessant bombardments. The ground shook. Even here, he could feed the constant tremble.

  That was just here… Just the vast Palace Zone, the Zone Imperialis Terra, a continent wide. Beyond it, global hell, a systematic ravaging of the home planet, a collateral disaster of pollutants, seismic shock and fallout that was hairowing outwards from this monumental focus of attack. He had been told the plume of poison ash and smoke trailing off the Imperial Palace obscured the entire Europa and Pan-Asiatic landmasses.

  He had been told…

  He didn’t need to be told. He could see it. He could see enough. He stepped to the parapet, rain kissing his face, and stood over the thousand incite drop straight down to the roofs of the West Constant Barracks.

  He could see the sprawl of the Sanctum Imperials Palatine, the scope of the vast city-palace beyond, the Anterior Barbican, the Greater Palace Magnifican, tumbled and laid out like a casualty awaiting death. He could see the vast gates, the spires, the immense forms of the once-majestic ports, the lines of walls that had been built never to fall. Beyond that, in every direction, the belts of flame, the girdling circumference of black smoke banked forty kilometres high. And through the distortion of concentric void shields that blurred the air to soft focus like petroleum jelly on glass, he could see the flash and blink of detonations, the blaze of vast and distant fire-deaths, the streak of energy weapons like lightning light years long. The muffled thunder of existential collapse rumbled on, lagged and softened by the void shields.

  No sun, just twilight. Poison grey. Like sight failing.

  This, here. Where it began. Where it ends.

  Sindermann looked down, down the deep drop. Rain had got under his coat, and into his eyes in place of tears. He saw the toes of his boots projecting slightly over the stone lip.

  He had been an iterator, but there was nothing left to say. He had been a historian, but history was dead. He had found faith – not just an intellectual faith in the Emperor’s stewardship of mankind, Inti something more: a true, shining faith that he had never dreamed possible. He’d clung to that, felt blessed by it for a while, secure against the gathering darkness. He’d even tried to share that word.

  But the darkness had thickened. The howls of the Neverborn had drawn doser. His faith had leaked away, frail in the face of pandaemonic horror, as piss-weak as his philosophy and scholarship. No purpose remained for him. Last night, some of his few remaining friends had claimed
that there was still some history left to tell: a future that would in turn beget another future that would want to hear, and deserved to hear, what had taken place before its birth. I rom the Katabat Terrace, Sindermann knew that could not be true.

  Others, young Hari, so diligent and dutiful, had insisted that whatever history was left, its dying days should be recorded.

  ‘The death should be marked,’ he had said, ‘even if no one survives to lead of it.’

  Untrue, young man. Wrong. Yes, a few days or weeks or even months of history remained, but Kyril Sindermann could see it from where he stood. He could read it in the distant mountain-walls of black smoke that surrounded them, the thickets of unquenchable flames. There was history left, but it was not a history that should be recorded. It was nothing but a litany of pain, of agony, of mutilation, of miserable destruction.

  No poet ever described the last, involuntary twitches of a corpse, and all historians had more decency than to linger over such things. The history left to write was a night terror of daemons, of abomination, of obscenity, and that should not be set down for anyone to hear.

  Even if they tried, there were no words left. No words in any human language could begin to describe the horror of this end.

  ‘I’ll speak and write no more,’ he had told them.

  No one had replied at first. They had all understood what he meant Kyril Sindermann would not be the first human soul to step away to end his witness by choice so he didn’t have to bear the rest ‘Who’s there?’ he asked, a halt in his voice.

  ‘I thought I was alone up here. Were you addressing me?’ Sindermann began to climb down. Suddenly the drop terrified him. He clutched the parapet to stop himself toppling.

  A figure pushed aside dank vines and tangled branches, and stepped onto the path. The cloth of his mantle was jewelled with raindrops.

  ‘Sindermann? What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘M-my lord. I come here from time to time-‘

  Rogal Dorn, several times Sindermann’s size, took his arm and lifted him off the parapet like a small child. He set him down.

  ‘Were you going to jump?’ Dorn asked. His voice, a whisper, was the rumble of an ocean murmuring secrets in its sleep.

  ‘N-no. No. My lord. I came to view the scene. It is… perhaps the best vantage point. So high up… I came to observe, and gain a greater perspective.’