The Lightning Tower & The Dark King Read online

  ‘Not yet,’ said Dorn.

  Malcador laughed. ‘No, not yet.’

  THEY SAID LITTLE at first. They left the Investiary and walked along the beige stones of the Precinct’s highest terraces, between the weeping fountains. They walked as far as Lion’s Gate, onto the platforms that overlooked the docking rings and landing fields of the Brahmaputra Plateau. The Gate had once been a thing of magnificence, two gilded beasts rising up to lock claws in a feral dispute. Dorn’s order of works had replaced them with giant grey donjons stippled with casemates and macro-gun ports. A curtain wall of bleak rockcrete encircled the gate, its edge fletched with void field vanes like the spines of some prehistoric reptile.

  They stood and considered it for a long time.

  ‘I am not a subtle man,’ Malcador said, at length.

  Dorn raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ said Malcador, ‘perhaps I am. Guile comes easily to a politician. I know I am considered cunning.’

  ‘An old word, with no more meaning than “wise”,’ Dorn replied.

  ‘Indeed. I will accept that as a compliment. All I meant to say was, I will not attempt to be subtle now.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘The Emperor has expressed his concerns.’

  ‘Meaning?’ Dorn asked.

  Malcador answered with a slight sigh. ‘He understands you are filled with misgivings.’

  ‘Only natural, I would think, given the circumstances,’ said Dorn.

  The Sigillite nodded. ‘He trusts you to undertake the defence. He counts on you. Terra must not fall, no matter what Horus brings. This palace must not fall. If it is to end here, then it must end in our triumph. But he knows, and I know, and you know, that any defence is only as strong as its weakest part: faith, belief, trust.’

  ‘What are you telling me?’

  ‘If there is doubt in your heart, then that is our weakness.’

  Dorn looked away. ‘My heart is sad because of what I have been made to do to this place. That’s all it is.’

  ‘Is it? I don’t think so. What are you really afraid of?’

  MALCADOR RAISED HIS hand and the lights in his chambers came on. Dorn looked around. He had never entered the Sigillite’s private apartments before. Ancient images hung on the walls: flaking, fragile things of wood, canvas and decomposing pigments, preserved in thin, blue fields of stasis; the smoke pale portrait of a woman with the most curious smile; garish yellow flowers rendered in thick paint; the unflinching, rheumy gaze of an old fleshy man, cast in shadow, tobacco brown.

  Along another wall hung old tattered banners showing the thunderbolt and lightning strike sigil of the Pre-Unity armies. Suits of armour – perfect, glinting thunder armour – were mounted in shimmering suspension zones.

  Malcador offered Dorn wine, which he refused, and a seat, which he accepted.

  ‘I have made a certain peace with myself,’ Dorn said. ‘I understand what I am afraid of.’

  Malcador nodded. He had pulled back his cowl and the light shone on his long white hair. He sipped from his glass. ‘Enlighten me.’

  ‘I do not fear anyone. Not Horus, not Fulgrim, none of them. I fear the cause. I fear the root of their enmity.’

  ‘You fear what you don’t understand.’

  ‘Exactly. I am at a loss to know what drives the Warmaster and his cohorts. It is an alien thing to me, quite defying translation. A strong defence relies on knowing what you are defending against. I can raise all the bulwarks and curtain walls and cannon-bastions I like, and I still won’t know what it is I’m fighting.’

  ‘Perceptive,’ said Malcador, ‘and true of us all. I fancy even the Emperor doesn’t fully understand what it is that drives Horus against us so furiously. Do you know what I think?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  Malcador shrugged. ‘I believe it is better that we don’t know. To understand it would be to understand insanity. Horus is quite mad. Chaos is inside him.’

  ‘You say that as if Chaos is a… thing.’

  ‘It is. Does that surprise you? You’ve known the warp and seen its corrupting touch, that’s Chaos. It has touched humanity now, twisted our brightest and best. All we can do is remain true to ourselves and fend it off, deny it. Trying to understand it is a fool’s errand. It would claim us too.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Don’t see, Rogal Dorn, and you will live longer. All you can do is acknowledge your fear. That’s all any of us can do. Recognise it for what it is: your pure, human sanity rocked by the sight of the warp’s infecting, suffocating madness.’

  ‘Is this what the Emperor believes?’ asked Dorn.

  ‘It’s what he knows. It’s what he knows he doesn’t know. Sometimes, my friend, there is salvation in ignorance.’

  Dorn sat still for a while. Malcador watched him, occasionally sipping from his glass.

  ‘Well, I thank you for your time, sir,’ said Dorn eventually. ‘Your candour too. I should—’

  ‘There is one other thing,’ said Malcador, setting his glass down and rising to his feet. ‘Something I want to show you.’

  Malcador crossed the chamber, and took something from a drawer in an old bureau. He walked hack to Dorn, and spread that something out on the low table between them.

  Dorn opened his mouth but no sound issued. Fear gripped him. ‘You recognise these, of course!

  Old cards, worn and fraying, discoloured and liver-spotted with time. One by one, Malcador laid them out.

  ‘The Lesser Arcanoi, just gaming trinkets, really, but used widely before the coming of Old Night for divination. This deck was made on Nostramo Quintus.’

  ‘He used them,’ Dorn breathed.

  ‘Yes, he did. He relied on them. He believed in cartomancy. He dealt his fate out, night after haunted night, and watched how the cards fell.’

  ‘Oh Holy Terra…’

  ‘Are you all right, sir?’ Malcador asked, looking up. ‘You are quite pale.’

  Dorn nodded. ‘Curze.’

  ‘Yes, Curze. Had you forgotten him, or simply blocked him out? You have bickered and sparred with many of your brothers over the years, but only Konrad Curze ever hurt you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He nearly killed you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On Cheraut, long ago.’

  ‘I remember it well enough!’

  Malcador looked up at Dorn. The primarch had risen to his feet. ‘Then sit back down and tell me, because I wasn’t there.’

  Dorn sat. ‘This is so long ago or like another life. We had brought the Cheraut system to compliance. It was hard fought. The Emperor’s Children, the Night Lords and my Fists, we affected compliance. But Curze didn’t know when to stop. He never knew when to stop.’

  ‘And you rebuked him?’

  ‘He was an animal. Yes, I rebuked him. Then Fulgrim told me.’

  ‘Told you what?’

  Dorn closed his eyes. ‘The Phoenician told me what Curze had told him: the fits, the seizures that had plagued Curze since his childhood on Nostramo, the visions. Curze said he had seen the galaxy in flames, the Emperor’s legacy overthrown, Astartes turning on Astartes. It was all lies, an insult to our creed!’

  ‘You confronted Curze?’

  ‘And he attacked me. He would have killed me, I think. He is insane. That’s why we drove him out, sick of his bloodletting. That’s why he burned his home world and took his Night Lords off into the darkest parts of the stars.’

  Malcador nodded, and continued to deal the cards. ‘Rogal, he is what you are truly afraid of, because he is fear incarnate. No other primarch uses terror as a weapon like Curze does. You are not afraid of Horus and his sallow heretics. You are afraid of the fear that sides with him, the night terror that advances alongside the traitors.’

  Dorn sat back and breathed out. ‘He has haunted me, I confess. All this time, he has haunted me.’

  ‘Because he was right. His visions were true. He saw this Heresy coming in his visions. That is t
he truth you fear. You wish you had listened.’

  Dorn looked down at the cards laid out on the table before him. ‘Do you believe in this divination, Sigillite?’

  ‘Let’s see,’ said Malcador, turning the cards over one by one: the Moon, the Martyr and the Monster, the Dark King askew across the Emperor.

  One other card, the Lightning Tower.

  Dorn groaned. ‘A bastion, blown out by lightning. A palace brought to ruin by fire. I’ve seen enough.’

  ‘The card has many meanings,’ said Malcador. ‘Like the Death card, it is not as obvious as it seems. In the hives of Nord Merica, it symbolised a change in fortune, an overturning of fate. To the tribes of Franc and Tali, it signified knowledge or achievement obtained through sacrifice. A flash of inspiration, if you will, one that tumbles the world you know down, but leaves you with a greater gift.’

  ‘The Dark King lies across the Emperor,’ said Dorn, pointing.

  Malcador sniffed. ‘It’s not exactly a science, my friend.’

  THEY HAD BLOWN their way through the massive earthwork defences at Haldwani and Xigaze. The sky at the top of the world was on fire. Despite the bombardments of the orbital platforms and the constant sorties of the Stormbirds and the Hawkwings, the Traitor Legions advanced, up through the Brahamputra, along the delta of the Karnali. Continental firestoms raged across Gangetic Plain.

  As they entered the rampart outworks of the palace, the streaming, screaming multitudes and the striding war machines were greeted by monsoons of firepower. Every emplacement along the Dhawalagiri prospect committed its weapons. Las reached out in neon slashes, annihilating everything it touched. Shells fell like sleet. Titans exploded, caught fire, collapsed on their faces and crushed the warriors swarming around their heels. Still they came. Lancing beams struck the armour-reinforced walls like lightning, like lighting smiting a tower.

  The walls fell. They collapsed like slumping glaciers. Gold-cased bodies spilled out, tumbling down in the deluge.

  The palace began to burn. Primus Gate fell; Lion’s Gate, subjected to attack from the north; Annapurna Gate. At the Ultimate Gate, the Traitors finally sliced into the palace, slaughtering everyone they found inside. Around every broken gate, the corpses of Titans piled up in vast, jumbled heaps where they had fallen over each other in their desire to break in. The heretic host clambered across their carcasses, pouring into the palace, yelling out the name of their-

  ‘End simulation,’ said Dorn.

  He gazed down at the hololithic table. At his command, the forces of the enemy withdrew, unit by unit, and the palace rebuilt itself. The smoke cleared. ‘Reset parameters to Horus, Perturabo, Angron and Curze.’

  ‘Opposition?’ the table queried.

  ‘Imperial Fists, Blood Angels, White Scars. Resume and replay scenario.’ The map flickered. Armies advanced. The palace began to burn again.

  ‘Play it out, simulation after simulation, if you like,’ said the voice behind him. ‘Simulations are just simulations. I know you won’t fail me when the time comes.’

  Dorn turned. ‘I would never knowingly fail you, Father,’ he said.

  ‘Then don’t be afraid. Don’t let fear get in your way.’

  What are you afraid of? What are you really afraid of?

  The Lightning Tower, thought Rogal Dorn. I understand its meaning: achievement obtained through sacrifice. I’m just afraid of what that sacrifice might be.

  THE DARK KING

  by Graham McNeill

  WHERE BEFORE THERE had been light, now there was only darkness. The hot, urgent pulse of near death surged in his veins, the bitter flavour of betrayal fully expected, yet wholly unwelcome. This was what it would come to he knew, this was the inevitable result of naïve belief in the goodness of the human heart. Death filled his senses, blood coating his teeth and the sharp reek of it thick in his nostrils.

  As though it were yesterday, long buried memories of years spent on the night world of Nostramo emblazoned themselves on the forefront of his thoughts: haunted darkness punctured by stuttering lumen strips that fizzed in the shimmering, rain-slick streets and the stillness of a population kept quiescent with fear.

  From out of this foetid darkness had come illumination and hope, the promise of a better future. But now that hope was dashed as the bright lance of the future seared itself into his thoughts…

  …the death of a world and a great eye of black and gold watching it burn…

  …Astartes fighting to the death beneath a red-lit sky…

  …a golden eagle cast from the heavens…

  He screamed in pain as images of destruction and the end of all things paraded before his mind’s eye. Voices called out to him. He heard his name, the name his father had bestowed upon him and the one his people had given him, in the fearful watches of the dark.

  He opened his eyes and let the visions fade from his mind as the sensations of the physical world returned to him. Blood and salty tears stung his eyes and he looked over to the sound of voices calling his name.

  Horrified faces stared at him in fear, but that was nothing new, Babble spewed from their mouths, but he could make nothing of it, the sense of the words lost in the screaming white noise filling his skull.

  What sight could be so terrible? What could evoke such horror?

  He looked down as he realised he squatted atop another, living, breathing figure. A giant in torn golden robes, his bone-white hair spattered with gleaming ruby droplets.

  A mantle of red velvet trimmed with golden weave spread out beneath him like a bloodstain.

  Tanned, iron flesh. Opened and bleeding.

  He took in the destruction wrought on the body beneath him, raising his hands, balled into fists. Blood dripped from his fingertips and he could taste the warm richness of the genetic mastery encoded into every molecule upon his teeth.

  He knew this giant.

  His name was legendary, his stony heart and mastery of war unmatched. His name was Rogal Dorn.

  He looked up again as he heard his own name, given voice by a warrior in the golden plate armour of the Imperial Fists who bore the black and white heraldry of its First Captain.

  He knew this warrior too…

  ‘Curze!’ cried Sigismund. ‘What have you done?’

  THE EMPTINESS OF space shimmered in the glow of distant suns beyond the armoured glass, faraway planets and unknown systems turning in their prescribed arcs without thought for the dramas being played out on the stage of human endeavour. What did those who lived beneath these suns know of the Cheraut system and the blood that had been shed to pacify it in the name of the emergent Imperium of Mankind?

  Curze stifled the anger such questions provoked, staring into his reflection with cold, obsidian eyes that resembled empty sockets in his pallid, sunken features. Lank hair hung to his neck like black ropes and spilled across his wide, powerful shoulders. He turned from his reflection, uncomfortable with the dreadful disappointment he saw there.

  Glinting metal caught his sullen gaze: his armour, standing in a shadowed alcove on the far wall. He crossed the chamber and placed his hand on the skull-faced helmet. The gem-like facets of its lenses winked in the low light and the sweeping dark wings rose from its sides like the pinions of some avenging angel of night. The burnished plates were dark, as befitted the Primarch of the Night Lords, each one contoured perfectly to his form and worked with gold edging that caught the starlight.

  Turning from his battle armour, he paced the hard, metallic floor of the gloomy, cavernous chamber that confined him. Thick steel columns supported a great vaulted ceiling, its upper reaches lost in shadow, and the hum of the mighty starfort’s reactor beat like a pulse in the metal.

  This aesthetic of functional austerity was typical of the Imperial Fists, whose artifice had constructed this mighty orbital fortress as a base of operations with which to begin the compliance of the Cheraut system.

  The Emperor’s Children had held their traditional victory feast before the first sho
t had been fired and together with Fulgrim’s Legion and the Night Lords, Rogal Dorn’s Imperial Fists had broken open the defences of the belligerent human coalition that resisted the coming of the Imperium. Within eight months of hard, bloody fighting, the eagle flew above the smoking ruins of the last bastion, but where Dorn lauded Fulgrim’s Legion, the conduct of the Night Lords had earned only his ire.

  Matters had finally come to a head amid the silver ruins of Osmium.

  Pyres of the dead stained the skies black and Curze had watched his chaplains orchestrating the executions of defeated prisoners when Dorn marched into his camp, his lean face thunderous. ‘Curze!’

  Never once had Rogal Dorn called him by his forename.

  ‘Brother?’ he had replied.

  ‘Throne! What are you doing here?’ demanded Dorn, his normal, affable tone swallowed in the depths of his outrage. A phalanx of gold-armoured warriors followed their lord and Curze had immediately sensed the tension in the air.

  ‘Punishing the guilty,’ he had answered coolly. ‘Restoring order.’

  The Primarch of the Imperial Fists shook his head. ‘This not order, Curze, it is murder. Order your warriors to stand down. My Imperial Fists will take over this sector.’

  ‘Stand down?’ said Curze. ‘Are they not the enemy?’

  ‘Not anymore,’ said Dorn. ‘They are prisoners now, but soon they will be a population and part of the Imperium. Have you forgotten the Emperor’s purpose in declaring the Great Crusade?’

  ‘To conquer,’ said Curze.

  ‘No,’ said Dorn, placing a golden gauntlet on his shoulder guard. ‘We are liberators, not destroyers, brother. We bring the light of illumination, not death. We must govern with benevolence if these people ar ever to recognise our authority in this galaxy.’

  Curze flinched at the touch, resenting the easy friendship Dorn pretended. Bilious anger bubbled invisibly beneath his skin, but if Dorn was aware of it, he gave no sign.

  ‘These people resisted us and must pay the penalty for that crime,’ said Curze. ‘Obedience to the Imperium will come from the fear of punishment, you know that as well as anyone, Dorn. Kill those that resisted and the others will learn the lesson that to oppose us is to die.’