Scars Read online

  ‘Matter is a slave in whatever realm of being it occupies. In the world of the senses it is constrained by the silent laws of space, time, logic and number. In the other world it is shackled to other immutable rigours – dreams, hopes, vicious desires. These things are the tenets of physics in that place. As our nightmares are but shadows in this world, banished by the hard-edged dawn of reason, order is but a shadow in that one.

  ‘Which is the more real? Which endures, and which is doomed to destruction? You may say neither, for they are reflections of one another. This is false. You must choose. We learned this during seven years of blood and compelled maturity.

  You must choose.

  ‘Daemons and mortals alike may have dignity. Only the vacillator, the equivocator, the cautious – only he has no place in the heavens.’

  – Reflections, Targutai Yesugei

  I

  He rolled onto his front, coughing blood between broken teeth. His chest dragged across the hard, grassy earth before he felt hands reach down for him again.

  Withdraw, then return.

  The words ran through his mind as hands tugged at his torn kaftan. That was the first principle of the Khin-zan way of war – to unbalance, to force into overreach, to hit on the counter.

  Tamu pulled his knees up sharply and pushed back against the clutching fingers. He heard a grunt of surprise as his wiry body thrust upwards, sending one of his assailants tumbling.

  He twisted around, loosing a tight-balled fist and feeling it connect. Another grunt, another body swaying away.

  Something hit his temple, knocking him down again. He saw the grass beneath him blur. His face thudded into the turf and he tasted flakes of grit between clenched teeth.

  More blows came in – kicks to his legs, thumps against his exposed back. He writhed, trying to find a way back up. A hot, wet pain started up at the back of his head.

  One of them stooped, thinking him finished, reaching for the scruff of his neck, ready to drag him up and cast him down again in the way the Talskar did to demonstrate mastery over an opponent.

  Withdraw, then return.

  Tamu waited, just for a fraction of a second. Then he bucked again, arching and squirming his body like an eel, swinging up and round, grabbing his assailant by his chest. He looked up into a face full of surprise, and laughed. Then he jabbed his head, butting against a looming brow, watching the blood speckle out and his captor reel from the impact.

  He thought then that he might break free of them, scatter the group and somehow tear away, back down the dry river course and to safety. It proved a fleeting hope – he was grabbed again, more securely this time, two hands at his shoulders gripped him fast. He was hurled onto his back. He saw three faces hovering over him, each one bruised and angry. Another kick came in, hard into his midriff. He curled up, gasping.

  ‘Enough.’

  They stopped immediately. They paused. They turned their heads. Uncertainty rippled through them.

  Tamu lifted his head. His vision was blurry. He saw one of them scamper off, breaking into a limping run. Then the others followed – two heavy-set men from Alju’s hearth wearing the red sashes of the old man’s keshig. They didn’t look back. As they ran they picked up speed, as if some strange panic had suddenly kindled in them.

  Tamu felt blood trickle down the back of his neck. He tried to rise and failed. The wind felt cold against his clothes despite the sun being high in the sky.

  He couldn’t see the one who’d spoken. Light glared painfully off the plains, dazzling him. He pushed himself up onto his elbows.

  ‘What quarrel did they have with you?’ came the voice.

  Tamu twisted his head towards the sound. A man walked out of the haze, his outline shimmering in the clear air. He was tall and broad – incredibly tall, incredibly broad – and clad in bone armour plates that glittered in the brightness. He carried a staff topped with a skull and wore an elaborate hood over his bare head.

  Only then was Tamu afraid. Where had the giant come from? The grassland had been empty a minute ago – just him and the three others, grappling and running across the wind-ruffled Altak.

  It took some force of will to reply.

  ‘I do not know,’ Tamu said.

  None of the man’s features moved, but Tamu detected amusement.

  ‘What quarrel did they have with you?’ the man asked again, inflecting the words identically.

  Tamu felt dizzy. The trickle of blood slowed but did not stop. The man made no move to help him.

  ‘I stole aduun,’ Tamu said, opting for the truth. He’d opened Alju’s corral in the night, leading three of his steeds away and taking them down the river to Erdil’s hearth. That had earned him a gulp of fermented milk and a slice of belly meat; worth a beating.

  ‘Three grown men against one boy,’ the man observed. ‘You hurt them almost as badly as they hurt you.’

  Despite the pain, Tamu grinned. He knew he had.

  The man crouched down, coming closer to his level and looking at Tamu closely. Tamu saw a long, jagged scar on his tanned cheek. The man had an unusual aroma, and a faint hum came from his body, as if a beast murmured somewhere in the folds of his cloak. His eyes were strange – golden, soft and glistening. They were like an animal’s eyes.

  ‘What is your name?’ he asked.

  ‘Tamu.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twelve years.’

  The man pursed his lips. ‘Eight in Terran,’ he murmured. ‘Not too late.’

  Tamu frowned. ‘Not too late for what?’

  The man rose to his feet again. ‘Come with me.’

  Tamu hesitated. His head was beginning to ache.

  ‘Come where?’ For some reason he thought of his mother, his father, his brothers, huddled in the ger, down in the valley, busy with a hundred mundane things. They would not miss him until dusk. Perhaps longer.

  ‘Do not question,’ said the hooded man. ‘Do as I say.’ Then, for the first time, he really smiled. The gesture was not without warmth, his bright white teeth flashing between leathery dark lips. ‘Unless you think you could take me, too.’

  Tamu didn’t move. He tensed his body, just as he had done before the others had caught up with him.

  Withdraw, then return, he thought.

  Rain angled down from a slate-dark sky, hammering and cold. The wide training ground was open to the elements and the water bounced from the rockcrete, glittering under flood-lumens arranged around the perimeter. In the distance rose spires: Iphigenis, Teleon, Morvo. Their ranked lines of hab-lights were faint, blurred by rain and the night and the atmospheric haze.

  A line of two dozen boys stood shivering in the downpour, each dressed only in a grey shift. The youngest might have been seven, the oldest no more than nine. They stared directly ahead, chins jutting with determination, water running down their tight faces.

  Haren shivered just like the others. Despite his origin in Skandmark his lean frame made him feel the cold. His fingernails pressed into the palms of his hands as he clenched his fists, determined not to lose control. On either side of him he could sense the other boys doing the same – Trevi, Amada, Kenet, all steeling themselves against the freeze, the dark, the fatigue, the nerves.

  No backward step, he thought to himself, remembering the words of the man who had taken him from his home in the frozen north and brought him halfway across Terra to the training centres in Imamdo. He’d learned later that those words were a credo of the organisation, something whispered by the battle-brothers to themselves before battle. It was said that the Legion had never retreated. He wanted to believe that. If true, it made them even more glorious, even more worthy of worship.

  ‘The test is of endurance,’ said the instructor, a severe-faced man with cropped black hair,
standing to one side of the line, barely looking at them. Haren had hated him on arrival – they all had. Now he felt nothing towards him, just a vague sense that he was one more obstacle amid a life of obstacles. For the last two months Haren had been tested, tried, pummelled, moulded, degraded and exhausted. The trials no longer hurt him, but they did remind him of the goal. He was close now. After so long, he was so very close.

  The instructor glanced upwards and rain spattered against his face. He looked sourly at the heavens. ‘You will be observed. Do not aid your brothers – this is an individual exercise. Begin with the gong.’

  Haren tried to loosen up. He looked out across the rockcrete arena before them. A long, looping track ran around the edge of it. Obstacles stood in the way: ramps, pits, walls, waterlogged tunnels. He’d been around the same course many times, sometimes more than once in a day. Every crevice and muddy puddle of it was familiar to him.

  He wondered how long the test would run for. They would make it long enough to weed out the weakest, to see how their conditioning programmes had fared.

  Haren considered his chances. They were good. Standing still and shuddering in the cold was the worst part; his muscles would respond once he was moving.

  Trevi leaned close. ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  Haren nodded in response. His stomach was too knotted for him to speak. It felt as if the tension in his muscles might spread to his heart.

  The gong sounded.

  The boys broke into a run. None of them sprinted, for they all knew how arduous the test would be. None of them dawdled, for they all knew what the punishments were for insufficient effort. All twenty-four of them jogged out onto the track, quickly settling into the rhythms they had been taught, letting their breathing adjust, inhaling through their nostrils and exhaling through half-open mouths. They stayed together in a loose huddle, padding around the damp surface in worn training shoes.

  Haren fell into his stride in the middle of the group. He let his mind glide into the semi-aware state that it always adopted during endurance exercises, repeating the empty phrase over and over again in time with his thudding feet.

  No backward step. No backward step.

  Some boys started struggling immediately – they’d let their muscles go cold during the long wait, or were under-hydrated, or were carrying injuries from previous sessions. Haren gave them no thought. He ran steadily, scaling the ramps, leaping over the pits, hauling himself up the walls and throwing himself down on the far side. He slipped easily into the run-rhythm, feeling his heart and lungs match the metronomic beat he played in his mind.

  His mind wandered. It was hard not to remember his previous life – his red-cheeked mother with her blonde hair in a tight bun, his father with his thinning pate, his older sister with her quiet voice and quick eyes. The exercises were designed to help you to forget the ones you’d left behind, but memories would come back when you least expected them to. Haren sometimes wondered if they would ever really leave. Perhaps after Ascension they would. For all he knew, Ascension wiped all your memories, scraping your mind clean.

  No backward step.

  He kept running. Loops of the track passed in sequence, over and over again. He began to feel the first stabs of muscle-burn. He felt old scars in his knees ache. He felt his lungs throb as he drew cold air in deeply. Circuits passed by, merging into one another.

  After two hours the first boy dropped out, shuddering as he tried to inhale, his limbs trembling in the rain. Attendants helped him up and carried him away.

  Haren allowed himself a flicker of surprise. Surprisingly weak. Perhaps he’d been sick, though it had surely ended his quest for Ascension. What would happen to him now? They had never been told. Perhaps they sent you home. Perhaps they didn’t.

  No backward step.

  The next one dropped out much later. Then several gave out, all of them collapsing in little exhausted bundles. They were whisked away.

  Haren found himself at the front of the group after that. He maintained his pace, careful not to speed up. He attacked the ramps hard, recovering on the far side. He felt his feet become heavier, his chest muscles tighter. He became light-headed, and sensed the first surges of nausea gather. More loops passed, one after the other, hypnotic in the rain.

  Amada was next to go, his thin face drawn and agonised. Kenet followed shortly after. Then they were dropping like flies, stumbling into the water or slumping by the side of the track. Haren got weaker. Breathing became harder. His feet ached as they hit the floor, his knees spiked with every impact. Still the second gong didn’t sound. He began to yearn for it.

  Trevi was on his shoulder by then. Haren caught a glimpse of his face – a rictus of pain. Barely half a dozen still ran with the group. Two more hobbled after them, a long way back.

  The pain intensified. More time passed, dragging as if mired in tar.

  No backward step.

  His vision shrunk down to a long, black tunnel. His pulse thumped, muffled, in his temples. He lost sight of Trevi. He lost sight of everything. He kept moving automatically, cut loose from conscious thought. His jaw hung slack, his arms went limp, bashing against his thighs as he stumbled onwards.

  He thought he heard the gong, then realised his mind was playing tricks on him. He kept going, head down, feet dragging. A wall approached, blunt and black in the downpour. He tried to jump up against it, but missed the handholds. He scrabbled briefly, unable to see anything but overlapping circles of red and black, before his frozen fingers lodged into a crack of masonry. He tried to pull up, to drag himself to the top, but something was wrong. His feet found no purchase. The rockcrete blocks were too smooth, too curved.

  It took him a long time to hear the laughter. It took him a long time to realise that he’d veered far off the track. It took him even longer to realise that it was no wall he was trying to climb up, but a giant figure of a warrior in white armour and with glowing slits for eyes.

  Haren collapsed at the giant’s feet, bewildered. The giant gazed down at him, immense and immobile. His outline shone dully from the flood-lumens, glossy with trailing beads of moisture.

  ‘Good,’ said the giant, amused. His voice was a low machine-growl. ‘You do not give up easily.’

  Haren felt himself begin to faint and squeezed his muscles to push blood to his head, desperate not to shame himself. He was shaking uncontrollably. Dimly, he heard attendants running towards him. He wondered how far he’d got before his body had given up.

  The giant crouched down beside him. Even stooped, he was huge. Haren saw a massive curved shoulder-plate hover above him. It had a wolf’s head painted on it, set against a crescent moon.

  ‘Last on your feet,’ said the giant. ‘Keep that up and you’ll be wearing this armour. Sixteenth Legion, lad.’

  Haren felt consciousness slipping away. His body ached, his limbs were quickly freezing, his lungs were raw with gasping. He’d never been in such pain.

  But as he gazed up at the wolf-moon device and heard the vox-filtered voice of the giant, imagining himself in a similar suit of power armour, imagining himself marching to war amid the ranks of those peerless fighters, he couldn’t help but let slip a smile of pure happiness.

  I will become one of you, he thought as his body seized up at last. For Horus. For Horus and the Emperor, I will become one of you.

  Tamu looked out across the Altak, feeling the wind brush against his bald head. Unconsciously he flexed his fingers, feeling the tough skin of his hands move. His chest ached still. The last implantation had not gone smoothly and he had woken six days ago on the operating table to see the floor of the laboratorium covered in his own blood.

  The Apothecary, an owlish Khitan from Choq-tan named Jeldjin, had been concerned for a while.

  ‘I have seen it before,’ he’d said, running a scanner over Tamu’s puckered scar tissue and shaking his head. ‘The flesh of Chogoris, it is tough, but these things were designed for Terrans. We are learning, but it all takes time.’


  Tamu had listened silently, gritting his teeth against the pain and refusing analgesics. Jeldjin hadn’t really been talking to him. Few of the full battle-brothers ever did. What could they have to say to a sixteen year-old stripling, raw from the grassland, eyes still wide with what he had witnessed in the monastery? Tamu doubted that they ever remembered their own Ascensions. He’d heard it said the memory faded quickly.

  Now Tamu had recovered most of his strength. He stood on the edge of the cliffs below the Khum Kharta fortress, breathing deeply again. It already hurt less.

  Below him, fifty metres down where the crumbling rocks of the monastery-bastion met the Altak, the plains began: ridged at first like sand dunes, then breaking into the eye-aching flatness of the eternal grass – blue-green, glossy, rustling as the wind eddied across it. The sky arched above, pale and unbroken, bright with diffused sunlight. On the far horizon he could see the eggshell smudge of the Ulaav range, just a whisper against the curve of the world.

  Tamu narrowed his eyes. He was a year away from receiving his occulobe implants, after which he knew his eyesight would rival that of the berkuts, the hunting raptors that circled the high airs. Of all the changes, he yearned for that one the most. He yearned for the day when he would gaze out across the empty land and see each blade of grass picked out sharply, like a frond of steel.

  As for now, I am half-finished, he thought. Half-boy, half-man. Half-man, half-god. Everything is incomplete.

  He smiled. He liked those contrasting pairs. He would find a use for them in a poem, and that would please the training masters, who liked to encourage the aspirants to adopt one of the Noble Pursuits. Most chose hunting, some Khorchin calligraphy. Only a few had the patience for the spare, hard, compact forms of ci verse, and so they had encouraged Tamu particularly strongly.

  Half-boy. Half-man. Half-god.

  He heard footsteps, and listened for the tread signature. Targutai Yesugei was coming down the citadel steps to join him. Tamu turned his head, watching the worn-earth edges of the monastery’s foundations soar away above him. Flags rustled at its summit – the red and gold of the khans, the black and silver of the Imperium.