Valdor: Birth of the Imperium Read online

  They were thrown to one side then the other, slammed violently against the cage’s innards and yanked upwards. Bordamo’s stomach lurched, and he suddenly felt weightless, his feet leaving the cage-floor and his lasrifle loosening in his hands. As his head smacked hard into one of the big iron bars, he saw a blur of gold close to his face, swiftly replaced by a whistling sound and the rip of hot air across his body.

  The golden devil had thrown – thrown – the cage across the muster-hall, slinging it one-handed and sending it careening into a heavy buttress-pillar. The impact was sickening. Bordamo was cracked against the skidding bars, his armour doused in a hail of sparks.

  The sliding cage spun to a halt, and he felt the hot slick of blood against his armour. His left arm was shot through with pain, his vision was cloudy, but he pushed himself around and tried to aim at what he knew was coming for him.

  The cage was a mess, a ruined tangle of dented iron, draped with the heavy bodies of stunned and broken Exemplars. Bordamo had the slurred impression of the golden monster coming for him, loping across the ground between them like some vast machine-wolf. He opened fire again, more out of reflex than hope, but the next thing he knew a cold gauntlet had closed around his neck, crushing him back to the ground.

  He looked up to see a mask of auramite, barely an arm’s length from his own helm. He saw twin lenses, flaring red in the dark, and a web of astrological engravings amid the scorchlines of the las-fire. He had never been so close to one before. At this range, the artistry was almost unbearably beautiful, and the stink of incense was overpowering.

  ‘Amar Astarte,’ came the voice of the mask – a deep, refined tone that gave away its owner’s lack of exertion. ‘Where is she?’

  Out of the corner of his eye, Bordamo could see other Custodians, maybe two of them, slaughtering their way across the chamber, churning through the remainder of his troops with a cool, casual expertise. They moved astonishingly fast, dancing effortlessly around the panicked las-fire before crunching their blades into bone and flesh. Already one had launched himself down the drop-shaft – others would no doubt follow.

  ‘Too late,’ Bordamo rasped, feeling his neck muscles contract. ‘She is… already in place.’

  The Custodian hesitated for a moment, as if considering whether anything more could be gleaned. Then he squeezed – a short, decisive, inward throttle of armoured fingers. Bordamo never even felt the end, just a sudden cold rush, and then blackness.

  Samonas stood up, unlocking his blade as he strode back towards the shafts.

  ‘We waited too long,’ he muttered to himself, breaking into a run. ‘Always, we are too cautious.’

  As he went, the shadow-world of tactical perception swayed and updated around him, a multilayered gauze of target-ghosts and shot-vectors. He could see the marked signals clustering and breaking, every one of them an Exemplar soldier moving across the bowels of the Senatorum and down towards the Dungeon’s secret chambers. Whole levels were now on fire, blasted into slag by incendiaries and now all but impassable. The infiltrators had done their job well – sowing confusion, generating false targets, sending the Palace guardians rushing to stamp out a hundred different insurrections.

  He felt reproach stir within him – a rare emotion, but one of the few he was still capable of experiencing. He had never understood why this had been allowed to fester. They had watched, guarded, observed, but never acted. He remembered Valdor’s instruction, right at the start.

  Find a weakness, a slip in resolve.

  Commendable, perhaps, but dangerous. Now the fruits of that decision were ripening.

  Samonas glimpse-analysed the movements running across his inner tactical display, the shifts, the pattern of the fighting. Future-states spiralled away from him like spectres, picked out across his cortical feed in a glowing filigree of false-light.

  He reached the lip of the drop-shaft, now slung with broken cabling and the tumbling fragments of the central chain-pulley.

  ‘To the repositories,’ he voxed to his command group, pulling them all from their killing and directing them towards the lowest levels of the hidden kingdom. ‘With all haste now – time is against us.’

  Then he flung himself over the edge, plummeting fast, feeling the hot air whip up around him and make his cloak snap, before he caught one of the remaining chains to break his fall. The atmosphere heated rapidly, fuelled by the furnace kindled at the roots of the mountain. He looked down and saw flames surging up the shaft, red and angry. His brothers were doing the same as him, racing down towards the deepest catacombs, dropping like stones through the winding pits.

  There was no going back now. The Order’s lethargy had to be accounted for, even at the cost of such extravagant danger.

  Samonas gauged the distance, unclenched his fists and plunged deeper down through the inferno.

  Valdor did not hurry. He went on foot, travelling alone down from the Tower and into the maze of streets below. Buffets of grey snow smacked and slid from his armour as he went, running down the auramite in glistening rivulets.

  The sky was now black and turgid, roiling and churning like a thick-stirred slick of bitumen. The howl of the gale never let up, but shot freezing spears through every exposed nook, whipping up filth and debris and hurling it against the reeling walls. Civilians caught out in the storm ran for cover where they could, slamming heavy portals behind them once they gained sanctuary. The many mobilised soldiers had no choice but to endure it, heading in bedraggled lines to their designated defence-points. Those mechanised transports still out of position laboured through the murk, their tracks spinning and their engines thudding.

  Valdor paid them no attention, but made his way calmly down through the terraced urban levels towards his destination. The flurries of airborne filth gave him a kind of anonymity during the passage – in normal times, the populace would have been shrinking back from him in reverence and fear, or maybe even creeping towards his cloak-hem to dare indulgence. As it was, even his splendour was obscured, swaddling him in a whine of wind-tatters and allowing him to move unseen. It was almost as if the entire climatic spectacle had been orchestrated for that very purpose.

  He, though, still saw everything clearly. His armour sensors were untroubled by even the wildest storms, and his augur-range was undiminished. As he neared the outskirts of the gigantic Lion’s Gate fortifications, he ran his projected tactical gaze over the army gathered in the wasteland beyond, counting their strength and comparing it to predictions. The statistics, as ever with him, were within expected parameters – the renegades out in the open far outnumbered those shivering on the walls, and no doubt exceeded them in lethal capacity many times over. That such an army had been assembled at all was a significant achievement, and Valdor found himself impressed, once again, with High Lord Kandawire. It was not easy to keep major operations secret on Terra, with its shifting allegiances and fractured politics. She had done it, though, just as thoroughly as she had done everything else.

  He reached the looming bastion fortress, just to the south of the massive gateway itself, its upper reaches hidden by the driving sleet but its heavy foundations a dark, glossy grey. He climbed the long stair that led towards the bastion’s inner ramparts. Troops of a dozen different units were taking their final positions, hauling lascannons and battening down the slamming access hatches. As Valdor reached the final uncovered courtyard before the gate’s main transit canyon, a senior officer in the colours of the fortress’ 12th High Watch noticed him at last. Caught in the middle of his duties, the man performed a fractionally amusing double take, froze for a second, then raced over clumsily to salute.

  ‘My lord!’ he shouted through the flying hail. ‘Thank the Emperor you’re here!’

  Valdor kept on walking. ‘Continue preparations, commander,’ he said. ‘No enemy must pass the threshold.’

  The man jogged to keep up with him. ‘By your will!’
he stammered. ‘But… but if I… There are more out there than we can… Will you join…? Will the Custodians be…?’

  ‘Maintain your positions,’ Valdor said, his mind already moving on to what would come next. His tactical readout was crowded now. ‘I will pass through the portal alone. It will be sealed behind me. None shall leave by it, none shall enter.’

  The commander hesitated again. No doubt he was considering another query, perhaps even a protest, but nothing came over the comm. Commendably, after a few moments more of confusion, he recovered himself and raced off to enact the order.

  By then Valdor was reaching the gate itself. When complete, the structure before him would be truly immense – a colossal archway of coal-black stone and adamantium bands, buttressed and reinforced and surmounted by gun-towers until it rose nearly to the level of the spire-tops beyond. Even now, in its semi-complete gestation, it was still a vast construction, its echoing innards exposed to the elements and resounding to the howl of the storm. Whole battalions of mechanised walkers were intended to be housed within these hangars, one day. Far above him, ranks of empty cannon-chassis gaped outwards, ready to receive the internal mechanisms that would allow them to hurl ordnance halfway across the plateau beyond.

  The place was being built for another age. No war machines yet existed that would remotely fit into its vast alcoves, and the entire Palace itself did not contain nearly enough troops to fill out the halls of this one bastion. In anticipation of future abundance, the interior now shuddered with emptiness. As Valdor made his progress towards the heavy shielded external doors, his footfalls resounded high into the yawning vaults above.

  Ahead of him, great doors slowly swung open, sliding along grooved tracks five metres wide, gradually exposing the wilds beyond. The portal gaped, more than thirty metres high, and swiftly filled with the flotsam of the storm’s wrath. Valdor walked out into it, alone. The night roared back at him. As he strode across the blasted tundra, the gates closed behind him, and the high walls of the Palace steadily fell into the snow clouds.

  In the darkness ahead, ten thousand lumens glowed amid driving filth. The high ridge beyond the plateau was occupied for its entire length, clustered with infantry and heavy armour strung out in a long, ragged line. Valdor’s augurs detected the ranges of myriad weaponry all primed to be loosed – some crude and ancient, much else capable of dealing out tremendous damage. Above all, he isolated the familiar profiles of those he had fought alongside for so many decades of conquest, as singular as fingerprints amid the rabble of mercenaries and unenhanced troopers around them.

  By now, the only souls who truly mattered were making their way down from the high ground to meet him. They had formed an embassy of sorts – two dozen Thunder Warriors limping along in their old, chipped armour, plus a diminutive figure in an overstuffed climate suit.

  And then there was Ushotan, of course, almost as resplendent now as he had been in the past. He had diminished very little, like a granite crag thrust out into a wearing sea, battered by erosion but still defiant. He alone still managed to walk without the twinge of visible pain. His dark gold plate still carried a mite of its old lustre, and the campaign sigils were still just about visible under all the dried bloodstains. The power armour gouted wisps of smoke from a boxy reactor-pack, and his creaking servos were audible even over the wind.

  Valdor met them in the scouring emptiness between the two armies, his storm-wracked city behind him, the gathered hordes dead ahead. They stood immobile, all of them, and for a while the sleet roared emptily around them.

  ‘Death will come for you, Ushotan, one way or another,’ Valdor said at last. ‘You do not need to seek it here.’

  The Thunder Legion primarch laughed. It was a sour sound, made machine-hard by his failing augmetics. ‘Oh, I do, Constantin. Of course I do. But this is arrogance, even by your standards. Where are your golden sword-slaves? Where are your guns?’

  Ushotan was a head shorter than Valdor, though built more heavily. The captain-general seemed almost untouched by the storm, whereas the primarch appeared to be emerging out of its heart, battered by it, fuelled by its inchoate wrath. The remainder of the Thunder Warriors glowered in the slush-haze, their armour mechanisms clunking and hissing. They were ragtag automata of destruction, assembled from rust and held together only by their fierce hatreds.

  ‘You have demands,’ Valdor said, equable as ever.

  Kandawire moved forwards, unsteady in the gale. ‘You know what this is about,’ she said, her voice cracking through its hard-pressed augmitter. ‘Crimes against the state. The slaughter of loyal forces in order to keep your grip on the Imperial war machine. By the authority of my office, you must now relinquish command of this city and open the gates. You will be tried in fair and open court, your fate determined by the Emperor when He returns.’

  Valdor nodded. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘And you did not think to serve this… summons when we spoke last?’

  ‘Would you have obeyed it?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Ushotan laughed again. ‘That’s why we’re here,’ he growled. ‘Every fighting soul with a grievance or a thirst for revenge, and there are a lot of those. You couldn’t erase us all – not quite perfect. That must really kill you.’

  Ice-spiked rain swilled across Valdor’s golden helm, sluicing like tears down the ornate swashes. His weapon, the immense spear, remained deactivated and sullen in the gloom. ‘The High Lord is acting only as she sees fit,’ he said, speaking to Ushotan. ‘But you. You have served with the Emperor Himself. You must see how futile this is.’

  Ushotan shrugged, sending cascades of rusty run-off shedding from his dented pauldrons. ‘More futile than dying from my bad blood? I don’t think so. I’d like to go out seeing my blade sticking from your spine, Constantin. That would be a good way to go.’

  ‘Only if you resist,’ interjected Kandawire, warily.

  ‘Yes, of course, only if you resist,’ echoed Ushotan, sardonically. ‘You can walk back in with us now, and we can finish this without a shot being fired. But I don’t think you’ll be doing that, will you?’

  ‘You know I cannot.’

  ‘Do not be a fool!’ Kandawire blurted. ‘The city is undermanned, your order is scattered by the war. Resistance now will only cause bloodshed.’

  ‘With respect, High Lord, you brought the bloodshed. The deaths this night will be on your conscience.’

  ‘Conscience,’ muttered Ushotan, amused. ‘So you can remember what it’s like to have one of those, can you?’

  ‘Stand aside, captain-general,’ insisted Kandawire. ‘Tell them to open the gates. Your trial will be in accordance with the Lex, and if you are innocent, then you have nothing to fear.’

  ‘Innocent, guilty,’ Valdor said, wearily. ‘I did not think to hear such facile terms from a High Lord.’ He rounded on Kandawire then, just a minute shift of stance, but the power in the gesture was briefly naked. ‘We are the architects of the species’ future. No crime could be judged as too heinous if it secured that, no virtue could be forgiven if it hindered it. The Lex is a tool for the control of the psychologically free. It is an expression of His will, and nothing more. You have been a fool to think it more than that. You could have served long and honourably as its protector, and now your fate is chained to theirs.’

  Kandawire held her ground, just, but Ushotan’s huge frame, undaunted, shook with laughter. ‘Now then, be nice – she has a point. You’re a lying, murdering bastard, and we were all supposed to be cracking down on them. You could give her what she wants, and you won’t have to watch your city burn.’

  ‘Walk away,’ Valdor told him. ‘This is the only chance you will ever have.’

  ‘We both know that’s not true.’

  ‘I will take no pleasure in seeing you slain.’

  ‘You take no pleasure in anything. That’s because you’re a ghoul.’
r />   ‘But I will end you, Ushotan – here, if I have to.’

  The primarch laughed out loud, throwing his cloak back and sweeping his arm out wide across the empty plateau. ‘Alone?’ he asked, incredulously. ‘You’ll take us all on, alone? By the gods, you become ever more insufferable.’

  ‘You cannot make a stand here, captain-general,’ added Kandawire, an edge of desperation in her voice now. ‘Despite all you’ve tried, all the weapons you’ve bought, we know your numbers are too few. You told me yourself – there are no new armies. All that’s left is you, standing here now. And that is not enough.’

  For a moment, just in the space between breaths, Valdor said nothing. In that instant, he seemed indeed beaten, or maybe resigned, a sliver of pale gold thrust into the heart of the infinite, ink-dark night.

  ‘You did not listen to me, High Lord,’ he said, finally kindling his great spear. ‘I told you there were no new generals.’ A halo of silver-gold light leapt out from its disruptor, dazzling as forked lightning. ‘But if you had heeded the lesson I gave you, then you would by now know the real truth – that there are many more armies, armies more deadly and more numerous than any created before.’

  Ushotan moved to strike, his own blade spitting blood-red plasma, and yet something stayed his hand. Something stayed the hand of every Thunder Warrior. Amid the roar and thunder of the world’s fury, something new could suddenly be detected, something familiar and yet unfamiliar, something horrifically dragged out of the past and yet even more horrifically indicative of the future. There was a whine, a grind of mechanics, a surge of something massive and coordinated out amid the sensor-baffling chaos of the maelstrom.

  ‘You should feel honoured,’ Valdor said, hefting the spear effortlessly into its killing position. ‘You are present at their very first engagement.’