Valdor: Birth of the Imperium Page 15

  ‘Well,’ said Ushotan, panting hard as he swung his thick blade around. ‘I don’t like them.’

  Valdor found himself admiring that dry-as-bones humour. He had always admired that about the Thunder Warriors – the humanity hadn’t been bled from them to turn them into what they were. They had never had their emotions etiolated, nor their dreams plucked from their minds and left to wither. He would have liked to agree with the sentiment – to reply with something that might make both of them laugh wryly together as warriors were supposed to do – but, as was usual, he couldn’t think of anything suitable. All he had were the facts of the case, the artefacts of duty.

  ‘I do not much like them, either,’ Valdor admitted, punching his gauntlet through the helm-face of an Imperial Guardsman before rounding on an already-stricken Thunder Warrior. ‘But they are here, nonetheless. You should, I think, have seen them coming.’

  ‘Ha!’ Ushotan snorted, driving his blade through a second Angel and flinging its twitching body aside. ‘We always knew something was up. He never made us stupid. Or maybe He did. Stupid to have gone along with it for so long.’

  He was staggering into range now, battering his way towards Valdor with his habitual blunt-force doggedness. For all that, the primarch had taken damage. These Angels weren’t like the power-armoured prey he’d cut down so contemptuously before – each one had landed a blow before the end. Cumulatively, they would have got him eventually, like wolves dragging down a bear, not that Valdor would have allowed it to happen that way.

  ‘You had no choice,’ Valdor said, now fighting his way into the primarch’s presence, spinning imperiously on his heel to despatch the last of his bodyguards. All around the two principals the fighting raged unchecked, though the remorseless march of the grey-clad Angels was now breaking the back of the enemy counter-advance. ‘None of us did.’

  ‘You almost sound like you regret that,’ Ushotan said, lumbering right at him, his blade held in that distinctive, rigid, two-handed style. ‘Don’t tell me you’re having second thoughts.’

  Their weapons crashed together for the first time – sword-edge grating against spear tip – and the kinetic release flattened a dozen fighters in all directions. Then they were driving savagely into one another, slashing, parrying, hacking, testing.

  ‘I regret nothing,’ Valdor said, pushing the Thunder Warrior back with a single, spine-jarring thrust.

  ‘Only because you can’t remember how,’ Ushotan laughed, pushing back hard. For all his decrepitude, all his battle-damage, he was still a furnace of energy, raging against the fading light. ‘Still, I always wondered what it would be like to fight you.’

  Valdor smashed a pauldron away, ripping the metal from its shackles and exposing blood-laced flesh. He followed up with a jab that would have taken the primarch’s head off had he not jerked back at the last moment.

  ‘Many people have wondered,’ Valdor remarked, battering him back another few paces. ‘So they tell me.’

  Ushotan was spitting blood by then, his shoulders dropping. His bladework never let up, though, and he kept on pressing, kept on blocking. ‘They’re all dead now, I guess,’ he spat, trying to shoot another grim smile.

  ‘It comes for us all, in the end.’

  ‘But not for you,’ Ushotan said, hammering back, putting all his strength into a sudden push that checked the Apollonian Spear for a moment and held it locked in a snarling mesh of electric overflow. Their faces came close for the first time – a blank mask of pure gold and a brutish pig-iron helm-grille. ‘I always knew you’d outlive us, because I saw what you did to all the others. These… Angels will fight for you now, but one day they’ll realise the truth about you. They’ll see you coming for them, too late to stop it. We’re all dispensable, every one of us that He made for these wars. All but you.’

  Valdor threw off the deadlock, hacked back at him, piling strength onto strength. He could feel abundance flowing through his sinews, fuelling him with a familiar cold martial perfection. Already he could perceive the end to this encounter, its possible outcomes narrowing swiftly now, pitilessly shrinking down to the singularity of another conquest. ‘I am nothing,’ he countered, finding that he uttered the words with more vehemence than he’d intended. ‘An instrument, to be cast aside when its function is performed.’

  ‘And what function is that? Do you even know? Or are you just playing along with this, hoping it becomes obvious later on?’

  Valdor saw the gap then, the weary slip of lactic acid-heavy arms, and pounced, spinning the spear and lancing it dead-straight. Ushotan tried to parry, and almost got there, but the strike was just too atom-perfect, and the blazing spear point crashed on through the primarch’s breast-plate, shoving him backwards.

  Ushotan roared, grabbing the hilt of Valdor’s weapon and trying to wrench himself free of it, but by now the disruptor charge was spilling across him, tearing up what remained of his battleplate and searing into the skin below. Valdor cast him down, using the spear’s leverage to slam him to the snow-piled ground.

  The impact was shuddering, sending a shock wave dancing across the terrain and snapping Ushotan’s spine. Grey-clad Angels coolly advanced around them both, past the kill-site, driving the last of the primarch’s ragtag army back towards the ridge, leaving burning vehicle-shells and freezing corpses in their wake.

  Valdor extinguished his spear’s disruptor, and knelt beside his victim. As he did so, he withdrew a long knife from his belt. When Ushotan saw that, he coughed out a final dry laugh.

  ‘The mercy stroke, eh?’ he rasped, his face transfixed with agony. Up close, the black veins of fermenting poisons were visible on his exposed skin. ‘The last indignity. You always were a miserable bastard.’

  Valdor placed the tip of the knife over Ushotan’s heart. Fresh snow was falling around them, turned brown and flaky by burning promethium. ‘I meant what I said, lord primarch,’ he said. ‘I take no pleasure in this. You were one of our finest commanders.’

  ‘And these new toys of yours – who will lead them now? Will they have their own commanders?’

  ‘No. Those ones are lost.’

  ‘Ha. All the better for you, then. The High Lord was right – you can’t bear rivals.’

  ‘It was not my doing.’

  ‘Sure it wasn’t.’ Ushotan spasmed, hacking up oily blood. ‘You know, when we were at Maulland Sen, and I said I pitied you, I meant it. I’m not trying to goad you. I really do pity you.’

  Valdor remained motionless for a moment, his hand on the grip of the knife.

  ‘I lived, captain-general,’ Ushotan rasped. ‘It was short, and it was painful, but by the nine hells, I lived. I’d rather have it that way than yours – no joy, no hate, no fear. Unbreakable without growth, immortal without passion.’

  As Valdor readied himself to apply downward pressure, he had a sudden vision of a far-off future-state, spun out of reality and into the cold halls of an undiscovered time, where the galaxy itself was darkened by strife and whole worlds were cast into flame, where wonders and madnesses had been unlocked and now screamed their way through the arch of reality, where the foundations of physics creaked beneath the ravening scuttle of nightmarish unreason, and he was still there, still unchanged, still cold and pure and steadfast and unable to feel anything but the ubiquitous press of unending responsibility.

  ‘What is left for you, Constantin?’ Ushotan breathed, blood bubbling up between his burned lips. ‘What more can He take from you that He hasn’t already?’

  Valdor drew in a long breath, then plunged the knife in, ending the primarch’s agony. For a moment he did nothing else, his head bowed, the storm exhausting itself around him and coating the land in a film of pale, drifting grey.

  Then, slowly, he withdrew the blade.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, very softly. ‘Nothing at all.’

  Samonas plummeted, leaping from the fal
tering platform and ploughing straight into the wall’s collapsing structure. He skidded down through the rows of vials, churning them up and casting a glittering wave of glass into the upswelling flames.

  For less than a second he remained poised just above the churning plasma, a speck of auramite speeding towards destruction. In that moment he caught a final glimpse of Astarte’s body as it tumbled away into oblivion, the platform twisting like a wick in the flames, and then everything blew into a roiling world of heat and light.

  Even encased in his superlative armour, the press of the inferno was colossal. His vision snapped out, replaced by a white dazzle-flare, and his tactical sensors disappeared into a soup of distortion. He could vaguely feel the disintegrating shelves as he tried to use them to slow his descent, gouging into the metal plates to make his headlong fall just a little less bone-shattering.

  When he finally collided with the rockcrete floor it was like being smashed into by a runaway land-hauler – both his legs flared in agony, and he felt the bones splinter. Heavy metal shards thunked down around him, slamming like molten rain amid the melting, churning world of magma.

  He had no fixed point of reference. All directions were blinding, shimmering with flame, thundering with the noise of impending implosion. He could only visualise what must have been happening all around him – the vials exploding, ejecting their priceless contents into the boiling flame-swill before even the glass fragments melted. Everything was poised on the indeterminate border between liquid and gas, and when he moved it felt as if he were swimming through the core of a star.

  And yet, even then, in the midst of that nigh-infinite destruction, the old manias still wouldn’t loose their grip.

  Failure. This is failure.

  Samonas dragged himself forwards, going on instinct, groping his way through the flames towards where he thought the portal must be. His earpieces rang with the roar of the inferno, blotting out his own strangled gasps of agony. He felt the impacts of debris on his back, and the skin-shredding heat getting in where his armour had been damaged.

  And yet, somehow, he reached the threshold. He hauled himself over the edge just as the entire structure behind finally began to fall in on itself. Even over the thundering outrush of the flames, he heard the cracking of the vault’s pillars, the toppling of its ancient retaining walls, the boom of rubble as it poured into the caldera created by Astarte’s destructive vengeance.

  He felt his pulse charging out of control, his consciousness wavering. Every movement was a fresh excruciation, a harrowing of his already mortified flesh.

  Too slow.

  His limbs were like lead. He tried to lift his arm again, and failed. Something heavy crunched on top of him, driving a rent in what remained of his armour, and he coughed blood into his mouthpiece.

  All he could see during that time was Astarte’s face – that strange mix of ruin and triumph, curdled into madness, setting off the annihilation of her life’s work. That, of all of it, was the worst thing. He couldn’t get the image out of his head, and had the sudden realisation that it was going to be the last thing he would ever see, and that was a bitter irony – a mortal’s scorn, marking his inadequacy.

  But he was wrong. With faltering awareness, his felt his ­broken wrists being grasped, and his body being dragged forwards. There was scarcely any let-up in the fury of the inferno, but through the rush and howl of flame he began to perceive dark outlines – armour-clad warriors, struggling against the backdraught, pulling him from danger.

  By the time they reached the first of the secure chambers, he was beginning to recover some of his awareness. The pain was almost all-consuming, but some of that now came from his body fixing itself, cauterising the wounds and combating infection from the burns. He felt someone wrench his helm off, and found himself blinking and coughing and spitting up more blood.

  He was in the Dungeon again, far enough up to escape the furnace but still surrounded by the evidence of destruction. The floor shook, and the stink of burning made the air acrid.

  ‘He will live.’

  Samonas heard the words through a blurry haze, and did not recognise the speaker. Only when a helmed face swam back into his field of vision did he see one of his own order standing over him. Of course, it had to have been one of his own order – no other soul would have been able to withstand the flames.

  ‘Were any others in there with you?’ came the question.

  He knew what that meant – any other Custodians, any other warriors capable of being saved.

  Samonas shook his head weakly. Sensation and control were coming back to him, vying with the anguish.

  ‘The vaults…’ he began, his charred tongue thick in his mouth.

  ‘Destroyed,’ came the reply, emotionlessly. ‘Nothing recovered.’

  Samonas let his head fall back, striking the stone heavily. That was that, then. The entire operation, all the preparation, for nothing. His watchfulness had been in vain, and an enemy had struck at the very heart of the Imperium, wiping out its greatest treasures.

  ‘There will be a price, for this,’ he found himself mumbling, even as consciousness began to slip away again. ‘There is always a price.’

  Sixteen

  She had started running at once. Just a single look at those… things had been enough. She had seen what the Thunder Warriors made of them too, the shock in their initial responses, and knew immediately that they had all stumbled, blindly, into a trap.

  She had no idea how such an army could have been concealed. Thinking back, she should have listened to the warnings her heart had been prompting for a long time. Valdor was no fool. The Emperor, his master, was no fool. The vulnerability of the Palace had always been an illusion, something placed tantalisingly in front of them like bait. And, like the eager simpletons they were, they had snatched at it.

  Kandawire was not built for this kind of exertion. She fell often, crashing to the frozen earth even as shells exploded around her and showered her with gouts of ice and grit. Her environment suit was a hindrance to any kind of rapid movement – it kept her warm enough to survive, but swaddled her limbs in layers of movement-inhibiting insulation.

  She fully expected to die in those first few moments of confusion. The air was so full of the lattice of las-beams and projectiles that it had seemed impossible for anything to emerge from its heart intact. She panicked, hyperventilating as she saw the hulls of entire tanks ripped apart and squads of soldiers mown down by explosive rounds. She never got close to making the ridge again – by the time she had got her bearings back and started to slip and stumble towards it, those terrible grey-clad warriors were already tearing Ushotan’s army apart and advancing into all corners of the exposed terrain. It seemed inevitable that she would be taken down next, just one more casualty among the thousands.

  Only slowly, with mounting disbelief, did she realise the truth. Valdor’s warriors had plenty of opportunity to end her. After a number of miraculous near misses, she finally fell on her knees before one of them, knowing that there was no way he could pass up the chance.

  ‘Do it, then!’ she yelled at him, her fists balled in impotent rage. ‘It’s all you know how to do!’

  The warrior glanced coolly at her. He was enormous, close to matching the Thunder Warriors in size. Whereas they were gloriously flamboyant – barbarian kings in bronze and crimson – he had a brutal, mechanistic look to him. All facial details were obscured. His armour was so dark as to be almost black, with only a few prominent markers – a single ‘I’ on the breast-plate, a winged sword emblem on the right shoulder-guard. It wasn’t even clear to her that any living person remained inside that suit – the profile looked like some kind of automaton, bulked out into more-than-human dimensions and outfitted with outrageously powerful sidearms.

  ‘Do your job!’ she screamed, out of frustration more than anything else. She had gone up against the death-deal
ers, and failed.

  The automaton looked at her for a moment longer, then turned away, contemptuously, stalking after other prey.

  She watched it go, dumbfounded. After that, more of them emerged from the charcoal-flecked storm, all of them ignoring her and going after the retreating remnants of Ushotan’s task force. With them, the warriors were pitiless, killing with a savage efficiency. Even to her unpractised eye, it was clear what differentiated these new creatures from the Cataegis troops – the latter were warlords, all of them, as gaudy and headstrong as they were lethal. These killers were line-troops – undifferentiated, but collectively devastating.

  Amid all the ruin, she found herself at a loss for what to do next. The screams of the dying and the desperate revving of the few surviving great engines were still deafening, vying with the maelstrom’s roar to disorientate her.

  ‘Get up,’ came a familiar voice from the darkness, one that immediately set her teeth on edge.

  She turned to see Valdor walking towards her. For the first time ever in her experience, his gait was not absolutely perfect – it looked as though he was carrying a slight limp, and the aurora around his spear tip was dimmed.

  She remained where she was. ‘You called your dogs off,’ she said, accusingly.

  ‘You were a High Lord,’ Valdor said, as if that explained everything.

  ‘Were?’

  Valdor didn’t dignify that with an explanation. ‘You should go. You can still make a life for yourself, Uwoma Kandawire. Take the opportunity.’

  She looked hard at him, trying to work out whether any of this was true. ‘So it was a deception,’ she said, accusingly. ‘From the start. You were toying with me.’