Scars Read online

  Yesugei made his way slowly down the wide stairway. Clear sunlight glinted from his armour. Tamu waited patiently, bowing respectfully as the zadyin arga approached.

  ‘Feeling better?’ asked Yesugei, looking at him intently.

  ‘The implant took,’ Tamu replied.

  ‘I was told you were near death.’

  Tamu grinned. ‘I eluded it.’

  Yesugei returned the smile. It did not take much for him to smile. Ever since Tamu had been plucked from the Altak and taken to the monastery, Yesugei’s smile had been somewhere close by him, emerging from weatherbeaten flesh the colour and toughness of beaten bronze.

  ‘I remember when I found you,’ Yesugei said. ‘You had a gash at the back of your head that should have killed you. And you tried to fight me, the first chance you got.’

  Tamu bowed his head, embarrassed. ‘I did not know–’

  ‘I was pleased. It made me think I had made the right choice.’ Yesugei’s smile faded a little. ‘I will not pretend I do not grieve when our choices are wrong.’

  Tamu felt self-conscious. He remembered very little of the time after Yesugei had taken him. He did not like being reminded of it.

  He looked down at his hands. They were too big, like most of his body. He already had the bulky frame of a grown man and knew that it would keep getting bigger. The stimulants and accelerants he took in his food made his muscles bunch and swell. At times he felt freakish, like a changeling left out on the steppe to die, all awkward limbs and fleshy growths. At others he felt invincible, bursting with power and energy and desperate to find an outlet for it.

  ‘I have a long way to go,’ Tamu said.

  ‘I do not think we will lose you now. I have a superstition.’

  ‘About me?’ Tamu asked.

  ‘About the universe,’ smiled Yesugei. ‘Have I never told you of it? The principle of the minor flaw.’

  Tamu shook his head.

  ‘A foolish thing,’ said Yesugei. ‘I found myself believing that every soul should possess a flaw. Some exhibit it early and survive. Others do not, and it grows, and when it emerges it has become monstrous. The greater the soul, the greater the monster. So it is better to have had your brush with destruction now.’

  Tamu squinted at Yesugei in the sun. He didn’t know whether he was being serious. ‘Then I no longer need worry.’

  ‘Of course you should.’

  ‘And you, zadyin arga?’

  ‘My flaws were identified a long time ago.’

  ‘And the Khan?’

  Yesugei looked at him sternly. ‘He will be an exception to the rule.’

  They stood together for a little longer. Yesugei was a companionable soul. It was strange to think of him as he really was: a master of the Arts of Heaven, a zadyin arga of prodigious power. Acolytes whispered along the corridors of the monastery that Targutai Yesugei had killed more men than any of the Legion, other than the Great Khan himself.

  Tamu believed it. He was not fooled by the soft voice or the sparkling eyes in that good-natured face. Yesugei was the embodiment of the Legion’s core principles: he killed without rancour, without angst, without obsession. His station did not require him to take an interest in the aspirants he had selected, especially as the demands of the Crusade took him away from Chogoris often. The fact that he paid his charges so much close attention had taught Tamu a lesson, one that he had absorbed far more readily than most others – that warriors need not be brutes.

  ‘I am leaving soon,’ Yesugei said. ‘I do not expect to return before you complete Ascension, and by then your name will no longer be Tamu.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Yesugei glanced up at the ice-blue sky. ‘Where the war leads.’

  Tamu felt a sharp pang of jealousy. Ever since he had begun his training he had burned to leave the home world. He dreamed often of other worlds, of stars burning in the vaults of the deep void, of combat against real enemies rather than drill-drones and sparring partners.

  Yesugei gave him a reassuring look. ‘We are inducting more Chogorians every cycle. Soon we will outnumber the Terrans. Perhaps it is unworthy to admit this, but I look forward to the day. The Khan is one of us, after all.’

  ‘He was not born here.’

  ‘All the same.’

  Tamu considered what Yesugei had said. ‘Do they follow the same training?’

  ‘Terrans? I doubt it.’

  ‘Is it easy to fight with them?’

  ‘Easy enough.’ Yesugei shot him a wry look. ‘We are all united now, of course. All united under one Throne.’

  Tamu gazed back out over the plains. ‘I can only imagine Terra.’

  ‘You may yet witness it.’

  ‘If I survive Ascension.’

  ‘I told you. You will.’

  Tamu flexed the muscles of his chest, breathing in heavily and feeling his ribs ache. ‘It cannot come soon enough.’

  ‘Patience,’ said Yesugei, resting a gauntlet on Tamu’s shoulder. ‘Work. Study. Live. Take advantage of this time. Once you are in the ordu you will have no space for anything but war-craft.’

  Tamu had been told the same thing many times. It had always troubled him. ‘Then I wonder why they make us learn so much.’

  ‘It is important,’ said Yesugei. ‘I am glad you are a poet. Only poets can be true warriors.’

  ‘Do the Terrans think the same?’

  Yesugei laughed. ‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘One day you will meet one. When you do, ask him.’

  Haren stepped forward as the doors slid open. The chamber beyond was dark, lit only by slants of orange light from the neon night sky. Streaks of rain trickled down the outside of armourglass windows. It had been raining for a long time. It always seemed to be raining in Imamdo.

  The man behind the pedestal desk looked up at him as he entered.

  ‘Haren Svensellen?’ he asked.

  Haren clicked his heels together and stood rigidly. ‘Sir.’

  The man looked Haren up and down. His flesh was grey and he looked tired. A glitter of augmetics ran down his right cheek, breaking the skin and pinning tight under his jaw. One eye glowed a soft red, the other was natural.

  ‘Your time here is complete,’ he said. ‘Are you prepared to serve?’

  ‘I am.’ The words made Haren swell with pride. The first stage – the selection, the physical conditioning – was over. He felt strong. His lean, immature limbs had hardened, his chest had broadened. More would come – the gene-therapy, the psycho-conditioning, and then, finally, the implants that would make him one with the Legion.

  The man looked down at the desk. Runes scrolled down its reflective surface. ‘Twenty-sixth out of thirty-two in your cadre. It was a good cadre – you have nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But it presents us with a problem.’

  Haren felt a twist of unease. Something in the man’s cold, clipped voice suddenly made him nervous.

  ‘The Luna Wolves had marked you for selection, but that means nothing until they come to collect,’ said the man. ‘They exceeded their targets, which is not easy. Other Legions have not been so successful. Some are under-strength. If you had made twenty-fifth or higher then it would have been different, but as it stands…’

  Haren listened warily. He remembered the wolf-moon device on the Space Marine’s shoulder-guard. He’d seen the same image a thousand times in the years since, plastered over every surface in the training facilities, the medicae bays, the tactica lecture halls, the dormitories. He’d begun seeing it in his sleep.

  ‘You did everything necessary,’ the man went on, methodically, coolly. Haren felt his cheeks begin to flush. ‘Reassignments happen. They are nothing to be ashamed of.’

  Reassignment. The word hit Haren like a blow. He heard his blood pumping hard in his ears. After so many years dealing with the rigid ways of the selection facility he should have known better than to question, but the words came out anyway. ‘I do not w
ish to be reassigned,’ he said.

  The man flicked his tired eyes – one brown, one red – up at him. A thin eyebrow raised by a fraction.

  ‘Are we here to facilitate your wishes, Svensellen?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Is that what we are here for, to facilitate the wishes of our aspirants?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Others have been reassigned. Do you think they felt differently?’

  ‘I doubt it, sir.’

  ‘And do you think we made special dispensation for any of them?’

  ‘No, sir. Sorry, sir. I…’

  The man lowered his eyes. Haren trailed off.

  One place away. One place.

  The man ran a pair of metal-tipped fingers over the desktop, dragging rune-clusters to and fro absently on the touch-reactive surface. ‘You will make the transfer to Luna in two weeks. Onward transport will be arranged there. You will complete your remaining programme with your new Legion. They have been given a full record of your progress with us. You will be welcomed. Our stock is highly prized.’

  Haren almost blurted out another protest. Is there no alternative? No other way? I can re-take the tests! Is this even permitted? I’ve absorbed the doctrine, the training, the methods...

  The man seemed to read his mind and his hands stopped moving. ‘You have at least ten years before you are due to enter a battle company,’ he said. ‘You will adjust. In the decades to come you will forget that this was even an issue.’

  That was perhaps meant as a kindness. Haren drew in a long breath through his nostrils, keeping his shoulders in place, his back straight. He wanted to be sick. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said. ‘And is it… is it permitted…?’

  ‘It is. You are assigned to the Fifth Legion.’

  The Fifth Legion. The White Scars. The mystic savages.

  It could have been worse: the Wolves of Fenris, maybe, or the War Hounds. Still, the White Scars...

  ‘I know nothing of the Fifth,’ Haren said.

  ‘You’ll learn. A liaison officer will join you on Luna, but you should commit to study before then.’

  Haren remained where he was, static, lost for words. The man looked up at him again.

  ‘Do you need anything else?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Haren, his mind drifting. ‘Do I?’

  The man thought for a moment. Something clicked in his augmetic, like clockwork. ‘You’ll change your name,’ he said. ‘That is one thing I do know – they are given new names on entry to the Legion.’

  ‘A new name,’ said Haren absently. ‘What kind of name?’

  The man shrugged. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘You have ten years to find out.’

  Tamu moved forward. The lights in the hangar were bright and the rows of warriors in white armour were dazzling, as pristine as the snows on the Ulaav in winter. Every so often he had to remind himself that he was one of them.

  One of them. One of the Legion. A Space Marine.

  Hasik Noyan-Khan stood before him. He held Tamu’s gaze for a moment, scrutinising him. Tamu looked back into Hasik’s brown eyes fearlessly. Despite Hasik’s immense and gilt-edged Terminator war-plate, despite the thousands of warriors standing to attention in the Dergun’s cavernous interior, despite the vast display of weaponry around him, he felt nothing but joy.

  ‘Tamu,’ said Hasik. His voice was a rumbling baritone, made harsh by more than sixty years’ service in the Legion. It was rumoured he was one of the very first to be raised from Chogoris, just as Yesugei had been. Looking up at his hard, ravaged features, Tamu could believe it. ‘Talskar?’

  Tamu shook his head. ‘Khin-zan,’ he said, referring to the clan he had been taken from on Chogoris. The Talskar were the Great Khan’s people, but many dozens of nations had been subsumed into the Legion. They were all White Scars now.

  ‘Show me,’ said Hasik.

  Tamu bared his left cheek, exposing the flesh to the hard light of the overhead lumens. Hasik ran an armoured finger down the raised flesh of the scar that stretched from Tamu’s cheekbone down to his chin.

  Hasik nodded, satisfied, and reached behind him. An adjutant delivered up the chosen weapon – a two-handed guan dao glaive with a disruptor-edged blade. Hasik held it before Tamu as an executioner might, poised to swing.

  ‘You were Tamu of the Khin-zan,’ he said. His voice filled the huge space. ‘Now you are of the ordu of Jaghatai and your old life is no more. What name do you take to mark your Ascension?’

  Tamu had spoken it out loud many times in the days prior to the ceremony, getting used to the feel of it on his lips, trying to ease the strangeness of the transition. When he replied, it still felt jarring.

  ‘Shiban,’ he said.

  Hasik handed him the glaive. ‘You are one with the ordu, Shiban. You are of the brotherhood. You will not leave it except in death – may it be long in coming, and may glory accompany your deeds until that day.’

  Shiban took the glaive in both hands. The weapon felt pleasingly heavy in his gauntlets. He ran his eyes up and down the blade, noting the glyphs on the metal, the gilding on the disruptor casing.

  It was perfect.

  ‘For the Great Khan,’ he said, bowing respectfully, his hearts full to bursting.

  It took more than ten years.

  In all, nearly fourteen passed before Haren was ready. The physical changes were hard, the surgery painful. The cultural ways of the V Legion were too different to be absorbed readily, and he had to learn Khorchin, the strange language of Chogoris. That alone tested him – despite his improved recall and mental agility, getting his tongue around such alien sounds remained a challenge.

  It was not just a matter of vocabulary and grammar; Khorchin had inflections and subtleties not shared by any Terran language. His first tutor, a stocky woman from the mega-grav world of Boe-Phe, had developed her own theory on the origin of the differences.

  ‘They are a poetic people,’ she had told him. ‘Their home is an empty place. It loosened their imagination, so they filled their minds with words.’ She had curled her lip. She did not especially admire Chogorians. ‘They are prolix. And they do not learn Gothic well, hence all this fuss.’

  ‘Why is that?’ Haren had asked.

  ‘I do not know. Perhaps they do not know themselves.’

  Haren mastered the speech in the end, just like all the other Terrans who had been inducted into the Legion. The inductees studied together, poring over curved character-clusters and diacritics, rolling their eyes at the complexities and cementing friendships in the face of adversity.

  Many of the others had been taken from the Asiatic hive clusters. Haren disapproved of that. After Unity the Imperium was meant to have moved beyond racial and ethnic stereotyping, so the fact that the V Legion remained mired in the physiognomic traits of their backwater world was an irritant.

  Much else about them was an irritant also: their archaic customs, their introversion, their exceptionalism. They placed enormous importance on speed – on being the first into combat, on being the first out, on movement, on shams and counterfeits.

  Withdraw, then return, they told him, over and over again.

  No backward step, he would occasionally remind himself.

  As time went on, though, Haren learned to admire their tenacity, their toughness, their energy. The combat drills were hard, just as hard as they had been with the Luna Wolves. The Scars could fight, that was certain, and he took some solace in that.

  His initial orientation took place in the Sol system. Then he was moved out with the others to off-world training facilities – a decommissioned battleship over Vhomarl, a jetbike squadron billeted temporarily on the lead-hard plains of Yyem, specialist combat units deployed on the aqua-world of Kail IX and the gas giant Revelet Taredes. He performed well throughout. The Chogorian instructors were fulsome in their praise, unlike the grudging hard-men of the Luna Wolves.

  ‘Take pleasure in your prowess!’ they would chide him, mock
ing his earnestness. ‘A warrior is a blessed thing, the most fortunate of creatures, gifted by heaven with unmatched power. It would be polite to acknowledge that, from time to time.’

  Haren did his best, but their cheerfulness never sat well with him.

  They take so little seriously, he thought. They are playing at this.

  Of course they weren’t. He knew that, but the nagging accusation would not leave him.

  ‘When are we going to Chogoris?’ he had asked them near the end.

  Tajik, his last instructor, had shaken his scarred head. ‘We will not go.’

  ‘So I will never see the home world?’

  ‘You will. Just not now.’

  Haren had frowned. ‘It seems strange, not to visit the centre.’

  ‘It is not the centre,’ said Tajik, lapsing into inscrutability as White Scars were prone to do.

  ‘It is where we are based,’ insisted Haren, using ‘we’ as he tried to do always.

  ‘We are based nowhere,’ said Tajik, smiling. ‘Nowhere is our home, and everywhere is. That is the difference between us and the others. You will learn it.’

  Haren wanted to ask more questions, but merely bowed and let the matter drop. Sometimes it was easier that way.

  And so, at last, Ascension arrived. The final ceremony took place in the humid equatorial zone of Taranagea: two hundred aspirants lined up on a rockcrete square as hot rain whipped and skipped across them, each decked out in newly crafted power armour in the V Legion colours of ivory, red and gold. Haren stood among them, feeling much as he had on the sodden training quads of Imamdo.

  But now, of course, he was far from being a boy on the cusp of a new life. He was a man.

  More than a man. A demigod. An angel. A guardian of Terra’s new order.

  Jemulan Noyan-Khan had made planetfall to oversee the Ascension. Like all Chogorians he was compact and wiry even in the standard battle-armour he had opted for on that day. As Jemulan reached Haren’s place in the line, Haren noticed that he was taller than the old lord commander. That unnerved him somewhat.

  ‘Haren,’ said Jemulan. ‘Which part of Terra?’

  ‘Skandmark,’ said Haren.