Valdor: Birth of the Imperium Read online

  Sevuu dropped to the ground and offered Kandawire a hand. Then they walked, their limbs stiff, past the metre-high locator-spear and out across the massif beyond.

  Flags snapped everywhere, caught in the strong breeze. Long trenches had been dug across the landscape, two metres deep and already scudded with snow. Workers huddled against the biting breeze, some of them with thin strips of exposed flesh under environment wrappers, others with dumb augmetics glinting. They went slowly, both human and servitor, half from the cold, half from the need to pay close attention to what they were doing.

  Kandawire surveyed the scene, all the while clambering over the frost-glistening gravel. Sevuu came with her, poised to offer an arm, should she need one. The cold air was already making his throat ache.

  ‘A suitable site,’ she said, looking back and forth, up to the cliffs above, down to the long snaking road that had brought them here. ‘I’m not a soldier, you understand.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Sevuu.

  She smiled at him – a flash of white teeth. ‘I can see why they did it here, though. Hemmed in, very high up. Flyers would struggle, yes? But a wide place where an army – where two armies – could meet. A proper contest.’ She breathed in, deeply. She put her hands on her hips, and stopped moving. ‘This is where it happened, then.’

  Sevuu kept walking. ‘I wanted to show you this one.’

  They picked their way between trenches, watched all the way by their chaperones. Kandawire started to pant – this was not her natural element – and her chainmail escorts moved in closer in case she needed them.

  Soon the trenches fell away behind them, one by one, filled with their gravel-dusted items. The soft chitter of servitor-binaric faded, and they were standing on the margins, where the plain began to break up into fractured rock shelves. A few hundred metres further, and the land plummeted again, falling away in cloud-wreathed steps.

  Sevuu squatted down beside the flapping skirts of a pinned awning, pushing his visor back as he did so. Kandawire joined him, and he caught a faint whiff of perfume – an urban scent, one worn in the growing cities of the south-east, not something to take into the wastes.

  He lifted the protective plastek sheets carefully, seeing how the dew clung to the earth under them. The objects revealed were small – just fragments of wholes, shrapnel and jetsam. He reached for one of them, picking it up carefully and turning it over in his palm.

  ‘We get a lot of these,’ he said, handing it to Kandawire.

  She took it, holding it up to the light. ‘Raptor Imperialis,’ she said, narrowing her eyes. Her fingers rubbed grit from the lacquer, revealing an armour-pin and its device – an eagle’s head surrounded by four thin jags of lightning. The image held her gaze for a long time. ‘I argued against this image,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘I told them it set the wrong tone. We were builders, not destroyers. An eagle builds nothing but its own eyrie, and a storm merely ravages. One of many arguments I lost. They were after a different message.’

  ‘The armour pieces are mixed. Some analyse as a ceramic compound, something very strong, heat-resistant, nothing I’ve seen before. Other pieces are metal – steel, even iron. And then there’s the rarest of all. We can’t even get it through the analysers without them breaking. To the touch, some of the fragments are still warm. And they look for all the world like–’

  ‘Gold,’ said Kandawire, getting back to her feet. She stowed the armour-fragment away. ‘Gold that never tarnishes, gold to withstand every flame. It’s not really gold, though. It just looks like it.’

  ‘I have a lot more to show you,’ Sevuu said.

  ‘How many died?’

  He paused. ‘Thousands. Tens of thousands. More than we can count here.’

  Kandawire nodded. Her fingers, wrapped in linen, curled up. ‘You won’t need to. I want you gone in two days. I want all this taken down and the compound pulled up.’

  ‘But we haven’t–’

  ‘It’s dangerous. It’s right what they say – the truth is in the earth.’ She started to walk again, a limping gait that betrayed her lack of conditioning. ‘I’ve seen all I need to.’

  ‘Like I said. I have no idea why,’ Sevuu said, watching her go. ‘You read the report. It looks… senseless.’

  Kandawire kept on going.

  ‘It wasn’t,’ she said, picking her way through the half-frozen detritus of war. ‘And it’s not the end.’

  ‘Not the end?’ he called out.

  ‘Nor the beginning,’ she muttered. ‘Just a continuation. Just a breath. This is routine killing, Sevuu, the unskilled business of humanity. We haven’t seen the last of it.’

  Two

  It was a ludicrous place for a city.

  The air was painfully thin, even with the embedded processors clattering along at full tilt, squirting oxygen into an altitude never designed for human lungs. It had taken years to stabilise the climate here, and continual effort was still required to maintain what had been painfully won. If the processors ever failed, or if the nuclear power plants buried deep in the mountains’ roots ever faltered, this place would revert to what it had been for most of its long history – a silent waste at the roof of the world, marked by nothing but hard-packed snow and naked rock.

  Few observers ever speculated why such a location had been chosen for the site of the new capital. Few ever speculated on any of His actions, these days – it had become commonplace to simply accept them. There had to be a reason, or He would not have done it. The recent decades of spectacular success had made people think He was invincible, inerrant, omnipotent.

  Dangerous thoughts. They ran counter to the very heart’s-blood of the whole enterprise, but once they were formulated, they were so particularly, so irritatingly, hard to stamp out.

  So there were organisations dedicated to eradicating difficult ideas. They operated subtly, for the most part – enforcing literature bans, having quiet words with the right, or the wrong, people – but Terra was still a violent world, still in the birth pangs of its new future, and there were times when sharper tools were needed. Some observers maintained that the planet was all but united now, and that only sporadic actions were necessary to keep a lid on the worst of long-engrained human nature. ‘Compliance’ actions, they called them. None of this, sadly, was true. Old powers still cultivated support in the dark soils of rad-infested valleys. Some were deluded, unable to accept the new truth of a dawning age. Others knew just what was happening, and fought to prevent its sunrise.

  Even so, the idea was the most dangerous part. The notion, the belief – belief, that most lingering of the old pathologies, clinging with withered fingertips on to the edge of the long fall into oblivion.

  ‘I teach the end of belief,’ He had said, once, so it was written. ‘I am its terminus, its replacement. After me, there will only be perception, a sight of the single truth, glimpsed from distance.’

  The Custodian Samonas had no belief, at least not in the sense of something superstitious, something grasping at the numinous. If he had once, as a child, been able to entertain such phantasms, that capability had been scrubbed out of him a long time ago. He did not miss it. Samonas had no regrets. Regrets were for the mass of humanity, the herds he had been appointed to watch over. For one of his order, there were only the stark binaries left: to know, to be ignorant; to overcome, to be defeated; to be loyal, to be traitor.

  So when he looked out over the Palace – as he knew, one day, it would routinely be called – he did not share in the fantastical idea that the half-finished domes and spires had been somehow fated to be raised here, or that its existence was proof of some ineffable divine will, for it was merely there. The order had been given. Now his purpose was to safeguard it, just as his purpose had always been to safeguard the Creations.

  He entertained a residual interest in the progress of the techwrights. He had watched the Tower of H
egemon rise, slowly, from extravagantly solid foundations. To the north, across a deep valley slowly filling with rockcrete piers, he had seen the great halls of the Senatorum Imperialis take shape. The size had impressed him – a typically bold statement of vision. For centuries, Terra had been a world of mediocre warlords’ roosts, crumbling palaces, ruins that slowly subsided into dust-drifts. This was something else.

  ‘I do not truly see the need for it,’ Kallander, the first chancellor, had once confided, irritably. As the man responsible for finding the coin necessary for its construction, he could be forgiven for doubting the purpose of it all.

  Samonas understood, though. He understood that, once complete, this fortress would daunt the mortal soul. Once complete, it would project such an air of domination that no enemy would ever contemplate attacking it, unless they had been driven into some kind of bestial madness and no longer feared total annihilation.

  He had seen the plans for the rest, too. He had seen blueprints for constructions of totally unknown purpose. Some of these would be immensely tall, just like the chamber of the Senatorum. Other galleries went down a long way. Despite the punishing environment, the Palace was not the first great fortress to be made here. As ever on Terra, foundations had been laid upon foundations. Who knew where the trail eventually ended? Perhaps even He did not. Samonas did not know how long He had been alive for, and what He had seen across those many years.

  That was natural. The Emperor, as they all called Him, was bounded by limitation. He required servants. He required allies, and He required tools. Some of these tools were trivial and plentiful, like the workers of the Masonic guilds who painstakingly engraved the stone capitals atop their skyscrapers of scaffolding. Some were rare and potent, like Samonas himself. Some were powerful almost beyond conception – creations of such outsized, bafflingly outrageous capability that one was tempted to echo Kallander’s scepticism, and fail to ‘see the need’.

  The greatest of these creatures was back in the Palace, now, withdrawn from the wars in the west, where the Emperor and His Regent still remained, so the reports went. He had been pulled from the fighting. That would not make his mood a cheerful one.

  So Samonas walked a little faster than he would normally have done. His boots, exquisite creations unique to him, clinked on the glass-marble with a fractionally more intense rhythm, not that any mortal ears would have detected the difference. By the time he had arrived at his destination, his total expenditure of energy was close to a single percentage point higher than the baseline estimate for such a short journey.

  Perhaps he could have done better. Then again, that was always the assessment.

  ‘Come.’

  The voice came from the other side of the heavy oak doors. It was as familiar to Samonas as his own – a sonorous voice, preternaturally calm, effortlessly confident, slighter than you’d expect, as translucent, in its own way, as the unbroken snow-palls outside. It was the voice of command. It was the voice of order. It was the voice of infinite violence, held back – barely – within a shell of fragile artifice.

  He went in.

  ‘Captain-general,’ Samonas said, bowing.

  Captain-general. A nondescript term for an office of colossal power. In the early days, all their titles had been modest, and it had only been the rapid expansion of the scholar class that had brought about the absurdities of Gothic rank inflation. Then again, this one had seen it all. He had been there from before the beginning, they said: the first of the Order, ­coeval with the Sigillite, the final element of the trinity that had brought a world to heel.

  Emperor, Sorcerer, Warrior.

  He was standing, looking out of a wide crystalflex window at the peaks in the west. His tall frame – far taller than the tallest unaltered human, a cathedral of hard-edged muscle and bone – made the room’s fittings shrink. He wore a pale robe, fine-spun, lined with gold. His head was bare, exposing a master-crafted ring of thread-implants around his neck. He stood with a dancer’s bearing, the unconscious poise that all of the Order shared, ready, at the prompt of a thought, to mobilise all that spectacular gene magick and biomancy into a whirl of destructive action, but for now still, held together, dormant.

  He turned, exposing his face. It was lean, a soft collection of taut lines.

  ‘I can imagine it now,’ Constantin Valdor said. ‘As it will be, when complete. I never could, before.’

  Samonas nodded. The grand plan was becoming increasingly obvious as the walls and the towers began to climb their way into the frosty airs. ‘A masterful vision,’ he ventured.

  ‘You think so?’ Valdor regarded him coolly. Valdor regarded most things coolly. ‘A ludicrous place for a city. I told Him that myself.’

  ‘It will be a symbol.’

  ‘We are the symbols.’

  So his master’s humours were cold, just as predicted. It was unlikely Valdor truly intended criticism of the Emperor. It was unlikely that Valdor, or Samonas, or any of the Order, were truly capable of sustained criticism of Him.

  We are extensions of a single will, Samonas had been told, on awakening from the final trial, decades ago. We are adjuncts, we are orbitals. We are the periphery of the immortal, not its heart.

  ‘Will He return soon?’ Samonas ventured.

  ‘No.’ Valdor turned back to the mountains. ‘At least that will give the techwrights time to finish it.’

  ‘I have reports, if you wish to read them.’

  Valdor turned back towards him, and there was the spectre of a half-smile, briefly. ‘Diligent Samonas,’ he said. ‘Tell me of her.’

  Samonas hesitated. Some matters were delicate, hard to handle even for one of his training. ‘She is near, now,’ he said. ‘Closing on her objective. I completed my researches, and the threat is significant. If you were asking for counsel–’

  ‘I was not. But give me it, since you’ve started.’

  ‘End her now.’

  Valdor thought on that for a moment. ‘She is that dangerous?’

  ‘She knows.’

  ‘Knowledge is no crime.’

  ‘In itself, no. But what is done with it, that can be.’

  Valdor moved away from the window. ‘No. Not yet.’ He drew in a breath, then winced a little. The air was antiseptic here, still raw from the cyclers, and was no substitute for the real thing. ‘This is a new age, vestarios. An age of law. I will not succumb to a warlord’s urges, and nor should you.’

  ‘It is understood, captain-general.’

  ‘Gather evidence. Find a weakness, a slip in resolve.’

  ‘It is understood, captain-general.’

  ‘Is she here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then this should be trivial, for one of your talents.’

  Samonas looked up, briefly entertaining the idea he was being mocked. Nothing was trivial, not in this place. ‘She has His trust.’

  Valdor did not smile. ‘I do not think He trusts, Samonas. Even we can trust, in an idea, or an order, but He has nothing. Be mindful – the stronger you become, the weaker everything around you is. He can grasp on to nothing, for His grip will break it. Imagine that. Imagine the solitude of it.’

  He turned away. His mood seemed capricious, or maybe the weariness was telling, even for one of his near-infinite resources. Samonas said nothing, waiting for it to play out.

  ‘I would not welcome seeing her ended,’ he said, at length. ‘She is a symbol too, of a kind. A better kind than we are, maybe.’

  ‘I will bear that in mind,’ said Samonas.

  ‘But if the moment comes, of course.’

  ‘Your sanction, captain-general?’

  ‘You will use your judgement.’

  And that was the end of it. Samonas bowed again, and withdrew, retracing his steps back to the heavy doors. By the time he pulled them closed, Valdor was facing back out into the landsc
ape beyond, hands clasped behind his back.

  He looked as solid as the peaks beyond, or more so, as if he would outlast them, and still be standing there when they were no more than rubble, just there, in that place, against the crystal screen where the air was thin.

  But then many things had looked eternal, at the start. That was the great lesson of Unification – none of it was. Nothing but Him, and He was not here yet, and so all could yet be doubted.

  So Samonas closed the doors. There was work to do.

  Three

  It was a fantastic place for a city – high up, away from the rads and the filth, one of the few places that had never been despoiled, still hard and clear and unsullied.

  Kandawire didn’t approve of everything that had been done over the last fifty years of debate and disagreement, but building the seat of Unity here was evidently the correct decision. All still living on Terra looked up to this place. No warlord had ever conquered it. The masses would lift their heads from their seamy plains and swamps, turn away from the degraded hive-sumps and sprawl-cities, and see something untrammelled rise into impossible heights, clean and unmatchable, a signal to the future.

  One day, of course. For now, it was a building site, the largest ever marshalled by human hands, toiling against the punishing elements to raise an icon of defiance. It was cold, the mud was frozen. The lumens would blink out at a moment’s notice. The piped water was gritty, and seldom got hot even when the generator-banks were working.

  That last one was an irritant. After the long atmospheric stage to Himalazia, it would have been good to relax in a pulse-shower, washing the dust from her body, but instead it had been a matter of grimly bearing the ice-cold spears of water before they guttered out in a splurt of muck. The torrent of expletives from her chambers had been enough to send orderlies scurrying, but there was little they could do when the whole complex was still half-finished. She emerged in a foul state, her hair disarranged and sodden, all fatigue dispelled by fury.