The Lords of Silence Read online

  He must believe, in the absence of any proof, that Terra is still unconquered. He must believe that somewhere, resistance is being mustered.

  He reaches the end of the corridor, where the doors stand open. Two guards bow low as he approaches – Chapter serfs in grey carapace armour and blue tabards. They make a decent show of looking alert and their gear is in good condition, but Xydias can see the fatigue in their eyes.

  He pauses before crossing the threshold. He looks at them both. ‘Nineteenth Company,’ he says, observing the designations on their breasts and nodding. ‘Rotated back from the Orvian Exterior Line. Well done. Well fought.’

  They mumble thanks.

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ Xydias says.

  ‘In eternal faith,’ they both reply, making the aquila.

  Then he moves on. He would like to spend more time with them, find out more from their own mouths about what they have seen out there, offer words of encouragement that might move beyond platitudes, but there is already so little time, and so many others who deserve his attention. The Praetorian squads have been well trained and well equipped – he must remember to trust what has been done here over the centuries to make these people strong.

  He enters a round chamber with slit windows set into the wall at regular intervals. The roof is domed and carries a fresco of the pri­march meeting the Emperor on Macragge. A long crack snakes from floor level to the apex, still unrepaired from the bombardment three weeks back. The floor is a dark, polished marble, and around the chamber rim sit columns with assorted battle-honours set within shimmering forcefields – a helm, a gladius, the tattered remnants of an old war-standard.

  Atramo is there in his deep-blue Librarian plate, the tallest and broadest of those assembled save Xydias himself. Opposite him is Memnon, Fourth Company captain and the most senior of his surviving officers. Next in the semicircle is Tadacar, Praetorian Castellan-Commander, then cowled Diamada, mistress of astropaths. Memnon’s Chaplain, Kandred, has returned from fighting on the Bulwark Ridge, and his armour is stained dirt-red. The acting master of the fleet, Landion, completes the makeshift command group, and is the most pitiable of all – he has no fleet left to command, just a couple of half-functional monitors at high anchor over the monastery’s spires and what remains of the Chapter’s atmospheric flyers.

  ‘My brothers,’ Xydias says, directing a perfunctory bow towards the Space Marines, then a brief acknowledgement of the two baseline humans. ‘I will ask you, mistress, the same thing I ask at every dawn.’

  Diamada smiles thinly, her eyeless face gaunt under a heavy cowl. ‘And I shall give you the same answer, lord. Nothing but screams.’

  Atramo grunts in agreement. He was a sour fellow even before this began. ‘I begin to think this is no fleeting effect. I begin to think this is the way of things now.’

  He has been hit hardest of all by the change. The path of the Librarian has always been strenuous, a test for the mind and the soul as much as the body, but now things are excruciating. Xydias has heard the cries of anguish from Atramo’s cell in the deep of the night, and has had to order him to refrain from probing beyond the veil unless in combat – as Diamada says, it is nothing but screams now.

  ‘The rules are broken,’ Atramo had told him, months ago now, when it all changed. ‘Everything I learned, studied, all gone.’

  That much became obvious soon enough. There can be no pretence about the daemonic anymore, for they are seen in every street and over every cathedral, translucent and fighting hard for instantiation. When they make it, ripping themselves through folds in the air and the earth, the killing is unrestrained.

  ‘And if this is eternal, we adjust to it,’ says Memnon sharply. Those two are wearing at one another like ill-aligned wheels in a machine.

  Xydias instinctively sympathises with his captain. Speculation is of no use, and the best must be made of things, but he feels his weakness acutely. The Chapter has been taking damage for a long time. First there was the disaster of the Boros Gate, the catastrophe that destroyed close to five whole companies, half the Chapter’s total. He had not been there, but had ceded operational command, as was the custom, to his counterpart, Chapter Master Titus Valens. Valens died in that bloodbath, replaced by his nominated successor, Ridian Artemanis.

  When the call for Cadia came, it was also Artemanis’ place to answer. This was the way of the White Consuls – a Chapter Master to oversee the wars, a Chapter Master to keep the walls. Such a dual arrangement had many strengths, and it had enabled rapid recovery after Boros. As a result the Chapter was able to field ten companies for the grand muster at Cadia, albeit at various levels of readiness for combat, and with the numerically weakest – the Fourth – leaving much of its complement on Sabatine as a skeleton guard force.

  Xydias had come close to overriding precedent and demanding to lead the Cadian offensive. Artemanis was in most respects his junior, despite the formal equality of rank, and would surely not have resisted a direct injunction. The burning shame of Boros had played on Xydias’ mind for years, and to lead the Chapter into that greater battle would have been a way of making restitution.

  But the power of the law, in the end, was too great. Everything they had built on Sabatine had revolved around the law, both its spirit and its letter. To deny that now, when everything was racing towards oblivion with such terrifying speed, would have been a renunciation of it all.

  So he had stayed. He had watched almost the entire Chapter’s total strength make for the void. He had seen the fleet leave, its thrusters glowing white-blue on the run towards the Mandeville points. No one had been in any doubt that the situation at Cadia was critical, and so the bare minimum guard remained in the Sabatine’s great monastery – eighty battle-brothers, thirty of whom had been accelerated from service in the Scouts and twelve who were still in recovery from near-terminal wounds in other battles. Two Castraferrum Dreadnoughts, Brother Argan and Brother Jerimias. Three regiments of Sabatine Praetorians, totalling just under seven thousand troops, only a fifth of that sent with the fleet to Cadia. Auxiliary serfs, militia and standing urban defence forces, plus a token orbital presence.

  It had been a great risk. In normal times, such near-complete off-world deployment would never have been undertaken, but all knew the cost should Cadia fall. As a Chapter of the Astartes Praeses, it was the White Consuls’ most solemn duty to ensure that the guard on the Eye of Terror was maintained at all times.

  Most solemn duty. Xydias feels the accusation in those three words, and they bear down on him now like a physical burden. In the past, his Chapter guarded an entire realm of far-flung worlds, sending guardians to administer and oversee them. Now they cannot even master their own failing citadel.

  ‘Report, if you please, castellan-commander,’ he says.

  Tadacar clears his throat. ‘Controlled withdrawal from Caldama and Bastion-Tor continues according to schedule. Losses within anticipated parameters, and the garrison at Hartad evacuated almost intact. Last elements of the guard on Orvian are now beyond contact – the Fifteenth Armoured assumed lost. No reports from south of the forty-fifth parallel, all zones there also assumed overrun. Acceptable control maintained across the Three Cities, though reports of incursion increase. Commissars have been stationed at all main gates, as ordered.’

  It is a grim tally. Sabatine is an administrative centre, a world studded with dense settlement and straggling urban hinterlands. For millennia it has been as well ordered and as peaceful as any Imperial world could be, but the sudden surge of cult activity, fuelled by the psychological shock of the Astronomican failing, has proved impossible to contain. Once, daemons were just rumours to these people, clamped down on by the priests and Inquisitors. Now all can witness them capering bloodily from spire to spire, grinning through their slaughter, and it has turned the minds of an entire planet.

  The rules are broken.

  ‘In my judg
ement, the time has come,’ Xydias says. ‘We have responsibilities to this world, but when we can no longer exert control, we must guard our own. The fortress is too vulnerable.’

  Atramo nods, but Kandred resists. ‘We can hold the Three Cities,’ he urges. ‘The Imperial Cult retains its strongest hold there. Just three squads would suffice to keep a lid on disorder.’

  ‘Just three squads,’ says Xydias, amused. ‘From which duties would you pull them, Kandred?’

  ‘As you said, lord,’ Kandred says, ‘we have responsibilities.’

  That is correct, and the reminder makes him wince. The White Consuls have always taken that seriously, nurturing the potential of the millions placed under their watch. Already many citizens have been evacuated inside the monastery’s high walls – senior administrators, military staff, astropaths and priests – but capacity is limited and now the halls are bursting.

  ‘Your devotion to them is commendable, brother,’ Atramo says, ‘but we cannot disperse our strength any longer. The fortress must be fully guarded.’

  ‘You have seen what they’re doing to our people out there?’ Kandred asks, a vein of anger in his controlled voice.

  ‘I have seen it all,’ says Atramo. ‘More, even, than you.’

  Xydias is privy to counsel from Atramo that none other hears, and so the words ring both true and chill. Atramo says the warp is now spilling like floodwater over the entirety of the galaxy, drenching the void with its contamination. He says that the stars themselves are in pain, and that the laws of physics are being strained beyond tolerance. No ships cross those treacherous gulfs without taking catastrophic damage, and even the Navigators cannot peer into that morass without losing their minds. No help will come from the void, Atramo says, for the only ones who traverse it now are already damned.

  ‘I understand the argument,’ says Memnon, as ever in lockstep with his Chaplain, ‘but the tactical squads can be recalled at a moment’s notice. Better to keep them fighting than patrol the walls in idleness.’

  ‘It will not be idleness for long,’ Atramo says.

  ‘That is the truth,’ says Diamada, who also experiences the horror more completely than most. ‘Forgive me if this is speaking beyond my station, but you have already done more than duty demands. They are coming now. We all know it – some of us feel it – and survival is the first duty of us all.’

  ‘The regiments can fight for a few more days,’ Tadacar says. At first, Xydias thinks this is designed to put pressure on his decision, but then realises what he means – they will sacrifice themselves to guard the withdrawal, just as they have been trained to do. That is yet another spike at his soul.

  ‘There is no escaping it,’ Xydias says. ‘If any of those we sent to Cadia still live, they are far out of range. We cannot even send our gene-banks into the void, such is the peril there. We have done what we can. Now we take to the walls.’

  Kandred tries a final time. ‘They are fighting for us, lord. They chant your name, and then they march out to die. We could march beside them, if we chose, for just a little longer.’

  Xydias turns to him and sees his scarred face, his dark eyes, his utter commitment. There is no insurrection in those words, just belief. Kandred is an exemplary Chaplain, fuelled by the fire of faith. For a moment, staring into that furnace, Xydias feels his own resolve tested. It has been too long since he took to the outer battlefield himself.

  But then the comm-bead at his neck pulses – a priority burst from Gamand, the master of signals. He silently shunts it to his earpiece.

  ‘Apologies, lord,’ comes Gamand’s crackling voice. ‘Two inbound markers detected, hostile, battlecruiser-class. Arrival within six hours. Orbital protocols – what remain of them – enacted.’

  Xydias smiles darkly. At least there are no more choices now.

  ‘Argument noted, my brother,’ he says to Kandred, thinking of the slab of names and its empty terminus. ‘But we pull back to the walls. The fortress must stand, if all else is lost in darkness.’

  He feels the first stirrings of hyperadrenaline – an automatic response, triggered by the very thought of battle.

  This is a violent world, he thinks. So much the better for breeding the strong.

  Vigilia Carceris, the Guarded Peak, stands alone. The nearest conurbations are several hundred kilometres away, spread out across the fertile lowlands of the Mandau Depression. To the east of the urban zone, the land rises sharply, a folded country of glistening black rock. The only tracks through that hard country are narrow and impassable, except for the mechanised transports of the Chapter and the Praetorians. Eventually, the highlands surge further up into steep-flanked mountains, barred by grey snow and hounded by the salt-thick winds, until that ever-rising country meets the grey press of the wild ocean and drops again precipitously.

  At the land’s extreme extent, the Oraun Peninsula thrusts out far into the Keldar Sea, a spar of cliffs and jumbled peaks that soars hundreds of metres above the churning swell. Its sides are as sheer as spear shafts, striated with lines of ice and needled rock pinnacles. The air is thin across that high mass, and no trees grow across the slick-wet stone. This is the landscape used to prove the mettle of aspirants – they are tested against the chill, the weather violence, the driving wind. When the storms break across the cliffs, boiling up out of the endless grey ocean to smash into that spur of stone, it is as if the gods are hurling their fists at it in anger.

  The easternmost tip of the Oraun would be a formidable defensive bastion even if no citadel had ever been raised there – a high knuckle of solid bedrock, bordered on three sides by plummets to the white surf, jabbed imperiously out into the storm-surge as a statement of immortal defiance. Over the millennia, though, the natural summit has been moulded and delved and hammered, eventually becoming a home fit for a Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. Its foundations were laid in the immediate aftermath of the Great Scouring, when a bruised and rebuilding Imperium still commanded the secrets of ancient manu­facture. The vaults of Vigilia Carceris are cut deep into the naked rock, the walls raised high above it. Its outer curtain traces the lines of the cliffs, creating a bow wave of black adamantium that soars even higher, both proud and austere. Parapets are lined with defence lasers, inside which towers are raised – heavy-set, heavily buttressed, overlooking one another to create close-packed fire-lanes and kill-zones. Gaols, forges and armouries have been carved out in the dripping foundations, until the many chambers run into the hundreds and an entire city emerges within those rock-cradled bastion walls.

  A fortress-monastery is a gigantic thing. It houses tens of thousands, from the lowliest servitors to warriors only a step less capable than the Space Marines they serve. Every single battle-brother of the Chapter is enabled by an interlocking web of a hundred attendants, all given their function to ensure that his weapons are blessed, his armour is maintained, his chambers are kept pristine and his rites of devotion are accommodated. Cavernous hangars ring with the constant din of metalwork. Shuttle bays thrum with a ceaseless cycle of landing and launching. Immense reactors buried deep in Sabatine’s crust provide power levels commensurate with a line battleship, driving huge void-shield generators and fixed lascannon batteries. Every surface is engraved with warding sigils against corruption, and every battlement is patrolled by lethal sentinels. Great rockcrete stages stand under the spiked shadow of gun-lines, the largest of which are capable of receiving regimental landers. Thunderhawks prowl like carrion crows above the high gates, arched and studded in the gothic template so familiar across the sprawling territories of the Throne.

  Vigilia Carceris has stood unbroken against every assault ever sent from the Eye’s edge. Aspirants from the Sabatine protectorate worlds have been taken up inside its walls for millennia, a ceaseless supply of new blood for the Chapter’s never-ending wars, only to emerge again on white ships to sail the unquiet tides of the restless void.

 
Now that movement is stilled. A few stragglers from its retreating armies race under the cover of the guns, trailing smog behind overworked turbines. Klaxons blare across the narrow courtyards, sending even the mute servitors trundling for cover. Searchlights scan and pool across the high towers, and void shields burst into gauzy hemispheres over the spire summits. The seas are no longer slate-grey, but red like a burst artery, and the crash of waves has been replaced by the echoing song of half-born daemons. The western horizons are burning, marked by the battles along the perimeter of the Three Cities that cannot be won, for Chaos has come to this world, unbound and infinite, and the tide of it now only flows one way.

  Soon the heavens are scored, scraped by long trails of fire. The clouds above the citadel flash wildly, lit from beyond. Comet trails sear down from the hidden heights, plunging through thunderheads to crash into distant seas. This is orbital wreckage – Sabatine’s shattered defence satellites, plus the remains of the enemy vessels they took down before their destruction. In normal times, that grid would have been bolstered by hundreds of capable ships, and in their absence the token defences are taking a battering.

  It only takes a few hours before ordnance is scything through the flame-wreathed heavens – orbital lasers hurled from the undersides of great battleships, lime-green and forge-red. The beams smack into the hard ground and splinter from the cliffsides. Plumes of steam boil up from the shoreline, growing greater as yet more las-strikes rain down.

  The rain becomes a deluge, a single massive column of coruscation that zips and roars, crashing over the void shields and spraying madly. Vigilia Carceris is lost behind a wall of fire, a thumping curtain that sends rock shards bouncing and foundations shaking. The fortress lets loose with its own defence lasers, and the inferno ramps up further. The air shakes with heat. The rocks begin to glow.