She rises, turning south, seeking the storm. Instead of the black-grey thunderheads she expects, the sky over the mountains glows with flames. The clouds churn, orange-bellied as they writhe above the peaks, flickering with inner torment that lights up the distant night.
A spaceship, she thinks. A spaceship is landing.
It streams through the clouds, black-hulled and streaming smoky fire, shaking the entire world as it roars overhead. A castle in the sky, descending, drifting down towards the villages and the great city beyond.
The spirits coalesce around her, their murmuring voices coloured by an emotion she has never heard in their tones before. She didn’t know ghosts could feel fear.
She hides in the forest, not far from her village. Not far enough, not as far as she wishes to be, but as far as her legs will take her. Like a panting beast she half digs her way into the wet earth, curling herself into the shadow of a fallen tree. Her throat is raw with straining breath. Her lips are cracked and dry.
‘The Imperium has returned,’ her mother had said. Her eyes were wet, her voice was shaking. ‘They are gathering the shamans and the spirit-speakers from every village.’
‘Why?’ the girl had asked. She heard the fear in her voice. Never had she felt less like a revered witch-priestess of her people.
‘A tithe. Another tithe. One of souls and magic, not wheat and grain.’
‘Run, Skoia,’ said her father, looking into her eyes. ‘Run and hide.’
The mothers of her mother and the fathers of her father had besieged her with agreement. The spirits, all of her ancestors, screamed at her to flee.
Skoia fled, white dress streaming, hair loose, into the forest.
Her people are part of the Imperium, so they are taught. Her grandmother told her of the Crusaders’ Coming, when the warriors from the Cradleworld landed almost a century ago and brought the word of peace from humanity’s Emperor. The First Earth, now called Terra, silent all these thousands of years, wasn’t a myth after all.
The First Earth warriors had demanded compliance, and it had been given. They demanded tithes, and these were also given. Every year the grain haulers carry great portions of the annual harvest into the heavens, to dock with the orbital platforms and await collection. This, it has always been believed, was enough. Mankind has been brought back together, each rediscovered world a jewel in the unknown Emperor’s crown.
But no Imperial spaceships have made planetfall since the Crusaders departed all those years before. Not until now.
Skoia hears dogs among her pursuers, barking and growling. The fear is enough to force her to her feet once more, staggering into a weak run. The spirits are hissing and agitated, yet she can scarcely hear them over the heaving of her breaths and the beat of her straining heart.
Through the trees ahead she sees one of the hunting dogs, as much machine as beast, its fur stripped in places in favour of robot parts, as though it had suffered in an accident and its owner had the credits required for expensive machine-fusion. Its jaws are locked open with a weapon pointing from inside its mouth. Behind it stands a woman, an Imperial woman, her head shaven, her flesh marked with tattoos of eagles. She wears gold and bronze beneath a red cloak. Her eyes are as dead as the gaze of a body upon an unlit funeral pyre.
Skoia turns and stumbles west. It’s no use. She hears the dog bearing down behind her, its machine parts whining. It shoulders into her, throwing her from her feet. It stands above her, growling. The weapon in its mouth aims down at her face.
The gold woman with the dead eyes draws nearer, and – for the very first time Skoia can remember – the spirits fall silent.
No, not just silent. Banished. Gone.
‘Leave me alone,’ the girl manages to say. ‘Please. I’ve done nothing wrong.’
The older woman says nothing.
Skoia breathes raggedly in the silence left by the spirits’ absence, staring up into the ice of the woman’s corpse-eyes.
‘I see nothing inside you,’ she murmurs through trembling lips. ‘You have no soul.’
Five
Bringer of Sorrow / Refugees / Requisition
Zephon’s hands betrayed him, as they betrayed him every day. The metal fingers lifted from the hair strings of the antique harp, their shuddering subsiding as he ceased focusing on them.
Zephon was familiar with the science behind this malfunction, having memorised the reports on the various failures of biology/technology linkage taking place where his stumped arms met his bionic limbs at both elbows. The pathways of nerve and muscle were poor at conducting the information from his brain. A common enough failure of fusion surgery when dealing with crude implants grafted to the human form, but to his knowledge he was one of the only living Space Marines to suffer such complete augmetic rejection.
That was why he was here, of course. He knew it, even if his brothers had been too compassionate to call it exile. You couldn’t fight in a Legion, let alone lead a strike force, if you couldn’t pull a trigger or wield a blade.
And so he had come, willingly to all outward perception, to Terra. He’d accepted his exile, pretending it was an accolade, as part of the Crusader Host. He stood with the other representatives of each Space Marine Legion, garrisoned on the Throneworld and charged to speak for their brothers.
In Hoc Officio Gloriam, read the words on the Preceptory’s basalt declaration plaques. There is honour in this duty.
A dubious honour at best, Zephon knew. Especially now that the Throneworld no longer trusted the eighteen Legions. He was one of only two Blood Angels present in the thirty-strong monastic ambassadorship that the Crusader Host represented. Of the other warriors, even his Legion-brother Marcus, he saw no sign. He had retreated from the hollow duties of the Preceptory, content no more to work through the unreliable lists of the dead and record their names. With the galaxy burning, no reports reaching Terra were anything close to reliable. Of his Legion and primarch, there was no word at all. Was he to painstakingly etch the name of every single Blood Angel into the bronze funeral slabs in the Halls of the Fallen?
Madness. Worse than madness. Futility.
Sanguinius lived. The Legion lived.
So he had retreated to his personal chambers, where other work awaited him.
It was a truth known to relatively few souls that many of the most beautiful works of art in the entire Imperium – indeed, in the span of human history – were displayed only in the bowels of Blood Angels warships and frontier fortresses. Stained-glass windows that would never see the flare of true sunlight; statues of metaphorical gods and demigods at war with creatures of legend and myth; paintings wrought with forgotten and rediscovered techniques rendered in agonising detail, going unseen amid orchestral compositions of instruments that would never be played for human ears.
The warriors of the IX Legion didn’t strive in the same way as the soldier-artisans of the III. The Emperor’s Children sculpted, painted, composed to achieve perfection. They crafted great works to bring about something superior to anything shaped by lesser hands. In the act of creation, they exalted themselves above others.