Текст книги "Age of Darkness"

Автор книги: Кристиан Данн

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

‘They came for us, the Sons of Horus. It was not until I saw them that I began to think that I had misunderstood this civil war.’ Voss glanced at Qruze and the old warrior felt an ice-cold touch in his guts. ‘Metal, sea green metal, edged with bronze and covered with red slit eyes. Some had dried blood flaking from their armour. There were heads hanging on chains and by bunches of hair. They reeked of iron and blood. They said to come with them. Only one person asked why. I wish I could remember her name, but at the time I just wanted her to be quiet. One of them walked over to her and pulled her arms from her body, and left her screaming on the floor. We went with them after that.’ Voss paused, his eyes unfocused as if seeing the woman die again in her own blood.

Qruze found his hands had clenched, angry questions surging through his mind. Which one had it been? Which one of his former brothers had done that deed? One that he knew? One he had liked? He thought of the moment when he had learnt the truth about the men he had called brothers. The past can still wound us, he thought. He let out a quiet breath, releasing the pain. He must listen. For now, that was what he was here to do.

‘There were many remembrancers with you?’ asked Dorn.

‘Yes,’ said Voss with a shiver. ‘I had persuaded a number of others to come with me. Other remembrancers who agreed we had a duty to show the truth of this darkening age. Twenty-one came with me. There were others too, taken from the ships of the Legions who had only just showed their allegiance.’ Voss licked his lips, his eyes wandering again.

‘What happened to them?’ said Dorn.

‘We were taken to the audience chamber on the Vengeful Spirit. I had seen it once before, a long time before.’ Voss made a small shake of his head. ‘It was not the same place. The viewport still looked out on the stars like a vast eye and the walls still tapered to darkness above. But things hung from the ceiling on chains, dried mutilated things, that I did not want to look at. Ragged banners, splattered with dark stains, covered the metal walls. It was hot, like the inside of a cave beside a fire pit. The air stank of hot metal and raw meat. I could see the Sons of Horus standing at the edge of the room, still, waiting. And at the centre of it all was Horus.

‘I think I still thought I would see the pearl-white armour, the ivory cloak and the face of a friend. I looked at him and he was looking at me, right at me. I wanted to run, but I could not, I could not move to breathe. I could only stare back at that face framed by armour the colour of an ocean storm. He pointed at me, and said “All but that one.” His sons did the rest.

‘Three seconds of thunder and blood. When it was quiet I was on the deck on my hands and knees. Blood was pooling around my fingers. There was just blood and pulped meat all around me. The only thing I could think of was that Askarid had been stood beside me. I felt her hand around mine just before the shooting started.’ Voss closed his eyes, his hands held together in his lap.

Qruze found that he could not look away from those ink-stained hands, the skin wrinkled, the fingers gripped together as if clutching a memory.

‘But he kept you alive,’ said Dorn, his voice as flat and hard as a hammer falling on stone.

Voss looked up, his eyes meeting the primarch’s. ‘Oh yes. Horus spared me. He walked to stand above me; I could feel his presence, that chained ferocity, like a furnace’s heat. “Look at me,” he said and I did. He smiled. “I remember you, Solomon Voss,” he said. “I have cleansed my fleets of your kind: all but you. You I will keep. No one will harm you. You will see everything.” He laughed. “You will be a remembrancer,” he said.’

‘And what did you do?’ asked Dorn.

‘I did the only thing I could. I was a remembrancer. I watched every bloody moment, heard the words of hate, smelt the stink of death and folly. I think for a time I went mad,’ Voss chuckled. ‘But then I realised what the truth of this age is. I found the truth I had come to see.’

‘What truth is that, remembrancer?’ said Dorn, and Qruze could hear the danger in the words like an edge on a blade.

Voss gave a small laugh, as if at a child’s foolish question. ‘That the future is dead, Rogal Dorn. It is ashes running through our hands.’

Dorn was on his feet before Qruze could blink. Rage radiated from him like the heat of a fire. Qruze had to steady himself as Dorn’s emotion filled the room like an expanding thundercloud.

‘You lie,’ roared the primarch in a voice that had cowed armies.

Qruze waited for the blow to land, for the remembrancer to be nothing more than bloody flesh on the floor. No blow came. Voss shook his head. Qruze wondered at what the man must have seen to make this primarch’s rage blow over him as if it were a gust of wind.

‘I have seen what your brother has become,’ said Voss, carefully measuring his words. ‘I have looked your enemy in the eye. I know what must happen.’

‘Horus will be defeated,’ spat Dorn.

‘Yes. Yes, perhaps he will, but I still speak the truth. It is not Horus that will destroy the future of the Imperium. It is you, Rogal Dorn. You and those that stand with you.’ Voss nodded to Qruze.

Dorn leant down so that he was looking the man in the eye.

‘We will rebuild the Imperium when this war is done.’

‘From what, Rogal Dorn? From what?’ sneered Voss, and Qruze saw the words hit Dorn like a blow. ‘The weapons of this age of darkness are silence and secrets. The enlightenment of Imperial truth, those were the ideals you fought for. But you cannot trust any more, and without trust those ideals will die, old friend.’

‘Why do you say this?’ hissed Dorn.

‘I say it because I am a remembrancer. I reflect the truth of the times. The truth is not something this new age wants to hear.’

‘I do not fear the truth.’

‘Then let my words,’ Voss tapped his parchment, ‘be heard by all. I have written it here, everything I saw, every dark and bloody moment.’

Qruze thought of the words of Solomon Voss spreading through the Imperium, carried by the authority of their author and the power of their message. It would be like poison spreading through the soul of those resisting Horus.

‘You lie,’ said Dorn carefully, as if the words were a shield.

‘We sit in a secret fortress built on suspicion, with a sword over my head, and you say I lie?’ Voss gave a humourless laugh.

Dorn let out a long breath and turned away from the remembrancer. ‘I say that you have condemned yourself.’ Dorn moved towards the door.

Qruze made to follow but Voss spoke from behind them.

‘I think I understand now. Why your brother kept me and then let me fall into your hands.’ Dorn turned from the open cell door. Voss looked back at him, a weary smile on his face. ‘He knew that his brother would want to save me as a relic of the past. And he knew that I would never be allowed free after what I had seen.’ Voss nodded, the smile gone from his face. ‘He wanted you to feel the ideals of the past dying in your hands. He wanted you to look it in the eye as you killed it. He wanted you to realise that you two are much alike, still, Rogal Dorn.’

‘BRING ME MY armour,’ said Rogal Dorn, and red-robed serfs scuttled from the darkness. Each bore a section of gold battle-plate. Some pieces were so large and heavy that several had to carry them.

Dorn and Qruze stood once more in the observation dome. The only light in the wide, circular chamber was from the starfield above. Rogal Dorn had not spoken since he had left Voss in his cell, and Qruze had for once not dared to speak. Voss’s words had shaken Qruze. No mad ranting or proclamation of Horus’s greatness. No, this was worse. The remembrancer’s words had spread through him like ice forming in water. Qruze had fought it, contained it within the walls of his will, but it still clawed at his mind. What if Voss had spoken the truth? He wondered if it was a poison strong enough to burn the mind of a primarch.

Dorn had stood looking out at the stars for over an hour before he had asked for his armour. The serfs would normally have armoured Dorn, cladding him in his battle-plate piece by piece. This time he armoured himself, pulling a hard skin of adamantium over his flesh, framing his stone-set face in gold: a war god rebuilding himself with his own hands. Qruze thought that the primarch looked like a man preparing for his last battle.

‘He has been twisted, my lord,’ said Qruze softly and the primarch paused, his bare right hand about to slot into a gauntlet worked in silver with eagle feathers. ‘Horus sent him here to wound and weaken you. He said as much himself. He speaks lies.’

‘Lies?’ said the primarch.

Qruze steeled himself and asked the question he had feared to ask since they had left Voss’s cell. ‘You fear that he is right? That the ideals of truth and illumination are dead?’ said Qruze, an edge of urgency to his voice.

As soon as he spoke he did not want to know the answer. Dorn put his hand into the gauntlet, the seals snapping shut around the wrist. He flexed his metal-sheathed hand and looked at Qruze. There was a coldness in his eyes that made Qruze remember moonlight glinting from wolves’ eyes in the darkness of lost winter nights.

‘No, Iacton Qruze,’ said Dorn. ‘I fear that they never existed at all.’

THE DOOR TO the cell opened, spilling the shadows of Rogal Dorn and Iacton Qruze across the floor. Solomon Voss sat at his desk facing the door as if waiting for them, his last manuscript on the desk at his side. Rogal Dorn stepped in, the low light catching the edges of his armour. He looked, thought Qruze, like a walking statue of burnished metal. There were no sounds other than the steps of the primarch and the hum of the glow-globes.

Qruze pulled the door shut behind them and moved to the side. Reaching behind his shoulder he gripped the hilt of the sword sheathed at his back. The blade slid out of its scabbard with a whisper sound of steel. Forged by the finest warsmiths at the command of Malcador the Sigillite, Regent of Terra, its double-edged blade was as tall as a mortal man. Its silvered surface was etched with screaming faces wreathed by serpents and weeping blood. It bore the name Tisiphone, in memory of a forgotten force of vengeance. Qruze rested the blade point down, his hands gripping the hilt level with his face.

Voss looked up at the armoured figure of Rogal Dorn and nodded.

‘I am ready,’ said Voss and stood up, straightening his robe over his thin body, running a hand over his grey hair. He looked at Qruze. ‘Is this your moment, grey watcher? That sword has waited for me.’

‘No,’ came the voice of Dorn. ‘I will be your executioner.’ He turned to Qruze and held out his hand. ‘Your sword, Iacton Qruze.’

Qruze looked into the face of the primarch. There was pain in Dorn’s eyes, unendurable pain locked behind walls of stone and iron, glimpsed for an instant through a crack.

Qruze bowed his head so that he did not need to look at Dorn’s face, and held the sword out hilt first. Dorn took the sword with one hand, its size and weight seeming to shrink as he took it. He brought it up between him and Solomon Voss. The sword’s power field activated with a crackle of bound lightning. The twitching glow of the blade cast the faces of both man and primarch in death-pale light and folds of shadow.

‘Good luck, old friend,’ said Solomon Voss, and did not look away as the blade fell.

Rogal Dorn stood for a moment, the blood pooling at his feet, the cell silent and still around him. He stepped towards the man’s makeshift desk where the heap of parchment lay neatly stacked. With a flick, the power wreathing the blade vanished. Slowly, as if goading a poisonous serpent, Dorn turned the page with the tip of the deactivated blade. He scanned one line of text. I have seen the future and it is dead, it read.

He let the blade drop to the floor with a clang and walked to the cell door. As it opened he looked back at Qruze and pointed at the parchment and at the corpse on the floor.

‘Burn it,’ said Rogal Dorn. ‘Burn it all.’

REBIRTH

Chris Wraight

I HAVE NO idea how long I’ve been out. I should have; my enhanced memory and catalepsean function should have retained some trace, but everything is blank.

Presumably, that is part of the process. They want to induce doubt, to make me question whether I am up to this. If that is so, then they have succeeded. My total lack of recall preys on my mind. I do not like not knowing.It feels, certainly, like I’ve been ignorant of far too many facts for far too long.

But I am alive, and my hearts beat. That is something. Since coming round, I have had several minutes to reflect on my situation. That is useful too, though also no doubt part of some planned sequence.

I run down the basics, the physical aspects of my predicament. It helps, to force my mind into something mechanical. As I do so, I feel a degree of mental alertness returning.

I am in a chair. I am naked. My wrists, ankles, neck and chest are shackled with iron bands.

No, not iron – I’d be able to break that. Something similarly blunt and uncomfortable.

There is almost no light. I can make out the outline of my limbs dimly, but little else. My breathing is light, and there is an old pain behind my rib-fused chest. My secondary heart is still beating, indicating that I am recovering from some extensive trauma or exertion. I can feel no major wounds on my body, though there are many hundreds of bruises and abrasions, consistent with having been in action recently.

I have no mind-sight. I sense no souls nearby. For the first time since ascending into the ranks of the Legion, I remember what it is like to be alone with my own thoughts. At first, this is strangely comforting, like stumbling across a memento of a happy childhood.

But I do not take comfort for long, since my non-psychic senses are not as truncated. As my body adjusts and my faculties return, I realise that I am not alone. There is someone in the chamber with me, invisible in the dark. I cannot see him, but I can smell him and hear him. There is blood on his hands, and it makes the air of this confined chamber sharp and unsavoury. He breathes in ragged, shuddering draughts, like a panting animal held briefly at bay.

For the moment, that is all I sense. We sit in silence for a while longer, and I try to recall the events leading up to this moment. They come back to me only slowly, and in disconnected parts.

It takes a long time for him to speak. When he does, the voice takes me by surprise.

It is magnificent. There is tightly-contained savagery in that voice, a throat-wet growl that slips round the words and underpins each of them with a precise degree of mordant threat. I suspect this is no charade to make me uneasy, but simply the way my interrogator talks.

So the process begins the way these things always begin, the way a million interrogations have started since the dawn of organised violence.

‘Tell me your name and company designation,’ he says.

And for a moment, for a terrible moment, I realise that I cannot remember.

THE G EOMETRICPULLED into high orbit, running silent, hull-lights extinguished. Two hundred kilometres down, the planet was almost as dark. It was void-black, laced with cracks of angry red where magma, or maybe surface fires, scored the crust.

Brother-Captain Menes Kalliston stood on the bridge of the destroyer and watched the approach through the realspace viewers. He was wearing battle-plate, but his head was bare. His dark eyes stayed fixed on the curve of the planet, now filling most of the plexiglass screens above him. His blunt, severe features were characteristically static. A slender patrician nose bisected rough-cut cheekbones. His flesh looked dry, like old parchment, and his burnt-umber hair was cropped close to the scalp. A single tattoo marked his right temple, an owl-archetype, symbol of the Athanaean cult discipline.

His armour was a deep, glossy red. His shoulder-guards were decorated in white and gold, picking out the icons and numerals of the Fourth Fellowship of the XV Legion Astartes, the Thousand Sons.

As he stood in contemplation, another figure came to join him. The new arrival had a stockier, shorter, more vigorous frame, and his features were closer to the Space Marine median – bull-necked, angular jaw, taut flesh over heavy bones. He might have been younger than the first, but the vagaries of gene-conditioning always made it so hard to tell.

‘No enemy signals?’ asked Kalliston, not turning.

‘None,’ confirmed Brother-Sergeant Revuel Arvida.

‘And you sense nothing?’

Arvida, who was Corvidae, gave a rueful smile.

‘It’s not as easy as it used to be.’

Kalliston nodded.

‘No. That it isn’t.’

To Kalliston’s left, a control column blinked with several runes. A hololith emerged above it, a rotating sphere marked with precogitated atmospheric descent routes.

‘Landers are prepared, captain,’ said Arvida. ‘We can do this whenever you want.’

‘And you’re still not sure we should.’

‘You know I’m not.’

Only then did Kalliston turn from the viewers and look his subordinate in the eye.

‘I’ll need you down there,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what the augur readings say, it’ll be dangerous. So, if your hearts aren’t in this, tell me now.’

Arvida returned the gaze steadily, the ghost of a smile on his lips.

‘So I get to choose which missions I go on?’

‘I won’t force you to come on this one.’

Arvida shook his head.

‘That’s not how it works. You’ll go, and I’ll follow, as will the rest of the squad. You’ve convinced them, at any rate.’

‘They needed little convincing.’

‘There are other mysteries to solve, and I don’t see how coming here helps with those.’

Kalliston let a flicker of exasperation escape from the edges of his severe expression.

‘We have to start somewhere.’

‘I know. And, like I said, if you’re sure about this, then I’ll be with you. Just be sure.’

Kalliston looked back up at the vision in the realspace viewers. The planet had a deathly aura to it, one that would have been evident even to the most warp-blind of mortals. The gaps between the rivers of fire were a deep sable, like shafts opening out onto nothingness. Something vast and terrible had happened there, and the residues of it were still echoing.

‘I am sure, brother,’ he said, and his voice was firm. ‘We were preserved for a reason, and that gives us responsibilities. We’ll make planetfall on the night-side of the terminator.’

His dark eyes narrowed, scrutinising the close view of the planet’s hemisphere. It looked like he was trying to conjure up a vision of something long gone, something destroyed beyond recovery.

‘Less than six months since we were ordered to leave,’ he said, talking to himself now. ‘Throne, Prospero has changed.’

‘MENES KALLISTON, CAPTAIN, Fourth Fellowship, Thousand Sons.’

I remember that after a few moments, and the words come quickly to my parched lips. That is what one is meant to say, I believe – name, rank and serial number.

Perhaps I should resist saying more, though I feel strangely reluctant to stay silent. They may have injected loquazine into my bloodstream, but I doubt it. I see no reason not to talk for a while. After all, I have no idea why I’m here, or what’s going on, or how long I will be alive.

‘What are you doing on Prospero?’ he asks.

‘I could ask you the same thing.’

‘You could. And I could kill you.’

I think he wants to kill me. There’s something in the voice, some timbre of eagerness, that gives it away. He’s holding himself back. He’s a Space Marine, I guess. There’s very little else like that voice, rolling up from those enhanced lungs and that muscle-slabbed gullet and that great barrel-chest like water from a deep mill.

We are brothers then, of a sort.

‘What do you know of the destruction of this planet?’ he asks.

His voice hasn’t been raised yet. He speaks carefully, keeping the tide of violence in check. It would not take much to break that dam.

‘We were ordered to leave orbit six months ago,’ I say. The truth seems the best policy, at least for now. ‘Some questioned it, but I did not. I never doubted the orders of my primarch. It was only later, when we could not make contact, that we realised something was wrong.’

‘How much later?’

‘Weeks. We’d been in the warp.’

‘Why did you not come back at once?’

Ah, yes. I have asked myself that many times. As the questions come, I remember more of myself. I still cannot recall what led me to this place, though. The blank is complete, like a steel mask over the past. There is an art to making such a mask, and it is not easy to master. I realise the calibre of those who have me captive.

‘I wanted to. Others did not. We made enquiries through astropaths, but our battle-codes were rejected whenever we made contact. Soon after that, our ships were attacked. By you, I presume, or those in league with you.’

Does my guess hit home? Am I nearing the truth? My interrogator gives no sign. He gives nothing away but the smell of blood and the hot, repeated breathing in the dark.

‘Did many of you survive?’

‘I don’t know. Dispersal was the only option.’

‘So your ship came here alone.’

‘Yes.’

Should I be more evasive? I really don’t know. I have no strategy, no objective. None of the information I give him seems important. Perhaps it would do, if I could remember more of the circumstances of my capture.

My mind-sight remains dark. To be confined to the five senses of my birth has become crippling. I realise then that the withdrawal will only get worse. I don’t know whether it’s permanent, or some feature of the chamber I’m in, or a temporary injury. As an Athanaean, I have become used to picking up the mental images of others shimmering beyond their faces, like a candle flickering behind a cotton sheet.

I’m handling its removal badly. It’s making me want to talk, to find some way of filling the gap. And, in any case, I don’t need psychic senses to detect the extremity of my interrogator. He’s cradling some enormous capacity for rage, for physical violence, and it’s barely in check. This is either something I can use, or it places me in terrible danger.

‘Even so, it took you a long time to come back,’ he remarks.

‘Warp storms held us. They were impenetrable for months.’

My interrogator laughs then, a horrifying sound like throat-cords being pulled apart.

‘They were. Surely you know what caused them.’

I sense him leaning forwards. I can see nothing, but the breathing comes closer. I have a mental image of a long, tooth-filled mouth, with a black tongue lolling out, and have no idea how accurate it is.

‘You were either blessed, or cursed, that you made it through,’ he says, and I feel the joy he takes in the control of my fate. ‘I have yet to determine which it will be, but we will come to that soon.’

THERE WERE NO Stormbirds left in the hold, and the Geometrichad never carried Thunderhawks, so the descent had to be in a bulk lander. The destroyer’s crew had been whittled down to a bare skeleton – a couple of hundred mortals, some still in Spireguard livery. In times past they would have looked up at their Legiones Astartes masters in awe as they worked to prepare the lander, but the events of the last few months had shaken that hold. They had seen the ruin of Prospero for themselves, and it had crushed what spirit remained in them.

Many, perhaps, had had family still on the planet when destruction came. Those connections, Kalliston knew, were important to mortals. He himself couldn’t remember what it was like to find such things significant, but he felt the loss in other ways.

After launch, the lander fell through the thickening atmosphere clumsily, responding to the pilot’s controls like an over-enthusiastic steed. The control column had been designed for smaller hands than a Space Marine’s, and the atmosphere was still clogged with clouds of ash, blown across the charred terrain below by the angry remnants of continent-wide storms.

The lander made planetfall hard, jarring the crew against their restraint-cages as the retro-burners struggled against the inertia of the plummet. None of the squad members spoke. The cages slammed up, freeing them to take up their weapons. Kalliston, Arvida and the other battle-brothers in the load-bay mag-locked bolters and power-blades smoothly before the rear doors wheezed open.

The air of Prospero sighed into the load-bay. Kalliston could taste the afterglow of the furnace through his helm’s rebreather. The atmosphere was still warm, still bitter with floating motes of ruin.

Night had fallen. The sky was the dark red of an old scab, broken with patches of messy shadow where the smog-clouds raced. Ruined buildings broke the horizon in all directions, skeletons of libraries and treasure houses, armouries and research stations. There was no sound save the winding-down of the lander’s twin engines and the enervated brush of the hot wind.

Kalliston walked down the ramp first. His boot crunched as he came off the end of it. He looked down. The earth of Prospero glistened. A carpet of glass fragments lay there, as deep and smooth as a dusting of snow.

Everything was glass, once. The pyramids, the libraries, the galleries. Now, it is our dust.

‘Sweep pattern,’ he ordered over the vox. ‘Ranged weapons. Rendezvous point Aleph.’

The remaining Space Marines spread out slowly from the embarkation point. The two who’d piloted the ship during the descent remained to guard it, stationed at the end of the ramp under the shelter of the rear fuselage. The seven others lowered bolters and walked as stealthily as they could across the glittering glass-dust. They organised themselves into a rough semi-circle, each brother heading for a different point in the line of buildings ahead. They stayed within a hundred metres of one another, opening out into a wide net. Steadily, they began to sweep though the devastated streets ahead.

Kalliston blink-clicked a rune to enhance his night vision lens-feed. The terrain around him shimmered into false colour contours. There were no target runes, no life-signs, no proximity warnings. The sterile bones of the shattered buildings loomed up towards him from the heat-hazed dark.

There was no chatter over the comm. The battle-brothers went reverently. They were treading on the tombs of their home world.

Kalliston raised his head fractionally, watching as a tall spur of metal emerged from the dark. It was over a hundred metres tall, but as thin as a burned-out tree-trunk. It had once supported a much bigger construction, but now tottered alone, a rare survivor of the firestorms that had raged through Tizca.

The City of Light. The home of our people.

‘Are you getting anything, brother-captain?’ came Arvida’s voice over a private channel.

Arvida had moved slightly ahead of the others, and his route had taken him out of formation. On another mission, Kalliston might have rebuked him for that.

‘Negative,’ replied Kalliston, keeping any emotion out of his voice. He could sense Arvida’s scepticism even from a hundred metres distant. Back on Prospero, Kalliston’s mind-scrying abilities had returned to their peak, and the moods of his squad were transparent to him.

‘There may be nothing left to get,’ said Arvida.

‘It’s possible.’

‘So how long are we going to look?’

‘I’ll determine that. Reserve your energies for the hunt, brother.’

Kalliston cut the comm-link.

The squad pressed on, passing deeper into the shattered city. Darkness clung to the bases of the ruined walls, squatting in the eaves of plasma-charred doorways that led nowhere.

Kalliston felt his boot crunch through something fragile, and looked down. A ribcage lay there, shattered by his heavy tread, as brittle and black as coal. It wasn’t big enough to be an adult’s.

He looked further up the street. Bones were strewn everywhere ahead, all of them human-sized.

Briefly, something flickered on his helm-display. Kalliston was instantly alert, though the signal, a threat rune on the edge of his armour’s detector range, disappeared as soon as it had come.

‘Captain,’ voxed Phaeret, one of his squad members. ‘You’ll want to see this.’

Kalliston blink-clicked an acknowledgement. The threat rune didn’t make another appearance on his display. Possibly a false reading, or some malfunction in the long-range augurs in his armour.

Both those possibilities were unlikely. Kalliston kept his boltgun muzzle in firing position as he walked towards Phaeret’s location marker, and his senses remained alert. He was perfectly aware of the danger, and perfectly aware of the opportunity.

Something else was alive on Prospero.

‘SO HOW DID you feel, seeing the destruction of your home world?’

The question surprises me. What does it matter, what I feel about anything? If this is an interrogation by a member of the forces occupying the planet, I would have expected questions on the disposition of the remains of my Legion, on the lingering capabilities of the survivors – something, at least, about military matters.

But then, there is much that is strange about this interrogation. I have the overwhelming feeling that I am not just here for the information I can provide. No, this unseen questioner wants something else.

‘Uncomfortable,’ I reply. ‘But nothing more than that. We knew something of what to expect. My deputy is a seer, and he had made us aware of what had happened in its broadest outline.’

At the mention of Arvida, I wonder if he still lives. Perhaps he is being questioned in a cell like this too, or maybe he lies dead in the glass dust of the city.

‘Uncomfortable?’ he repeats.

The word seems to irritate him, and the breathing becomes more erratic.

‘You were spineless,’ he says, and the voice is harsh and accusatory. ‘You come back here, like damned reclamators, picking through the rubble of what you let be destroyed. If this had been my world I’d never have left it. I’d have killed any invader who dared come close to it, and damned be my primarch’s orders. You were weak, Captain Kalliston. Weak.’

He insists on the term, spitting it out. I sense his body coming closer. He is looming in the dark now, just beyond the ends of my chair-arms. Exhalations brush against my face, hot and caustic, like the breath of a dog.