Knights of the Imperium

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  He must be humble of heart, strong of arm,

  Be savage in war, loyal to hearth,

  And follow deeds of Glory.

  He must keep honour with all,

  Banish cowardice from his doings,

  And bring his House no shame.

  He must serve the Emperor,

  And defend the Imperium.

  Thus should a Knight rule himself.

  The Chivalric Duty, Aquitainus

  Malory Cadmus, M31

  Tellurus

  Making children cry was a sacred duty to Raym Bartaum. He regarded the scale of their tearful sobs and the volume of their snot as a measure of how well he was doing his job. The sound of a nine year-old in tears as he struggled to reload an autogun with frostbitten fingers was music to his ears.

  It was the sound of them learning not to make the mistake that had seen them brought before him ever again.

  ‘Give me the child, and I will mould the man,’ had been his favourite riposte when do-gooding nobles evinced squeamishness at his methods.

  Leave the inspirational crap to Kaytein. Raym had become a drill abbot to scare a thousand tonnes of hell out of each and every progena that came through Scholam Vikara.

  And scaring them was easy.

  The Imperium was a frightening place, after all.

  Frightening for trained Guardsmen, let alone young children sent to a grim, granite-faced scholam with their parents freshly dead or so far away they might as well be.

  And once he’d shown them just how bad everything else in the galaxy was, he taught them to be even worse. He taught them to be stronger than the things that wanted them dead. He taught them how to fight.

  Yes, scaring progena was easy, but nothing he’d ever shown or told them of bloodthirsty xenoforms, Traitors or warp-spawned monsters had scared them quite as much as the sight of his terror was doing right now.

  Raym Bartaum was terrified because he knew what was coming.

  He had a cybernetic arm and adamantium plates replacing half his pitted skull to remind him just how bad things were going to get.

  The scholam yard was the size of a good-sized regimental assembly ground, which, come rain, sun or snow it was, six days out of seven. A mix of heavy supply trucks, groundcars and a couple of stripped-down Chimeras used for training gunned their engines by the opened Proximus Gate. Slow, lumbering things, none had speed enough to outpace the approaching enemy.

  Thudding explosions sounded from beyond the scholam walls, bouncing echoes making it impossible to tell from where in the city the sound originated. Raym heard the rattle of small arms fire, the heavier thud of artillery and the unmistakable sound of dying soldiers.

  Twelve years had passed since Raym had set foot on a real battlefield, fifteen since he’d heard the screeching howls of this particular foe.

  But there were some sounds you never forgot; some sounds that could still bring a decorated veteran out in cold sweat and make him want to eat the barrel of his bolt pistol.

  Children were spilling from the cloisters of the scholam, barely dressed and fumbling with their rifle slings. The youngest was barely six, the oldest approaching his maturity.

  And every single one of them was going to die here.

  They flinched at the crash of artillery fire from deeper in the city and stared in horror at the distant smudges of black smoke rising in the distance.

  Raym’s fellow drill abbots herded their charges towards the waiting vehicles. Military-grade voices shouted at the youngsters; parade-ground trained, audible even over the scholam’s bells and the ululating sirens blaring from the city walls of Vikara.

  The progena were chased by profanity Raym had last heard in a Catachan brothel and switches to beat the backs of those moving too slowly. His own class were already following at his heels. Just like the first day they had come to him, most were blubbering in fear. Others were too terrified to even cry.

  They were a good bunch now; the softest clay beaten and then built into what he’d hoped would be the finest warriors, statesmen, generals or inquisitors of the Imperium. They’d hated him at first; oh, how they’d hated him.

  Two of them had even tried to kill him.

  But they’d learned to respect him. And as they grew and saw who they had become, they understood just what he’d made of them and were grateful.

  Raym looked up as a squadron of aircraft roared overhead. Too fast to see what kind. Lightnings most likely. Dogfighters, which meant the enemy was almost here.

  ‘Hurry it up, damn you!’ he shouted, hoping his angry tone would mask his fear. He hauled down the tailgate of the first truck. Something exploded beyond the walls of the scholam. A greenish fireball painted the sky.

  Children scrambled aboard, the older ones helping the youngest. Raym was gratified to see the disciplined control in their faces. Fear as well, but no panic.

  ‘Are they coming to rescue us?’ asked Morlay, a promising young lad with pinched cheeks and the potential to be a quality leader of men.

  ‘Rescue us?’ snapped Raym, turning his fear into an authoritative bark. ‘Don’t be soft, lad. Why would Lord Ohden send troops to save our sorry arses when he’s a war to fight? Every Guardsman with a gun will be heading to the walls.’

  ‘No one’s coming?’ said a sandy-haired girl named Lorza.

  Tough and uncompromising, if she hadn’t made the cut for interrogator training, Raym would have been outraged. Right now she looked like a frightened ten year-old.

  ‘Why would they? We’re no priority at all. Just a bunch of half-trained orphans and cripples. We’re hungry mouths, dead weight,’ said Raym, raising his voice so others could hear. ‘So if they won’t come for us, we’re going to have to do this ourselves, right? We’re going to have to uphold the grand traditions of Scholam Vikara at the end of a lasgun and on the edge of a combat blade.’

  Some of the younger ones cheered, but the older ones saw through his bravado.

  The last of the progena were aboard, and Raym slammed the tailgate shut. He dropped the locking bolt into place and slapped his ha
nd on the vehicle’s side.

  ‘All aboard!’

  The far wall of the scholam buckled as something enormous slammed into it. Heavy blocks tumbled to the parade ground and cracks split the masonry from the foundations upwards.

  ‘Go!’ he shouted, and the truck belched a filthy cloud of engine smoke. Its tyres spun on gravel as Raym heard the frenzied scrape of hundreds of razor-sharp talons on stone.

  They came over the wall in a chittering, screeching tide of hissing killers. Blade-limbed and sheathed in chitinous plates of glistening organic armour. Bulbous heads that were all questing tongues, needle-toothed jaws and dead, black eyes.

  Hormagaunts, remembered Raym. That’s what we called them.

  He heard barked orders, but they were dulled and slow, like something heard in a nightmare. Gunfire flayed the ruined wall, bursting scores of the creatures like pus-filled blisters.

  It wouldn’t be enough: they were coming over in their hundreds, maybe even thousands. Then the wall buckled and collapsed as something even worse came through.

  Raym had no name for it. A hulking colossus with a segmented carapace, bent low where its ram-like skull had demolished the wall. Taller than five strong men, its thorax limbs were fused horrors of drooling bio-weaponry. Caustic slime slathered its elephantine legs as it bludgeoned a way inside. Its chest spasmed with intercostal muscle contraction and hundreds of chitinous barbs spat like bullets from between its ribs. Three trucks were shredded like they’d been hosed with assault cannon fire.

  Young bodies fell to the parade ground, ripped up and screaming. A Chimera exploded as a gout of corrosive bio-acid punched through its armour. A few pitiful figures tumbled from the wreckage, the flesh sloughing from their bones.

  Packs of swarming alien creatures raced across the parade ground, leaping and bounding, trampling one another as their overriding biological imperative to tear and kill made them mad with a devouring, all

  consuming hunger.

  The colossus finally tore through the ruined wall. A pair of hooked blade limbs at least two metres long unsheathed from creamy folds of flesh at its shoulders. With its blunt, bladed snout still lowered, the behemoth charged in the midst of the pack beasts.

  Raym drew his bolt pistol. He wasn’t a drill abbot now, he was a soldier of the Imperial Guard.

  ‘For Vikara!’ he shouted and fired his bolt pistol empty.

  Ten shots, each one a kill. Not enough to make even the slightest difference, but when had that ever mattered to one of the Emperor’s finest?

  And then the front line of the swarm vanished in a deafening blizzard of explosions. Sawing blasts of fire cut through the packs of shrieking monsters as they died by the score. Raym ducked back at the overwhelming noise, feeling the percussive thunder of high-calibre shells passing so close.

  He crouched as something huge passed by him, towering and monstrous, a giant of adamantium and fury. With a booming cannon and a roaring chainblade for arms, it was clad in armour the colour of a winter’s sky. Blue and cold, chevroned with streaks of black and amber. A bright gonfalon streamed from its left shoulder. A rearing horse with a fluted horn at its forehead.

  The giant planted its splay-clawed feet, bellowing defiance as its enormous cannon poured a relentless torrent of shells into the screaming swarm. Carapace-mounted assault weaponry sawed through the horde, cutting down what little the rapid-firing explosive ordnance left alive.

  The charging colossus bellowed and bared a vast, fang-filled mouth, recognising an opponent worthy of its attention.

  The armoured giant loosed an answering blast of a skirling horn and brought its long chainblade to bear. Hot vapours bled from the roaring friction of its tearing teeth. The monster spat green fire, but the giant shrugged it off with an unseen energy shield.

  They came together in a crashing thunder that shook the parade ground with its fury. The giant swung its enormous blade and the beast crashed to its knees as most of its torso simply ceased to exist.

  A noxious cloud of atomised alien flesh sprayed from the embedded blade’s teeth as the beast fell forward. Its limbs thrashed, still trying to raise its gutted carcass, still driven to kill by its monstrous overmind.

  It bellowed in pain and hideous appetite.

  The armoured giant crushed its vast skull with a final thunderous stomp. Its stubber cannons raked the ruined wall as more of the alien packs gathered for an assault. The giant’s horn skirled a blast that Raym recognised, the order to retreat under cover.

  Raym took a moment to salute the giant before climbing onto the back of his truck as it pulled away. The Proximus Gate passed overhead as the driver gunned the engine. He lost sight of the giant as they turned a corner. The white of its horned-horse banner was spattered with alien blood.

  Raym dropped over the tailgate and leaned against it.

  ‘What in the name of Ohden’s balls was that?’ said Lorza, breathless with fear and wonder.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Morlay.

  Raym took a moment to catch his breath.

  ‘That, my lad,’ said Raym, ‘was a Knight.’

  Roland

  It never becomes any less painful. Communion with the other half of my soul should be easy, but a union of flesh and steel is no trifling matter. I feel the connection burn through the cold metal of the Throne Mechanicus. Its umbilicals thread their way into my skull and spine. It feels like every vein and cell is filling with ice water.

  My throne sits within the Chamber of Echoes, a circular hall of dark stone and soaring iron girders. It is a place well named. A swelling tide of voices rises from the depths of Golem Keep’s Sanctuary and the dark ocean of the past.

  The voices are many. My ancestors and companions. My judges and battle brothers. I recognise my father’s voice, stern and uncompromising, and beyond that I hear the sonorous tenor of my grandfather. Also stern and uncompromising.

  In that, at least, the men of House Cadmus speak as one.

  The presences of the armour’s previous occupants settle upon me like a well-worn hauberk; comforting in its steely protection, familiar in its fit. And as always, the void within me is filled with a sense of completeness.

  Bonded with my Throne Mechanicus I am becoming whole.

  I always tell Cordelia that she completes me, that she is the other half of my soul, and sometimes I even believe it myself. In turn, she has the good grace to allow my ego to think she believes me. She knows, as all consorts know, that a warrior of House Cadmus is only truly complete when he sits enshrined within the iron behemoth of his Knight armour.

  Twenty-six warriors are enthroned alongside me in the Chamber of Echoes, a fraction of our former strength, but I lose sight of them as my throne rolls backwards and slots home in the guide rails of a vertical transit tunnel.

  Darkness enfolds me and my awareness of the physical world begins to recede. Connections within my brain are rerouting to ease the neural interface with the senses of the great machine below.

  The Throne Mechanicus drops, mag-lev rails hurtling it towards my waiting Knight.

  I feel the movement, the rush of air, the smell of grease and lubricant, but it is distant to me. I can taste the dangerous friction of hot metal and the actinic flavour of crackling electricity, but it is flat and colourless.

  My heart rate soars with excitement as seconds pass.

  Then, from darkness into light.

  The Vault Transcendent.

  I have only a fraction of a second, too quick for even my enhanced cognition to snatch more than a fleeting impression of its enormous dimensions.

  Carved into the rock of Golem Keep before the Imperium’s painful birth, the Vault Transcendent is a stone-wrought cavern of biting winds and cold light.

  Here, my armour awaits.

  The twenty-seven surviving Knight machines of House Cadmus stand unm
oving, facing one another in two rows. Each is a bipedal giant, ten metres tall with enormous chainblades and lethal cannons slung from their shoulder mounts.

  Heavy plates of olive green and jaundice yellow encase the ancient mechanisms of their bodies, and proud banners of red, gold and black waft slowly in the icy wind. A half-winged aquila ripples upon one field, a mutant’s split skull on the other.

  The Throne Mechanicus rams down into my Lancer armour, the carapace sealing behind me with a clang of metal and the racketing hiss of locking bolts. Entoptic light swells around me, and I gasp with connection pain once more as the Knight’s aural sensors and the receptors of the throne mesh.

  And what had been dull and distant now becomes gloriously sharp and vibrant.

  Three hundred of Assembler Thexton’s hooded Sacristans kneel at our feet, binary plainsong drifting from vox-implants and their retinues of servitors. I sense the tension and hope in the Martian-trained artificers. We are bound for Vondrak at the behest of the Mechanicus, but if Thexton thinks I am returning House Cadmus to the aegis of the Red Planet, he is to be sorely disappointed.

  I will not make the same mistake Godfrey made.

  I have removed the Cog from our heraldry, which once again bears the Aquila of Terra.

  And while I am the master of House Cadmus, it always will.

  Directly across the Vault, the golden eyes of Sir Malcolm’s armour flare with connection. I raise my arms. Not the limbs of flesh and blood – they remain unmoving on my throne – but the limbs of my armour. My weapon arms, one a thermal lance, the other a battle cannon with an underslung relic blade, lift in salute.

  Sir Malcolm repeats the gesture, albeit with the begrudged, teeth-gritted restraint of a rival-in-waiting.

  Next to Malcolm, Sir Roderick and Sir Anthonis raise their weapons. Beside me, Sir William does the same. These are my senior Knights, my preceptors. My most trusted warriors.

  Brothers for whom I would gladly lay down my life.

  Hunting horns blare as the rest of the Knights slam the barrels of their cannons across the heraldic plates at their shoulders.