The Successors, page 4
The last devotee was running to find a hiding place among the statues crowding the far end of the chamber. Cyvon hurled the combat knife at them. The blade punched through one shoulder blade and through the side of their chest, pinning them to the statue of a crowned figure waving a sculpted flag.
Cyvon ran to the last body, pulled out his knife, and willed his hearts to slow down. He heard no more breathing, no guns being cocked or footsteps on the floorboards. There were no more enemies in the chamber, just the smell of bolter propellant and torn bodies.
Impressive,+ came the intruder voice again. +Such a show of entirely unnecessary brutality. Is there anything more Imperial than the sound of a ceramite gauntlet on flesh?+
‘You are talkative for someone whose allies are being wiped out,’ said Cyvon. ‘My brethren are busy culling. The parliament is falling, if it has not already.’
Quite the assumption to suppose I care about those perfumed inbreds.+ If the reply had been spoken aloud, it would have been with a smirk. +But this is good, Brother… Cyvon? Yes, Cyvon. Fight back! Scorn and defy me! There is far too much dull stoicism among your kind.+
‘These chattels did not last long,’ retorted Cyvon. ‘Do you believe you will fare better? I will find you, witch!’
I do not doubt it, Brother Cyvon. I am not trying to hide.+
Cyvon flicked through the channels of the vox-net again. He could not raise his squad, or Captain Quhya’s command channel. He was still cut off. The storm rumbled and strobed outside, filling the airwaves with howling static.
Cyvon reloaded his bolt rifle and headed for the next doorway. The mission’s briefings had included the layout of the palace and he recalled he was somewhere in the southern wings. He had to head through the centre of the galleries to link up with the rest of the strike force. Cyvon had no knowledge of what was waiting for him in the galleries, except for a powerful psyker somewhere nearby who was definitely aware Cyvon was there.
The next chamber was high-ceilinged to accommodate the gargantuan canvases hanging on its walls. Reclining couches and a pair of dormant valet-servitors provided comfort for the city’s rulers to wallow in the glory of their art. The air was heavy with perfume, mingling with the shell propellant and blood from the statue room.
The closest canvas was a battle scene with armoured cavalry slamming into a host of reptilian xenos savages. The banners of Theophanos Minoris’ old noble houses flew from the cavalry’s lances. Aliens were crushed beneath the hooves of their gene-cultured warhorses. A lance skewered another through the throat, its purple blood a bright sash of colour to draw the eye.
The Battle of Krixus,+ came the psyker’s voice. +Note the features of First Satrap Corondela, on the lead horse. Note the scars on his face. The painter included the marks earned in battle but omitted the ones he got from too many dalliances in the pleasure-houses.+
‘You are something of an expert,’ said Cyvon. He had no great wish to carry on a cultured conversation with the witch, but the more they spoke, the more he would learn about his enemy.
Of course. I was the keeper of these galleries. Before, that is.+
Cyvon could hear gunfire from elsewhere in the acropolis. The Soul Drinkers were attacking and the aristocrats holding the parliament building were resisting. There was no way of knowing how the fight was proceeding.
He swept the galleries leading off to east and west down the sights of his bolt rifle. More paintings, some shrouded in white sheeting ready for transport. He wondered with an idle thought what it all might be worth. On one world they might buy a city, a continent, but on another they might be worth no more than the timber in their frames. Or perhaps there was some planet across the Imperium where the treasures of Skagengrad were a legend, a fountain of cultural power. With countless worlds, some forgotten for centuries, it was impossible to tell.
A Space Marine’s areas of expertise did not include art. Nevertheless, Cyvon could not deny the craftsmanship all around him, nor the fact that men and women had lived and died furnishing the planet’s rulers with such grandeur. Even as his memorised battle-rites had him noting escape routes and angles of attack, the magnitude of the art and what it meant became lodged in his mind.
What do you see, brother?+
The psyker was reading his mind. His thoughts would betray him. The witch knew more about Cyvon with every second.
When I saw it, my transformation was total. I could never go back. To think that millions have walked these halls and not seen what I have. Can you see it, Brother Cyvon?+
The portraits were of battles and coronations, weddings and debates. Cyvon recognised the architecture of the parliament chambers from the intelligence briefings on the mission, and the symbols of the noble houses everywhere.
‘I am not here to appreciate your curation skills, witch,’ said Cyvon. ‘You are a heretic, and you will die.’
Spoken like a soldier!+ came the voice, calculated to infuriate with its mocking lilt. +But come now, Brother Cyvon. You can’t pretend you’re not curious.+
The flare of anger Cyvon felt was not at the voice’s tone, but at the fact it was right.
It is fascinating to see the spark of your mind, brother! A burning that leaps from one thought to the next! A rare specimen we have here, I think. And to find that brain in the head of a Space Marine, no less!+
Cyvon cursed himself inwardly. His thoughts had been unguarded and the psyker had read them as clearly as if Cyvon had yelled them out loud.
He remembered Librarian Oxyath, a battle psyker of the Soul Drinkers lost on Kepris. Oxyath would have known how to shield his mind and render it a fortress impenetrable to the witch. Cyvon had no psychic power of his own, no such weapons and defences to bring to bear.
Hurriedly, Cyvon banished the name of Oxyath from his mind. He did not want the enemy psyker getting hold of the memory. He recalled, instead, the lessons he had learned about protecting his mind from the arts of a witch. One way was absolute contempt – the armour of hatred, a shield of denial that could blunt a witch’s mental assault. But this witch would expect such a crude response, and would mock Cyvon for it even as it failed.
He needed another way, and the lesson came to him from his tutelage as a novitiate. It was Oxyath who had told him that a mind could be blanked out with a flood of thoughts the enemy psyker could not use. Mental chaff to jam the psychic airwaves and deafen the witch, a sandstorm to spoil its aim.
Cyvon’s mind went back to the vast repository in the back of his memory, neatly filed away according to the sleep-taught battle-rites of a Primaris Space Marine. The tactical sermons, the wargear rites, the Battles Exemplar, the Codex Astartes itself, all the masses of information crammed into a Space Marine’s head.
A Space Marine exists only in battle, came one memory, a preface to the Codex. When not on the battlefield, he prepares for it. When victory is won, he learns from it. He exists only in battle, and he fights it every moment until he dies.
Cyvon charged forward through the nearest doors, shouldering them open. He burst into a chamber lined with more paintings, these ones sedate portraits of glowering aristocrats arranged to loom down over viewers as if passing judgement.
Close the gap to your enemy, and you close off every chance he has to defeat you. More words, this time attributed to Rogal Dorn, the primarch of the old Chapter after whom the Soul Drinkers were named. Cyvon needed a foe to close with. He needed to fight.
He heard raised voices through an archway to his right. He ran through it, bolt rifle in one hand and combat knife drawn in the other. He burst into the chamber to see a grand fountain in the form of an armoured knight mounted on a horse, the water pouring from the three-barrelled rifle in the knight’s hands.
Two brute-mutants had just entered through a set of doors to the outside, soaked from the rainstorm. They were grossly deformed abhumans with asymmetrical, hugely muscled bodies, and faces as lumpen and savage as the knuckles of a balled fist.
They must have been called to the gallery to face the enemy murdering his way through the devotees there. Even so, they were caught by surprise as Cyvon rushed right at them. One of them fired, its shotgun barking and sending hot chains of shrapnel across the fountain chamber.
It was a poor choice of tool for the job. Hundreds of pellets rained against Cyvon’s armour. Some tattooed a hot pattern across his unprotected face, but the collar of his chestplate shielded him from the worst and the rest pinged harmlessly off the ceramite.
The other brute-mutant shrugged the heavy stubber off its shoulder and groped for the trigger with its oversized fingers. Cyvon slammed into it before it could fire, throwing both of them back into the fountain pool.
Cold and fast. That is how a Soul Drinker fights. A rare fragment of the old Chapter came to mind, forgotten to Imperial history. It was the sole lesson they had passed down to their new Primaris incarnation.
Cold and fast, and show no mercy.
Cyvon let the sleep-taught lessons flood through him. Fighting styles and pressure points. The anatomy of humans and abhumans, the best ways to cripple and kill. He saw illuminated scripts describing every joint and muscle. He rolled through the shallow pool, striking out behind him to slice through the mutant’s hamstring. It bellowed wordlessly as the leg it was trying to stand on buckled under it. Cyvon rolled onto his back and fired a tight group of three bolter shots into the top of its head and huge, meaty shoulders.
The bolts burst inside the mutant’s chest cavity, blowing its ribcage apart. The propellant loads and projectile properties of the mass-reactive bolt-rounds flickered through Cyvon’s mind. The equations of ruination against muscle and bone. The mathematics of violence.
The second brute had shouldered its shotgun and pulled out a massive length of steel with chunks of rockcrete clinging to either end. It waded into the pool now reddening with the fallen mutant’s blood and swung the weapon down at Cyvon. The improvised club hammered hard into Cyvon’s side.
The armour held. His body shuddered with a dull upwelling of pain. He had left himself open. A calculated risk.
The images of his own physiology ran through his mind. The inner breastplate of fused ribs and the black carapace interfacing between his body and his armour, the twin hearts and third lung, the dense bone and enhanced musculature. It hurt, but he was not injured.
Cyvon came up firing. A bolt slammed into the mutant’s hip and blew the joint apart, but the mutant barrelled onwards with a bellow. It was either inhumanly tough or too stupid to realise the severity of the wound. Only a kill-shot would do.
Cyvon rolled to his feet, ducked low and powered up within the brute-mutant’s guard. His mind whirled with fighting styles now, duelling, wrestling, ways of mutilating the body of another living creature with hundreds of weapons and thousands of techniques. He stamped down on the mutant’s front leg, snapping the fibula and tibia beneath his sabaton.
The mutant pitched forward and Cyvon grabbed it by the throat, using its momentum to power it forward and slam its head into the flank of the marble horse. The stone cracked as the front of the mutant’s skull caved in.
The body slid into the filthy water, now a dark wine red with the two mutants’ blood. The mutant’s last breath rattled out of it as its brains leaked through its ruined forehead into the fountain pool.
The immediate threat was gone, but Cyvon had to keep going. He ticked off ways in and out, methods of approach, cover and firing points. A stray shot had blown out one of the window panes by the entrance doors, and the rain blew in from the storm. Cyvon recalculated the environmental factors in battle: water and mud underfoot, high winds affecting projectile flight, the thunder and roar that might hide a foe’s footsteps or the cocking of a gun.
He had to keep thinking, filling up his mind with noise. He charged through a door sprayed with the dead mutants’ blood, calculating in his mind how an ambusher might dive at him or skulk by the door frame, or how a tripwire might be stretched at shin height to detonate a hidden grenade.
‘There you are,’ said the psyker.
It was the same voice, but not in his head. It was spoken out loud.
Cyvon was yanked off his feet. The chamber whirled around him and he got an impression of fluted columns and a domed ceiling painted with angels battling daemons. Works of art standing discarded or in heaps. And a man, slender and unassuming, in a long grey coat with the silver piping of a high-ranking servant to the nobility.
Cyvon slammed against the wall back first. He was held in place as if his limbs were cemented into the stone. The pressure against him was so heavy he had to fight to draw breath.
The psyker had one hand held out in Cyvon’s direction, a smirk on his face. With his other hand he made a series of gestures that forced Cyvon’s fingers open and sent the bolt rifle and knife clattering away from him, across the chamber floor.
‘You almost got the better of me, Brother Cyvon,’ said the psyker. His face was delicate and pale. He had high cheekbones, a thin mouth and a long, straight nose on which perched a pair of small round spectacles. His straw-coloured hair was cut short, revealing a set of three small neural input jacks on his temple. He was devoid of ornamentation or weaponry. In any other situation, Cyvon would have barely registered his existence. The psyker tilted his head, examining the Space Marine caught in his mental web. ‘I was deafened to your thoughts. Your location, even. But fate led you right to me. And you made quite the commotion outside. I didn’t need to be psychic to know you were coming.’
‘And now you’ve got me,’ replied Cyvon. Speaking was about the only thing he could do. ‘You could crush me right now. Burst my hearts. Tear my brain out. But you haven’t. So I am forced to wonder, what do you want from me?’
‘Not everyone has a pet Space Marine,’ replied the psyker with a smirk. ‘But, quite right. You are good for more than dying. I have seen your mind, brother. Sharp, inquisitive. But so strangely unformed. Taken whole but unsullied and filled with all the ways of war. Beneath all the lore of violence, a blank slate. Brother Cyvon has not yet been born. The galaxy has not impressed your true self onto your mind.’
‘And what shall I call my vanquisher?’ replied Cyvon. Alongside the anger at being blindsided and the hatred of this heretic witch, there was a very human annoyance at the psyker’s mocking voice. ‘What name will enter history as the man who talked a Soul Drinker to death?’
‘A reasonable request,’ replied the psyker. ‘My name is Dwynen Kesseoth. I studied the history of Imperial art my whole life so I could serve the nobles of the acropolis watching over their prettiest things. It was the highest station I could hope to attain. But then, things changed.’
‘You surprise me,’ said Cyvon. ‘I had thought this was all business as usual.’
‘Humour ill becomes an Angel of Death,’ said Kesseoth. ‘But by all means, do try to match wits. Let us see just how sharp you are. My powers awoke at the same time as my decision to rip this sorry little world out of the Imperium’s grasp. The catalyst for that change was something I saw here.’
Kesseoth gestured again and after a few moments, one of the gallery’s monumental paintings drifted through the door. It was the scene of the charging nobles Cyvon had seen before, The Battle of Krixus.
‘Do you see it, brother?’ asked Kesseoth. Cyvon saw genuine curiosity on the man’s face, and hope. Kesseoth wanted Cyvon to come to the same conclusion he had, to validate the madness that had awoken in him.
It was an opportunity. If he kept Kesseoth talking, if he played the mad witch’s game, Cyvon would buy more seconds to find a way to strike back. Kesseoth’s attention was wavering between Cyvon and the painting, and Cyvon felt he had the use of his right hand, but his gun and knife were too far away to use.
Cyvon stared at the painting, trying to pick out the detail that had sparked such a revelation in Kesseoth.
‘You see it,’ said Kesseoth. ‘Tell me.’
The lead figure, the satrap on his charger, was not the detail he wanted. It was too obvious. The reptilian aliens were sketchy and inconsistent, the best estimate of a painter working without a model. First-hand knowledge of the xenos was unbecoming of the average Imperial citizen, so the aliens were abstracted figures of inhumanity and savagery. The sky above Krixus was darkness streaked with red.
In the background, almost merging with the darkness, were the suggestion of spears and serried ranks. A few muted bursts of gunfire. Curls of deep red paint, indicating the plumes on dozens of helmets.
‘There,’ said Cyvon, ‘behind the cavalry. ‘The citizen-soldiers. The people.’
Kesseoth smiled. The light behind his eyes was real. ‘And?’ he prompted.
‘They were the ones who actually won the battle.’
‘Krixus was won by the ranks of riflemen driving the xenos into the sea. The high-born cavalry were a detail. A sideshow. Without the nameless infantry, there was no victory. And when I realised that, I understood.’ Kesseoth’s face was that of someone beholding a holy vision, ecstatic. ‘The people. The masses. The low-born. Everything the nobles have is taken from the people. The victory at Krixus, every battle won. Every credit and coin, every thread of finery, every foundation of every city. All created from the blood and toil of the people. All stolen by their betters, painted over, and paraded as the triumph of those who did not win it.’
‘So you rebelled,’ said Cyvon. He flexed his fingers, eking out a little more movement from the tiny shred of freedom Kesseoth had given him.
‘My mind awoke,’ Kesseoth was saying. ‘I knew what I had to do. And now I had the power to do it. I wept that violence was the only way this world could be freed, but there was no other path.’
