Legion (16 page)

Chayne had already decided what the note meant, and was fully confident that Eiman and Belloc had grasped the implications too, from the bare facts he had relayed. As had been suspected, a process of espial was active at Mon Lo, within the weave of the Imperial fortifications. The spies were good, able, intelligent and well equipped. Their loyalties were unclear. Chayne had suspected the Nurthene, but no Nurthene would have left a note in Low Gothic, unless the Imperials had massively underestimated the enemy’s capacity for psychological warfare.

The note meant many things, but most of all it meant over-confidence, and that was a fatal weakness in any person. A weakness of emotion. It was quite a feat to be able to sneak out from under the piercingly vigilant lattice of an Imperial security system, but it was altogether something else to acknowledge that you had been there, to leave a trace, a signature, a calling card. Why evade detection, seamlessly in this particular case, if you then admit that evasion by taking credit for it? Two motives occurred to Chayne: someone wanted to goad him and play games with him, or someone was so sure of himself, the gamesmanship was part of the sport.

Either way, over-confidence. A fatal flaw.

The note itself, that little scrap of paper, would tell him everything he needed: the choice of language, the use of language, the phraseology, the psychology of meaning, the pen weight, the handwriting, the paper source, the type of stylus, the ink residue, the gene residue, the fibre trace, the note’s position, the type and origin of the stone left to weigh it down.

The spy, Chayne’s prey, had betrayed himself in a hundred different ways, simply by being cocky. And that cockiness was the biggest lead of all.

Chayne removed his black helmet, slid it under his arm, and entered the main chamber of the glowing pavilion. Inside, lords of mankind were speaking with demigods.

‘K
ON, MY LOVE
?’ the dragon crooned, and licked his forehead with its red tongue.

John Grammaticus forced his way out of the dragon’s biting jaws and woke up. Rukhsana smiled down at him, stroking his cheek.

‘Damn. What time is it?’ he asked.

‘Night has fallen, Kon. Lord Alpharius is dining in the pavilion tent with the Lord Commander.’

Grammaticus sat up quickly, blinking. ‘Damn! I have to go. I have to be there.’

‘Be here with me instead, Kon.’

‘I wish I could.’

He began to get dressed. She sat back, sullen and rebuffed. She glanced around. ‘I think someone’s been in here,’ Rukhsana observed. ‘Yes. The genewhips,’ he said, nodding. ‘Terra!’ she asked. What were they looking for?’

‘Me,’ he smiled.

A
SLOW SMILE
extended across Namatjira’s lips. ‘I’m no expert,’ he said, ‘but you can’t all be Alpharius.’

Alpharius, or at least the giant who had presented himself as Alpharius to the Lord Commander at the Great Welcome, tipped back his head and laughed.

‘Of course not, lord. My Legion is one body, and we share everything. Identity can be used as a weapon, so we turn one face against the enemy. However, we are friends here.’

Surrounded by his Lucifer Black companions, Namatjira stood at one end of the tented chamber, the senior commanders of the expedition grouped around him in a crescent. The filament lamps covered the pavilion ceiling like stars, and lumen banks underlit the tent walls. Striped and spotted animal pelts had been laid out across the floor as rugs, overlapping and luxurious. Serendip, Namatjira’s thylacene, had laid itself down on a speckled hide at the end of its slack, gold lead.

Facing them were four Astartes in purple plate. Foremost, Alpharius, his helmet still doffed, his copper skin lustrous in the golden light. The other three had joined him for the meeting, though no one, as Chayne would later discover to his consternation, could say from where.

Chayne slipped in through a flap at the rear of the chamber, behind Namatjira’s entourage. Through a slit in the folds of the pavilion’s walls, he could see gangs of liveried servants awaiting the order to hurry in with trays of sweetmeats, wine and fruit. Chamberlains were holding them at the ready.

‘I am Alpharius,’ said the copper-skinned giant, repeated the pledge-claim he had made at the Great Welcome. ‘I have brought with me Ingo Pech and Thias Herzog, my first and second captains.’

Two of the Astartes behind him stepped forwards, removed their helmets with a click-hiss of collar locks, and bowed. They were shaven headed and copper-skinned too. A simple human glance would have read all three as identical triplets.

Chayne did not make a human glance. He appraised them, quickly and efficiently. Not identical triplets, not non-identical triplets, or even uterine brothers. The immediate similarities were strong but superficial. Alpharius was considerably taller than both of his captains. What was more, there was an evident ethnic derivation in the build of his cranium, a slope of the forehead, a mass of the brow. Chayne had been in the presence of Horus Lupercal, and he’d seen that distinctive physiognomy before. There was something about the eyes too. Alpharius’s eyes were cold blue, and shone with an arctic intelligence that made Chayne shudder slightly.

Of the other two, Herzog was ever so slightly the taller. Chayne gauged their heights using the angles of the guy wires and sheet planes of the pavilion behind them. Herzog and Pech were not related either. Chayne counted eighteen points of dissimilarity between the comparative angles of their skulls, their eyes, their lips, the structure of their cheeks, the muscles of their necks, their noses and, most especially, the fingerprint-precise lobes of their ears. Herzog was older by twenty years. Pech was smaller, but stronger and smarter. There was a very slight but telling shadow around Herzog’s scalp that suggested his hair was of a darker natural colour, and that he shaved his head to resemble his primarch and his fellow captain. Herzog’s eyes were blue, like his primarch’s, but Pech’s were gold-flecked brown.

‘Welcome, captains,’ Namatjira said.

The Astartes nodded.

‘And the other?’ Namatjira asked.

The fourth Astartes had remained at the back of the group, his helmet in place.

‘That is one of my common troopers,’ Alpharius said. ‘He is simply here as an escort. His name is Omegon.’

The warrior bowed, without removing his helmet. The first lie, Chayne thought. Omegon is no common trooper.

Chayne estimated Omegon’s stature, once again using the geometries of the tent structure as a scale. The Astartes was at least as big as the primarch himself.

Who are you, Chayne wondered? What are you pretending to be?

‘Let us talk of Nurth, my lord,’ said Pech, ‘and of how we finish this war.’

Namatjira smiled. ‘This
compliance
,’ he corrected.

‘It is a war, sir,’ Pech replied, ‘as I’m sure the stalwart soldiers of the Imperial Army would attest. Let us not dress it up in political terms. Let us not skip over their sacrifices.’

Major General Dev and Lord Wilde of the Torrent coughed to suggest their gratitude at Pech’s acknowledgement of their efforts. Some of their huscarls and high officers clacked their swords against their shields in approval.

Namatjira snapped up a hand quickly for silence.

‘Of course it’s a war, sir,’ the Lord Commander said, acid in his tone. ‘Men die.
My
men die. But this is still an Action of Compliance, or are you questioning the Emperor’s design?’

Pech shook his head. ‘No, lord. I appreciate that the Emperor upholds a teleological scheme for the future of man, and I will endeavour to uphold it.’

‘He chases a Utopian ideal,’ Herzog put in.

‘He wishes to unify and perfect humanity through the intense application of martial violence,’ said Pech.

‘We have no quarrel with that approach,’ said Herzog. ‘It is the only proven way man’s destiny has ever been advanced.’

‘Even if Utopian goals are ultimately counterintuitive to species survival,’ Pech added quickly.

‘Any political ambition that is inherently impossible to achieve is ultimately corrupting,’ said Herzog.

‘You cannot engender, or force to be engendered, a state of perfection,’ said Pech. ‘That line of action leads only to disaster, because perfection is an absolute that cannot be attained by an imperfect species.’

‘Utopia is a dangerous myth,’ said Herzog, ‘and only a fool would chase it.’

‘It is better to manage and maintain the flaws of man on an ongoing basis,’ said Pech.

‘We say this only to recognise the blood debt of the Imperial Army, that suffers and dies, resolutely, in the pursuit of that goal,’ said Herzog.

There was a long silence, just as the blades began to batter the shields again, Alpharius said, ‘I encourage my men to explore the philosophy of bloodshed, lord. I like them to understand the intellectual structure that informs their killing. The Emperor, my love and my life, seeks to set mankind in place as the uppermost species of the galaxy. I will not dispute that ambition, neither will my captains. We simply recognise the pro-crustean methods with which he enforces that dream. A Utopian ideal is a fine thing to chase, and to measure one’s achievements against. But it cannot, ultimately, be achieved.’

‘Are you suggesting the Emperor’s design is… wrong?’ Namatjira asked.

‘Not in the slightest,’ replied Alpharius.

‘My Lord Alpharius,’ said Lord Wilde in his piercing, blade-keen voice, ‘how do we combat the Nurthene… magick?’

‘My Lord Wilde,’ said Alpharius, ‘we don’t. We extinguish it.’

T
HE TRAYS OF
food were heavy. There was no telling how much longer they’d be forced to stand there in the tented wings of the main pavilion space. The worst of it was, he simply couldn’t hear. The voices in the main tent were muffled. Grammaticus realised he should have brought a listening aid.

He thought he’d be close enough to hear the proceedings for himself. He needed a revised plan quickly, or the significant risk he was taking would be for nothing.

‘Sir?’ he whispered.

One of the chamberlains came down the line to him.

‘What’s the matter, boy?’ the chamberlain asked. Some of the other platter-laden servants in the line looked around.

‘How much longer, sir?’ Grammaticus asked.

‘As long as it damn well takes,’ the chamberlain replied.

‘Sir,’ said Grammaticus, ‘this sauce is curdling. It needs to be set on the heat again, or it will spoil. I dare not, for my life, serve bad food to the Lord Commander and his guests.’

The liveried chamberlain nodded. ‘Back to the kitchens with it. Be quick. They’ll be calling for us soon.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Grammaticus, and left the line, running with his platter towards the back flap of the tent’s service entrance.

Outside, in the dark, he paused, and dumped the platter and its contents into a spoil bin.

No one noticed him. Outremar guards were distantly patrolling the edge of the pavilion’s perimeter. He slipped into the dark blue shadows of the desert night.

Grammaticus pulled off the servant’s tabard and discarded it. He hadn’t disguised himself as one of the feast servants in any detailed way, trusting his logokine to get him by. But knowing he would be under scrutiny for several minutes, he had stolen a tabard to wear over his tight, armoured bodyglove to reinforce his logokine disguise.

He took a pair of low-light goggles from his thigh pouch and put them on. The world around him was instantly rendered in fuzzy, caustic shades of red and ochre light. He read the rows of taut cables that stretched from the side of the pavilion like millipede legs, anchoring it to the ground. Between these physical lines, he made out the web of intangible ones: the sensor beams and harmonic tripwires that protected the skirts of the great tent. Invisible to the naked eye, these thin beams would set off a multitude of alarms if tripped. Grammaticus adjusted his goggles to pick them up, tuning them to a harmonic value he’d cribbed from Rukhsana’s code book without her knowledge or permission.

He skirted forwards, along the flank of the pavilion, looking for another way in, ducking under and stepping over the rigid cables and the ghost beams alike. In several places he had to stoop or even crawl to avoid breaking the luminous strands. Most projected diagonally down from small emitters attached to the lip of the tent’s roof, but others followed the ground, or ran parallel to the pavilion, snaking between emitters spiked in the sand. The goggles guided him. This endeavour was a great deal more demanding than evading the field security lattice on the kitchen block roof. The beams were active and live. Three times, he froze, realising he was about to interrupt a beam with a leg or a shoulder.

There was no obvious vent or egress. Grammaticus found an open spot and knelt down. He put his ear against the skin of the tent, using its taut acoustics to bring the voices inside to him.

He could hear voices in conference. Lord Namatjira’s tone was easy to detect, as was Lord Wilde’s. Grammaticus identified the voice that had to belong to Alpharius, and listened to the way it sounded for the first time. There was a quality to it that was quite distinctive.

They were talking about the Nurthene magick and how to combat it. It both amused and distressed Grammaticus to hear the condescension in the primarch’s tone as he explained the notion of Chaos to the Lord Commander and his retinue. What he was saying was such an over-simplification. The Alpha Legion barely understood the nature of Chaos, yet here was its leader presuming to teach even less well-informed souls about it. The Alpha Legion were the ones who had to learn, and soon.

Grammaticus was concentrating so hard on listening that he detected the Lucifer Black behind him with only seconds to spare.

Grammaticus stood up and turned. The Lucifer, who had come up behind him quite silently, was raising his sabre to strike.

‘Fool!’ Grammaticus hissed. ‘It’s me!’

The Lucifer stopped in his tracks, and quickly lowered his sword.

‘Chayne?’ he asked. ‘Sir?’

‘Yes!’ Grammaticus snapped. ‘Return to your patrol.’

Chayne.
Grammaticus logged the name in his memory for future reference. ‘Apologies,’ the Lucifer replied. ‘I obey.’ The Lucifer turned to melt away into the night. He hesitated.