Graham McNeill: False Gods

'You're hurt,' she said, passing him a towel from the bench. He looked down, as though unaware of the wound.

'It's nothing,’ he said, wiping away the already clotted blood. His breathing came in short bursts and she tried to mask her surprise. To see an Astartes out of breath was utterly alien to her. How long had he been training before she had arrived in the halls?

Loken wiped the sweat from his face and upper body as he made his way to his personal arming chamber. Mersadie followed him and, as usual, could not help but admire the sheer physical perfection of his enhanced physique. The ancient tribes of the Olympian Hege­mony were said to have called such specimens of physical perfection Adonian, and the word fit Loken like a masterfully crafted suit of Mark IV plate. Almost with­out thinking, Mersadie blink-clicked the image of his body.

You're staring,' said Loken, without turning.

Momentarily flustered, she said, 'Sorry, I didn't mean-'

He laughed. I'm teasing. I don't mind. If I am to be remembered, I'd like it to be when I was at my peak rather than as a toothless old man drooling into my gruel.'

'I didn't realise Astartes aged,’ she replied, regaining her composure.

Loken shrugged, picking up a carved vambrace and a polishing cloth. 'I don't know if we do either. None of us has ever lived long enough to find out,’

Her sense for things unsaid told her that she could use this angle in a chapter of her remembrances, if he would talk more on the subject. The melancholy of the immor­tal, or the paradox of an ageless being caught in the flux of constantly changing times – struggling flies in the clotting amber of history.

She realised she was getting ahead of herself and asked, 'Does that bother you, not getting old? Is there some part of you that wants to?'

'Why would I want to get old?' asked Loken, opening his tin of lapping powder and applying it to the vam-brace, its new colour, a pale, greenish hued metallic still unfamiliar to her. 'Do you?'

'No,’ she admitted, unconsciously reaching up to touch the smooth black skin of her hairless augmetic scalp. 'No, I don't. To be honest, it scares me. Does it scare you?'

'No. I've told you, I'm not built to feel like that. I am powerful now, strong. Why would I want to change that?'

'I don't know. I thought that if you aged maybe you'd be able to, you know, retire one day. Once the Crusade is over I mean.'

'Over?'

'Yes, once the fighting is done and the Emperor's realm is restored.'

Loken didn't answer immediately, instead continuing to polish his armour. She was about to ask the question again when he said, 'I don't know that it ever will be over, Mer-sadie. Since I joined the Mournival, I've spoken to a number of people who seem to think we'll never finish the Great Unification. Or if we do, that it won't last.'

She laughed. 'Sounds like you've been spending too much time with Ignace. Has his poetry taken a turn for the maudlin again?'

He shook his head. 'No.'

Then what is it? What makes you think like this? Those books you've been borrowing from Sindermann?'

'No,' repeated Loken, his pale grey eyes darkening at the mention of the venerable primary iterator, and she sensed that he would not be drawn any further on the subject. Instead, she stored this conversation away for another time, one when he might be more forthcoming on these unchar­acteristically gloomy thoughts.

She decided to ask another question and steer the con­versation in a more upbeat direction, when a looming

shadow fell over the pair of them and she turned to see the massive, slab-like form of First Captain Abaddon towering over her.

As usual, his long hair was pulled up in its silver-sheathed topknot, the rest of his scalp shaved bare. The captain of the First Company of the Sons of Horas was dressed in simple sparring fatigues and carried a mon­strous sword with a toomed edge.

He glared disapprovingly at Mersadie.

'First Captain Abaddon-' she began, bowing her head, but he cut her off.

'You bleed?' said Abaddon and took Loken's arm in his powerful grip, the sonorous tone of his voice only accentuating his massive bulk. 'The sparring machine drew Astartes blood?'

Loken glanced at the bulging muscle where the blade had cut across the black, double-headed eagle tattoo there. 'Yes, Ezekyle, it was a long session and I was get­ting tired. It's nothing.'

Abaddon grunted and said, You're getting soft, Loken. Perhaps if you spent more time in the company of war­riors than troublesome poets and inquisitive scriveners you'd be less inclined to such tiredness,’

'Perhaps,’ agreed Loken, and Mersadie could sense the crackling tension between the two Astartes. Abaddon nodded curtly to Loken and gave her a last, barbed glance before turning away to the sparring cages, his sword buzzing into throaty life.

Mersadie watched Loken's eyes as they followed Abad­don, and saw something she never expected to see there-wariness.

'What was all that about?' she asked. 'Did it have any­thing to do with what happened on Davin?'

Loken shrugged. 'I can't say,’

* Ш *

Davin. The melancholy ruins scattered throughout its deserts told of its once civilised culture, but the anarchy of Old Night had destroyed whatever society had once prospered many centuries before. Now Davin was a feral world swept by hot, arid winds and baking under the baleful red eye of a sun. It had been six decades since Loken had last set foot on Davin, though back then it had been known as Sixty-Three Eight, being the eighth world brought into compliance by the 63rd Expedi­tionary force.

Compliance had not improved it much in his opinion.

Its surface was hard, baked clay clumped with scrubby vegetation and forests of tall, powerfully scented trees. Habitation was limited to primitive townships along the fertile river valleys, though there were many nomadic tribes that made their lonely way across the mighty, ser­pent-infested deserts.

Loken well remembered the battles they'd fought to bring this world into compliance, short sharp conflicts with the autochthonic warrior castes who made war upon one another, and whose internecine conflicts had almost wiped them out. Though outnumbered and hopelessly outclassed, they had fought with great courage, before offering their surrender after doing all that honour demanded.

The Luna Wolves had been impressed by their courage and willingness to accept the new order of their society and the commander – not yet the Warmaster – had decreed that his warriors could learn much from these brave opponents.

Though the tribesmen were separated from the human genome by millennia of isolation, and shared few physical traits with the settlers that came after the Astartes, Horas had allowed the feral tribesmen to remain, in light of their enthusiastic embracing of the Imperial way of life.

Iterators and remembrancers had not yet become an official part of the Crusade fleets, but the civilians and scholars who hung on the coattails of the expeditionary forces moved amongst the populace and promulgated the glory and truth of the Imperium. They had been wel­comed with open arms, thanks largely to the dutiful work undertaken by the chaplains of the XVII Legion, the Word Bearers, in the wake of the conquest.

It had been a good war; won rapidly and, for the Luna Wolves, bloodlessly. The defeated foe was brought into compliance quickly and efficiently, allowing the com­mander to leave Kor-Phaeron of the Word Bearers to complete the task of bringing the light of truth and enlightenment to Davin.

Yes, it had been a good war, or so he had thought.

Sweat trickled down the back of his head and ran down the inside of his armour, its greenish, metallic sheen still new and startling to him, even though it had been months since he had repainted it. He could have left the job to one of the Legion's many artificers, but had known on some bone-deep level that he must look to his battle gear himself, and thus had painstakingly repainted each armoured segment single-handedly. He missed the pristine gleam of his white plate, but the Warmaster had decreed that the new colour be adopted to accompany the Legion's new name: the Sons of Horas.