Son of Sek (Gaunt’s Ghosts) Read online

  He brought his gun up. The painted man flinched. The trigger snapped back. Nothing. The painted man lunged. The lasgun barrel hit the painted man’s patchwork face, and spread his nose into a pink smear. The side of the casing came next, crashing into cheekbones and jaw; once, twice, a number that was lost in the slippery, bloody roar that had become the world. The man was no longer painted, he was a slack bag of split skin and streaming crimson. Blood was everywhere, and he could not tell whose it was. He had it in his eyes, on his cheeks, on his lips.

  Las-bolts whizzed above his head, and slammed into the scrap of wall. He glanced up as he dropped between the two corpses, one a comrade, one an enemy.

  Three, maybe more figures in ochre were closing in, firing as they moved. His vision was smudging at the edges. He did not want to look at his legs. He could taste metal in his mouth. The two grenades were heavy lumps as he pulled them from the painted man’s corpse. He was breathing hard. The pins ran free in his fingers. He turned, raising his head above the wall as he threw. He got it wrong, his arm suddenly weak, his vision softening to dizzy grey. It was a perfect piece of luck.

  The grenades hit the soft ground, rolled away, and detonated just as the charging figures ran over them. The lead man punched into the air, flailing, legs gone under the knee, body a pincushion of shrapnel. The rest just vanished.

  He waited, fighting to keep his eyes open as the smoke drifted over him. He waited. Nothing happened. His ears were ringing. He waited. He tried to shake his head, but the movement began, and did not end. The ground rocked as he moved. Bright, chequerboard bands ran across his eyes.

  Bright…

  Lights…

  Stars…

  He woke again, but the world was different, made of sharp pain, stitches and tubes. For a few days, maybe weeks, he thought about the sound of the guns, about the painted man, about seeing a figure cartwheel through the air without legs. Then they reduced something in the tube feeds, and the pain of healing stole much of his memory. He was almost grateful.

  An officer came to see him. She acted as though they had talked before, but he had no idea who she was, or why she was there. She wore a different uniform from his regiment, matt black with red piping, cap tucked under her left epaulet. Her pips said major, but everything else about her said ‘much more important than that, thank you very much’.

  She started talking, rattling through words like a crank gun swallowing rounds.

  ‘Good thing is that you are going to be training-ready in four weeks. Field-ready… Well, we will see. Not enough left of your outfit to send you back to, and that is probably not the best use of your profile now. Zerdian Heavy 101st is looking promising, lots of punch on paper, but… lacking the polish of battle. You are just what they need. Fine scarred hero of a platoon leader to send a signal, pull the rest up. Once you’re fit that is, and once you’ve got through training to fill the gaps.’

  ‘Gaps?’

  ‘Tactics, leadership, all the tricks of the trade, all the things that you didn’t need at the baseline of things.’ She handed him a sheaf of parchment. The paper was thick, weighted and textured with importance. A phrase she had said surfaced in his pain- and drug-fogged mind. Platoon leader… That meant, presuming she was serious – and the paper in his hand had all the look of seriousness – that he was being promoted, straight from the lines, and his first action, into the officer ranks.

  He turned the paper over in his hands, carefully slowly. After a moment she started to speak.

  ‘Three platoons went into that area. You and ten others came out. You stopped an ambush becoming a rout. The enemy stopped dead, when they meant to keep going. They would’ve been Throne knows how much further by now, maybe even to the supply base at Talimanx.’

  He didn’t know how to say that she was wrong. He had just tried to stay alive. He was not a leader. He was alone, no matter how many people stood next to him. You could not hold on to anything, everything went away sooner or later. The only thing that was his was the beat of his heart, and he had to fight to hold on to that.

  ‘It’s not a reward,’ she said, after he still said nothing. ‘It’s another way for you to serve.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked, and looked up at her.

  ‘Haven’t you heard, soldier? The Emperor’s magnificent Guard runs on bullets, blood, and heroes. Finding the first two can be tricky, the third, Throne near impossible. Live ones at least.’ She smiled, grey eyes sparkling like polished gunmetal. ‘Plenty of the other kind.’

  He looked down at the dockets in his hands. No choice… There never was a choice, ever.

  She straightened, nodded to the papers in his hand.

  ‘It’s all in there, timings, posting details, all the stuff that the ink drinkers want.’ She gave another nod, which said not to bother saluting – in case he was thinking of it – turned and began to walk away, boots clicking on the plastek coated floor.

  ‘I can’t read,’ he said, throwing the only thing he could think of at her.

  ‘Learn,’ she said, without looking back.

  V

  There is a majesty in desecration, a truth in horror. As I kneel here, I am clad in the stuff of nightmares. My head is bare, the skin the gloss pink of scar tissue. My mouth is masked, and the hand that covers it came from an unwilling sacrifice. The skin of the hand has withered, but the nails still grow; their hooked tips claw at the skin of my cheeks. I cut my own ears from my head. They hang around my neck, knocking softly on my breastplate. My armour is plasteel, bronzed, and the dried crust of blood blessings cling to its carving. Ink, scars and brands mark my arms, and tell the gods that I am theirs, and that my master raised me to them. Bones gather at my waist. Fingers, fragments of skull, and teeth, looped on wire or held on chains beside the knives of sacrifice, flaying and mortification. I know each bone, and made the sharpness of each blade edge. They are bound to me, though I do not own them. They have their own souls, their own silence.

  I can see the terror in the eyes of those who look on me. That is as it should be. They are weak, and lost in the din of their delusion. They look on the marks of the Dark Beyond, hear the clatter of bones on sharp iron, and they think these devotions are for them. They think that their fear is why I took the finger bones of the priest who ended in a pyre on Noor, why I burnt the eightfold star on my hands, and why the first blood of battle wets my eyelids. I do not do these things to be feared, and the unshriven do not fear me because of them.

  They fear me because I am everything that they fail to be.

  I wear the truth of the universe as my skin.

  VI

  Sartusa’s rain drummed on the visor of his helmet. He had pushed it up so that it could shield his eyes, and his breath would not fog his vision.

  ‘Any word from command?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing, sir. Just the same as before.’

  ‘Try again, keep trying,’ he said. He did not look at the sergeant standing at attention, water pouring from the gilt and green of his chest-plate. The golden lions were wet and bright in the flash of lightning. ‘Get the rest of the irregulars down to the southern edge. Sandwich them between whatever is down there from the Circanian and Kenrenith.’

  ‘Sir,’ said the sergeant. In less than three hours he would be dead, the left half of his head sheared away by a flake of shrapnel the size of a food plate. Blood would replace the water running over the gold of the lions on his chest.

  ‘Tell the provender-at-arms to get every cell we have next to a soldier with a gun.’

  ‘Sir…’ began the sergeant. He is an older man, seasoned, experienced, he knows when it is best to question an officer, and how to do it when he feels he must. ‘Sir, what was the last order we had from command?’

  ‘Last thing they said was that we were to sit tight, and wait.’ He met the sergeant’s eye, and gave his best version of a grin. It looked real.
He had had long years to practise. For him, and for the sergeant, it was part of the expected form in the situation, part of the drill among soldiers who know that they might have reached the end of the odds. ‘That was before command went silent, and every other unit outside the city limits became unreachable. But they said sit tight, and we are following that order.’

  He left the fact that command said nothing about going to full battle readiness unsaid.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the sergeant, and saluted.

  ‘Get moving,’ he said with a nod. The sergeant went, and the rain and gloom filled the space where he had been.

  The rain kept falling, thick and unrelenting. Sartusa lay before him, its low sprawl of plastered walls and tangled streets swallowing the wet curtains from the sky above. The spires of temples rose here and there, sharp fingers pointed at the storm-shrouded heavens. The city should have been called a town, but a disciple of Saint Sabbat had drunk from a spring here, or some such, and so it clung to the ancient title, even while it refused to grow to fit it. It was a long way from Khulan, or Urdesh, let alone Balhaut. Too many people lived here, though, too many for a world which was now on the front lines, too many to keep safe, and far too many to just leave here in the hope that the Archenemy would not come.

  And they were coming. That is what the silence meant.

  He looked around. There were eyes watching him. He could feel them, and knew that what he needed to do was not look for them. People want their leaders to look to destiny, to hope, to the future which they pray will still come. Look into their eyes and they see that those they follow feel the same fear. Dreams of salvation die in that look. He knew this; he had followed its wisdom many times. It was part of what he had become, a lodestone for the weight of others.

  He unsheathed his sword. He did it casually, turning it over so that the rain ran down its fuller. He could read the words etched in the blade, but did not; they were not intended to comfort. He gave the blade a lazy swipe, like a child hitting grass, and allowed a tune to whistle from his lips. He made a smile with his mouth as he sheathed the blade. The eyes watching beneath helmets and above sandbag walls saw the smile, and for some it was enough to stop their fingers rattling against their guns. It was what was needed of him, one more act of futility in a lifetime without meaning. Above him the statue of the Emperor looked down with empty eyes from a cast bronze face.

  The sergeant ran to his side.

  ‘Everyone’s in place, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, sergeant,’ he said, but kept his eyes on the darkening boundary between storm sky and shadowed ground.

  They will come. They always come, in the end.

  He wondered why he was there. He knew every step of his life, but they did not feel like his. He had seen the stars he craved to see as a child, he had been called a hero, and been given rank. He had learnt to read, so that now the words on his sword and the marks on prayer books could mean something to him. They don’t, though, and they never have. He stood there not because of the will of a distant god, or because he had risen to greatness. He stood there because he had never seen a choice, other than the quick oblivion of a gun barrel in the mouth.

  So he waited, and the rain fell, and high above the clouds the approaching bombers roared with the thunder’s growl.

  He will meet the end that he craves, but does not have the courage to embrace.

  He and I will meet when the men and women who looked to him for courage are corpses. The sword in his hand will be shaking with the fatigue he is fighting to control. We will meet then, the Son of Sek and the hollow son of the Imperium. The chemical fires will billow in the rain, and we will save him for last, so that he can hear the sweet cries from those he tried to save and failed. We will let him watch as we take offerings from them. He will think then that he never wanted any scrap of his life, that he has done nothing that has been his own choice since he first breathed. He will see us, our knives, and the tatters of skin hanging in our fingers. We will let him see all this, and then, at last, slowly – because it is important how such things are done – we will come for him. I will come for him.

  All this will happen. I know because I was there, under the rain, with the smell of burning flesh and dead civilisation in my mouth and on my tongue.

  But those moments were still to come to this man, this hero. The rain rolled down, and the eyes of those who would soon die watched him, and he waited, not knowing what he waited for.

  VII

  The door will open soon, and I will be called to rise and go to meet Him. He will ask me of the man that ended in Sartusa, of his last words, of the plea that the universe cannot grant.

  ‘No… no… no…’

  I will tell him of that long fall to the ground, of the thoughts which had turned in his skull since the stars took his parents, but which had never found a voice.

  Make it stop.

  Please make it stop.

  Please.

  ‘Please.’

  I will tell him all that I know, and all that can be known, of a life that is now not mine, of a life that was another man’s, a man who is no more. I will tell him what he already knows, for he is the mouth of the gods, and his voice is the voice that drowns out all others.

  He will speak then.

  And I will be his son.

  About the Author

  John French is the author of several Horus Heresy stories including the novels Praetorian of Dorn and Tallarn, the novella The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Dark Compliance, Templar and Warmaster. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Resurrection and Incarnation for The Horusian Wars and two tie-in audio dramas – the Scribe award-winning Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies and Agent of the Throne: Truth and Dreams. John has also written the Ahriman series and many short stories.

  A Black Library Publication

  First published in Sabbat Crusade in Great Britain in 2014.

  This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

  Cover illustration by Raymond Swanland.

  Son of Sek © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Son of Sek, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.

  All Rights Reserved.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-78030-819-7

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

 

 

  John French, Son of Sek (Gaunt’s Ghosts)

 

 

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