The Flight of the Eisenstein (30 page)

Garro's eyes narrowed. 'Events have forced me to end the lives of too many of my kindred already! Now you would ask me to slit the throat of one who lies too weak to defend himself?'

'It would be a mercy.'

'For whom?' Garro demanded. 'For Decius, or for you? I see the disgust you can barely hide, Voyen. You would rather all evidence of the foulness that attacked us be jettisoned, eh? Easier for you to ignore its consequence and whatever connection it might have to your blasted lodges!'

The Apothecary froze, shocked into silence by his commander's outburst.

Garro saw his reaction and immediately regretted his words. He looked away to see the Luna Wolf approaching. 'I am sorry, Meric, I spoke out of turn. My frustration overtook my reason-'

Voyen hid his wounded expression. 'I have duties I must address, lord. By your leave.' He moved away as Qruze came closer.

The old Astartes threw a glance after him. 'We think we have seen it all and yet there always comes a day when the universe shows us the folly of that hubris.'

'Aye,' managed Garro.

Qruze nodded to himself. 'Captain, I took the liberty of compiling an order of battle for your review, following the retreat from Isstvan.' He handed over a data-slate and Garro scanned the names. 'Just over forty line Astartes and half that number of men of veteran ranking, including myself. Five warriors severely injured in the escape but capable of meeting battle, should it come to it. The count does not include you or the Apothecary.'

'Solun Decius is not listed.'

'He's in a coma, is he not? He is an invalid and cannot fight.'

The captain tapped a balled fist on his augmetic leg with a defiant grimace. 'Some dared to say that to me and I made a lie of it! While Decius lives, he's still one of my men,' Garro retorted. 'You'll add him to the roll until I tell you otherwise.'

'As you wish,' said Qruze.

Garro weighed the slate in his hand. 'Seventy men, Iacton. Out of thousands of Astartes at Isstvan, we are all that still live beyond the reach of the Warmaster's treachery.' The words were still difficult for him to say aloud, and he saw that Qruze found it just as hard to hear them.

'There will be others,' insisted the Luna Wolf. 'Tarvitz, Loken, Varren... all of them are good, staunch warriors who won't see such rebellion without opposing it.'

'I do not question that,' replied the Death Guard, 'but when I think of them left behind while we fled for the warp-' He broke off, his voice tightening. The memory of the virus bombing was still painful. 'I wonder how many made it to shelter before the plague and the firestorm. If only we could have saved some of them, rescued a few more of our brethren.' Garro thought of Saul Tarvitz and Ullis Temeter, and hoped that death had come quickly for his friends.

'It is the duty of this vessel to be a messenger, not a lifeboat. For all we can know, other ships may have slipped away, or gone to ground. The fleet is huge and the Warmaster cannot have eyes everywhere.'

'Perhaps,' said Garro, 'but I cannot look upon my brothers hereabouts and not see those we left to face Horns,' He stood, his glove pressed to the thick armourglass of the containment chamber, and studied the papery face of Decius where the youth lay amid a nest of life-support devices and autonarthecia. 'I feel like I have aged centuries in a day,' he admitted.

Qruze snorted in a dry chuckle. 'Is that all? Live as long as I have and you'll come to understand that it's not the years that count, it's the distance you travel.'

Garro broke away from the sight of his comrade. Then by that reckoning, I am older still.'

'With all due respect, you're a stripling, Battle-Captain Garro.'

'You think so, Luna Wolf?' Garro replied. 'You forget the nature of the realm through which we pass. I would warrant that were we to match our days of birth to the Imperial calendar, I would be as old as you, brother, perhaps even your senior.'

'Impossible,' scoffed the other Astartes.

'Is it? Time moves at different rates on Terra and Cthonia. In the warp it becomes malleable and unpredictable. When I think of the years I have spent in passage through that infernal domain or in the little-death of cold sleep on voyages below the speed of light... I may not match you in days, but in chronology the story would be quite different,' He looked back at Decius. 'I see this poor, untempered boy and I wonder if he will ever live to see the glory and the scope of what I have known. Today, I feel more weary than I ever have before. All those days escaped and deaths postponed drag at me. Their weight threatens to pull me under.'

The veil of long-suffering temper that was Qruze's usual mien dropped away for a moment, and the old soldier placed a hand on Garro's shoulder. 'Brother, this is the weight we bear all our living days, the burden of the Astartes as the Emperor gave it to us. We must carry the future of mankind and the Imperium upon our backs, keep it safe and held high for Him. Today that burden weighs more than it ever has, and we have seen that there are those among our number who cannot support it any longer. They chose...' He took a deep breath.
'Horus
chose to throw it aside and become an oath-breaker, so we must bear it without him. You must bear it, Nathaniel. The alarm we hold cannot sound unheard out here in the darkness. You must do whatever must be done in order to warn Terra. All other concerns, our lives and those of our brothers, come a distant second to that mission.'

'Aye,' said Garro, after a few moments. You only voice the words I heed inside myself, but it braces me to hear another say them.'

'The Half-heard is heard at last, eh? A pity it has taken such a turn of events to bring that to pass.'

'I accept my lot in this,' the Death Guard noted, fingering the oath paper sealed to the breastplate of his power armour, 'and yet I do not understand it.'

'Understanding is not required,' Qruze quoted the old axiom, 'only obedience.'

'Not true,' reasoned Garro. 'Obedience,
blind obedience,
would have made us follow Horas to his banner and go against the Emperor. What I wish to understand is
why,
Iacton. Why would he do this, to his father of all men?'

'The question that comes again and again.' A shadow passed over the Luna Wolfs face. 'Damn me, Nathaniel. Damn me if I didn't see this coming but had too much pride to accept it.'

'The lodges,'

'And more,' said Qruze. 'In hindsight I see trivial things that meant so little at the time, turns of phrase and looks in the eyes of my kinsmen. Now, under the light of what has transpired, suddenly they show a different aspect.' He mused for a moment. 'The death of Xavyer Jubal on Sixty-Three Nineteen, the burning of the Interex... Davin, it was on Davin that things began to turn, where the momentum came to a head. Horus fell and then he rose, healed by the arcane. I knew then, even if I dared not take the scope of it.

Men took the good and open nature of our brotherhood and turned it slowly to meet their own ends. Dark shadows grew over the hearts of warriors who had once been devoted and loyal, Astartes I had seen grow from whelps to fine, upstanding brothers. When I finally spoke of these things, they thought me an old fool with nothing to provide but war stories and a target for their mockery.' The Luna Wolf looked away. 'My crime, brother, my crime was that I let them. I took the easy road.'

Garro shook his head. 'If that were true, then you would not be here. If events of recent days have taught me anything, it is that there comes a moment for each of us when we are
tested!
As he said it, once again Euphrati Keeler came to the surface of his thoughts. 'What happens in that moment is the true measure of us, Iacton. We cannot break, old man. If we do, then we
will
be damned.'

Qruze chuckled softly. 'Strange, is it not, that we choose that word? A term so loaded with overtones of religion and holy creed, at polar opposites to the secular truth we are oath-bound to serve.'

'Belief is not always a matter of religion,' said Garro. 'Faith can be a thing of men as well as gods.'

You think so? Perhaps then you ought to venture below decks and visit the empty water store on the forty-ninth tier, and share your viewpoint with those gathered there.'

Garro's brow furrowed. 'I do not follow you.'

'I have learned there is a church aboard your ship, captain,' said Iacton, 'and the congregation swells with each passing day'

Sindermann looked up as Mersadie tapped him on the shoulder. He put down the electroquill and slate.

He saw she had a couple of men with her, two junior officers in the uniforms of the engineering division.

The remembrancer hesitated, and one of the men spoke. We've come to see the Saint.'

Kyril threw a sideways glance along the length of the makeshift chapel. He saw Euphrati down there, talking and smiling. 'Of course,' he began. 'You may have to wait.'

That's all right,' said the other. We're off-shift. Couldn't make the... the sermon before.'

The iterator smiled slightly. 'It was hardly that, just a few people of like mind, talking.' He nodded to the dark-skinned woman. 'Mersadie, why don't you take these young gentlemen up?' He patted his pockets. 'I think I have a tract I could give you both.'

'Got one already,' said the man who'd spoken first. He showed Sindermann a frayed booklet with the kind of rough printing that came from old and rusted machinery. It wasn't a pamphlet he had seen before, not one of those that had circulated on the
Vengeful Spirit.
It appeared that the
Lectitio Divinitatus
had already made inroads aboard the
Eisenstein
long before his arrival.

Oliton led the men away, and Kyril watched her go. Like all of them, only now was Mersadie coming to understand the path that was laid out before her. Sindermann knew she was holding true to her calling as a remembrancer, but the recollections that she stored in the memory spools of her augmented skull were not tales of the Great Crusade and of Horus's glory. Mersadie had gently moved into the role of docu-mentarist for their nascent credo. It was Euphrati Keeler's stories that she wrote now, storing them and weaving them into a coherent whole. Kyril looked down at the data-slate where he had been attempting to marshal his own thoughts, and reflected. How could he ever have expected to become part of something like this? All around him, a church, a system of belief was accreting, gaining mass and potency beneath the shadow of the Warmaster's rebellion. How could any fate have judged that he, Kyril Sindermann, primary iterator of the Imperial truth, was suited for this new role? And yet here he found himself, shepherding the words of Keeler, moulding them for the ears of the people even as Mersadie stood at his side, blink-clicking still images and recording Euphrati's every deed.

Not for the first time, Sindermann traced the line of events that had brought him here and pondered how things might have played had he spoken differently, thought differently. He had no doubt that he would be dead by now, gunned down in the mass termination of the remembrancers aboard Horus's battle-barge. It was only the intervention of Loken's comrade Qruze that had saved their lives. The echo of the fear he felt at the sight of the bombing of Isstvan III whispered through him again. Death had been only a moment away, and yet Euphrati had shown no apprehension. She had known that they would live, just as she had been able to guide them to this ship and their escape. Once he would have rejected ideas of divine powers and of the so-called saints who communed with them. Euphrati Keeler took that scepticism away from him with her quiet authority, and made him question the secular light of unswerving reason he had lived his life in service to.

They had all been changed after that day at the Whisperhead Mountains, when Jubal had transformed into something that still defied categorisation in Sindermann's thoughts.
A daemon?
In the end,

Kyril was unable to find any other means to explain it away. His light of logic fled from him, his precious Imperial truth was found lacking. Then the horror had come again, this time to destroy them all.

But he lived.
They
lived, thanks to Euphrati. With his own eyes, Sindermann saw her turn the might of a warp-spawned monstrosity with nothing more than a silver aquila and her faith in the Emperor of Mankind. His need for denial perished with the hateful creature that day, and the iterator saw truth,
real truth.
Keeler was an instrument of the Emperor's will. There was no other explanation for it. In His greatness – no, in His
divinity –
the Emperor had granted the imagist some splinter of His might. They had all been changed, yes, but Euphrati Keeler the most of all.

Gone was the defiant but directionless young woman whose picts had caught the history around them. In her stead there was a new creation, a woman both finding and forging the path for all of them. Kyril should have been afraid. He should have been terrified that they would perish fleeing from Horus's perfidy. A single look at Keeler made that all disappear. He watched her talk to the two engineers, smiling and nodding, and a warmth spread through him.
This is faith,
he realised,
and it is such a heady sensation!
It was no wonder that the believers he had encountered during the Crusade resisted so hard, if this was what they felt.

Now, in the
Lectitio Divinitatus,
Kyril Sindermann found the same strength. His loyalty and love for the Imperium had never swayed. Now, if it were possible, he felt an even deeper devotion to the Lord of Man. He was ready to give himself to the Emperor, not just in heart and mind, but in body and soul.

He was not alone in this. The Cult of Terra, as it was sometimes known, was strengthening. The pamphlet in the engineer's hands, the ease with which Mersadie was able to find this disused water reservoir in which to assemble their makeshift chapel, all these things showed that the
Lectitio Divinitatus
existed on this vessel. And if it was here on this small, unremarkable frigate, then perhaps it was elsewhere too, not just concealed in the midst of Horus's fleet but maybe further afield, on worlds and ships spread across the Imperium. This faith was on the cusp of becoming a self-actualised creation, and all it needed was an icon to rally behind, a living saint.