Scions of the Emperor by David Guymer

Author:David Guymer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2020-06-30T08:22:56+00:00

THE SINEW OF WAR

Darius Hinks

I watched Macragge City burn, listening to the panicked reports flooding down the Neetum Transitway.

‘Seven cohorts. Men who were loyal to Libanus, Gallan and Palatinus. They’re murdering and burning. Captain Melotus says they were bribed. Bribed, Lord Guilliman. Killing for coin. What have we come to? They tore down the Tomb of Megaricus. They’ve lit fires all along the Proana Arch. They’re fighting outside the Senatorum and Consul House.’

Killing for coin. Every time I heard a grotesque, barbaric phrase like that it reminded me how different I was. I did not think like others. I was a breed apart. Where others saw pieces of a puzzle, I saw the whole. Whether it was military strategy, theology or philosophy, my mind seemed to function on a different level to my peers. Sometimes I found the thought reassuring, other times it troubled me. Why should I be so different? To murder, simply for financial gain, was baffling to me. It was the action of someone lost in the dark; blinded by ignorance and base, animal needs.

The transitway was crowded with people fleeing the violence, and my cohorts had to move frustratingly slowly to avoid killing anyone. Several times our armoured transports ground to a halt as panicked people struggled to move aside. No one wanted to get in our path, though. We made a fearsome sight, still filthy from battle, and those that were able scrambled as far from our tattered banners as they could. I continued giving orders as we approached the city, processing information I knew no one else would register, but the phrase ‘killing for coin’ had summoned a memory.

I was five and my father had taken me hunting. I knew why. Even then I could read people as easily as I read the military treatises in Deucalis Library. My father had seen me watching his generals and magistrates. He saw how I despised them. The greatest statesmen of the greatest city were idiots, blind to the most important resource on the planet – their own, needlessly oppressed people. They were fools and tyrants and, even aged five, I wanted to tear down the whole, hide-bound edifice. My father felt the same, I knew he did. But my place in Macragge was precarious and he was too wise to risk my life on a point of principle. So he took me away, to a place we both loved, to the cold, beautiful foothills of the Crown Mountains where we could breathe clean air and ease our fury by scrambling over rocks and scree. Away from the Senate, my father dropped the pretence that I was a normal child and we hunted together as equals. He laughed, as he always did, at the sight of my unfettered strength, proud of his strange little son. But then, when I saw him fall, grimacing at a gash on his arm, a dreadful truth hit me.

We were not equals. We never could be. My father was not like me. The man who taught me about life was not destined to live.

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