The Sleeper of Olympia

I

The waking always begins with the taste.

Greywater. So the first of my keepers called it, ten thousand years ago, and the word has outlived every keeper since: the suspension fluid of the sarcophagus that rinses through what is left of my mouth — a taste of coins, of oil, and right at the back, under everything, of something sweet that does not belong there and that I long believed to be a contamination, until I grasped that it is a memory. Honey. The mountain thyme honey of Olympia. The flesh forgets last what it tasted first.

Then comes the pain of the senses, one after another, like siege batteries opening fire: the hearing, a waterfall of static that sorts itself into sounds. The optics, first grey, then lines, then world. The body — not mine; the great one, the iron one, four and a half metres of Contemptor pattern, whose joints I feel like distant provinces from which reports arrive. And last, always last, the thinking.

For the thinking there is the Protocol. I wrote it for myself, in the first night in the sarcophagus, when I still knew how much one forgets. One speaks it before one does anything else. One speaks it before one asks after the enemy or the year:

I am — — —.

I am property of the warband of the Iron Tenth, object Wiege-4, called the sleeper.

Iron within. Iron without.

I stopped, as one stops on a stair with a missing step. There was a gap in the Protocol. There had been a gap in the Protocol for a long time; I knew that lines had once stood there, three, perhaps four, as one knows of a razed bastion that it once interrupted the horizon. A name had stood there. My — the name.

"Good morning, Lord Iron," said a voice from outside, young, with the singsong of the machine decks. "Don't be startled. It's only me. Sette."

Sette. The keeper. I called up the identifier: Sette, Oil-Hand in the nineteenth — no, twenty-first generation, twenty-three standard years, daughter of the Oil-Hand Marev, who had been the daughter of the Oil-Hand Ostra, who as a child had sat on my shoulder while her father greased the knee joints. I remembered Ostra. I remembered Marev as a sound. Sette I knew only as a voice that had spoken me down into the last three sleeps and spoken me up again, the way one leads a pack animal up a steep ramp.

"Status report," I said. My voice comes out of four vox-horns at once and sounds like a quarry speaking. Sette did not flinch. Oil-Hands never flinch; it is bred out of them, generation by generation, not by intervention but by nearness.

"Year of the Emperor, as they no longer call it: one hundred and twelve in the forty-second millennium." She worked while she spoke; I heard the grease gun at my left hip. "Duration of sleep: fifty-six years. Location: the Perpetua Malleus, warp transit. Occasion of your waking —" the grease gun stopped — "a battle, in four days. Boarding action. And, Lord Iron …"

Oil-Hands never hesitate either. I heard the hesitation for the first time in twenty-one generations.

"Speak."

"The Warpsmith was down here three times during your sleep. With measuring instruments. And with chalk." She lowered her voice, although down here, on the Wiege deck, nobody was listening but the others — the chained ones, whose howling came through the bulkheads like wind through bad masonry. "He has drawn signs around your Wiege, and the Warsmith has inspected them like a building site. They do not say it aloud. But the Oil-Hands hear everything, that is our craft since the beginning: they mean to take your sleep from you, Lord Iron. After this battle they mean to open your Wiege for something else."

Through the bulkheads howled the chained ones, my brothers, who had not been able to sleep since their sarcophagi were patched with things that had grown in the warp, and their howling had no words any more and needed none: it was the same single sentence for ten thousand years.

I checked my weapon systems, as I check them after every waking — the Kheres assault cannon on the right, six barrels, blessed and cursed in the same liturgy; the power fist on the left, in whose knuckles are engraved the names of fortresses that no longer exist — and while the systems reported green, one after another, I thought what I have thought on waking for some centuries and never write into a Protocol:

That I once knew what it was all for. That the knowing stayed behind in one of the sleeps, as baggage stays behind in a camp that is struck too hastily. And that if they now take my sleep from me as well, I lose the last camp in which something of me may still be stored.

"Sette," I said. "Tell me about the beginning."

She knew what I meant. The Oil-Hands always know; it is the other of their crafts, the secret one, the older one. She pulled herself up onto the maintenance ledge at my chest, to the place where twenty-one generations before her had sat, leaned her back against my sight-glass, behind which what is left of me floats in grey-green water, and began, as her mother had begun and her mother's mother before her, with the words that are older than the warband:

"There was once a Centurion on a world of mountains, and the mountains gave honey …"

And while the ship fell through the Immaterium and the chained ones howled and somewhere above us a Warpsmith sharpened his chalk, a child of twenty-three years told me my own life, so that I should possess it once more before it was expropriated for the last time.

I shall set it down here as she told it and as I remember it, both interwoven, for I can no longer separate the threads and do not wish to. It does not begin with the iron.

It begins with the Hrud.

II

In the year 899 of the thirtieth millennium I was Hetair Kandron, Centurion of the 114th Grand Battalion of the IV Legion, and I was thirty-one years old and would be a hundred and four at the end of that campaign, without more than a month passing.

The war against the Hrud has been dismissed in the annals of the Legion with two lines, and both lines lie by brevity. I will do it more exactly while I still can: the Hrud are xenos who live in the cellars of the galaxy, in migration streams of billions, and around them time spoils. That is no metaphor. Their nearness lets years run out of things like water out of a staved cask. We besieged their nest worlds in the Sak'trada Deeps, gallery by gallery, and the enemy seldom fired and seldom had to: one posted a squad at a gallery fork, and when the relief came, old men saluted. Armour rusted on the body. Bolt shells crumbled to grit in the magazine. Brothers who had gone into the mountain as giants came out as skeletons in servo-armour, the gene-seed in their glands decayed to dust, and the Primarch, whom I saw twice from afar in that campaign, a shadow of wrath at the end of a gallery, wrote casualty lists as other men breathe.

We won. The IV Legion always won; that was our function and our curse, we were the hammer that was thrown into every swamp and not wiped clean after use.

It caught me in the seventh week, in a collector gallery beneath the third nest fortress. The migration broke through a wall the auspex had declared solid, and for eleven seconds my squad stood in the entropy field of a wandering Hrud swarm. Eleven seconds. I lived them as decades, for they were decades: I felt my joints silting up, my teeth loosening, my heart — the second first, then the first — falling into a rhythm I knew from dying veterans. I gave firing orders the whole time. I know this because the vox recording survived; the voice on it grows older from order to order, a man going grey between two sentences.

Four of us were carried out. Three died in the following night of old age, with the faces of ancestors. I did not die, which the Apothecary took for a malfunction of my self and told me so as well — we were the IV Legion, we did not embrace one another. My body was a hundred and four years old, without the hardening that otherwise accompanies an Astartes century; the organs turned to parchment, the spine a report on lost ground. He said: "You have two possibilities, Centurion. The end or the sarcophagus. The sarcophagus is no mercy. I am obliged to tell you this: those who lie in it all say the same thing when one wakes them. They say the worst is not the fighting. The worst is the in-between."

I was thirty-one and a hundred and four, and through the infirmary bulkhead I heard the 114th making ready to march, to the next gallery, to the next swamp into which the hammer was thrown.

"The in-between," I said, "cannot be worse than eleven seconds of Hrud."

I have been wrong about many things in ten thousand years. About nothing so thoroughly as about that sentence.

The interment — the transfer is so called, and it is a rite, which I understood only in the sarcophagus: one is interred, with honours, with litanies, and the lid closes, and the brothers go back to the front, and one is left behind with oneself like the only mourner at one's own grave. The Techmarines of that time — they were still Techmarines, not Warpsmiths, the difference is that between a physician and a butcher — soldered my spinal cord to the Contemptor pattern Wiege-4, and the machine spirit of the body sniffed at me as a dog sniffs at its new master, mistrustful and then, trial by trial, devoted.

In my last night with a tongue of my own I dictated the Protocol of which I spoke. In full it ran thus, and I set it down here so that it may exist in a place outside myself:

I am Hetair Kandron, Centurion of the 114th Grand Battalion of the IV Legion. I am a son of Olympia; the mountains there give honey, and I learned building on the North Ridge above Lochos before I learned breaking. I owe the Emperor an oath and my Primarch a work. I have brothers; they call me Hetair, and I call them by name. Iron within. Iron without.

Five lines. I thought a man could hold on to five lines, even if he held on to nothing else.

Then the lid closed, the greywater rose, and the IV Legion lowered me into the first sleep, and the first sleep was merciful, for I did not yet know that I would be interred on one side of a war and woken on the other.

III

One does not wake gradually in the sarcophagus. One is switched on.

Between the last thought above the Sak'trada Deeps and the first one after it there lay for me no interval, no night, no dream — only a cut, and behind the cut: fire on every auspex band, bombardment alarm, the Wiege already falling, a drop pod around me like a second suit of armour, and in the vox a voice I knew and that sounded fifteen years older and a thousand years harder: Harkor, my old master-at-arms, now with a rank that had not existed in my day.

<Wiege-4! Centurion Kandron! Target assignment follows on impact. Welcome to the war, brother — it has been waiting for you.>

The impact came, the pod burst open, and I stepped for the first time as what I had become into an engagement, and the engagement was the greatest ever fought, and nobody had told me against whom.

I stood on a plain of shot-up rockcrete, and before me, filling half the sky, stood a wall. I was born on Olympia; I learned building before breaking; I knew every fortress of the Great Crusade from data sheets and most of them from close to. This wall I knew from a dream the whole Legion had shared, from the plans our Primarch had once been permitted to draw up and which were then given to another: I stood before the Eternity Gate.

I stood before the walls of the Imperial Palace, and my target assignment lay upon them.

One must understand how a Dreadnought fights in order to understand what happened then. The machine spirit takes over the grammar of the engagement: it marks, prioritises, lays the weapons on; the I within it is the will that says yes or no, and the yes is ground in like a prayer. The Kheres cannon turned onto its first target, a gun position on the second rampart step, and I said yes, and the position ceased to be, and the yes to the second target was already spoken before the first had finished falling. So I fought my way through the first hour of my second life: from yes to yes, a Centurion of the IV Legion doing what the IV Legion had always done — breaking a fortress that had been assigned to it — and at my back the Grand Battalion sang its old trench songs, and everything was war and therefore in order.

Then I struck down the first defender at close quarters, with the power fist, inside the breach, and saw what was left of him.

Yellow ceramite. The clenched fist of the VII Legion on the shoulder. And on the breastplate, under the blood, the eagle.

The eagle. Our eagle. The eagle on which I had sworn an —

I stood in the breach, four and a half metres of iron between two firestorms, and the machine spirit offered me targets, urgent, singing, and I said for the first time since my interment: no — and called on every frequency of the battalion, with the quarry voice that had once been a man's: <Harkor! Those are the Fists! That is TERRA! Who has given us — what order —>

And Harkor, my master-at-arms, who had taught me to hold a blade when I was a boy from the North Ridge, came to me through the breach, in the middle of the iron hail, laid his hand on my sight-glass, as one lays it on the flank of a frightened grox, and said the sentences with which my second life truly began:

"You have been asleep, Hetair. Much has happened. Olympia rose; we burned it back into obedience, city by city — yes, Lochos too, do not ask. The Emperor thanked us for it as always: not at all. And the Warmaster has offered the Legion a place where we are no longer burned up but reckoned with." His voice was calm, as one reads out ammunition lists. "You were not there, so we chose for you. As one chooses for the dead. Be angry with us or do not — but the breach is open, brother, and behind you stands the battalion, and before you stands the one fortress it has ever been worth breaking. The result is the same whether you understand it or not."

I went on fighting that day. That is the sentence I least like to set down in ten thousand years, and therefore I set it down first: I went on fighting. Not out of conviction; conviction needs time, and I had had eleven seconds, so it seemed to me, eleven seconds between the oath and the breaking of it. I fought because behind me stood the battalion and beside me Harkor and because a Dreadnought that stops in the middle of a breach kills his brothers, and because — this is the truth, and it is ugly like all serviceable truths — because the yes went so much more easily than the no. The yes had been soldered into my spinal cord. The no I had to lift by hand, every single one, like a block of stone.

When they lowered me back into sleep after the fall of the Warmaster — that too I learned in the retreat, between two firing orders, as one learns the weather — aboard a fleeing battle barge, I spoke my Protocol, and it had altered of itself, and that was the first thing the sleep took from me, before it had even begun:

I owe the Emperor an oath — the line was still there. But it stood now in the past tense, like a fortress on a map that is not reprinted after the war.

And the second sleep was not merciful. In the second sleep the dreams began, and in the dreams I stood on the North Ridge above Lochos, and down in the city the first house was missing.

IV

They woke me again after barely a year, and I woke knowing that something in me had gone on thinking during the sleep, for the anger I had not had before Terra lay ready on waking, like a suit of armour somebody had laid out for me overnight.

The place was called Sebastus IV, and the position we had built there was called in the orders The Eternal Rampart and in the trench songs of the Legion simply: the cage. I will not set down much of the battle in the Iron Cage; enough has been lied about it, on both sides, and the truth can in any case only be told with a measuring rod: twenty square kilometres of trenchwork, designed by our Primarch as an arithmetical problem with exactly one solution, and the solution was that there was none. No centre one could take, no wall one could break. A fortress whose only purpose was to digest the assault.

And Dorn came. Of course he came. The cage had been built for his pride like a trap for a particular animal, and the animal was punctual.

I stood eleven days in the trenchwork of Sebastus IV, and what I did there can be read in the casualty lists of the VII Legion, if the Fists ever kept them in full. I fought against warriors in yellow ceramite, in mud that consisted half of the fallen, at ranges at which one sees the white in the other man's ocular, and the eagle on their breastplates no longer stopped me. That is the change of which I am to speak — Sette says I am to speak of the changes, that is the core of the telling — so I speak of it, with the measuring rod:

Before Terra I had still been able to lift the no, block by block. In the cage I no longer lifted it. Not because it had grown too heavy. Because I had found a place for the anger, and the place was comfortable. The Fists had stood on the wall that it should have been our right to build. The Fists had reaped the thanks for four centuries in which we had filled the coffins. None of that justified anything: I knew it then, I know it today. But anger needs no justification, only a direction, and the Legion was ten thousand direction-givers strong, and I slept between the engagements in a sarcophagus in which the anger was the only company that did not spoil.

On the eleventh day the remnants of the Fists withdrew under the shield of the Ultramarines, and we stood in the trenchwork and had won and possessed: twenty square kilometres of mud on a world nobody wanted. I saw our Primarch once from close to, on that last night, walking over the field and regarding the fallen of both Legions with the face of a builder who has checked the statics and found them correct, and I understood for the first time, entirely, the sentence Harkor had said to me in the breach: the result is the same whether you understand it or not. That had been no apology.

That had been the new religion.

When they lowered me again after Sebastus — we were already fleeing by then, the whole Legion was fleeing, into the Eye of Terror, which I have never seen from outside and out of which I have never slept my way again — I spoke the Protocol, and the line with the oath was gone. Not struck out. Gone, together with the memory of how it had run; I knew only that a line had stood there, as one knows of a razed bastion —

I have used this image before. Sette says I use it every time, and every time I believe it is new. That too belongs to the telling.

V

Between the cage and the next waking there lay for the galaxy fifteen hundred years and for me a sentence nobody finished speaking.

They woke me in the thirty-second millennium, in the middle of a war the mortals called the War of the Beast: the Orks had grown themselves a maw that snapped at the whole galaxy, the Imperium reeled, and for a warband such as ours a reeling galaxy was what a battlefield is for carrion birds — a laid table, nobody counting. We plundered the shipyard belts of Ophira for three weeks while the defence there fought against an Ork moon, and I remember two things from that campaign, and neither of them is a battle.

The first: I fought against Orks on a bursting shipyard platform, back to back with warriors whose names I did not know, and one of them sang while loading the trench song of the old 114th, third verse, the one with the sally ports, and I joined in, four vox-horns strong, and for the length of a verse it was as though the battalion stood again. When the fighting was over, I asked him which company of the 114th he came from. He said he did not know what I was talking about; an old man had taught him the song, at some time, on some ship, and the old man had had it only from an older one. The battalion had become a song that had outlived its own regiment. I have not sung the third verse since.

The second: I asked after Harkor.

I asked as one asks after every waking, in passing, in status format — whereabouts master-at-arms Harkor, last known position — and the adept who attended my waking checked his registers and said, without looking up, in the tone in which one reports stock levels: "No entry under that name. Register-keeping before the sixth Warsmith is incomplete. Presumably written off."

Presumably written off. I have learned many ways in ten thousand years of hearing of a brother's death. One can see him fall; that is the most merciful, for it has a place and an hour to which one can chain the grief. One can receive the report; that too still has edges to hold on to. But to learn between two sleeps that a man who laid his hand on my sight-glass in the breach of Terra stayed behind somewhere in fifteen centuries somewhere, without an entry, without an hour, without anybody thinking it worth communicating, because nobody was alive any more who knew that there slept one whom it concerned —

I understood on that day what the Apothecary in the Sak'trada Deeps had meant. The worst is not the fighting. The worst is that the world goes on dying between the fights and does not bring one the dead singly but in sacks, unsorted, tipped out before the Wiege on waking: here. This is what has accrued in the meantime. Carry it away, we need you at the front at six.

I carried it away. I fought the campaign to its end, with all figures in the green, and when they lowered me, I spoke the Protocol, and the line I have brothers; they call me Hetair was still there — but it stood there now as the song of the 114th had been sung: by somebody who no longer knows what it is about. I had had brothers. The last who had called me by name was a missing entry in an incomplete register.

In the sleep after that, half the Cistern Lane was missing in Lochos, and the thing with the courtesy stood at the well and watched the water dry up, and nodded to it as assessors nod.

VI

I am to speak of the sleeps themselves. Good. Let us speak of the in-between.

The sleep of a Dreadnought is no sleep of the flesh. The greywater stills the remnant body, but that which thinks is only dimmed, not extinguished — a camp at night, the fires burned down, the sentries awake. In the first centuries I dreamed of Olympia, and the dreams were a homecoming: the North Ridge, the thyme wind, the city of Lochos in its hollow, the knocking of the stonemasons' hammers carrying over the slopes. I learned to look forward to sleep as a frontier sentry looks forward to leave.

Then I noticed the first missing house.

It was the ropemaker's house, down on Cistern Lane, a house about which there was nothing except that I knew it. In one sleep it stood, in the next there was a gap, smoothed over as with a trowel, and the neighbouring houses closed up as though nothing had ever stood between them. I told myself: memory fades, that is arithmetic, not drama. But the fading had a gait. Sleep by sleep more was missing — first houses, then lanes, then the sound of the hammers, then the colour of the honey, of which I know today only that I once knew it — and at some point, I believe it was around the fourth millennium, I grasped that I was watching my own siege. Something was laying trenches around my Olympia and drawing them tighter, methodically, patiently, by all the rules of the art my Legion had taught the galaxy, and I stood on the North Ridge and could not relieve the city, for I was in it and the besieger at once.

And in the warp, one must set this down, even if nobody is to read it who still wishes to sleep, one does not dream unobserved. It happened that in the lanes of my dwindling Lochos somebody stood who had never lived there. Never the same face; always the same courtesy. It offered nothing. It viewed. As buyers view a house whose occupant has fallen into arrears, and once, I no longer know in which century, it stopped before the gap where the ropemaker's house had been missing, and said, without turning round: "Fine plot."

The keepers were the counterweight. That I grasped late, and I set it down here with gratitude, the only one left to me: while inside the city fell, outside on the maintenance ledge somebody always sat and talked. The first was an Olympian armsman named Ohl who had fled with the Legion and who was assigned to me because he was too old to fight and too useful to put out. Ohl spoke to me while greasing the joints as to a mule, half tenderly, half in business, and when he died his daughter greased, and the family soon called itself the Oil-Hands, and the warband let them be, for slaves who wish to inherit a labour need no guarding.

Once — it must have been in the thirty-sixth millennium, I hang the story on a battle of which I shall speak presently — they woke me, and on the ledge sat an old man, and I said: "You are new," and the old man laughed a laugh I knew, and said: "Lord Iron, I sat on your shoulder as a boy. You taught me counting, on the barrels of your cannon. Six barrels, do you remember?"

I no longer knew it. I know to this day that I no longer knew it, for the not-knowing left a scar, and scars are the most durable archive left to me: for the boy fifty years had passed, a whole human life at my flank, and for me he was a marginal note between two wars. I understood on that day that I was to the Oil-Hands what Olympia had been to me — the abiding thing to which one fastens one's short life — and that I was dwindling as Olympia dwindled, only that they could not see it, for the iron outside stayed the same.

Of the lowering itself the Oil-Hands have built over the generations a rite of their own that stands in no liturgy of the warband and that I record here because otherwise it dies with them and because it is the wisest thing I have ever heard about sleep. When the greywater rises, the keeper does not speak the blessings of the Warpsmiths — they never learned those, deliberately, I believe. The keeper counts. He names what was still there at the last waking: the names I still knew, the verses I could still say, the lanes of Lochos that still stood — he takes an inventory, aloud, patiently, item by item, until the water rises over the vox-horns, and the last sentence is always the same: "All this we keep for you, Lord Iron. What you lose over there, you fetch back from us."

It is a lie, of course. One cannot keep memory as one keeps tools; what the sleep takes, no inventory gives back. I have known that, and they have known it, for twenty-one generations, and none has ever said it aloud — and even so I set down that no blessing, no oil and no litany in the whole history of the Legion has ever held me as that whispered inventory did. For the lie had a true core, and the core was not the stock. The core was the book-keeper. The lowering was never about what was kept. It was about the fact that outside somebody sat who found it worth the keeping.

That is the difference between me and the chained ones, and I have needed ten thousand years to find it, and it is shamefully small and carries everything all the same: it was not my sarcophagus that was better. Not my will. I had book-keepers, and they had none.

Only the Protocol grew shorter. But the Protocol I spoke alone.

VII

The battle on which the story of the old man hangs was the taking of Hive Carceri Ultima, in the year 738 of the thirty-sixth millennium, and I set it down although it does me no honour. Precisely therefore. Sette says the telling needs the place where one takes fright at oneself, otherwise it is only a parade.

The warband — it was already called the Iron Tenth then, after the share the Warsmith set aside from every spoil for the Great Debt that the Legion believed it had to collect from the universe — needed labour and reactor cores, and Hive Carceri had both. It was no great battle. It was routine: a hive city of the outermost rim worlds, defended by planetary troops who were brave, which in our book-keeping is a property of materials like brittleness.

My sector was the core of the underhive. There lay a shelter from the founding era, forefathers' work, well built — I recognised the hand of old standard patterns and had, I set this down, a moment of something like pleasure in it, as one has pleasure in a well-kept tool. In that shelter sat no combatants. The auspex images were unambiguous: heat signatures too small, too dense, too still. Civilians, some thousands. The shelter leaned with its western flank against the support pillar I had to fell in order to lay bare the reactor level — and to go around it would have cost six hours and opened the pillar from the worse side.

I felled the pillar from the good side.

I do not wish to set down the figures, and that is itself a statement, for I am of the IV Legion and always set down the figures. What I do wish to set down is this: I afterwards checked my own stirrings, as I check the weapon systems after every engagement, and found — green. All green. No echo. There was the place at which, ten thousand years before, a man had stood in a breach and lifted a no like a block of stone, and the place reported: function not assigned. I had not decided against a conscience. Simply none had appeared to vote.

That did not frighten me. That is the frightening thing I mean: it did not frighten me, it merely struck me, as a missing limb strikes one when one goes to reach with it — a clean, interested finding. I noted it in the battle report under system condition, and the Warpsmith of that era, a predecessor of Skavarn, read it and was satisfied. He called it maturing. He said the old portions were ballast from the time of the false oath, and the sarcophagus distilled the warrior out like an alembic, and I should look forward to the coming sleeps, each would make me purer.

That night — the old man on the ledge greased my joints and told me about counting on the six barrels — I spoke the Protocol, silently, to myself, and it ran:

I am — Kandron. Centurion of the 114th. I am a son of Olympia; the mountains there give — the mountains there gave something, it was sweet. I have had brothers. Iron within. Iron without.

And beneath it, in a hand that was not mine and that I nevertheless knew from within, there stood a new line of which I could not say when it had crept in:

Iron owes nothing.

I have tried to strike it out. One cannot strike out in one's own head. One can only overwrite, and to overwrite one needs material, and my material grew less with every sleep, while the foreign line stood there fresh at every waking as though newly chiselled.

Maturing, said the Warpsmith.

Siege, I said to nobody. I knew the hand of those trenches. It was our own.

VIII

Of the last waking but one I must speak, for it was the one in which the name fell, and without this place one does not understand the end.

They woke me in the year 999 of the forty-first millennium, and this time they woke all. All five Wiegen, the chained ones included; that alone told me, before the optics showed world, that something great was afoot, for the chained ones are woken only when one does not intend to catch them again. The Despoiler had raised his crusade banners for the thirteenth time, and the whole long debt of the traitor Legions was rolling towards a single name that every soldier of the Imperium carried like a prayer and every one of us like a splinter: Cadia.

The Iron Tenth did not fight at the main thrust; we were a side theatre, as always, the pincer one sets at the edge — an assault on the Kasrkin positions of the satellite Vigilatum, whose batteries swept the approach corridor. Of this battle I set down the craft, for the craft was perfect: Cadian fortress-building is the best the Imperium has brought forth since the fall of our Legion, every kasr a lesson, and I went through their trenchworks like an old master through the journeyman pieces of a foreign guild — approving, correcting, deadly. I broke three bastions in one night. I fought against men and women who did not yield, who crawled under my treads with melta bombs and while doing so spoke their prayers no louder than their firing orders, and I set down what I felt in doing it, for Sette says the telling needs this place too:

Nothing.

Not the emptiness of Carceri, which back then had at least still struck me like a missing limb. This time not even the missing struck me. I fought like weather. I was a front of iron that passed over people, and the people were terrain, and somewhere behind the front something that had once been me noted, in a dwindling hand, observations that nobody read any more. The Warpsmith called it in his report final maturing. The curves of which Skavarn would later speak come from that night.

After the battle — Vigilatum burned, the corridor stood open, and what happened to Cadia afterwards the whole galaxy knows: the planet broke apart, and the sky behind it tore open, and out of the tear the Immaterium poured into realspace like greywater into a burst sarcophagus the size of creation — after the battle, then, I stood on the Wiege deck, and the Oil-Hand of those years, Marev, Sette's mother, made me ready for sleep, and I spoke the Protocol.

I am — —.

The first line was empty.

I checked it three times, as one checks a magazine that clicks empty. Centurion of the 114th — that still stood, loose, like a rank badge without a uniform. A mountain, something sweet, faded into vocabulary. But the name, the name that had held for eleven hundred years and then ten thousand, the name with which Harkor in the breach —

"Keeper," I said, and four vox-horns made a rockfall of the word. "What is my name?"

Marev stopped in mid-movement, the grease gun in both hands, and I saw her wrestle — I did not understand then with what; today I know: with the oldest law of her family. For the first Ohl had not only written the lines down. He had also laid down when they were to be spoken, and not sooner, for a name given back too early to one who is dwindling is worn away with everything else; one gives it only when it is needed as a weapon, not as a crutch. Twenty-one generations had waited for the right day and had not lived to see it.

"In the register of the warband," said Marev at last, and her voice was calm and her eyes were not, "you stand as object Wiege-4, called the sleeper."

"That is the designation. I am asking for the name."

"I know," said Sette's mother, and laid her hand flat against my sight-glass, as ten thousand years before a master-at-arms in a breach, and it was the same gesture and this time meant the opposite: not submit, but hold out. "And I swear to you by my children's rations: there are people who know it. It is not lost, Lord Iron. It is only — kept. Do not ask where. Sleep. We will wake you when it is time."

I could have forced it. A power fist against a woman with a grease gun — the reckoning has no second line. I set down why I did not, for it is the only victory I brought with me out of the forty-first millennium: because the something behind the front that noted observations in a dwindling hand made one last note, and the note ran: they are keeping something for you. If you take it from them by force, it will not have been keeping but only spoil — and then the warp is right about you.

So I slept nameless, for fifty-six years, and in Lochos three lanes still stood, the cistern square and a single hammer, and the thing with the courtesy sat by then on the North Ridge, in my place, and waited with me for the waking — so sure of its case was it already.

And then the taste of coins, oil and thyme honey woke me, and a young voice said: "Good morning, Lord Iron. Don't be startled. It's only me. Sette."

With which this record has arrived again where it began.

IX

Of the chained ones I must speak, so that one understands what they mean to take from me when they take my sleep.

The Wiege deck of the Perpetua Malleus houses five of us. I am Wiege-4. The other four sleep no longer, and three of them have names nobody uses any more, and one never had one, for what lies in him was soldered together out of the remains of two brothers, after the battle of — I have forgotten the name of the battle and the names of the brothers as well, and that is perhaps the most merciful thing my dwindling has ever done.

Wiege-1 hangs in chains of consecrated adamantium and sings. He has sung the same trench song of the old Legion for six hundred years, verse by verse, in perfect order — only backwards, from the last word to the first, and when he arrives at the first word he begins again at the last. The Warpsmith says that in Wiege-1 there now dwells something that regards time from the other side. He is deployed against enemies one wishes to demoralise. One need not let him aim. One need only let him go.

Wiege-2 and Wiege-3 are Helbrutes, and of Helbrutes I set down only one sentence: they are sarcophagi with which one has stopped pretending that the occupant is master of the house. The flesh grows there through the iron like roots through the joints of a wall, and what comes out of the vox-horns is no howling of pain. It is howling of appetite, and the difference is the whole distance still left to me.

Wiege-5 is empty. It was not always empty. I do not ask.

I overheard the conversation about my future through the maintenance manifold, three days before the battle — not by cunning; the lords of the warband speak before their tools as unselfconsciously as before their furniture, and I have been furniture for millennia. Warsmith Ossyk Dral stood with the Warpsmith Skavarn between the Wiegen, and Dral reckoned, for Dral always reckons, and I set down his reckoning fairly, for it is not stupid, and enemies one lies stupid to oneself are already half lost:

"Four decades of sleep for one decade of service," said Dral. "Wiege-4 is the best weapon on this ship and stands idle in four decades out of five. Add the Oil-Hands: thirty mouths across the centuries, special rations, superstition on the crew deck. The sleeper has become a shrine, Skavarn, and shrines are rust in the gears of a warband. What do you offer?"

"Permanence." Skavarn's voice sounds like wet parchment. "An occupant for the Wiege who need not sleep. The old one is dreaming himself empty, Warsmith — I have the curves; in two or three sleeps there is nothing left in there that can say yes, and a weapon without a yes is scrap with a pedigree. I will give the Wiege a new will, young, hungry, bound by every rule. The old one is preserved as a ground layer — the craft stays in the spinal cord after all, the siege knowledge, all the fine fortresses. Only the hesitation is lost." A pause, and then, almost gently: "It is a mercy, if you consider it rightly. He has been besieging himself for ten thousand years. I only end the siege."

"After the boarding," said Dral. "I need him whole for the boarding. After that the Wiege is yours."

They went, and the Wiege deck was still again but for the backwards song of Wiege-1, and I hung in my greywater and checked the Warpsmith's finding as I check weapon systems, and found it — correct. That was the appalling thing. The curves were right. I was dreaming myself empty. In two or three sleeps the last lane of Lochos would fall, and then only the thing with the courtesy would sit on the North Ridge and view.

They were right in everything but a single word. Skavarn had said: only the hesitation is lost.

The hesitation was all that was left of Hetair Kandron. The hesitation was the last manned tower.

One day before the battle Ossyk Dral came to the Wiege deck himself, and that had not happened in four hundred years.

He came alone, without retinue, in the plain working armour he had worn since I had known him (Warsmiths of the old school wear their trophies inside, as lists of interest), and he placed himself before my sight-glass and regarded me a long time, as one regards a building whose demolition one has signed and whose masonry one respects all the same.

"You listened in," he said. Not a question. Dral wasted no questions whose answers he knew.

"I am furniture," I said. "Furniture hears everything."

"Then I will spare us the speech." He folded his arms. "Tell me instead where my reckoning is wrong. You were a Centurion; you kept stocks yourself. Four decades of standstill for one decade of service. A dreamer who is emptying himself. A warband that grows smaller, in a galaxy that hungers larger. If you stood in my place, Wiege-4 — before your own Wiege, with your own curves in your hand: what would you order?"

I have often thought about that question since, for it was honestly meant, and honestly meant questions from enemies are rarer than relics. I gave him the answer I had:

"The same as you, Warsmith. Line for line the same. That is what has become of us: a Legion in which everyone can check everyone else's reckoning and nobody asks any more who put in the first figure." I let the optics focus on him, so that he saw that I was looking at him. "Your reckoning is right, Ossyk Dral. It was also right when the Warmaster laid it before our Primarch, and right when the Primarch laid it before the Legion, and right at every breach since. Ten thousand years of unbroken correct reckonings — and look where we live. Somewhere there must be an error that does not stand in the lines. I have not found it. But I sleep better than all of you, and perhaps that is a clue."

Dral stood still. Then he did something I did not know in him: he laughed, briefly, a sound like a loading mechanism. "The Warpsmith says there is almost nothing left in you."

"The Warpsmith measures what he means to harvest," I said. "That is the way with harvest-gauges."

"Hm," said Ossyk Dral, and went, and at the lock he stopped once more, his back to me, and said, so quietly that it did not go into the deck record: "The 114th held my Grand Battalion's left flank at Sebastus. Eleven days. It stands in no register any more; the register-keeping is incomplete." A pause. "Fight well the day after tomorrow, Centurion."

It was the first time since the War of the Beast that anybody outside the Oil-Hands called me by a rank instead of an inventory number, and I set it down because it belongs to the reckoning that nobody keeps: even in the book-keeping of treachery there are items that refuse to come out.

X

The boarding was aimed at a convoy of the Corpus Route: three troopships, two frigates, a grand cruiser as shepherd — and the grand cruiser bore the black-and-white heraldry of those who came forth from the sons of Dorn and have made a religion of their fathers' wrath. Black Templars. The universe has a bent for symmetry that in better times I would have taken for providence and today take for what it is: siege logic. Everything comes back to the breach at which it began.

I set down the battle as I lived it, for it was the last, and the last has a claim to exactness.

The impact of our boarding claw threw me into a hangar deck full of light. The Templars were expecting us; they are always expecting somebody, that is their way of living. My target assignments came in cascades — gun positions, bulkhead reinforcements, then the first resistance in black ceramite — and I said yes and yes and yes, and the Kheres cannon sang its six-barrelled song, and behind me the Iron Tenth poured into the cruiser like water into a staved ship.

I fought through three decks. I felled a bulkhead that by the plans should have held two hours, in four minutes, for I knew the standard pattern; I had helped design such bulkheads before the builder of this ship was born, before his Chapter was born. I took a combat squad of the Templars in the cloister of their ship's chapel, between banners whose honour rolls were longer than the memory left to me, and their sergeant died with his Chapter's war cry against my fist, and I heard myself — I set this down, for it belongs to the reckoning — I heard myself answer the cry with the trench song of the old Legion, and did not know for three verses whether I was singing it forwards or backwards.

On the fourth deck they tried to kill me as one kills Dreadnoughts: with geometry. A Templar squad lured me into a munitions gallery whose floor they had underlaid with cutting charges — cleanly thought; a Contemptor that falls two decks does not get up again, no matter what dwells in him. I did not smell the charges; I have no nose any more. But I had designed such galleries, and I saw what a young Centurion would have seen ten thousand years ago: that the deck plates of that section were a hand's breadth too new for a ship of that age. One forgets faces, names, honey. The craft one forgets last; the craft is the skeleton on which everything else hung.

I stopped at the threshold, fired the Kheres cannon into the floor of the gallery and let their own trap take the deck on which they were waiting. Two of the Templars survived the fall and the rubble; I left them lying. Not out of mercy. Out of economy, I would have said once. I set down today that even then I no longer knew, and that this not-knowing was the first new thing to accrue to me in three thousand years instead of going missing.

Further down, on the between-deck, the crew of the cruiser had improvised a defence of their own: voidsmen and armsmen behind welded barricades, men and women who could do as much against the Iron Tenth as rain against artillery, and who stood all the same, because behind them lay their families' escape pods. My target assignment led straight through them. I went around the outside, through the cargo lock, which cost me ninety seconds, and justified it on the battle manifold with structural sparing of the main girders, and nobody checked it, for my justifications had been correct for ten thousand years. It was the first lie of my second life. It felt like a block of stone one lifts.

And then I reached the reactor gallery, and there, in the heart of the cruiser, Skavarn had built his stage.

He had not waited for the end of the battle. Of course not; I should have known, I who have designed or broken every trap in the galaxy: a binding needs blood in motion, a battlefield is a laid table, and what was better suited to lure the new occupant of my Wiege than the Wiege itself, steaming from the work, in the midst of the dying of two ships? The chalk signs of which Sette had spoken were glowing on my own hull — he had set them under the maintenance plates, in the weeks of my sleep, and they woke now, line by line, a trenchwork of light drawing itself around the last manned tower.

<It is time, old one>, came Skavarn's voice through the manifold, wet and friendly. <Do not resist. You have earned relief from your watch. Ten thousand years of sentry duty — what post could ever —>

The warp opened in the reactor gallery like an eyelid from within.

What came through had no shape and needed none; it was appetite with an address, and the address was me. I felt it flowing along the chalk lines, into the seams of my armour, down to the place where greywater washes round an old man, and inside, on the North Ridge above what still stood of Lochos — three lanes, the cistern square, the knocking of a single hammer — the thing with the courtesy stepped out of the nothing and viewed no longer.

It moved in.

And then two things happened at once, and I set them down in the order of their importance, not of their size.

The great one: a spearhead of the Black Templars broke into the reactor gallery from the engine room, a crusader squad with a Sword Brother and two meltaguns, and threw itself upon everything that bore the mark of Chaos, with that hatred which with them is prayer, and Skavarn's ritual guards had to turn about, and the gallery became a three-sided mincing machine.

The important one: through the maintenance manifold, on the frequency of the Oil-Hands, which stands in no warband register because slave frequencies lie beneath the attention of lords, a young voice spoke, breathless from running, for she had followed me through three burning decks as her family had followed me through ten thousand years:

"Lord Iron! Hear me — the line you are missing, the gap in the Protocol — we have it! We have always had it! The first Ohl wrote it down, in the first night, and we learn it by heart, every generation, mother to child, that is the real inheritance, the grease is only the pretext —" and then Sette, Oil-Hand in the twenty-first generation, spoke over a slave frequency into a raging battle the five lines I have already set down once at the beginning of this record, in full, without error, with the North Ridge and the honey and the oath and the brothers and the iron, and closed with the sentence the first Ohl had not written, but which in twenty-one generations had accrued of itself:

"You are Hetair Kandron, and you taught a child to count, on six barrels, and such a one does not belong to the warp."

There is a kind of ammunition against which no trenchwork helps, because it does not come from outside. The art of siege has an old word for it, the oldest of the craft, and the word is: relief.

XI

The thing in my seams reached the greywater in the moment in which the name reached me, and so they met, in me, on the North Ridge: the moving in and the relief, and I stood between them and was for the first time since Terra at full strength again.

I will not set down how it felt, for there are no words for it that do not lie. I set down what it effected, with the measuring rod: the will that Skavarn held to be extinguished — the yes-and-no, the hesitation, the last tower — got back for a moment its entire garrison. Five lines. An oath, a mountain, a honey, brothers, iron. Not as memory; memories can be ground away. As testimony, spoken from outside, by a line of free mouths that had carried through the Eye of Terror for ten thousand years what I could not hold.

And with the whole garrison of the tower I did what a Centurion of the IV Legion does with a besieger who has laid his trenches too close to the wall because he took the fortress for unmanned:

I made a sortie.

I did not turn against the thing in my seams; one does not fight in one's own keep. I turned against the binding — against Skavarn, who stood on his stage of chalk and blood singing the litany of the moving in, protected by ritual guards who were wrestling with the Templars, protected by the one certainty all Warpsmiths share: that tools do not choose. My Kheres cannon he had locked, of course, over the maintenance manifold; he was thorough.

He had forgotten the power fist. Nobody locks a fist. A fist is too simple for sorcerers.

I set down the rest of the reckoning briefly, for it was brief: three steps that shook the gallery. A ritual guard whom I kicked into the second. Skavarn's face — he still had one, half — lifting towards me, with an expression in which for the first time in centuries something real stood, and what stood real in him was miscalculation. Then the fist closed, in whose knuckles are engraved the names of fallen fortresses, around the Warpsmith of the Iron Tenth, and I added no engraving for the name, for it had earned none.

The binding tore. The thing in my seams, suddenly without an address, half moved in, half shut out, screamed on every frequency at once — and sought the nearest open vessel, as water seeks the fall, and the nearest open vessel was the stage itself, the chalk circle, the tear it had come out of. The reactor gallery began to fold itself wrongly from the inside out.

<All claws — all units of the warband: withdraw to the boarding claw>, came Ossyk Dral's voice, and I must grant him this: he was reckoning even now, quickly and rightly. <The Warpsmith has overdrawn his budget. We write the gallery off. Wiege-4 —> a pause, half a heartbeat in which ten thousand years of book-keeping faltered for a single time — <Wiege-4, withdrawal or write-off, as you please. You have earned the one as much as the other.>

It was the first time since Terra that anybody left me a choice. I took it.

<Write-off>, I sent. <But on my terms. Sette goes with you. The Oil-Hands go with you, all of them, with full hereditary right to their rations, and whoever lays a hand on them, my machine spirit will find; I have taught it to carry things forward for ten thousand years. That is the price for ten thousand years of service, Warsmith, and it is laughably cheap, and you know it.>

<Booked>, said Ossyk Dral, with the one word from the street speech of old Olympia that the Legion has never laid aside, and it was, in its iron way, a salute.

Sette wept on the slave frequency. Oil-Hands do not flinch, but weep, that I have learned in twenty-one generations, weep they can. "Lord Iron — Hetair — what are you doing —"

"I am holding a gallery," I said. "It is what I am. And Sette: the Protocol belongs to you now. Carry it on as before. One never knows when somebody will need his lines again."

Then I turned to the tear, behind which the address-less thing raged, and to the Black Templars, who stood between me and the tear, their meltaguns levelled at me, and the situation was of perfect clarity, as only final situations are: the tear had to close before the thing found itself a new address. The Templars could not close it; they could only die and pray while doing it. I could close it — an overloaded Wiege full of greywater and millennia, rammed into the chalk circle, with the reactor heart of the Contemptor pattern on fusion beyond all safeties, was exactly the sort of plug this tear had been built too small for. I had the figures. I always had the figures.

The Sword Brother of the Templars looked up at me, his power sword raised, black ceramite, the cross on his shoulder, and in his oculars I read the whole simple theology of his Chapter: traitor. Abomination. Enemy. All of it accurate. I had fired on his great-great-grandfathers, at a wall whose name he carried in every prayer.

"Son of Dorn," I said, with the quarry voice, over the raging of the tear. "We have had each other at two walls, your line and mine. Leave me the third."

And the Sword Brother — one should set down what ennobles the enemy, we never did, and it did us no good — the Sword Brother held my dead sight-glass in view for three raging seconds, as though he read in it something that stood in none of his scriptures.

Then he stepped aside and pulled his brothers with him, and between me and the tear the way was clear, and I spoke as I went — one may call it going; towers go so when they fall — for the last time the Protocol, in full, all five lines and the sixth that had accrued, and the honey, I set it down as a final finding:

The honey tasted of thyme again.

XII

What stands of that hour in the chronicles is little, and all of it in foreign books.

The Black Templars of the Crusade of Helsreach Secundus record the loss of the grand cruiser Indomitable by self-detonation after Chaos boarding, the rescue of two thirds of the crew and — in a marginal note that was checked three times by censors and three times left standing, because nobody dared strike it — the testimony of all survivors of the reactor gallery that an enemy Dreadnought sealed the warp rift with his own body, and that the Sword Brother Adalric cleared the way for it and afterwards submitted himself voluntarily to eighty days of penitential fasting, without ever explaining what for: for the clearing or for the doubt it signified.

The Iron Tenth carry Wiege-4 in their registers as written off, value rendered, which in the book-keeping of the IV Legion is the highest distinction it knows.

And on the Perpetua Malleus, on the crew deck, there has been since then a family with hereditary right to special rations that nobody touches, for the machine spirit of the ship began shortly after that battle to fail anybody who comes too close to an Oil-Hand in the lock inspections, and the warband has resolved not to investigate this. The family tends no Wiege any more. They do something else, every evening, after the shift: the eldest sits down with the children, and the children speak in chorus five lines and a sixth, about a Centurion, a mountain, a honey, an oath, about brothers and about iron, and when a child asks what it is good for, since Lord Iron is gone after all, the eldest answers what Sette answered to the end of her life:

"Because a fortress does not fall as long as its plans are being recited somewhere. And now from the beginning. First line."

Far out, though, on the Corpus Route, a debris field has drifted since that day, and in the debris field a hull segment, blackened, warped, four and a half metres of Contemptor pattern, which every auspex records as dead and which every salvage crew that ever approached has left again with nothing done — the one sort because their priests advised against it, the other because their instruments measured, near the wreck, something that did not fit the forms: no energy, no motion, no life.

Only, deep down under the iron, at intervals of years, something that the instruments, for want of a better rubric, record as dormancy.

Iron does not rust in the void. Iron waits. And if it is true what the old besiegers said: that sleep is the only fortress that is besieged from within, then this is the last thing that remains to be set down about Hetair Kandron, and I set it down with the measuring rod, for he would have wanted it so:

Somewhere in the dark a son of Olympia sleeps, for the first time in ten thousand years unobserved, and on the North Ridge above Lochos the ropemaker's house stands again, and down in the city the hammers are knocking, and nobody is viewing.

The siege is lifted.

There remains the question who composed this record, if its subject drifts in the void and sleeps. I answer it as the Oil-Hands answer everything: with an inventory. The lines up to the reactor gallery Lord Iron dictated himself, in the four days before the battle, to Sette, who could write faster than he could speak slowly; he called it his Protocol outside the skull and said he had the method from a Skitarii Alpha — he no longer knew where he had the story from, and perhaps he had only dreamed it, warp dreams sometimes carry foreign things in. The rest the Oil-Hands wrote in addition, out of what they saw, and out of what the Sword Brother Adalric dictated years later to a scribe of the Templars, without suspecting where it would travel; slave frequencies lie beneath the attention of lords, and slave networks too.

The record is kept, as the name was kept. Should a salvage crew ever open the wreck on the Corpus Route and something inside wake that asks after its lines: they lie ready. First line. A Centurion. A mountain. Something sweet.