The Knight of Mandatio
The centaurs draw back their black saddle bows and loose.
Their arrows are long darts of lethal bloodlight. Their first volley passes over Loken to drive him forward. Where they strike, against causeway stone, pool edge or sky-mirror bowl, the three burning arrows explode like bolter rounds, casting broken ceramic and flakes of stone into the air, and spilling the reflected stars.
There is no cover. Loken starts to race down the causeway towards the leading sagittary, hoping to close with him before he or his two grim companions can string a second volley. But they have already nocked their next flight of crimson arrows, and are bending their powerful torsos to loose again.
They falter, all three of them, suddenly. Three faces of Horus grimace in pain, as though afflicted by some unseen injury. Still, they loose, but their shots are off-mark. The arrows of the two sagittaries at the sides of the twilit garden strike against obsidian columns in sprays of pink light. The arrow of the lead sagittary, despite his last-moment flinch of pain, flies more truly.
Loken dives headlong off the causeway to avoid it. The pool’s ink-dark water enfolds him as the arrow destroys two more scrying pools.
The three sagittaries recover their composure, and spur forward, fresh arrows nocked. The Luna Wolf has vanished. Smoke rises from the shattered urns and bowls their darts have exploded. Ripples spread wide and slow across the left-hand pool, disrupting the zodiacal patterns and the tiny new moon reflected in the water’s glossy black mirror.
The leader stops halfway along the causeway, where Loken was last standing. He stares down into the ripples, his bow drawn ready. He jerks his head in a gesture that any man who had served alongside the Lupercal, or First Captain Abaddon, would recognise. The centaur on the right-hand edge of the pools starts to canter at once, rounding the far end of the pool to join his leader on the causeway. The leader, and the centaur facing him across the left-hand pool, draw back their right arms, and loose arrows down into the water.
In starless black, his senses muffled by more than water, Loken sinks. The depth of the pool is a cold, inky darkness. Silver bubbles of air bead the contours of his plate and his slow-moving limbs, and tumble upwards around him, like mirror stars dislodged from the surface. He sees the bright flashes, to his left and directly ahead, as arrows, burning like scarlet neon, slice down into the water at steep angles, hissing like angry snakes. The arrows trail away, until they are lost from view in the blackness below. Their bloodlit fire has not been extinguished. They have simply travelled too far. The pool has no fathomable bottom.
The lead centaur strings another arrow. The archer facing him across the water does likewise. The third is starting up the causeway to join his commander. Nothing has risen to the surface. No arrow-speared corpse has bobbed up. But the leader sees the tiny trace of silver bubbles, air trapped beneath the curve of a pauldron or plastron, escaping to the water’s surface.
He strains to loose again, his bowmanship the fluid model of perfection. On the wild and un-timed steppes of the immaterium, he and his kin have hunted forever, and brought down every quarry in the warp. Their bow-skill has become so intuitive, so perfect, it has the grace of high art.
Loken’s martial skill does not. He has never cared for the perfection of form, like Lucius or Eidolon, or any other showman. He does not care how he looks when he fights, only what that fight can achieve. His skill has the grace of high function, delivered for maximum effect and the greatest efficiency: Astartesian principles of practicality and tactical performance to reverse an enemy’s advantage, even in the most untenable situation.
The arrows hiss into the pool. As they strike, Loken erupts from the water, right at the edge of the pool beside the causeway. He appears in a spray of water, and Rubio’s blade lashes out in a lateral slice even though Loken is but chest-high against the causeway edge.
The sword severs the rear ankles of the lead sagittary. The leader makes a strangled, animal sound as he topples onto his side on the causeway stones, forelegs kicking and churning. Loken has already hoisted himself out of the pool. He rolls over the fallen centaur’s body, and uses its spasming, snorting bulk as cover as the third centaur bears down on him along the causeway at a gallop, bow drawn. Rubio’s fine blade has no utility against a large, moving target with a ranged weapon. Loken wrenches the bow from the fallen leader’s grip, and a bloodlight arrow from the spilled quiver. The arrow stings and burns his fingers as he nocks it.
Blame yourself, Lupercal, Loken thinks as he draws the bow back, kneeling behind the thrashing centaur. Bolter and blade are the fundamental weapons of the Legiones Astartes, but the great Lupercal always insisted his Luna Wolves should know the way of all weapons, and train in their function, through endless practice evolutions in the cages and the sparring decks. His warriors should be ready for any circumstance.
‘Imagine,’ he once said, ‘that you are caught on some simple world during a compliance, your sword lost, your ammunition spent. Could you use even the basic weapons of the Imperium’s enemies against them?’
The Luna Wolves could fight with anything. A spear, an axe, a trident, a net, they knew the fundamentals of all, the strengths and weaknesses, just as they could turn a stick into a weapon, a rock, a table, a mirror, a pen.
Loken has not shot a bow for years, but the eidetic Astartesian mind does not forget a technique once it has been learned.
He looses at the centaur charging at him, just as the charging centaur looses at him. The centaur’s arrow strikes the belly of the fallen leader, and the leader’s thrashing, whinnying screams increase in intensity. Loken’s arrow strikes the approaching centaur in the centre mass of its human torso. Its charge becomes a helpless, tumbling collapse. It slips sideways onto the causeway and crashes over into the right-hand pool in a sheet of spray.
The remaining centaur shoots across the left-hand pool. His skill is superb, but he lifts his aim too high for fear of hitting his stricken leader. The arrow spits past Loken’s shoulder. Loken turns, still on his knee, still using the beast’s body as a shield, and nocks another corrosive dart. It streaks across the pool, its lurid pink trail reflecting beneath it like a shooting star. It strikes the centaur just as he is drawing again, and shatters his bow in his hands. Hurt, snarling, the sagittary throws the broken bow aside, draws a black scythe off his back and jumps headlong into the pool.
The mirror pools are not fathomless to the centaur-sons of Horus, it would appear. The sagittary thrashes through the black water towards Loken, churning it like a cavalry outrider fording a river. Even half-submerged, he moves with furious equine power and speed.
Loken stands up, nocks a third arrow, ignoring the sting of it in his hand, and shoots it through the approaching centaur’s face. The sagittary shudders, his head snapping back, and he rolls onto his side, wallowing in the pool, floating for a few moments before slowly sinking into the glassy blackness.
The pool’s chopped water sloshes against the stone sides, before slowly returning to stillness. Loken snaps the bow across his knee and casts it away. He recovers his sword. He can still trace the smudge of fire along its edge.
The maimed leader is on his side on the causeway, his huge, gleaming form panting and rasping, death squeezing the last gulps of breath out of him. His black skin, knotted with muscle, is sheened with sweat. Dark blood from his severed limbs and the arrow in his belly forms a new mirror on the causeway stone.
‘Oathbreaker!’ he snorts at Loken, trying to turn his head.
‘I kept my oaths,’ Loken replies. ‘I stood firm against all enemies. I kept brotherhood when others forsook it. I served the Luna Wolves, and maintained that proud name.’
The sagittary laughs, a ghastly sound thickened and choked by the blood in his throat. ‘Did you uphold the confraternity of the Mournival, Loken? You did not!’
Loken walks around its body so he can look it in the eyes, though he has no wish to see the face it wears. That face, familiar from his beloved father, and so many of his brothers. It is flecked with blood, with a spittle of foam around its lips, and twisted in venomous rage towards him.
‘I did,’ Loken says. ‘The duty of the Mournival was to stand counsel to our father. To guide him, and keep him ever true, even if our advice was not what he wanted to hear. We were meant to balance his errors of judgement. I never broke that duty. The Mournival failed, but I have never, ever forsaken that oath. I’m here to keep it, even now.’
The sagittary laughs, blood spraying from his mouth.
‘This is how you keep your pledge to your primarch?’ His voice is wheezing, mocking.
‘The oath had many parts,’ Loken replies. ‘But all were contingent to the last and highest. To swear to uphold the truth of the Imperium of Mankind, no matter what evil may assault it. My father’s truth is no longer that truth. It opposes it. It has become that assailing evil.’
The sagittary stares up at him, his breathing shallow and frayed.
‘You honestly believe that, don’t you?’ he asks. ‘You child. You vain, naive child. You think you are blameless, and have kept your promises, through all this horror–’
‘Seven years of horror,’ says Loken. ‘Seven years of loss. The greatest price we have ever paid for anything. I would give anything to undo what has been done. I will give anything to make it stop.’
‘You will!’ the centaur spits.
Loken nods. ‘I will. I accepted that when I took the oath. No matter the cost. That was our promise. A trillion lives to halt the darkness. Whatever it may take. No matter the cost.’
The sagittary starts to laugh again, gagging and coughing gore. Loken raises his sword to end its mockery and its misery.
‘You’re too late anyway,’ the sagittary says, looking up at him. ‘Far too late. While you have fought your vain fight to keep a meaningless pledge, the world has ended. There’s none of your truth left to fight for. The Imperium has gone, Loken. The Imperium is lost.’
Loken brings the sword down anyway.