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Lion El’Jonson: Lord of the First – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

I

Norlev hated the ship.

He hated the high-frequency whine of her three hundred-year-old plasma combustors. He had barely slept since his transfer from the laser defence platforms on Muspel. Even with the ship at its geostationary low anchorage over the capitolis complex at Sheitansvar, which it always was, even when the reactors were only working to minimum power requirements, which they always were, Norlev could feel the trembling through the bulkhead beside his bunk. When he did manage to sleep he had bad dreams – dreams of shivering cold, claws on the other side of the metal – and he would rise less rested than he had begun. He hated that it was always too cold, and he hated that it was always too dark. He hated that the vox-satellites were still down. He hadn’t been able to relay a message to Anastana and his sons in six months.

But most of all he hated the damned ship.

Her name was the Obrin. Together with another two dozen out-of-date warships and semi-derelicts, she had been left behind when the Crusade fleet had moved on to brighter worlds. Much like Norlev. Had it been Norlev’s decision he would have scrapped the lot and recycled the parts.

Maybe then the vox-satellites would be working.

Ignoring his crewmates in the armsmen’s dormitory, Norlev walked straight for his locker.

He despised its utilitarian gunmetal finish, the squeak it made as it opened. As if mankind could bring light and reason to the galaxy, but not a tube of oil. The scuffed mirror on the door’s inside winked as it crossed the light from the lho-brown lumen strip, suspended in a nest of crash webbing and naked cables.

Norlev glanced into the mirror, his eyes widening momentarily before sliding across his reflection like a spotlight over smoke.

Behind him Yansliev and Valdimir sat in fold-down alum-frame chairs. Empty ranka glasses and coloured gaming tokens littered the screw-in table that folded down from the wall between them. In the bunk beside them, Gitr lay in the single cot, still fully clothed in a cadet’s uniform and an unbuckled flak vest, having apparently forgotten to undress, staring blankly at the rivets in the ceiling. The local recruits were all like that. The planet was full of them. Norlev hated their bovine docility.

What angered him more, he realised, was that he was sure he was starting to notice the same placid traits in himself. An hour lost here, a half there, gazing at walls, overlooking the everyday jibes of his crewmates until it was too late to respond.

Reaching into the locker for his uniform, Norlev pulled on his belt. He drew the sidearm from the holster and checked the load. Voss-pattern Mark IV autopistol, a single box magazine, carrying thirty high-dispersal rounds.

‘What’re you doing, Norlev?’

Valdimir looked up from his game, his face so much like that of a drunken dog Norlev was surprised he didn’t pant as well as drool. ‘Red shift doesn’t start for another six hours.’

‘Not another kit inspection, is it?’ said Yansliev, leaning across the table with the bottle to spill more oxide-red ranka over Valdimir’s glass, drill or no drill.

By the Emperor, they were as much a disgrace to the uniform as the local mobs.

He closed the locker and turned around.

‘Gavnat,’ Valdimir swore. ‘What’s happened to your face?’

Norlev shot him between the eyes.

The flechette-burst shredded most of the officer’s face as well as Yansliev’s hand. The ranka bottle exploded. Yansliev screamed. Not at Norlev though. Not at the autopistol. At the bloodied claw of his hand. Bits of glass and flechette stuck out of it, glittering like an unwrapped gift under the swaying lumen strip. The association was a jarring one, from a time when Norlev had been able to feel, when he hadn’t felt so… different, and something within him forced the recollection down. He fired again. Another half-second squeeze delivered fifteen rounds until there was nothing left of Yansliev’s head but meat dripping from a wet skull.

Gitr was still lying in his bunk, still staring blankly, but this time at Norlev, or through him, as though he could see something wondrous written inside the back of his skull.

Something prompted Norlev to lower his weapon.

He did.

A whisper reached into his thoughts from beyond the void.

‘Yes,’ he murmured, like a man half asleep.

A distant star pulsed, as if for him alone, and he basked in the cold light of its approval.

‘I know the way to the nearest armoury locker.’

Behind him Gitr turned back to the rivets in the ceiling, ignoring the blood on his cadet’s uniform, as Norlev slotted a fresh magazine into his autopistol and stepped into the corridor.

II

‘Take us in,’ said Duriel. His voice was low, a habit of the forest, barely even registering to unaugmented ears as a whisper.

‘Weapons?’ said Stenius.

‘Not yet.’

The Invincible Reason had achieved complete translation into the Muspel System approximately twenty-one hours previously, and had been decelerating for the last ten. Attended by a silent entourage of battleships, cruisers and escorts, a splinter battlegroup of the Fourth Expedition Fleet sailing under the temporary, anonymous ident-colours of the 2003rd, she had made her long voyage from the darkness of the system Oort cloud under a cloak of secrecy. She had broadcast no transponder sequences or auto-identifier codes. She had made no attempt at hailing the planet’s Imperial authorities. Only now, the planet a cloud-swathed blue orb filling their screens, did the command crew commence pre-fire rituals on the behemoth warship’s void shield arrays and weapons systems.

The Lion, as was his custom, had shared little of the purpose behind this course, even with those whom rank and veterancy qualified as confidantes. Duriel, as was the custom of every Dark Angel, had spent the bulk of the last day-cycle catching up to his primarch’s thinking.

‘What in the Emperor’s name is going on out there?’

Duriel, captain of the 12th Order, senior forge-wright and master of the Ironwing, castellan of the Invincible Reason, lowered the slate he had been studying. Plugged into the cogitation-dense instrumentarium of the Gloriana-class capital ship’s primary command dais, the slate was superfluous, a prompt at best, an affectation at worst. If asked, he would say that he savoured the tactile experience of ‘reading’. Even if his artificer harness had already in-loaded the data in bulk and dumped it via the connection nodes imbedded in his black carapace directly into his spinal column.

He was, as his tutors in the Emperor’s forges of Narodnya and Manraga would often despair, as stuck in his ways as a five-millennia-old cogitator when he chose to be.

The Legion flagship’s central dais was a rock of adamantium struts and insulated cabling, buffeted from all sides by a sea of system noise and glittering lights. To stand there and listen, to actually listen, was to lose oneself to a seethe of warring linguistic forms. Mortal human crewmen whispered to one another in Gothic, both Low and High, impenetrable technical jargon and a plethora of dialects from a score of disparate worlds. Cogitators issued binharic clicks, heavily accented with the numeral-forms of their Terran, Martian and Jovian birthplaces. Red-robed machine-priests muttered in the harsh sing-song of lingua-technis. Armoured legionaries, stationed about the deck like angelic statuary, addressed one another curtly in Legion battle-cant or in any one of the dozens of Calibanite languages officially codified lingua mortis by the census takers of the Great Crusade.

Duriel, and in the absence of the Lion perhaps only Duriel, could follow it all.

He was not sure if his talent for language was one he had possessed before his ascension to the ranks of angels, for the opportunity to discover it had never arisen in the forest encampment in which he had lived as a child. He had not then met a man to whom he was not related, much less heard one speak another language, before the Legion recruiter had come to take him to Aldurukh.

The bridge’s cathedral-like ceiling was paned with sloping plates of armourglass, ultra-hard and toughened with void frost, baring the deck to the scattered lights of the void. Only a handful of stars were visible. The rest had been bleached out by the albedo of the bright, blue-green crescent that was their destination.

Muspel.

Duriel felt the nape of his neck prickle, the way it once had when something he was not yet consciously aware of stalked him through the trees.

‘What do you see out there, lord?’ he murmured to himself, at a register below even his habitual whisper.

‘What do they say, brother?’ said Farith Redloss, nodding towards the slate in Duriel’s hand. As master of the Dreadwing his rank and Duriel’s were technically equal, but aboard the Invincible Reason, the additional title of castellan gave Duriel sovereignty. Though Redloss called him brother, he posed his question with the due respect.

‘Little that I am at liberty to share.’

Redloss grunted, but pressed no further.

Duriel smiled, his planned response interrupted by the frustrated burr of a Mechanicum priest below the main dais, struggling again with the command systems’ Himalazian base code.

The forge-wrights of the Ironwing were, insofar as Duriel knew, a unique brotherhood amongst the Legiones Astartes, serving as a parallel and independent reservoir of machine lore to that provided by the Legion’s Techmarines. Following in the footsteps of their earliest forebears, they learned their arts from the enginesires and artisan-lords of the Throneworld’s ancient forges – the very same forges that, long after they had tutored the antecedents of the First Legion in machinecraft, would go on to host Fulgrim and Vulkan and Ferrus Manus. The First Legion as a whole, too, still received the bulk of its consumables and equipment from Terra rather than from any of the forge worlds that had been swallowed up by the growing Imperium – much to the occasional chagrin of the Expedition’s vestigial Mechanicum complement. Regardless of how far the Expedition journeyed from the Throneworld, however many times it had split and split again, this preference had remained in place. To most outsiders who had served prior terms of service on other Expedition vessels, the experience of a First Legion warship was one, initially at least, of horror, spent wondering how any craft as complicated as a Gloriana could function without a horde of crimson robes beetling about its interiors. The truth was that the forge-wrights and Techmarines were capable of tending to all but the most arcane and intemperate of their technologies themselves, and did so.

Duriel was the master of a select order, a caretaker of its secrets as much as its technologies, and even he was not privy to why any of this should be so.

He had his theories.

He scratched thoughtfully at his beard, his hand un-gauntleted but sheathed in signus rings and digital lasers. It was a mortal habit that, he knew, brought his brothers in the Council of Masters no shortage of amusement.

It makes you look like a peasant, Griffayn of the Firewing had once said.

‘What can you tell us?’ said Stenius. The courtly, Calibanite manner of speaking whilst actually saying little was one that many of the older Terrans in the Legion found irritating. Stenius, though he masked it as well as any lord of Caliban, was assuredly one of them.

Duriel frowned at the slate in his hand.

‘123997.M30. Two Chartist ships lost in the warp en route to Muspel. 125997.M30. A Mechanicum ark transiting the subsector is forced into an emergency translation. It isn’t heard from again, presumed lost with all hands. 129997.M30. The first brigade of Muspellian irregulars is lost in its entirety, five thousand men-at-arms, in transit to a training exercise aboard the Muspel XII astropathic relay station. No reasons given and no trace of the missing conveyor and its escorts is ever found. 131997.M30. A fire aboard one of the orbital substations effectively cuts off nine-tenths of the planet from vox and auspex coverage. That was six months ago. It still hasn’t been repaired. A rash of accidents among the resident Mechanicum, apparently. And the transport that was supposed to be bringing in a fresh detachment along with a strengthened skitarii detail is months overdue.’

‘You make it sound like the Bermudan Tryptych,’ said Stenius.

‘The what?’ said Redloss.

‘An old Terran myth,’ Duriel explained. Stenius looked at him, surprised. ‘The libraries of Manraga were well conserved, brother, and its masters encourage broader study.’

‘There are no oceans left on Terra,’ said Stenius, ‘and yet we still tell ourselves tales of captains driven mad and ships lost without trace.’

‘Humans will always need their ghost stories,’ said Duriel. ‘It was the Ninth that brought this world to compliance, was it not?’

‘The original inhabitants of Muspel had regressed into a state of savagery,’ said Redloss. ‘Barbarians, squatting in the ruins of Dark Age cities, crying out for the primitive gods that had abandoned them. According to Sanguinius’ own writings the native populace was entirely passive, not a trace of choler in its humours at all.’

‘The Ninth didn’t find even a single weapon,’ said Stenius. ‘Not so much as a flint axe.’

Redloss crossed his arms over the broad curve of his breastplate. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere.’

‘By every iterator’s account, the Blood Angels left the world perfectly compliant,’ said Stenius.

A tectonic rumble passed through the command deck superstructure, and a burst of thrust from the Invincible Reason’s colossal drives slowed her for the final half-million-kilometre coast into the planet’s orbital fleet anchorages. Across the low wall of display panes that encircled the dais Duriel could see the icons of eighteen night-black battleships as they joined the flagship in her deceleration. Their actual appearance, as glimpsed through the flagship’s crystalflex screens, was far less ordered or majestic. A positional thruster out of alignment. The faintest wobble in bearing. The oily shimmer of rolling shield blackouts. Others were missing sensor masts, or looked as though they had faced down an asteroid and lost. The scars of Rangda were fresh on all of them. And not just the ships. Only the Lion himself knew the true toll that the third and final xenocide had taken on the Legion. It was a burden he chose to bear alone. Duriel sighed.

They would always be the First, envied and admired by all, but the X, the XIII, the XVI, even the XVII in spite of their own setbacks, all threatened to surpass them in strength and in deed now.

But they had done their duty.

The Dark Angels always did their duty.

‘I wish I knew what we were doing here,’ Stenius muttered, interrupting his commander’s reverie. ‘The warp claims its share of shipping, and some regions have always been more treacherous than others. A few hundred die-hard malcontents intent on disruption is only to be expected on a newly compliant world, even one as ostensibly peaceable as Muspel, whatever the Ninth claims.’

Duriel gestured towards the peaceful pirouette of void-anchored ships in the crystalflex, a pair of semi-retired heavy cruisers wearing a collage of obsolete heraldries; a handful of destroyers and corvettes, all drifting in near-total EM-silence. A couple of the lighter escorts were signalling contradictory distress codes, one engine fire and one full-blown mutiny, but the rest were eerily quiet.

‘Does this not seem amiss to you, brother?’

‘This is beneath us,’ said Stenius. ‘Unless it’s the Lion’s intention to bring slight upon the Angel.’

‘That is beneath you, my son.’

The three knights turned. Stenius blanched and dropped to one knee, head bowed, chin to his plastron. The command deck’s titanic blast doors ground into the receiving blocks as Lion El’Jonson, primarch of the First Legion, swept up the ascent ramp to the dais.

Huge in his intricately crafted harness of powered plate, a gift from the Emperor Himself, the Lion was an enigma to the laws of reality, somehow achieving the feat of being larger, greater, than the mighty Gloriana that conveyed him. Gilt scrollwork decorated the curved black ceramite, ornate reliefs depicting forest scenes. At one hip, the artificer edge of the Lion Sword rested in a sheath artfully fashioned to evoke folded leaves. In a holster worn from the other was the Fusil Actinaeus. The Emperor alone knew how many lives of human, xenos and sentient AI it had terminated since its conception in the Dark Age of Technology, before He had consigned it to the bottomless vaults of the First Legion’s armouries. But it had found a fitting home in the left hand of the secular enlightenment’s foremost god of war.

The Lion moved as a predator moves through the forest, all about him hush and stillness as he swept his fur-edged cloak from behind him and took his seat in the carved wooden command throne. His majesty went beyond mere physical stature, his brooding presence alone enough to cow a hall of proud transhuman knights. The Lion was warrior above all other warriors. Seventeen brothers he may have had, but that was far from an acknowledgement that any had been made even remotely equal or that the Lion of Caliban was not the most singular of beings.

Drawing a crown of dark ceramite from his head, allowing his long mane of russet-gold hair to fall across over his shoulders, he leaned forward, eyes the same brutal green of Caliban’s forests taking in two dozen display panes all at once. The Dark Angels were capable of swift and incisive action, but in every endeavour, in peace or in war, it was the unseen hand of the Lion that guided them, providing for each of his sons a piece of the larger picture that he and he alone could see.

The universe waited on his word.

He made it wait.

‘Board those ships,’ he said, a voice so authoritative it could never have been mistaken for human.

‘Which ones, sire?’ said Duriel.

‘All of them.’

III

Aravain reached up into the cargo netting in the overhead space, carefully hanging the bundle of dried leaves and seed cones. When he pulled his hands away, the scent on his gauntlet was that of another world, a dark and hateful world, a world that had never wished anything for Aravain and his kind but the bloodiest of deaths. He closed his eyes and drew breath, and for the briefest of moments the reek of promethium and the howl of turbofans pitched for vertical uplift was no more. In its place, the lethal, still-wild dignity of the mountainous Northwilds, his home, still reigned. He opened his eyes, allowing the launch bay klaxons and engine noise to again pass his mental guard. The simple charm he had set bounced and turned on its wire as the rest of the squad trouped up the boarding ramp. He made a quick sign in the air, the emerald leaves of his psychic hood breathing the ice-cold winds of Mount Sartana over the nape of his neck, as he mouthed a prayer against the dangers of the void.

‘Brother-knights,’ barked the squad sergeant as he came last up the ramp.

His name, Kaye, had been etched in curving filigree into the edgework of his armour, the plasteel oiled and lapped to a dark mirror-shine. An elaborate hierarchy of symbols identified him as a knight of the Third Order, 15th Company, commander of Tactical Squad ‘Martlet’. The emblem of the Stormwing was etched into his breastplate. And it appeared again, more discreetly, alongside the unit markings on his right pauldron, together with a deliberately obtuse arrangement of subordinate sigils that denoted rank in the parallel echelons of the hexagrammaton. Each new examination of his armour revealed heraldic icons of secret orders more obscure even than these, enfolded within leaf and laurel motifs.

He drew a long, cross-hilted Calibanite warblade from its sheath.

‘On the eve of battle, we give reverence.’

The squad sergeant turned his sword point down to the gunship’s deck plates and then went to one knee, his battleplate purring as he lowered his brow to the crosspiece. The Dark Angels crowding the troop aisle similarly took the knee, swearing on blades and bolters.

The mortal woman already strapped into her too-large restraints reached instinctively for the confiscated imager unit that should have been in her satchel. From the corner of his eye Aravain saw her frown in annoyance.

‘For the Lion and Caliban,’ Kaye declared.

‘For the Lion and Caliban,’ came the rejoinder.

The sergeant rose with a whirr of servo-assisted knee joints as the rest of the squad backed into their restraint harnesses.

Aravain found himself directly opposite the woman. Savine, Kaye had called her. She flashed him a nervous smile, which he ignored. Kaye banged his fist on the roof, reaching over the high rim of his gorget to manually vox-click a ready signal to the cockpit. The shriek of the turbofans redoubled in intensity. The human woman muttered her own prayer as the hatch swung up to mute the launch bay din and locked. Aravain’s long moustaches obscured a thin smile. Her carefully secular phrasing, even in the midst of prayer, amused the cynic in him. That she was diligent enough to use it even whilst in the grip of fear of what was to follow spoke of an inner courage that impressed him. Despite the conspicuous medicae armband and flak vest that she wore for protection, the woman was clearly one of the remembrancers that had joined the Expedition fleet in the decades after Perditus. The Dark Angels were not the XVI or the III, whose embrace of the new order seemed to speak of poor taste, a boorish desire to have one’s achievements celebrated beyond the ranks of brotherhood, but that hadn’t stopped a persistent and self-assured handful from trying.

The allure of the First, he supposed.

He closed his eyes, blotting out external noise, preparing himself to spend the minutes of void flight in meditation.

‘Is it normal for a Legion combat squad to be accompanied by one of its Librarians?’

He gritted his teeth, eyes still closed. ‘No.’

‘What’s the significance of that… fetish you put in the ceiling?’

Aravain said nothing, and the woman fell mercifully quiet. With a lurch the Thunderhawk lifted from its landing block, pirouetting on its slab-hulled axis towards the launch bay doors. The woman murmured. The gunship shuddered into forward motion. The sudden shift in velocity barely affected the enhanced humours of a Legiones Astartes legionary, but the remembrancer gripped the harness straps as though she feared she might be thrown into space.

‘Why… would the Lion… accept an… imagist… onto… his… ship… and then… deny her… her… imager?’

‘Who can say?’

Unlike the human woman’s, Aravain’s vocal cords were scarcely perturbed by the gunship’s vibrations.

‘What… do you… think… we’re going to… find… over there?’

Trigaine, Kaye’s direct subordinate, chuckled as the rest of his brothers fitted helmets and performed last-minute checks on their weapons.

‘I don’t know about you, my brothers, but I’m still hoping for orks.’

Click here to buy Lion El’Jonson: Lord of the First.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mikhail Savier.

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