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Valdor: Birth of the Imperium – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

Sevuu watched the flyer come in from the west, low across the ravines of eastern Anatolya, a deepening sky at its back. He shaded his eyes with a dry palm, squinting against the glare of the slowly sinking sun. Before him stretched the baking stonescape of rock and smoulder, still angry, still hot.

The flyer trailed two lines of dirty smoke. As it neared, dipping in the heat, Sevuu noticed its chipped red hull, its old-style turbine nacelles. It was big – a twenty-seater, maybe – but out of shape.

Sevuu smiled. Just like her to find a rust-hulk, the kind of thing any out-of-luck merchant prince would scrape up from a salvage yard. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her in a Palace vehicle. All that gold didn’t really suit her.

He waited, standing still as the dust billowed up around his robes. The flyer extended landing pads, and the turbines swivelled earthwards. In a whine-hail of engines, it came down, kicking up dry soil across the landing site.

Then he moved, walking gingerly across the rock-strewn field, covering his mouth against the grit with a mesh scarf. The first two people out of the flyer were her guards, chainmail armoured, environment masked, projectile-weapon clutching. Sevuu had never discovered what regiment or detachment she took her close protection from – it was hard, even now, to keep track of all the current, semi-current, legal and illegal military units on a world whose only real occupation for several mortal generations had been killing.

Then she emerged, waddling down the ramp, swaddled in grey skirts, clomping her heavy boots, eyes hidden behind thick shades. Her hair was tied up, wrapped around in a red scarf, exposing only patches of her dark, tough skin.

Sevuu went up to her, extending his hands in greeting. She grabbed them both, squeezing hard.

‘Sevuu,’ she said.

‘Madam High Lord,’ he replied.

‘Ready to show me?’

‘Everything,’ he said.

On the journey, two things occurred to him as if for the first time, despite how often he had made the same flight and seen the same things.

The first was the vastness of the place. Soon after lifting again from the landing stage, locked down in the flyer’s hold and pressed up against a smeary viewport, he could see the land wrinkle away towards the curved horizon, a mass of cranial defiles and pale orange mesas. The sky was still a pale blue in the west, darkening at the apex of the atmosphere’s dome, and long shadows ran west-east.

This country had no settled name. It had been depopulated for hundreds of years, just another casualty of chem-clogged warfare and environmental collapse. So much of the globe was the same. Humanity had clung on during the years of strife, crammed within the iron shells of the great coastal cities that now peered across boiled-off seabeds, but not everywhere. For hundreds of kilometres, thousands of kilometres, there was nothing now – just the tick of poison-detectors and rad-counters, the scuttle of six-eyed rodents, the brush of a reproachful wind.

This place, he had been told, had once been called Urartu. There had been kings here, just as there had been kings everywhere – tech-warlords with violent courts, barely deserving the many titles they were given. So far, so unremarkable. You could have said the same about the wild steppes of Asia, the teeming weapon factories of Europa, the hyper-cities of Pan-Pacifica – all at one another’s throats, gripped by the terror and ecstasy of killing.

But there was something about this place. Something primordial.

And that was the second thing. The rocks were old here. Very old. The ruins were old. The watercourses were old. You could smell the age, staining everything, humming softly under a surface cocktail of military-grade chemical spills.

Sevuu was not a historian. There had only been real historians operating on Terra for a short time, ever since He had brought them back into service, and so the past was to him as it was to almost everyone, a blurry mass of myth and conjecture. But you looked at the rocks, here. You ran your finger over them, and you felt where old rainfall had pattered and the hoof-prints of extinct animals were preserved, and you knew. You knew that a story had started here, so long ago that its opening words would never be remembered, but that the story itself still mattered, for it hadn’t finished yet.

Sevuu looked over at High Lord Uwoma Kandawire, who was not looking through the viewport at the scenery. She was sitting in her chair, small and uncomfortable. Her hands gripped the armrests. She had taken her shades off, and that made it easier to see the unease on her face.

‘You have already had a long journey,’ Sevuu said.

Kandawire glanced up at him, roused from thoughts of her own, then shot him a wry smile.

‘You’d have thought,’ she said, ‘that after all we’ve done, all we’ve gone through, we could design an atmospheric flyer that didn’t make me puke.’

Sevuu nodded. Of course, the High Lord was incorrect. There were plenty of flyers that she could have taken, ones that glided through the air with nary a vibration, air-conditioned and whisper-quiet; but they were ostentatious and expensive and would have been noticed by any of the hundreds of makeshift intelligence operations working both within and without the Palace system. And so she, Mistress of the Lex Pacifica and commander of a bureaucracy of thousands, had made herself pukesome on a rattling hunk of poorly riveted steel. Admirable devotion to the cause.

‘Not far now,’ Sevuu said.

Kandawire pushed her shoulders back, hard into the flaking synthleather padding, and tried to ride the judder. ‘I read your ’slate bulletin,’ she said. ‘Anything to add before we arrive?’

Sevuu shook his head. ‘Not really. I can’t decide if they were careless, or we were thorough.’

‘You were thorough. It’s why I chose you.’

‘Or they thought, with some justification, that no one cared enough to look.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘That too.’ For the first time, she looked out of her viewport, where the sky was falling away into that deep, oceanic blue that ushered in sunset. Stars were already visible in the east, tiny points of light purer than any now generated on a spoiled world. ‘I’m grateful to you, that you took this on. I’m mindful of the dangers you all faced.’

Sevuu bowed, appreciative. ‘It has been fascinating.’

‘I feel, to be honest, that I already have much of what I need. Your report was as complete as ever. But I–’

‘–needed to see for yourself.’

Kandawire smiled. ‘We do, don’t we?’ She turned away from the viewport. ‘Even now, that hasn’t changed.’

A light blinked on the overhead panel, and the flyer began to dip into its descent. The vibration became worse.

‘Would anything change your mind?’ Sevuu asked.

‘Plenty,’ Kandawire said. ‘I want to be wrong. I always have.’

The shaking hit a rhythmic stride, marking their descent down to another dirt-blown landing strip bordering what had once, on the edge of a species’ memory, deserved the name civilisation.

‘You’re not often wrong,’ said Sevuu.

They did not ascend the mountain that day.

By the time they’d come down to the final-stage landing ground, the compound’s security lumens were at full beam and the sun was burning its way into a distant, still war-ravaged, west. Sevuu escorted Kandawire through the streets of his temporary township – a dirty grid of prefab accommodation blocks on the edge of the landing strip, airlifted in two months ago and bolted together against the elements. The wind was blowing from the high eastern scarps, stirring the dust into spirals. Sevuu had donned an environment mask by then, but Kandawire seemed content to wrap her scarf around her face and huddle against the gritty breeze.

The security detail that met them was from Sevuu’s command – twelve troopers of the Yoyoda Servine 12th, drawn from a regiment that had seen active service nine months ago halfway across the planet and had since been put on less arduous duty to recover. They were good, professional men and women, but Kandawire’s bodyguards looked altogether more threatening as they fanned out across the landing site.

Sevuu took the High Lord to her quarters – one of the larger units, cleared hurriedly and kitted out with a working heater-unit. She took a single look at it and hid her dismay reasonably well. Then he bade her a good night, closed the doors and double-checked the security details.

He didn’t sleep much after that. His own quarters were draughty, and once the sun disappeared the temperature plummeted. He reviewed his work. He tried to ignore the clump and bang of armed troops patrolling the perimeter fence. Eventually, he lay on his sagging cot, staring at the ceiling, thinking back over the past weeks of toil and what it all meant, or didn’t mean. Gradually, slinking around the edges of his blinds, sunlight crept back in, and another day had passed.

Sighing, he got to his feet, washed at the basin, tried to make his crumpled uniform look a little less disgraceful. A shot of recaff and a carb-stick later and he was making his way back to Kandawire’s unit. He knocked on the door. When she opened it, she looked crisp and businesslike, freshly draped in those long robes she always wore, the scarf artfully arranged again – a sky-blue one, this time.

‘Sleep?’ he asked.

‘Better than you, by the looks of things,’ said Kandawire, gingerly stepping down the metal steps.

They met their escort – more of the chainmail-armoured soldiers – and took a convoy of six trucks out of the eastern gate and up into the highlands beyond. Five of the carriers were Odion troop haulers, heavy and bolstered with thick metal plating. Theirs was a civilian transport, adapted for the rough terrain and, as a result, boneshakingly uncomfortable.

The air was crisp and clear, still cold although warming fast. The rockscape stretched away from them in all directions, bare and glistening with the last of the dew. It was a pale brown, like flesh. Ahead loomed their destination.

‘Impressive,’ said Kandawire, tilting her shades down and peering over the rim. ‘A suitable location for the drama of it, at least.’

It was a long trek up the dirt tracks, ones that were barely used by any but the old smuggler-gang remnants. Scrub clung to the margins, black-leaved and sparse. You could still taste the rads here, making the air pungent like spilled spice.

Ahead of them, it loomed – double-peaked, a sweep of mountain like a white wave. Behind its shoulders marched the badlands of the lesser Caucasus, snow-capped and wind-blasted, but ahead of its skirts there was nothing but more emptiness.

The mountain. Ararat. Storied since the earliest days of humanity, a name recorded and erased and recorded again in a thousand holy palimpsests, all of them now proscribed and destined for the incinerators.

‘There’s nothing here,’ Sevuu said, bracing himself against the movement of the transport. ‘Nothing left to fight over. I still don’t understand it.’

‘There’s plenty here,’ said Kandawire. ‘On the other side of this range, a few hundred kilometres away, there’s an empire. One responsible for the death of a whole army. We sent it in, it never came out.’

Sevuu looked at her, startled. ‘Really?’ he asked.

‘Even now.’ Kandawire looked like she was enjoying herself. ‘Its days are marked, of course. All these places – their days are marked. We’ll send another army in there, one day. It’s all about choosing the moment.’

‘So this was a warning, here,’ Sevuu said, cautiously. ‘A display of strength.’

‘I don’t think so. I think the symbolism was more important.’ Kandawire rubbed her elbows to get the blood moving. The bumps and rocking were getting arduous. ‘But, in a way, it’s always been about strength, this whole thing, from beginning to end. The question we should be asking is – what kind?’

‘And you have an answer to that.’

‘I have an answer to everything,’ said Kandawire. ‘The right one, I hope.’

‘No doubt.’

Now they were climbing higher, riding the switchbacked trails over deep defiles. It got hotter inside the transports as the sun climbed with them, boiling off the last of the mists and making the air shimmer. The atmosphere became thin, making the engines labour. It took several hours of shaking and revving across the uneven terrain before, finally, the narrow, embedded shaft of Sevuu’s locator-spear came into view. The transports shuddered to a halt, steaming in the sun’s glare. One by one, the guards disembarked, looking around themselves warily.

Sevuu dropped to the ground and offered Kandawire a hand. Then they walked, their limbs stiff, past the metre-high locator-spear and out across the massif beyond.

Flags snapped everywhere, caught in the strong breeze. Long trenches had been dug across the landscape, two metres deep and already scudded with snow. Workers huddled against the biting breeze, some of them with thin strips of exposed flesh under environment wrappers, others with dumb augmetics glinting. They went slowly, both human and servitor, half from the cold, half from the need to pay close attention to what they were doing.

Kandawire surveyed the scene, all the while clambering over the frost-glistening gravel. Sevuu came with her, poised to offer an arm, should she need one. The cold air was already making his throat ache.

‘A suitable site,’ she said, looking back and forth, up to the cliffs above, down to the long snaking road that had brought them here. ‘I’m not a soldier, you understand.’

‘I understand,’ said Sevuu.

She smiled at him – a flash of white teeth. ‘I can see why they did it here, though. Hemmed in, very high up. Flyers would struggle, yes? But a wide place where an army – where two armies – could meet. A proper contest.’ She breathed in, deeply. She put her hands on her hips, and stopped moving. ‘This is where it happened, then.’

Sevuu kept walking. ‘I wanted to show you this one.’

They picked their way between trenches, watched all the way by their chaperones. Kandawire started to pant – this was not her natural element – and her chainmail escorts moved in closer in case she needed them.

Soon the trenches fell away behind them, one by one, filled with their gravel-dusted items. The soft chitter of servitor-binaric faded, and they were standing on the margins, where the plain began to break up into fractured rock shelves. A few hundred metres further, and the land plummeted again, falling away in cloud-wreathed steps.

Sevuu squatted down beside the flapping skirts of a pinned awning, pushing his visor back as he did so. Kandawire joined him, and he caught a faint whiff of perfume – an urban scent, one worn in the growing cities of the south-east, not something to take into the wastes.

He lifted the protective plastek sheets carefully, seeing how the dew clung to the earth under them. The objects revealed were small – just fragments of wholes, shrapnel and jetsam. He reached for one of them, picking it up carefully and turning it over in his palm.

‘We get a lot of these,’ he said, handing it to Kandawire.

She took it, holding it up to the light. ‘Raptor Imperialis,’ she said, narrowing her eyes. Her fingers rubbed grit from the lacquer, revealing an armour-pin and its device – an eagle’s head surrounded by four thin jags of lightning. The image held her gaze for a long time. ‘I argued against this image,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘I told them it set the wrong tone. We were builders, not destroyers. An eagle builds nothing but its own eyrie, and a storm merely ravages. One of many arguments I lost. They were after a different message.’

‘The armour pieces are mixed. Some analyse as a ceramic compound, something very strong, heat-resistant, nothing I’ve seen before. Other pieces are metal – steel, even iron. And then there’s the rarest of all. We can’t even get it through the analysers without them breaking. To the touch, some of the fragments are still warm. And they look for all the world like–’

‘Gold,’ said Kandawire, getting back to her feet. She stowed the armour-fragment away. ‘Gold that never tarnishes, gold to withstand every flame. It’s not really gold, though. It just looks like it.’

‘I have a lot more to show you,’ Sevuu said.

‘How many died?’

He paused. ‘Thousands. Tens of thousands. More than we can count here.’

Kandawire nodded. Her fingers, wrapped in linen, curled up. ‘You won’t need to. I want you gone in two days. I want all this taken down and the compound pulled up.’

‘But we haven’t–’

‘It’s dangerous. It’s right what they say – the truth is in the earth.’ She started to walk again, a limping gait that betrayed her lack of conditioning. ‘I’ve seen all I need to.’

‘Like I said. I have no idea why,’ Sevuu said, watching her go. ‘You read the report. It looks… senseless.’

Kandawire kept on going.

‘It wasn’t,’ she said, picking her way through the half-frozen detritus of war. ‘And it’s not the end.’

‘Not the end?’ he called out.

‘Nor the beginning,’ she muttered. ‘Just a continuation. Just a breath. This is routine killing, Sevuu, the unskilled business of humanity. We haven’t seen the last of it.’

Click here to buy Valdor: Birth of the Imperium.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019.
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 Aaron Griffin.

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With many thanks to Nick Kyme and to John French
for invaluable feedback and advice on the lore.

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