CH. 2 - A Thousand Years Late

The Wolves give me quarters fit for a jarl, and it takes me two hours to fix that.

The chamber they assign me is hung with furs, racked with drinking horns, and guarded by a wall-mounted skull with tusks longer than my forearm. Greenskin. Big one. Somebody's trophy, gifted to the strange guest as an honour, and I spend a while standing in front of it trying to compose a sentence that contains both thank you and get it out before giving up and doing the work myself.

Furs, out. Horns, out. Skull, out — carried down the corridor and returned to a bewildered thrall with as much courtesy as I can fake. What's left is what I need: a bare slab, an arming rack, and a corner where I set the two things I own in the galaxy that aren't a weapon. The stasis-vial, in a cradle I bend from salvage wire. The cross, hung on the bulkhead above it, where I can see it from the slab.

A cell. My cell. For the first time since I woke up half a man, something is correct.

Then, because a Templar rots without purpose and my only purposes aboard this ship are healing and waiting, I walk the Wyrmslayer.

She's a strike cruiser, but she doesn't feel like one. Templar ships are cathedrals — incense, silence, votive candles by the ten thousand, every corridor a nave. This ship is a longhouse that someone strapped engines to. The corridors are hung with totems: wolf tails, knotted cords, iron charms that turn slowly in the recycled air. The mortal crew — kaerls, they're called, ship-thralls with braided beards and bone fetishes — don't scurry the way Chapter serfs do. They look me in the eye. One of them makes a small sign against evil as I pass, which is fair, and another one nods at me, which is baffling.

There's a corridor near the training decks that I take to calling the tooth-hall. Trophies, floor to ceiling, deck after deck of them: ork tusks the size of ploughshares, a tyranid scything-claw longer than I am, the crumpled faceplate of a Traitor Marine with a single bolt-hole through the brow. And one small thing that stops me mid-stride — a sliver of pale material, curved, pearlescent, mounted alone in a case with no plaque. Bone that isn't bone. It hums. Not a sound; a pressure behind the eyes, like a word someone almost says.

Wraithbone. Aeldari work. I stand there longer than I mean to, and the hum sits in my back teeth, and something about it reminds me — absurdly, unpleasantly — of cold green light drifting through dead corridors, and of being watched.

I move on. Fast.

They ambush me on the training deck, which I later learn is the Fenrisian word for hospitality.

I've come down to learn my legs. That's the honest, humiliating truth of it — the Iron Priests built me legs stronger than the flesh I lost, and I still walk like a Dreadnought with a hangover, because two centuries of instinct keep telling me I weigh something I no longer weigh. So I'm alone in the practice cages, running footwork drills like a neophyte, iron feet ringing off the deck, when a voice behind me says:

"He fights the floor. Ten thrones on the floor."

Bjarn. Leaning on the cage with two Blood Claws in tow like a man walking large, badly behaved dogs. One of them I know — the young one missing two fingers, who hammered the table for me in the feast-hall. Ketil, they call him. Ketil Half-Hand, because Space Wolves will name you for the thing you'd least like to discuss, as I have personal reason to know.

"Templar!" Ketil calls out, delighted. "We've come to help."

"He's come to gawp," Bjarn corrects. "I've come to collect material. The saga has a gap in it between cut in half and drank the Lord's mjod, and my art demands—" he bares his teeth "—research."

Which is how I end up in the duelling circle with a blunted practice blade, facing a Grey Hunter with four hundred years of dirty tricks and a grudge about poetry.

The first exchange, I win. He comes in loose and grinning, expecting the stiff parade-ground fencing the Chapters of Dorn are famous for, and I give him exactly that for three heartbeats — then I stop fencing and start crusading, because a Black Templar duels the way he prays: without moderation. I put him on the deck with a shoulder he never saw coming and the point at his gorget, and the Blood Claws howl like it's a feast day.

"Again," says Bjarn, no longer grinning.

The second exchange, he wins, and I will carry the manner of it to my grave. He feints high, stamps on my iron foot — which I do not feel, and therefore do not react to, and therefore do not move — and while my two-century-old reflexes are still asking the leg for a report, he hooks my knee with the flat of his blade and dumps me on my back like a sack of bolts. The deck rings. Somewhere above me, Ketil is making a noise I associate with dying animals.

"Your legs don't lie to you," Bjarn says, standing over me, offering a hand. "Flesh flinches. Iron doesn't. Stop listening for a flinch that's never coming."

It is, infuriatingly, the best sword lesson anyone has given me in a hundred years.

The third exchange goes long. Long enough that the cages fill up around us — Grey Hunters drifting in, kaerls pretending to have errands, a pack of Blood Claws hanging off the bars — long enough that I stop thinking about the legs at all, and the moment I stop thinking about them they finally become mine: I plant where flesh could never plant, pivot off iron that doesn't tire, and Bjarn and I hammer up and down that circle like two smiths arguing. When Hakon Iron-Tooth's voice finally cuts through the din — "Enough, before I have to rebuild both of you" — neither of us has scored, both of us are bleeding from somewhere honest, and the hall sounds like a thunderstorm indoors.

Bjarn clasps my forearm, wolf-grin back in place, and turns to the crowd.

"Verse the fourth!" he bellows. "In the iron circle the Sundered stood — and the floor, at last, forgave him!"

I have been mocked in verse by better poets, but never louder ones.

Afterwards there's mjod — there is always mjod; I begin to suspect the ship's plasma drive runs on it — and we sit on the cage floor like neophytes, and that's when Ketil, too young to know which questions have teeth, asks it.

"So what did happen, Templar? Between the storm and the claw. You never told it whole."

The circle quiets. Bjarn doesn't stop him. Even the kaerls stop pretending to have errands.

So I tell it whole.

"I wasn't at my post when it began," I say. "I was in the cold. Stasis. We'd been Warp-lost since the Rift-storm ripped us out of the fleet, and a lost ship husbands what it has — the Marshal's order was rotating stasis for half the brotherhood, wake on contact. I went into the casket with the fleet beacon still strong in the vox-log — not my first cold sleep, not by a long way, though it would prove my longest." I turn the cup in my hand. "I woke to boarding klaxons and a deck already burning. First thing I saw was the casket next to mine, open and empty. Second thing I saw was Brother Dietmar, and what was left of him wasn't standing."

"And the third thing?" Ketil, quietly.

"The third thing was the mission chrono on my own casket lid." I look up. "Wake-cycle logs. Elapsed time. And the number was wrong. Not drifted-wrong. Not damage-wrong. Wrong like a joke in poor taste — years where there should have been weeks. I remember thinking the casket's spirit had been Warp-touched and lying to me. Then I picked up my sword, because the Enemy was aboard and arithmetic could wait." A breath. "The arithmetic has been waiting nineteen days and several weeks now."

Bjarn and Hakon trade a look over my head — the kind of look that has a whole conversation inside it — and Hakon rises without a word and comes back with a data-slate and a face like a closed door.

"We pulled your ship's cogitator cores before we gave her to the guns," the Wolf Priest says. "Wondered when you'd ask. The logs are Warp-garbled — time runs like wax in the Sea of Souls, and your ship swam in it a long while. Nothing in here is conclusive." He says the word the way a surgeon says inoperable. "But the last clean date-stamp in your ship's log, Templar — the last hour your Vow Eternal agreed with the rest of the Imperium about what year it was — was the hour the storm took you."

He turns the slate around.

I read the date-stamp. It's the one I remember. Generations deep into the Indomitus years — the Great Rift long open, the age no longer new, Primaris a common sight by then and still a word that made the oldest firstborn spit. Yesterday, as my hearts count it.

"And by your reckoning," I say, "what year is it now?"

Hakon tells me.

The number doesn't fit through my ears on the first pass. On the second pass it fits, and I do the arithmetic I've been refusing to do for weeks, and the answer is not years and it is not decades. The gap between the man on the slate and the man on this deck is the better part of a thousand years.

Nobody laughs. Even Ketil has gone still. In a hall of Wolves you can hear my two hearts change rhythm.

"That's why," I hear myself say, "your Priest called me new-forged. My plate is a museum pattern. My geneline is first-batch. I'm fresh, aren't I — a fresh Primaris off Cawl's first forges, a thousand years late for my own war." I laugh, once, and it comes out with edges. "The Karrivan Crusade. My Marshal. Every brother who wasn't on that ship—"

"—is dust or legend," Hakon finishes, because a Wolf Priest does not soften bones he's setting. "Aye. Likely so."

The circle stays quiet. Then Bjarn, of all people, says: "Not the Chapter, though."

I look at him.

"Chapters outlive men. Yours more than most — your fortress is a ship, isn't it? The great crusader-barge, sailing since the Heresy." He shrugs, as if he hasn't just handed a drowning man a plank. "Ten thousand years old already when you were forged. What's one more thousand to that old monster? Your brothers are dead, Templar. Your Chapter is out there somewhere, same as it ever was. And you've got its seed in a jar."

The vial is in its cradle, decks above me, next to a cross that stays warm in the cold. One seed of Dorn's line — a millennium out of its time, same as its carrier.

The vow doesn't change, I realise. It just got longer. It was always going to be delivered to strangers; now the strangers won't even know the names of my dead. I will teach them the names.

"Verse the fifth," Bjarn says quietly, to no one, already composing. "A thousand years the Allfather hid him, and the wolves found him, and he did not break."

"Break." I turn the cup in my hand, and something older than grief straightens my spine. "Do you know what my Chapter says of our Primarch, Wolf? Not that he died. Show me the tomb — there is none. We say the Praetorian stands a duel outside time itself. Blade against the Blood God himself, some tellings; against his deathless champion, say others — the tellings argue, the duel doesn't. Ten thousand years, and Dorn has not yielded one step. When the last siege comes, he will still be standing in that timeless place, still swinging." I drain the cup the way Bjarn does, to the dregs. "That is the line I am forged from. Time is a siege like any other. The sons of Dorn do not break for time — we persevere it."

Bjarn stares at me for a long moment. Then he barks a laugh that startles the kaerls off the cage bars.

"Allfather's teeth. You sound like us." He raises his empty cup. "We keep a king in reserve for the end of the world too, Templar. To stubborn fathers, then — yours in his duel, ours in his hunt."

Even Hakon drinks to that.

That night, in my bare and correct little cell, I don't recite the prayer for the dead. I stand my vigil before an iron cross and a cold vial, and I make a new vow, out loud, alone, the way vows have always been made — to a God-Emperor a thousand years further from me than He was yesterday, and to a Primarch who has been fighting a single duel for ten thousand.

"You persevered," I tell them both. "So will I. The crusade is not ended while one of us stands — and I am still standing. Half of me, on iron. It will be enough."

The cross is warm all night.