Hellsreach - Aaron Dembski-Bowden [1]
These are my thoughts as I kneel before my commanders, this bleak mesh of my master’s death and my own yet to come. This is the blackness that festers unspoken.
At last, unaware of my secret torments, the High Marshal speaks my name.
‘Grimaldus,’ High Marshal Helbrecht intoned. His voice was a guttural rumble, rendered harsh from yelling orders and battle cries in a hundred wars on a hundred worlds.
Grimaldus did not raise his head. The knight closed his disquietingly gentle eyes, as if this gesture could seal the doubts within his skull.
‘Yes, my liege.’
‘We have brought you here to honour you, just as you have honoured us for so many years.’
Grimaldus said nothing, sensing it was not his time to speak. He knew why they were honouring him now, of course, and the knowledge was bitter. Mordred – Grimaldus’s mentor, a Reclusiarch of the Eternal Crusade – was dead.
After the ritual, Grimaldus would take his place.
It was an honour he had waited one hundred and sixty-six years to receive.
A century and a half of wrath, courage and pain since the Battle of Fire and Blood, when he drew the eye of the revered Mordred – who was already ancient but unbowed, and who saw within the young Grimaldus a burning core of potential.
A century and a half since he was inducted into the lowest ranks of the Chaplain brotherhood, rising through the tiers in his master’s shadow, knowing that he was being forged in war to replace his ageing guardian.
Over a century and a half of believing he would not deserve the title when it finally rested upon his shoulders.
Now the time had come, and his conviction had not changed.
‘We have summoned you,’ Helbrecht said, ‘to be judged.’
‘I have answered the summons,’ Grimaldus said in the silence of the Reclusiam. ‘I submit myself before your judgement, my liege.’
Helbrecht wore no armour, but his bulk was barely diminished. Clad in layered robes of bone-white and bearing his personal black heraldry, the High Marshal stood in the Temple of Dorn, his hands clutching an ornate helm with all due respect.
‘Mordred is dead,’ Helbrecht’s voice was a deep murmur. ‘Slain by the Archenemy. You, Grimaldus, have lost a master. We have all of us lost a brother.’
The Temple of Dorn, a museum, a Reclusiam, a sanctuary of hanging banners from ten thousand years of crusading, briefly came alive as the knights in the shadows intoned their agreement with their liege lord’s words.
Silence returned, and Grimaldus kept his gaze on the floor.
‘We mourn his loss,’ the High Marshal said, ‘but honour his wisdom in this, his final order.’
It comes to this. Grimaldus tensed. Show no weakness. Show no doubt.
‘Grimaldus, warrior-priest of the Eternal Crusade. It was the belief of Reclusiarch Mordred that upon his death, you would be worthiest of our Brother-Chaplains to stand in his stead. His final decree before the returning of his gene-seed to the Chapter was that you, of all your brethren, would be the one to rise to the rank of Reclusiarch.’
Grimaldus opened his eyes and licked lips that had suddenly turned dry. Slowly he raised his head, facing the High Marshal, seeing Mordred’s helm – a grinning steel skull – in the commander’s scarred hands.
‘Grimaldus,’ Helbrecht spoke again, no hint of emotion colouring his voice. ‘You are a veteran in your own right, and once stood as the youngest Sword Brother in the history of the Black Templars. As a Chaplain, your life has been without cowardice or shame, your ferocity and faith without equal. It is my belief, not merely the wish of your fallen master, that you should take the honour we offer you now.’
Grimaldus nodded, but uttered no words. His eyes, so deceptively soft in their gaze, did not waver from their stare. The helm’s slanted eye lenses were the rich, deep red of arterial blood. The death mask was utterly familiar to him – the face of his master when the knights went to war, making it the face of his master for most of his life.
Its skullish visage smiled.
‘Rise, if you would refuse this honour,’ Helbrecht finished.