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Loken knew this wasn't so. Qruze's wits were not as sharp as they'd once been, and he often appeared tired or inappropriate in his commentary or advice. He was known as 'the Half-Heard' because his pronouncements were best not listened to too closely.
Qruze believed he stood as a wise father-figure to the Legion, and no one had the spite to inform him otherwise. There had been several quiet attempts to deprive him of company command, just as Qruze had made several attempts to become elected to the first captaincy.
By duration of service, he should have been so long since. Loken believed that the Warmaster regarded Qruze with some pity and couldn't abide the idea of retiring him. Qruze was an irksome relic, regarded by the rest of them with equal measures of affection and frustration, who could not accept that the Legion had matured and advanced without him.
"We will be out of this in a day.’ he a
'Tarik is doing well.’ Loken began.
'The boy Torgaddon has been lucky, but he ca
'I wish I was down there.’ Marr said.
'Foolish thoughts.’ Qruze decided. 'It's only a rescue run. I ca
'It certainly was.’ said Loken.
'It most certainly was.’ agreed Qruze, missing the irony entirely. 'I can't imagine what they thought they were doing here.'
'Prosecuting a war?' Loken suggested.
Qruze looked at him diffidently. 'Are you mocking me, Garviel?'
'Never, sir. I would never do that.'
'I hope we're deployed.’ Marr grumbled, 'and soon.’
"We won't be.’ Qruze declared. He rubbed the patchy grey goatee that decorated his long, lined face. He was most certainly not a son of Horus.
'I've business to attend to.’ Loken said, excusing himself. 'I'll take my leave, brothers.’
Marr glared at Loken, a
Loken went downship to the barrack decks of Tenth Company. His men were waiting, half-armoured, weapons and kit spread out for fitting. Apprenta and servitors ma
Loken took the time to appraise Vipus and the other squad leaders of the situation, and then spoke briefly to some of the new blood warriors they'd raised to company service during the voyage. These men were especially tense. One Forty Twenty might see their baptism as full Astartes.
In the solitude of his arming chamber, Loken sat for a while, ru
He'd read a good deal less of The Chronicles of Ursh during the voyage than he'd intended. The commander
had kept him busy. He folded the heavy, yellowed pages open with ungloved hands and found his place.
The Chronicles were as raw and brutal as Sinderma
It amused Loken, for the most part. Fanciful logic abounded, as did an air of strained realism. Feats of arms were described that no pre-Unity warriors could have accomplished. These, after all, were the feral hosts of techno-barbarians that the proto-Astartes, in their crude thunder armour, had been created to bring to heel. Kalaga
Loken had skipped ahead once or twice, and saw that later parts of the work recounted the fall of Kalaga
in what terms, and wanted to look to see if he could recognise the names of any of the proto-Astartes warriors.
But he felt he owed it to Kyril Sinderma
The Nordafrik technogogues had preserved a great deal more high technology for the good of their conclaves than Ursh possessed, and sheer envy, more than anything, motivated the war. Kalaga
Eight epic battles marked Shang Khal's advance into the Nordafrik zones, the greatest of them being Xozer. Over a period of nine days and nights, the war machines of the Red Engines blasted their way across the cultivated agroponic pastures and reduced them back to the desert, from which they had originally been irrigated and nurtured. They cut through the laserthorn hedges and the jewelled walls of the outer conclave, and unleashed dirty atomics into the heart of the ruling zone, before the Lancers led a tidal wave of screaming berserkers through the breach into the earthly paradise of the gardens at Xozer, the last fragment of Eden on a corrupted planet.
Which they, of course, trampled underfoot.
Loken felt himself skipping ahead again, as the account bogged down in interminable lists of battle glories and honour rolls. Then his eyes alighted on a strange phrase, and he read back. At the heart of the
ruling zone, a ninth, minor battle had marked the conquest, almost as an afterthought. One bastion had remained, the murengon, or walled sanctuary, where the last hierophants of the conclaves held out, practising, so the text said, their 'sciomancy by the flame lyght of their burning realm'.
Shang Khal, wishing swift resolution to the conquest, had sent Anult Keyser to crush the sanctuary. Keyser was lord martial of the Tupelov Lancers and, by various bonds of honour, could call freely upon the services of the Roma, a squadron of mercenary fliers whose richly decorated interceptors, legend said, never landed or touched the earth, but lived eternally in the scope of the air. During the advance on the murengon, Keyser's oneirocriticks - and by that word, Loken understood the text meant 'interpreters of dreams' - had warned of the hierophants' sciomancy, and their phantasmagorian ways.