The verdict of the Scythe
David Annandale

Death closed in on Absyrtus like the mailed fist of a god. A fleet of grey ships, each of them powerful enough to lay waste to a world, shouldered through the planet's defence systems as if they weren't even there. Orbital platforms fired beam weapons pointlessly into void shields that barely flickered. The god's hand smashed the platforms aside contemptuously. It reached low anchor and struck its blow.
 	At the head of the attack was a ship three kilometres long. It was the Fourth Horseman. No void ship this large should have still been descending, but the attack barque was heading for the planet's surface. Already, its heat shields were glowing red as it burned its way down through the mesosphere. It was brutish, merciless, unyielding.
 	Mortarion stood on the bridge of the Fourth Horseman, his eyes on the main viewport, waiting for the murky clouds below to part and expose his prey to his sight.
 	'Drop pods launched,' a vox-officer called out. 'Storm Eagle flights away.'
 	Mortarion gave a bare nod of acknowledgment. He already knew. He had given the commands, and his Death Guard obeyed them as perfectly as if every ship and every legionary were extensions of his body. The hail of landings striking downwards was the sweep of his scythe. The Death Guard acted as a single entity, animated by his will.
 	The Fourth Horseman plunged through the roiling clouds, searing them with its passage. The deck vibrated as the gigantic ship descended, the planet's atmosphere burning as it pushed back against the adamantine monster. The attack barque began to slow, but its landfall would still be a deathblow.
 	As if defeated, the clouds parted. The city of Temnis appeared far below, a sprawling web, its walls no more than a gossamer perimeter thread. There were faint sparks on the wall's length as its guns opened up on the approaching colossus.
 	Standing beside the primarch, Calas Typhon said, 'I can't imagine they think that artillery will slow us down.'
 	'That is a gesture of defiance, not a tactic,' said Mortarion. 'Their primary defence will come at closer range, after we land.'
 	'Their sorcery,' Typhon said quietly.
 	'Their crime and their death sentence.'
 	When the Death Guard had been tasked with bringing Absyrtus into compliance, Mortarion had gone over the data-slates reporting conditions on the world with cold, tightening anger. Absyrtus was an echo of Barbarus, with a sorcerous ruling class in power. Its physical conditions were harsh, and if they were not as toxic as those on Barbarus, that hardly mattered. It was the enslavement of the population by sorcery that had summoned his wrath. This was humanity's great torment. There would never be true freedom in the galaxy until its last traces had been exterminated.
 	Liberation came through death. There was no other recourse for the poison that held Absyrtus in its grip.
 	'What vox traffic from the other population centres?' Mortarion called out
 	'We are picking up signs of alarm, but no organised response, Lord Primarch. Most of the traffic is calls for help and requests for instruction.'
 	Mortarion nodded again. This was as he had expected. Temnis was the centre of life on Absyrtus in every respect. 'Their centre will not hold,' he said. 'Without it, all will fall apart.'
 	The city gathered definition in the viewport. Its precise contours had been unknown until now. It had been shielded by the thick cloud cover, and the reports of scouts had been badly incomplete. Now it was open to Mortarion's gaze. It stood upon a group of low hills. On a rise in the eastern sector was the largest complex. That would be the seat of the planet's government.
 	It was time to decide where the Fourth Horseman would hit.
 	'Do we strike the heart?' Typhon asked.
 	It was what they had done on Galaspar. The attack barque had smashed into the primary hive like a glaive chopping into a wasp nest, and its troops had poured in, purging resistance with fire. If the Fourth Horseman aimed for the complex on the hill, it would hit the regime with the impact of an asteroid.
 	Galaspar. Mortarion's most signal victory, the one where he had shown what his Legion could and would do to bring a war to an end, and the conquest that had earned stinging rebukes from his brothers. They had not been there a year ago. They had not read the battlefield as he had. They would not have brought the war to such a sudden and total halt as he did. By fighting as brutally as he had, he had liberated a hundred billion citizens from the tyranny of the Order. And yet. There was that look in his father's eyes. The look that haunted him now.
 	Galaspar was not Barbarus, and Absyrtus was not Galaspar. Temnis was a fraction of the size of the Galaspar hives. It had nowhere near the same level of defence. Mortarion was here to liberate humanity. He came to destroy a regime. He was not here to exterminate a planet.
 	Bringing the Fourth Horseman down on that complex would break the spine of Absyrtus' defences in an instant. But the sector was densely populated. It had the highest concentration of structures in the entire city. Slaughter was necessary in war…
 	'But not always,' Mortarion whispered to himself.
 	'Lord Primarch?' Typhon asked.
 	Mortarion ignored him. 'That is a space port,' he said, pointing to an area to the west of the complex. It was flat, paved, and sat between the hills. 'Take us down there.' It was a worthwhile strategic target, and the civilian population would be sparse.
 	This will be enough, Mortarion thought. His eyes moved over the contours of the city. He saw where the drop pods would land outside the wall, the barracks on the inside that the gunships would attack and destroy before landing their troops, and the impact the Fourth Horseman would have at the space port. This will be more than enough.
 	The attack barque changed orientation as it drew closer to the surface, and Temnis disappeared from the viewport. Mortarion turned his eyes to the vid-feed above it. Temnis seemed to rush towards its conqueror. Mortarion stretched out his hand. The fingers of his gauntlet hooked like talons to claim the prey. This was how he would take the city. This was how he was taking the city, even now. As his orders were executed, he knew what happened at every landing site, even before the reports reached the ship.
 	He was there as the drop pods came down in force outside the main gates, and his legionaries began their steady, unwavering march on the defences. He was there as the Storm Eagles' Vengeance rocket launchers turned the barracks into smoking craters, and there when the gunships landed, unleashing another tide of warriors who closed on the walls from the other side. And he was here in the Fourth Horseman as it thundered down on the space port, three kilometres of brutish ship, melting the rockcrete with the down blast of its engines and its superheated hull, crushing the feeble vessels of Temnis beneath its landing gear. The attack barque's massive guns turned the tanks that approached from the outskirts of the space port into molten ruins.
 	'Sorcerers on the walls,' the vox-officer warned. 'Spatial distortions reported. Warp bolts hitting our troops.'
 	'Burn them out,' Mortarion said. 'Burn them all out.'
 	He did not have to be present to know that his Deathshroud Terminators were obeying his command by hurling phosphex bombs onto the walls. He knew that crawling, green fire was melting the flesh from bones all along the ramparts of Temnis. He knew that sorcery was meeting an end that, no matter how agonising, was more merciful than it deserved.
 	The struggle ended before Mortarion, Typhon and the leading ranks of the First Great Company had reached the bottom of the attack barque's troop ramps.
 	'Lord Primarch,' the vox-officer called. 'We are receiving a request for a cease fire.'
 	'Patch it through,' Mortarion said coldly. He had not granted one on Galaspar. Let his brothers think what they would. He was conducting this war, and he knew best. He had taken the measures he needed to liberate the population.
 	And yet… and yet… The look in father's eyes…
 	His vox-bead crackled in his ear. Then a desperate voice spoke.
 	'This is Queen Cirkesce of Absyrtus. We beg you to accept our surrender. Whatever your terms are, we accept them without reservation. Only spare our people. Please, spare our people.'
 	Mortarion hesitated. Beside him, Typhon stirred, also receiving messages.
 	'The enemy is laying down arms across the city,' Typhon said. 'Our foe is surrendering.'
 	'Without terms,' said Mortarion. This was not Galaspar. When the Order had sued for peace, its goal had been self-preservation. This ruler was pleading for her people. The situation was not the same. Not at all.
 	'Do we continue, Lord Primarch?' Typhon asked.
 	What are you? Mortarion asked himself. His instinct was to continue to prosecute the battle until no enemy was left. This was a regime that used sorcery. It needed to vanish. Now it seemed that it was willing to do so.
 	A new path opened up before Mortarion. It was not one he had ever conceived of as possible. It might be for Roboute. It certainly was for Vulkan. Not for Konrad, though. And never for himself. But here it was. There was nothing to fight. The enemy was pleading to surrender. If he continued to prosecute the war, what would he become?
 	'Great lord, spare my people,' came the voice on the bead again. Mortarion clenched his teeth. He did not answer the voice. He switched the channel to the command network and issued a new order. 'Cease fire,' he said, and he arrested the sweep of the scythe.
 	Legionaries lined both sides of the street leading to the entrance of the royal palace. The building was at the centre of the complex Mortarion had identified during the Fourth Horseman's descent. It was built of soot-darkened limestone, a soaring spire rising up every hundred metres along its circular wall. The stonework was elaborately wrought, but had been eaten away by acid rain over time, and not been repaired. The windows were dull, leaded glass.
 	Mortarion walked up the gentle slope of the boulevard with Typhon and an escort of the Deathshroud honour guard. The queen of Absyrtus waited for them at the entrance to the palace. The doors were wide open. She was alone.
 	'I do not understand why we have left this place standing,' Typhon said.
 	'Because it was not necessary to destroy it,' Mortarion told him. The words felt strange to utter. He was not sure he believed them. But he needed to put them to the test.
 	'Are you sure of this?' Typhon asked, as if reading his mind.
 	'I intend to be. One way or the other.'
 	There was the sound of a crowd from somewhere in the near distance, but there was no one on the streets on this side of the palace. The facades of the buildings along the street were dark and empty.
 	As Mortarion approached the palace doors, the queen bowed low.
 	'You are welcome, Lord Mortarion,' she said. 'This house is now yours, to do with as you see fit. In gratitude for your mercy, grant me the honour of letting me be your guide.' There was nothing but deference in her manner, yet there was little of the awe Mortarion was used to in other mortals, as if there were something else that had already claimed her capacity for wonder. She was an older woman, her hair white, a delicate tracery of wrinkles surrounding her lips and eyes. Her face was strong, and her eyes were a deep shade of green. Her gaze was open and frank, and did not seem to mind the obvious distaste with which Mortarion regarded her. Her robes, though handsome, were relatively simple. They were a bit worn on the hems and sleeves, as if much work was done while wearing them. They were dark, with sigils embroidered in gold thread. Mortarion frowned when he saw them, but at least she was not dissembling.
 	Behind Cirkesce, the entrance hall of the palace was empty. The surrender appeared to be total. She was throwing herself on Mortarion's mercy. He was not yet convinced that he had any.
 	'Very well,' he said. 'Show me.'
 	Cirkesce bowed again in thanks, and led the way into the palace. After the entrance hall, they began to encounter servants. Mortarion watched them closely. They were not cowed by the presence of their queen. It was clear that it was he who frightened them. They were turning to Cirkesce for reassurance. She smiled gently at each one she passed. She kept murmuring, 'All will be well, all will be well,' to them, like a mother soothing an anxious child before sleep.
 	This is not Barbarus, Mortarion thought. This is not Barbarus at all. He glanced at Typhon. The First Captain had kept his helmet on and walked on stolidly, facing forwards, keeping his views to himself.
 	Cirkesce took them through the main chambers of the palace. She took special care to show them two spaces. One was the council hall, now sitting empty. The other was a chapel. It was in the centre of the palace circular, like the building, and was the only chamber in the palace that appeared to be fully cared for. In the middle of its floor was an altar. It was rectangular, but its lines were strangely curved. It appeared to be in motion, as if the stone were a cross section of a wave. It was hard to look at directly, and in the corner of the eye, it seemed to twist. The walls, floor and ceiling were polished black marble, with runes in silver inlay that seemed to flow from Cirkesce's robes into the stone.
 	'This is our place of ritual,' the queen said.
 	'No more,' said Mortarion. 'You have been apprised of the articles of compliance?'
 	'I have.'
 	'And you accept them?'
 	'I do.'
 	'You understand there is no place in the Imperium for such rituals.'
 	'I do.'
 	'Your people will no longer be subject to rule by sorcery.'
 	He thought there might have been the smallest hesitation before she agreed again. He wasn't sure.
 	'This chamber will be destroyed,' he continued.
 	'I understand.'
 	The ritual hall was in the lowest level of the palace. The queen now led them up grand flights of stairs to the uppermost floor.
 	'The people await you, Lord Mortarion,' Cirkesce said.
 	She brought them through a wide airy chamber to a balcony overlooking a great square. Here was the crowd that Mortarion had heard earlier. The citizens of Temnis had gathered in the tens of thousands, anxious faces staring up at the balcony. Cirkesce stepped forwards, and when she was greeted with a grateful cry, Mortarion saw how truly, utterly different the relationship between the rulers and the ruled on Absyrtus was from what it had been on Barbarus.
 	'Fear not!' Cirkesce called to the crowd. 'All will be well. You have been afraid, but let the fear pass. The war is over, peace has returned, and we are now taking our place in the Imperium of Man. Do not think we have been conquered, for we were wrong to fight. We should have been welcoming our new destiny with open arms, so let us do so now! All will be well! All is well!'
 	She invited Mortarion to come forwards. He stared down at the thousands of faces. They gazed with adoration at the queen, and then, taking their cue from her, turned with hope to him. No one had ever looked at him in quite that way. He felt odd, as if he were an imposter. He was not sure if the pretence was directed at the people of Absyrtus or at himself.
 	Mortarion was still wondering the same thing hours later when, with the Deathshroud standing behind him, he and Typhon sat on stone seats, honoured guests in the banquet hall of the royal palace, at a celebration of peace and union. He did not want to be here. He understood that people had a need for such a ritual, but he did not share that need, and he disliked the clamour and frivolity attendant upon the event. He sat opposite the queen, at one end of a huge table, long enough for thirty of the monarch's councillors and ministers.
 	The evening had consisted of one speech after another, each longer than the one before, all of them bland variations on the same obsequious theme. Over and over, Mortarion was assured of the gratitude of the people for the mercy he had shown, and of the utter loyalty and compliance of Absyrtus' government. Cirkesce caught Mortarion's eye every so often and smiled in sympathy. Then she turned back to the speakers, the smile becoming parental and indulgent.
 	The servility of these people, and the total capitulation, grated on Mortarion. He had no doubt every word was meant. They seemed so weak, it was hard to imagine that they had ever represented the smallest threat.
 	But they did fight. They were prepared to resist until they saw that their efforts would be futile. They knew they could not defeat us, and so gave up immediately. Does that make them intelligent or cowardly? Either way, he wished they were less voluble.
 	Typhon seemed no happier. He sat on Mortarion's right, resolutely silent, regarding the food and drink with glowering resignation. 'So this is what we have saved.' He spoke quietly enough so only Mortarion heard.
 	'Would you prefer compliance to have had a higher cost?'
 	Typhon shrugged. 'Is this who we are?' he asked.
 	'We must be shaped by our purpose, and not the other way around,' said Mortarion. The words rang false. He was taking steps down a path that many of his brothers would embrace, and that he believed his father would choose for him. He was not sure of his footing, though. The way ahead was unclear. He went on. 'Our purpose is the liberation of humanity.'
 	Of that, at least, he was sure. 'Death is not the only form of liberation.'
 	'No,' Typhon conceded. 'But what if it is the form that ours takes?'
 	Mortarion thought for a moment, then shook his head. He had no good answer for Typhon.
 	'What have we saved?' Typhon asked. 'Do we know that?'
 	'I will learn tonight,' Mortarion told him. 'I will walk the streets of this city. I will learn its true nature.'
 	'Like the Lords Fulgrim and Guilliman.'
 	'No. Not like them. They do not look with my eyes.'
 	Mortarion walked the night. At his command, the Deathshroud held back the full forty-nine steps behind him. He wanted space to be alone with his thoughts.
 	He left the environs of the palace and headed south-west down its slope, into the densest of the residential sectors. There were celebrations everywhere, as if the war had lasted years instead of hours. Mortarion skirted their edges, coming close enough to get a sense of the revels, and then moving on. News of who he was had spread quickly, and all who saw him paused in their feasting and dancing to bow before him, pressing foreheads to the ground, calling out their praise and thanks. They had none of the practised formulations of the politicians, but they were just as ingratiating. Mortarion said nothing, his lip curling in disgust as he left the grovelling wretches behind.
 	He took streets at random, choosing smaller and smaller alleys, wandering in and out of cul-de-sacs. The hab complexes were low, none more than five storeys high. Like the palace, their walls were blackened with filth. The air was greasy, and tasted of the soot it carried from the industrial regions and blanketed over the city.
 	The windows of the buildings were close together, suggesting tiny, cramped dwellings. There were impromptu celebrations here too, but also many faces at the windows, looking down on the grey spectre and his grim escort that walked in their midst. The people in the streets abased themselves to him, but those at the windows stared silently, or ducked away.
 	Is this liberation? Is there value in these lives?
 	Perhaps there was. He was not seeing it, though. What he was seeing was a facade. He was seeing no more into the truth of these people than he was into their dwellings. The further he walked, the more he felt that what he had witnessed since arriving on Absyrtus was a brittle surface.
 	Things were wrong, though he could not see what yet. The same was true of this path he had chosen to try. He was growing more and more certain that he was making a mistake.
 	Is that what I truly believe? Or what I want to believe?
 	He didn't know. He needed certainty. And so he kept walking, and kept looking, willing the night to show him what he needed to know.
 	The dwellings became poorer the further down the hill he went. When he reached the base, he was in the slum areas. The habs crowded closer together. The people were shabbier, and the streets as empty as they were narrow and winding. Mortarion paused at the entrance to an alleyway that was so cramped, the blank walls of the buildings on either side almost brushed his shoulders. A sound had caught his ear. He heard a child crying, and what at first he had taken for a mother singing a lullaby.
 	She wasn't singing. She was chanting.
 	Mortarion walked down the alleyway, moving through the darkness towards the sounds. He stopped at a doorway. It was barely visible, the opening a maw of greater night. 'Wait at the palace,' he told the Deathshroud. He ducked low and crossed the threshold.
 	Refuse crunched under his boots. The stinking corridor turned at sharp angles, making no architectural sense. After the second turn, the darkness began to give way to a dull red glow.
 	The chanting grew louder. The voice rasped and gurgled. The child's cries became more shrill. There was no comfort here.
 	Mortarion rounded another corner, and stepped into a low-ceilinged room. Tattered books crowded on sagging shelves. Incomprehensible carvings were scattered over every level space. They were, Mortarion thought, worse than the products of a disordered mind. There was a consistency to their insanity. They were the icons of delusional belief. There was an altar in the centre of the floor. It was a crudely hewn block of rockcrete, but it was clearly a product of the same faith as the altar in the royal palace. Despite the indifferent skill with which it had been made, it had some of the same strange suggestion of fluidity in stone.
 	An old woman bent over the altar, chanting harsh, slithering words. Strands of lank, grey hair hung from her. She was clad in rags, the patchwork worn with pride another symbol of the tyranny of superstition that clung so ferociously to humanity.
 	There was no child in the room. As the woman chanted, stone flames flickered into being over the altar, wavered, then vanished. The cries came from the flames during their evanescent lives. The air pulsed with the possibilities of creation.
 	A psyker, one given over to the madness her very existence made inevitable. Mortarion's jaw tightened in disgust.
 	The woman finished her chant and looked up at Mortarion. She smiled. One eye was pale, covered in cataracts. The other was clear. It gazed at him with a sharp, knowing expression that Mortarion now realised he had seen in Cirkesce's eyes at the banquet.
 	'Have you come to join me?' the woman asked with a whispering taunt. She showed no fear. She was violating the edicts of the compliance, and the commands of her queen. Perhaps she did not know about the new realities of Absyrtus, but Mortarion was sure she did. There was too much mockery in her gaze for her not to.
 	This creature was everything he strove to purge from the galaxy. She distorted reality around her. It would be a mistake, though, simply to destroy her and leave. There was something here he must know.
 	'I came to learn the truth of Absyrtus,' he said.
 	'Then you have found it.'
 	'What are you?'
 	'The one who does not hide.'
 	'There are others like you who hide.'
 	'All others,' she said, and cackled. 'Do you believe in surrender, great lord?'
 	'No,' he said. That was the easiest truth he had spoken in many hours.
 	'No. Neither does Absyrtus. It believes in survival.'
 	'Which you are dooming through your words.'
 	The woman ran a clawed finger across the altar, and the stone flowed like water, spiralling into beckoning patterns. 'There is nothing here that you can end,' she said.
 	'You are mistaken.'
 	'I think not.' The woman smiled and smiled and smiled. Mortanon left, then. He did not kill her. Not yet. He needed to determine how deeply the infection she represented had spread. As he walked from her hovel, she whispered, 'Listen, Mortarion of Barbarus. Listen well.'
 	Mortanon listened. He looked. He did both with renewed suspicion. He made his way slowly back to the royal palace, and Temnis was transformed. He had already made a new judgement before he stepped back into the alleyway. The path he had tried to walk was the wrong one. The attempt to do so had blinded him.
 	No longer. There were psykers everywhere, consumed by the irrationality they had embraced. They infested this world like a plague. Mortarion heard now the fragments of whispers that crawled into the night from the windows of the hab complexes. He saw the strange patterns scratched into the soot in shadowed corners of buildings. When he passed celebrations in the distance and the participants did not see him, he saw the dances that were too frenzied. He saw the light of the fires bend unnaturally.
 	And he heard, from the darkest streets, the child's cry of the flames.
 	Typhon and the Deathshroud were waiting for him at the entrance to the palace when he returned. They saw what was written on his face. He did not have to say a word. They took up arms and marched with him, heading back to the Land Raiders that would return them to the space port and to the Fourth Horseman. Mortarion looked back once as they left the palace. On the top floor, lights blazed from the vast windows of the throne room. They silhouetted Cirkesce.
 	You tried a different kind of sorcery. It won't save you either.
 	He said nothing on the journey, except to issue a terse command recalling all troops to their landing ships and ordering a return to the orbiting fleet. The take-off of the Fourth Horseman turned night into day across Temnis, the fires of its rise even more terrible than those of its descent.
 	Mortarion broke his silence at last when he and Typhon were on the bridge once more, watching the city diminish below, and then disappear beneath the clouds.
 	'Ask me what you want to know,' he said.
 	'What did you see? Are we abandoning a conquest?'
 	'I saw the truth. I saw that you were right, Calas. The liberation we bring is death. There is nothing here to conquer. There is nothing to give to this world except death.'
 	'The compliance was a sham?'
 	'It was. The sorcery of this world is not the tool of its tyrants. It infects its society from top to bottom. There is nothing to be saved.' He paused, turning to the weapons officers. 'Ready cyclonic torpedoes.'
 	'By your command, Lord Primarch.'
 	'Humans must be freed from sorcery,' Mortarion said to Typhon. 'But they cannot be reasoned out of it. So we must purge it by whatever means possible. What cannot be saved, must be turned into an example.'
 	'Will examples be enough?' Typhon asked.
 	'Not on their own. The force that creates the examples must be known. And it must be without mercy.'
 	The Fourth Horseman reached orbit. The sphere of Absyrtus turned slowly before Mortarion. Its clouds no longer concealed anything from him. He saw clearly. He saw the path that was his. It was the one that had always been his.
 	'Cyclonic torpedoes standing by, Lord Primarch,' the officer reported.
 	He had halted the swing of his scythe. He would complete the strike now, and he would never hesitate again.
 	You must become Death.
 	If he had to be the greater horror in order to save humanity from itself, then that would be the burden he would shoulder.
 	'Launch torpedoes,' he said. 'Turn that planet into a cinder.' He watched the streak of the torpedoes burning into the atmosphere, and they were his hand too. He was reaching down to Absyrtus. With his scythe, he was bringing his verdict.
 	It was, he now knew, the only verdict he would ever give.