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Born to Us - Dan Abnett

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BORN TO US

Dan Abnett

If I have learned one thing in my career as a devoted inquisitor of the Holy Ordos, it is that there is always some truth at the heart of a story. No matter how fanciful the notion, how remote the myth, how distant the originating point in history, some indelible truth always lies at the story’s beginning.

I remember, in the old days, when I was just a novitiate, when I was just plain Interrogator Eisenhorn, I would marvel over the strange wonders that I was required to examine in old books, in flickering data-slates, in crumbling scrolls. They were most often legends of the remote past, stories of wonder and, as I believed then, wild imagination. They were tales, I was sure, designed to entertain the young or the gullible, tales of thrills and miracles and amazements and terrors, all of them constructed from nothing but invention.

Then I learned, and I saw. I experienced. I discovered that the universe we inhabit is a place more darkly strange, more grimly dangerous and more impossibly fanciful than anything that human imagination can manufacture. Immortal beings roam the stars. Primordial entities lurk in the bleak fastnesses of space. Daemons plunge and breach in the malevolent oceans of the warp. There are no stories, no tales of wonder, no myths, no fairy tales, that do not in some way depend upon a grain of truth, like every pearl depends upon a grain of sand. A good inquisitor needs to learn this and be sure of it, or he will always be surprised when the truth emerges.

I remember Koradrum. I remember the cold wind coming out of the northern wastes, the small villages and settlements shuttered against the pitch of winter. I remember the single, vigilant star that hung in the mauve evening sky, as cold and bright as a Glaw’s ambition. It was a portent, the locals said, a sign, a warning from the gods of the advent of some great occurrence. The star had not been there the year before.

Of course, I knew from the Celestial Navigation advisories circulated by the Imperial Navy Scarus Sector that the mature veil star at 476 Gamma Haruspex had gone supernova ten years earlier, and the flash of its scintillating demise had finally reached Koradrum. Nevertheless, the locals clung to their stories. A birth, they said: it presages the birth of a great being. A leader will be born to us, they told me. He will be a god in the form of a man. He has slept in death for thousands of years, but he will be resurrected. He will be the life. He will deliver us from evil.

Nayl was with me. Even in those days, he’d seen his share too. He knew the hocus pocus and the mumbo jumbo, and he knew that both could conceal the awkward trace of a truth. Still, he scoffed.

‘They are slaves to their superstitions,’ he grumbled, trying to get the cargo-8’s engine started with cold-numbed fingers. ‘A star in the sky, speaking of a deliverer? A resurrection and a birth? Please.’

He had read the Celestial Navigation advisories too. His cynicism was understandable. The vast proportion of the common Imperial population lives in a condition of startling ignorance. It is often safer that way. We let them keep their traditions of devils and gods and angels, to dabble in their heathen beliefs, because it is easier than having to nurse their sanity after admitting that devils and gods and angels do exist.

‘Remain open minded, Harlon,’ I counselled him. ‘The legends of this place run deep. That is why Lenhema came here to excavate.’

I believe I may have treated him to a friendly elaboration of the essential wisdoms I put forth at the start of this account. He bore it stoically.

Darred Lenhema was one of the sector’s most admired archaeologists. He specialised in human remains from the earliest times, from the era of the First Expansions, before Old Night fell upon us. He had been missing for two years.

Once we got into the hills, we found the site where his team had last been seen. An extensive area had been cleared and an entrance dug into a mound structure. There was a great deal of equipment around, but no sign of life.

‘The popular legend here,’ I remarked, as we made our way down the excavation tunnel by lamplight, ‘is an old one, Nayl. One of the oldest of all. It appears throughout human space, and was one of the most important and significant to our distant ancestors before Old Night.’

‘The return of a king?’ asked Nayl. ‘A god-as-man reborn to redeem us?’

‘Correct. It dominated Terran culture between M0 and M5, and undoubtedly predates that period. Many faiths were founded upon it, including the preeminent ones of the age. A god in human form, immortal and ineffable, is born to us to guide us to salvation.’

‘He’s a little late,’ Nayl growled. ‘We already have a perfectly good God-Emperor.’

Nayl had his sidearm drawn. His cynicism was matched by his caution.

We found the deepest buried chamber. It had been opened by Lenhema’s drills and cutters, though there was still no sign of him or his team. The chamber had been sealed for an unimaginable time.

Nayl called out a warning, but I had already seen it.

Something had indeed been born, reborn, in fact, after a period of death beyond measure. It was a god in the shape of a man, his auspicious resurrection from lifeless sleep aptly signified by the star.

He was no redeemer, not for the likes of us, anyway.

The stories had not been entirely correct. Myths are full of lies, but a grain of truth always emerges at the heart.

Nayl started firing. I raised my staff.

The necron king rose from the bodies of Lenhema and his team, and turned to greet us.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dan Abnett is a multiple New York Times bestselling author and an award-winning comic book writer. He has written over forty novels, including the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series, and the Eisenhorn and Ravenor trilogies. His Horus Heresy novel Prospero Burns topped the SF charts in the UK and the US. In addition to writing for Black Library, Dan scripts audio dramas, movies, games, comics and bestselling novels for major publishers in Britain and America. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.

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