The Colonel's Monograph Read online

  The road looped steadily downhill until we crossed a narrow bridge of black steel to enter a coastal township of such charm and beauty that it all but took my breath away, after the maudlin character of the journey.

  This was Vansen Falls, and it sprawled pleasantly on the inner slopes of what had once been an impact crater blasted in the planet’s bedrock over ten thousand years ago. The rising of the ocean and its erosive powers had collapsed the western portion of the crater wall, allowing water to rush in and form an almost perfectly circular bay, with two jutting promontories to the north and south. An Imperial temple of black stone, hewn from the surrounding mountains, sat precipitously on the northernmost promontory, its spire curiously crooked and stark against the pale blue of the sky.

  Across from the temple, on the opposite promontory, was Grayloc Manor.

  My first impression was of astonishment, for the dwelling was far larger and more ornamented than I had expected for a soldier. In my years archiving the records of the cardinal and lord militant general, I have had the opportunity to converse with many who served the Imperium as warriors, and even the most senior of those never lived so grandly.

  As if in contrast to the temple opposite, Grayloc Manor was primarily constructed from white marble, with flashes of colour worked into its domes and the long magenta banners hanging between its fluted pillars. The high portico of its entrance was grander than many Imperial shrines, and spreading out from the well-manicured gardens were expansive vineyards that tumbled to the shoreline in waves of undulant greenery. Gilded follies, like ornamented birdcages, dotted the slopes overlooking the sea, and I immediately pictured myself seated within one, reading The Brothers Carmassi while sipping a sugared tisane.

  The little I had been able to learn of Colonel ­Grayloc, on the journey to Vansen Falls, spoke simply of merit­orious service in campaigns fought throughout the neighbouring Ocyllaria subsector, but the sources were maddeningly light on details. She had been awarded the Honorifica Imperialis, but I could find no specific citation. She had been granted leave to retire with full honours, and again I found no explanation of why so senior and capable an officer would be allowed to withdraw from the battlefield at a time when the threat was so great.

  Wars against the Archenemy had been raging throughout the Ocyllaria subsector since before my birth. I had never known a time without war, or without the sons and daughters of our world being tithed for the Astra Militarum. Each time I saw the transports climbing to the bulk carriers in orbit I felt a strange mixture of emotions: guilt and sadness that Teodoro and I had chosen not to have children who might serve the Emperor, yet also relief that we would never send them off to die on some far-flung battlefield.

  The groundcar purred smoothly through Vansen Falls, allowing me a closer look at the town itself. Its stone and timber structures spoke of a period of human habitation that predated the Imperium, and the people I saw on its streets were tall, clean-limbed and healthy. Their eyes followed the Kiehlen as it swept past.

  The road curved up and around the southern peninsula, and soon the tires crunched on the gravel driveway of the pale house as we came to a halt before its main entrance, an imposing double door of pale blue timber. The servitor-chauffeur disengaged the drive mechanism and got out to open the door for me. I did not look at it for fear of what I might see. The memory of my dream in the marsh was still fresh in my mind. My limbs were stiff from so long in the back of the car, so I was grateful to finally stretch my legs.

  The view was quite spectacular, and a path of embossed paviors led a weaving path down the stepped slopes. The crash of booming waves upon the cliffs drifted up to me, and I took a deep breath, tasting chill air freighted with a faint salty tang. I also smelled fresh-turned earth, and the ever-so-slightly acidic tang of the offshore Mechanicus geocore platforms that marred the horizon with a faint petrochemical haze. I turned as I heard the doors opening behind me.

  A man in his middle years wearing a crisp tunic-suit of pressed white linen descended the steps to greet me, his hand extended. I had never met him, but the resemblance to his mother, the colonel, removed all doubt as to his identity.

  ‘Mistress Sullo,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Grayloc Manor.’

  Garrett Grayloc pre-empted the servitor-chauffeur’s efforts to bring my few bags within, and hefted them with the casual ease of a man not used to others waiting hand and foot upon him. I had, as was my habit, travelled light, but to see the lord of Grayloc Manor bearing my travel cases within his home immediately created a favourable impression of the man.

  He set down my luggage, and I took a moment to look around.

  The vestibule was high-ceilinged with a curving stone staircase leading to the upper levels and a number of arches leading into other rooms. To my left was a receiving room with white sheets draped across the few remaining pieces of furniture, while to my right was an expansive ballroom large enough to host hundreds of guests with ease. Like the receiving room, its furniture was also draped with white sheets.

  The structure of Grayloc Manor was very fine indeed, but my initial impression was that it was absent of the usual finery one expects in such a dwelling; the accoutrements of deep history and long centuries of familial acquisition. I was reminded of the time Teodoro and I had been the last guests to leave an isolated hotel in the northern mountains, as its solitary caretaker worked diligently to shut the building up before winter snows closed the roads.

  A single portrait hung opposite the main entrance, a large oil painting depicting Colonel Grayloc standing alongside her command vehicle – a Salamander, I believe. The colonel was depicted in her combat uniform, the fabric torn and bloodstained, her boots caked in mud. The bronze of her breastplate was dented by numerous hard-round impacts, and her battered helmet lay broken at her feet. In one hand she held a power sabre, a plasma pistol in the other.

  A trooper’s lasrifle was slung across her shoulder.

  Clearly Elena Grayloc had not been one to avoid the ­crucible of combat.

  As naturalistic as the rest of the painting was, I felt drawn to her patrician face, framed as it was with silver hair that hung loose to her neck. Her expression was aristocratically aloof, yet weary, and her vividly rendered eyes were a rich golden-green that conveyed a sense of her unwavering purpose.

  The resemblance between the colonel and her son was striking, though the younger Grayloc’s features possessed less of a war-hardened edge to them. His blond hair was thinning at the temples, but he retained an air of youth to him that appeared natural and not the result of a regime of juvenat treatments.

  ‘I hope your journey was without incident, Mistress Sullo,’ said Garrett Grayloc.3

  I struggled to think of how I might convey how disquieting a journey it had been without sounding ridiculous. I did not wish my host to form an adverse impression of my faculties from the outset, so decided to keep what I had felt to myself.

  ‘It passed most uneventfully,’ I replied, ‘which is exactly what I hope for whenever I travel, Lord Grayloc.’

  ‘Most excellent. Now, uneventful though it was, you must be tired. And please, call me Garrett. My mother was the one who obsessed over rank and title. Thankfully, something I didn’t inherit.’

  His words were unusually forthright and strangely accented with a curious lilt I could not easily place.

  ‘Is that an off-world accent I hear?’ I asked. ‘Daranian, perhaps?’

  ‘You have a good ear, Teresina,’ he said. ‘Oh, do you mind if I call you Teresina?’

  ‘It would seem only fair,’ I answered, and he smiled in return.

  ‘I was born on Yervaunt,’ he said, ‘but grew up on Darania, learning how to manage the family’s inter-system trade networks from my father. I had no impulse to join the Guard, much to my mother’s disappointment.’

  He shrugged, as if realising he had let slip a confidence to a stranger, and smiled a
gain.

  ‘Come, let me show you to your room,’ he said. ‘Assuming I can find it, that is. I’m still finding my feet around here. It’s been decades since I set foot in this house.’

  Garrett moved to retrieve my luggage, only to find the servitor-chauffeur had followed us within, and now held both my bags.

  ‘Ah, yes, I suppose I should let Kyrano attend to your luggage,’ he said with an embarrassed smile. ‘I believe he knows the layout better than I do.’

  ‘Kyrano?’ I said. ‘I was given to understand it was normal practice for servitors to be shorn of their past identities.’

  ‘In most cases, yes, but Kyrano here was senior colour guard in the 83rd,’ explained Garrett. ‘Threw himself on a greenskin bomb to save my mother’s life some fifty years ago. Most of his body was destroyed, as well as his brain, but still he never let the regimental standard fall. My mother said his last wish was to continue to serve. Only in death does duty end, you know? Throne, but I must have heard that story a thousand times as a boy.’

  I nodded, and took a moment to more fully study the servitor.

  Its kind are woven so deeply into the Imperium that they have become virtually essential to its continued workings, yet they are all but invisible. That their names are erased along with their history further pushes them out to the margins, and I wondered then, as I wonder now, what horrors we perpetuate on our own people for the sake of convenience and functionality.

  This half human, half cyborgised servitor was bulked out with combat augmetics, but it was clear the individual had been of considerable size even before the Adeptus Mechanicus remade him. Though dressed in smartly functional attire of pale blue tailored silk, Kyrano looked more like an underhive thug in a borrowed suit. The lower half of his face was obscured, or had been replaced, by a moulded bronze plate that exuded thin wisps of gaseous breath. The remainder of his features were expressionless, one eye having been replaced with what looked like a field-installed augmetic. What little skin remained on his face was pockmarked with what I guessed were shrapnel scars from the bomb that ended his service.

  ‘Perhaps after I have settled into my room, we might reconvene in your mother’s library,’ I suggested.

  Garrett nodded, and I saw relief wash through him. I was reminded that I was only here thanks to the death of his mother. Clearly a complex play of emotions existed between son and mother, though I could not guess how complex at this time. Whatever troubles may rear their head in later life, I am told it is hard to entirely shake the bonds or dysfunctions that grow between parents and their children.

  ‘Yes, of course. I expect you’re eager to get to work.’

  ‘Indeed I am,’ I said. ‘Your mother’s collection was a source of great interest to us at the repository, and I would dearly love to see it for myself.’

  Garrett gave a shallow bow, and said, ‘I hope the room proves comfortable, but instruct Kyrano should anything not be to your satisfaction.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied, as the servitor began climbing to the upper levels of the house.

  I followed Kyrano upstairs, before turning to ask one last question at the turn on the landing.

  But Garrett Grayloc had already gone.

  Kyrano led me to my room along a series of wood-panelled corridors floored with worn and stained carpets. The notion of a servitor with a name still sat strangely with me, but I was too struck by the air of neglect I saw throughout Grayloc Manor to fully understand just how wrong that was.

  We passed a wide set of doors that gleamed with a vivid red lacquer.

  ‘Is that the colonel’s library?’ I asked.

  Kyrano nodded, but did not respond. I wondered if it had the capacity for speech at all.

  A little farther along the corridor we reached the room I had been assigned, and I was grateful to close the door behind me and be done with the mute servitor. The chamber was indeed functional, much larger than I had been expecting, but I shall not waste time on its description, save to say that its furnishings had the musty smell common to items having been kept in a basement, an impression only heightened by the folded white sheets piled on a threadbare chaise longue beneath a cracked window with a view of the ocean.

  After settling in to my room and taking some time to refresh myself after the journey, I sat at an antique desk and took some time to more fully acquaint myself with the colonel’s history from the files upon which I had been unable to concentrate during the journey here.

  Colonel Elena Grayloc had commanded Guardsmen for seventy years, earning almost every battle honour it was possible to win and drawing admiration for both her military conduct and intellectual achievements. During her time in the Astra Militarum, she was a prolific writer, composing numerous treatises on regimental tactics and leadership that are still required reading at the Yervaunt schola progenium.

  She also became something of a collector, amassing a wealth of rare texts from her many victorious campaigns and shipping them back to the library in Grayloc Manor.

  It seemed her star was in the ascendant, with her promotion to the rank of lord militant general or, some whispered, even lord commander of the sector, all but assured.

  Then the Archenemy launched a counter-attack that few within high command will openly speak about or even acknowledge. It has since become known as the Dawn of Dark Suns, a night where the stars reportedly went out and the bonds between regiments of the Astra Militarum were sundered as they have not been since the age of the Great Betrayal.

  A dearth of reports exist that chronicle the Dark Suns campaign, in part because so few survived it.4 It is impossible to obtain confirmed casualty figures, but I have heard rumours that over thirty-six million Guardsmen were lost in that one disaster.

  Colonel Grayloc had led her soldiers in a fighting retreat that lasted nearly three years of gruelling guerrilla warfare and desperate survival against the odds.

  Her regiment, which had started out fifteen thousand strong, finally returned to Imperial space numbering a mere two hundred souls. For her meritorious service, Colonel Grayloc was awarded the Honorifica Imperialis, though as I have previously recorded, I can find no specific citation as to the exact circumstances surrounding the action that led to this award. The colonel was granted a discharge with full honours, and retired to her estates on Yervaunt, where she would live out the last fifteen years of her life as a recluse, emerging only rarely to attend regimental functions and low-key philanthropic events.

  I checked my chrono and saw that ninety minutes had passed since my arrival.

  Gathering the papers spread across the desk, and returning each document and report to its assigned place within my folders, I then rose with a groan as my back twinged painfully. The chirurgeon has told me often enough that sitting too long at a desk is not good for me – an occupational hazard of the archivist – so I began a series of stretches.

  As I worked through exercises to loosen the muscular cramps around my vertebra, I took a moment to admire the shrine on the opposite promontory through the window. It was a fine structure, and I resolved to walk around the crater to offer prayers at my earliest opportunity.

  Until then, I decided it was time to visit the colonel’s library. I pulled my long silver hair back into a ponytail and opened the door to my room.

  Kyrano was standing right outside.

  The servitor stood motionless, his bulk filling the doorway.

  ‘Throne!’ I cried, stepping back.

  I was struck by the sudden sense he… no, not he, it had been waiting for me.

  When I recovered my composure, I said, ‘Excuse me, I wish to visit Lord Grayloc’s library now.’

  The servitor did not move.

  I repeated my request, and this time the lens of its right eye whirred and clicked, its iris dilating as if in appraisal. Reluctantly it seemed, the servitor decided it would move. It bowed its he
ad and stepped aside. I closed my door as I moved past it and walked the short distance towards the red lacquered doors.

  As I stood before them, all thoughts of how I had admonished my staff for their fevered speculation as to what might lie within Colonel Grayloc’s library were entirely forgotten. I felt giddy at the prospect of beginning my work and learning what lay within.

  I gripped the handles, took a breath and pushed the doors open.

  The library of Grayloc Manor was perhaps smaller than I had expected, but what it lacked in scale, it more than made up for in content. Its high ceiling was vaulted with square coffers, the interiors of which were decorated with repeating patterns of square-cut spirals that drew the eye around the space, no doubt as its architect intended.

  Another portrait hung opposite the entrance, this one stiffer and more formal than the one hanging in the vestibule. This depicted Colonel Grayloc, now clad in the rich dress greens of the 83rd Yervaunt Voltigeurs, staring imperiously out of the canvas. She stood beside an archaic map table piled high with scrolls, and with a gilt-edged book tucked in the crook of her arm. The colonel’s weapons – the battered lasrifle, plasma pistol and power sabre – were hung on polished wooden plaques beneath the painting. I wondered if they were still functional.

  Tearing my gaze from the colonel’s visage, the first thing that struck me was the faint smell of age and preservatives, of powders, and the hum of precise temperature controls. Light diffused from the upper skylights with the crisp quality of polarisation, and cast a pleasingly warm illumination. Where the few parts of the house I had recently seen appeared somewhat neglected, no expense had been spared in the library’s upkeep.

  Elaborately carved walnut shelves lined every wall, rising from floor to ceiling, and each shelf groaned with potential. Books of all ages, dimensions and descriptions were neatly stacked in a pleasing array of colours and sizes, each a portal to knowledge and understanding.

  A rush of sensation and memory surged through me; of my youth as an inscriber and conservator of damaged manuscripts, of weeks spent in the basement archives of the repository hunting down one elusive piece of corroboration, and the simple joy of finding a lost book that had been mis-shelved centuries before.