‘We have struggled recently as well,’ Te Kahurangi admitted. ‘Cut off from the full channels of recruitment, consigned to exile… We both know the difficulties of finding pure, worthy candidates.’
‘Yet you have one,’ Arathar said. ‘I can sense his potential.’
‘He was procured at great cost,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘But I have spared nothing in his tutelage. My own visions tell me he will play a vital part in the future of the Chapter.’
‘And what of your new Reaper Prime?’ Arathar asked. ‘I witnessed old Akia’s passing in a warp dream one night. It was a hard death.’
‘Akia’s mastery of the company had begun to slip towards the end,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘I had many doubts about Bail Sharr when first he took up Reaper, but he has proven me wrong more often than not.’
‘He is of Akia’s own legacy is he not?’
‘He is. He is younger though, more controlled. He will clash with authority, as Akia did, but he is wise enough to not lose sight of the larger picture. Akia had started to do that too often towards the end.’
‘You must be careful, brother. Nev will seek to use his own heritage against him.’
‘I trust him. Perhaps I should not, but we will soon know whether my judgement is misplaced.’
‘I fear he will struggle to win any form of agreement. Nev was left in a vengeful mood after the last visit. He wants blood.’
Any reply from Te Kahurangi was interrupted when Arathar came to an abrupt halt, his grip tightening on his staff. He turned back towards the librarium’s entrance. After a moment the Pale Nomad sensed what Arathar had already felt.
‘Khauri,’ he muttered. Arathar was moving towards the door.
‘They have him,’ he said.
Nehat Nev had risen and paced round from behind the hall’s high table, coming to stand before Sharr. A number of his Ashen Claws made moves to follow him, but the pale warrior stilled them with a gesture. He was taller than Sharr, and almost as broad even without power armour. He looked down at the Carcharodon, head cocked slightly to one side, disdain warring with interest in his haughty gaze. For a brief moment, Sharr thought he knew what it felt like to be hunted by one of the Chapter’s hook-beaked raptors.
‘Do we have an agreement then, Reaper Prime?’ the Ashen Claw asked.
‘The Red Wake will not surrender his weapons,’ Sharr said. ‘I can make an agreement, but I can give no guarantees.’
Nev turned away and, with a speed that was almost blinding, snatched the large corvid skull from the feast table and smashed it into the floor at his feet, shattering it into a hundred fragments. He looked once more at Sharr, and his black eyes blazed with an abiding, arrogant fury.
‘I welcome you here and still you insult me, Carcharodon?’
‘The gauntlets are not mine to give.’
‘Then what is? You came here to negotiate, so where is your leverage?’
Sharr glanced around. Since they had first stopped before the high table the occupants of the rest of the hall had risen and approached. Sharr’s command squad were surrounded by well over a hundred humans and Space Marines, all stoked by their master’s fury. Their feast had been interrupted, and the cold indifference of the intruders had set them on edge. They wanted blood, Sharr could smell it.
‘I have offered you all I have brought,’ he said to Nev. ‘Arms, ammunition, the gene-seed that will slow the degeneration of your brotherhood. What more can I give?’
Nev stared at Sharr for a long time. The chamber was hushed. Eventually, the harsh cawing of one of the avians perched high broke the silence.
‘You can give me your life, Carcharodon,’ Nev said. The comm-bead in Sharr’s ear ticked.
‘Contact outside the main doors,’ Kordi’s voice crackled, accompanied by the sounds of bolters being racked. ‘A dozen Claws in Terminator armour, and more approaching.’
The first thing that Khauri realised when he woke was that he was surrounded by beings of immense psychic power. Not as strong as the dormant energies he occasionally sensed surrounding Te Kahurangi, but potent nonetheless.
The second thing was that he couldn’t move. He was clamped onto what appeared to be a rusting surgical rack, powerful spot-lumens glaring in his eyes. Even worse, his breastplate and backpack had been removed, right down to the servos, leaving his pallid torso and the puckered skin around his neural ports exposed. The armour itself, along with his stave, lay propped against the only door leading into the rock-cut room.
He tensed, trying to break his bonds, but they held firm.
‘Steady now, child of the shadows,’ said a sibilant voice. ’This will not take long.’
Khauri blinked, his genhanced eyesight reducing the burning light of the lumens shining in his face. There were four figures gathered around the rack he was bound to. Three were the children, their faces lost in the deep shadows of their cowls. The fourth, while likewise clad in a frayed, filth-encrusted green robe and hood, was older – from a glance Khauri guessed he was middle-aged, though the struggles of a hard life had left his features pallid and deeply worn. Like the children, his eyes were also milky and blind. Only with that realisation did Khauri recognise the psychic powers his witch-sight could sense coiling around his captors. They were astropaths, or at the very least the eldest had undergone the Soul-Binding.
‘We need to get rid of the taint inside you,’ the elder one said, smiling and exposing the nubs of his rotting teeth. Khauri realised the blind figure was wearing stained surgical gloves, and held a scalpel in one hand. There was a rusting rack behind him, littered with more medicae tools. Worse, he had inscribed markings onto Khauri’s bare chest with a black stylo – a circle over his abdomen, another just below his throat. He had marked out the location of the Librarian’s progenoid glands, the most vital part of his gene-seed.
‘I will cut the taint out,’ the astropath hissed. ’I can feel it, squirming and writhing inside you. Breeding. Our hated enemies. The Great Crow will reward me for this.’
‘Get away from me,’ Khauri snarled, trying to marshal his thoughts, trying to bind together the energies that would spring open his locks and fling his captors back against the roughly hewn stone of the small medicae chamber. His stave lay where it had been discarded, beside the door. He felt lost without it, addled and unfocused.
‘The taint must be torn free,’ the children chorused as the older psyker leaned over Khauri, his vile breath in the Carcharodon’s face, the gleaming edge of his scalpel pressing down against the white skin of his chest.
Then, with an ear-splitting crash, the door to the chamber blew inwards. A gale seized the room, sending trays of rusting tools clattering and whipping at the robes of Khauri’s captors, making them stagger. Brilliant light blazed through the doorway, resolving itself around the stooped figure of Arathar. The ancient Librarian’s eyes were ablaze with lambent power, and warpfire flared around the tip of his staff. His dark grey robes snapped and fluttered, as though caught at the centre of a storm.
‘Enough!’ he bellowed, his voice riven with the power of the immaterium, words over-layered as though he spoke from three throats at once. ‘This one isn’t for you, Damarius!’
The three children fled, wailing, to the embrace of the one Arathar had called Damarius. The astropath spat, clutching the younger psykers protectively as they buried their faces in the folds of his robes.
‘He is one of them,’ he hissed, gesturing at Khauri with his scalpel. ’His presence here violates the Eyrie! I can sense the taint inside him, and across his back! I have seen the scars!’
Arathar made the slightest of gestures, and the clamps holding Khauri in place sprang open with a thud. The Carcharodon leapt to the floor and snatched his stave, a canticle of binding on his lips. Rather than the vengeful surge of power he was seeking, however, he felt his strength desert him, as though drained by some external s
ource. He put a hand against the cool, rough stone of the wall, steadying himself.
‘Easy now, brother,’ said a new voice. It was Te Kahurangi. He had stepped in after Arathar, the jade stone that tipped his own force staff pulsing with power. ‘There is no need for violence here.’
Arathar had also lowered his staff, though witch-light still lingered in his one good eye as he glared at Damarius. The air of the room was vibrating, affected by the presence of so many psykers. Khauri could sense the tension continuing to rise – he could feel the very stone beneath his fingers pulsing with raw energy.
‘You’ve scared them!’ Damarius snapped as he cradled the weeping children. ’You should know not to do that by now!’
‘Then calm them,’ Arathar responded coldly. ‘This is no way to treat our guests. You could have broken our entire pact single-handedly.’
Damarius hushed the psy-sensitive youths, and slowly Khauri felt the pressure in the room starting to subside. He eased his grip on his stave and bent to retrieve his breastplate. As he did so he felt Arathar’s eyes on him, running the length of his scarred back, taking in the wounds dealt to him a decade earlier. Though he had suffered them before his transcendence to the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes, they had never healed. Te Kahurangi had dismissed their significance, though he knew their origin better than most.
‘They are hungry,’ Damarius said, gesturing down at his now-quiet charges.
‘I will have leftovers brought down from the feast hall,’ Arathar said. He sounded weary, distracted, the fearsome psychic warrior that had first burst into the chamber now gone.
‘We should return to the hall,’ Te Kahurangi said as Khauri clamped on his upper armour, moving to help him connect the backpack’s exposed Mark V power cables. ‘I fear the Reaper Prime has arrived at the decisive point in the negotiations.’
‘One last word before you go, brother,’ Arathar said. He nodded at Khauri and Te Kahurangi motioned him outside with his staff.
‘Follow the corridor beyond this door up two flights,’ he said. ‘It will take you back onto the path to the hall. When you find it, wait, and I will catch up with you.’
Khauri didn’t move. For a few long seconds the Chief Librarian and his apprentice locked eyes, saying nothing. One of the children began to cry again.
Eventually the Lexicanium nodded and left, saying nothing.
‘What is he?’
Te Kahurangi didn’t reply. Arathar shook his head.
‘You are bold, bringing him to this place. I know now why you have sought me out, rather than joining your captain in the high hall.’
‘He is vital to the Chapter’s future,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘I have seen it.’
‘What else have you seen?’ Arathar demanded. ‘Do not tell me that this… creature, brings only hope.’
‘You know as well as I that the future is a narrow path for ones such as us,’ Te Kahurangi replied. ‘On the one side, the salvation of the Chapter. On the other, annihilation, damnation. Khauri walks it, just like the rest of us.’
‘And if he should fall?’ Arathar asked. ‘Or, worse, if he should realise what the scarring on his back portends?’
‘Then I will catch him,’ Te Kahurangi said, turning and leaving the medicae room.
The Ashen Claws’ gladiatorial pit lay in the open air, out amidst the jagged black rocks that marked the boundary between the Lost Eyrie’s spire and the rugged, bleak tundra of the Atargatis plains. Night had fallen, swathing the land in darkness, but the great braziers and burning pits that surrounded the arena had been lit, rendering the display in a fiery hue. The arena itself was a natural depression that had been augmented by its renegade masters. The bottom, a bare place of gravel and gnawed bones, had been accentuated so that the immediate sides were sheer, trapping anyone caught in it. The rugged sides above the edge had been planed down to rough tiers, stepped seating that was now teeming with hundreds of onlookers, human and transhuman alike. They had come to the arena not over the rocky slopes that descended from the Eyrie’s plunging flanks, but through the underground passageways and tunnels that honeycombed its surface.
It was in one such tunnel that Sharr made ready for combat. As the cheering of the crowd drifted down to them, Strike Veteran Dorthor checked his battleplate, the few scarred parts of his face not replaced by bionic augmentation unreadable in the torchlight. He tugged at a vambrace, rang his fist against a pauldron, checked the sealant clamps around Sharr’s gorget. The rest of the command squad, accompanied by Te Kahurangi and Khauri, stood around them in the flickering firelight. The two psykers had joined them as they descended from the high hall to the pit. Sharr had explained the situation on the way.
‘Let me go,’ Red Tane said for the eleventh time. The Third Company’s champion was practically shuddering in his own armour, desperate to defend the honour of his void brethren and the Reaper Prime. Sharr said nothing, turning to allow Dorthor to check his backpack’s vent tabs, power cables and mag-clamps.
‘It is my purpose in life,’ Tane went on, hand clenching and unclenching with subconscious fervour around the pommel of the void sword. ‘You chose me to be the company champion. That means you chose me to represent you in trials like these. I will slaughter whatever these renegades unleash.’
‘Enough, brother,’ Sharr said quietly as Dorthor stepped away, his work done. ‘Nehat Nev was clear enough. For the agreement to be binding, it must be me.’
‘He dishonours me,’ Tane said, grip on his sword tightening. ‘He dishonours us all!’
‘How often must I tell you that honour is a dead thing,’ Sharr replied, unclamping Reaper from his backpack and testing the great chainaxe’s weight. ‘Will you never learn the tenets of the Chapter, young champion?’
‘Be silent,’ Dorthor said, the strike veteran’s rasping tone cutting off Tane as he began to speak again. The champion bristled, but said nothing more.
‘Swear me an oath that you will not draw the void sword this day, regardless of what happens to me,’ Sharr said to Tane.
‘This is wrong,’ the champion said through gritted teeth.
‘It is unavoidable,’ Te Kahurangi said, laying a hand on Tane’s pauldron. ‘Nehat Nev has to make an example of us. He has failed to secure a guarantee over Hunger and Slake, just as he failed when last we came here. He has failed to take the upper hand because we hold nothing more than we originally intended to offer. He can either accept what we are giving him and save his Chapter, or spite us with a refusal.’
‘So why must the Reaper Prime fight?’ Tane demanded.
‘It is a show of strength. Nev has taken our bargain, but he has to be seen to be in control. He also knows we are not likely to turn down a trial by arms. Officially, it is only a formality, a means of sealing negotiations.’
‘That is madness. We don’t even know what is waiting in that pit. The Reaper Prime could be killed!’
‘If that is the Void Father’s wish, it will be so,’ Sharr said. ‘At this point my fate is no longer relevant. Korro and Kordi’s squads are overseeing the delivery of our cargo and the arrival of the shuttles that will take the Ashen Claw’s tribute. If I die here, I will have done my duty to the Chapter. Nuritona will return to the Nomad Predation Fleet with our tithe, and you will be with him.’
The cheering of the crowd outside rose.
‘It is time,’ Te Kahurangi said. ‘Go with Rangu’s blessings, Reaper Prime.’
Sharr stepped away from his command squad, towards the end of the tunnel. The roaring of the crowd reached a crescendo as he passed out into the firelight bathing the bottom of the pit. Thousands lined the tiers above him, jeering, yelling and gesticulating, the arena resounding with their thunderous expectations. Nehat Nev sat enthroned on a rocky spur, flanked by blazing braziers, his court and a bodyguard of Terminators, fully armed and armoured. He had donned his own wargear, baroque plat
es of dark grey and red.
‘Welcome, shark,’ the master of the Ashen Claws called down to Sharr as the Reaper Prime paced towards the centre of the pit, gravel crunching beneath his boots. ‘I am glad to see your commitment to our new pact runs deep enough for you to risk your own life. We shall have a little sport, you and I, before we part ways.’
‘Unleash whatever pet you keep locked down here, Nev,’ Sharr said, eyes on the tunnel opposite the one he had emerged from, its entrance barred by a rusting portcullis. ‘The sooner I put it down, the sooner I can return to my shoal.’
‘You shouldn’t call him a pet, Sharr,’ Nev said, his voice slick with cruel humour. ‘He could well be a brother to you. We picked him up during a supply raid into the Mordant Nebula six years ago. We found his vile breed attacking an agri-cluster off Hyrax. He was unfortunate enough to survive.’
The cheering of the crowd redoubled as the portcullis opposite Sharr clattered slowly upwards, the stone tunnel beyond yawning. Sharr hefted Reaper and planted his feet, boots grinding in the grit. For a moment there was nothing as the portcullis grated up into its slats, nothing but the howling and jeering of the spectators and the quiet in Sharr’s mind as his Lyman’s ear silenced them.
Then came a roar, one that was immediately familiar to the Reaper Prime – the sound of a chainaxe activating. It was followed by a second similar roar, and the crowd reached new heights of fervour as, with a bellow of rawest hatred, a Space Marine came storming from the shadows of the tunnel.
Sharr’s genhanced mind took two seconds to assess the oncoming figure before his reflexes kicked in, causing him to trigger Reaper and bring the weapon up in a defensive stance. The warrior was excommunicate traitoris, a heretic. His armour was ancient and badly worn, chipped and crusted with old blood, but the symbols of one particularly hateful Legion were still visible alongside the blasphemous runes of his savage allegiances – the XII, the World Eaters. He wielded a chainaxe in each fist, both shorter and more nimble than Reaper’s two-handed length. Judging by the speed and ferocity of the warrior’s charge he was more than likely addled by excessive combat stimms and the nightmarish cranial surgery that drove all World Eaters into their berserk state.
Carcharodons: Outer Dark Page 10