Corax- Lord of Shadows

by Guy Haley

  ‘A target of our choosing,’ said Belthann. ‘A situation of our contrivance. A result of our prediction.’

  ‘That’ll be dangerous for the representative.’

  ‘The fate of the target is irrelevant. The capture of the criminal is our goal.’

  ‘I don’t think I can go along with this,’ said Tensat. ‘It will cause a lot of problems here if the representative is killed.’

  ‘You’re a guilder, but they don’t tell me you have any more affection for these slave-keeping bastards than I do, enforcer,’ said Belthann.

  ‘Maybe not, but we risk serious unrest. Civil conflict, even,’ said Tensat.

  ‘I was raised in the prison mines up there.’ Belthann’s eyes became flinty. ‘Third generation. I had done nothing, my parents had done nothing, my grandparents had done precious little, but it was enough to condemn my family for all time. If it were not for Lord Corax’s orders to leave guilders alone, I would probably be killing them myself.’

  Tensat glanced at the procurator, then back to the legionary.

  ‘The fastest way to the resolution of this crisis is by using the representative,’ said Belthann. ‘He will be safe. If that is not to your liking, you can enjoy a stay at the Ravenspire until the situation is contained.’

  Tensat scraped a fingernail along the table, and tapped once. ‘Fine. Fine then. I agree. I shall see what I can arrange, but if it goes wrong, I would be grateful if you offer up an explanation to the government instead of my head.’

  In the corner, the procurator mechanical made a noise that might possibly have been a laugh.

  Seventeen

  moritat

  Visions of darkness assailed Fedann Pexx. Flights of black birds wheeled over battlefields where nothing moved except carrion feeders. Bodies lay in heaps, impaled on their own weapons. Smoke blew from fires across the land, harried by strong winds round the rims of blood-soaked hollows, and caressed the faces of the dead.

  The arms and armour of the combatants altered without warning. One moment, they bore fanciful, archaic stuff, beaten metal draped in cloth of bright heraldries, soaked in the uniform crimson of blood. Swords lay by nerveless hands. Dead steeds lay atop their slaughtered masters. Then the scene would change and the warriors would be legionaries of the Raven Guard lying under a dry alien sky, their armour riven by bolt shells, their hands clasped about each other’s throats in poses of mutual fratricide.

  Pexx saw this from above sometimes. Other times he wandered the landscapes of his torment physically, clad in robes as grey as ash, feet dragging in gory mud, hands wringing, for he could do nothing to help those who had died and was persecuted by feelings that there was something he could have done to stop it, if only he had acted sooner. What this averting action was, however, he did not know, and that only deepened his woe. Guilt raked him with dirty claws.

  Mingled with these feelings were those of frustrated aggression. He resented not being present at the fight. He hungered to blood himself as the dead warriors had, to drive out the feelings of helplessness and impending doom with battle fury.

  These feelings gripped him, toyed with him, and cast him back into misery.

  When he did not wander the battlefield, he roamed a dreary wood of grey mists and leafless branches, or a desert of bones, or a city where wan faces peered accusingly from unglazed windows.

  When he emerged from the recesses of his own mind, he faced the total blackness of his cell. A Space Marine required a fraction of the light an unmodified human did to see clearly, but there was none at all in the cell. It was so perfectly proof against any intrusion of light that he could have been buried far beneath the surface of a lightless world. He sometimes fancied he was, until the throbbing of ship’s engines and sporadic, distant noises of menials at work assured him he was not.

  In the darkness he could not tell if his eyes were open or closed. He could not tell if he was dreaming or asleep. In time, the dark became populated by horrors of its own, and these blended with the visions he experienced in his mind’s eye until the two were indistinguishable. Pexx had not known it was possible to feel so utterly dejected. If the Imperial Truth did not deny its existence, he would have said his soul had been plucked from his body, and dipped in a stinking tar rendered from the worst sins imaginable.

  The sound of his own breathing became raw. He thought he might have turned into something less than human. Perhaps he had.

  A time after Pexx had been incarcerated – how long was impossible to gauge – the door lock clunked. The faint blue light from the cell block corridor outside was dazzling, though it was no brighter than the first smudge of dawn.

  Agapito stepped into the room. Pexx recognised his scent.

  ‘How are you keeping, brother?’

  Pexx shifted. His manacles clanked. He laughed at the question.

  ‘Badly,’ he said. ‘I am left in here with my horrors. It is not a pleasant way to spend my time.’

  ‘That is to be expected,’ said Agapito sympathetically. Both of them were boy soldiers in Corax’s rebellion. They had lived lives in cells like this, before the Emperor lifted them up to the stars. They had fought to prevent others having the same life. Now Pexx was back where they had started, locked up in the dark.

  ‘This is an unpleasant place,’ Agapito said.

  ‘I am supposed to ride this out, see it through to the end. If I am to recover, first I must suffer.’

  ‘That’s almost… religious.’

  Pexx closed his eyes and rested his head back against the wall.

  ‘I do not think it is working.’ He shook his head. His hair had been shaved down to skin when he came in. Now the bristles rasped against the rough metal. ‘I never thought I would fall to the sable brand. I did not think I had the temperament.’

  ‘It is not to do with temperament.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Pexx miserably. ‘I am sorry, captain, but I am not much in the mood for talking. If you have something to say to me, I would be grateful if you could say it and then leave.’ He smiled grimly to himself. ‘Unless you have come to let me out, in which case, I shall come with you.’

  ‘There is a chance of that,’ said Agapito.

  Pexx sat forward. He turned to look at his captain and narrowed his eyes against the light.

  Dim blue lit Agapito’s face like a moon in half-eclipse.

  ‘I am not recovered,’ he said.

  ‘You are not. But there is another way.’

  ‘Shadow Killers,’ said Pexx. He lifted his hands, making his chains chink. ‘It has come to the Moritat then.’

  ‘Serving with them might help you,’ said Agapito.

  ‘It might not. Kill or cure,’ said Pexx. ‘It is a shameful assignment.’

  ‘No longer. They have a new name, a new purpose.’

  ‘But still no honour,’ said Pexx.

  ‘Did you hear what happened?’ asked Agapito.

  ‘Some,’ said Pexx. ‘An Apothecary comes in every two days to feed and assess me. He talks. He says it helps to talk between bouts of isolation. That to shift from one state to another can jar the mind out of this blasted introspection.’

  ‘Vicente Sixx,’ said Agapito. ‘I have spoken with him.’

  About my condition, Pexx thought. Neither of them said so.

  ‘Do you know about Agarth?’

  ‘I do. The anima-phage. What he did was terrible, worse than what I see in the visions. I am sorry it happened. It is a shame he escaped.’

  ‘We have found him, though it has taken precious time.’

  Pexx sensed unhappiness in Agapito. The sable brand had sharpened his intuition. He didn’t detect Agapito’s mental state through the usual cues of facial expression or vocal tone; Agapito hid his emotions well. But somehow he knew that he was unhappy.

  It was disturbing.

  �
�How long?’ he asked.

  ‘The search took weeks,’ said Agapito. ‘And there were some… questionable methods used to locate him.’

  ‘Such as?’ said Pexx.

  Agapito would not be drawn. ‘Agarth has escaped to an outpost hidden within the upper reaches of the star’s corona,’ Agapito said. ‘The Moritat are to be sent in to disable it.’

  ‘You are here to offer me the chance to join them. They are killers. Mind-damaged. The worst of the Legion.’

  ‘That is true. Many of them are recidivists, but some of them, though, are sable brand like you and some of those who have recovered in the past did so through service in that dark brotherhood.’

  ‘Is it an order that I join them, captain?’ asked Pexx.

  ‘No order, but an offer. If you want my opinion, you should do it. More sable brand come through their trial by fighting than by sitting in these places and staring darkness in the face.’

  ‘A poetic way of saying going raving mad and tearing your own body apart,’ said Pexx.

  ‘Granted,’ said Agapito.

  ‘I will do it, of course.’

  ‘I thought you would say that.’ Agapito pressed a button on a small box hanging from his waist. Pexx’s manacles snapped open. His head spun when he stood. He had been sitting down for a long time.

  ‘When do we go?’ Pexx asked.

  ‘Right now,’ said Agapito.

  The heat from the sun scorched them. Behind a metre of cera­mite and ablative materials, they could still feel it. Agarth’s station was located on the edge of the star’s atmosphere where the heat was measured in the millions of degrees. How Agarth had constructed his hideout there was a source of debate among the Legion. Perhaps it dated from the times before, when man’s science was greater. However it was done, it had been made, this keep protected by wards of fire.

  The station hung over boiling plasma. No void ship could fly so close to the sun. Munitions would detonate. Solid mass projectiles would evaporate. Laser and particle weapons would see their beams sent awry by the magnetic fields flexing around the star. Finding the station had been a feat in itself. In the end, the information was gathered from captives taken by snatch squads from the cities most closely aligned with Zenith-312.

  Agarth no doubt felt safe where he was. But nobody was beyond the reach of the Raven Guard.

  Launched from the tubes of the Tenebrous, the Moritat coasted towards the sun in boarding torpedoes.

  Only a madman would fly so near to a star. The Moritat had enough madness to spare.

  The Moritat in front of Pexx slammed his head repeatedly against his restraints. The rhythm of ceramite on plasteel increased tempo with each strike, then slowed, then sped up again. The warrior behind him chuckled darkly.

  ‘Andoro is at it again. He is. At it again!’ he growled. Despair lurked behind his laughter. ‘Banging his head.’

  The remaining two were mercifully silent.

  Here were the Legion’s misfits; the criminally minded who had slipped through recruitment screening, murderers from erstwhile Lycaeus who had taken to bad ways again, men whose humours were unbalanced by implant malfunction, and, among them, those who had fallen to the sable brand. Corax’s genetic curse. Some Space Marines enjoyed ranging alone without brotherhood; it left them free to murder in the dark unobserved. They requested the assignment. Pexx wished to meet that sort least of all. He imagined them all around him, waiting for him to fail so they could condemn him and kill him out of the sight of justice.

  Black avians cawed in Pexx’s imagination. A pitiless well of misery bubbled over in his head, polluting his psyche. Intellectually he stood back from it, appalled at the effect his affliction had upon his spirits, but though he could attempt to remain detached, darkness laced his thoughts, so that his being became worthless rock, and the misery the veins of precious ore fate wished to drill out of him, obliterating his mind in the process.

  He remembered sadness from his life before. When he was a boy there had been a plenitude of despair available to sample in the prison of Lycaeus, but what he endured now was something new, so concentrated no amount of mental effort could overcome it.

  It did not matter, he told himself. I could be dead in a moment.

  Boarding torpedoes had the highest chance of making the journey to the solar outpost. They were easy to hide in the chaotic torrents of radiation around the sun. But their survivability more than stealth forced their choice. The prow-baffling the torpedoes carried to shield them from the emissions of their melta arrays presented some protection from the sun. Even then the angle of insertion had to be precise. The prows had to be dead on to the star, or the torpedoes would melt like sticks of sealing wax.

  As much additional shielding as the torpedoes could carry had been hastily added to their sides for the mission. It made little difference. Pexx felt the star’s endless burning through the wadding of the ceramite panels as if he were stood on the equator of a desert world. His armour pack whirred with cooling activity. Soft runes blinked every twenty seconds on his helmplate display to remind him of the environmental dangers. The configuration was new to him. Moritat wargear was different to that of ordinary troopers.

  They used the smallest size of torpedo, five-man infiltration tubes. An argument could be made that the twenty-eight-strong Moritat force could spread out more effectively that way, but in reality it was about minimising losses. Moritat were suicide troops, the duty given out of scorn or as a chance at redemption. They were not expected to survive. Those that made the crossing would have to fight their way through Agarth’s Zenith-guard to the mission targets. Once the station was disabled, they had to find their own way off. Mission parameters were defined with their escape as an optional objective, as the briefing euphemistically put it.

  Moritat was a young name for an old punishment. Pexx thought it fitting.

  Through all this rumination he felt no regret. From the coldly rational part of himself, he saw the horror of his condition was not born of fear of death, but a hopelessness that his death would mean nothing. This small realisation gave him a foothold on sanity, and for a time the visions and the anguish abated. He was a warrior again, sealed in his little world of ceramite, waiting for a worthy battle to commence. He let his body go loose within his armour, let the vibration of the ­torpedo’s engine lull him into a state halfway back from madness.

  Retro-thrusters burst. Pexx slammed into the restraint cage as their ship decelerated rapidly. There came the roar of melta arrays and the greater impact of a torpedo on its target. Pexx was thrown about hard by the shuddering penetration into the outpost. They came to a violent halt, the door exploded outwards, the harnesses detached and before Pexx knew what he was doing, he was in a brightly lit corridor where the sharp smell of the void mingled with ferrofoam sealant and hot metal. The twin volkite serpentas he held in his hands came online of their own accord. Their paired plasma feeds snaking from his backpack warmed. The suit possessed a sophisticated targeting array. It too activated without his input, flooding his helm plate with a welter of information. The bright icons superimposed over his vision competed with the wheeling black birds infesting his imagination. Neither would let him be.

  A few moments after that, he was killing again.

  Agarth had protected himself well.

  Automated defence points guarded the station’s corridors. Every part of its interior was covered by picter units and more esoteric sensors. Combat servitors supplemented the fixed defences. Pexx encountered these first, blasting them apart before they could open fire on him. Their places were taken by Zenith-guard.

  The warriors garrisoning the station were an elite formation. They wore armour decorated with bold emblems in blue and red, and carried weaponry of more advanced make than their now dead counterparts aboard the home moonlet. Often the prime units of autocracies were elite only in name, good at terrorising
civilians and marching in formation, but their vaunted abilities proved lacking when tested in combat. Pexx reflected that it was the soldiers defending popular governments, or with a strong national ethic that fought the best. Rarely did the tools of oppression make a good show on the battlefield.

  Agarth’s men were better than most, but not as good as some. Almost elite, he thought, as he advanced into a storm of fire. Flechettes ricocheted from his suit’s reinforced front. Double hits from his paired volkites turned a man to meat-scented steam. Two of the dead soldier’s companions broke and ran. The cowardice they displayed and the bravery of the men that stayed behind were not characteristics of brainwashed warriors. At some level, then, they had made the decision to come here freely and let their families die, thought Pexx. He slew those that had stood their ground. Their guns rattled on full automatic. Needle projectiles skipped off the curved surfaces of his Moritat armour, suddenly ceasing with the firers’ deaths.

  The Moritat suit was a modification of Crusade-pattern armour. It was slow, but more heavily armoured than standard plate, ideal for warriors expected to weather the attentions of the enemy alone, and forged to allow them to do as much damage as they could before they were slain. Enhanced auto-senses gave Pexx a superior situational awareness. Pexx thought these and other things to keep his mind occupied and the visions at bay. When he let himself slip into the fugue of combat, he was alarmed to find his inner horrors impinging on the outside world. The ghosts of screams that he at first took for genuine haunted his vox-pickup, and once, when he killed an officer of Agarth’s men, his chest exploded with cawing black birds instead of gore.

  He addressed the nature of the sights rationally to distract himself. Was the Legion’s iconography influencing these hallucinations, or something else? Would a Xeric tribesman’s hallucinations be different to the visions of a Lycaean?

  Pexx’s guns vented superheated steam as he strode into a three-way junction arranged like a horizontal Y. Tarry residue and body parts marked the deaths of thirteen guards. The remainder were falling back under the cover of smoke and blind grenades towards the station centre. A wall of chemical smoke and electrical arcing half hid them from his suit’s systems. They were retreating to protect their master. Pexx let them go. A bullet would not end Agarth’s life.