I ran through the Swathe, getting fearful looks from its inhabitants. The dregs lingered here in the deeps and they wanted to be left alone in misery and squalor. Some brandished weapons, ready to defend their sorry lives, but they were empty threats. Others took refuge in their hovels, hunkering down and shutting their eyes, as if waiting for a storm to pass.
In an ancient part of the district, I found a Legion mark carved into a stone stairwell. The old lightning bolt led me downwards into a catacomb. I knew this place. It was called the Flood, the deepest part of the Swathe. Ancient columns streaked with grime rose up to a curved and vaulted ceiling. It had been beautiful once, but as with so many things age had stolen its glory. Parts of the Flood had collapsed, surrendering to the agglomerated weight of the levels above. I clambered over a sloping heap of debris, slewed across my path like a bulging sack had split its stitches and spewed into the main thoroughfare, its contents left to sit where they may. I seldom came here. I had no cause, but wondered what Vezulah’s might be.
‘Is this our last battlefield, brother?’ I asked of the dark, and was surprised when it answered.
‘I have fought my last battle already, Dah.’
I found him leaning against the curved catacomb wall, a hand across his stomach holding everything in. Something wet and dark gleamed between Vezulah’s trembling fingers. His broken axe lay next to his body, the blade acid-burned in two.
‘Vez…’ I knelt down beside him. He looked deathly in the flickering glow of the overhead phosphor lamps.
‘Are you armed?’ he rasped.
I frowned, about to gesture to my drawn sword and the broad-blade strapped to my back when I realised Vezulah was blind. A milky sheen covered his eyes, and there were burn marks around the sockets and across his face.
‘Acid…’ he said, correctly assuming the reason for my silence. ‘Forgot they could do that.’ He laughed, but the effort cost him. ‘He gave them all the gifts, didn’t He. And left us to fester and rot.’ He reached out and grabbed my arm, fumbling with his blindness. ‘We should not have lasted this long.’
I held his head to the light, trying to examine the ghastly injuries to his face. He resisted as if ashamed of his condition.
‘The gut wound is fatal,’ he hissed, teeth clenched with a sudden flare of pain.
‘Who did this?’ I asked, and let him go. I peered into the darkness but found no attackers lurking.
‘They were among us, Dah,’ he said. ‘Hiding in the Swathe. I fought them. They ran and led me here. Left me to die.’ He grimaced, and I felt the pull of Vezulah’s mortal thread growing taut.
‘Who, brother? Who hid from us?’
‘A mark, red-raw, like a brand…’ He pointed to his left cheek, his finger lathered in blood. ‘They said his name. Said…’
I grabbed his armoured collar, and wrenched him to me.
‘Tell me, brother! Let me avenge you.’
‘Said… he is coming.’
Vezulah let out a long shuddering breath, and it was over.
I had been wrong. Vezulah hadn’t slaughtered the settlement or left Tarrigata to die. But someone had.
Head bowed, I shut my eyes and felt the heft of the rad pistol against my leg. I considered drawing it. My fingers closed around the grip. A single shot, if it could still fire. Left temple.
I opened my eyes and let the pistol go.
‘For Unity…’ I muttered, and laid my Legion ring in Vezulah’s lap.
‘The enemy within.’ A mark, a name. That’s what Vezulah had said. I had heard stories, most of them from Tarrigata. War was coming. Some said it had already arrived, that traitors were among us.
At the faint clash of steel I looked up.
I got to my feet and ran through the catacombs, chasing the sounds of battle.
Tagiomalchian limped into the catacombs, ignoring the pain beneath his cracked auramite armour. A shredded falsehood lay somewhere in his wake. The cloak had proven ineffective against his quarry, which had sensed him by unnatural means. Its blood, or what passed for blood, slicked the edge of his sentinel blade. The weapon weighed heavy in his grasp. So did the shield on his back, and he knew that the creature had hurt him. But he had also hurt it.
‘Mark my location,’ he said into the vox.
‘You sound injured.’
Tagiomalchian gritted his teeth. ‘Mark it.’
A brief pause suggested another enquiry was coming, but in the end it didn’t materialise. Instead, a different interrogative.
‘Are you close, Tagiomalchian?’
‘I am.’
‘Is it them?’
Few knew of the attack on the Throneworld by the Alpha Legion. In the end it had been contained and the immediate threat neutralised. Concerns remained. There had been ‘incidents’. One at the Plaintive Reach watch station had been difficult to suppress. Rumours had leaked out into the districts. Madness swept throughout Terra. The Warmaster was coming. Sympathisers had sprung up in the populace. Cults. A purge had been ordered, a cleansing fire in the face of the oncoming corruption.
The harbingers of that corruption stood before Tagiomalchian.
‘It’s them,’ he said, and shut off the vox.
Tagiomalchian had emerged into the flickering light of a subterranean hall. The tunnels had led him here. An icy chill touched him even through his armour. The hall’s original purpose had been obscured by time and invention. An old bathhouse, perhaps, its rusted copper pipes still visible but only partially intact. A pair of handle-driven pumps shaped into the mouths of heraldic gryphonnes fed a deep basin, but were seized in place by decay. Flaking filigree spoke of mythic seaborne beasts but those artistic images had been perverted.
Something more ancient and primal stood in this place now. Torches burned eagerly in iron sconces, letting off a cloying scent of fouled meat and sour milk. A rimy scum of blood, not water, ringed the edge of the basin where a symbol had been crudely drawn in a tarry black substance. Candles guttered, clumped like overgrown weeds. Their waxy stems gave off the stink of animal fat.
Tagiomalchian raised his sword. Gilded whorls and ornate intaglio caught the light. A crackle of energy ran up the blade.
A short row of steps led up to the old bathhouse dais. Dark streaks ran down the grimy stone. It waited for him here, as he knew it would be waiting ever since it had tasted his blood. A ragged black cloak sat around its armoured shoulders, draped over scaled war-plate the colour of forgotten seas. Strange, organic spines poked through its sackcloth mantle. It needed no weapons. Its fingers ended in long talons that had tasted Tagiomalchian’s blood. It had been a legionary once, but now something else had taken residence in the mortal flesh it wore.
‘Abomination,’ declared Tagiomalchian, unhurried as he climbed the steps and so calm he could have been commenting on the weather. His gaze stayed on the legionary, but he was also aware of the robed figures by its side. Eight men and women. Though they were hooded, and stood over several bodies in the basin. Partly clotted blood rimed the drainage grate, clinging to the metal and darkening the rust at the edges.
The robed figures each bore the brand of the hydra on their cheek, so did the dead. Willing sacrifices. Each mark looked freshly made and raw, just like the one Tagiomalchian had seen in the dive bar before he had been attacked.
A ritual circle had been drawn in the black tar. He was to be sacrificed. The Emperor’s blood flowed in his veins, potent and preternatural. That had meaning for these depraved creatures and the thing they served.
Amongst the robed supplicants, a demagogue stepped forwards.
‘He is coming,’ the woman uttered, without zeal as if she were simply speaking a fact.
‘Lupercal,’ the rest replied.
‘Lupercal,’ the cultists chimed as one.
‘Lupercal,’ echoed the legionary. He spoke in two voices in opposite registers. Then he leapt at Tagiomalchian.
I heard the crash of metal hitting stone, the sound of an armoured body borne
down by something bigger and heavier. Flickering torchlight beckoned at the tunnel edge and the hint of a larger chamber began to come into being.
I smelled the ice plains again, heard the wind and fought to keep the old dreams at bay. Whatever had had its way in the Swathe, had killed Vezulah and led to Tarrigata’s death was here. I alone could reckon that debt and avenge the dead.
The rad pistol slapped at my thigh as I ran. The broad-blade felt leaden in my grasp, old muscles protesting even before this last battle. I ignored the pain and activated the disruptor. It flared then failed. I tried again, still running, about to break through an archway and into the light. It flickered and held. The actinic crackle running along the blade tanged my mouth as though an electric current had just been laid across my tongue.
I breached the cordon of light and saw a golden warrior on his back, and a thing that defied understanding hacking at him with dagger-length talons. I knew the warrior, if not by name. A Custodian of the Emperor. I had fought beside them during the wars for Unity.
He half turned at my approach, expecting another enemy, but powerless to do anything about it if I was. His faceplate was impassive, but his struggle was far more obvious. The beast, the part-legionary, part-mutant that thrashed at the Custodian paid me no heed at all.
The eight figures on the bloody dais above them did and turned at once, opening their robes to reveal long, curved blades. Cultists.
Tarrigata, you old bastard. You were right after all…
Howling madness, they came at me.
I gutted the first, impaling him on the end of my sword. The disruptor field blew the body apart. Skin, bone and organs evaporated. The others seemed undeterred despite the spattering of gore. As I hacked the arm off one, I felt a blade cut into my bicep. It went deep and I stifled a growl of pain. Never show your weakness, the arena had taught me that. Another blade bit into my back. Now I roared. They had me surrounded. I felt the dreams of Unity pull at my mind. If I drifted now, I died, and so did the Custodian. Weakened, he struggled to fight back. The beast gored at him like prey it had brought down from the hunt. A few more minutes and it would be over.
I swung my arm, feeling a solid hit and the sharp crack of bone as one of the cultists flew like a broken spear haft and crashed somewhere out of my immediate sight. Holding the broad-blade one-handed, I drew my short sword and staked another into the ground. Despite his mania, the wretch began to wail.
I finished off the partly dismembered cultist next, my skull splitting hers open like an egg. A wild slash of my broad-blade brought death to another, a disembowelling blow that sluiced the ground with his guts. Stamping on the one I had staked a moment before left two still standing.
The first rushed me, curved blade swinging. I extended a savage kick into his torso hard enough to penetrate the ribcage and snap through the spine. My boot came through his back and I had to shake off the ragged corpse. The last, the leader I think, slit her throat rather than face me, her body falling off the dais and into the empty basin to join the other bodies below.
Now the beast turned and in its gaze I saw something fathomless and evil. And I knew, in my marrow, it was no beast. At least, not of the natural order. All the stories I had heard, of the darkness coming to Terra, of the pacts made with beings older than the Imperium, I believed them.
Evil was amongst us, defying the Emperor’s rule of order. And I served the Emperor. I always have. I always will. It is my oath. It is the thunder and the lightning.
It threw the Custodian aside, casting him off like tough meat forgotten in preference of a sweeter kill. I brandished my sword.
‘For Unity!’ I roared.
We charged at each other, man against beast.
It struck like a tank, smashing me off my feet. My sword had barely cut a groove in armour that resembled arachnid carapace only many times more robust.
I staggered up, sword as heavy as a tombstone, skull pounding.
The Sibir ice plain…
Smoke drifting from the Abyssna…
Shaking off the dreams, I scarcely parried a slashing talon. It had prodigious strength, the repelled blow nearly jolted loose my shoulder, but its presence felt… wrong. A deeper malaise, more than just physical pain began to wear at me. Old voices of the dead, visions of carnage yet to come. My own ignominious death, sacrificed to some entity from beyond…
I cried out, and realised its talons ripped at my flesh, taking a butcher’s fill. I swung, cutting off a hand or a claw. The appendage flopped to the ground, flipped from back to front and then scuttled, spider-like into the shadows.
Such horrors, I had barely seen the like.
I backed away and knew I was dying, not from the wasting of my limbs and mind, but from the wound it had dealt. I felt it. I knew it.
I barely had the strength remaining to lift my sword. I had dropped the other blade. It had scattered away into the same shadows where the spider-hand had sought refuge.
I slashed wildly, trying to hold off the beast. It laughed at my efforts, its voice inhuman enough to set the hairs on the back of my neck on end. Then I reached down, out of instinct or by design I could not be certain, and felt the grip of the rad pistol. The mark of Unity pressed against the palm of my hand as I wrenched it loose of the holster, not knowing if it would even fire.
I clenched the trigger.
A focused burst of intense radiation struck the beast in its torso. The mortal shell it wore shuddered. It sagged, momentarily weakened. In that moment I swung the broad-blade with every ounce of my strength and cleaved through shoulder, through torso, through neck. It should have been dead, but instead it mewled and staggered, its plaintive wailing enough to set my teeth on edge.
Then I fell, unable to stand any longer and felt the depth of my failure.
‘For Unity,’ I spat, blood lacing my phlegm.
‘For Unity,’ said the Custodian, risen up behind it, his great golden blade splitting the beast’s head in two.
A second thrust of that perfect sword pierced where the heart should be, the beast now prostrate on the ground. A shriek tore from its mouth grille, a ghastly and inhuman sound. Tarry smoke issued from the joins in its armour like a guttering candle starved of air.
‘Is it dead?’ I asked, sunk to my knees and leaning heavily on the pommel of my sword.
The Custodian looked at me and I felt the weighing of judgement in his wary gaze. At length, he nodded.
‘In a manner of speaking, yes. You have my thanks…’
‘Heruk,’ I said, recognising the pause as an invitation, ‘Dahren Heruk.’
‘Thunder Legion?’
It was my turn to nod.
‘I thought your kind were all dead.’
‘We are. Near enough.’
‘Tagiomalchian. I am in your debt, Dahren Heruk. Terra is in your debt.’
‘Then I have one favour to ask of you,’ I said, raising my hand to stop Tagiomalchian from sheathing his sword.
He looked at me, that impassive mask as unreadable as a statue, but then I saw the slightest nod.
As the grip of mortality closed about me, I felt the dream. Smell and taste at first, but then I began to hear the cheers of victory as the Lightning Banner was lifted into the sky. I stood upon the slopes of Mount Ararat, Kabe and Gairok and Vezulah at my side.
Reality grew fleeting though I heard the soft clank of Tagiomalchian’s armour as he came to stand behind me, and the scrape of his blade as he brought it aloft.
‘Give me the honoured death,’ I said, and the cheers rose louder.
Unity! Unity! Unity!
I closed my eyes as tears of joy flowed down my face, and whispered.
‘For Unity…’
And heard the blade fall.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Kyme is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Old Earth, Deathfire, Vulkan Lives and Sons of the Forge, the novellas Promethean Sun and Scorched Earth, and the audio dramas Censure and Red-Marked. His novella Feat of Iron
was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection, The Primarchs. Nick is well known for his popular Salamanders novels, including Rebirth, the Space Marine Battles novel Damnos, and numerous short stories. He has also written fiction set in the world of Warhammer, most notably the Time of Legends novel The Great Betrayal and the Age of Sigmar story ‘Borne by the Storm’, included in the novel War Storm. He lives and works in Nottingham, and has a rabbit.
A lone Astropath learns a secret that will tip the balance of the war. But are his guardians leading him to safety or damnation?
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Dreams of Unity © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Dreams of Unity, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-78572-853-2
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
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