Slaves to Darkness

by John French

  ‘Are we truly going to find Fulgrim?’ asked Layak at last.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lorgar. ‘A throne cannot be taken alone. Everything we do or cause to happen must serve our true purpose. That is why I have told you this, my son, and why you are coming with me. You have a great task to perform, and a greater role to play in what must be brought about.’

  ‘Speak your will, lord, and it shall be done.’

  Lorgar looked at him, and there was sorrow in his starlit eyes.

  Volk

  It was dawn on the Onyx Mountain. Smoke-laced fog poured into the trench in front of Volk, curling over the armoured lip and flowing between the assembled warriors. Far off, the false thunder of a bombardment rolled as the sun rose. Volk breathed in the damp air and snapped the ninth round into his bolter. Two more sat in his palm. Two more, eleven in total, and the magazine pouches on his waist empty. It was the same for each of the fourteen legionaries waiting with him in the trench. Each of them had a melee weapon sheathed at his waist or strapped to his back: heavy-bladed gladius swords, hammers with steel crow beaks on their reverse side, axes with razor-sharp edges on their triangular heads.

  Old weapons of war, thought Volk, weapons from ages when man hacked and bled in mud to take fortresses of stone from enemies in reeking mail and dented plate. The world was meant to have moved on, to have moved past such baseness, but here they were, warriors forged from secret lore going into battle armed like barbarians. That was what it had come to, though – war ground down to the point where battle began with the mathematics of ammo reserves and ended with hacking and bludgeoning in the mud until one side was exhausted or dead.

  ‘Sixty seconds,’ called the squad sergeant, pulling a studded helm over his scarred head. The rest of the squad followed suit.

  All of them were new recruits, selected and raised to the Legion in the years since the war against the Emperor had begun. Faster induction and implantation methods meant that most of these warriors had not seen more than half a decade of combat. They looked like veterans though, Volk thought. No, they were veterans. They had been blooded and tested on worlds like Hydra Cordatus, Nestoraia, Tallarn. They knew one type of war and one type alone: killing their own kind.

  Volk put his helm on. It pressurised with a hiss.

  ‘By your leave, commander,’ said the sergeant over the vox.

  ‘Carry on, sergeant’ said Volk. ‘This action is yours. I am just a passenger.’

  ‘As you command,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Entry onto trench line!’ came a shout to Volk’s right. The squad turned as one, guns moving to cover every approach.

  ‘Hold fire!’ said Volk. A figure in black-and-green power armour was moving down the trench. The bronze Cthonian runes worked into the battleplate gleamed. The faceplate of the helm was embellished with silver and crowned with a red topknot that stirred in the fog-laden breeze. Argonis moved towards them with relaxed focus, like a predator watching for prey. ‘We could have killed you,’ snarled Volk as Argonis approached.

  ‘You could have tried,’ said the emissary. He had a black-cased boltgun clamped to his thigh and a sword buckled at his waist beside a pair of sheathed power knives. Volk recognised the black-clouded crimson of Cthonian rubies on the pommel of each knife. They were gang knives fitted with power generators above their hilts. Volk had seen them before and faced them in the practice cages, long ago now, in an age where brotherhood had meant something more than a cloak for betrayal.

  ‘Why are you out here?’ snarled Volk.

  ‘I am the voice of Horus, and I go where I please,’ said Argonis. He looked down the waiting line of Iron Warriors. ‘Why are you out here, brother?’

  ‘Raiding party,’ said Volk.

  ‘Then we are here for the same reason,’ said Argonis, and unfastened his bolter. He racked the arming slide.

  Volk was about to snarl something but then shook his head.

  ‘It is time, commander,’ said the sergeant.

  Volk looked at Argonis and then back at the squad.

  ‘Proceed,’ he said.

  ‘Standby,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Your air cover should be coming over now,’ said Argonis over the vox. As though drawn by his words, two strike fighters shrieked past overhead. The sonic boom of their passing echoed down the trench. The ground shook an instant later. Fists of smoke and earth punched into the sky beyond the trench lip.

  ‘Go,’ called the sergeant. The squad vaulted out of the trench. Volk was with them.

  Torn stumps of trees and charred scrub dotted a slope of bare earth, broken by jutting fingers of black stone. Three hundred metres down, the clouds of debris from the air strike were falling to the ground around the remains of a trench line. Three hundred metres.

  Volk began to run. Argonis was on his right. The strike fighters wheeled overhead. Fire flickered out from the settling debris. The strike might have bought them a few metres, but whoever was in the target trench was still alive. Las-bolts smacked into the Iron Warrior to Volk’s right. Ceramite burned and flaked away from him as he kept running.

  More fire came, wild at first, then sheeting up the slope in disciplined volleys. An Iron Warrior went down, the front of his armour torn apart.

  A hundred metres.

  Volk could see the humans hunched behind their laslocks on the trench lip, gas masks beneath chromed helms. They did not flinch as the Iron Warriors closed.

  Disciplined, thought Volk. These trenches had been taken by the enemy the day before, along with another ten kilometres of defence lines across the mountainside. The human soldiers holding this section had failed when their ammunition had run out. So now the Iron Warriors came to take back what mortal hands had lost.

  Argonis began to fire. Bolts exploded along the trench lip. Three soldiers vanished. Blood and chromed metal scattered into the air. None of the Iron Warriors fired. Volk caught the glint of charge coils on the parapet.

  ‘Plasma weapon,’ he shouted.

  Target runes were blinking red in his eyes. He squeezed the trigger of his gun once. The bolt hit the plasma gun as it was about to fire. Blue-hot energy exploded out in a sphere. Rockcrete, flesh and metal became dust. Volk’s helm display dimmed. He reached the trench line and dropped into it. A human staggered towards him. Volk slammed the barrel of his bolter into the human’s face. Blood sprayed from the shattered eyepieces. Volk stamped on the figure as it collapsed. Argonis was next to him. The Cthonian fired down the trench. Bolt-rounds scattered shrapnel from the reinforced walls.

  ‘Moving left!’ shouted the sergeant. The squad obeyed, breaking into pairs as they spread out, blades and hands red. Argonis was the only one firing his weapon. The Cthonian moved with fluid brutality, killing as he went, his advance blending seamlessly with the Iron Warriors’ own.

  ‘Why are you here, brother?’ shouted Argonis, ducking into a niche as heavy-calibre rounds buzzed down the trench. Volk went the other way. A round hit his left shoulder, and he felt muscles tear as the shell gouged through the armour. Target runes spun amber in his eyes, searching for a lock. He fired twice. The first round roared down the trench. He put the second into the rockcrete wall. Dust and splinters fountained out. Argonis was already moving forwards through the cover they provided. More rounds flashed past. Volk followed.

  ‘To remember,’ he growled into the vox-link.

  ‘To remember what?’ said Argonis.

  ‘What we are abandoning,’ said Volk.

  Argonis was three strides in front of him as they came through the dust. The heavy-calibre gun stuck out of a firing loop in a plasteel barrier across the trench. Volk could see the glint of the gunner’s helm. He dipped his shoulder and charged. Normally they would have used grenades, flamers and a storm of bolt shells to tear the emplacement apart. The luxury of such methods was now only a memory.

  The gun open
ed fire, but the shots were high. Volk had a second to wonder why the gunner had aimed wide, when the axe blow fell.

  The Ultramarine had been waiting in a niche cut into the trench wall. Volk would have seen him, but the gun had fired at just the perfect time to give the Ultramarine total surprise. The power field around the blade lit as it arced down. Volk twisted, arm rising. He was out of position and off balance. He knew each of these facts with a stopped-time clarity as his eyes met the red gaze of the Ultramarine’s helm. There were gold laurels worked into the warrior’s temples, tiny eagle’s wings on the fingers that held the axe.

  Bolt-rounds struck the Ultramarine. Sapphire and gold shredded into shrapnel. The warrior staggered. Volk rammed his weight forwards. The axe blow cut wide. His shoulder struck the Ultramarine in the chest and cannoned him back into the trench wall. Rockcrete cracked under the impact. Blood scattered from the torn armour down the warrior’s right side. He was injured, isolated, but he was a son of Ultramar.

  Volk drew his sword. Its blade was short and heavy, the tip a wicked point. He rammed it upwards, aiming for the join under the arm. The Ultramarine twisted. The pommel of the power axe crashed into Volk’s right eye. He felt his thrust gouge across the warrior’s chest plate. He whipped his forearm up and crashed his elbow into his opponent’s faceplate. Crystal eyepieces shattered. Ceramite cracked. The Ultramarine rammed him back and raised a bolt pistol. Blood was running down the cheeks of the warrior’s white helm. Volk knew what was coming next even as a gap opened between them. The Ultramarine raised his gun to fire.

  Argonis’ power knife took the Ultramarine’s hand just below the wrist. Volk rammed the tip of his sword into the warrior’s neck. Vulcanised rubber and cables parted, and the tip punched into flesh. Volk felt the blade hit the back of the collar ring. Blood gushed out. Volk held the dead warrior’s weight for an instant. He stripped a grenade off the Ultramarine’s belt, ripped the blade free, turned and threw the grenade through the firing loop of the gun emplacement. The explosion buckled the metal plates from the inside. A pair of Iron Warriors with beak-headed hammers ran past.

  Volk knelt and began to strip ammunition, grenades and weapons from the dead Ultramarine. Argonis stood over him, knife and boltgun in hand.

  ‘This is what you wished to remember, fighting like a carrion-eater hungry for bullets?’

  Volk straightened and looked at his one-time friend.

  ‘The Fourth Legion fought the Emperor’s battles that no one else would. We laboured and slaughtered and bled in forgotten places. We were forsaken – ever obedient and ever ill-used. The primarch believed that our destiny could be different, that we would have a different place in the future that Horus would forge.’ Volk pointed his bloody blade at the red-and-gold Eye of Horus on Argonis’ armour. ‘I wanted to remind myself that things do not change.’

  ‘Ammunition expenditure limit reached,’ called the sergeant’s voice over the vox. ‘Prepare for withdrawal.’

  Volk moved past Argonis, heading back along the trench towards the point they had hit the line. Before the Warmaster’s order to muster at Ullanor they would have been able to hold the ground they had just cleared. Now they would have to leave it. Within a day there would not be enough troops in the fortress to man the defences they still held. That was what the battles across Ultramar’s border worlds would become: every victory a delay of ever-shortening duration.

  ‘This is the beginning of victory,’ said Argonis from behind Volk. ‘Even if the view from here does not allow us to see it – victory is coming.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Volk. ‘Is that belief or hope talking?’ He turned away. Black smoke was drifting over the trench from lower down the mountain. The stuttering boom of a distant explosion rolled through the air. ‘We will obey, brother. The end was only a dream, and what do dreams matter?’

  Part Two

  Burning Empire

  Five

  Ekaddon

  He breathed and closed his eyes for a second. Blood ran down his face and shoulders. There had not been time for it to clot. His hearts were already settling into a low, steady rhythm. It was one thing that he thought he missed of humanity – the feeling of exertion, the breathlessness, the hammer of a single heartbeat in his chest. The gene-ascension that remade a man into a warrior of the Legions had stolen that.

  He opened his eyes. The remains of fifteen combat servitors lay around him. Blood oozed from their meat, and oil from their machine grafts. All of them had been fresh conversions, made with good strong stock from the slave chaff held in the lower decks. All of them had been killers of the type bred by situations in which one needed to be a predator lest one become the prey. The Mechanicum had left them their full motor function and the parts of the brain that held their combat instincts. Aggression enhancers, crude nerve grafting and weapon implants had pushed their abilities past the point of effectiveness into a realm of inhuman slaughter. He had demanded no less from the tech-priests, and they had supplied in full.

  Still… He had to confess that he found the result disappointing.

  Others might favour sword or bolter, or an axe like that in his hand, but the knife was the soul of a killer. That was the Cthonian lesson, one that had been delivered by the muffled cries of the dying in dark tunnels during another life. It was a remnant of the world that had borne him and the brief childhood that had shaped him. It had a… truth. Only the brother in blood who had come with him into the Legion at his side was, perhaps, better at this way of murder.

  He rolled his shoulders and padded across the chamber, bare feet splashing in the puddles of blood and oil. He put the axe back on the weapon rack, activating its power field briefly to burn the blood from its blade. He was bare to the waist, and the tattoos and brands covering his skin stretched as he tensed and released each one in turn. The marks were mainly geometric, the jagged lines of Cthonia’s gang language. It was not a sophisticated tongue, but you didn’t need sophistication when your main purpose was to threaten. In the gloom or total dark of Cthonia’s tunnels it was meant to be read as much by touch as by eye, the marks gouged deep into stone or metal by blade tip. It was a language of cuts, made by murderers. Kalus Ekaddon found that amusing as often as he found it appropriate.

  He looked at the weapon rack. He was a good killer, always had been. It was something that had come easily to him as a child, that had kept him alive and then given him everything he knew. Pride, status – such as that was – and brotherhood had all come from the edge of his blade or the muzzle of his gun.

  He stepped away from the rack and drew his dagger from its thigh sheath. A power field generator sat at the base of the blade, but otherwise it was the same weapon that he had brought from Cthonia: straight-bladed, narrow-tipped, razor-sharp on one side with a blood fuller running beside its blunt back. A mirror coin had been beaten into the pommel and then burnished smooth. He flicked it between fore and reverse grip, then opened his mouth to call the next wave of servitors.

  The doors to the practice chamber clanged as their locks released. Ekaddon turned as they began to pull wide. Falkus Kibre walked through them. The humming vibration of his Terminator plate shivered along Ekaddon’s nerves as he watched the Widowmaker advance towards him. He did not move and kept his face composed in its habitual half-sneer.

  ‘Brother,’ said Kibre, coming to a halt. Even without the Terminator armour, Kibre was a huge man; with it he was a mountain of jet surfaces and blunt edges.

  ‘Falkus,’ said Ekaddon. ‘You are overdressed if you came to test your skill.’

  Kibre gave a short growl that might have been a laugh and walked past Ekaddon, boots crushing the corpses of the servitors to pulp. He walked around the training pit, head turning as he glanced at the remains.

  ‘You are worried that you are losing your edge, brother?’ said Kibre at last, nudging a severed head with the tip of his boot.

  ‘An edge
is only worth something if you keep it sharp,’ said Ekaddon.

  ‘Truth,’ barked Kibre. ‘Truth…’ He nodded at the knife in Ekaddon’s hand. ‘You did this with that?’

  Ekaddon shook his head.

  ‘This is for the next batch.’

  ‘You like your childhood toys, don’t you, brother? I heard that you tried to kill the warrior who tried to take it from you on Cthonia when you were recruited. Story says he lost an eye to you.’

  ‘He didn’t,’ said Ekaddon.

  ‘Just a story then…’ said Kibre. ‘Who was it that picked you out of the tunnels? Sejanus? The Half-Heard?’

  ‘You know who it was,’ said Ekaddon carefully.

  Kibre’s eyes moved back to the knife in Ekaddon’s hand and flicked up to where the silver cord held the pierced obsidian disc against his forearm. The whirl of feathers, claws and eyes cut into the disc were invisible in the gloom of the training chamber, but he knew they were there, an echo of the pattern in his dreams. He had tied it there while he trained and would hang it back around his neck later. Its weight and touch against his skin were still unfamiliar.

  ‘Loyalty…’ said Kibre, hefting the word deliberately. ‘These are difficult times, testing times.’ Ekaddon heard the weight placed on the word.

  ‘You mean your dispute with Maloghurst?’ He felt a flare of pleasure as Kibre blinked. ‘I am not of the Mournival, brother, but I wear the same black as you. We are First Company. We guard and watch, and we hear…’

  ‘He cannot be trusted,’ said Kibre.

  Ekaddon raised an eyebrow above his habitual sneer.

  ‘The Warmaster trusts him.’

  Kibre clenched his teeth and then let out a long breath.

  ‘The Warmaster… in his… withdrawal cannot trust or condemn. We must do that for him. We are his guardians.’

  Ekaddon kept his eyebrow raised.

  ‘And Abaddon? What would our First Captain say?’