Slaves to Darkness

by John French

  ‘Stand down, Hegron,’ said Ekaddon.

  The other warriors halted but did not lower their weapons, Ekaddon noted.

  ‘I was not informed of your presence in this area of the ship, captain. Full battle condition is in place,’ said Hegron, his head moving fractionally as his gaze shifted to the hatch that Ekaddon had just pulled open. ‘And this area of the ship is on special condition.’

  ‘First Company business,’ said Ekaddon. The tunnel space about them was still but for the quick flashes of the alert lights. Hegron and his squad had still not moved. ‘Stand down, lieutenant.’

  ‘You were not logged or linked into the local tactical vox,’ said Hegron, flatly. ‘What are you doing here?’

  Ekaddon stepped away from the hatch, raising his hand placatingly.

  ‘I cannot tell you, brother, but we do not have much time, so I hope that you will forgive–’

  Ekaddon drew and fired his bolt pistol. The round that punched from the barrel had twice the explosive force of a standard bolt shell, and a shaped cap of ceramite around a metal tip. When it struck, the explosion turned the metal to liquid and the sheath directed the blast and liquid forwards in a burning jet. They had not existed before the beginning of the war; they had not needed to. After all, what need for a round that had only one purpose: to kill armoured Space Marines?

  The round struck Hegron on the raised lip of armour just below his neck. The detonation was a blink-flash and roar of light. Hegron’s head ripped from his body. He fell, arms thrashing, as the pressure wave slammed through his flesh.

  One of Hegron’s squad opened fire.

  Fast, thought Ekaddon, a shame to waste such ability. He half ducked back as a bolt-round burst on the mass of the open hatch beside him. He fired back as the rest of his command squad opened up. They had been ready; Hegron’s squad had not. Sound roared through the corridor, rising to drown out the alert sirens for a second, then vanishing to leave only echoes. Ekaddon’s Reavers moved forwards, and for a moment the sound of single gunshots returned as they put rounds through the left eye of each of Hegron’s squad.

  ‘Give them the coins,’ said Ekaddon, taking a circle of mirror-polished metal from a pouch on his waste and tossing it onto Hegron’s gore-splattered chest. It was an old custom, older than the Legion, an honour given to the dead and a warning to the living from the murder-soaked tunnels of Cthonia.

  ‘Captain,’ Kobarak hissed, ‘we should not–’

  ‘Do it,’ snarled Ekaddon. ‘This is a blood war now. The least we can do is observe the formalities.’ He moved back to the hatch. There was a second door beyond the first, smaller and heavier, its frame and setting thick with rust bloom. He tried to open it just to be certain, but its lock had been fused long ago.

  ‘Cut it,’ said Ekaddon. ‘Fast.’ One of his warriors moved past him, a lascutter keening as it lit. Molten metal began to run down the door. Rust puffed to smoke. The beat of sirens filled his ears. His mouth was dry with adrenaline. The lascutter went out. The warrior stepped back, and Ekaddon took hold of the release handle.

  He hesitated.

  He felt his breath hold in a dry mouth. He had not paused before killing Hegron, nor when the creature Tormageddon had come to him, but now he felt that he was about to do something that would have implications larger than anything he had done before. He was crossing a line. The future that waited beyond this door was one that he wondered if he would survive.

  He let out the breath and pulled. The hatch creaked, then came free. Droplets of cooling metal fell from it as it hinged wide. Air rushed into the space beyond, tugging at the hatch before he secured it. Somewhere a system screen would be blinking amber at a servitor monitoring internal atmosphere pressure. Like the dead they left in the outside corridor, that did not matter.

  Beyond the hatch, the cold dark of the Black Levels marched away out of sight. He drew his powerblade, thumb on the activation stud, and stepped through. Low-temperature warnings lit in his helmet display. Nothing moved around him except dust and rust particles stirred up by the false wind. He had taken three steps when he felt instinct prickle the back of his neck. He whirled, blade lighting.

  An armoured figure stood in the dark beside him.

  ‘Captain,’ rasped Maloghurst, and Ekaddon thought he could hear the twisted bastard smiling. ‘I almost thought you would not be coming.’

  Layak

  ‘You need to return to the war, Fulgrim,’ said Lorgar. His voice was low but rolled across the throng like a pressure wave. Some of the mutants knelt. Others twitched and vomited blood. A golden halo had unfolded from Lorgar’s shoulders as his psychic force manifested in the warp-saturated air.

  Fulgrim squirmed, a hand running through N’kari’s hair, while another picked a wet, red fruit from a silver platter and held it out to the bloated daemon. Layak noticed that the exalted daemon’s face was a warped echo of Fulgrim’s own, a fattened parody of the daemon primarch’s soul-breaking perfection. N’kari ate the fruit and licked Fulgrim’s fingers.

  ‘How long has it been, brother, since we talked? I mean, really talked, swapped stories and all those little conversational intimacies that are supposed to be the mark of fraternal bond? Too long.’ He ran his tongue over his teeth. It was very pink. ‘Maybe… But then again maybe not…’

  ‘The war–’

  ‘After all, we are not really brothers, are we? Any more than bacteria that spawn on the same rotten meat are siblings. It is difficult to grow emotion in a test tube, though I doubt that our father tried that hard – the balance of family life was hardly the top priority.’

  Lorgar’s face remained unmoved, his eyes unblinking. Layak could feel the control washing off the primarch as the halo glowed brighter around his head.

  ‘You have been blessed and exalted, Fulgrim,’ he said. ‘Your nature is as the Dark Prince wills, I do not dispute that. But I am here to bring you back to the war you left incomplete.’

  ‘Which war is this, brother dear?’ said Fulgrim, running a finger over N’kari’s cheek. ‘I lose track. Time is not what it was.’

  ‘The war against the Emperor, the war to take back the Imperium and give it to the gods.’

  ‘Oh, yes… That war. I remember it. How did it end again?’

  ‘It did not,’ said Lorgar, though his eyes had narrowed slightly. ‘Though the end is close. That is why I am here, to call you back to it.’

  ‘For Horus…’ said Fulgrim, watching Lorgar out of the side of his eyes as he licked the red fruit stains from his fingers.

  ‘This war was never just about Horus,’ said Lorgar. ‘It is the victory of the primordial truth over our father’s lies.’

  ‘Lies… I was always rather fond of lies. But no matter, what you have come all this way to say is that I should come back to your piti­ful age, gather the creatures that the Emperor tore from my loins, and what…?’ Fulgrim twitched a shrug, then continued in a voice that roiled and growled with false exultation. ‘I should stand shoulder to shoulder with my beloved brother Horus, fight the fight of righteousness, see our father cast down, weep the tears of a rejected but avenged son?’ A murmur of laughter ran through the watching crowd of monsters. ‘That’s your job, brother dear.’

  ‘You are refusing?’ said Lorgar.

  ‘Refusing is too strong a word. The truth…’ The daemon primarch smiled as he weighted the word. ‘The truth is that I just don’t care.’

  ‘Now you are lying,’ said Lorgar.

  ‘No…’ Fulgrim fixed his gaze on Lorgar’s, the smile sinking back into coldness. ‘No, I am not.’ Red malice bloomed in Fulgrim’s slit pupils. ‘I am sure you don’t intend every detail of this meeting to be pathetic, Lorgar, but somehow even without that intention you have succeeded. Horus would be so displeased.’

  ‘Horus…’ Lorgar said the name carefully, rolling the sound like a wave turning over
a stone. ‘I am not here for Horus.’

  ‘You said something almost like that before,’ said Fulgrim, the sly grin hooking back into place. ‘And I thought, that can’t be high and true Aurelian flirting with treachery. But it wasn’t just flirting, was it?’ Delight shone in the gleam of teeth behind his grin. ‘Do tell me more.’

  ‘Horus will fail, and then everything that we have done will be ashes. Mankind will not embrace the gods. The tyranny of our father’s ignorance will continue.’

  ‘You want me to help you betray him. Oh, Lorgar, I didn’t think you had it in you!’ Fulgrim uncoiled himself from N’kari and slithered down the side of the dais towards Lorgar. ‘And then what? Who will take his place? Oh…’ Fulgrim chuckled. ‘Brother sweet, brother mine, you mean to take the crown and sit on the throne, don’t you? You have become far less dull than I remember. Priest King of a realm where gods and mortals dwell in union, where ambition is righteousness, entropy sacred, excess embraced and slaughter is devotion. I can see it… I can see it, brother, the cities of gold and bone, the worlds of ash. I can hear the screams and taste the pyre smoke.’ Fulgrim closed his eyes and rolled his head back, nostrils flaring as he inhaled.

  ‘It is not for me. This is for the gods, for mankind.’

  Fulgrim swayed in place and then exhaled with a sigh. He lowered his head and opened his eyes. They were a flawless, wet black.

  ‘He died on Davin, you know? He only lives by the power of the Four,’ he said. ‘If the gods abandon him he will be no more, the echo finally faded, the light that blazes in place of his soul gone.’ Fulgrim’s smile flickered and thinned. ‘Like pulling the cables out of a machine…’

  ‘Victory in this war is greater than any individual. It is worth anything and everything.’

  ‘And you want me to what, return to Horus’ side and then plunge the dagger in before following you to Terra?’ The words still held an edge of mockery, but the tone was grave.

  ‘Not just that, Fulgrim,’ said Lorgar. ‘You are at one with the divinity of the Dark Prince. You are the son of the False Emperor and brother to Horus. Where you go, the tide of your god flows.’

  ‘Flattering… Tempting… But, as I said, I just don’t care enough to join in.’ His smile split wide across his face again. ‘You really are a fool. The Dark Prince does not withdraw his favour from Horus. And you think that you can lay low the Warmaster and then tame the forces loyal to him? Hubris is a delicious sin, but one that will undo you if taken to excess. Take it from me.’

  ‘He will fall,’ said Lorgar. ‘He falls already. That is why this must be done, because he is too weak to see this crusade to its end.’

  ‘And you think that the others will bend their knee to you?’

  ‘They will bend their knee to the gods that own their souls, and the gods have brought me this insight so that I might do their bidding. They are all the gods’ children, and the gods will this.’

  ‘You are sure of that?’

  Lorgar’s face twitched into a smile.

  ‘I have faith.’

  ‘You will need more than that to persuade a child that this is anything but a joke without the grace of humour.’ He turned and began to slither back to the dais. ‘I will enjoy watching what happens, though.’

  ‘I am sorry, Fulgrim,’ said Lorgar, his voice calm but the halo of power around him growing like a sun rising above the horizon. ‘That choice is not one that I can allow you to make.’ The crowd shivered and hissed with fear and anger. Fulgrim was turning, the white mane of his hair rising in a sudden wind.

  Your time is now, my son.+ Lorgar’s psychic sending slotted into Layak’s mind and turned it over like a key opening a lock.

  Layak took a breath. Behind his eyes, thoughts began to whirl. Fragments of memory and sensation and words began to flow together.

  ‘It…’ he had said to Lorgar in his sanctuary on the Trisagion. ‘The exalted creature that is your brother – it may refuse?’

  ‘It may, my son,’ his primarch said. ‘That is why you are coming with me, and why I must ask your forgiveness again.’

  ‘Forgiveness, lord?’

  ‘You need to bear a burden that I cannot.’

  Fulgrim was still turning. Blades glinted in hands. Mouths opened in cries of delight and rage.

  A void opened in Layak’s mind. Words unfolded into blackness, spreading into strings of syllables that reached past language and into eternity. It was not language, not as mortals could speak it. It was a name, a single name spoken by nightmares beyond the door of sleep. On and on it went, curling like a serpent. He felt his soul shriek, but the fragments of knowledge were bursting out from where they had been seeded inside him. Each of them was a part of the name, a slice of the worm that pushed up from the void and into his throat.

  The first syllable coughed into the air in a splatter of blood. The stones of the piazza shook. Fulgrim twisted as though struck. And now time was winding slowly as the syllables sliced through the instants. The crowd howled in rage.

  Lorgar’s mace was in his hand, lit with lightning. His halo was flame. A pulse of telepathic command snapped out. The guns of the Word Bearers came up, fingers on triggers. Actaea was in Lorgar’s shadow, blurred by psychic force. All of these things happened in the split second it took Fulgrim to rear up and turn. He grew as he moved, faster than a lightning strike, body swelling with anger. The sky flashed to black. Light became blinding. Lightning cloaked his muscle, freezing into plates of armour. Curved swords manifested in his fists as they rose.

  His eyes fastened on Layak, burning with fury. Layak could feel that gaze passing through his flesh and armour, stripping back the wards written on his skin and shivering through his body. The mask was glowing white-hot against his face. He felt small, an insect flying into a thunderstorm.

  Fulgrim lashed forwards. The Word Bearers opened fire. The crowd charged. Lorgar leapt to block the path of his daemonic brother as Layak felt another molten, writhing sound force its way onto his tongue and the next syllable of Fulgrim’s true name split the air.

  Argonis

  Deluge sparkled with flames. Detonations spread under the black pall, clogging the atmosphere. Equatorial forests burned from the edge of night to the dawn terminator. Millions of sap-heavy trees poured smoke into the air. Above the planet’s sphere, the ruin of its defences drifted in a belt of gnawed wreckage. Warships hung low above the planet. Their guns were silent, their scarred hulls emptied onto the world beneath. Storm clouds boiled above the ruins of its cities. Dirty lightning sheeted the sky. Ash-clogged rain daubed the ruins grey. The fires of the death pits still burned, though, even under the wet lash.

  Argonis had looked down into the first pit they passed. A scum floated on the surface of the burning oil and fat. The domes and faces of a few skulls poked through the liquid and fire. The air above the pits shimmered. Patterns formed in the smoke: faces, mouths, teeth. They had seen bodies in the cities, hacked apart and left where they had fallen. Only those that died with weapons in their hands went into the skull pits.

  He had seen similar before, though not on this scale. On Hastrix the Warmaster-sworn forces had piled the bodies and heads of the slain under conical crusts of earth and cooked the meat off them. Raked from the ashes, the skulls had been hung from the crane gantries above the mines. It was ritual, a vile kind of honour to the enemy and an offering to the slaughter-born god of the warp.

  Pieces of armour, helmets and lasguns littered the lips of the pits, slathered with soot and blood. The gleam of frogging and the marks of uniform designations flashed from the muck. They had passed ten cairns of skulls already, each as high as a tank. He understood what was happening here. He had listened to Maloghurst enough to know why such things were done. He did not like it. It was not the slaughter that worried him; it was what it implied.

  ‘This is an accursed world now,’ he said aloud. ‘
They have made it so.’ Perturabo said nothing but looked out as the grey rain fell to meet the rising fires.

  The Iron Warriors stood on a hill that had been a building. Girders projected from the slope of rubble, chips of painted plaster still visible amongst the shattered brick. Thick rain pattered off the shells of their armour. A demi-grand company arrayed beside armour, and the hulking forms of Dreadnoughts. Vehicles and prefabricated fortifications ringed them, positioned and deployed in minutes once they had reached the hill from the landing site. That had been over three hours before. In that time, and in the ten kilometres of flattened city they had crossed, they had seen no living thing.

  ‘They are not coming,’ said Argonis. The air tasted of copper even through his helm filters.

  ‘They will,’ said Perturabo, eyes fixed on the land lurking beyond the curtains of rain.

  They had seen the fires of battle from the edge of the system, sensor echoes of plasma and nuclear detonations across the spectrum. No one had challenged the Iron Blood or its sisters as they moved in-system. There were no picket ships, no watches waiting for enemies or friends. Just the smudges of heat from where defence platforms had exploded. The fleet had been within weapon range of the planet before the World Eaters ships had responded. There were a lot of them – thirty at least in visual range and likely more on the other side of the planet. They had moved as though in a torpor, uncoordinated, their guns ready but their sensors half shut down. The largest of them bore a name that had held a reputation even before the Shadow Crusade had marked it with scars, and the warp had set a patina of crimson on its hull. The Conqueror looked like a ruined queen of destruction, her finery tattered, her beauty lost to scars. She was the equal to the Iron Blood in size, but war had not been kind to her. Still she turned to meet the Iron Warriors like a slaughter-drunk warrior rising from her chair with sword ready.

  Perturabo’s ships had stopped dead on the edge of the World Eaters’ weapon range. Their guns were lit, and they had painted every ship and angle with weapon plots. Ten thousand Iron Warriors waited in their launch bays, their guns filled with ammunition, their lips silent as they awaited their lord’s will.