by Various
Lorgar shook his head, offering his kindest, most sincere smile. In his mind, he heard the eldar reaver’s words once more. The one to become the Blood God’s son. The pain engines bend the soul to the Eightfold Path. That Path leads to the Skull Throne.
‘I was wrong, and my concern was foolish. You have survived this long. You will endure into the future.’
‘You are lying to me, Lorgar.’
‘For once, Angron, I am not. Your Butcher’s Nails will never kill you, I am certain of that. If I could ease some of the pain you must be suffering, then I would, but they cannot be removed, and tampering with them is likely to kill you just as quickly as removing them. They are as much a part of you now as the weapons you wield and the scars you carry.’
‘If you are not lying, you are at least hiding something.’
‘I am hiding many things.’ Lorgar spoke through a smile, deceitless in his regret. ‘We will speak of them in time. They are not secrets, merely truths that cannot bloom until the moment is right, and the pieces of this great puzzle begin to fall into place. There is much I do not yet understand myself.’
The World Eaters primarch bared his teeth in a metallic smile. It contained nothing of warmth.
‘Back to your ship then, crusader. It was a pleasure to shed blood with you, while it lasted.’
Lorgar nodded, not looking back over his shoulder as he ascended the ramp into his gunship.
‘Farewell, brother.’
Angron watched the gunship leave the docking bay, and streak away towards the Fidelitas Lex.
‘Khârn,’ he said quietly. The equerry moved forward from his master’s honour guard, who stood silently in their hulking Terminator armour.
‘Yes?’
‘Lorgar has changed, yet he still keeps his secrets beneath a forked tongue. What is the name of the Word Bearer you duel with?’
‘Argel Tal. The Seventh Captain.’
‘You have known him long, yes?’
‘Decades. We fought together in three compliances. Why do you ask?’
The primarch didn’t answer at once. He reached up to scratch the back of his head. The flesh felt raw, swollen. The headache was worse than usual, coming to a crest. He could feel a trickle of blood worming a warm trail down his neck, running from his ear.
‘We have many months of difficult unity with the Word Bearers ahead of us. Remain vigilant, Khârn. That is all I ask.’
The two warriors duelled the very next night: the sons of the crusader and the gladiator facing each other in the pit, chainaxe against power sword. Argel Tal’s crimson war-plate was undecorated, missing the scrolls of faith and devotion he wore in battle. Khârn’s white ceramite was similarly unadorned, but for the chains binding his weapons to his arms.
Both warriors ignored the cheers and cries of their comrades at the pit’s edge. Helmetless, they duelled in the sand, blade cracking against blade.
When their weapons locked again, the two warriors squared against each other, boots grinding back through the sand as they sought leverage. Their faces were inches apart, breathing acid-stinking breath as they struggled to break the deadlock. Argel Tal’s voice betrayed a curious duality, his twin souls speaking through one mouth.
‘You are slow tonight, Khârn. What steals your attention?’
The World Eater redoubled his efforts, muscles straining to throw his enemy back. Argel Tal responded in kind, ichor forming stalactites along his upper teeth.
‘Not slow,’ Khârn forced the words through a sneer. ‘Difficult... to fight... two of you.’
Argel Tal gave a toothy grin. As he drew breath to speak, it was all the edge Khârn needed. The World Eater leaned into a turn, letting his adversary overbalance. The revving chainaxe howled through the air, only to crash against the Word Bearer’s golden sword edge yet again.
‘Not slow,’ he chuckled breathlessly, showing his exhaustion as plainly as Khârn showed his own. ‘But not fast enough.’
The accursed implants sent a bolt of jagged pain sawing down the World Eater’s spine. Khârn felt one eye flicker, and his left arm spasm in ungainly response. The Butcher’s Nails were threatening to take hold now. He disengaged, backing away with his axe raised, taking a moment to spit out the acidic saliva brewing beneath his tongue. Chains rattled against his armour as he came en garde.
The chains were a personal tradition, spread even among the other Legions after their popularity had escaped beyond the fighting pits of the World Eaters. Sigismund, First Captain of the Imperial Fists, had taken to the custom with his usual zeal, binding his knightly weapons to his wrists on dense black chains. He’d made an impressive name for himself here in the bowels of the Conqueror, duelling with the XII Legion’s finest warriors late in the Great Crusade. The Black Knight, they called him, in honour of his prowess, his nobility and his personal heraldry.
The Flesh Tearer was another to earn great glory in the World Eaters pits – Amit, a captain of the Blood Angels, who’d fought with the same savagery and brutality as his hosts. Before Isstvan, Khârn had counted them both among his oath-brothers. When the time came to lay siege to Terra and bring the palace walls tumbling down, he would regret slaying those two warriors above all others.
‘Focus,’ Argel Tal growled. ‘You are drifting, and your skill fades with your attention.’
Khârn disengaged with a twist of his axe blade, and attacked in a series of vicious, howling cuts. Argel Tal wove back, dodging rather than risk missing a block.
The Word Bearer caught the last strike on his sword’s edge, and locked Khârn in place again. Both warriors stood unmoving as they pushed against one another with equal force.
‘The war to come,’ said Khârn. ‘Does it not feel ignoble to you? Dishonourable?’
‘Honour?’ Argel Tal’s twin voice was throaty with amusement. ‘I do not care about honour, cousin. I care about the truth, and I care about victory.’
Khârn drew breath to reply, just as the chamber’s vox crackled live.
‘Captain Khârn? Captain Argel Tal?’
Both warriors froze. Argel Tal’s stillness was born of inhuman control over his body. Khârn was motionless, but not entirely still – he trembled with tics from the Butcher’s Nails cooling in the back of his skull.
‘What is it, Lotara?’ he asked.
‘We’re receiving word from the fleet. Lord Aurelian is sending a mass-pulse from all Word Bearers vessels, focused by the Lex. Kor Phaeron’s armada has just launched its assault on Calth.’ She paused, taking a breath. ‘The war in Ultramar has begun.’
Khârn deactivated his axe and stood in silence.
Argel Tal chuckled, a threatening lion’s purr in his daemonic twin-chorus. ‘It is time, cousin.’
Khârn smiled, though the expression held nothing of amusement. The Butcher’s Nails still hummed in the meat of his mind, flicking out their pulses of pain and irrational anger.
‘Now the Shadow Crusade begins, while Calth burns.’
‘Warmaster…’
The word hung in the silence as it left Horus’s lips. Beyond the high crystalflex windows, the light of distant stars hung in sickly folds of gas and dust. Armoured and enthroned, the Primarch of the XVI Legion gazed into the shadows as though waiting for an answer.
‘The title is heavy around my neck. Horus. Lupercal. Father, son, friend, enemy – all are lost beneath the weight of that one word.’
He turned his head, looking to the black iron arms of the throne. His eyes moved over the bronze of a mace as tall as a mortal man. It was called Worldbreaker, and he had accepted it from his father’s hand along with the title of Warmaster and command of the Great Crusade. His gaze came to rest upon the eagle-head pommel. A ghost of a smile touched his lips.
‘Our father never spoke of what it meant, only the limits of its authority. A dangerous word to leave unqualified. Perhaps he intended me to discover its meaning. Perhaps he did not care what it meant, as long as it freed him from us, his sons. Perhaps he did no
t know what it would mean for his Imperium.’
Horus raised his hand, and a column of hololithic light filled the air before the throne. The shapes of men and women formed in the grainy projection – twisting, shouting, dying, their pleas and screams looping over and over as the thunder of bolter fire rolled through the silence.
‘He knows now.’
He nodded to himself, the reflected light of the hololith flickering across the liquid black of his eyes.
‘The fire is lit, and all that was is cast to the wind. We are committed – he and I, my brothers and our Legions. All humanity’s futures bound together in this circle of blood. We are all the storm now. The Imperium will fall and rise by my hand. Or fall, and fall, and fall.’
Slowly he stood, his armour whispering and clicking. He gestured again, and more cones of cold light surrounded him, turning with images of blind faces. Some screamed, with words, blood and smoke spewing forth from their mouths, while others droned on in their dead, monotonous voices. Horus inclined his head, listening.
‘All is blood and the screams of change. Anarchy is this age’s king. We fall apart and this war slips from our fingers to spin into oblivion,’ he said, his voice clear even over the cacophony.
Horus turned, watching the holographic recordings bloom around him, and the throne room danced with the ghost-light of a thousand messages.
‘Isstvan was supposed to burn in silence so that our war could be won before it ever truly began. The Angel’s wings were to be broken at my feet. And still failures come tumbling one over the other. And on, and on.’
He paused, his eyes fixed upon the image of a shrunken astropath.
‘Calth burned, yet our brother lives. Roboute. Wise Roboute. Roboute with his scratching quills, his plans and his hope. Too understanding, too strong. Too damned perfect.’ Horus let out a long breath, and turned back to his empty throne. ‘I wish he was with us.’
With a flick of his bladed fingers, the throng of images vanished and silence flowed back with the returning shadows. Horus shook his head, his eyes still fixed upon the throne.
‘You would say that I listened too much to Alpharius and Lorgar – that a war fought with deceit is doomed to fail. Perhaps you would be right. The Hydra does not see all, and now his blindness places a knife at his own back. Corax would not have made such an error.’
He gave a mirthless laugh.
‘Strange is it not, that so many I wish beside me stand against me, while at my back are only the flawed and damaged. I am a master of broken monsters.’
Slowly he began to circle the edge of the great hololithic table, the sound of his footsteps lost in the echoing silence.
‘I cannot control them or their sons, and they know it. Mortarion and Perturabo and the rest, they can all feel it. They all know that this war is no longer something that can be guided, only ridden out. But they never understood me, not truly, and they understand less with each passing second. They doubt. They think that I have lost my way. I can see it in their hearts – the pettiness, the pride, the seeds of ruin driving them on, feeding the tempest. With such creatures must I remake the future!’
He stopped again at the foot of the throne, and reached out. His hand closed over Worldbreaker’s haft. With casual ease he raised it up, so that the chamber’s thin light caught every dent and scar on the polished metal.
‘A thousand battles. Ten thousand. Ten times ten times ten thousand, to bring about the new age. All of the certainties of the past torn down, all the beliefs that made them turned to ashes. War on every front, stretched across time until none can know when the final blow will come. There is no disaster, for all disasters serve me alone. The storm rises only so that the thunderbolt may fall.’
He looked down at the throne again, shaking his head sadly. His arm relaxed and Worldbreaker rested at his side. His gaze shifted, as though he were looking at something beyond what lay in front of him.
‘No other would have dared this. Not even you. Perhaps that is why our father chose me. Perhaps that was his only moment of honesty.’ Then his gaze focused and hardened, black eyes like reflective pools in the face of an unforgiving king.
Upon the arm of the throne, the skull of Ferrus Manus stared back at Horus with empty sockets that had once been eyes. A thin fracture-web of cracks ran across the perfect dome of the slain primarch’s crown, spiralling back to a splintered pit in its temple. Even reduced to polished bone, the skull still seemed to radiate strength and defiance.
‘It does not matter how the galaxy burns, only that it does. Warmaster – that is what it means, my brother. The strength to do what must be done.’
Atomic skies burned with violent electromagnetic flares, arcing up from ruined tesla-coil energy stacks as the dying machines of Cavor Sarta screamed in terror. The air was filled with the static burr of unimaginably complex mechanisms being tortured, a planet-wide screeching of noospheric dissolution.
Sprawling ore-fields ran molten and mountainous refineries slumped as the volcanic hearts that had empowered their industry now destroyed them. Continent-sized assembly yards and manufactoria were reduced to scrap metal in the blink of an eye by nuclear detonations, and construction hangars that once rang with the relentless hammering of worthy endeavour now echoed to the beat of a far darker drum.
Loyal forges that had once helped build the Imperium of Man were now enslaved to monstrous, inhuman masters who sought to tear it down. Thoroughfares of hard-won knowledge wrested from Old Night now echoed with yells of shouting soldiers, random barks of gunfire and the pounding tread of hybrid creatures wrought from wormflesh and iron.
The Venomous Thorns Chapter of the Word Bearers had brought war to Cavor Sarta, a war the fief-world of the Mechanicum had lost before the first shots were fired. A nameless, unseen foe that struck without warning and left only carnage in its wake had isolated Cavor Sarta from the Imperial strongholds of Heroldar and Thramas. Striking from the shadows of the great asteroid belt around Tsagualsa, this nameless enemy had crippled Cavor Sarta even before the Word Bearers and their billions-strong armies of mortals had dropped through the nuclear firestorms burning the sky.
No fear is as great as the fear of the unknown, and the panic that held Cavor Sarta tight in its grip had already done more than any orbital barrage in weakening the defenders’ resolve to fight. The forge world fell in six days, its limitless resources perverted to serve strange alchemy and nightmarish purpose. Forbidden vaults were reopened and buried sciences from the age of Iron and Gold were dragged from dusty tombs to rush hideous war-machines of warp sorcery into production.
Cavor Sarta screamed as it was reborn in a hideous new form.
It would go on screaming until its towering stacks burned out and the fiery core at its heart was cold and lifeless.
The Imperial world was dying, but its death did not go unobserved.
The creature moved with a rolling, mechanised gait that was at once graceful and unnatural. It had an odd number of legs, which offended Nykona Sharrowkyn’s sensibilities. Concealed in the shadows of a collapsed smelting tower, his body was utterly immobile, his armour’s emissions and the vents of his compact jump pack kept below the threshold of detection by custom-designed stealth systems.
He was as invisible as it was possible for one of Corax’s sons to be.
Sharrowkyn scanned the ruins of the wrecked forge for more of the creatures, even though he knew it was alone. The forge was little more than smouldering scrap metal, blasted brickwork and unbendable girders twisted around like steel wool. Magnetic squalls swirled like miniature dust devils, and the atmospherics were lousy with echoing machine screams and random detonations of discarded munitions. Violet light spilled down through the skeletal steelwork of the roof, and drifts of radioactive shavings fogged his visor.
The creature paused by the wreckage of a pressing machine, its burn-scar face twisting on a neck of metallic tendons and wet gristle. Implanted ocular orbs glowed in a triangular pattern, pulsing brief
ly as a bray of sound bellowed from the cavernous vox-lungs buried in the flesh of its chest. Vaguely simian, its upper body was massively muscled with cultured slabs of meat and pistons, coiled magnetic enhancers and heaving chem-shunts. Its head was a pyramid-shaped horror of steel tumours and bloated flesh. Its broad back bristled with a number of missile pods, though Sharrowkyn had never seen anything quite like the warheads that jutted from the launch tubes. Each forearm carried a wide-bore weapon, one a hissing flame-lance, the other some form of harpoon-cannon.
It moved by means of three over-articulated limbs that writhed like tentacles, and Wayland had christened these monsters ferrovores, thanks to their habit of devouring mouthfuls of scrap metal to excrete as exo-armour plates. They were fast, faster than anything else they had encountered in the three days since their stealthy insertion onto the planet’s surface.
Penetrating the ruins of Cavor Sarta had been child’s play. Even a novice Raven Guard could have evaded detection. The armies that had taken this planet were rough and unprofessional, dancing around revel fires of vast promethium lakes. Mushroom clouds of exploding ordnance shook the ground on an hourly basis, and Sharrowkyn’s greatest fear had not been capture, but getting caught in the blast of an accidental detonation.
Both Sharrowkyn and Wayland had cause to hate the foe that had conquered Cavor Sarta, but too many lives were at stake to risk the mission for hate’s sake. Since his youth as a freedom fighter in the tunnels of Deliverance, Sharrowkyn had learned to use hatred, to keep every breath of it bottled up ready for release, but Wayland’s Legion wasn’t like the Raven Guard. Sabik Wayland was a warrior of heart, and that thought almost made Sharrowkyn smile at the irony.
He itched to bring his needle-carbine to bear, but Wayland had elected to take the shot.
A cascade of scorched metal and a billow of irradiated dust billowed around the tentacle-limbs of the ferrovore, and it screeched with abominable satisfaction as it inhaled great lungfuls of metallic debris. It moved onwards, stomping through the forge temple with a grotesque, peristaltic motion. The creature was almost at the edge of the manufactory, and Wayland had yet to shoot.