by Various
Nor was the chaos of the temple’s doom confined to its structural elements as Sabik Wayland and its dying machine-heart took their vengeance. Automated gunfire blitzed from defence turrets to strafe traitor positions with armour-penetrating shells. Trip-switches designed to detonate buried mines when certain parameters were met blew out in a rolling series of thunderous explosions that shook the earth and toppled nearby structures in roaring fireballs. The ferrovores convulsed as their cortical implants received contradictory orders, opening fire and scooping up swathes of skitarii to devour their metal-sheathed bodies.
Sharrowkyn and Wayland ran through the strobing hell of explosions and gunfire with the cool precision of hunters.
Wayland moved with his implanted rifle barking out deafening sub-sonic rounds. Each shell detonated explosively within the carapace armour of a skitarii warlord or discipline master, each target carefully chosen to hinder the command structure of the enemy from regaining control. He moved in mechanical precision with the bellowing ferrovore as its guns unleashed arcs of searing fire and electrified harpoons to cut a path through those few traitors that recognised them as enemies.
The launchers on its back sent salvos of air-bursting rockets into the gathered traitors, multiple shells exploding and showering the ground with hundreds of plasma bomblets. Searing bursts of blue-hot fire crackled among the traitorous Army units, fusing metal and flesh and bone with a grotesque hissing sound.
Sharrowkyn’s carbine was lighter than Wayland’s, but no less deadly in the hands of a master marksman. Each pull of the trigger shattered an enemy skull or tore out an exposed throat; kill shots that took a target’s life before they were even aware there was a danger.
‘He’s running,’ said Sharrowkyn, as the Word Bearer threw the robed adept over his shoulder and bolted for a low-roofed structure at the corner of the temple compound.
‘Can you catch him?’ asked Wayland, pumping a bolt-round through the chest of a screaming skitarii warrior with a bloodied animal pelt draped over his fanged shoulder guards.
‘Please,’ said Sharrowkyn.
‘Find me in sixty seconds or you won’t make it off this world.’
Sharrowkyn nodded and triggered his jump jets, soaring away from Wayland and the berserk ferrovore. The Word Bearer was too distant to reach in one jump, and Sharrowkyn slammed down on the run, firing on full-auto as he built speed for his next leap. The jets blazed and as he arced up into the air Sharrowkyn saw the Word Bearer had reached the structure, its roof irising open to reveal a silver-bodied flyer with enormous engine nacelles.
‘It’s not the enemy you see that gets you,’ hissed Sharrowkyn. ‘It’s the one you don’t.’
His carbine blazed and the Word Bearer staggered as high-velocity needles punched into the side of his helm and shoulder. Mangled metal and ceramite flew from the impacts, and Sharrowkyn slid the weapon around his shoulder as he landed with a crack of stone in a billow of heated smoke.
Sharrowkyn drew two black-bladed gladiuses from shoulder-sheaths and threw himself at the Word Bearer. The traitor tossed his ruined helmet aside, and Sharrowkyn saw his face was grey and ashen, covered in a writhing mass of tattoos that slithered beneath his skin like worms of sentient ink.
The Word Bearer dropped the Kryptos and brought his bolter to bear. Sharrowkyn hacked through the barrel with his first gladius and buried his second in the centre of the Word Bearers’s plastron. The warrior grunted in pain and fell back as the shell in the breech of his weapon exploded. He lashed out with a clubbing fist, but Sharrowkyn was already moving. He spun around the Word Bearer and drove the monomolecular tip of his gladius down through the warrior’s neck.
Sharrowkyn’s blade clove the Word Bearer’s spinal column. He wrenched the sword up, and his foe’s head lolled to the side as it tore free. Even before the body fell, Sharrowkyn turned and lifted the black-robed adept from the ground. Its hood had fallen back, and he flinched as he saw the creature’s horrific face. Its flesh was as pale as his own, the lower half of its face a nightmarish arrangement of moving parts, augmitters, vox-grilles and sound-producing elements that bore no relation to anything Sharrowkyn had ever seen. What remained of its skull was like the punch-interface of a cogitator, a brass and flesh arrangement of alien anatomy meshed with glass compartments that left portions of an augmented brain visible.
The Kryptos brayed with a sound that screeched like iron nails on slate, and a stream of garbled machine noise grated from a mouth that moved with abominable mechanised clicking and a wetly animal gurgle.
‘Just what I was thinking,’ said Sharrowkyn, hauling the Kryptos onto his shoulder and calling up the icon that displayed Wayland’s location. The Iron Hand was in the thick of the fighting, keeping in the shadow of the ferrovore as it tore into its erstwhile allies. Sharrowkyn leapt through the air on a trail of fire, landing in the crater of a sonic mine’s detonation. A second leap carried him over a group of cowering mortals and his third landed him beside Wayland.
‘Cutting it fine as usual,’ said Wayland. ‘The core is at critical mass.’
‘How long?’ asked Sharrowkyn, pulling the Kryptos from his shoulder.
Wayland unclipped the second device the Mechanicum adepts had given him and placed it on the ground between them. He flipped up the trigger mechanism, his thumb hovering over the activation stud.
‘Ready?’ he said.
‘Do it,’ said Sharrowkyn as the sky flashed impossibly bright, and furious radiance wiped the forge temple from the face of the planet in a bellow of nuclear fire.
Time ceased to have meaning.
An age or the blink of an eye passed for Sharrowkyn, a span of time impossible to gauge. Light and shadow billowed and faded, the world beyond the shimmering bubble of unreality that sheltered them from atomic annihilation moving like a picter reel in overdrive. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t think, and – for all intents and purposes – he didn’t exist.
And then the world snapped back into focus as the timer on the stasis field generator reached zero. Hot winds surged around them, irradiated and laden with toxic poisons that would render this region of Cavor Sarta uninhabitable for millennia. Nothing remained of the forge temple, only a glassy plain and a deep gouge in the earth where its molten core had sunk deep into the rock of the planet. A kilometres-high mushroom cloud seethed with fire, and the hammer-blow pressure waves of its power rumbled through the atmosphere. Caustic tornadoes of heavy metals twisted in the nightmarish ruins of the atomic explosion, and lightning storms surged and roared in electromagnetic melees.
Wayland still knelt beside the stasis field generator, but stood and shook off its lingering aftereffects. Sharrowkyn swept his gaze around the devastation, amazed they had survived ground zero of a nuclear holocaust.
‘I think that went satisfactorily,’ said Wayland.
‘We’re alive and we have the Kryptos,’ agreed Sharrowkyn, watching as the cringing adept creature curled into a foetal ball, babbling in its unnatural, inexplicable cipher-language as the radiation worked upon its frail body.
‘And the traitors will be none the wiser to our involvement. As far as anyone will know, this was simply an accidental meltdown.’
‘Do you think the enemy will believe that?’
‘Given the lack of cohesion and mechanical expertise among the occupying forces, such events are far from uncommon,’ said Wayland. ‘I believe our involvement will go undetected.’
Sharrowkyn nodded and activated the integral teleport homer of his armour to signal the Iron Hands vessel concealed in the orbital debris surrounding Cavor Sarta. The electromagnetic storms would cover any trace of the teleport beam, and they would be gone before any enemy forces arrived to search the ruined site.
‘Good work, Sabik Wayland,’ said Sharrowkyn.
‘Good work indeed, Nykona Sharrowkyn,’ answered Wayland.
All in all, thought Sharrowkyn, it was a bad day to be a traitor.
His enemy wore the scaled, blue
-green livery of the traitors. He was massive, a heavy-treading monster in Tactical Dreadnought plate, with twin chainblades slung under combi-boltered fists. Already three Wolves of Fenris lay at his feet, bleeding and broken.
Bjorn crouched low, hugging the wall of the corridor. Ship combat was a close, claustrophobic thing – a matter of thick shadows and tight spaces. Only four remained of the pack he had brought with him onto the Alpha Legion frigate Iota Malaphelos. There was nowhere to fall back to, no cover to use. Three more traitor legionaries advanced in the shadow of the Terminator champion, crunching over the bodies of the fallen as they came.
Bjorn tensed, readying for the counter-charge. He felt the hunt-spirits of his surviving brothers prepare for the same.
And just then, just as his muscles flooded with hyperadrenaline and his hearts thudded with kill-urge, he remembered how it had been before. He remembered going to Slejek for the tools of war he needed, and what answer he had been given.
What would the Blademaker say, Bjorn wondered, now that the tide of murder had risen again? What curses would spit from those burned and blunted fangs, once he realised what had been done?
Down in the depths of the Hrafnkel’s forge-level, the fires never went out. Calderas of molten iron poured ceaselessly, flaring as the liquid metal hissed into the formers. Hammers rose and fell against adamantium anvils, and the whine of the conveyers was broken only by the steel-thin benediction of crimson-robed tech-priests.
Bjorn pushed his way through the toiling masses, heading with singular purpose towards his target. The flagship’s forgemaster, glowering in a near-black array of scored and ancient battleplate, was waiting for him before the open maw of a glowing furnace.
‘I wondered how long it would be,’ said the priest of iron, his face hidden behind a slope-grilled deathmask.
‘I seek the one they call Blademaker,’ said Bjorn.
‘We’re all called that, down here. But you’ve found the one you’re after, and he already knows what you want.’
Bjorn looked up at Slejek Blademaker’s towering servo-arm, slick with oils and bearing the chip-marks of recent work.
‘I need a gauntlet,’ Bjorn said.
Slejek laughed, his voice as dry as brazier coals. ‘The Wolf King likes you. Sent you down himself, I was told.’ He drew closer, and Bjorn smelled his acrid smoke-stench. ‘It won’t do you any good. You could be Lord Gunn himself, and you’d still have to wait in line.’
Bjorn raised his left arm. It terminated in a tangle of scorched and broken metal spars. Since losing his hand on Prospero there had been no opportunity to forge an augmetic replacement, and his last combat against the Alpha Legion had mangled what remained.
‘I can’t fight like this,’ Bjorn said, turning the stump in the light of the fires. ‘Not again.’
‘I heard you’d been doing fine.’
‘I need to grasp a blade again.’
For a second time, the forgemaster laughed. ‘More than one?’
‘This was my sword-arm.’
‘Best learn to use the other, then.’
Bjorn squared up to Slejek. ‘Don’t jest with me, hammerer.’
‘You think I jest? Look around you. I have four thousand warriors to clad and arm. Every hour that passes brings me another bloodied tally of cracked armour and broken blades. I have worked my thralls to death to meet the thirst for iron, and it will not cease while the Snakes have us by the throat. You have your sight, your strength and you can carry a bolter. That makes you one of the lucky ones.’
‘It is not enough,’ snarled Bjorn. ‘I need a gauntlet.’
Slejek stooped, lowering his blackened helm until it was a hand’s breadth from Bjorn’s. ‘Get… in... line,’ he said.
For a moment, Bjorn didn’t move. He flexed the fingers of his right hand, considering forcing the issue. It was a possibility. Slejek was big, but Bjorn had taken on bigger.
But then, grudgingly, he backed down. Brawling with his own kind would only accelerate their likely doom amid the rust-red stars of Alaxxes.
‘I will return,’ he promised, stomping away from Slejek. ‘You will not refuse me again.’
Slejek merely shrugged, and returned to his work. His servo-arms whirled into action, and the fires blazed anew.
Bjorn strode on past rows of labouring thralls, barely noticing the flicker of arc-welders against their heavy masks. His every nerve burned with fury. He would have to enter combat again as a half-breed, a liability, a cripple. His own death held no fear for him, but the thought of failing his pack-brothers soured his blood.
Then, in the final reaches of the forge-chamber, he saw it. It hung on adamantium chains, half-lost in the darkness, glinting sharply from the reflected light of the furnaces. It was complete, pristine, and savagely beautiful.
‘You,’ Bjorn said, picking out a mortal thrall. ‘Who was this made for?’
The thrall bowed clumsily in his thick forge-armour. ‘I know not, lord. Shall I beg knowledge of my masters?’
Bjorn looked at it again. The alloy was flawless. This was a singular thing, the work of an artisan-genius. The bearer of this would slay and slay until the stars burned out and darkness howled across an empty void.
‘Can you fit it?’ asked Bjorn, extending his withered arm.
‘Yes, but–’ began the thrall, uncertainly.
‘Do it,’ said Bjorn, reaching for the hanging chains. His pulse was already quickening. ‘Do it now.’
Roaring death-curses from the Old Ice, Bjorn leapt out at the enemy. His four adamantium talons snarled into energy-shrouded life, harsh blue against the gloom around him.
The Terminator champion came at him hard, chainblades juddering in a bloody shriek. The two warriors crashed together, and Bjorn felt the raking pain of adamantium teeth cutting into his pauldron. He took a bolt-round close to the chest, nearly hurling him onto his back. He veered, swerved and thrust, twisting to keep his foe close.
He thrust his wolf claw upward, catching the legionary beneath the helm. Lesser talons would have cracked and splayed, breaking on the reinforced gorget-collar and opening Bjorn up to the killing blow.
But these talons bit true. Their disruptor shroud blazed in a riot of blue-white, tearing into the thick ceramite. The claws pushed deeper, slicking through flesh and carving up sinew, muscle and bone. Hot blood fountained along the adamantium claw-lengths, fizzing as it boiled away on the edges.
The champion staggered, pinned at the neck. Bjorn twisted the blades and the enemy fell, his throat torn out, thudding to the deck with the heavy, final crash of dead battleplate.
Bjorn howled his triumph, flinging his claws wide and spraying blood-flecks across the corridor. In his wake came his brothers, firing freely, locking down the surviving Alpha Legionnaires and driving them back.
Godsmote, Bjorn’s second, chuckled as he ran past.
‘One-Handed no more,’ he remarked, glorying at the deed. ‘We shall have to find you a better name.’
Bjorn paid no attention. He was restored, ready to rip and tear and pierce, crippled no longer by fate and the whims of war.
Blademaker could curse all he liked – he would not be getting these claws back.
‘Slay them!’ Bjorn roared. ‘Slay them all!’
And, with a grind of battleplate and the crackle of disruptor energies, he strode out, whole once more, into the shadows.
Of all the truths Ahzek Ahriman had learned as a scholar of the Corvidae, this was the most galling – the understanding that real knowledge came from knowing the extent of his own ignorance. He had believed that he understood the mysteries of the Great Ocean and its myriad complexities, but events on Prospero had shown him that his every certitude poured through his fingers like wind-blown dust.
Ahriman’s tower, a spiralling horn of white stone raised on the edge of a geomantically volatile plateau, was a thing of beauty. The glittering ruins of Tizca had been transplanted to this world of warp-charged rock, but Ahriman could not b
ring himself to reoccupy his former chambers. That time of his life was over, and Ahriman had chosen to wield the power that this world offered to craft a new demesne for himself.
A devil’s bargain perhaps, but one that might see the Thousand Sons elevated to their former glory, and vindicate their actions in the eyes of the fools who condemned them.
The Book of Magnus, his primarch’s last gift to him, lay open on a lectern of glass and silver, its heavy pages rustling with a life of their own.
Precious little else remained of the accumulated knowledge contained within Prospero’s burned libraries, but what he had saved was stacked in one endless shelf that spiralled from the base of the tower to its topmost spire.
It was here, at the summit, that Ahriman worked.
Held immobile by coruscating chains of light, a bound figure was spread in a cruciform pattern. The body had once been that of a legionary, a perfect representation of all that humanity could achieve. A paladin of enlightenment, but now little better than a monster.
His name had once been Astennu, and he had been a brother of the Pyrae Fellowship until the flesh change had taken him.
He hung a metre from the reflective floor and fire crawled across his skin. Phosphor-bright traceries limned his veins where aetheric energy oozed through translucent flesh. Daemonic coals burned in sunken eye sockets, and his lips were stretched in the rictus grin of a burning reaper.
The mouth moved, but no sounds emerged from Astennu’s throat, only furnace-hot blasts of superheated air.
Concentric circles enclosed the transformed legionary, wards that had been used by the Practicus of the Thousand Sons for centuries when releasing their subtle bodies into the aether. By such means were the denizens of the Great Ocean kept at bay, and by such means could a creature of the abyss be contained.
Nine circles of lunar caustic were described around Astennu, six of which had already burned away, the argent gleam of each ring slowly fading until it was black and inert. The lustre of the seventh ring was already dying.