by Various
‘Very good, Kaeloq.’ Sedd looks up again to the screen and the ritual tunnels they have hollowed out beneath the rock. Here, an old sewer line. There, a mag-lev track fallen to disuse. All Sedd had to do was join up the points. So much of it was already there, part of the cosmic pattern long before the war even came to Calth. This subterranean bunker of the Ultramarines provided the nexus. A pleasing twist of fate.
He gestures back to the map. ‘Miraculous, isn’t it?’
‘It is.’
Realising that this voice does not belong to Kaeloq, Kurtha Sedd starts to turn again. He recognises the blood-soaked Ultramarine wearing Kaeloq’s helmet.
‘By the Word!’
‘I have a word for you,’ Aeonid Thiel replies. ‘I’ll let my bolter speak it for me.’
Muzzle flare rips into the darkness, tearing open Lathek’s chest plate and exposing his insides to the air. He crumples with a muted gurgle of pain. The pinned Ultramarine Hadrius, who still has Lathek’s ritual knife embedded in his clavicle, stamps down on his captor’s neck as he lies supine on the floor.
Screams and cries of alarm echo in the chamber as the human captives scramble to get out of harm’s way. Sedd is faster than his warriors, and dives for cover, shouting at his remaining disciples to counter-attack even as another of them is cut down. Word Bearers are not the tactical equals of Ultramarines – perhaps they are not even on an equal footing as warriors, but Thiel knows that to dismiss them all as mindless fanatics is an error.
Hadrius learns this fact to his cost, his throat and right arm exploding into bloody gore when a Word Bearer opens fire, as the Ultramarine attempts to rush Sedd.
Thiel roars in anger and guns down Hadrius’s killer. There is only one more Word Bearer left, besides Sedd; the rest of their enemies are human cultists.
Vultius lunges from the shadows, killing two with well aimed shots from his bolter. He’s injured, but the captain still manages to square the odds. Another cultist hauls up a chain-stubber, spitting dogma copied from his master’s heretic tongue.
A bright las-beam scythes through the dark, striking the gunner in the chest and leaving a burning crater as it passes out of his back.
Rowd has a good eye, and Thiel is thankful that he has the convict-turned-soldier watching his back.
Enfilading fire keeps the traitors down behind a command console, Vultius pinning them from one end of the room, and Thiel from the other.
Just below the fire exchange, Thiel discerns the sound of rhythmic chanting and recognises Sedd’s voice.
‘Captain!’ he calls out.
Vultius has heard it too, but he is weak and slumped behind a blasted column. Sedd’s remaining disciple is switching fire between them, snatching off rapid bursts that are foiling Thiel’s aim.
But Thiel is not alone.
‘Rowd! Remember those vittle-cans, out in the fields?’
Rowd’s reply is nearly swallowed by the harsh retort of the bolter. ‘I’ve never forgotten them.’
Thiel smiles. ‘Hit one for me now, would you.’
Stepping from his hiding place in the fallen rubble strewn halfway across the command hub, Rowd fires a single shot. The rifle is pressed into his shoulder to swallow the recoil, his eye squeezed in to the sight. The las-bolt travels through smoke and debris, burning across the shadows of the room to strike the Word Bearer just above the eye. It stings, but doesn’t kill – makes him shift, turn and seek out his aggressor.
The momentary lapse in concentration is all Thiel needs to put a round through the side of his head. Before the body has even fallen, the Ultramarine is leaping clear and discarding the spent bolter.
Vultius leans out of cover, firing off a flurry of shots into Kurtha Sedd as the Dark Apostle rises. The explosive shells burst against a dark aura now surrounding him, some foul ritual of summoning lending him unnatural protection from harm.
Thiel sees the practical at once, forgetting the pistol at his hip. Aboard the Macragge’s Honour, blades and axes smote the Neverborn more efficiently than any firearm: something to do with the creatures’ ties to ancient times, and the old methods employed to banish them. But Thiel has no knife or blade. They were lost in the Rhino crash, his prized longsword – a weapon from the primarch’s own armoury – amongst them.
When the Unburdened died, capricious fate delivering it to the edge of that electromagnetic blade, it exploded, showering Thiel with daemonic gore. As he awoke, the blood cooked to his armour, he fashioned a theoretical that would give him the element of surprise and a practical he could exploit to save his battle-brothers. Kaeloq’s borrowed helm, repugnant as it was, completed the subterfuge. Now, as he runs at Kurtha Sedd, as the apostle’s skin writhes and shifts with warp-spawned mutation, Thiel uses the helm again. Ripping it off his head, glad to be free of its stinking confines, he wields it like a weapon.
Sedd is delirious, revelling in his burgeoning power.
‘The veil thins, and I ascend!’
‘You die,’ Thiel corrects him, and slams the horned helm into the apostle’s skull-like face.
Sedd screams with two voices as the ritual falters and the change begins to reshape and devour. Armour, skin and flesh melts into a gelatinous soup, until even that starts to smoke and wither.
Recoiling from the hideous creature, Thiel draws his pistol and aims squarely at the fleshy mass that used to be Kurtha Sedd.
‘Vanquish it, Thiel!’ Vultius cries out.
The captain shoots at the same time, and the two Ultramarines empty their magazines into the spawn. Every explosive impact shrinks it, reducing it down until it is little more than a stain.
The echo of bolter fire fades. Calm returns, undercut by shallow weeping and the muttered thanks of the human captives for their deliverance.
Thiel sags a little where he stands, still holding out his smoking pistol as if the thing he and Captain Vultius have just eradicated might yet come back to the material plane. He flinches as he feels a hand upon his arm.
‘Easy, sergeant,’ says Vultius. ‘It’s over.’
Men and women are crawling from behind cover, blinking as the emergency lumens kick in. Thiel nudges a dead Word Bearer with his boot, the one Rowd clipped. ‘Need to make sure they’re all dead. Clear this place out.’
‘Give it a few minutes.’ Vultius claps him on the shoulder as Thiel sits down on a fallen column, exhausted. ‘I misjudged you, Aeonid. I’m sorry for that. You are a credit to the Legion.’
‘I didn’t do it alone.’
Thiel looks for Rowd. He sees him, slumped against the wall, legs out, head off to one side. There is a gash in his rad-suit, one that has been there ever since the tunnel collapse. He is not moving, but there is blood on the rebreather mask hanging loose at his neck. Rowd’s eyes are open, but they do not blink.
‘You brave and foolish bastard. You followed me onto the surface anyway.’
Vultius follows Thiel’s gaze. ‘A conscript? Penal legion?’
Thiel shakes his head. ‘A farmer, a husband and a father.’ He gestures to the stuttering green pict-feed and the Word Bearers’ mapped excavations. ‘We’ll find the break in the hardline along one of those tunnels.’
Vultius nods. ‘We’ll lead teams, effect a repair and call for reinforcement. You and I can’t run this hub alone.’
Grunting, Thiel gets to his feet.
‘You’ll have to do it without me, sir.’
‘What?’
Thiel’s eyes are weary, and not just from the fight. ‘As soon as the next wave of reinforcements arrive, I am leaving for Macragge. I made a mistake coming back here, to this.’
‘We must keep fighting, Sergeant Thiel.’
‘Yes, we must. But not here. This is propaganda, and I’m not much for politics. I’ll only do or say something that’ll see red on my armour again.’
Vultius looks about to protest, when he nods and smiles.
‘You’re probably right.’ He salutes, and Thiel returns it. ‘For the Emperor. F
or Calth.’
Thiel spares a final glance for Rowd.
‘Aye, for Calth.’
The gunship powers up from a bare landing field on the surface, several kilometres outside Numinus City. The legionary reinforcements have already been deployed, and now only a single warrior besides the pilot remains aboard.
‘Brace yourself, sergeant,’ a voice crackles through the vox-feed in the hold.
Thiel is fastened into a mag-harness. His bolter is stowed in the overhead weapons locker, along with his electromagnetic longsword. After the arcology was secured, he went back to retrieve it from the wreckage of the crashed Rhino; he could hardly return to Lord Guilliman without it. Thiel’s armour is cleaned, though the practicals etched into the ceramite remain. He doesn’t need them to recall his battle plans – they are for the purposes of legacy, to preserve his combat logic for future generations.
When he gets back to Macragge, Thiel thinks that he will present them to his primarch.
As they break for orbit, the pilot’s voice crackles over the vox again.
‘Are you glad to be leaving, Sergeant Thiel?’
‘Glad to be getting back to the war. Has much changed in my absence?’
There’s a pause as the pilot makes the necessary adjustments for void flight.
‘You haven’t heard?’
Thiel looks up, paying proper attention for the first time since the ascent.
‘Heard what?’
‘Our Lord Guilliman is building.’
Thiel frowns. ‘Building what exactly?’
‘Imperium Secundus.’
As he runs across it, the earth ignites. He goes so fast that he might be flying, barely touching the charred plates, tearing through the blue-tinged tongues that ripple out from the fissures below. The sky is alive ahead of him, riven by the aurorae of a thinning veil.
He has seen the prey, towering above the boiling mass of bodies, and that is enough. Axes rise, silhouetted against fire, hurled into the faces of the damned as they scream, but none are his.
The entire Rout fights across the sprawling battle plains of Velbayne, its fury set against a host of madness. The Wolves are loosed, thrown into the furnace, just where they wish to be. The packs fight, covering one another, forming shieldwalls and axe-wedges. Screaming night-creatures crash against them, though such shrieks freeze in unholy mouths as they face the wrath of Russ. The primarch still fights, though his immense presence cannot be seen – there are horrors enough on this battlefield to keep even the Wolf King busy.
As for him, he has no pack to protect his approach, none to cover his desperate charge. He has been alone for long enough now that he no longer feels the strangeness of it. His axe whirls around him like a bolas, whistling, accelerating, ramping up for the strike.
The prey looms over him. It is massive and crustaceous, boiling with black-hearted fire. Its wings unravel into the tortured night, ragged and skin-stretched. Its hooves crack the earth beneath it, its blade rips the air itself, its bellows make the world shake.
It is a vision of mortal terrors, merged and bulked into colossal proportions and forged in madness. It strides across the fields of murder, lashing out with smouldering strikes. The fires leap up to greet it, rippling across blood-dark muscles and reflected in oil-slick spines. A long taurian face is crammed with tusks, weighed down by a crown of horns, wrinkled into a snarl of wrathful contempt.
He accelerates. He has seen the creature before. He recognises the curl of the daemonic skin, the axe it carries, the runes of destruction hammered into iron ingots. He remembers what it did the last time their fates crossed.
How could he forget? He remembers almost nothing else.
It sees him, and its roar of challenge shivers the battlefield. Its leading leg crashes down, sending cracks racing out over the fire-edged plates. Its weapon moves heavily, trailing streamers of boiling blood from the edge.
By then he is going too fast to stop. He jumps, vaulting past the lesser ranks of terrors, shouldering them aside and breaking through their ineffective cordon.
He calls out for the first time in years. He frees his tongue, held silent since the last of his pack brothers burned on the pyres. They are declaimed in the order they went into battle. He promised their ghosts as much, back when the funeral embers still glowed like dying stars.
Alvi. He shouts the name as he smites the creature for the first time. Gore the thickness of magma spouts across his axe-blade. Alvi, who had no deed name, who was the purest of them all. Alvi had died when his breastplate was crushed under the creature’s hooves, still hacking at its unnatural flesh even as his helm filled with blood.
The daemon howls, arcing down its own axe-edge, but he is too quick. He is moving like storm-lightning now, spinning out of contact and spearing in close – uncatchable, unhaltable.
Byrnjolf, Teller-of-Tales. The pack’s skjald, heavy-limbed but agile-tongued, the carrier of the pack saga and the memory of its slayings. Byrnjolf had died as the creature’s fist had dragged low, thrown back into the mire of Gryth’s eternal miasmic plague plains. With the Teller gone, the tales fell into silence.
The daemon tries the same trick on him, but he is too wily for that now. He is older, tempered in fires far hotter than those that harrow this world. He hastens aside, already coiled for the next thrust.
Eirik. Golden-haired, vital. Eirik had cut it deep before the end, clambering up the creature’s own body to stab at it.
He does the same now – he uses its massiveness against it, countering bulk with speed. The daemon’s axe sweeps around, heavy as a pendulum, missing him by a finger’s breadth. He plunges his blade into its chest, catching on to the chains of iron to arrest his fall and haul himself higher.
Gunnald Shieldbearer. How could Gunnald have died? What force could have ended such a bastion of defiance? Gunnald had weathered the worst of it until the end, wielding his thunder hammer and spitting curses even as his throat was throttled.
He does not try the same thing. He does not have the heft of Gunnald and so sticks to speed, clambering up the daemon’s hide of iron plates. It tries to shake him clear and fails. He can feel its mounting fear. It knows who he is now.
Hiorvard. Hrani. The twins, fighting together as always, levelling bolters and filling the air with curtains of explosive power. They had only been taken down when the creature had broken the assault and cast aside the last of the blade-bearers. He remembered the way they had cast aside their guns, drawn swords and charged. They had died as they had lived – shoulder to shoulder.
No more names now. He is fighting as if maddened, clinging to the daemon’s shoulder with his artificial clawed hand, working the axe with the other. It tries to throw him off, to hurl him away like it did before, but his talons are sharper now.
Everything is harder, deeper, older, wiser, tougher. In killing his pack, it has made him into a slaughterer of apocalyptic stature. He is like the old huntsmen of legend – drawing in the strength of the slain.
The creature bats away his axe and bellows in triumph. It watches the blade tumble clear, flashing red before it hits the seething earth. In pausing to watch, it has erred.
He has been waiting for this. His wolf claw reaches for the creature’s neck. Adamantium blades, each crackling with actinic energy, clench tight around daemonic thews, pressing the stringy muscle together.
It thrashes. It claws at him. Its talons rake down his armoured back. All he has to do now is hold on. He presses harder, digs deep, pushing the physical air from un-physical lungs. He grits his fangs. He is bleeding now from the wounds it has inflicted upon him.
Its skin bursts, its vessels swell and flood, its strength ebbs. He hangs on, strangling the life from it even as it falls to its knees. The battle rages around them, a whirlpool of unfettered rage, but even the daemon no longer sees this.
Its red eyes glare at him a final time, and he stares back into them. It chokes, it writhes, but he never lets go.
Only when
the creature is gone, its mortal frame turned to unmoving slag and ash, does he raise his bloody claw in triumph. He tears his helm from his head and lifts his shaggy head to the sky. Tasting unfiltered air, he howls in triumph.
His living brothers howl with him. They know that he will be coming back to them now. They know what manner of thing he has really killed.
He stands upon the smoking corpse of the daemon, grinding his boots into its slumped shoulders. Only one name remains to be declaimed, the last member of the pack, the one who hunted through the sea of stars for vengeance, the one they have called the Lone Wolf for too many years.
Bjorn.
Afterword
Legacies of Betrayal is something of a first for the Horus Heresy series, in that it is an anthology composed entirely of stories that have already been available elsewhere, in one format or another. Indeed, many of these stories have been made available in several different formats before now…
Take ‘Warmaster’ by John French – quite aside from being a truly excellent glimpse into the mind of Horus himself, this little tale started off as an exclusive MP3 audio drama in the 2012 Advent Calendar on the Black Library website. It was then included in the audio anthology CD digipack Echoes of Ruin, along with a PDF of the recording script on the bonus disc. Now, it’s been printed as a short story in an anthology that will go through the usual progression of hardback, paperback, mass-market paperback over the next year or so, so you can add it to your collection in any/every way that you want.
That’s not to say that these stories are just orphans, gathered up and taped together long enough to reach your eager hands – each one features a character who has been affected by the horrors of the ongoing galactic civil war, and who may yet have a bigger part to play. Brotherhood of the Storm, for example (limited edition novella, then non-limited hardback novella, eBook, audio book, and now presented in this anthology too) shows the beginnings of the rivalry that almost ended the White Scars Legion in Chris Wraight’s later novel Scars. Similarly, ‘The Divine Word’ by Gav Thorpe (event-exclusive anthology short, eBook, and now the uncut editorial version you’ve just finished reading) might just show the beginnings of a whole new spiritual journey for young Marcus Valerius.