The Chapters Due

by Graham McNeill

  “I am saying that we must pull back to the keep. The wall is too long to hold with so few men. The Codex says—”

  “I know what the Codex says,” snapped Agemman. “I wrote enough of it.”

  “By Codex principles, you don’t have enough warriors to defend a wall this long,” said Tigurius, as though Agemman hadn’t spoken. “Logic says you must pull back to the keep.”

  Agemman looked set to argue, but he knew the teachings of the Codex backed Tigurius.

  “Does Lord Calgar give this order?”

  “Not yet, but he will.”

  “Then I will wait for his order to withdraw. It sits ill for the 1st to retreat.”

  “Would defeat sit better?”

  Agemman scowled at him and waved a gauntleted hand towards the sigil inscribed on the merlon. “Do what you must, Librarian, and then begone. I tire of your company.”

  “If you do not retreat, this wall will fall,” said Tigurius as the temperature plummeted once again. Tigurius’ breath misted before him and he tasted metal. Angry voices rose from the courtyard, and Tigurius saw several fist-fights erupt among the mortal soldiers.

  “What?” said Agemman, turning back with a furious look on his face.

  “Without my powers you will not hold this wall,” repeated Tigurius. “You should be begging me for my help.”

  “I beg of no man, warlock,” hissed Agemman, his face inches from Tigurius and bristling with barely-restrained aggression. “This wall is held by warriors of the 1st Company, and there are no better fighters in the galaxy,”

  “That will not matter. If you fight you will fail.”

  “You insult the honour of the 1st!”

  “There is no honour in stupidity,” said Tigurius.

  Agemman’s hand stabbed out and took Tigurius by the throat, his fingers closing like a Dreadnought’s claw upon his windpipe. Tigurius expelled a gust of misty breath and clenched the muscles in his neck as frost limned the edges of Agemman’s pauldrons. A killing light glittered in the eyes of the First Captain. A raging fury that sought only to destroy.

  Tigurius felt as if his entire body was immersed in an icy lake, his limbs leaden and numb. His thoughts were gelid, slow and dull-witted. So strange that his life would be ended at the hands of one of his battle-brothers; that was a future he had never suspected. Agemman forced him to his knees, choking the life from him with every second.

  Gunshots echoed from the walls, and the bloodshed in the courtyard spread from the epicentres of violence like an airborne infection. Tigurius dropped his staff and clamped his hands on Agemman’s wrists as the crystals woven into his armour’s hood pulsed with life.

  Warmth flowed into his mind, melting the cold grip of unreasoning anger that held him in its grip. He saw with total clarity, and his body threw off the unnatural belligerence driving him to violence. Tigurius opened his mind to the psychic light around the fortress, seeing a red mist seeping into the shrine fortress through the cracks in the stonework and pouring over the walls like a creeping fog. Wherever it touched, it lit the fires of resentment, jealousy and bitterness. It withered the nobility of humanity and fanned the flames of anger and hatred.

  Tigurius pushed against the red mist, driving it out of his own body and sending golden light into Agemman, purging his spirit of the enemy’s warpcraft in a heartbeat.

  The First Captain sagged against Tigurius, the furious light in his eyes replaced with horrified understanding. His grip slackened and Tigurius pushed himself to his feet as Agemman slumped against the wall for support.

  “Varro…” said Agemman. “I… Emperor’s blood, forgive me! I…”

  “Apologise later,” rasped Tigurius. “The daemons will be coming.”

  Agemman nodded, recovering his composure with a speed that reminded Tigurius why he was the Regent of Ultramar and Captain of the 1st Company. Tigurius reached out and placed his hand on the dulled sigil on the wall, feeling its strength eroding in the face of the enemy warpcraft.

  Barely any hint of power was left.

  “Stupid,” he hissed. “Should have felt it, should have known. Too tired…”

  Tigurius closed his eyes and allowed his consciousness to flow into the sigil, spreading through the walls to the others worked into the stonework. He poured his energy into the wards, replenishing them with power and strengthening them against attack. All along the wall, the sigils blazed with light, and the red haze over the fortress faded like morning mist.

  Lingering traces of it remained, but Tigurius knew they were few and far between, remaining only as long as it took the more aggressive mortals to realise the horror of their behaviour. The icy temperatures retreated, and Tigurius let out a shuddering breath as he felt the malign power of the enemy dissipate. Confusion and shame filled the fortress, but Tigurius forced himself to ignore it as he felt a wave of revulsion fill his belly with bilious acid. He opened his eyes and his heart lurched at the sight before him.

  Thousands of daemons, horned, blood-hued and scaled, charged towards Castra Tanagra with smoking black swords carried over their shoulders. Capering monsters with livid skin and pincer arms followed them, and in their wake came lumpen monstrosities that looked like corpses fresh from a plague pit. Daemonic vigour empowered them, and Tigurius saw they would never be able to hold the wall against such a horde.

  “First Company,” shouted Agemman. “Stand to! Courage and honour!”

  “No,” said Tigurius, recovering his staff from the ramparts. “Be ready to fall back.”

  Agemman’s jaw clenched, but he nodded curtly, and Tigurius hauled himself along the wall towards the edge of the breach. Marneus Calgar had already marshalled his warriors and a wall of lowered blades stood ready to face the daemons. Tigurius leapt from the ramparts and landed behind the breach with a thunderous crack of stone. He ran over to the Chapter Master and said, “You aren’t seriously going to face this charge are you?”

  “What else is there?” said Calgar. “I did it at Zalathras, and I can do it here. You remember that battle? Day and night I fought the greenskins and not one of them got past me.”

  “This is not Zalathras, and these are not greenskins,” said Tigurius. “You must withdraw to the keep. It is the only way.”

  Calgar glanced at the walls, thinly held by the warriors of the 1st Company and those few mortal soldiers from the Caesar and a handful of civilians. He saw the truth of Tigurius’ words in an instant.

  “Can you give us the time we will need?”

  “I can,” promised Tigurius. “Now go!”

  Calgar nodded and broadcast a force-wide communication. “Everyone back to the keep! Fall back by squads, but leave no man behind. Courage and honour. Calgar out.”

  All along the length of the wall, men and women streamed back towards the safety of the keep while the warriors of the 1st remained on the walls. Crisp volleys of bolter fire boomed and missiles streaked from their launch tubes.

  “Go, my lord,” said Tigurius. “I will keep the daemons at bay long enough.”

  The Chapter Master placed a hand on his shoulder. “I will stand with you, Varro.”

  Tigurius took a deep breath and strode into the breach, planting his staff in the ground beside him. Its power was enormous, with a connection to the immaterium that was unmatched by any other such talisman. He would need all the help he could get. The daemons were almost upon the fortress, a raging tide of nightmares made real and dragged from the warp by a power beyond comprehension. To maintain a horde such as this required a vast reservoir of power, and Tigurius knew that when the Thrice Born chose to take the field of battle, there would be a slaughter unlike anything the Ultramarines had witnessed since the Battle for Macragge.

  Tigurius hoped this battle would not have the same consequences for the 1st Company.

  He drew upon his every reserve of power, using his staff to drink deeply of the warp’s energies. Strange tides flowed into him, cold and deep, but he welcomed the surging power, shaping it
into lambent fire that lit his flesh and blazed from the skull atop his staff.

  The daemons were almost upon him. He could see the dead lights in their eyes and feel the furnace heat of their unnatural bodies. Darkness empowered them, but the light would destroy them. The fire raged within Tigurius, a seething conflagration that would consume him if left unchecked.

  Tigurius raised his staff as the daemons scrambled towards him and slammed it down.

  White fire exploded from the impact, and a searing wall of white flame erupted from the rock of the mountains. Those daemons closest to Tigurius were blown to cindered ash, their forms utterly destroyed without hope of renewal. Like a match dropped in a ditch of promethium, the flames raced around the circumference of Castra Tanagra billowing over the walls like a living thing. The gold sigils blazed with light, magnifying the killing power of the brilliant fire. Its touch was death to the daemons, and they screeched and howled in rage as its cleansing fires burned with blinding light. The mindless things of the horde hurled themselves at the walls, only to shriek in deathly agony as the fire burned them and spread across their bodies to devour them.

  Tigurius fought to hold onto the power flowing through him, feeling the fire draw upon his own vital essences as it burned. He looked up at the walls, seeing the warriors of the 1st Company falling back. Agemman was the last to quit the walls, and Tigurius felt his shame.

  The daemons hurled themselves at the fire, and the mountains shook with their death screams. As each was destroyed, Tigurius felt his grip on the energy empowering it falter. He could not hold onto it much longer without dreadful consequences, and he felt the enormous power in orbit around Talassar turn its baleful gaze upon him.

  It was as though he looked into the darkest abyss, a vast emptiness from which there could be no return. Tigurius quailed before the horror of ultimate oblivion, and knew there could be no victory against such power.

  The last of his strength was gone, and Tigurius felt himself falling into the abyss.

  Powerful hands caught him, and he felt himself being carried away. Blades were clashing and bolters were firing, but all Tigurius could feel was the cold emptiness of the void.

  His eyes slowly closed and he heard a voice calling to him.

  “I’ve got you, Varro,” said Marneus Calgar. “I’ve got you.”

  THE RHINO GROUND its way through the streets of Corinth, its hatches shut tight and its engine belching what must surely be its last, consumptive exhalations. Scipio touched a beaten iron plate on the back of the driver’s compartment. Laenus had scratched a crude representation of the Mechanicus cog, swearing it was all that kept the vehicle running.

  Scipio wasn’t about to contradict him, and gave thanks to whatever power was at work.

  He looked out through the commander’s periscope. The glass on the outside was scuffed and cracked, though they had cleaned it as best they could. The Bloodborn soldiers were few and far between, most lying in drunken stupors in their billets or slumped against walls daubed in profane graffiti. Those soldiers still on their feet gave them a wide berth, bowing and hammering their fists against their chests.

  Scipio saw only a few traitor Astartes, but even they appeared distracted.

  Yet for all the disorder, there was a definite shift towards a more sophisticated layer of organisation the deeper into the city they penetrated. The praetor of Corinth had dwelled in a utilitarian structure of understated grandeur, its columned portico and domed roof rearing up in the distance. Sunlight gleamed from the silver ramparts of its gatehouse, and Scipio hoped that Salombar might be vainglorious enough to make her lair within, as it was certainly the grandest structure still standing.

  The arterial roads leading into the heart of the city were patrolled, and a number of timber sawhorses were set up to block the approaches to the inner precincts. Only Bloodborn warriors manned these checkpoints, and at the sight of an Astartes Rhino, the sawhorses were quickly moved off the road.

  “Slovenly,” said Scipio as they passed through. “They don’t even check who’s inside.”

  “I’ll take slovenly enemies over efficient ones any day,” said Helicas. His missile launcher was standing upright between his knees, the blue and red warhead already loaded. It was a violation of every safety protocol in the Codex, but when the time came to fight, Scipio didn’t want any delay in getting support fire laid down.

  “You’re sure this is a good idea, sergeant?” asked Coltanis, his plasma gun held across his lap. Scipio turned to face the warrior. Clad in his full battle armour, Coltanis was every inch a warrior of Ultramar. The gold of his pauldron trims gleamed in the unkind light of the troop compartment, but the lustre of his plate was clear.

  “No, but I’m all out of other ideas, and it’s time we took charge of this situation. I’m tired of skulking in the shadows. That’s a job for Scouts,” He was met with growls of approbation, for his words reflected every warrior’s sentiment exactly. They were the best fighters in the galaxy in a city full of enemies. It was time to let slip these dogs of war. Though he and his squad often acted as the eyes and ears of the 2nd Company, it was in the crucible of combat they were at their best.

  Each of the Thunderbolts was clad in his power armour, and Scipio felt renewed to once again be encased in plates of ceramite and armaplas. To be an Ultramarines warrior did not require armour, but to be clad in the blue and gold gave Scipio a sense of purpose and belonging that he lacked whenever he went without. He touched the skull icon upon his plastron, closing his eyes and offering a benediction to the warrior spirit within his armour.

  None of the prisoners they had taken had given them any hint that the Corsair Queen was in Corinth, but that very absence of corroboration gave Scipio hope that his suspicion was correct. Kaarja Salombar was in Corinth, he was sure of it.

  Now he would put that theory to the test.

  “Sergeant, you might want to take a look at this,” said Laenus from the driver’s seat.

  Scipio pressed his eyes to the periscope once again.

  He saw another roadblock, but this one was manned by traitor Astartes in the orange and black of the Claws of Lorek. Six of them, each with a weapon slung at the hip. Their leader marched into the centre of the road and held up his hand for them to stop.

  “What do you want me to do?” asked Laenus.

  Scipio spun the locking wheel on the commander’s hatch and said, “Punch through, and if you can crush any of those bastards underneath, so much the better.”

  He pushed open the hatch and activated the power feed to the pintle-mounted bolters.

  “This is it, Thunderbolts,” he said. “Time to strike.”

  STRIPPED OF HIS armour and bound to a bare steel excruciation chair, Ardaric Vaanes was a pitiful sight. His body was pale, bleached of all colour by virtue of his Chapter’s heritage, and Uriel found himself unable to think of anything to say that wouldn’t sound trite.

  “They say you will only speak to me,” he said at last.

  Vaanes looked up, and Uriel tried to read his expression. Part hate, part relief, and part… part some other emotion he couldn’t identify. So swift did it cross the renegade’s face that he wasn’t even sure he’d seen it, but there had been something he had tried to hide.

  “They were right,” said Vaanes. “I know there will be others listening, but I wanted to speak to you face to face once again.”

  The interrogation chamber was a square box deep inside Lex Tredecim, four metres by four metres, with a wide spectrum of recording devices invisibly incorporated into its walls, floor and ceiling. Nothing the captive said, did or felt would be missed.

  “Where are Honsou and his Iron Warriors?” said Uriel, stepping in close to the renegade Raven Guard. “They did not take the field of battle, and Honsou is not a man to miss such slaughter.”

  “The battle’s over?”

  “This stage of it,” answered Uriel. “The Black Basilica is gone and with it your corrupted magos. He tried to take contr
ol of the Praetorians, but he was defeated, and your forces were pushed back to their bridgehead.”

  “Of course you realise that the battle was just a sideshow?”

  “The fifth tunneller,” said Uriel. “Honsou and the Iron Warriors are in it, are they not?”

  Vaanes nodded. “Him and Xiomagra’s Blade dancers. Honsou wasn’t even sure you’d notice it.”

  “He always was good at underestimating me.”

  “We all were.”

  “So where is he going? Do not lie to me, or I will hand you over to the people beyond that door. They want you executed right now,” said Uriel.

  That was only partly true. Namira Suzaku had pushed for Vaanes’ execution, but Aethon Shaan, battered and burn-scarred from his battle aboard the Black Basilica, had been adamant. Vaanes was to be returned to Deliverance for judgment by the Raven Guard.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” replied Vaanes. “The Imperium has always been pretty unimaginative with its punishments. You should see the many and varied ways a warlord of Chaos keeps order. It’s not pretty but it keeps the underlings in line.”

  “And that is to be admired?”

  Vaanes shook his head. “You’re not listening to me. You’re just hearing what you want to hear, so if you’re going to kill me, just do it and stop wasting time. I thought I could talk to you because you might actually use your brain instead of jumping for the nearest executioner’s spike.”

  “Then tell me where the fifth tunnelling machine has gone.” Vaanes said nothing, and Uriel stepped towards him.

  “I’ll tell you, but first you have to offer me something,” said Vaanes.

  “You are a traitor,” spat Uriel. “Why should I offer you anything?”

  “How can you ask me that?” said Vaanes. “Aren’t we old comrades in arms? Didn’t we cross a world of the damned together? Didn’t we storm a fortress of the Iron Warriors? Do you know how many people can say that who are still breathing?”

  “Aye, we did all those things,” said Uriel. “And I offered you a chance for redemption once the foe was defeated, but you refused it.”