The Chapters Due

by Graham McNeill

  “Just another reason to kill you,” snapped Pasanius.

  “That’s the arm?” said Suzaku. “The one tainted with the necrontyr living metal?”

  “Is that what it is?” said Honsou, as though they were not mortal enemies, but friends sharing a spirited debate. “I always wondered how it worked. Even Cycerin couldn’t fathom it, and he used to be a priest of Mars.”

  “Why are you here?” demanded Uriel, fighting for calm as memories of all the destruction Honsou had unleashed flooded his consciousness. “Why this place?”

  “Honestly? A daemon sent me to destroy it, though for the life of me I can’t think why. I mean it’s not as though there’s anything useful here. Just some bones, some broken plates of armour… and this.”

  Honsou held up the item he’d taken from the tomb of Ventanus. It was a dagger, a long-bladed poniard with a golden hilt. Its blade was triangular in section and fashioned from some strange stone, like chipped flint with a glitter sheen to its edge.

  “It’s a pretty enough piece,” said Honsou, turning the weapon over in his hands. “Nice hilt, though the blade looks like something cave-dwelling savages might make. Curious, is it not?”

  “Fascinating,” hissed Pasanius. “You’re going to pay for all the lives you’ve taken.”

  Uriel placed a restraining hand on Pasanius’ shoulder. With the odds stacked against them, he needed Honsou’s warriors to lower their guard before making any hostile move.

  “Why Tarsis Ultra?” he asked.

  Honsou looked confused for a moment, as though the name were unfamiliar to him.

  “Ah, the world we used the virus on,” he said. “One your Mechanicus devised I might add. Very nice work too. Did a thorough job from what I understand. I needed to get your attention, didn’t I? After all, what’s the point of wreaking havoc if the person you want to suffer doesn’t know why they’re suffering?”

  “You are a monster, Honsou,” snarled Uriel, drawing the sword of Idaeus with cold deliberation. “And I will relish cutting you down.”

  Honsou laughed and gestured to the Iron Warriors arrayed around him. “Why is it you always think we’re going to duel? I have you outgunned and outnumbered, and every square inch of this tomb is wired to blow it back to the age of the Warmaster.”

  “You are a coward,” said Uriel, hoping to anger Honsou to rashness, but instead the Warsmith gestured to the warrior next to him, the thing Vaanes had called the Newborn.

  “Why should I fight you when I have a champion to do it for me?”

  The Newborn removed its helmet, and Uriel felt a sickening repulsion at the sight of the dead face before him. Its skin was a leathery and inflexible mask, but there was no mistaking the bone structure beneath that gave it the lie of resemblance. Nor was there any doubt as to the heritage of the stormcloud eyes that smouldered with hatred and desperate need.

  It took a step forward and cocked its head to one side.

  “Your face is different,” it said. Uriel saw its fleshless lips moving behind its dead skin mask, feeling his gorge rise at the sight.

  “Thanks to your bolt round.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “It did,” confirmed Uriel.

  “Good,” said the creature. “Since I was spat out in that cavern I have lived with pain. My life is broken memories sewn together, my body a monstrous thing neither alive nor dead.”

  Petronius Nero drew his blade and said, “Let me kill it, captain. Champion to champion.”

  Uriel shook his head. “Not this time, Petronius. This is a battle I must fight on my own.”

  Honsou pressed the poniard he’d stolen from the tomb into the Newborn’s hand. “Here, use this. Seems appropriate that he dies with his hero’s blade in his heart.”

  The Newborn looked at the weapon and nodded. “I never asked for this,” it said. “I should have died, and that would have been a mercy. But you breathed life into my broken form. And for that I will kill you.”

  Uriel felt the anguish in its words, the tortured pain of a monster set to kill its creator.

  “You don’t have to do this,” said Uriel.

  “Yes,” said the Newborn, walking towards him. “I do. I end your life and then my own.”

  “You were a young boy once,” said Uriel, stopping the Newborn in its tracks. “I know because I lived your memories. As you saw mine, I saw yours. I saw it. You were training to be a commissar. You were taken by the Iron Warriors and turned into a monster, but that’s not what you are. They twisted your outward form, but they can’t change what you are inside, no matter how much they try and fill your head with their warped thoughts.”

  “You saw my life?”

  “Parts of it, yes,” said Uriel.

  The Newborn stared at him, as though trying to decide if he were lying.

  “It doesn’t matter what you say to it,” said Honsou. “It doesn’t matter what it was, it’s a thing of the warp now.”

  The Newborn reversed the blade Honsou had given it and dropped into a fighting crouch.

  “Come, father,” it said. “Come and die with me.”

  THE PALACE GROUNDS had become a bloodbath. Desperate Bloodborn soldiers were fighting for their lives as the 2nd Company cut into their numbers with all the brutal efficiency for which the Ultramarines were famed. Tactical squads advanced in rigid echelon formation, firing on the move with relentless barrages from their weapons. Assault squads struck into the gaps, tearing them wider and breaking the Bloodborn into isolated pockets to be slaughtered piecemeal.

  Scipio Vorolanus led Coltanis, Helicas and Nivian through the raging battle, firing his bolt pistol in economical bursts. He’d picked up a new weapon from the Spatha’s stowage racks, and it felt good in his hands. Helicas had procured a heavy bolter, and whenever their advance stalled he unleashed a sawing blast of shells into the enemy. Nivian held onto Scipio’s battered pistol and fired one-handed while Coltanis had replenished the energy cells of his plasma gun.

  Explosions burst amongst the Bloodborn and the Ultramarines, for the enemy soldiers beyond the walls and gatehouse were fighting furiously to come to their queen’s aid. Scipio had no fear that any would get through, for Praxor Manorian always seemed to feel the need to prove his worth over and above anyone else. If there was any squad that could hold the gatehouse, it was the Shield Bearers.

  The Corsair Queen’s skiff was trying to retreat to the palace, but in their desperation to save her, the Bloodborn forces inside the walls had hemmed her in. Wedged in place by the press of bodies, the skiff fired over their heads into the Ultramarines, but so thickly enmeshed with the Bloodborn were they that it was impossible to avoid hitting their own men.

  Traitor Astartes were battering their way through the Bloodborn to take up position with Kaarja Salombar, and Scipio saw the vivid blue of her hair through the blazing muzzle flashes and explosions. To see the object of their quest so close was intoxicating, and he led the Thunderbolts on with even greater vigour.

  Scipio saw a flash of crimson ahead, and the sight of Captain Sicarius lifted his heart. The captain of the 2nd was an unstoppable force, a sublime warrior beyond compare whose blade seemed able to find the weak point in any armour, the vulnerable point in any defence. Every stroke of his tempest blade and every shot from his plasma pistol saw a host of Bloodborn soldiers killed.

  He fought with a wildness that many found unsettling in a captain of the Ultramarines, but the more Scipio studied his swordplay the more he saw a studied precision to every blow. The Lions of Macragge fought beside their captain, a fighting unit without equal in a Chapter of heroes. Daceus protected the captain’s right flank, while Prabian secured the left. Vandius carried the company standard, its blue, gold and green snapping proudly in the wind.

  Sicarius paused to recharge his pistol and saw Scipio’s men approaching.

  “Sergeant Vorolanus. By the four winds it’s good to see you!” cried Sicarius, taking Scipio’s hand. “You’ve won me a great victory her
e, Scipio. A great victory for the 2nd!”

  “Thank you, my lord,” said Scipio.

  “You’ve taken some losses, but by the Emperor I’m proud of you. All of you!”

  “The Thunderbolts never fail, my lord,” said Scipio proudly.

  “No they don’t,” agreed Sicarius. “Now, you’ve done us a damn fine turn, Scipio, but this fight’s not done yet. Are you with me?”

  “Always, my lord,” promised Scipio, and his men echoed his sentiment.

  “Then follow me!” shouted Sicarius, plunging once more into the fray.

  To fight alongside Captain Sicarius was a great honour, for this was the warrior who had saved Black Reach, who had defeated the reavers of the Halamar Rift and freed the Zeist sector from the insidious domination of the tau. He was, by any definition, a hero, and Scipio felt guilty for ever having doubted his course.

  Their advance was unstoppable, but as the last of the Bloodborn melted away in the face of their rigid ferocity, the Lions of Macragge reached the point where they were faced with tougher opposition than mere mortals.

  Just ahead, within twenty metres, was Kaarja Salombar, standing atop her beleaguered skiff with a gold-plated pistol and long curved sabre raised overhead. A host of traitor Astartes, thirty berserk Skulltakers and tiger-striped Claws of Lorek, stood between her and the Ultramarines.

  Salombar saw Sicarius and smiled in genuine pleasure. She aimed the tip of her sword towards him, and the brazen nature of the challenge was unmistakable.

  “Now I get to kill a queen,” hissed Sicarius.

  THE NEWBORN LEAPT for Uriel, faster than he would have believed possible for a warrior in power armour. The blade of the poniard slashed for his throat, but Uriel swayed aside, bringing his sword up to block the reverse stroke. The Newborn’s face was a blank mask and as Uriel backed away, it reached up to tear it off.

  Its patchwork covering had been hideous, but the vile, skinless face beneath was even worse. It glistened with exposed musculature, wet and raw. It stared at Uriel with eyes bleeding madness, pain and a lifetime’s worth of suffering. Its mouth pulled wide in a grimace of a trapped animal. As much as Uriel wanted to lower his blade and reason with the Newborn, he knew there was no way he could reach it. Events on Salinas had shown him the impossibility of trying to save warp-touched creatures.

  The Newborn came at him again, slashing with the flint-bladed dagger and scoring the surface of Uriel’s armour. He heard bolters pulled into shoulders and shells racked into breeches with Ultramarines precision.

  “No!” he said. “This is between us.”

  The Iron Warriors watched with their bolters still slung insouciantly at their sides. They knew they had the upper hand and were dismissive of the ragtag force arrayed before them. They had also seen the Newborn in action and knew the contest before them could only end one way.

  Uriel sent a long, slashing blow towards the Newborn’s side, but it swayed left and rolled beneath his guard to thrust its dagger at his groin. Uriel spun to the side and the blade skidded from his thigh. He hammered his elbow down, thundering it into the Newborn’s face, Blood burst from its cheek and it fell back, vaulting to its feet as Uriel stamped down.

  In a contest between a swordsman and a knifeman, the advantage lay with the warrior bearing the longer blade. Yet that advantage counted for nothing against the Newborn’s speed. Time and time again, Uriel thought he had a killing stroke, but each time his opponent would somehow manage to avoid the deathblow.

  “Stop playing with him!” ordered Honsou. “Finish him.”

  The Newborn nodded and closed on Uriel with the poniard held out before it.

  Uriel raised his sword, but before he could raise his guard, the Newborn was upon him, ripping the sword from his grip and slamming the dagger’s pommel into his cheek. He tumbled backwards, hearing a commotion from behind him. He hit the ground hard and rolled, but before he could move, the Newborn was on top of him with the grey dagger held above him.

  “Now the pain ends,” said the Newborn, its voice choked with emotion.

  Two bolter shots broke the sepulchral hush of the tomb and a pair of explosions punched through the Newborn’s chest. Bloody craters big enough for an Astartes fist blew its body open, and Uriel could see Pasanius and a smoking bolter through the exit wounds. The Newborn shuddered, but didn’t fall. The dagger slipped from its hand, landing with a clatter of stone on stone beside Uriel.

  Bright blood and sickly yellow light oozed from the wounds. As Uriel watched the horrific injury, new ribs formed and slithering organs, arteries, sinews and muscle grew around them.

  “You see the pain I am in?” it said. “The memory of every wound stays with me.”

  Uriel swept up the fallen dagger as the Newborn’s hands closed on his throat.

  “Samuquan!” gasped Uriel. “That was your name. You were called Samuquan!”

  The Newborn’s grip slackened a fraction and its eyes widened in horror as a flood of memories were unlocked in a single, tumultuous moment. Its hands fled to its face and a strangled sob tore from its throat, but instead of freeing it from its domination, Uriel saw only fresh fury in its eyes. The realisation of what it was and what had become of it.

  “I’m sorry,” whispered Uriel, and rammed the dagger into the Newborn’s chest.

  He drove the blade up into its innards, through the knitting flesh of the bolter wounds, with all his strength. As the blade struck, Uriel felt a hideous sensation of finality flow from the weapon, an awful sense of a thread being severed between the material world and whatever realms lay beyond. The Newborn howled and fell back, pulling itself off the blade.

  It climbed to its feet and then dropped to its knees, clutching its head and screaming. Uriel felt its pain as a piercing ache in his head, knowing in that instant of connection it was reliving every degradation since its capture. The young boy he had been now saw the monster he had become, and its already fragile mind collapsed under the weight of shame and horror. The light oozing from its body vanished, and the regeneration of its wounds abruptly halted.

  The child that had been Samuquan looked at Uriel and said, “Thank you,” It slumped onto its side, its legs curling up and hands folding inwards into a foetal position. Its eyes closed and a soft death rattle issued from its lips. Uriel stared at the dagger in amazement, not knowing how it had cut the life-thread of the Newborn or how Captain Ventanus had come to own such a weapon.

  He heard the clatter of Iron Warriors bolters and rolled to the side as a roaring volley blasted from two score weapons. With the death of the Newborn, the uneasy and unnatural truce between the Ultramarines and Iron Warriors was ended in the thunder of bolters.

  THE TOMB WAS filled with barking echoes of gunfire as the Iron Warriors and Imperial forces opened fire. Uriel scrambled back to his warriors as shells tore up the ground towards him. He jinked right, keeping low to avoid the streams of fire, and rolled into the cover of a cracked sarcophagus as its corner exploded into fragments of pulverised stone.

  He risked a glance around the edge to see the Iron Warriors fanning out to surround them.

  “Shaan!” shouted Uriel, gesturing to the flanking forces.

  “We’re on it,” said the Raven Guard, leading his warriors into the lines of sarcophagi.

  Pasanius dropped into cover beside Uriel, now armed with his flamer.

  “Thank you,” said Uriel, loading a fresh clip into his bolt pistol.

  “Someone’s got to look out for you every time you do something foolish.”

  Pasanius leaned over the edge of the sarcophagus and sent a blazing gout of promethium into the Iron Warriors. Three of the enemy set alight, but only one fell, the others walking through the fire unscathed.

  The Firebrands and Swords of Calth returned fire from cover as best they could, but this was an unenviable tactical situation. Sheer weight of enemy fire was keeping most of his men pinned down while the Iron Warriors moved to flank them. Their enemies were risking nothing i
n such tactics, and were giving the Ultramarines no chance to heroically charge or meet them in close combat.

  “Come and face us like men, you cowards!” shouted Pasanius, but Uriel knew Honsou would never rise to such bait. He looked for his nemesis through the blazing storms of gunfire, finally spotting him behind a sarcophagus twenty metres to the right. Seven warriors flanked him, and there was no way to reach him alive.

  Uriel’s frustration was almost unbearable. To have come this far and have everything ended in such ignoble defeat! More of the Firebrands went down, felled by a methodical burst of overwatch as they tried to return fire. Brutus Cyprian grunted as a bolter round blew out his kneecap, and Ancient Peleus fell back as a round clipped the side of his shoulder guard. Selenus low-crawled over to them, but Peleus waved him off. Their circle of resistance was shrinking with every passing second as the Iron Warriors closed in.

  Inquisitor Suzaku crawled through the smoke and dust towards him. Blood soaked her side and a fresh cut on her forehead bled onto her face.

  “If your Codex has any plan for dealing with this, I’d love to hear it,” she said.

  “Nothing springs to mind,” admitted Uriel, snapping off a shot toward Honsou. It was hastily taken and poorly aimed, flying wide of the mark and ricocheting from the shoulder guard of the warrior to Honsou’s left.

  “So what now?” asked Pasanius.

  Uriel had no answer for him, but then the Raven Guard struck with their last stab of defiance. Screams of pain echoed from the walls as Shaan’s Raven Guard tore through Iron Warriors flanking squads. Yet as devastating as these strikes were, the Iron Warriors were no fools, and reserve squads gunned down the black-armoured warriors before they could make their escape.

  Uriel saw Revys Kyre go down with three bolt impacts blowing open his plastron and throwing him back over a sarcophagus. Aethon Shaan fell as a bolter round pulped his hip, but even carrying such a grievous wound, he managed to throw himself into cover. Crimson blood spilled down the carven faces of the sarcophagus, flowing around the images of heroic Ultramarines facing their damned foes and pooling on the cracked floor.