Betrayer

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Lorgar drew in a shivery breath as he continued. ‘There, a ship burns in Latona’s atmosphere, the cries of the doomed souls echoing into the empyrean. And there, a warship ploughs into the surface of Ulixis, digging its own grave, taking a hundred thousand souls shrieking into the afterlife. Do you hear them dying, Magnus? Do you hear the song shifting in time to their extinguished essences?’

  He was laughing now, raising a hand to the heavens, weeping as he whispered.

  ‘Every life. Every death. Every cry of pain across these burning worlds thins the veil between reality and the first-realm. Call it Hades or Hell, Jahannam, Naraka or the Underworld. Call it the warp… call it whatever you will. But I am bringing it forth onto the material plane. Calth was the genesis of the storm, Magnus. I will make an entire sub-sector suffer enough that the curtain falls and the Five Hundred Worlds drown in the warp.’

  He turned at last, eyes aflame with psychic fervour. ‘Tell me you feel it. Tell me you can hear the million, million daemons shrieking and baying, desperate to be born upon these burning worlds.’

  Magnus felt it, as real as the wind he’d never again feel against his flesh. A pulling, a tightening, of the weave behind the physical universe. Far from the impassioned sensation his brother described, the sorcerer felt it with clinical distraction, no different from an equation written on parchment and begging to be solved. Lorgar, in his madness, was doing more than breaking the natural order. He was rewriting the code of the universe.

  ‘You cannot kill Armatura,’ Magnus said. ‘You can shred the curtain between reality and unreality all you like, Lorgar. You can even call it a song, if you wish. Your life is still measured in minutes.’

  The fleet began to dive in earnest above and around them. When the Fidelitas Lex took its first hit, the lights across its many decks flickered once, twice, then settled stable. Lorgar looked back to the black heavens.

  ‘To break Armatura, we’ll need a vessel to rival anything humanity has ever wrought.’ He seemed thoughtful, a painting with unfocused eyes, brushing his fingertips over the scripture tattooed across his cheek. ‘We had one, you know. Zadkiel’s folly, the Furious Abyss.’

  Magnus watched the combined fleet beginning to burn. ‘And what happened to it?’

  ‘Oh.’ Lorgar shook his head, focus returning. ‘It died days ago, close to the same moment Kor Phaeron struck at Calth. Its corpse is probably still a shadow in the skies above Macragge – a monument to the Word Bearers failure. Another inscription on Zadkiel’s legacy of little idiocies. I told him he was a fool to attack Macragge, but he was so keen to bathe in glory, and all he ever heard were the whispers begging for revenge. I indulged him.’

  ‘Why did you let him? Are your sons so disobedient?’

  Lorgar laughed again, ignoring the ship shaking around him. ‘Harsh words, from the primarch whose sons defy him in the grandest ways. Your Legion didn’t bare their throats to the rampaging Wolves as you wished them to, did they?’

  Magnus conceded that with a nod. ‘Even so. Your fleet is dying, brother. What will you do without the Furious Abyss?’

  Lorgar looked back to the embattled skies. ‘This is what I meant when I said you underestimated us, Magnus. To you, this war is something shocking and new. Yet it is something I’ve been planning for half a century. I spent a quarter of the Great Crusade preparing for the moment when our father’s sad cravings of eminent domain would end, and the true holy war would begin.’

  The sorcerer swallowed, sensing the onrushing presence of something pressing against reality from the tumult of the warp. Something out there, about to make itself known.

  ‘Ah! Now you hear the song,’ Lorgar said. His laugh echoed around the basilica. ‘You hear the rhythm at last! But we need more control. So we summon new instruments to enliven the chorus.’

  Lorgar exhaled, gesturing to the deep void, past Armatura. Reality opened. Though Magnus’s ethereal incarnation was immune to such weakness, instinct made him shield his eye. A warp-rift formed in space, far from both closing fleets. Something was coming through, something vast: a trident of dark metal immediately familiar to the sorcerer.

  The ship grinding into reality was a reflection of the slain colossus Lorgar had spoken of. A city of monasteries and cathedrals rose from its back with the reverence of clawed hands sculpted to clutch at the stars. Where most Imperial battleships were spears of crenellated intent and iron-ridged might, this was a fortress in space, borne on the back of a great trident. The central tine served as the vessel’s core: dense at the stern, encrusted with massive engines and tapering towards the prow, where it formed a pointed ram the size of lesser vessels. The trident’s adjacent tines formed smaller blade-wings, each one barnacled with broadsides and cannon batteries.

  If one were to clad the concept of spite in iron and set it sailing amongst the stars, it might approach the image of what burst back into the universe in that moment. It was, in every way, the Furious Abyss reborn.

  ‘That,’ Lorgar smiled, ‘is the Blessed Lady.’

  Magnus released an unnecessary breath, watching as a ship too vast to exist left the wound in the material universe. It easily eclipsed even the Gloriana-class flagships of the combined Legion fleet, and the warp’s cloudy tendrils lashed at its spires, shrieking into the silence, seemingly reluctant to let the vessel back into reality.

  ‘You built two,’ the sorcerer breathed.

  ‘Oh, no.’ Lorgar didn’t even open his eyes. He raised a hand to point into the void, where a second warp-slice ripped across the stars. ‘I built three.’

  TWO

  Barely Human

  Warriors and Crusaders

  Broken Upon the Same Anvil

  The two warriors were human only in the loosest sense. They’d been human children, but time, excruciating surgery and extensive gene-therapy had seen them grow along less natural paths.

  There they stood, the sons of two worlds and two Legions, embodying the ideals and flaws of their birth worlds and bloodlines. More than any of their brethren, they exemplified their Legions’ triumphs – and their fathers’ sins.

  The Conqueror’s primary hangar platform was already shivering with the first barrage from Armatura’s guns. Flags and victory banners swayed in the false wind of the ship’s shaking bones. Several of them were scorched, ragged standards pulled from the dead hands of Raven Guard and Salamanders on the killing fields of Isstvan V. Trophies to inspire the legionaries of the World Eaters in the final moments before they made planetfall.

  The first warrior’s ceramite armour plating was cast in the same white as clean marble, from churches that should never have been built. The suit’s reinforced edges were the same blue as a winter sky back in the impious ages of Old Terra, before humanity burned the world’s surface and drank the natural oceans dry. His skin was as pale as any consumptive, a legacy of the pain machine inside his skull. It pulsed even now, teasingly erratic, sending fire tick-tocking through the meat of his mind.

  The helm he carried under his arm was a slant-eyed, snarling thing of red eye lenses and a Sarum-pattern mouth grille. An officer’s crest of white horsehair rose, sharkfin-like, to mark him out from his men in the heat of battle. The etching on his shoulder guard, written in the mongrel tongue called Nagrakali, named him as Khârn of the Eighth.

  A technological ballet was taking place around both warriors – an industrial performance of gunships and drop pods being craned and winched and towed into position. Khârn tried and failed to ignore the pain knifing through his head. When it became almost too much to bear, as it so often did, he pressed both hands to his face, digging armoured fingertips into his temples, seeking veins and pressure points. It occasionally helped.

  Not this time, though.

  He’d never prayed in his life, but he looked very much the part in that moment.

  ‘The Nails?’ his brother asked. The other warrior spok
e in a voice made rancid by empathy. Khârn felt him rest a gauntleted hand on his shoulder, and moved away from the unwelcome grip.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ Khârn told him, as he’d told countless others, countless times. Being too near other people always gave him headaches.

  The other warrior was long-used to Khârn’s awkwardness. Colchisian runic lettering on his armour named him as Argel Tal, Lord of the Chapter of Consecrated Iron, and he was known to all as Khârn’s brother by deed, not by blood. Standing in arterial crimson plating, edged by silver the same shade as pewter relics unearthed from an old tomb, Argel Tal’s dusky skin spoke of birth on a world of sand and ever-present thirst. No pain machine crackled in his brain, for he was of the XVII Legion, not the XII. Instead, a faith he wished was untrue had left his soul deformed.

  He spoke with two voices: the man he’d been, and the thing he was becoming. The latter underlaid his human voice in a bestial snarl – every word he spoke came out in both voices at once.

  ‘Armatura,’ his voices said. ‘This world is suicide. The Armaturan Academy Guard. The Thirteenth’s barracks-cities, for its initiates and Evocati overlords. The Titan Legio Lysanda. We’re going to die down there, you know.’

  Khârn wasn’t sure he disagreed. He’d read the analytics and studied the reports. He’d led half a dozen briefings himself, outlining the expected resistance to other World Eaters centurions and sub-commanders.

  And damn it, his skull ached today. The headache to end all headaches. Argel Tal always had this effect on him. The Word Bearer was as bad as Esca or Vorias.

  ‘The numbers are exaggerated,’ Khârn said with a pained grunt. A billion human soldiers. A billion. Not even counting Titans or Mechanicum skitarii. Not even considering the tank battalions stationed down there. Not even adding in the thousands of Ultramarines Evocati. The numbers had to be exaggerated, or they were all dead.

  Argel Tal gave a bitter laugh. ‘You don’t actually believe that, do you?’

  No. He didn’t. The geo-conflict analytics came from Ultramar’s own census archives. A handful of years out of date, certainly, but they were still facing a billion soldiers. Even if a tenth of them were teenage youths in the earliest stages of gene-implantation, there was no sense pretending this was going to be a bloodless triumph.

  Khârn didn’t answer. Even his eyes were starting to hurt now. The Nails were running hot. He looked back at the Dreadclaw assault pods – gifts from the Warmaster to suit the World Eaters way of warfare – being craned into place. Each of their hulls was a spiked and ridged testament to their lethal intent, a reflection of the vicious machine-spirits within. The number of ‘accidents’ due to Dreadclaw malfunction was on the wrong side of hilarious. Spiteful things, and that made them useful as often as it left them useless. Most Imperial commanders preferred to deploy using more reliable, less hateful machine-spirits.

  Khârn liked them immensely. Not from any real affection, but from honest – and perhaps amused – sympathy. He liked them not out of admiration, but a sense of kinship. They’d never steered him or his men wrong.

  Tech-priests moved between the raised pods, chanting and whispering last-minute invocations. A particularly spindly priest, walking on five stalk-like legs of burnished black iron, oversaw the preparations. His red robe stirred in the hangar’s false wind, rippled by the shaking deck and the hot wash of gunship engines cycling up to launch.

  ‘Archmagos,’ Khârn greeted Vel-Kheredar, representative of Sacred Mars.

  The robed cyborg turned three green eye lenses down towards them as it passed, speaking toneless greetings from a mouthless iron face. ‘Centurion Khârn,’ it said. ‘Commander Argel Tal.’

  The priest walked on, its eye lenses whirring and adjusting as it breathed a continual stream of orders in Martian binaric code. Soon enough, his calculated complaints were drowned out in the din. Was there anything louder than a warship’s deployment hangar in the minutes before planetfall? Khârn had fought at the heart of cities that fell with less assault on the eardrums.

  He turned to Argel Tal. ‘This world would be suicide without the Abyss-class warships. With them? It might be easy. The Seventeenth Legion is too dour, brother.’

  ‘Ah.’ Argel Tal smiled. ‘This again.’

  Khârn wasn’t jesting this time. ‘You’re right, Armatura will be suicide for skitarii and your levies of zealots. The rest of us will bleed as we always bleed.’

  ‘I dislike the relish in your tone.’

  He always did. Khârn gave a small smile. ‘Do you fear death?’

  ‘We are the Legiones Astartes,’ said the Word Bearer. ‘We know no fear.’

  Khârn met his brother’s eyes. His silence served to ask the question again.

  ‘Yes,’ said Argel Tal. ‘I do. I’ve seen what waits for us on the other side.’

  The sincerity in the other warrior’s voice made Khârn shiver. ‘We survived Isstvan III,’ he said. ‘We’ll survive this.’

  Argel Tal’s features were very calm, almost aesthetic; the innocent face of a battlefield priest or a warrior-poet. Smiles didn’t suit him – they depleted what dignified handsomeness remained to any Legiones Astartes warrior – yet he smiled often. Very few souls knew him well enough to see how false those smiles were. Khârn was one. His primarch was another. All the others were dead.

  ‘You survived Isstvan III,’ he said. ‘I survived Isstvan V.’ He hesitated, hardly blind to the pain-tics that were now making Khârn’s face twitch in weak spasms. ‘Be careful down there, Khârn.’

  That really was too much. Khârn snorted before replying.

  ‘Such warm words from a man with a devil in his heart.’

  Argel Tal smiled again. Khârn loathed that smile, because this one wasn’t false. It was the smile of a murderer, not a warrior. Fanatics smiled like that.

  They walked the length of the hangar, watching over their warriors assembling before embarkation. While the Legions’ differences were as distinct as night and day on the battlefield, they were no less stark beneath the harsh glare of emergency lighting.

  The Word Bearers of the Vakrah Jal stood in neat, organised rows: blades sheathed, weapons deactivated, oath papers bolted to red armour plating. Several hundred soldiers, fresh from their months of training in the Conqueror’s gladiator pits and swearing their oaths of union with Khârn’s own oversized Eighth Assault Company. As the two commanders passed, every Word Bearer went to one knee. They lowered their heads and chanted prayers drawn from the Word of Lorgar.

  Khârn couldn’t help but cringe. His skin crawled to hear such strange rhymes and benedictions vox-whispered by so many throats.

  ‘I will never understand your Legion,’ he told Argel Tal.

  The Word Bearer watched his men and their reverences, their silver helms tilted down in contemplative repose, before looking over at Khârn’s forces. Where the Word Bearers were a kneeling phalanx, the XII warriors were a disorganised mob – laughing, sharing last-minute taunts between squads, with the continuous background whine of chainblades being triggered in twitching fists.

  Argel Tal raised a dark eyebrow as two World Eaters banged the foreheads of their helms together, with the unmistakable dull ring of ceramite on ceramite.

  ‘And I will never understand yours,’ he replied. His tone said it all.

  ‘Understanding us is simple,’ said Khârn. ‘You just have to realise that there are some warriors who actually enjoy war. War, and the brotherhood that comes with it. I know that must be difficult for you to understand.’ He gestured to the kneeling, praying Word Bearers. ‘You come from a serious breed.’

  Argel Tal muffled his answer in the emotionless mask of a crested, silver-faced helm.

  ‘I’ve seen into the hell behind reality,’ he said. ‘It stole my sense of humour.’

  Hard to argue with that.

  ‘Good hunting,’ Argel T
al told him.

  The two commanders grasped each other’s forearms. No lingering words; they simply clashed vambraces and went their separate ways.

  Khârn’s command squad waited in a shallow illusion of discipline. Esca loosened his wrists, cutting through the air with both of his blades. His psychic hood was an armoured half-dome over the back of his head, with its cables bonded to his temples. He was the only man in Eighth Company to lack the Butcher’s Nails, and therefore the only man who didn’t look on the edge of spitting in irritation or howling in impatience. Kargos, by comparison, was already helmed, checking the drills and bonesaws deployable from his narthecium gauntlet.

  ‘I killed Harakal in the pits last night,’ Kargos said. He drawled the words through the mouth grille of a Mark IV helmet. His accent was thick enough to be almost impenetrable. He came from the plains of Sethek, where the Imperial Gothic tongue was no more than a memory. Hypnotic implantation had given him mastery over other languages, but nothing could shake his accent free.

  Khârn smiled, devoid of mirth. ‘I liked Harakal.’

  ‘Everyone liked Harakal. Didn’t stop his head from rolling across the deck, though.’ Kargos mimed the final blow in slow motion, sweeping a chainblade through Harakal’s neck. The others could hear the grin in his voice. ‘The look in his eyes was priceless, Khârn. Even you’d have laughed, you miserable bastard.’

  Khârn doubted that. ‘I heard you and Delvarus went to third blood.’

  ‘Delvarus.’ Kargos fairly spat the word. ‘I’ll get him, one day.’

  ‘No,’ Khârn shook his head. ‘You won’t. No one will.’

  Kargos tsked. ‘What do you say, Esca? Any prophecies for me? Will anyone ever beat that whoreson Delvarus in the pits?’

  Esca shook his head, a refusal rather than a disagreement. ‘You don’t still assume I can see the future, do you?’