Kejic called from his station. ‘Incoming hail from the Praetorian Truth.’
‘Perfect timing.’ She gestured her acceptance, a queen enthroned on black iron and brass. The voice that strained over the bridge speakers was human and wounded, and punctuated by the sounds of its ship detonating in the background.
‘For the Emperor,’ it said. ‘Courage and honour!’
The link died. Lotara steepled her fingers beneath her chin, still watching the Truth’s death throes. She knew exactly what she was looking for, and she nodded to herself when she saw it. Airbursts along the Truth’s edges, but not the release of broadside weapons batteries. Oh, no. This was a Legiones Astartes vessel, after all.
‘Western battlement turrets, form a contiguous firing solution. Interception spread.’
A servitor at the gunnery consoles blurted its lifeless response. ‘Compliance.’
‘Commander Tobin?’ she asked.
‘Captain?’
‘Lock the ship down. Get Delvarus of the Triarii up here at once.’
It took him a couple of seconds to realise she was right. ‘Aye, ma’am.’
As he moved away to give the necessary orders, she tapped a quick code into her throne’s armrests and leaned back to get comfortable. The shipwide vox gave a three-tone alarm, preceding every captain’s address.
‘This is Captain Lotara Sarrin,’ she addressed the tens of thousands of slaves, menials, officers and soldiers. ‘All hands to your stations. Prepare to repel boarders.’
As a cautionary measure, surely pointless, she drew her sidearm and checked the power cell. Immaculate and charged, as always. On the oculus, the defensive turrets were spitting incendiary fire into the space between the vessels, but shooting down boarding pods was always an exercise in luck as much as skill.
‘Captain?’ Tobin called. Lotara wasn’t sure she liked the note of unease in his voice. Nothing ever made Ivar Tobin uneasy. ‘Captain?’
She holstered her laspistol. ‘Commander.’
‘Delvarus of the Triarii has been reported as making unauthorised planetfall.’
She sat straight at that. ‘Pardon me?’ she said, with a politeness and calm she most definitely didn’t feel.
‘Delvarus and the Triarii aren’t on board, ma’am. From the reports, they made planetfall with the Legion and apparently “neglected” to inform command.’
Lotara took a breath. Could this Legion do nothing right?
‘We’re being boarded by what may well be an entire company of Ultramarines,’ she pointed out, still with the same alien calm.
‘I know, ma’am.’
The Triarii: five full companies of the World Eater’s finest shipboard warriors, excelling in void warfare and boarding actions far beyond traditional Legion training. Five hundred of Angron’s best, led by the Legion’s undisputed pit champion, all of whom were vowed and bound to defend the flagship. It was their duty. Their honour-bound duty.
‘This bloody Legion,’ she said.
The two armies faced each other across the open plaza. Details were sparse through the dust, but Khârn could see their front rank standing still in funereal dignity. Bronze edges on their armour burned silver in the moonlight. Helmet crests wavered, but not from fear – from the wind’s touch and the hammerfall of heavy rain.
Khârn stared at the front rank, hundreds of metres away, and the indistinct figures behind. Accursed dust.
As he watched, another gunship soared overhead. He activated his vox-link, speaking in a hurried slur.
‘This is Khârn to gunship Tyresius, abort your–’
The gunship exploded. It blew into flaming scrap directly above a nearby memorial necropolis and crashed down, taking the marble building with it. Several World Eaters stared, several others chuckled. Most ignored it, in favour of watching the hazy ranks of the Ultramarines.
‘I can’t see a damn thing,’ Skane said. ‘How many do you think there are?’
‘This has all the hallmarks of a last stand,’ Khârn replied. ‘We’re not attacking without Titans.’
‘Want me to make a weapons check?’ Skane asked.
Khârn looked at the chainaxe in his hands; it was missing several teeth, but had a way to go before it was worthless. ‘Do it. My thanks.’
He heard Skane making the rounds through the World Eaters loose ranks, checking the condition of blades, axes and supplies of ammunition. Another reality of war the sagas always missed.
Khârn kept watching the stalwart, unmoving ranks in the distance. More of his three companies’ survivors were catching up now, thickening the World Eaters lines.
‘Does anyone have an auspex still functioning in this dust?’
Several warriors gave noncommittal grunts. A few guessed at heat signatures of tanks among the heatwash of over a hundred Ultramarines, but no one had anything reliable to offer.
Khârn chose two squads to cut east and west respectively, reporting back on whatever they found.
More World Eaters caught up, with three rumbling Malcador battle tanks behind them. Chains rattled against the tanks’ hulls, each one hung with dozens of legionary helms taken from the Isstvan Atrocity and the Dropsite Massacre.
He felt it, then. A subtle change in the atmosphere, not quite physical, but still undeniable. Chainblades started revving. Warriors started pacing, caged lions aching to hunt.
‘Steady,’ he voxed. ‘All of you, steady.’
But he felt it, too. The Nails tick-tocked with little pushes of pain, demanding he act, act, act. He gunned his own chainaxe without intending to, lips falling into the familiar snarl.
‘Steady,’ he said again. And then, ‘Esca.’
The Codicier came forwards. His brothers parted instinctively, several spitting on the floor before him, to ward off ill fortune. A superstitious habit taken from Angron’s homeworld, and one that had resonated through the Legion.
Esca, unhelmed, had uncertainty writ plain across his features. ‘Captain?’
Khârn swallowed back the rise of discomfort, which in turn was adding fuel to his anger.
‘Can you use your powers to tell me what lies across from us in that plaza?’
Esca’s surprise deepened. He blinked, and looked at his brothers around him. Khârn banged a fist against his own chestplate. ‘Look at me, damn you. Answer me. Can you do it?’
The Codicier nodded. His eyes were slate grey, a rare colour on all of the World Eaters recruiting planets. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Stand your ground, the rest of you.’ Khârn leaned closer to Esca. Moving near him meant pushing against some unseen resistance, like walking underwater. ‘Be swift,’ Khârn warned. ‘The Nails are singing.’
Esca knelt down, closing his eyes.
Khârn, and all the others, backed away to give him room for whatever he was doing.
‘I don’t suppose the Word Bearers would like to join us for this one?’ Kargos ventured with an ugly smile.
Khârn had been listening to the other Legion’s vox-traffic, flawed as it was by interference. ‘They’ve got their own battles,’ he said. ‘They’ll pr–’
‘Vindicators.’ Esca opened his eyes, rising to his feet.
All eyes turned to him.
‘Vindicators,’ he repeated, ‘and other siege tanks – a battalion of them.’
The World Eaters looked to one another. Skane’s back-mounted turbines started cycling up, while Kargos confronted Esca, face to face.
‘They mean to shell us?’
The Codicier nodded. ‘There’s more. There’s something near here. Something immense, and alive. Inhuman.’
‘Where is it?’ asked Skane.
‘I can’t tell.’
‘What is it?’ asked Kargos.
‘I can’t tell.’
The Destroyer and the Apothecary shared a
glance, as if this only confirmed the Codicier’s uselessness. Around them, the gathering World Eaters gunned their chainblades and started beating their weapons against their armour, prowling in loose packs, eager to run forwards and meet the enemy.
But Khârn’s blood ran cold. He stared at the unyielding shadows of the distant Ultramarines in their phalanx.
‘Something’s wrong,’ he said. ‘All squads, fall back. Put distance between the tanks as well. The fleet can annihilate this plaza from orbit.’
His own men defied him, growling and arguing to the throaty whine of live chainaxes.
‘Angron demanded no bombardment,’ said Sergeant Gharte, his gaunt features unhelmed. ‘The enemy must bleed, not burn.’
‘We should charge,’ Kargos insisted. Khârn saw the twitch in his brother’s eyes, and the shine of saliva wetting the Apothecary’s lips. ‘Charge before they shell us!’
‘This is the Nails talking,’ Khârn said, but the words drowned in the cheer. They took up the Apothecary’s cry, almost all of them, raising their axes to the occluded moon.
‘Wait,’ Khârn ordered. ‘Wait.’
But the first shell was falling. It struck far, far back along the avenue, not even touching the rearguard. It didn’t matter that it missed. The World Eaters cried their rage at the filthy sky.
The second shell came no closer. The third did, though only barely. Loose debris clattered on the tanks’ hulls, falling from the plume of soil and stone that shot into the air.
The sound of any Legion charging was earthbound thunder, something tempestuous chained to the ground rather than allowed to fly free where it belonged. Along with the roars rising from spit-flecked mouths and the aggrieved complaint of chainweapons chewing the air – when the World Eaters charged, the sound was close to tectonic.
Khârn was seven steps into the charge before he realised he’d been swept up in it. He stopped, looking back, seeing Esca standing alone. Even the Malcador tanks were rolling, engines belching smog, their turrets cranking around in readiness.
‘Do not engage!’ Khârn voxed to his men, trying in the face of futility. ‘They’re driving us forwards! They want us to charge!’
‘Wait for Audax!’ Esca joined his voice to his captain’s. ‘Wait for the Titans!’
The dust thinned as he ran, and Khârn saw just what they were charging.
Nothing in mankind’s long history of warfare quite matched the sound of two Legions crashing together. Space Marine was never born to fight Space Marine, so betrayal had a tune all of its own. Not the metallic, bronze-banging din of the Ancient World, nor the chattering spit of automatic weapons in city streets that so blighted the age of humanity’s first terrified steps into space. Ceramite hit ceramite with a cracked-bell clang, strangely dull, pervasively resonant, as if the sound itself responded to the wrongness of the act.
Khârn was in the front rank when the World Eaters met the Ultramarines. He watched the gold and blue Evocati vanguard brace their shields, clashing their edges together, forming an unbreakable wall of overlapping cobalt. Full-body boarding shields. These warriors were arrayed for tight-knit boarding actions, where protection mattered more than anything else. They stood behind their decorated pavises, clad in brutal suits of densely layered Mark III plate, pistols and swords held in their free fists.
Khârn’s warriors had charged, in broken formation, a phalanx of the finest and most heavily armoured warriors in the Imperium. And he’d done it with the dregs of three disparate companies.
Break the wall. Nothing else mattered. Break the wall. Tear it down. If they couldn’t break the wall, they’d be at the Ultramarines mercy and dead within minutes. It had to fall at the first charge.
He wasn’t sure if he was thinking all this or shouting it. His men fired as they ran; gunfire clattered against the shield wall, leaving burn marks on the dark, sloping surfaces. He shouted for grenades, yelling in Nagrakali, but most of his men were already lost to the Nails.
The last thing he heard before the impact was the Ultramarines captain shouting a final order.
‘Ciringite frontem!’ he called in High Gothic. The shields lifted higher as the Ultramarines braced. The World Eaters roared loud enough to shake the sky.
When the lines met, they met with ceramite’s unmistakable clang and a bodily crunch of weight levied against weight. World Eaters lashed out with whirring chainblades, thudding blunt against shields, or found themselves hurled from their feet by the press of their enemies’ pavises slamming back as one. The Evocati were too closely packed. Every World Eater faced two Ultramarines. Khârn’s overhead chop was blocked by one of his opponents, and he took a shield bash to the face from the other. He stumbled back, sprawling, cursing, screaming; bleeding inside his helmet.
The World Eaters assault the Evocati shield wall
The Nails punished him for trying to retain control by knifing into the soft meat of his brain.
Mere seconds after the lines met, the charge had faltered, broken and collapsed.
‘Contendite vestra sponte!’ cried the Ultramarines lord. His men shifted their weight, fighting back with their pistols and blades. The World Eaters still at the shield wall started dying in droves, cut down by enemies they couldn’t reach.
Time slowed for Khârn in that moment. He found his focus stolen by eerie distraction – was this what Angron had felt on his homeworld? Was this what his doomed army of slaves and renegades had felt when they were being butchered by their masters’ soldiers? When the outcast gladiator mob raised spears and swords against entire armies of shield-bearing warriors?
He rose. At least, he tried to. A bolt shell hammer-cracked into his shin, sending him stumbling again. Another tore his helm free, leaving his face stinging with bleeding burns, and giving him the taste of gunsmoke on his tongue. That flavour would never fade; he’d live the many centuries of his life never tasting anything else.
As he rose a second time, another bolt shell cracked against his pauldron, blasting fire and smoke into his face, and ripping the armour plating completely free. He didn’t care. Slavering from the Nails’ pain, he needed to kill to end the pressure inside his skull.
Staring with bloodshot eyes, a thick string of acidic drool hanging from his bared teeth, Khârn breathed two words at the advancing Ultramarines formation. They were the last two words he spoke before the Nails bit deep enough to take over. Anyone who had ever been faced with anger strong enough to steal reason knew that the seeing red spoken of by poets and scribes throughout history was no metaphor, but a literal staining of the sight.
He was no longer Khârn. Khârn, the identity built of a lifetime’s memories and decisions, faded beneath the wash of red, red rage and frantic, berserk lethality.
Just two words.
‘Our turn.’
EIGHT
Summons
A ship was never truly silent. One could never escape the steady hum of the drive engines, nor the muted echoes of distant bootsteps on other decks. Yet Lorgar prayed in silence; prayed through the pain of his wounds, while listening past the sounds of the ship for a deeper, sweeter song.
Something tugged at his thoughts. A presence, demanding his attention, as though his name were being called – barely heard – in another room.
The demigod-priest smiled at the sensation. Rather than ignore it, he turned towards it, questing for its source. It felt no different from chasing an old memory.
First, he saw the great, dark chamber, with its banners hanging from girder-rafters. Then he felt it, the cold against his skin, as if he were really standing there in the still air. His brother, one of the few he loved and who loved him in return, turned from the book he was reading on a raised plinth. Its thick cover slapped closed; neither brother was foolish enough to believe the peach-coloured leather binding was from a wholesome source.
‘Lorgar,’ said the brother in t
hat far-off chamber.
The Word Bearer smiled – he smiled in his meditation chamber aboard the Lex above Armatura, and he smiled halfway across the galaxy – physically present in the former, a soul incarnated in the latter.
His brother looked like a god. No other word did the man justice. His armour was black chrome, a dark that suggested not only the absence of colour but the banishment of light, the way an eclipse swallows the sun. Many symbols covered its surfaces, the chief of which was the single, staring eye fashioned across the breastplate. That eye had once stared in lordly, but ignorant, invigilation. Now it glared, seeing all, black-veined by too many truths.
Above the breastplate, the face was bare, smiling, perfect in every dimension and detail, suffused with confidence. So beautiful. So very beautiful. Of all the primarchs, Lorgar’s face most closely resembled a stable composite of their father’s shifting features, but Horus was an avatar of an idealised version of the Emperor, perfected, iconic and completely devoid of the concerns of human existence. Or at least that was usually the case. Now, however, as Horus looked upon his brother, his sun-darkened features were deepened with the profoundest of concern.
‘Lorgar?’ he said again, as if unsure of the apparition standing before him.
‘It is I,’ the Word Bearer replied.
Horus stepped closer, as if he might reach out to touch his brother’s ruined face. He hesitated, and lowered his hand.
‘What happened?’
‘Armatura. Angron looks little better. The difference is that he chose to keep fighting. I trust the war to my men.’
Unasked questions drifted in the air between them. In time, thought Lorgar. In time.
Horus gestured to the book on the plinth. ‘I confess, I didn’t expect this to work. To speak a man’s name and have him appear before you? It reeks of black magic. The warp-flasks I can understand, but–’
‘Black magic,’ Lorgar smiled. He felt no pain here. Smiling was still something he was capable of. ‘An amusing notion.’ The Word Bearer walked to the book, an ephemeral hand above its closed pages. ‘Have you read it all?’
Betrayer Page 12