Bolt shells burst against his atomantic shield. A roiling bolt of plasma splashed over it, briefly lighting the energy screen with oily, refracted luminescence, only to dissipate into painless steam. Lhorke took their onslaught head-on, striding up the stairs, joints whirring out a grind-song despite the limp, as he pushed his ironform to move faster, faster.
His shield burst at point-blank range. It died with a final, gasping surge, sending worms of discharging electricity crawling across the power pack mounted on his back. It meant nothing. It meant less than nothing.
He crushed the first crawling Ultramarine beneath his massive foot, crumbling the warrior’s ceramite into mangled metal panels and smearing the pulped biological remains across the deck. Bolts clattered against his armour, decorating him in scorch marks, scrambling the delicate circuits of his retinal display yet not quite blanking his vision. Scratches. Flesh wounds, for want of a better term. Lhorke reached for the next two warriors, the combi-bolters in his fists opening up with nasty chatters even as he lunged to smash the enemies aside. He caught them both and started squeezing.
The Ultramarine in his left fist was dead before he clutched him, holed through by the combi-bolter volley. He shook the fresh corpse regardless, its limbs and neck breaking, before it was hurled across the bridge to crash along the deck.
The one in his right hand took several seconds to die, fighting and shouting in fruitless defiance against the slow-closing fingers. With a final meaty crunch, the warrior fell limp and gushed blood from a ruptured body. Lhorke hurled the organic detritus in the same direction as the last.
‘You,’ he said to the last Ultramarine. A more patient, sonorous threat had never been uttered on the Conqueror’s bridge.
The warrior was scrambling back, unable to run with the injuries to his knee and belly. Defiant to the very end, he raised his plasma gun. The magnetic coils glowed, then brightened, then went phosphorous.
Lhorke tore it from the warrior’s hand, compressing his iron claws and scrapping the priceless weapon without a thought. Its gathering power erupted in a torrent of liquid blue-white fire, eating into the Dreadnought’s arm. Retinal temperature gauges spiked to the accompaniment of warning runes. Lhorke looked through them, reaching down to clutch the Ultramarine’s leg as the warrior crawled away.
A twist, a rotation of his wrist servos, and the legionary’s spine crackled into worthless bone pebbles. Lhorke tossed the paralysed wretch away, towards a crowd of bridge crew armed with service pistols and unsheathed knives. They descended in a pack, finishing what the Dreadnought had begun.
He heard the Ultramarine scream, but only once. From the pain of being carved apart, rather than fear. Very admirable indeed.
Lhorke walked past the central auspex array table, where a legless young woman, surgically implanted to the scanner machinery around her, was shivering on her augmetic suspension cables. Her eyes were wide, unseeing. How she still lived after being at the eye of the firefight storm, he could only guess. The wires and leads linking her head to the ceiling rattled as she trembled with shock. He almost reached out a hand to comfort her, before recalling just what he was now. Dead men entombed in towering bodies of oil-bleeding iron were not, by and large, a comfort to victims of trauma.
He passed her, limping to where Lotara was rising from cover with her overprotective armsmen.
‘Captain Sarrin.’
‘Lhorke.’ She wiped her forehead with her sleeve, craning her neck to look up at him. She scarcely reached his thigh.
‘These were the last.’
‘Thank you, Legion Master.’
He almost said I need to rest, but caught the slip before it left his speaker grille. ‘I will submit myself for repairs,’ he said instead, then hesitated. ‘With your permission.’
She nodded, seeing the eerie calmness of devastation’s aftermath taking hold of her bridge. Somehow, it was worse than the gunfight.
‘I have some work to do here.’ As if just recalling, she cleared her throat and asked, ‘How many of your brothers still walk the decks?’
He performed a vox-relayed calculation, citing vital signs uploaded to his retinal feed. ‘Three,’ he said. ‘Including myself.’
Something like guilt paled her skin. ‘Thank you, Lhorke. Convey my thanks to them, as well.’
He bowed – a gesture that didn’t come naturally to the Contemptor-class ironform, nor to the warrior bound within this one – and left the bridge in her hands.
Distraction was a warrior’s worst enemy. More than once, Khârn’s gaze snapped to the wealth of inscriptions on Orfeo’s armour, unintentionally reading a detail or two. The captain had fought in more campaigns across the Eastern Fringe than Khârn was even aware had taken place. No wonder the XIII claimed five hundred planets as their kingdom.
You couldn’t parry a power blade with a chainsword; doing it once was pushing your luck, doing it twice was asking to be disarmed. The energy corona around the former would break the latter apart. Chainblades parried poorly at the best of times, always with the risk of losing teeth if struck at the wrong angle.
The disadvantage of chainsword and gladius would have had Khârn on the defensive, but the ground was thick with corpses and unclaimed weapons. Barely twenty heartbeats had passed before he managed to steal a fallen Ultramarine’s power sword. He grinned as he thumbed the activation rune, blinking away the sweat stewing his eyes. Lightning snaked along the silver steel, rippling from the generator in the hilt and dissolving the dusty blood that had dirtied the blade.
They met again, each of them forced to fight as their weapons allowed. Orfeo led with his long sword, cleaving in a series of arcing chops, while using his gladius main-gauche to parry more than thrust. As a stabbing weapon, it was worthless without a kill-plunge to the belly.
Khârn had the advantage of reach with his two longer blades, but his chainsword was a fragile boon at best, useless against the captain’s reinforced ceramite and already spitting teeth from deflecting the shortsword’s infrequent lunges. It was almost amusing how every other warrior avoided them both now, making room for the fight between their commanders. Energy flared each time the two power swords clashed. Khârn lost track of time, focusing everything he had on the battle before him.
‘That isn’t an axe,’ Orfeo laughed at one point. He parried another of Khârn’s cuts, and the World Eater heard the smile in the other warrior’s voice. ‘Look at you with that blade. Always trying the edge. However did you earn your reputation, Khârn? Who trained you to fight as though all foes were lumber to be chopped?’
Khârn lashed back with three cuts, as quick as his burning muscles would allow. Each one clanged as it was blocked and turned aside.
‘Lhorke,’ he said. ‘Legion Master of the War Hounds.’
Their blades locked again, and Khârn found himself glad of the moment’s respite. He tried to catch his breath, but Orfeo disengaged with a flourishing spin, launching immediately into another barrage of blows.
‘Lhorke is dead,’ Orfeo voxed from his helm’s grille. ‘Lhorke died on Jeracau.’
Khârn was backing up now, his footwork fumbling on the tide of corpses beneath his boots. How long had he been fighting? It could have been hours, and he’d believe any man that told him so.
‘You run from me, World Eater? The great Khârn, fleeing from a fight?’
The Nails replied before Khârn could. They stabbed into his skull, pulling at the nerves in his brain, sending electrical fire through the blood vessels. He screamed to vent pain, charging in to swing at the advancing Ultramarine. He cut high. Orfeo parried, and cleaved low.
Fresh agony danced a line down Khârn’s side, adding a second carving along the wound he’d taken earlier that day. With a grunt, he staggered in a halting spin, bringing his blades down in time to turn back a thrust that would have cored him from spine to belly.
A kic
k to Orfeo’s thigh forced the swordsman to stumble, but Khârn swore as he missed the sweet spot to break the knee. Nevertheless, he took what ease he could get, moving back and casting the defanged chainsword aside. In its absence, he clutched the power blade tighter.
‘I was never much of a swordsman.’ He tried to say it through a smile, showing no pain, but the Nails turned it into a rictus, pulling at one side of his mouth in quick twitches.
‘Brother,’ came two voices at once. Khârn dared a glance away from Orfeo.
Argel Tal drew close, wings folding, his spined and calcified armour creaking. Whatever beast lived inside his heart, it made itself known, warping the silver-faced helm to the visage of a flayed skull, then Khârn’s own features, then those of Argel Tal himself, giving him a death mask of his own features cast in silver.
More World Eaters closed in, jackal-packs of them, tilting their heads or watching in mute silence. Orfeo seemed not to notice.
‘Look around you, captain,’ Khârn said quietly, and with gentle respect.
Orfeo did, turning slowly, faced with an army of ragged, bloody XII legionaries standing knee-deep in the blue and white dead. Behind them, scarlet Word Bearers crouched among the corpses and brandished silver knives. Orfeo saw them digging through the fallen, chanting in Colchisian as they cast prophecies in entrails, or leashed war totems together from Ultramarines’ carcasses. Wounded survivors were already being dragged for crucifixion against XVII Legion tanks.
‘The war is over,’ said Argel Tal.
Orfeo turned back to the Legion commanders. ‘Do you say so?’
Argel Tal gestured to the lone champion. ‘I believe the scene speaks for itself.’
The Ultramarine nodded. ‘Then I accept your surrender,’ he said. The World Eaters shared a low laugh.
Orfeo wasn’t finished. ‘Tell me why you came to this world.’
‘To kill it,’ replied Khârn.
‘To make it suffer,’ Argel Tal amended. ‘To make the cries of Armatura’s population pierce the veil and enrich the warp. It is all part of a great chorus, playing out across your kingdom of Ultramar.’
Orfeo’s officer crest wavered as he shook his head. ‘Madness.’
‘To the ignorant,’ Argel Tal allowed. He spoke softly, never threatening, almost regretful. ‘But you will shortly see what lies on the Other Side. Your screams will add to the song, as your spirit boils away to oblivion in the Sea of Souls.’
‘Madness,’ Orfeo said again.
‘Your brothers spoke of courage,’ interrupted Khârn. ‘Courage and honour.’
‘And you speak of knowing no fear,’ Argel Tal added, his words blending with Khârn’s. ‘Yet Macraggian poetry has always felt foul on the tongue.’
Orfeo looked between the ragged form of Khârn and the vicious thing Argel Tal had become. He pulled his helm free, breathed in the choking reek of his burning world, and lifted his gladius for the last time. It hissed as Khârn’s blood baked on the live blade.
‘Enough talk, traitors. Come, learn the price of setting foot on the Five Hundred Worlds. Live or die, it will spare me from your preaching.’
Argel Tal stepped forwards, but Khârn warned him back.
‘Let me finish this.’
But nearby legionaries were shoved aside by a taller, bulkier figure approaching. The primarch was lacerated by a hundred wounds he did not feel.
‘No,’ Angron breathed through sticky teeth. ‘Let me.’
ELEVEN
The End of Armatura
Triarii
Homecoming
‘I will remember these screams until my dying day.’
The toneless quality of Argel Tal’s voices suggested neither disgust nor pleasure, but a perspective detached from both. If anything, he sounded weary.
The Word Bearer was himself again, the silver death-mask gone, his wings melted back into the ceramite of his armour. One moment he’d walked with Khârn through the dead and the dying in what his Legion whisperingly revered as his ‘divine form’. The next, Khârn had been walking alongside his brother as he knew him before Isstvan.
Just how and when the Change took hold of the Word Bearer was something Khârn couldn’t quite grasp. Sometimes it seemed slow, sometimes it happened in the span of a blink. Sometimes it was subtle, other times overt enough that there seemed little left of the warrior Khârn admired beneath the slavering thing in Argel Tal’s armour.
The Word Bearer removed his helm, closing his pale eyes for a moment and breathing in the taste of the charred air. It smelled of victory, but that was a laughable truth. Victory and defeat smelled the same – it never mattered which side’s tanks were burning and whose blood had flowed. Death still assaulted the same senses in the same ways.
The screaming continued unabated. Khârn had been the first to turn his back on their source, and to his surprise, Argel Tal had been the second. Now they walked together, taking the names of the slain, recording them for the necrologists.
‘Your men do worse,’ Khârn pointed out. He gestured as they made their way through the plaza, where the two Legions were dealing with the distasteful duty of finishing the fight. The World Eaters were mercy-killing any survivors among their fallen foes. The Word Bearers were dragging injured Ultramarines towards scarlet tanks and gunships, to be taken back into orbit and dealt with away from prying eyes. Arguments over the choicest wounded were breaking out between the warriors in white and those in red, but the presence of their commanders restored a semblance of discipline.
‘Worse is a matter of perspective,’ Argel Tal replied.
Captain Orfeo’s screams rose above the combined cries and moans of all the other Ultramarines currently being mutilated and sawn apart by XVII Legion knives.
Khârn looked over a gladius he’d acquired from amongst the dead. ‘Why does that one warrior’s agony distress you, given what your men are doing here? Why is it that his fate leaves you sneering?’
‘You will not like the answer, brother,’ said Argel Tal, recording the name of another fallen Word Bearer as he did. ‘Don’t make me speak it.’
‘Speak it, anyway. For the sake of the next time we’re chained together in the pits.’
‘Deal with him first.’ Argel Tal gestured to a fallen World Eater, clad in the colours of a sergeant. ‘Blood of the True, is that Gharte?’
Khârn moved to the corpse, atop a loose mound of three Ultramarines. Damn it. It was Gharte.
Khârn crouched by the body, lifting the sergeant’s head in his hands and gently turning the helm this way and that. He had no idea where his own helmet was. He’d been breathing in the gritty air for so long that, despite the genetic enhancements done to his respiration, Armatura’s taste was a smoky itch in the back of his throat.
‘Captain,’ the wounded warrior voxed. ‘I can’t move.’
Gharte had no legs below his mid-thighs – Khârn couldn’t begin to guess where they were in this sea of mangled corpses – and his chest was a ruin of violated breastbone and ceramite.
‘Bide,’ he said, lowering the warrior’s helm. ‘Kargos will come.’
The warrior gripped Khârn’s collar with weak fingers. ‘The Nails are aflame, even now.’ He coughed something wet into his helm. ‘How can that be? I’m dying, and they still sing? What do they want from me?’
‘Bide,’ Khârn said again, though he knew it was useless.
‘Just give me the Peace.’ The warrior sank back to the ground. ‘Seventy years of serving the Butcher and his Nails is long enough.’
Khârn wished he’d not heard those words. Discomfort danced its tingling way down his backbone.
‘You served well, Gharte.’ Khârn disengaged the seals at the warrior’s throat, lifting the helm clear. There wasn’t much left of the sergeant’s face. Something must have reflected in Khârn’s expression, for Gharte made his devas
tated face into something like a grin.
‘That bad, eh?’ he asked. His gurgling laughter became another cough.
Khârn’s reply was solemn obedience. He held the gladius above Gharte’s left eye, its point a finger’s breadth above the dilated pupil.
‘Any last words?’
‘Aye. Piss on Angron’s grave when he finally lies dead.’
Khârn wished he’d not heard those words, either.
He rammed the blade down, with the sound of dry twigs breaking beneath a boot, and the faintest clink of the point striking the stone under Gharte’s head.
He rose after it, hearing Argel Tal speaking to another of the fallen.
‘Greetings,’ the Word Bearer said, pressing a boot onto an Ultramarine’s chestplate. The warrior clawed useless scrapes against Argel Tal’s leg. ‘Even in death, you still fight. So defiant, Evocatus? You should have worn Dorn’s yellow.’
Khârn drew nearer. ‘I’ll end him.’
‘No.’
The World Eater shook his head at Argel Tal’s refusal. ‘How can you hold such a depth of hatred for this Legion? Their backs are broken. They suffer as the Ravens and Salamanders suffered on the killing fields. Isn’t that enough? Is your sore pride still not avenged?’
‘Hate them?’ Argel Tal looked up, confusion slowly giving way to humour. ‘That’s what you think? Why would I hate the Ultramarines, Khârn?’
‘Monarchia. Your humiliation, kneeling before Guilliman.’
Argel Tal’s eyes glittered in amusement. Khârn was less sure of his words with each passing second.
‘Do you hate the Wolves,’ Argel Tal asked, ‘for descending upon you?’
‘That’s different.’ The World Eater bared his teeth. ‘We weren’t humiliated. The Wolves didn’t win.’
‘No? I heard a different tale. I heard it was Russ who howled in triumph when dawn brought the Night of the Wolf to an end.’
Betrayer Page 17