He dragged in another breath. ‘Next.’ The challenge was almost a wheeze.
Kargos stepped forwards. ‘Sanguis extremis,’ he said. ‘To the death.’
Delvarus narrowed his eyes, giving a snarl that wouldn’t have been out of place rolling from the throat of an Ancient Terran tyger, or Fenrisian wolf.
‘So eager,’ he breathed, ‘to die, Apothecary?’
Kargos gave a crooked, nasty smirk and held out his hand towards Skane. The sergeant handed him a power sword without a word.
Their weapons came alive in the same moment: Kargos’s borrowed blade and the spiked flail-head crackling with opposing power fields. Neither warrior went to parry. Neither did anything beyond trying kill strike after kill strike, weaving aside when death came too close for comfort.
Desperation gave strength to Delvarus’s sore muscles, but it couldn’t give him the agility he possessed while fresh. Kargos’s first blow came after the first minute, cutting a shallow line of sizzling flesh down the Triarii’s cheek. Delvarus’s face twitched as his Nails pulsed and he launched back at the Apothecary.
He scored the next hit, his flail’s head catching Kargos on the jaw. The barest scratch, too weak to even flare the power field, but it painted blood over Kargos’s pale skin and left his gums bleeding. That was enough to bring Delvarus’s smile back.
He was wise to Kargos’s games. He flinched aside when the Apothecary spat bloody saliva in reply, ready for the oldest of tricks that earned Kargos his pit-fighting name.
‘A filthy habit,’ Delvarus grinned. His return blow lashed through the air with a whine of energised metal, pulled back before it could crash into the deck and wedge in the iron.
Kargos’s reply came with another smile, this one with blood-reddened teeth. ‘You look tired,’ he said.
Delvarus sprayed spit as he roared in reply.
Above them, Vorias narrowed his eyes in thought. ‘Did you feel that?’ he asked softly.
Esca nodded. He’d felt something change in the air, a tightening of the atmosphere around the circle as Delvarus’s implants ramped up. The Triarii’s blows were wilder, heavier, accompanied by grunts and snarls.
‘Six seconds,’ Vorias said in the same quiet voice. ‘Maybe eight.’
It was six. Kargos parried for the first time, cleaving through the meteor hammer’s chain in one chop. The deactivated flail head crashed into the closest World Eaters observer, raking across his bare chest.
At the mercy of his implants, Delvarus reached for Kargos with his bare hands, only to find the point of the Apothecary’s blade at his throat. Even with the Nails stealing the edge from his reason, the threat of imminent death penetrated to his hind-brain instincts, forcing him to hesitate. The silence was louder than the cheering had ever been.
‘Finish it, Bloodspitter.’ Saliva trailed in a thick string down the Triarii’s chin. ‘You’ve proven your point. All of you have. So finish it.’
Kargos kept the blade against Delvarus’s throat. ‘The other Legions have primarchs that lead them to glory. They have homeworlds to honour and cultural legacies to live by. We have scraps of stolen tradition and the trust between brothers. That’s all. Brotherhood, captain. A brotherhood you broke when you abandoned your duty and lied to your sworn kindred.’
Delvarus was clearly fighting the Nails, forcing his twitching fingers into fists to maintain a semblance of control. The sword’s tip blackened his throat where it touched and scorched the flesh.
‘I recognise my failing–’ he growled the words ‘–and will be sure to correct it.’
Quoting the traditional apology of the VI Legion earned a guttural tide of chuckles. Even Kargos smiled, and this time without the shadow of malice that had backlit every one of his expressions thus far. The Apothecary stared hard into the Triarii’s eyes.
‘Are you my brother, Delvarus?’
The Triarii exhaled, tilting his head back to bare his throat for the final thrust. ‘I am. And I’ll die as your brother. Finish it.’
Kargos deactivated the blade. He lowered it, and tossed it back to Skane at the circle’s edge.
Delvarus stared, wide-eyed, the Nails sparking in his brain. ‘Sanguis extremis,’ he said. ‘To the death. To the death.’
‘We’ve all broken traditions in our time,’ said Kargos. ‘You’re one of our best, Delvarus. Remember that. Remind us why we’ve spent so many years thinking it.’
The dark-skinned warrior met the eyes of his surrounding brothers. ‘You all stand by his words? Any who would make a liar of Kargos step forwards now.’ He spread his arms wide. ‘Plunge a blade through my breast. I will stand here and let you.’
No one came forwards. A few warriors smiled, others nodded in a respect that passed for forgiveness.
‘I sense Khârn’s hand in this,’ Delvarus said to Kargos. ‘It smells like his wisdom, carried out by other hands.’ That earned more quiet laughter; no longer was it the sound of mockery.
‘I couldn’t possibly comment,’ the Apothecary replied.
Above the dispersing confrontation, Esca finally turned to Vorias. ‘They still have nobility in them. The Nails haven’t bled them dry.’
The Lectio Primus nodded. ‘Yet.’
As both Librarians turned away and left their brothers to the comfort of comradeship, Vorias spoke without looking into his protégé’s eyes.
‘Legion Master Lhorke came to me earlier today. He believes the primarch stands on the precipice, and a reckoning is long overdue.’
Esca didn’t answer at once. ‘That almost sounds like a threat,’ he said at last.
‘Yes,’ Vorias agreed. His scholarly face was cadaverous away from the hangar deck lighting, now a mask of pale angles and worn lines. ‘It does, doesn’t it?’
SIXTEEN
Regenesis
Blessed Lady
Vakrah Jal
Khârn expected chanting, candles and all the cringeworthy trappings of superstition. In this, he was not disappointed.
Erebus maintained personal quarters aboard the Fidelitas Lex, despite commanding his own warship, Destiny’s Hand. It was here that he brought Argel Tal and Khârn, and it was here that he prepared to commit blasphemy against the natural order.
Khârn knew little of Erebus beyond what Argel Tal had told him, and his Word Bearers brother was the kind of soul who disliked speaking ill of anyone without sincere and inviolate reasons to do so. Argel Tal would face down someone he despised and threaten to pull them apart, but he consistently refused to spread foul word about any other warrior once their backs were turned. ‘Defamation,’ he always claimed, ‘is for cowards and insecure children.’
Still, Argel Tal’s dislike for Erebus had come up more than once in conversation over the last year since Isstvan V, when Khârn and the Gal Vorbak warrior had renewed their acquaintance as respective subcommanders of their Legions’ forces, in readiness for the Shadow Crusade.
To Khârn’s thinking, the name Erebus chose for his battle-barge perfectly summed up the First Chaplain’s attitudes towards fate and his place in shaping it. Destiny’s Hand. Such arrogance. Such ardent, seething hubris.
Such an attitude led to… Well, it led to this.
Erebus had gathered a coven of slaves in his quarters, seventeen of them in all, each one chained by the throat to the central altar. The oldest was a crone who would never see eighty again. The youngest was a boy who couldn’t be long into double figures. Quite how they managed to chant from their parchments while breathing in the stench of the Blessed Lady’s bones was beyond Khârn. He’d seen unaugmented humans vomit at much less provocation, yet these murmuring worthies stared with dead eyes into the parchments clutched loosely in their dirt-stained hands. They chanted, but he wasn’t sure they were even reading.
Candles lined the chamber’s iron walls, each one marked with a meticulously etched Colchi
sian rune in its red wax. Shrieking angels and serene gargoyles formed of the same metal as the walls looked down from their perches sculpted into the ceiling. Several of the statues were reaching in motionless need, warped hands striving to touch the room’s inhabitants – perhaps to bestow a blessing, perhaps to mutilate them on devilry’s whim.
Most legionaries kept their arming chambers as places of meditation and training, filled with mementos of victories stored alongside their personal armouries. Erebus had made his haven into a heathen temple. The altar was a central table of filigreed black steel, complete with manacles for reasons Khârn didn’t care to know but had no trouble imagining. Blood channels were cut into the table’s surface: deep grooves that would funnel gore and whatever else into a shallow bronze bowl beneath the altar.
‘What’s the bowl for?’ he’d asked upon entering.
‘Scrying,’ Erebus had answered. ‘Now be silent and show some respect.’
Khârn had complied with the former. He wasn’t certain he could convincingly feign the latter.
Argel Tal remained at Khârn’s side, arms crossed over his breastplate. If his features were brightened by hope or darkened by distrust, his helm blocked all insight. Crystal blue eye lenses fixed on Erebus and the mouldering, disconnected bones resting on the burial shroud. The Word Bearer watched everything and revealed nothing.
‘Brother.’ Khârn spoke softly, so as not to interrupt the vileness taking place before him. He could hear drumming on the deck above, and weeping from another chamber nearby. A plague on this wretched vessel; this ship of the faithful damned.
Argel Tal turned with a low thrum of active armour joints. His twin voices were pitched low, leaving his human voice almost as soft as the daemon’s whisper.
‘What?’
Khârn inclined his crested helm to the chanting beggars. ‘Will they survive this ritual?’ he asked, his tone edged.
The Word Bearer looked back to the muttering choir. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know or you don’t care?’
‘I don’t care,’ Argel Tal admitted.
‘You’d kill them to save her soul?’ Even knowing it was too late, Khârn wouldn’t back down. ‘Is that who you are?’
Argel Tal breathed out a rueful sigh. ‘It might be. I don’t yet know. I’m willing to become it, to bring her back.’
The World Eater gestured to the chanting mortals. Chains rattled on his bracers as he swept his arm to encompass them all.
‘This is how it begins,’ Khârn said. ‘This is how the coldness you so despise in Erebus first takes root in you.’
Argel Tal shook his head. ‘Don’t act as if this is new to either of us; as though neither of us has butchered hundreds of innocents, young and old, with our own hands. This isn’t a game of selective morality, Khârn. We slaughter the innocent and guilty alike, whether they hold lasguns, bolters, or cower in their homes holding only each other.’
‘I was Lost each time I killed civilians.’ Khârn gritted his teeth. ‘Lost to the Nails.’
‘You can lie to yourself and your Legion – but not to me, brother. Even if you were “Lost”, does that excuse what you have done? Does it make everything better? As you tore those men, women and children apart, did any of their screams even once turn to understanding smiles? Did they reach up during their own massacres to give your their blessings, forgiving you for the fact you can’t control your own rage?’
Argel Tal looked back to the preparations as he continued. ‘We are the Legiones Astartes. We choose who lives and who dies in this galaxy. It is the way of things.’
‘This is murder,’ said Khârn. ‘Not war. Murder.’
‘Just because we are soldiers in a warzone, it is no less murder if we slaughter unarmed civilians. The context is irrelevant. But I will not argue with you.’ He nodded towards the remains on the altar. ‘Her life is worth a thousand others. These are… humanity’s dregs, but they are not here completely involuntarily. Look at them. You’d not think twice about breaking their skulls open if they were in your way. The only reason you’re roused to disgust now is because this heathen ritual makes your skin crawl.’
Khârn had no reply. His brother knew him too well.
‘It makes mine crawl, as well,’ Argel Tal confessed. ‘How many times have I told you I wished this Truth wasn’t true? But it is, Khârn. It is true – the Truth – and we face it. We will not live a lie.’
Despite their surroundings, Khârn felt himself at risk of smiling. ‘You sermonise well, brother. You should give more speeches to the Seventeenth.’
Argel Tal shuddered, his gaze never leaving the mouldering bones. ‘I’m no preacher.’
Khârn fell silent. One minute he’d tell himself he would interrupt the rite by drawing his chainblade and threatening Erebus’s life. The next he’d confess to a curiosity of his own, fierce even in the face of the distant drums and the chanting that pressed against his senses like an unwelcome smell.
As for the Blessed Lady herself, she was a year on the wrong side of the grave. With no real experience in how religious cultures preserved the remains of their ‘saints’ as relics, Khârn had expected her bones to be bleached and polished, or for her wounded body to be preserved in stasis at the moment of her death.
The reality was altogether more macabre. Full decay hadn’t yet left her entirely fleshless – her initial interment in the mausoleum’s hermetically-sealed casket had protected her at least a little – but it was clear that the worshippers who stole her body had been praying to a decomposing corpse for almost a year. All that remained of the XVII Legion’s Confessor of the Word was a ragged skeleton, with a touch of ripped-parchment skin and rotted grey-green strings of tendon clinging to her joints. Her eyeless, jawless skull stared blindly at the gargoyles carved into the left wall. Skinless hands were nothing more than fragments of bone scattered on the black shroud. The last bits of organic matter she possessed gave off a cloying, musty reek as they broke down through the slow, slow process of inevitability. It was the befouled burial shroud that gave off the stench more than the pathetic remnants of her corpse.
Khârn knew Argel Tal as well as the Word Bearer knew him. Several long compliances and joint campaigns during the Great Crusade had seen to that, and respect had quickly grown between them. Khârn knew full well the nature of the repentant symbolism that his brother so often felt was necessary, and he could all too easily see Argel Tal wearing that burial shroud as a ceremonial cloak, whether this madness worked or not. Khârn resolved to put a stop to that, one way or the other. There was symbolism, and then there was morbid obsession. The Word Bearers – even the saner ones – often seemed to struggle telling the two apart.
‘What of the Geller field?’ he asked. With the Lex in the warp, its protective shielding guarded the hull against the touch of the Neverborn thrashing through the Sea of Souls.
‘Geller fields ward metal and flesh,’ Argel Tal replied. ‘Nothing can fully ward the human soul.’
The breeze came from nowhere. Just gently at first, tugging at the parchments bound to Erebus’s and Argel Tal’s armour; curling the edges of the scrolls held in the slaves’ hands. The temperature gauge on Khârn’s retinal display flickered, telling him it was too cold in the chamber to sustain human life, then scrambling with static a second time and reporting that it was hotter than the surface of a weak sun.
‘What are they chanting?’ Khârn asked. He spoke Colchisian close to fluently, yet struggled to make out a single word leaving the slaves’ lips.
Argel Tal’s answer was several seconds in coming. ‘Names,’ he said in Raum’s slithering voice. ‘Thousands of names.’
Khârn’s Nails gave an irritated tick-tick pulse, sending pain dancing down his spinal column. ‘What names?’
‘The names of Neverborn,’ Raum replied, his tone in the velvet border between caution and unease. ‘
Daemon-names, rendered crudely by human tongues. Erebus is drawing their eyes to him, asking the denizens of the warp if they have seen Cyrene’s soul.’
‘Seen it?’
‘Captured it. Immolated it. Flayed it. Flensed it. Devoured it.’
Khârn grunted, watching as the wind from nowhere clawed at the slaves’ rags. The candles cast cavorting shadows of long-limbed things that weren’t present in the chamber. The drums grew louder – the ship’s own heartbeat pounding against the walls.
He was reaching for his weapon, whether the gesture was futile or not, when the first of the murmuring choir died.
The woman, clad in beggar’s robes, tore the parchment in her hands, crying out as she ran towards Khârn. Revelation was a sick sunrise behind her eyes.
‘Betrayer!’ she screamed. ‘Khârn the betrayer! Khârn the betrayer!’ The chain leash around her throat pulled tight when she reached the end of its slack – the sound of a splitting tree trunk cut right through the drumbeat – and the woman tumbled to the ground, her neck snapped.
Khârn’s skin prickled beneath his armour. Argel Tal – or was it Raum? – turned to regard him. Liquid mercury coalesced and clashed in the Word Bearer’s eye lenses. Neither warrior said a word. The drums intensified, furious now, mimicking a dozen hearts beating in opposition.
Across the chamber, Erebus watched the bones and only the bones. Khârn saw the Chaplain’s mouth moving, but he read from no parchment or tome. Whatever he whispered, he did so from inspiration or memory.
A dishevelled man was next. He cried out in ugly, staccato shrieks as he smashed his face repeatedly into the altar, spattering the Blessed Lady’s thigh bones with dark cranial blood and brain matter. It took him eleven impacts to kill himself; on the last, he slumped to the deck, twitching.
Khârn felt fingers scraping and scratching faintly at his armour. Uncertain target locks kept trying to track half-formed shapes of things that weren’t really there.
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