It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.
Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.
To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.
The Masters, Bidding
by Matthew Farrer
In the days between the third and final Waaagh! Ungskar and the wars that the Imperium was to name the Greyblood Tribulations, Chengrel of the Iron Warriors greeted four visitors in his fortress home among the wrecked worlds of the Mitre Gulf.
It was an outlandish procession that came from the landing craft which had touched down at his outer walls. Chengrel watched it with surly suspicion, for all that he had invited these visitors himself. The paths were lit up with the riotous clamour of the Emperor’s Children and the more regal but equally dazzling livery of the Thousand Sons. The Night Lords cloaked their armour and kept their silence, but the Word Bearers hoisted their banners proudly and lifted their voices in discordant songs of worship. Chengrel glowered at them all as they converged on the meeting-square he had built, exchanging taunts and boasts.
They had landed in a great ring of fortifications that Chengrel had erected on the world he had claimed, a place designed to flaunt his power. In a half-circle around the eastern walls he had built stone ziggurats capped with platforms for the landers, and broad fields in which his visitors could set their pavilions. In the centre of the ring were the ruins of an old Imperial settlement, and in these ruins was the meeting-square beneath a canopy of wiry and blighted trees, just large enough for Chengrel to confer with only his most distinguished guests. There was a surrounding wall and an arch for his guests to file through, and a stone platform upon which Chengrel himself could stand and address them.
Chengrel had made his own home out of a crashed orkish raider-ship, which had ploughed into the world’s surface during the fiercest fighting of the Waaagh! years before. He had hollowed out the great mound of hull, sunk pits into the rock beneath it, and filled the space with barracks, forges and batteries. The ramming-prow was rebuilt into a high-crowned gate and processional down which Chengrel could lead his warriors when he wished to hunt, or to go forth to war.
It was when Chengrel first picked over the wreck of this ship that he had found an unusual prize. In a net of fine diamond-fibre were a full dozen stones, fist-sized, gently curved almost like eggs, impossibly hard, so smooth they were almost slick to the touch, and such a deep and lustrous red that they almost seemed to burn. Chengrel knew full well what he had found, although not how they had come to be there. Had the eldar really allowed so many soulstones to fall into the hands of the orks? Or had the stones already been torn from their dead owners’ baubles that caught a greenskin’s eye when their original collector had become a trophy in their own turn? No matter. Although Chengrel himself had little direct use for the stones, he knew many others valued them as precious indeed, and so he sent out his heralds.
For four responses. That gnawed at his pride. Certainly, Chengrel had not expected every one of his summons to be answered. Some of his heralds had been unable to find their recipients amongst the churn of the Eye of Terror or along the perpetual trails of war that the Traitor Legions blazed. Others had returned with rebuffs, and some had not returned at all. But still, no more than four. Was there some plot afoot among the other Legions to defame him and isolate him? What enemies were moving against him?
So thinking, he went down from his fortress to greet his guests.
Master Chengrel was an Iron Warrior of old, who had earned his scars and his honours at the walls of the Imperial Palace during the last fearful days of the Horus Heresy. Millennia of fighting the Long War had taken its toll on his body, stripping the flesh and then breaking the steel which replaced it. Now Chengrel’s remains floated in a thick flesh-syrup within a great four-legged Dreadnought built to his personal design. His face, miraculously untouched by war but bloated and puffy like a baby’s, peered out at the world through a hemisphere of armoured glass built onto the hulk’s front, with eyes that writhed as though their sockets were packed with maggots.
What those eyes now saw was the four emissaries striding into the square, each seeking to outdo the others in the arrogance and power of their bearing. Chengrel had set out a half-circle of iron chairs for his guests, adorned with sullenly glowing gems and angular scrollwork, and now each wordlessly paid their respects to their host and took their seats.
On the far left sat Hodir of the Night Lords, dressed in worn and pitted battle armour over which he had thrown a cloak of shining black feathers. Every so often, luminous blue-white trails would crawl and sizzle from the cloak and worm their way over the surfaces of his warplate. At each hip was a braided leather rope to which the scalps of his enemies were fixed with wire, each rope trailing far behind him as he walked. As he sat he drew them in, coiling them about his feet and stroking the scalps as though they were pets.
To his right, second in the arc, was Emmesh-Aiye of the Emperor’s Children, a notorious reaver and architect of degeneracies. Emmesh-Aiye’s skin was pallid and wrinkled, the mark of the neural mites with which he had infested himself on some trackless death world to ensure the constant, agonising stimulation of his nerves. He was armoured in a breastplate of dazzlingly polished silver, studded all down its length with barbed hooks and metal burrs of exquisite fineness and elegance, and he wore his tongue stretched from his mouth, drawn down and pinned over these spikes, so that he could toss his head and relish the sensation of the tender meat being torn.
Third was the Word Bearer Drachmus, who placed in front of his seat a brass bowl of smouldering ash that was his personal talisman. This ash was made from the burning bones of Imperial Adeptus Astartes whom he had defeated but who refused to turn their loyalties to the Ruinous Powers he served; worked so that they would burn forever in the bowl and never be consumed. Atop the left pauldron of Drachmus’s ancient and dark red plate rode a tiny gargoyle whose belly was all bright clockwork and engines, but whose limbs and head were daemon-flesh. The creature grasped one of the great steel horns on his helm and whispered passages from the works of Lorgar in a tiny, scratching voice.
The fourth in the arc, sitting at Chengrel’s right, was Khrove of the Thousand Sons, who had arrived alone declaring himself the envoy
of the several sorcerer-lords to whom Chengrel had sent heralds. Khrove was dressed in the baroque custom of his Legion, his armour and cloak worked with lustrous blue and gold, adorned with a rich azure surcoat whose hem shimmered with all the colours the eye could describe and with the indescribable hues of the warp. In one arm he cradled a tall adamantine staff, inlaid with threads of psycho-reactive crystal and topped with a great darkened sapphire.
Chengrel’s head bobbed in its little curved window as he looked from one to the other, his displeasure unabated. He resolved to make it known from the first who was the master of masters here, and addressed the other legionaries with the following.
‘Resolve upon my words, my blood-cousins and fellow champions of the Legions! You attend here upon Chengrel, birthed a child of long-razed Olympia and wrought a blood-child of great Perturabo, mighty among all the primarchs! Named Iron Warrior in the Great Crusade of old and named Traitor when our Legion-fathers rose up to make an eternal corpse of the one who named himself Emperor, in punishment for his vanity and his faithlessness! Made outcast when our Legion was forced from the ramparts of Terra, and made master on unconquerable Medrengard when my warsmith saluted my prowess before Perturabo’s gates and in sight of my company!
‘It is I who claim this world and make this fortress of it, and I who recovered these caged souls before you,’ for the lustrous stones were set at Chengrel’s feet, flanked by two of Chengrel’s most trusted Terminator guard. ‘And although I shall dispose of these stones to whichever of you offers the greatest tribute in exchange, you must acquit yourselves in another way.’ The grate of his voice from his speakers mixed with the creak of metal and the hiss of pistons as his tank shifted on its stout legs.
‘I am no beast-thrall or petty hetman such as think themselves grand for raising up a rabble in the Eye of Terror or on some decaying colony world,’ he told them. ‘And I shall treat with none who are not my peers. For your bids you shall present not only your material offerings, but an accounting. You shall tell, on the honour of your Legions, of a feat of arms and generalship, showing yourself most deserving of this prize.
‘And consider now the evidence of my goodwill and favour, for before you begin your bids I shall furnish you with an account of myself, by which you shall know my power and my worth.’
In this way Chengrel of the Iron Warriors began his tale.
‘Accursed are the sons of Dorn, who call themselves the Imperial Fists! Accursed are the sons of Guilliman, who call themselves the Ultramarines!
‘Do you recall the face of Dorn? His vanity and his intransigence? His petulance? His worming sycophancy?
‘Do you recall the face of Guilliman? His arrogance and his presumption? His treachery? His cowardice?
‘What soothing balm it was to see those faces at the Iron Cage! Dorn’s cries in the trenches, Guilliman’s dismay when he saw what we had made of his weakling brother. These were memories I took care to harden against the passage of time and to return to over and again. By the day of my ascension to my own command, when I watched a cohort of Iron Warriors raise their fists above their heads and shout their loyalty to me, I knew my first endeavour would be to once again see the sign of the Fist and the sign of the Omega brought low together.
‘Heggoru! This was the world I chose for my purpose. Slow-boiling Heggoru with its shifting lands of slick, grey rock and the rich red cauldrons of its oceans under sulphur skies. I had passed close by there in Crusade – and you, any of you, did your fleets take you into the galactic south-west? No answer? No matter. At Heggoru, we heard, the Imperial Fists had celebrated the world’s compliance with a ring of great works around the polar coast. Towering hive-cities, thrusting high above the heat-haze of the land, linked one to the next with bullet-rails and laser nets that flickered in the cloudy dusks.
‘The Imperial Fists had crowned Heggoru, so they said, given it a regal coronet to celebrate its accession to our Human Imperium. We laughed to hear that, until we saw that Perturabo did not laugh, but looked at the picts through hooded eyes and then turned his back upon them. From then on we only spoke of “yellow-crowned Heggoru” in soft and bitter tones.
‘Much later, too long and strange a time of warp-faring for me to know the years, the name came to my ears again, as I roamed that tract of space brooding upon how best the Crusade’s work could be unworked again. The warp was thick with the babble of Imperial astropaths, and when my own seers plucked the connections between their minds we found the hailing codes of the Ultramarines, the strutting and preening heirs of the strutting and preening Guilliman. They boasted of an Ultramarine’s triumph, doubtless unearned. Bloodshed had come to Heggoru in the form of reaving xenos whose nests the Ultramarines had purged. What water-blooded things the Thirteenth have become, to boast of this as a mighty victory! But boast they did, and when I led my loyal Iron Warriors back to Heggoru their words still burned in my mind.
‘Their words burned, so we burned the cities to match them. We re-crowned Heggoru in the rich yellow of flame, not the spiritless yellow of the Seventh’s banners. We showed the defenders of the Dorn-built cities who was the more steeped in siegecraft. Our lance and battery strikes tore the atmosphere until it boiled, scrubbing whole flights of their attack craft out of the skies, forcing their defence silos to try to track us through superheated clouds and radiation static while we bombarded them with precision. Twenty days we jousted with their cannons from orbit, the sum of the numbers of Guilliman’s and Dorn’s Legions, and on the twenty-first we took to our landers to bring the little mortals their doom with our own hands.
‘I was not as you see me, not then. I strode to war in Terminator array, badged in adamantium and black and yellow. I rode with my assault pioneers in the first flight of storm-torpedoes, spearing through the skin of Roeghym Hive, whose voids had crumbled to us. The upper hive had been sloped to deflect just such an entry, layered and honeycombed to rob a storm-torp of its momentum and trap it in a maze of half-collapsed cells. But those we left behind in the Imperium are stupid, my brothers, and they forget. The defences had been quarried hollow, leached of their strength by complacent generations. Ah, the glorious clamour of a storm-torpedo’s passage into an enemy bastion! There are moments in a siege more satisfying, but few more exhilarating.
‘Once we were in among them they forgot any fortitude they had known, and fled from us. I had vowed that I would spend my shells only in true combat, and so instead slew with my power fist and the raking-spikes of my armour, painting my arm in blood to the shoulder. The blood and dust from our bombardment made a red-grey slurry on my fist, which stained the golden aquila from the temple spire when I crushed it in my claws.’
Chengrel’s head twitched and bobbed in its fluid as the memories of the slaughter excited him more and more.
‘What worth now, the pride of Dorn? Had he made something that could stand against us? He had not! Roeghym was our breach and into it we poured. The Emperor’s flocks were panic-blind, and only one of the neighbouring hives thought to destroy its bullet-rail links in time. To reward them, my artisans built blast-carriages that rode out along the rails faster than sound, wrecking themselves where the rails had been severed and flinging plasma charges into the flanks of Tolmea Hive. Along the other line to Behremvalt Hive went the hive’s own cars, wrapped in cunning armour fashioned by my metalworkers and warpsmiths, filled with warriors I had handpicked to present my greetings. Cold-armoured, cold-eyed siege teams, adept in crippling a hive’s vital systems or weakening its adamantium and carbon-foam bones. And, the fire to their frost, hot-blooded berserkers, brothers who had forsworn their loyalty to the Throne of Gold and pledged it to the Throne of Skulls.
‘No one who has not built a fortress can truly understand what it is to destroy one. A fortress falls the way a warrior falls, and every fortress’s death is unique. Every tine in Heggoru’s coronet died its own death.
‘Tolmea died like a warrior
before an enemy’s guns, its side caved by the plasma charges like a breastplate breached by a bolt-round. For two days it staggered in a death agony and sagged over the crater in its side as a man might double over a death-wound, and then the peak and shoulder fell in upon the foundations, crumpling in that obeisance to dying that we have all seen on the battlefield. The pall from the collapse still shrouded its ruin as we took our leave from Heggoru.
‘Behremvalt was stung by our troop trains like an unwitting scout stung by death world vermin. My warriors were the infection, the venom. The berserkers roared through its halls like a fever in the veins, wetting the toothed chains of their weapons so deeply that they may still drip with Behremvalt blood today. My own Iron Warriors were a subtler poison, stopping the organs and nerves: they crippled the power and data lines, the air and water purifiers, the climate controllers, and left Behremvalt’s corpse dark and still.
‘Massoga Hive perished like a trooper whose foot has kicked a mine. A seismic bombardment cracked its geothermal core and the shockwave of magma that burst up through its foundations toppled the hive, lit up the night and choked the sky. Dekachel Hive bled out, its populace streaming out onto the hot gravel of the wastelands as we wounded the upper levels. Kailenga Hive died a coward’s death, paralysed by the sight of true war, torn between trying to evacuate itself, fight or surrender. The indecision robbed it of sinew and made it prey for us. Dauphiel Hive, weakened the most by the xenos purging, died a death worthy of respect, the death of a wounded veteran who will not allow his wound to humble him.
‘It ended in madness, at Attegal Hive, with all the rest of Dorn’s coronet left behind us in ruin. My berserkers still rode their rage, as though their fury was a furnace and the endless bodies they scythed through just fuel to stoke it. Some had drowned so deep in bloodlust that they chased fleeing refugees away into the wastes and could not be recalled, but the rest put the sacking of Dauphiel at their backs and lunged across the wastes. When they exhausted the fuel in their own transports, they pillaged the refugee columns for trucks or gravel-crawlers; when they had burned out the engines of their new steeds, they tore them apart in pique and rushed on, on foot. They had run loose in bloody delirium through half of Attegal before we caught up and saw their handiwork.
Treacheries of the Space Marines Page 1