‘And yet you swagger in front of us demanding that we prove ourselves your equals?’ Khrove went on, scattering from his hand a sizzling radiance that pierced Chengrel’s followers like quills. ‘It is no small satisfaction to me that I could not do so. What true heir to the primarchs would wish to lower themselves to equality with such as you?’
The obscenities that burst from Chengrel then were too foul and fast to comprehend, for his speakers could not keep pace with his rage. A streaking missile from Drachmus’s followers shattered his remaining cannon before it could fire. Chengrel’s vision swam with red and black as feedback from the hit lanced into him, but all his attention remained on the incandescent figure of Khrove in front of him. He fired his bolters again and again, and although many of the shells vanished in the sorcerer’s aura of flame, some had been warp-worked by Chengrel’s smiths and crashed home against the ancient blue armour. Chengrel’s roar as Khrove lurched back through the air was one of feral satisfaction.
While this melee blazed at the meeting-space a second contest, smaller but no less fierce, had begun on the road back to Chengrel’s palace. The two Iron Warriors Terminators were marching onwards with the soulstones when the auto-senses of the rearmost registered movement and heat in overgrown ruins that should have been empty. Straight away he lashed the ruins with double combi-bolter shots, beginning in an ancient Legiones Astartes suppression pattern, then abruptly switching to a semi-random drill designed to catch a target who might have learned the same fire pattern.
Walking backwards, gun still nosing the night, the Iron Warrior watched tracking overlays and hit readouts. They showed plumes of rock dust, splintered vegetation, a little cloud of atomised sap where a bolt had punched through the bole of a twisted tree. But both he and his armour systems knew, from bitter lessons begun on Isstvan, the look and sound of a bolt-shell hitting Space Marine war plate, and there had been no evidence of that.
Then a melta-blast slagged the plasteel-bound frame of the combi-bolter, and an eye-blink later the white-hot wreck of the weapon was blown apart by the shells still in the magazine. Startled but not frightened, the Iron Warrior shook weapon fragments off his gauntlet as his companion’s reaper cannon sent a salvo at the source of the blast. The two warriors had just enough time to close together before a quick-lunging figure raked a chainblade across the leader’s faceplate, precisely exploiting a weak spot in the Terminator suit’s range of movement that made it hard to twitch the head aside from an attack on that one vector. The Iron Warrior’s eye-lens was damaged and his vision jittery with feedback, but instinct took over. There were three ways an enemy could dodge after that lunge. Two were back to safety, but the third carried forwards and would allow a grab at the bag of stones on the way clear. Without looking he swept the bladed barrel of the reaper through that space and was rewarded with the sound of splintering armour and a cry of fury.
But now more Night Lords were joining the fray. The meltagunner shot a blast into the leader’s faceplate that destroyed several sensory inputs and overwhelmed the others for whole seconds. That was long enough for Hodir’s power knife to begin hacking at the arm whose gauntleted fist still held the bag.
A terse bark of battle-cant between the two Terminators communicated Hodir’s position, and the Night Lord realised how long he was taking, and what a mistake that was, when the muzzle of the reaper cannon clanked into the pit of his left arm. Even in the split second between contact and firing he was twisting away, presenting the Iron Warrior with a curved armour surface for the shells to carom off. But that could not save him completely and the triple shot spun him four metres away with an ugly crater in his armour.
The Iron Warrior holding the stones felt another blast of heat that failed to injure him, but damaged enough of the fine componentry in his arm that the limb locked stiff; from behind him came the crack and flare of a thunder hammer, and he heard the curse as his companion went down on one knee. He twisted so that the bag of stones would be carried away from the Night Lords on that side, but now pain sizzled in his fingertips and he snarled in frustration as he felt the bag being snatched away. Then there was only the two of them, part-crippled, firing a hail of shells into the dark where the Night Lords had vanished.
Hodir gave a liquid, agonised cough as his fractured rib-carapace ground and his lungs worked to expel the blood already half-clotted in them. But meanwhile his thoughts danced with what power he could purchase now that the prize was out of the clutches of the pompous Iron Warrior fool. Strange and avaricious dreams filled him, such as he had not remembered having before. These dreams, Hodir realised, did not even seem to be his own. The dance of his own thoughts was alien to him. At that moment his brother Night Lords let him drop to his knees on the ground.
Hodir looked around and saw that his band of reavers had stumbled to a halt. Some were readying weapons, but clumsily, with none of the fast and lethal cohesion born of so many thousands of battles. One or two of them were even making little jerking motions as though resisting some mad call to dance, gasping and crying into the vox.
With the ethereal song of Slaanesh trilling from his distended lips, Emmesh-Aiye sauntered into the group. His two slaves still trailed behind him, but behind them in turn came an extravagant parade cloaked in pastel light and scented steam. Hodir had faced their like before, but there was no preparation or readiness that could protect him from the savage ache of desire that flashed from his skull to his heels. He wanted to move with their beautiful rhythms, laugh like them, be like them, and these desires barely faltered when he saw them take the head of one of his warriors and drop it to the ground in a shower of blood and laughter.
But still, his pistol kicked and the creature who was reaching for the bag of stones shrieked and rippled. For a moment it was something whose features took all those strange desires and wrenched them back on themselves, and then it shrieked as Hodir’s power knife opened it from throat to belly. That damage was more than its will to stay corporeal could override, and the daemonette shivered into nothing.
The thing’s destruction managed a moment of ugly counterpoint to the blanket of hypnotic noise, and the Night Lords, whose minds had needed only the slightest opportunity, seized on the change and fought. Now suddenly the Slaaneshi cavalcade had to contend with resistance: curved claws and barb-tipped tongues clashed with blades, hammers, and desperate, point-blank bolter shots.
But Emmesh-Aiye would not be denied his prize. Shivering from the resonance of the sonic discharges in his bones, Hodir shivered anew as Emmesh-Aiye’s finger-quills slid into his arm. His hand went warm, then numb, and Emmesh-Aiye plucked the bag from his fingers. Hodir saw the ruby light from the stones kindle in the Slaaneshi’s own eyes, and then he brought his power knife up and jammed it into Emmesh-Aiye’s hip.
The man convulsed, the wounds in his pinned tongue opening into weeping holes, and his red-reflecting eyes stared into Hodir’s face for a moment. Then he backhanded the injured Night Lord to the ground and scampered lopsidedly away from the fight, doubled over the bag of stones he held to his belly with his slaves dragged along behind.
The mistrustful Chengrel had ordered his troops to prepare a killing-ground for his guests even before they had landed, and now his warriors prepared their positions at the landing-camps. These were Iron Warriors combat engineers, crafty and capable. They threw open carefully concealed foxholes and enfilades, and used scatter munitions to lay down instant fields of krak mines and webs of memory-wire strong enough to entangle even power-armoured legs. Shadow-quiet, they moved in amongst their new trenchworks, their fire-lanes already planned and directed, ready for master Chengrel’s fleeing guests.
But of course their enemies were Space Marines too. Each point the Iron Warriors had chosen to fortify had been anticipated by the Night Lords, and the first team found themselves dealing with ambushes of diabolical precision and cohesion. Newly opened foxholes were already trapped; Iron Warriors
simply vanished on the way to their positions; odd bursts of interference interrupted the vox-chatter no matter which band the Iron Warriors used, just enough to muddle their commands and make their attempts at organisation worse than useless.
The attempt to cut off Drachmus’s retreat did better, but when Drachmus left Chengrel and Khrove to one another’s mercies and struck out for his ship, he had more warriors with him. In time to his gargoyle’s recitation of the Spiral Catechism he marched towards his landing-camp with his bowl of burning ashes held high and his banner-bearer behind him. The Iron Warriors in his way almost laughed at the crude approach, but caught themselves; Drachmus was making himself so visible for a reason. They realised that reason barely in time to mount a fight against an expert Word Bearers pincer assault with Drachmus at its hinge.
On the far flank the Iron Warriors around Emmesh-Aiye’s battered little cutter was bogged down in a hellish firefight against the ship’s guards, Noise Marine artillerists who fought with percussive rumbles that could shake armour and bone apart, and shrieks to rupture flesh from cellular membranes on up. Into the middle of this came Emmesh-Aiye himself, his daemonic retinue left behind to finish the fight against Hodir’s elite, dancing through the Iron Warriors line. He chirruped laughter as one armoured figure after another fell to his warp-screams and the venom of his finger-quills, and when the last scrap of resistance was desperately falling back he could control himself no longer. He leapt and cut capers on the blasted ground, scoring his slaves’ skin with the spines and hooks of his breastplate, and leaving the welts and wounds slicked with the secretions of his tongue.
That was how Khrove found him. The sorcerer had fought Chengrel to a standstill; the warding and working of the tank, and the sheer brute force of the will driving it, had been enough to blunt most of the assaults Khrove had cared to throw, and the fury of Chengrel’s assaults did not allow him time to prepare deeper and more potent measures. Finally, Khrove had redirected one of his attack calculi through a false logical form, outflanking Chengrel’s wards and hitting home. The forelegs of Chengrel’s tank turned from metal to an elegant blue crystal that instantly shattered under the tank’s weight. As Chengrel howled his fury into the dirt, Khrove had turned his back without further ado.
He did not hail Emmesh-Aiye, or curse him either. Khrove had had enough of words, and so he threw his staff down like a javelin into a spot not far from where Emmesh-Aiye danced. Suddenly Emmesh-Aiye found that he was mired in something that seemed to be at once tarry liquid and clinging dust, and after a moment found that he had sunk from his ankles to his thighs. Seeing Khrove standing on his disc up above, he launched a savage witch-howl that might have stripped armour and flesh from the sorcerer’s body had he not dismissed it with a gesture.
Now Emmesh-Aiye was up to his waist and screaming with anger. He held the bag of soulstones up to keep it from becoming submerged and, like Hodir before him, felt it being plucked from his hand. What had taken it not even his senses could discern, but as he sank up to his chest he saw Khrove hang the stones from his belt.
Now, casting about desperately for leverage or footing, Emmesh-Aiye saw his slaves. Like him, they were trapped and sinking, but they had leaned together and put their heads on one another’s shoulders. Each careworn face now carried a small, sweet smile, for they had realised that soon they would finally be free of their misery, and would go into oblivion together.
That stung Emmesh-Aiye more than the loss of the stones. That he could not prevent his slave-twins from dying happy suddenly seemed the most profound of defeats, and he groaned and wept and tried to lunge at them as the ground finally took all three of them under. A moment later they were gone and Khrove looked about him.
Doubtless there were ambushes around his lander too, but they did not matter. Khrove had descended from his ship by more direct means, and the blocky, golden craft in his camp was nothing more than a diversion. Now it buckled and faded as Khrove dissolved the knots of force that bound it together.
The sun was starting to rise, and Khrove could see the great ring of fortifications take shape in the dawn. Here and there was a bark and twitch of motion as the last of the brawl among the Word Bearers, Iron Warriors and Night Lords played out. Emmesh-Aiye’s retinue were not to be seen, having tumbled back into their craft in a panic when they saw their master die, or melted back into the warp.
Khrove’s left hand dropped to the bag of soulstones at his belt, and his right extended. After a moment his staff flew up out of the ground and into his grip. There seemed no good reason to stay longer. The sorcerer murmured a word, followed it with another, and departed for his ship in a soft thunderclap of displaced air and a flowering burst of light.
In the time between the ravages of the final Waaagh! Ungskar and the beginning of the Greyblood Tribulations, Chengrel of the Iron Warriors built himself a fortress home upon Burjan’s World in the Mitre Gulf. He dwells there still, although his lordly demeanour is not quite what it was and many of his Iron Warriors have now departed from his service.
Chengrel has spent much time combing the ruins of Burjan’s World for another prize like the one that was stolen from him, for he is convinced that with it he can once again purchase power and allies. When he floats in a circle inside his tank-hulk so that his head nestles in the scraps of what was his body, he still broods on revenge; but now rather than revenge on the Golden Throne he plots it on the legionaries who came to visit him after that long-ago summons, and who betrayed him so bitterly and so foolishly.
Khrove of the Thousand Sons would be amused by that, should he ever learn of it. If he and master Chengrel should ever meet again, doubtless he will point the irony out.
The Carrion Anthem
by David Annandale
He was thinking bitter thoughts about glory. He couldn’t help it. As he took his seat in the governor’s private box overlooking the stage, Corvus Parthamen was surrounded by glory that was not his. The luxury of the box, a riot of crimson leather and velvet laced with gold and platinum thread, was a tribute, in the form of excess, to the honour of Governor Elpidius. That didn’t trouble Corvus. The box represented a soft, false glory, a renown that came with the title, not the deeds or the man. Then there was the stage, to which all sight lines led. It was a prone monolith, carved from a single massive obsidian slab. It was an altar on which one could sacrifice gods, but instead it abased itself beneath the feet of the artist. It was stone magnificence, and tonight it paid tribute to Corvus’s brother. That didn’t trouble Corvus, either. He didn’t understand what Gurges did, but he recognised that his twin did, at least, work for his laurels. Art was a form of deed, Corvus supposed.
What bothered him were the walls. Windowless, rising two hundred metres to meet in the distant vault of the ceiling, they were draped with immense tapestries. These were hand-woven tributes to Imperial victories. Kieldar. The Planus Steppes. Ichar IV. On and on and on. Warriors of legend, both ancient and contemporary, towered above Corvus. They were meant to inspire, to draw the eye as the spirit soared, moved by the majesty of the tribute paid by the music. The works of art in this monumental space – stone, image and sound – were supposed to entwine to the further glory of the Emperor and his legions.
But lately, the current of worship had reversed. Now the tapestry colossi, frozen in their moments of triumphant battle, were also bowing before the glory of Gurges, and that was wrong. That was what made Corvus dig his fingers in hard enough to mar the leather of his armrests.
The governor’s wife, Lady Ahala, turned to him, her multiple necklaces rattling together. ‘It’s nice to see you, colonel,’ she said. ‘You must be so proud.’
Proud of what? he wanted to say. Proud of his home world’s contributions to the Imperial crusades? That was a joke. Ligeta was a joke. Of the hundred tapestries here in the Performance Hall of the Imperial Palace of Culture, not one portrayed a Ligetan hero. Deep in the Segmentum Pacificus, far
from the front lines of any contest, Ligeta was untouched by war beyond the usual tithe of citizens bequeathed to the Imperial Guard. Many of its sons had fought and fallen on distant soil, but how many had distinguished themselves to the point that they might be remembered and celebrated? None.
Proud of what? Of his own war effort? That he commanded Ligeta’s defence regiment? That only made him part of the Ligetan joke. Officers who were posted back to their home worlds developed reputations, especially when those home worlds were pampered, decadent backwaters. The awful thing was that he couldn’t even ask himself what he’d done wrong. He knew the answer. Nothing. He’d done everything right. He’d made all the right friends, served under all the right officers, bowed and scraped in all the right places at all the right times. He had done his duty on the battlefield, too. No one could say otherwise. But there had been no desperate charges, no last-man-standing defences. The Ligetan regiments were called upon to maintain supply lines, garrison captured territory, and mop up the token resistance of those who were defeated but hadn’t quite come to terms with the fact. They were not summoned when the need was urgent.
The injustice made him seethe. He knew his worth, and that of his fellows. They fought and died with the best, when given the chance. Not every mop-up had been routine. Not every territory had been easily pacified. Ligetans knew how to fight, and they had plenty to prove.
Only no one ever saw. No one thought to look, because everyone knew Ligeta’s reputation. It was the planet of the dilettante and the artist. The planet of the song.
Proud of that?
Yes, that was exactly what Ahala meant. Proud of the music, proud of the song. Proud of Gurges. Ligeta’s civilian population rejoiced in the planet’s reputation. They saw no shame or weakness in it. They used the same logic as Corvus’s superiors, who thought they had rewarded his political loyalty by sending him home. Who wouldn’t want a pleasant command, far from the filth of a Chaos-infested hive-world? Who wouldn’t want to be near Gurges Parthamen, maker not of song, but of The Song?
Treacheries of the Space Marines Page 7