In the shadow of the great idol, a figure – a giant of a man – sits upon a throne of black metal and burnished gold, a cloak of snowtusk fur draped about the broad shoulders of his ensorcelled armour. His head is bare, the lines of a dozen duelling scars visible on a face that is an alabaster echo of the edifice staring down at everything taking place within the arena. So the Liberator himself gazes down upon the Oppressor and his retinue with invidious intent.
The Lord of Constantinium rises to his feet and a hush descends over the bloodthirsty throng without ever a word being spoken. Gha’gur Nor cannot help but be impressed.
The Liberator speaks then, his voice echoing from the shattered walls of the once-cathedral. ‘Who is it that comes seeking death and disgrace?’
The Dvar comes to a halt, his retinue forming up behind him, a wall of ceramite, steel and scrimshaw. His personal arms – the skull set within the star – displayed upon the banner-pole that rises from his own ornate armour, snaps in the wind that sends eddies of dust dancing across the amphitheatre. The cherub beats the air at Ghorgoth’s shoulder.
Gha’gur Nor feels the atmosphere palpably thicken about him. He has never heard a man, demi-god or otherwise, speak to the Packmaster like that and live a moment longer.
At a nod from the Dvar, the malformed, crow-winged servitor flies up to the balcony where the Liberator sits and clears its throat.
‘My lord’s name is spoken of in hushed whispers on a dozen worlds. At his behest war-fleets that rival those seen during the days of the Great Uprising strike out across the stars. Civilisations fall and worlds burn at his merest displeasure. He is the ravager of a hundred worlds, victor of a thousand battles. He is Dvar Ghorgoth the Oppressor, flayer of worlds and Packmaster of the Screaming Skulls.’
The Dvar thumbs the activation rune of his axe and with a shrill shriek the gore-stained fangs of tyranids and carnosaurs set within its adamantium links, eat up the air.
The proud words of the Dvar’s herald fade to wind-hushed echoes and are replaced by the hollow sound of clapping gauntleted hands.
‘Proud words,’ the giant in red-black and gold armour says. ‘But does Dvar Ghorgoth, also known as Oppressor and Packmaster, not know that a warrior is not judged here upon his rhetoric but by the strength of his sword-arm?’
‘Then I hereby issue my challenge!’ Ghorgoth roars, silencing his herald before the thing can even attempt a response. ‘I challenge you, Constantinus, sometimes called Liberator, sometimes Oathbreaker, to a duel.’
A gasp passes like a breeze through the gathered throng of cultists. Some call for the Dvar’s head whilst defending their lord’s reputation, calling down vituperative curses upon the Screaming Skulls.
‘Fight me, in single combat, if you dare!’
‘The question, Dvar,’ the giant in gold-chased power armour rumbles as he descends the steps from the balcony to the arena floor, one hand on the pommel of the sword sheathed in the ornately tooled scabbard hanging at his side, ‘is do you dare?’
Gha’gur Nor watches with intent interest as the giant strides across the ash and sand of the Place of Testing towards the Packmaster. He really is a giant; but it is not just his physical stature that makes him appear enormous. It is his bearing, the way he carries himself; the air of supreme self-confidence that hangs about him like his mantle of snowtusk fur.
‘But understand this, Oppressor,’ Constantinus the Liberator declares as he unsheathes his golden sword, the spectators within the coliseum hanging on every word of their lord’s proclamation. ‘To the victor, the spoils. The war-host of the other.’
Ghorgoth hefts the whirling chainaxe in both hands, revving the whirling teeth with a squeeze of a bone-encrusted gauntlet as he strides forth to meet his opponent.
‘His men, fighting machines, unholy relics, slaves, battleships and all worlds that are his dominion.’
‘Enough talk!’ the Packmaster roars. The duellists are almost upon each other. ‘Shut up and fight!’
‘So be it,’ the Liberator says, and Gha’gur Nor feels something he has not felt in a long time. He feels fear.
He cannot tear his eyes away. His fate, and that of the Screaming Skulls, rests upon the outcome of this one battle.
With that the two champions bring their weapons to bear, axe and sword clashing; the whirling teeth of one kicking sparks from the humming blade of the other.
Gen-hanced muscles bunch and tense, power armour servo-motors grind in protest. Face to face, eyes as hard as adamantium drill bits boring into the bone-ringed eye sockets of the Packmaster’s skull-helm, the Liberator makes one last utterance as battle is joined; ‘To the death! And pray that the denizens of the warp do not make too much of a meal of devouring your damned soul.’
The mass of humanity gathered before the broken steps of the Great Cathedral of Cirtus City, looks, to Brother Maimon’s mind, like a grotesque monster; some spawn of the outer darkness, one body with a thousand gurning faces. It is a beast that has grown fat and bloated and hideous, feeding, driven by its own greed, a hunger that has become insatiable.
The mob wants a change to the established order. The people want to take the place of those who were once their betters and who are now nothing more than burning bonfires of xenos-tainted flesh. The people want to rule where once they were ruled. They want power.
There is only one way to tame such a beast, that Brother Maimon knows of, and that is to break its spirit, to make it fear you. Respect takes time; it must be earned, and it can be a fickle beast too. Fear, however, is instantaneous. Fear is constant. Fear can be forever, if you want it to be.
The power-hungry crowd fills the plaza, the rioters gathered now within the precinct of the Great Cathedral. The city has burned at their hand. Thousands have died, innocent and guilty together, going to their deaths side by side.
Constantinus stands before the beast now. He is as still as a statue, the coldly impassive expression on his face as constant as if it were cast in steel as he regards the monster. The monster he made.
This world’s erstwhile rulers deserved to die. They had given themselves over body and soul to the other, the unclean, the unnatural; to the alien. The sergeant had acted swiftly, cutting off the head of that gene-stealing brood before the cult’s taint could become too deeply rooted within the general populace of Nova Terra. But that same populace had not seen with the same clarity of thought as the Sons of Guilliman had.
Enraged by the summary execution of their leaders perpetrated by Constantinus and his battle-brothers, the masses had risen up in revolt. The Space Marines had freed the ungrateful horde from corruption, alien rule and, ultimately the insatiable appetite of the Devourer of Worlds, only for the throng to turn on their saviours in their thousands.
Maimon knows that was the moment when everything had changed. Sons of Guilliman had died for this world, fighting to stem the alien tide in the Emperor’s name, and every single one of those Sons had been worth more than the entire numberless, treacherous horde put together.
It was said that there was one Space Marine to fight for each of the million worlds that made up the Imperium, to save mankind from the forces of the alien, heretics and the corrupting powers of the warp. It was also said that one Space Marine for each world is enough for the task in hand. Yet two dozen battle-brothers of the Fourth Company of the Sons of Guilliman have sacrificed themselves for this world, this Nova Terra, only for those who had remained behind to battle the tyranid threat – unremembered and unrewarded – to now have to suffer this final dishonour.
That had been the final disgrace, the final injurious slight that had pushed Sergeant Constantinus beyond the brink. It was more than any mortal man, or immortal Adeptus Astartes, should ever have to endure. If the scum of Cirtus city wanted rebellion, to see their world burn, Squad Constantinus would light the fire for them.
But the revolt that spawned the b
east, and the sergeant’s actions that followed, could only ever have led to one outcome. That was why Constantinus and his battle-brothers stand before the mob now, Sons of Guilliman no longer, ready to break the beast. The sergeant will demonstrate to the mob who is the mightier, who is possessed of the stronger will, who it is that will dominate whom.
There are those who had already sworn themselves to the sergeant, having seen what Constantinus and his brethren have wrought within the city sectors – Guardsmen who have seen their fellow soldiers die to save Nova Terra from the tyranids, looters, rioters, the dispossessed, former servants of the Ecclesiarchy, members of the Adeptus Arbites stationed on this world. They appreciate what the sergeant and his men have done, what they have been forced to do and why. They follow Constantinus now, and even go so far as to call him Liberator.
Those faithful to him are gathered about his feet, upon the broken steps of the cathedral, their weapons – guns, knives, and anything else they have been able to lay their hands on – displayed in a crude show of might. Behind Constantinus stands Maimon and his brothers, Pius and Hector, who came to this world with the sergeant and who have helped shape it beyond all recognition. They sweep the throng of humanity before them – the panting beast – with boltgun and flamer, armoured incarnations of war and wrath, vengeance and retribution.
Constantinus appears regal in his quartered power armour and snowtusk cloak. In his right hand he grips the ebon hilt of his power sword, the tip of the blade resting against the fractured rockcrete at his feet. For the time being he keeps his left hand behind his back, the trophy he hides there held just as tightly in its gauntleted grasp.
Then Constantinus speaks and the beast learns of the sacrifices its new master has made, how what they have lost cannot compare to what he has given up, in their name; how he has forsworn all he once held true and noble and honourable having seen the Imperial Truth for the lie it really is.
In his very next breath he decries the Emperor and his minions, Constantinus’s loyal brethren echoing his words like a mantra, Maimon feeling a part of himself die forever as he does so.
The crowd chant and cheer in response to the sergeant’s rhetoric. They are Sons of the false prophet Guilliman no longer, he tells the frenzied mob, for they have been betrayed by those they once called ‘brother’. He has gazed upon the true face of the false God-Emperor of Mankind, he tells them, and fathomed the true nature of the universe. He has torn down the false idols raised within the Great Cathedral, he and his fellow Iconoclasts, and just as he has freed his battle-brothers from the shackles of their misguided faith, so shall he liberate all the peoples of this forsaken world.
It is then, and only then, that he reveals his trophy, holding it high so that the gathered masses may see that what he has told them is the truth and nothing less.
Brother Maimon regards Antenor’s severed head with cold detachment. Antenor had been disloyal. He had paid the price for that disloyalty, and rightly so, as had the rest. For that was all Constantinus the Iconoclast, Constantinus the Liberator asked of any of them. All he desired was their devotion. Their trust. Their loyalty.
The city of Cirtus burns, its fine avenues awash with blood and thick with rioting mobs. In the outlying districts of the industrial quarter a firestorm consumes the templum-manufactories where certain cult elements made a futile last stand in a vain attempt to resist the wrath of the Emperor, meted out by his finest warriors in violent fashion.
The labyrinth of the mercantile district has been purged with bolter and flamer, and tactically detonated thermic charges. Every metre has been won in hard-fought battle, but now not a single hybrid or purestrain ’stealer remains alive.
The purging of Cirtus city has not been without its cost. Where ten quit Nova Terra’s volcanic plateau regions – having cleansed the basalt caverns that lie there with flamer, sword and boltgun – eight now reconvene within a shattered plaza in the skeletal charcoal shadows of the palaces of the nobility.
It was the city’s ruling aristocracy who were the first to face the full force of the Emperor’s divine retribution, for it was they who had broken faith with Him, giving themselves over to the xenos contagion. The taint riddled the families of the planet’s ruling classes. But, driven by their sergeant’s righteous fervour, Squad Constantinus had acted swiftly, hunting down the infected, rooting out the evil and eradicating any sign of the cult’s bloodline. Now they are dead, all of them, and the threat the insidious alien infection posed is no more.
That is where the purging of Cirtus city should have ended.
If only that had been the case, Brother Antenor thinks as Squad Constantinus reunites at the centre of the rubble-strewn plaza, the weapons in their hands still hot from the battles they have fought, befouled with blood and viscera and in serious need of holy cleansing and reconsecration.
Antenor, with Brother Cain at his side, climbs the slope of broken rubble on the northern side of the plaza. Brother Maimon enters from the east, via a shattered colonnade, Brother Hector sweeping the ruined alcoves with his flamer. Brothers Diomed and Palamedes join them, emerging from the shadows that have collected beneath a cracked Imperial eagle. It turns out the sergeant has been waiting for them all along, hidden in plain sight beneath an ornamental archway, its stuccoed plaster façade riddled with bullet holes. A bowed and bloodied Brother Pius skulks behind him.
Antenor hears the crackle of flames in the distance, as entire city sectors are consumed, along with the cries of looters and madmen running riot through the mercantile zones and once proud avenues of Cirtus city.
The eight stand together, reunited once more. But as the sergeant scrutinises his battle-brothers, Antenor feels uneasy – as if there has been a sudden drop in atmospheric pressure, or some unknowable sleeping psyker-sense is trying to pass on a warning, a traitorous thought worming its way into his subconscious and worrying at his surface thoughts. Antenor cannot help thinking that they have never been less united, as if their bonds of brotherhood have never been less certain. Less binding.
Using his free hand, the sergeant deactivates the mag-locks securing his helmet to the neck-ring of his power armour, removes it, and clamps it instead to his side. In the other, he still grips his power sword tightly.
Constantinus fixes each of them in turn then with his granite-hard gaze. But when the stare, as unrelenting as an orbital bombardment, lingers on him, Antenor sees something else in the sergeant’s eyes: a fire he has not seen before. The sergeant has always been possessed of an ardent righteousness, a proud desire to see that no wrong-doer goes unpunished, but this is something else. Antenor’s throat feels suddenly dry.
The sergeant’s blood is up, that is clear, but his spirit is no longer fired by a righteous desire to see the will of the Emperor done but by the hungry fires of untrammelled rage and thirsty blood-lust.
‘Well met, my Sons,’ the sergeant says, a cruel smile on his lips. His argent and azure quartered battle plate has become a uniform black and red, scorched by the fires he has marched through in order to see the city purged of those he has declared heretics, and doused in the blood and bodily fluids of the same, which even now steam from the energised blade of his active power sword. ‘How goes our campaign?’
‘It goes well, brother-sergeant,’ Brother Maimon replies, with rather too much gusto for Antenor’s liking. ‘These ungrateful heretic scum will not forget the toll their transgressions against us have exacted. Those that still live.’
‘Excellent, excellent. I myself have purged half a dozen city sectors with fire, bolter and sword, with Brother Pius at my side,’ the sergeant announces proudly.
‘Such is the price of treachery,’ exalts Pius, sounding like some pontiff quoting scripture from his mobile pulpit.
‘And what of the rest of you? What do you have to report, Brother Antenor? Brother Palamedes? How goes your holy work?’
‘It grieves me to hear
you call what we have done here holy work, brother-sergeant,’ Antenor says with a heavy heart, knowing that such words, once said, can never be unspoken.
‘How so?’ Constantinus’s voice is a guttural growl, the sound made by a cornered carnodon or an angry grox.
‘Because what you have decreed is against all the teachings of the holy Codex and flies in the face of the oaths we swore when we became Sons of Guilliman.’
‘We all swore oaths of moment when we first arrived on this Emperor-forsaken world,’ Constantinus declares, his own words coming louder now, and venom-edged, ‘and that moment lasted for three long years. I swore to liberate this world from the grip of the Great Devourer, as did you, Brother Antenor, as did we all. Have you forgotten that?’
‘No, brother-sergeant, I have not forgotten, and thanks to our tireless upholding of those oaths the tyranid menace has been expunged from Nova Terra.’
‘Yes, but only to be replaced by the taint of heresy!’ Constantinus roars. ‘The people of this world are no better than the worms that even now feast upon the flesh of our dead brethren, noble Sons like Brother Ignatius and Brother Lucian. These whoreson wretches have no appreciation of who has saved them from a fate beyond damnation. We are the guardians of mankind and yet mankind does not deserve us. The people of Nova Terra owe us a debt that can never be repaid. But worse than that, we free them from the threat of alien tyranny and they rebel. So it is up to us to educate them, so that they understand fully the error of their ways.’
‘We are done here, Constantinus. The cult is vanquished, the last of the tyranid broods eradicated. We should leave Nova Terra and set out upon a penitent crusade, in acknowledgement of our own transgressions, and seek the Emperor’s absolution for the crimes we have committed here in His name.’
‘Absolution? I am absolved every time I bathe in the blood of heretics and traitors,’ the sergeant snarls, not once breaking eye contact with Brother Antenor.
Treacheries of the Space Marines Page 11