Sons of Corax

by George Mann

  Nevertheless, Daed would fight on until the bitter end, clinging to those benighted worlds until the very last of them had fallen. Such was the duty of a Space Marine. Such was the honour of a Brazen Minotaur.

  For now though, Daed had other priorities to attend to; the means, perhaps, by which to turn the tide of the war. At the very least, the means by which he could offer his brothers a fighting chance, a reason to hope. Somewhere on Kasharat was the key to their salvation.

  If only he could find it.

  Daed sat rigid in his webbing as the Thunderhawk banked, its engines howling as it dipped beneath the cover of the dark, viscous clouds. The planet’s atmosphere was thick with the aura of death, a haze of green mist that cloaked the mortuary world to form a near-impenetrable shroud. The Thunderhawk sighed as its airbrakes dragged at the putrid fog, churning great funnels in its wake. It slewed around, searching for a place to set down, its search lamps penetrating the eerie gloom. It drifted along a corridor of marble spires, dipping and banking to avoid the structures that loomed out of the foetid haze, and then moments later the pilot was easing it down between two massive obelisks, its landing gear sinking into the soft loam. The engines wheezed for a moment longer, and then were still.

  If the arrival of the Thunderhawk had been noticed by anyone on the planet’s surface, it went unremarked. There was no chatter of autocannons, no bark of plasma guns. Either the traitors were unaware of Daed’s arrival, or they were unconcerned. The latter thought didn’t offer Daed much comfort as he pulled himself free of the webbing, glancing from side to side to see his battle-brothers doing the same.

  A few seconds later the vessel’s hatch slid open and Captain Daed of the Brazen Minotaurs Third Company stood framed in the doorway, a gleaming silhouette against the stark light spilling out from within. He was tall, even for a Space Marine, encased in shimmering golden power armour. His shoulders were draped with the pelt of one of the hulking black lions that roamed the forests of Tauron, his home world, and his left pauldron bore the blue-on-white bull’s-head insignia of his chapter. In his fist he carried a slender power axe, its head finely etched with Tauronic traceries and runes.

  Daed’s neck was thick with ropey muscles and his face was craggy and tanned, pitted with innumerable scars, as if he wore his centuries of service to the Emperor like tally marks on his flesh.

  He stood for a moment, sucking at the foul air, his nose wrinkling in distaste. His eyes narrowed as he surveyed the eerie landscape around them. ‘There’s nothing but death here, Bardus,’ he said, his voice a low growl.

  In response, another figure appeared in the hatchway behind him. He wore the same shining golden armour as his captain, but his lower face was swathed in a long plaited beard and he carried a bolter in his right hand.

  ‘The stench of the traitor,’ Bardus replied, and Daed could hear the disgust in his tone. ‘Their very presence is enough to choke the life out of a world.’

  ‘True enough, brother,’ said Daed, hefting his axe. ‘But remember – we are not here to reclaim Kasharat from the traitors, much as the notion galls me. We are here to retrieve what they have taken from us, so that we may use it against them. We must look to the war and not to the battle. This mortuary world will be of little use to either side in the conflict ahead.’

  ‘Aye, but it makes for a damn good hiding place,’ muttered Bardus, peering out through the open hatch. He raised his bolter as he spoke, as if he expected something diabolical to come lurching out of the fog at any moment. Daed could hardly blame him for that – it wasn’t as if it hadn’t happened before. They had been caught unawares any number of times in the last few months during their extended campaign against the Death Guard. There were things in the fog, half-dead creatures that didn’t even register life signs on their auspexes, cursed monsters that had once been men but were now nothing but shambling, diseased carcasses, unholy plague spawn created only to spread the festering curse of Chaos ever further, or to soak up fire on the field of battle. Even these had proved difficult to despatch in such incessant numbers. The Death Guard had infected the populations of entire worlds as they had cut a swath through the Sargassion Reach; now they were goading the fallen into battle in their multitudes.

  The damned smog gave the enemy a great advantage – that and the fact they seemed able to survive wounds that would have felled a normal Space Marine, shrugging off bolter fire and blows from Daed’s power axe as if they had barely been scratched.

  ‘You stand there talking like tacticians!’ bellowed Brother Targus from behind them, laughing as he hefted his heavy bolter onto his shoulder. ‘I hunger for the opportunity to put some more of those plague-ridden traitors out of their misery.’

  Daed grinned. He could understand that impulse, the desire to smite the wretches where they stood. He relished the idea as much as Targus himself – burned, in fact, with the need to bring the Emperor’s justice to bear on their corrupt souls.

  ‘I assure you, Targus, there will be time enough for us all to blunt our axes in the stinking corpses of our enemies. I wish for nothing more myself. But first, we have a job to do.’

  Daed turned and strode down the disembarkation ramp, his footsteps strangely muffled by the thick, diseased air. Glancing up, he could make out only the spear-like tips of mortuary structures silhouetted against the sky, and the dull orbs of the twin moons that circled Kasharat in their stately, perpetual dance. Around him, there was nothing but an impenetrable bank of putrid fog. Yet even before it was infested with the plague, Daed mused, there would have been a grim, funereal air about the place.

  He stood for a moment as the others clambered out of the hatch, coming to join him, their boots sinking in the sticky loam.

  ‘Engage your respirators,’ he said, fixing his own mouthpiece into place and activating his vox link. ‘Keep this foul air from settling in your lungs.’ He glanced around at his assembled squad as they followed his lead, each of them fixing their helms to their gorgets with a series of hissing, pneumatic sighs, then gestured to one of them. ‘Bast, check your auspex for signs of life.’

  Bast unclipped the scanning device from his belt and studied the readout. ‘Nothing, Captain.’ He turned it so that Daed could see the display. ‘It’s this fog – it smothers everything. I can’t get a reading. It’s as if the mist itself were alive.’

  ‘Widen the spectrum. Look for anything at all.’

  ‘Captain…’ started another of the squad, Brother Throle, but Daed silenced his objections with a wave of his hand.

  The auspex chirped momentarily before going silent again. ‘Bast?’

  ‘It’s intermittent, captain, but there’s something there. A beacon…’ Bast turned and the auspex emitted another dull electronic bleep. ‘That way.’ He pointed to indicate the direction from which he had registered the distress signal.

  ‘It’s most likely a trap,’ muttered Targus, moving around to stand before Daed. ‘They may be traitors but they’re not fools. They know we’re here.’

  Daed set his jaw. He fixed Targus with a resolute stare. ‘Throle?’ he called over his shoulder.

  ‘Aye, captain?’

  ‘Move out.’

  Daed watched Targus as he fell into formation behind the others, the enormous bulk of the heavy bolter balanced on his right pauldron. He understood his brother’s reluctance. They probably were walking into a trap, but there were no other options. They had a mission to complete, and they were Brazen Minotaurs. They would face whatever the enemy put before them with unflinching determination, and they would do it in the name of the Emperor. That, or they would die trying.

  Daed hefted his power axe and unholstered his bolt pistol, falling into line behind the others.

  KORYN

  They moved silently, as if they had surrendered their corporeal forms to become spirits or wraiths, as if the very shadows themselves were living things that shifted and
breathed – shadows that wore black ceramite armour and harboured vicious adamantium claws. Shadows that were trained to kill.

  Ravens.

  Shadow Captain Koryn of the Raven Guard flexed his neck and shoulders to dispel the tension. He sensed more than saw his brothers – Argis, Grayvus, Syrus and Coraan – as the five of them crept through the narrow tunnels of the maze-like mortuary complex, surrounded by the remnants of the dead. Dour faces hewn from soapstone and marble loomed out at him from all sides in the gloaming, their blank eyes watching impassively from across the centuries. Ornate tombs, stone coffins and the skeletal remains of old politicians and administrators – some of them still wearing their now-faded finery – lined the walls, embedded in roughly chiselled niches like insects in a hive.

  It had once been a sacred place, a place to honour the dead in the name of the Emperor. Now, though, the blight of Chaos had infected the planet, and even here, in the bowels of this ancient mortuary complex, the evidence of corruption was all around them.

  Foul mist clung to the air, turning everything a pale, putrid green. The walls were slick with ochre slime that seemed to quiver and move with the perturbations caused by their passing. Worse of all was the stench, the rotten reek of death and decay that pervaded everything, threatening to overwhelm even Koryn’s hardened senses.

  He didn’t know what had brought the Death Guard to Kasharat, a mortuary world on the outer rim of the Imperium. Their reasons were opaque. It may simply have been a symptom of their inexorable drive to spread their foul plague – that burning, zealous desire to infect world after world with their sickening rot – but their actions hinted at some greater purpose. Koryn knew that his bull-headed brothers, the Brazen Minotaurs, would be concerned only with smiting the enemy and not with understanding their motives. To them, Koryn knew, the enemy were the enemy; faceless traitors who needed only to be vanquished. Their strategies were not subtle. They did not need to understand their enemy in order to strike them with a wall of sheer force, to overwhelm them with firepower. There was a certain honesty in that sort of combat, and Koryn respected the Brazen Minotaurs for their unwavering, unquestioning approach. He had seen them storm their way to victory on more than one occasion, a fist of iron driven into the very heart of the enemy.

  The sons of Corax, however, excelled at a different kind of combat. Koryn knew how to hit an enemy where it hurt, to search out their weak points, to foil their plans. The Raven Guard struck from the shadows and were gone before their foe was even aware of what had happened. That, he knew, was what was needed here on Kasharat. That would ensure the success of their mission. The mortuary complex would be easily defended and a full assault would result only in a stand-off. That stand-off, in turn, would result in a siege that would take days, if not longer, to break. And days were a luxury the Brazen Minotaurs didn’t have. Not if they wanted to retrieve their target in one piece.

  Koryn hoped that their brothers might have had a chance by now to pick up the signal from the beacon he had planted earlier, amongst the corpses of the corrupted humans who had guarded the entrance to the mortuary complex.

  He slowed as the passageway opened into a large, cavernous space. They were now far below ground, and looking up, Koryn could see that the space had originally been a natural formation, remodelled some time in the distant past for the mortuary builders’ macabre purposes. Huge stalactites dripped from the roof like fangs encircling an enormous maw. Two colossal statues towered over the Space Marines, the figures’ heads bowed in quiet repose. Each of them clutched a sword and shield and wore an unfamiliar pattern of armour. Effigies, Koryn assumed, of ancient heroes, long since forgotten.

  At the feet of these towering figures stood a small group of grotesque creatures, formerly human, but now mutated and corrupted by the Sickening. One bore a writhing, wriggling proboscis where its arm had once been, erupting from just beneath the shoulder joint to curl, snake-like, in the air. The man’s face was deformed with pustulent growths, and his belly was distended and marred with puckered sores. Beside him, another appeared to have lost his lower jaw, and his tongue, now oversized and sickly yellow, lolled across his naked chest, where his skin erupted in innumerable boils. He clutched a lasrifle in his disgusting, weeping fingers. There were five others, each of them bearing the diabolical mark of Nurgle.

  Koryn glanced from side to side, noting how his brothers had fanned out in the shadows, drawing a wide semicircle around the group of cultists. This was how the Raven Guard worked. So attuned were they to each other, so practised were they in the art of subtle warfare that he need not even issue his command. Intuitively, his veterans knew what he expected, what was necessary.

  Koryn readied himself. He would enjoy this, would enjoy despatching these foul bearers of the taint.

  Silently he raised his twin lightning claws, the flashing blades glinting in the half-light. He drew his breath and then swooped forward, barely making a sound as he erupted from the shadows like a whirlwind of slashing blades, spinning about so that his talons traced wide circles through the miasmic air. The lightning claws parted the flesh of the nearest cultist like warm butter, slicing him open from shoulder to belly so that his body collapsed silently in a bloody heap in the dirt.

  Koryn’s blood sang as he twisted, knocking aside the raised barrel of a lasrifle and skewering a second cultist through the belly. The man opened his mouth as if to howl in agony, but was silenced a second later as Koryn’s other set of talons flashed, removing the cultist’s head from his shoulders and spattering hot, festering blood over the Space Marine’s ebony chest-plate.

  Around him, Koryn’s brothers moved silently in the dance of death, ducking and weaving and swiping as their blades and talons despatched the remaining five cultists in moments. The disciples of the Death Guard barely had time to register what was happening before it was all over. None of them had the opportunity to even squeeze off a shot or so much as raise an arm in defence. Within seconds the Raven Guard had melted away into the shadows, their work done, the only trace of their passing the quivering heap of corpulent flesh and severed limbs on the ground, writhing with the swarms of maggots that the cultists had harboured within their obscene bodies.

  Talons dripping with gore, Koryn moved silently to join his brothers.

  ‘Captain?’ The voice that came over the vox was barely a whisper.

  ‘Yes, Argis?’

  ‘I understand, captain, that we owe the Brazen Minotaurs a grave debt, but should we not honour them on the field of battle as they honoured us, and not silently, from the shadows?’

  ‘Argis, the Brazen Minotaurs honoured us in the only way they know how, in open combat, using their brute strength to aid us in our hour of need. Their sacrifice was great. But honour is not simply a matter of trading one life for another, of standing side by side on the field of battle. We honour our brothers the way we know how. The situation on Kasharat demands more subtlety than our bull-headed brothers could muster. We repay our debt the Raven’s way.’

  ‘Yes, captain,’ said Argis, his tone circumspect. One of the shadows up ahead inclined its head, and Koryn smiled. Yes. The Raven’s way.

  Koryn watched as Argis slipped away into the darkness, and then followed silently behind.

  DAED

  The corpses were hideous to look upon, and if he hadn’t seen their like a thousand times before, it might have been enough to turn even Daed’s iron stomach. There were at least ten of them, perhaps more, heaped one upon another like some grisly diorama, an assemblage of severed limbs, decapitated heads and spilled organs. Some of the body parts still writhed, as if by their own volition, as if the diabolical pestilence that had infected them was unwilling to release its foul grip, even now, after death. They twitched and spasmed as if trying to pull themselves back together, trying to reassemble themselves into new, blasphemous forms.

  Bast was standing over this strange monument to the dead, his
jaw set firm in obvious disgust. ‘This appears to be the origin of the signal, Captain.’

  Daed sensed movement and glanced down to see a twitching arm scrabbling in the dirt near his boots, its fingernails raking pathetically at his leg brace. He sent it spinning away into the murky fog with a sharp kick.

  ‘Explain,’ he said, sharply.

  ‘The beacon, captain. It must be buried somewhere in there amongst the corpses, transmitting its distress signal.’ Bast was still studying the readout on his auspex, and he dropped to his haunches, running the device over the slurry of bodies. One of the torsos twitched suddenly, and Throle stilled it again with a short burst from his bolter, sending a fountain of blood and gore into the air. It spattered Bast where he stood, but he continued to study the readout without comment.

  ‘Like I said, a trap,’ growled Targus. ‘They’re trying to lure us in.’

  The five Brazen Minotaurs were standing by the pillared entrance to a vast mausoleum complex, much of which, Daed had gathered, was buried far beneath their feet. The readings he had seen suggested there was a warren of tunnels and chambers stretching for miles below ground, although given the interference caused by the green mist, he knew the veracity of any such readouts was in doubt. If they entered the labyrinthine structure, they would be going in blind.

  The entrance yawned open before him, a marble staircase descending into the gloom. The traitor’s icons and wards were splashed in sickly green across the pillars like a warning. Or, Daed considered, like a challenge.

  ‘A trap?’ said Throle in gruff rebuttal. ‘Why would the enemy leave a distress beacon buried in a heap of their own dead?’

  ‘The enemy are not easily fathomed,’ said Bardus, his back to them as he kept watch, surveying their surroundings for anything that might come swooping out of the fog. ‘There is no understanding the depths of their perversity.’