Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  The enemy mass gave no sign that it had sighted them. It just continued its steady, turgid advance. It had time and weight on its side. Even obscured by the drifting smoke, it was clear that the Prince of Decay had fielded a vast number of his warriors against the Colossi line, seven times or more than the Khan had walked forward from the trenches. The lack of reaction did not seem like brute stupidity, or even the preening confidence of a superior force. To Raldoron of the Blood Angels, it felt like a simple lack of response. The Death Guard did not react, in the same way that an encroaching disease does not react. It simply continues, at its own insidious pace, invading a body, multiplying, spreading. As a cancer advances through a body, through system and tissue and organ, as an infection spreads and overwhelms, it creeps at its own pace, heedless of the antigens and philtres dispersed against it, knowing that it will consume and envelop, that it will triumph, and it will be neither delayed nor rushed.

  The Death Guard would not be provoked into urgency, not even by the sight of its enemy emerging from the smoke to meet it. It would approach at its own speed, slow and lingering and relentless.

  For the lingering was part of its process. It was built to overwhelm eventually, but it wanted the lingering agony that preceded that end to last.

  The torment was the point.

  The Khan’s rate of stride began to increase. No word or command was given or needed. The Astartes line accelerated with him, keeping pace. Fast strides, then a jogging measure, then a bounding run, heavy plated figures spattering wet mud and quaking the ground as they began to charge.

  Shields up, blades lifting, heads down, weapons aimed.

  Twenty metres from the advancing wave of grey-green diseased monsters, the Khan’s force began to fire. Boltguns boomed and sparked, their muzzle flashes dull red in the twilight of smoke. Front-rank Death Guard crumpled and fell, spinning aside, toppled, blown open, punctured. Fractured armour burst from explosive impacts. Putrid meat and liquid discharge showered.

  The guns of the XIV began to answer, blinking and roaring from the plodding ranks. The Death Guard had stirred from its brumation. Charging legionaries on either side of the Khan dropped, killed outright, or smacked off their feet as explosive bolts detonated against storm shields. With another ten metres clearance, the Death Guard mass would mow the loyalist strike force down entirely.

  But it did not have ten metres. The Khan’s war line was running, and it was already on them.

  The impact was a rippling clatter of metal on metal, of plasteel and ceramite clashing, that ran along the battle line like the hammer blows from a thousand working anvils. It was so loud and fierce it could be heard by Burr and his men back in the trenches.

  The assaulting Space Marines brought the force of momentum with them. They collapsed and splintered the leading files of the enemy, running them down and trampling them, finishing those that fell underfoot with stabbing blades and merciless execution shots, using their corpses as stepping stones to meet the rows behind.

  Foremost were the Khan, Valdor and Raldoron. A triumvirate, they were the leading edge of the assault’s blade. Constantin Valdor, a figure of gold, broke the enemy line like a siege ram. His Custodes spear had obliterated eight of the foe before he’d even made contact, the weapon held level like a spearing pike, the bolter mechanism spitting fire above the aimed blade-head. Once he was in among them, he scythed them apart, cutting through corrupted plate, cracking armour like porcelain, crushing helms like eggshells, flipping bodies into the dank air. Within seconds, his magnificent form was plastered with suppurating matter, back-spattered from his kills. Blades struck and broke against his auramite. A giant, he drove into the ranks, like a reaper hacking through dense vegetation, raking a pathway into the mass.

  Raldoron was a crimson spectre. His greatsword glinted as it swung, refracting the infernal light. Nothing it met stayed whole. Bodies fell either side of him, cut through, severed, sliced segments falling and rolling in the mire. He howled the battle hymn of his Legion, the sacred songs of blood and wonder that fuelled every blow he struck. If Valdor was a demigod unleashed, then Raldoron was an angel, demonstrating the monstrous terror of an angelic being unbound. He was the face of revelation. Angels inspire awe: the grace and serenity they radiate in repose becomes astonishing fury when they are roused.

  They fought at either hand of Jaghatai Khan, Valdor to his left, Raldoron to his right. The Khagan, Khan of Khans, was another thing altogether. His primarch frame towered over the enemies he raged upon. Death Guard broke hopelessly around him like storm waves dashing against a rock. There was a fire in his eyes that lit fear even in diseased minds. He was feral and elemental. It was not the wild ferocity of his gene-brother Russ, the shadow-savage killing lust of the wolf pack. It was pure, the clean, cleaving, unblinking razor of an eagle, focus locked and emotionless, surgical. He was no snarling muzzle, tearing a carcass apart in a frenzy. He left that kind of manic killing to the Wolf King and his Fenrisian Rout. He was the cloudless wild, the splintering strike of lightning, the bone-snap impact of a striking hawk, the sharp cry of unheralded death in a wild and lonely place. He was the unmourned death of a far, forgotten cairn.

  His bolter spoke. His dao gleamed. The enemy simply died around him. Every strike and every shot maximised its killing potential, an utter economy of destruction, as though death were a finite resource, and he was meting it out; unstintingly, but never more than was necessary, so as not to waste a single drop of it. Death Guard crumpled in his wake, many apparently still intact or whole, felled by an exact thrust, a single expert slice. Not overkill, just total kill. He had come among his foe to measure out death, blow by blow, each dose in a precisely lethal quantity.

  His White Scars did the same. Along the line, they matched the superbly drilled and tireless precision of the Imperial Fists with shocking and relentless fidelity of their own. They fought at the sides of Raldoron’s ferocious Blood Angels and the staggering might of Valdor’s invincible Custodians, and sowed death with sure and rigorous lucidity, with the hardwired focus of apex predators. None who witnessed it, Custodians, Imperial Fists or Blood Angels, would ever demean them as barbarians again. They would respect them as a man respects the unnegotiable destruction of a storm.

  The unwavering loyalist line buckled the front of the Death Guard host, and compressed it, driving it into itself, in a tangled maelstrom of confusion and slaughter. The mud vanished under a carpet of impacted and contorted armoured corpses. The air hung heavy with a murk of blood vapour, smoke and clouds of swarming flies. The brutal carnage was muffled by the pall, as if everything was swaddled in thick blankets. The blast of guns was dulled, the impact of blades hollow. For every warrior, the world was wrapped tight, confined in a deadened space where the loudest sounds were his own rasping breath inside his helm, the noxious buzzing of insects and the ring of weapons striking his plate.

  Deep in the press of the slaughter, the Khan sensed the enemy formation breaking around him, disintegrating into retreat.

  And he sensed flashing. There was flashing. Broad and bright, banishing the smoke, strobe-lighting the entire killing field. Sheet lightning, wide and amorphous, was shivering and blinking overhead.

  The Khan heard sharp pinging. Hailstones were raining across them, chiming like bells as they bounced off his armour, and off the plate of the bodies around him.

  He put a warrior of the XIV to death with a wrench of his sword, let the body flop backwards, and looked up. Pebbles of dirty ice burst into powder and grit across his face. The low sky was churning, pestilential clouds frothing and souring. The sheet lightning became more intense, backlighting the heaving clouds with a blue, photoluminescent afterburn.

  He knew that blight-taste. Knew it too well.

  ‘Naranbaatarl’ he yelled, trying to locate his senior Stormseer in the sea of mayhem around him. Hail was bouncing off everything like spilled ball bearings.

  ‘We must go as we have come,’ said Qin Fai
, reaching his Khagan’s side. The loyal noyen-khan was smeared in blood that was running pink, the melting hail diluting it.

  ‘Agreed,’ rumbled the Khan. ‘Sound it. Call it, Qin Fai. Let us draw back.’

  ‘Not yet!’ Valdor cried. He was close by, still at the Khan’s left hand, demolishing Death Guard, who were tumbling before him.

  He looked back. ‘Turn now? Jaghatai, we’re breaking them!’

  ‘They are breaking themselves, Constantin,’ said the Khan.

  He could hear a thunder of hooves. It was not the drum-roll thump of cannons that had made his charge, two days before, to resemble a cavalry action of old.

  It was actual hooves.

  The massed lines of the Death Guard before him were breaking, but not in overrun and retreat. They were parting to let something through.

  Giant hooves trampled the mud. Antlers and horns loomed through the smoke and hail, high above the heads of men.

  The Neverborn descended. Brute monsters, warp horrors, cloven-footed, broad-horned, their legs jointed like goats, their hunched torsos like ogres, skins charred black and gleaming, their bristled lips drawn back from snouts and muzzles, from fangs and equine teeth that slobbered foam and spittle, and brayed and roared and squealed. Above those mouths, their faces were autumnal masks of moth-wing patterns, brown stripes and whorled dusty creams, dotted with asymmetrical clusters of spider-eyes.

  From where he stood, the Khan could see eight of them bearing down, hideous to behold, like the devil-daemons in old and fanciful woodcuts. Not a single one of them was smaller than a Warhound Titan.

  The sabre in his fist felt like nothing, as weak and useless as the ice flecks melting on his plate.

  He felt the true ice of terror in his heart.

  Ahriman lowered his hands. They trembled, as though a high voltage current was streaming through his fingers. Braying and howling rang up the vale to the broken battlements of Corbenic.

  He looked across at Mortarion. The Pale King was watching the horror unfold below.

  ‘They ride out,’ said the Pale King.

  ‘They ride out,’ agreed Ahriman. ‘They are summoned into flesh upon the face of Terra, and they walk. Your warriors have drawn the enemy into the open field. What mine have summoned will purge the field entire, and bring Colossi down.’

  THREE

  * * *

  Guelb er Richât

  Rules of hospitality

  The Opener of the Ways

  John descended into the eroded dome.

  It was over forty miles across, formed of varying concentric rings of sedimentary rock and quartzite. From the air, it looked like a whirlpool with its circling bands of rhyolite, vegetation and sand. He knew that, because he’d flown above it, several times, years before.

  Many years before. It had been her camp then, her retreat. Now, apparently, it had become her permanent home.

  Some said it looked like an eye. An eye staring up at the heavens. It had been staring for a long time, since the primordial period known as the Cretaceous. The eye had opened long before the rise of man. It had gazed at the sky as man learned to walk. It had sheltered walking man, Homo erectus, in its wadis, and those walking men of the Acheulean epoch had left their bones and hand axes in its dust.

  It had stared, unblinking, through time, through eras of humid vegetation and creeping glaciation. The land had come to be called Mauritania. That was the name John remembered, at least. Names

  changed, eroded by time. The descendants of the ancient Sheba and Thamud had named the eye Guelb er Richât.

  For so many aeons it had gazed up at nothing but sky and stars. What gazed back at it now? John wondered.

  The sky, dipping to evening, had turned reef-water blue. White dust kicked up around his boots like bread flour. He passed the first of the outer markers. Stone idols set on boulders. Pendulous Earth-mothers, full bellied, and warding fetishes made of bone and twig and straw. John was fairly sure they were cautionary signs and had no power, no magic in them. But there was a good chance they could be wired with sensor trip systems, or placed to conceal auspex pods.

  He drew his pistol. Then he bolstered it again. He wanted to be noticed. He wanted to be found and greeted. A drawn weapon would only invite violence.

  Ahead, in the bowl of a wadi, he saw a cluster of dwellings. Some rusted habitat pods, half-tented with draped tarpaulins, and large Berber tents were gathered around a central structure. A few small enviro-tents, old and patched, dotted the site. They, and the hab-pods, and the corroded vox-mast poking up above the scraggy thorn and mastic trees, were the only clues that this place was not exactly the way it had been when man first came to the spring that rose here.

  He could hear the spring gurgling in its old stone cistern, the dull neck bells of goats grazing on the salt grass.

  The central structure was a stone ruin, an earth lodge secured and out-built with carved stone by the ancient Berber people. No, they hadn’t been called that in a long time. Berber was a slur drawn from the Eleniki dead tongue, barbaros, a word for outsider just like barbarian. What were they called now? Amizigh… ‘free men’. No, that name was probably a long time dead too. Numid? Whatever. The Berber were probably long dead too. This wasn’t their place any more. This was no one’s place.

  Except hers.

  The earth lodge was half-buried in the soil. Its stone walls, above ground, had toppled and been rebuilt many times. Missing sections and lost roofs had been covered with stretched cloth, dyed indigo, as rich as the evening sky.

  The place was so still. Was she even here any more?

  Had everyone gone? Had he wasted his time?

  ‘Hello?’ John called out. His voice seemed an intrusion on the quiet.

  ‘Hello,’ replied a voice, right against his ear. The voice wasn’t what concerned John Grammaticus, even though it had risen out of nowhere. What concerned him was the weight pressed against the back of his skull. The cold muzzle of a weapon. A large-calibre weapon.

  John half-raised his hands, a casual gesture to display his submission.

  ‘I’m armed, but not dangerous,’ he said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘You can take my gun.’

  ‘I have.’

  John glanced down. The pistol had been removed from his holster. Damn.

  ‘Neatly done,’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, now I’m not armed or dangerous,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not armed,’ said the voice. ‘But you’re definitely dangerous.’

  ‘Oh, come on…’

  ‘I typed you as you wandered in. Face match. Gene-print. I know exactly who you are, or who you’re pretending to be.’

  ‘Really?’ asked John.

  ‘John Grammaticus.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘John Grammaticus. Mercenary. Outcast. Rogue. Pariah. Agitator. Agent of xenos. Perpetual, to some degree. By any measure, dangerous. Would you like to take a moment to deny this? Or would you like to take this opportunity to lose the mask and admit a truer identity?’

  ‘I have no mask,’ said John. ‘I am no shifted xenos, nor am I wearing a psykana disguise. I am what you see. John Grammaticus. Just that. I would quibble with your other descriptors. 1 haven’t been any of those things for a long time, though I confess I have been most of them, a record that shames me.’

  ‘It would shame the devil,’ said the voice.

  ‘Ah, well, he’s hard at work on his own sources of shame. Can I lower my hands? Turn around?’

  The weight withdrew from his head. John turned slowly.

  He was looking down the barrel of a bolt pistol. It looked like a Phobos-pattern, the oldest pattern of all, and the weapon was a genuine antique. Cared for, it was, nevertheless worn and burnished by use. It had a patina of age that was impossible to fake. And no one mass-built them with a gold-wire grip and side-sights any more.

  It was being aimed at him by a figure in plate ar
mour. Legiones Astartes plate, and the figure wearing it was Astartes big and Astartes bred. But the armour was colourless and unmarked, not even the bare grey of the Knights Errant. It was pale, a sheened silver finish like a lead ingot.

  The warrior wore no helmet and no smile. His face was clean-shaven, set hard, grizzled, as if he had a patina of age like the pistol he aimed. His hair was cropped straw. His eyes were indigo blue.

  ‘What are you now, then?’ the legionary asked.

  ‘Just me,’ replied John. ‘A friend of the Emperor.’

  ‘Well,’ said the legionary, ‘isn’t that the most dangerous thing of all?’ ‘These days?’ asked John. He chuckled. ‘I should think so.’

  ‘In any day,’ replied the legionary, without a hint of humour.

  ‘But you’re one of His,’ said John.

  The warrior gently shook his head.

  John felt his guts coil. Of course. He was too late. The Archenemy was already here. He was cornered by Traitor Astartes. Which faction? Which Legion? It hardly mattered, but he searched for a clue.

  ‘I’m not His,’ the legionary said.

  ‘Then… the Warmaster?’

  ‘Not his either.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said John.

  ‘It seems you never did. So she says.’

  ‘You work for her?’

  ‘Till the day I die.’

  John had noticed something. A small stamp strip, like a hallmark, etched into the legionary’s uncoloured plate just below the breast line. LE 2. What did that denote?

  ‘I’ve come to see her. To talk with her,’ said John.

  ‘No,’ said the Space Marine. ‘She won’t meet with you. She knows what you are. What you’ve done. You’re lucky she didn’t just send me out to sanction you. A gesture for old time’s sake, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m sorry, friend,’ said John. ‘I need to see her. I’ve come a long way to see her. A long time. I know I’m not popular here. I understand she despises me.’