Saturnine

by Dan Abnett

  They had sent the homing signal repeatedly. Once every three seconds, standard protocol. Extraction ordered, urgent.

  No flare had come.

  Their signal might have been blocked. The Mantolith might have withdrawn from teleport range. No, the damn thing’s grid had jammed. That was it. Abaddon could picture it, the filthy tech-adept scum, frantically scurrying around the Termite cabin, trying to repair a burned out grid, his beacon signal flashing on their consoles. The teleport had failed so many damn times on the approach. The magi had blamed it on bedrock, on energy obstruction, on everything but themselves.

  It was their own shoddy, miserable incompetence. They’d barely managed to get Abaddon and his men to the target. Now the inadequate bastards couldn’t get them back out.

  In the eighth minute, Abaddon decided that if he ever got out, if he did manage that somehow, he would track down Eyet-Good-For-Nothing-One-Tag, and kill her. He would kill her and her whole shitting linked unity at the Epta war-stead for their ineptitude. He would hack off their hands and feet, and load them into a teleport grid, and transfer them, unprotected, into hard vacuum. Or the heart of a star. Or on an unset, diffuse pattern so the organic drizzle of their remains rained down over multiple sites at once.

  By the ninth minute, bleeding from a dozen wounds, two of them critical, he had resolved to kill the Lord of Iron too. If he got out. In that dream of escape. He would find the great Perturabo and kill him. This had been his great idea. Perturabo had seen the flaw, the Saturnine fault. He had toyed with it, cooed over it, revealed it to Abaddon furtively, like some pornographic image. He had gulled Abaddon into this. He’d used the First Captain, with his reputation, and his authority, and his unrivalled connections. He had used Abaddon to make this happen. Perturabo, damn his soul, had played First Captain Ezekyle Abaddon like a fool. He had tempted him with glory, made him feel smart and noticed, preened his ego. Made him feel like it was all his big, clever idea. The bastard had even made Abaddon beg him to let him do it. The Lord of Iron, lord of shit, had manipulated Abaddon into using his influence to draw resources from the Sons of Horus, coerce the Emperor’s Children into playing along, broker the help of the Mechanicum. He’d made Abaddon do all the work and take the credit, so if it failed – if it failed – if it failed like it was failing now, Abaddon would be to blame.

  Perturabo had deniability if it turned to shit. Perturabo could claim ignorance if three companies of the Sons of Horus, including the elite, not to mention how damn many of the Emperor’s Children, failed to return.

  In death, Abaddon would be blamed for the disaster, and his memory dishonoured. In death, he would be disgraced. Called overreaching. Called ‘that fool Abaddon’.

  Abaddon would find the Lord of Iron, in that dream escape from this hell-pit. He would annihilate those damned war-tometa with meltas. He would face Perturabo, and tear his skull off his spine, and ram the haft of Forgebreaker down the stump of his neck, and keep ramming it until the bastard’s body split like a rotten gourd.

  In the tenth minute, Abaddon arrived at a point of calm. Of serenity. He accepted his onrushing death, which was surely only seconds away. It had become a game, a contest, like the old practice cages. How many of them could he kill before he was bested? Some? Most? All? Some were fine warriors. Sepatus, he was magnificent. Haar was a brute, but an interesting challenge. Garro… Abaddon fancied his own chances in an even match, but the man’s sword was a piece of work, and so was Garro’s skill with it.

  He realised, as he killed, and killed, and killed, that he owed the Lord of Iron a genuine debt of gratitude. Abaddon was a warrior. He’d always been a warrior. It was his life. His purpose. He excelled at it. The warp was a distraction. It was just another weapon. Those who knelt before it and pledged their worship, treating it like some kind of god, they were fools. All of them. Magnus. Lorgar. Fulgrim. Fools. Horus was a fool. The warp was nothing.

  Being a warrior was everything. It defined him. The skill of combat. The lessons of defeat. The joy of triumph. That was his sacrament. Let them worship their false gods and giggling abominations. This was what he had wanted. The chance to fight, like a man, not a daemon. The chance to take the Palace, and claim Terra, the old-fashioned way. By force of arms.

  He had wanted to win as a warrior. Perturabo had let him try. He owed the Lord of Iron thanks for that.

  This was everything, he realised, as he entered the eleventh minute, with almost everyone dead. This moment. Its simplicity. Skill and courage, tested to the limit, for no other reason, to serve no grand plan or devious ruse… just tested for the sake of skill and courage.

  This moment was his life in its purest form. His life distilled. He fought Katechon, and Imperial Fists, and Blackshields, and Cataphractii Terminators, and Tactical Space Marines, for no other principle than to find out who was best. There were no sides. No good or bad. No rebel cause or loyalist alliance. No Warmaster. No Emperor. No point to anything outside the broken, blood-smeared walls of the killing chamber.

  Just war. Only war. The binary test of the galaxy, that you passed in triumph, or failed in glory.

  Death, rushing closer, was immaterial.

  How many could he take? How many more times could he prove his prowess?

  He was Abaddon. Let them come. Let them all come. Find more, and bring them too. Bring anyone. Bring everyone.

  He would take them. Or he would die. Either way. It didn’t matter any more.

  In the twelfth minute, Nathaniel Garro reached him, cleaving through one last Justaerin to close with him. They duelled, blade into blade, munitions long since exhausted. Garro was good. His sword was remarkable. He dealt Abaddon two wounds that would have killed lesser men. He drove Abaddon back, boxing him against the chamber’s ancient wall. Good tactics, but a mistake. When Abaddon pivoted, it was Garro who found himself boxed, his back to the stone. Abaddon threw a punch that smashed Garro against the wall. The man slumped, dazed, chestplate cracked. Abaddon swung to finish him.

  Bel Sepatus blocked his descending blade. Sepatus. Now, a proper test. A dance of equals that carried them into the thirteenth and final minute of the fight. Their blades clashed and parried with such speed. It was joyful. The Blood Angel was amazing. The deftness of his skill, the precision of his strokes, the intensity of his address. Sepatus produced nuanced swordplay that Abaddon could barely turn back. There were skills here to learn, tricks to appreciate and copy. And the Kheruvim’s attack was absolute. A miraculous degree of murderous focus.

  Abaddon was sorry to kill him.

  His blade cut Sepatus in half.

  The Riven Hound slammed Abaddon into the wall. Bricks shattered. Abaddon fell bones break and organs rupture. Haar was size and brute strength. There was no skill to speak of. Just beautiful fury, like one of Russ’ pack-dogs, or Angron’s thug Kham. A wall of strength that crushed everything before it. The Blackshield had him by the throat. Haar took six or seven of Abaddon’s kill-thrusts in the belly and chest, and refused to die. Just refused. His strength seemed to grow as the blood wept out of him. Haar’s power fist, like a siege ram, hammered at Abaddon’s head until his helmet broke and deformed, and Abaddon’s face was a mess of gore.

  One mote like that. One more and it’s done.

  Hut Haar was a dead weight, pinning him to the wall. Abaddon’s blade had found Haar’s throat and slid in, up into the brain, and out through the back of the Riven Hound’s head.

  Abaddon couldn’t move. He could barely see. Endryd Haar’s dead mass was slumped against him, crushing him against the wall. Abaddon tried to get free. There wasn’t time.

  Garro was back on his feet. That sword of his, gleaming.

  Garro raised it.

  This was it then. One downward slash from a sword whose edge cut everything. This was it.

  Abaddon wanted it to never end. Ever. Ever.

  The end came anyway.

  * * *

  Garro lowered Libertas.
/>   ‘No!’ he yelled. ‘No!’ He punched the wall.

  * * *

  Haar’s enormous corpse shifted and fell away as the teleport flare faded.

  ‘My lord!’ the Mechanicum adepts cried. ‘My lord!’

  They carried him to the arrestor seats, and tried to peel the bloody visor of his helm away without taking his face with it.

  All the other seats in the Mantolith’s compartment were empty.

  ‘We tried,’ a magos said. The grid… We had to reposition the Termite to fire the grid again. It took time. I am sorry.’

  Abaddon murmured something.

  ‘What is he saying?’ the magos asked.

  ‘We are returning,’ one of the others told Abaddon eagerly. ‘Full rate. The motivators are running. We are exiting the fault, lord, ahead of the enemy’s attempt to seal it. The medicae will be waiting for you.’

  Abaddon’s mouth stirred again.

  ‘My lord?’ the magos asked, leaning in to hear.

  ‘Let me go back…’ Abaddon whispered. He was weeping. ‘Let me go back…’

  * * *

  They tested him. Eidolon was the worst by far. The howling lord commander fractured Dorn’s warplate with his polyphonic screams. His blade pierced the Praetorian twice. Eidolon had the strength of a primarch.

  Dorn had slain sixteen of the killers. They were on him two or three at a time, raking and jabbing. Dorn’s shield, already shredded, was hooked away by one of Quine Mylossar’s chrome sabres. Mylossar’s blade reach was extreme. Dorn knew he had to kill him fast, so he could concentrate on the others.

  Mylossar’s head came spinning off in a shower of peacock feathers. The squirts of blood from his severed neck shot metres into the air.

  Sigismund said nothing, turning from Mylossar’s toppling form to smash his blade into Janvar Kell. As Kell collapsed, the Templar yelled a war cry, but it had no words. It was just a howl of defiance. He despatched the champion Jarkon Darol with two hacking blows.

  The Praetorian and the Templar slotted back to back, covering each other’s guard, turning together to drive away the circle of killers. They deflected cuts and thrusts, snapped golden spears and endured the keening, concussing screams.

  ‘To the glory of Him on Earth!’ Dorn roared.

  ‘To the death!’ Sigismund shouted.

  They smashed the gaudy, lethal champions of the III down, one by one: Von Kaida, who bellowed an adult’s death scream from his child’s face; Illarus, who crawled on all fours for several seconds, searching for his severed head; Symmomus, whose body split apart as Dorn caught him; Zeneb Zenar, who fell to his knees, and tried to hold his sheared body together with both arms, Lecus Phodion, the vexillarius, who was sent cartwheeling away in a welter of blood.

  When Eidolon surged in again, Sigismund charged him out of the circle, knocking men aside. The two fought like furies along the edge of the wall, both possessed, but only one a daemon. When Eidolon, gleeful, lammed his sword through Sigismund’s collarbone, Sigismund snarled, seized the bare blade impaling him, and used his bodyweight to tear it out of Eidolon’s grip.

  Eidolon looked appalled as Sigismund came on, the sword wedged through his shoulder. He scrambled backwards. The Templar’s chained blade ripped Eidolon’s pink plate open. Blood like quicksilver, like liquid chrome, sprayed out and dappled Sigismund’s armour.

  Eidolon screamed. Sigismund kicked him over the ledge. The lord commander’s flailing body plunged away, eleven hundred metres down into the burning darkness below the Saturnine Wall.

  By then, Dorn had felled another nine with his greatsword. Their bodies lay around him like the ransacked contents of a jewel box. Nuno DeDonna, famed for his cunning, tried to slip in behind Dorn as the Praetorian fought off two others.

  Maximus Thane broke DeDonna’s back with his hammer, then mashed his head into the wall top for good measure.

  The wallguard, a mix of Imperial Fists and Auxilia troops led by members of the kill teams Devotion and Helios, had cleared the lower galleries, and driven the Emperor’s Children out of the wall, either into the night or into the arms of death. Below, the ravaged host of the III Legion, perhaps in answer to some petulant summons from their fleeing lord, began to withdraw. They left some eighteen thousand of their dead behind.

  The last to die were on the wall top, as Thane’s garrison scoured out the last pockets of resistance beneath the burning flanks of Oanis guntower. Bohemond was with them, trudging and snarling, blitzing fire from his gun-pods to mow down the last few of the killer elite that menaced his beloved Praetorian lord.

  There was cheering when the voids flared back into life overhead, their breach repaired. Weary, bloodied men lined the wall under the aurora shimmer, shouting the war cry of the VII defiantly at the night beyond the wall. A few last confirmation shots echoed around the battlement.

  Dorn crouched beside the broken form of the newblood Madius.

  ‘The Apothecaries are coming, my son,’ he told him.

  ‘Did we win, my lord?’ Madius asked.

  ‘This is what victory feels like, wall master,’ said Dorn. ‘I’ll make damn sure you live long enough to get used to it.’

  ‘What did we win, Praetorian?’ asked the captain through a film of his own blood.

  ‘The day,’ Dorn replied.

  * * *

  When Loken found him, he was still looking for a way out.

  He had reached the lower levels of the emptied Saturnine mansions, expending all the ammunition he carried to cut down any of the Hort Palatine or Seventh or Naysmith kill teams who got in his way. A long way to come, all on his own, through fierce opposition.

  But then, he was Mournival.

  He was picking his way along a gloomy gallery, half-lit by the dull glow of the solar lamps that lit rows of hydroponic tanks full of dead plants, searching for a door, a window.

  Aximand turned as Loken approached. The sight of the armour and the face made him breathe hard.

  ‘You’re a dream!’ said Little Horus.

  ‘No,’ said Loken.

  ‘A nightmare!’

  ‘That, perhaps,’ said Loken.

  ‘You should be dead!’

  ‘I decided to live,’ said Loken. ‘So that you and your kind could die.’

  Aximand drew Mourn-it-All.

  ‘All these years, you’ve been coming after me!’ he spat.

  Loken shook his head. His chainsword purred in one hand. Rubio’s blade crackled in the other. ‘Not you particularly,’ said Loken. ‘Just all of you.’

  ‘No, me!’ cried Aximand. ‘You’ve always been there! I know it!’

  ‘That’s probably just your guilt,’ said Loken.

  They flew at each other, blades arcing in the soft light. Edges dashed. The rapid impacts echoed in the empty gallery. Aximand parried both of Loken’s blades. He hadn’t lost his touch. He sliced at Loken, Loken ducked, swung out, braced his chainsword to block Mourn-it-All, and thrust with Rubio’s blade.

  Aximand darted out of reach, springing on his toes, mobile. He lunged again. Loken drove Mourn-it-All aside.

  ‘I wanted Abaddon,’ said Loken. ‘I wanted Lupercal. Those were the names at the head of my list.’

  ‘Well, you got me,’ Aximand sneered.

  ‘You always were the wrong Horus,’ said Loken.

  Aximand screeched in rage, and lunged.

  Rubio’s blade, lit from within, parried Mourn-it-All away.

  The chainsword rammed through Aximand’s sternum, and speared out between his shoulder blades. Loken lifted him on the revving blade, and held him there, quivering. Aximand uttered a long, slow, oddly modulated scream, as the cycling blades chewed up his internal organs. A torrent of blood pumped out of his mouth, down his chin and chest, pulsing with the tempo of the whirring chain.

  He dropped Mourn-it-All.

  Holding him fast, Loken raised Rubio’s blade, and sliced his head off with one fluid execu
tion stroke.

  In the gloom, the sound of slow breathing that had haunted Little Horus Aximand ceased, forever.

  FIVE

  * * *

  Totality

  The wall that had held them at bay was falling. The wrath of Khârn’s master, Angron, the Red Angel, had brought it down, into the dirt. The port was open.

  The rest would be swift. It would be totality, as his master desired.

  Khârn, hound of war, First Captain of the World Eaters, prepared himself. Warriors surged forward in a great, blind torrent on either side of him, bellowing in incoherent triumph as they saw the wall collapse. Most were so far gone in their feral lust that they did not understand what they were attacking. They didn’t know it was a space port. They didn’t know it had significant strategic value. Like their primarch lord, they didn’t care.

  A thick wall had halted them. Now the thick wall was gone. They could move again, and plough onwards into the next place, where there would be more things to kill.

  Where they could make new libations for the Thirsty God.

  Khârn had forced himself, with some effort, to retain a slightly greater measure of reason and coherence than his brothers. Someone had to keep the destructive swarm of the World Eaters pointing in the right direction, and moving with something vaguely resembling a purpose. Once Terra fell, he could give in entirely, and submit to the sublime and eternal fury.

  Khârn yearned to do that.

  Until then, someone had to think, at least a little.

  The World Eaters host poured ahead of him. Through his visor display, Khârn saw the poverty of the port’s defences. A curtain wall, a bastion gard. Nothing like the meat-body resistance he had expected. It was a space port. Surely Dorn would have wanted it defended at all costs? Where were the Space Marines? The Blood Angels, the Imperial Fists… even the slippery White Scars, so hard to catch?

  Maybe Dorn was slipping? Maybe the so-called loyalists were closer to the end than Perturabo thought? Perhaps Great Dorn no longer had the forces to stage an adequate defence?