‘The primarch would wish us to fight this battle to the end.’
‘He would indeed, but you said the primarch is dying. If so, his wishes mean nothing at all.’
‘The Dark Angels are our equals, not our betters,’ one of the brothers stressed. ‘We can win the Crusade with the right counter-attack.’
‘So you say, Malithos,’ Sevatar replied with the same mild, unpleasant smile. ‘It sounds to me as though you’d cripple us all in a bid to soothe the Legion’s bruised ego.’
Malithos, Captain of the Ninth Company, growled through his crested helm’s vox-grille. ‘If Lord Curze dies, your reign as his precious favourite ends this very night.’
Sevatar was still smiling. They could hear it in his voice. ‘Don’t threaten me, Ninth Captain. It will not end well for you.’
‘Brothers, be at peace,’ said the second of them. ‘Sevatar, you are right; we must beware of wounded pride forcing us into foolish action. And Malithos, you are right; we have to strike back, for duty and pleasure in equal measure. But we must not be at odds. The moment is too grave.’
‘I appreciate your conciliatory efforts, Var Jahan.’ Sevatar’s voice was calm, devoid of the usual baiting edge. ‘But the Lion’s forces just broke the Legion’s back in a single strike. The entire fleet is scattered. We lost dozens of ships; both our own and those of the humans that follow us. The last I saw of the Legio Ulricon’s flagship was its wreckage, spilling into the void after the kiss of Dark Angels guns. How many Titans died in that wreck alone? How many tens of thousands of trained crew?’
‘We will regroup,’ said Malithos. ‘It is our duty. The war hasn’t ended just because you’ve become craven.’
‘Craven,’ Sevatar replied. ‘A strange word to use when describing the one who remained behind to help the slower ships evacuate.’
‘But duty demands we fight,’ said Var Jahan, Captain of the 27th. ‘Death is nothing compared to vindication.’
Sevatar grinned at that. ‘Such pretty words. I wonder if they’ll echo into eternity as wisdom or foolishness. Whichever Fate decides, you will not have me at your side. Some of my sub-captains already speak of sailing to Terra, or rejoining the Warmaster’s fleet. Others wish to break apart to venture elsewhere, harrying Imperial supply lines. I am inclined to grant them their request, rather than send them to die with you.’
‘The Kyroptera will vote,’ said Malithos.
Sevatar gave a sneering snort. ‘Voting. How very democratic. Since when have we needed to vote on anything?’
‘Since you returned to us,’ said the last brother, Cel Herec, Captain of the 43rd, ‘and the Kyroptera ceased to speak with one voice. United we stand, Sevatar. Divided we fall.’
‘So many pretty words tonight, yet they all miss the point. The Legion is better suited to the shadows until we are ready to strike in force. Then we butcher. Then we taste their blood. The Angels just taught us a stern lesson in the foolishness of gathering together in one place, and trying to engage in a fair fight.’
Sevatar leaned on a support pillar, crossing his arms over his chestplate as he continued. ‘I’ll be absolutely clear, since you are all so reluctant to take the hint. I will not let you take the Legion back into this war, after such a crippling defeat. That’s all there is to it. I will take the Atramentar, along with any other companies that choose to stand with me, and rejoin the Warmaster’s fleet. There is nothing more we can do here – and I say that delaying the Dark Angels for almost three years is more than long enough. I am finished with the Thramas Crusade. I am taking my companies to Terra. I plan to see the real war before the final day dawns. The rest of the Legion should come with me. I may lose my temper if you try to keep fighting this meaningless war.’
Malithos looked at his brother in raw disbelief for a moment. ‘Are you mad, Sevatar?’
‘I don’t think so. I feel fine.’
‘How would you stop us from staying?’ asked Var Jahan.
‘I’d kill you, of course. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Emotions are running high, and my spear is all the way over there.’ He gestured to where it lay on the table.
‘Brother, if you’re finished acting the fool, may we focus on the matters at hand?’
‘Focus on them all you like. I’m going to see the primarch with my own eyes, rather than rely on your prattling about his demise.’ Sevatar moved away from the pillar, heading for the sealed bulkhead.
‘Your spear, Sevatar.’
‘I will be back for it soon enough. Enjoy your discussion, brothers.’
He walked from the chamber, his silhouette filling the entryway for a moment before he turned the corner. The door rumbled closed.
Malithos shook his head. ‘I grow weary of him,’ he said to the others.
‘Many of us do,’ Cel Herec replied. ‘When we rebuild the Kyroptera, we would be better served if Sevatar found himself unable to rejoin.’
Malithos sneered, as only he could do. ‘Why the spineless turn of phrase? Just say the truth. I’ll kill him myself, when the time comes.’
Var Jahan scarcely listened to their words. His attention lingered on Sevatar’s spear, resting on the table. The blade was a monstrous glaive; the haft a solid length of black iron and ridged ceramite; the rear butted by a brutal spike, with a crystalline power generator above. Every warrior within the Eighteen Legions knew of that blade. What far fewer knew was the nature of the haft’s secondary generator. Having fought at Sevatar’s side many times, Var Jahan knew its purpose very well indeed.
Ultimately, Var Jahan trusted none of his brothers, least of all those in the Kyroptera. When his teeth began to itch with the onset of displacing air pressure, he was the only one of the three captains not surprised.
He was also the only one running for the door.
The assassins appeared in a storm of white noise and aetheric mist. As the captains recoiled, raising futile hands to ward off the blinding light, all three knew just what that thunder heralded. Malithos and Cel Herec reached for their weapons, which was why they died. Var Jahan never stopped running.
The Atramentar manifested across the chamber, wreathed in the greasy after-smoke of teleportation flare, their bolters already raised.
‘We have come for you,’ the first of the Terminators growled before their guns opened up in a unified cascade.
Var Jahan heard his brothers die, heard their cries and gurgles across the vox, over the pounding of his boots and both hearts. Bolts took him high in the back and low in the left leg, sending him into a stumble, falling down onto a deck being riven by detonating shells. He rolled across the decking, never ceasing, and threw himself through the automated bulkhead.
In the corridor beyond, 27th Captain Var Jahan lay panting on the decking. He looked up at Sevatar. The First Captain stood with his back to the wall, arms crossed over his breastplate, looking down in idle curiosity.
‘Hello, captain,’ said Sevatar.
Var Jahan was rising when the doors opened again, releasing gunsmoke into the corridor. A squad of Atramentar Terminators stood in their hulking war plate, immense bolters aimed at the prey that had fled them.
‘Stand down,’ Sevatar said, and offered a hand to help his brother up. ‘This one was intelligent enough to sense my intent. He gets to live.’
Var Jahan almost spat. ‘Most generous of you.’
Sevatar chuckled before replying. ‘I thought so, too.’
‘Why did you kill them?’ Var Jahan moved so his back wasn’t facing the Atramentar. ‘Why did you want us dead? Fratricide, brother… Has it really come to this?’
‘We came to this the moment you three fools decided it was best to kill the Legion simply to expunge some imaginary stain on our imaginary honour.’
‘But the preparation…’
‘I had a feeling the Kyroptera would need reorganising. I was rig
ht.’
‘You killed them because they disagreed with you. Sevatar, you are insane.’
The First Captain gave a subtle shrug. ‘So I am often told. What matters is that the Legion needs the Kyroptera now more than ever, and we will not lead our brethren back onto the Dark Angels’ blades.’
‘But the Warmaster…’
Sevatar’s hand was at his throat before the sentence could end. The First Captain lifted him, slamming him back against the wall.
‘Do I look like I care what the Warmaster wants of me?’ Sevatar’s skullish faceplate stared with its red eye-lenses. ‘We never cared what the Emperor wanted of us. Why should we waste our lives out here in the back end of the galaxy, dancing to the Warmaster’s tune?’ He released Var Jahan, walking back into the chamber. ‘He has leashed us for three years. I am done with obedience. To the abyss with Horus and his arrogant whims. He is no better than the Emperor.’
Var Jahan followed his brother. He had to step over Cel Herec’s smoking corpse, sparing it barely a glance. Malithos had died in similar indignity; the Ninth Captain’s body was half-draped across the central table, blood pooling across the surface in a spreading lake.
‘True independence, then? Our allies in the other Legions are simply alliances of convenience?’
‘Better that than living shackled to a sickened, dying Imperium.’ Sevatar’s voice was softer now, more distant. ‘Var Jahan. Forgive my display of anger.’ He recovered his spear, and rested it on his shoulder guard. ‘I am going to see our father.’
As the bootsteps faded, Var Jahan looked to the towering forms of the Night Lords Terminators. They offered no hint of their emotions or thoughts, staring impassively through the scarlet eye-lenses of their brutish war-helms.
‘I know you all,’ Var Jahan said to them. ‘By name and reputation, even if I’ve not served with all of you. Thorion, Malek, Jakresh…’ he listed their names one by one, nodding to them each in turn. ‘What did Sevatar offer you, to make such loyal warriors? What is it he holds over you that makes you serve him even through the spilled blood of our Legion-kin?’
Thorion, commander of the Atramentar, shook his head as coils of teleportation mist started forming around their dark armour.
‘He gives us the truth.’
Their departure was as sudden and loud as their arrival, leaving Var Jahan alone with the bodies of his brothers.
Chapter II
Lair
The last time Sevatar wept had been as a boy, on the edge of becoming a man. After that night over a century ago, the boy he’d been never grew to manhood. Instead, he became a weapon, growing into a life with neither the need for emotion nor the time for tears.
Even seeing his gene-father in the apothecarion didn’t move him to sorrow. He wasn’t sure why. And yet he could hear seasoned warriors – murderers and flayers and torturers all – praying and weeping across the Legion’s mass-relay vox-network. The Luna Wolves had sounded the same, when Horus was wounded. Sevatar hadn’t understood it then, and he didn’t understand it now. The easy expression of emotion was just something that happened to other people.
Curze lay on the surgical slab, tended by bloodstained Legion Apothecaries and the insectile arms of semi-automated medicae tenders attached to the ceiling. The press of bodies prevented a clear look, but Sevatar wasn’t optimistic. He’d caught a glance at the primarch’s severed throat, the flesh knitted in ragged cohesion, while the entire chamber reeked of spilled blood. There was something raw and primal in the scent, something beyond the coppery smell of human life. The Emperor alone knew what the primarchs really were. Sevatar had no inclination to waste time guessing.
But if the primarch died…
The thought ended there. He couldn’t carry it any further. To try was no different from imagining a colour never before conceived, or recalling a song never before heard. His mind rebelled at the very effort.
How did a Legion function without its guiding hand? Without its lord, mentor, and genetic sire? Father was too trite a word when dealing with such concepts. Father implied mortality. Fathers died.
Sevatar remembered Isstvan all too well. Although he spent much of that miserable massacre grinding through warriors of the Raven Guard, he’d been blade to blade with the Iron Hands when Lord Manus, their primarch, fell. He’d seen the psychic echo rip through them. Subtle in some, ravaging in others – every single warrior in the black of the X Legion had reacted with a fury suddenly unrestrained. All hesitation cast aside, all notion of a defensive battle forgotten.
Sevatar still carried scars from that battle. He could’ve had them sealed and healed by augmetic surgery or synthetic skin grafts, but he preferred to keep them as they were. They were some of the few things he wholly owned himself, in an existence of slavery to gene-wrought gods of war.
He looked down at his gauntleted hands, weaponless and painted crimson. Months ago, he’d told the Dark Angels the truth: that to bear hands of sinners’ red was a gangland custom from Nostramo, forced upon those who failed their families. The fate of traitors and fools, carried into the VIII Legion as it conquered the stars. The Ultramarines had taken that tradition, as they took so much from the other Legions. It was less severe, less grave among the warriors of Ultramar – to them, a helm of red merely meant censure. To the sons of Nostramo, the crimson hands were a death sentence. The mark of the condemned.
Sevatar had earned his red hands on Isstvan V, for failures too great to forgive. Even the memory made him smile with an actual edge of sincerity, as so few things ever did. He lived life on borrowed time, every night a gift from the primarch until Lord Curze chose the hour of his execution.
The wet rasp of laboured breathing drew his attention, though he didn’t need to look up. He smelled the man’s wax-candle scent, the musk of fine parchment and old, old blood pushed through weak veins by a slow heart. The newcomer reeked of age, and therefore, of weakness.
Sevatar shuddered.
‘Trez,’ he greeted the archivist. The old man nodded in reply, wheezing into a rebreather mask. ‘When did you come over from the Nightfall?’
‘I just arrived, Jago. I came to get you. Please come back to the flagship with me. I have something to show you, and we have something to discuss.’
The doors rolled open, freeing the smell of an open grave. Trez entered, still heaving shallow exhalations into his rebreather. Sevatar followed, his boots thudding on the decking, echoing off the arched walls.
Trez ignored the bodies hanging on chains. Sevatar didn’t. Rare were the moments he entered his primarch’s inner sanctum, and despite everything he’d seen and done in over a century of serving in the Great Crusade, Curze’s private chamber always made his skin crawl. Here he saw the madness within his father’s mind, pushed out to infect the surrounding world. A psyche’s truths, written in skinned bodies and desecrated remains.
Trez sucked in a ragged breath. Moisture droplets gathered in the transparent oxygen mask he wore, dewing before his thin lips.
‘He talks to them.’
‘Talks to who?’
Trez gestured to the bodies. ‘Them.’
Sevatar reached out to one of the hanging corpses, giving its scourged, naked torso a gentle shove. The body rocked back and forth on its chains. Something dark and wet trickled from its open mouth, spattering onto the floor.
‘Delightful,’ the Night Lord said. He turned back to the archivist. ‘What do you want of me, little man? I have a Legion to piece back together.’
Trez brought his old bones over to a chair by a wooden desk, sized accordingly for a human. With no evidence of impatience, he started leafing through parchments, the papers fluttering softly in his arthritic hands.
‘You have never understood the man you serve,’ he said without looking up from his work. ‘None of his warriors ever have. Does that not seem like a risible flaw to you, Jago?’
‘My name is Sevatar.’
‘Indeed.’ Trez smoothed his thinning white hair back from his cratered features, arranging a piece of parchment on the desk, until it was placed just so. He read the words from the cream-coloured paper, between rebreather wheezes. ‘Jago Sevatarion, born in City’s Edge. First Captain of the Eighth Legion, Commander of the Atramentar, officer of the Kyroptera; known also by the names Sevatar the Condemned, and…’ Trez snorted, shaking his head, ‘…and by the rather amusing title, Prince of Crows.’
Sevatar removed his helm with a snap-hiss of air pressure venting from unlocked collar seals. He breathed in the chamber’s abattoir smell, his expression thoughtful.
‘I’m not sure I like your tone. The last man to sneer at me like that soon wished he hadn’t, little archivist.’
‘Oh?’ Trez looked up, curiosity writ plain across his weathered visage. ‘And who might that have been?’
‘I don’t recall his name.’
‘I was given to understand all warriors of the Legiones Astartes were gifted with eidetic recall. A hololithic memory, if you will.’
‘We are,’ Sevatar admitted. ‘I just never asked his name. I was rather preoccupied skinning him alive at the time. Now tell me what you want of me, Trez. I doubt you’ve mistaken me for someone famed for the virtue of patience.’
The old man’s grin showed a blunt arsenal of age-darkened teeth. ‘You will need patience if you wish to lead this Legion.’
Sevatar laughed, drawing the spicy, meaty scent of unrefrigerated cadavers into his lungs. ‘Even you are sure Lord Curze will die? Even you, his devoted little ape-creature, have given him up as dead? Whatever will you do once you can no longer eat the mud from our master’s boots, Trez? It would grieve me to see you starve to death.’
The archivist went back his parchments, still smiling into his rebreather. ‘I know your secret, Jago.’
‘I have no secrets.’
Shadows of Treachery Page 24