They dare blame me for this…
They open fire.
I am not a heretic.
But this must end.
V
ZAVIEN REACHED DRYFIELD just as the sun was setting.
He had left the jungle behind three hours before. The lone warrior's run came to an end at the fortified walls - outside the mining settlement, he heard no sound from within, only the desperate howl of the wind across the wasteland.
Hailing the walls, calling for sentries, earned him no response.
The settlement's gates were sealed: a jury-rigged amalgamation of steel bars, flakboard and even furniture piled high behind the double doors in the wall ringing the village. These pitiful defences were the colony's attempts to reinforce their walls against the ork hordes sweeping across the planet.
With neither the time nor the inclination to hammer the gates open through force, Zavien mag-locked his axe to his back and punched handholds in the metal wall itself, dragging himself to the ramparts fifteen metres above.
The village was a collection of one-storey buildings, perhaps enough to house fifteen families. A dirt track cut through the village's centre like an old scar; evidence of the supply convoys that made it this far out from the main hives, and the passage of ore haulers who came to profit from the local copper mine. Low-quality metal would be in great demand by the planet's impoverished citizens, who could afford no better.
The largest building - indeed, the only one that was more than a hut made from scrap - was a spired church bedecked in crudely-carved gargoyles.
Zavien acknowledged all of this in a heartbeat's span. The Astartes scanned the ramshackle battlements around the village, then turned to stare at the settlement itself.
No sign of movement.
He walked from the platform, falling the fifteen metres to the ground and landing in a balanced crouch.
He came across the first body less than a minute later.
A woman. Unarmed. Slumped against the wall of a hovel, a blood-smear decorating the wall behind her. She was carved in half, and not cleanly.
The wide streets between the ramshackle huts and homes were decorated with trails of blood and the tracks of weight dragged through the dirt. All of these led to the same place. Whomever had come here and slain the colonists had dragged the bodies to the modest church with its shattered windows and corroded walls of flakboard and red iron.
Zavien's retinal locator display was finally picking up faint returns from Jarl's war plate. His brother was inside, no longer running. And from the silence, no longer killing.
The Flesh Tearer stalked past the weaponless corpse, limp in its lifeless repose, slain by his own sword in his brother's hands. Zavien had seen such things before - they were images he would never forget while he still drew breath.
He felt cold, clinging shame run through his blood like a toxin. Just like at Gaius Point.
It wasn't supposed to happen.
At Gaius Point.
It was never supposed to happen.
THAT NIGHT, THEY had damned themselves forever.
It should have been a triumph worthy of being etched onto the armour of every warrior that fought there.
The Imperial front line was held by the Point's militia and the Order of the Argent Shroud, who had rallied the people of the wasteland town into an armed fighting force and raised morale to fever pitch through their sermons and blessings in the name of the God-Emperor.
The greenskins descended in a swarm of thousands, hurling themselves at the town's barricades, their mass forming a sea of bellowing challenges, leathery flesh and hacking blades.
At the battle's apex, the Sisters and the militia were on the edge of being overwhelmed. At last, and when it mattered most, Gaius Point's frantic distress calls were answered.
They came in Thunderhawks, boosters howling as they soared over the embattled horde. The gunships kissed the scorched earth only long enough to deploy their forces: almost two hundred Astartes in armour of arterial red and charcoal black. The rattling roar of so many chainblades came together in a ragged, ear splitting choms, sounding like the war-cry of a mechanical god.
Zavien was in the first wave. Alongside Jarl and his brothers, he hewed left and right, his blade's grinding teeth chewing through armour and bloody, fungal flesh as the sons of Sanguinius reaped the aliens' lives.
The orks were butchered in droves, caught between a hammer and anvil, being annihilated from behind and gunned down from the front.
Zavien saw nothing but blood. Xenos blood, stinking and thick, splashing across his helm. The smell of triumph, the reek of exultant victory.
He was also one of the first to the barricades.
By then, he couldn't see. He couldn't think. His senses were flooded by stimuli, all of it aching, enticing and maddening. He tried to speak, but it tore from his lips as a cry aimed at the polluted skies. Even breathing did nothing but draw the rich scent of alien blood deeper into his body, disseminating it through his system. To be so saturated by xenos taint ignited a fire in his mind, tapping into the gene-deep fury that forever threatened to overwhelm him.
Driven on by the ceaseless urge to drown his senses in the purity of enemy blood, Zavien disembowelled the last ork before him, and vaulted the barricade. He had to kill. He had to kill. He was born for nothing else.
He and his brothers had been fighting in ferocious hand-to-hand battle for two hours. The enemy was destroyed. The joyous cheers of the militia died in thousands of throats as, in a wave of vox-screams and howling chainswords, half of the Flesh Tearers broke the barricades and ran into the town.
With no foes to slay, the Astartes turned their rage upon whatever still lived.
The Angel mourned the slain.
Their deaths were a dark necessity on the path to redemption. The prayers he chanted to the ceiling of the Emperor's throne room inspired tears in his eyes, and tears in the eyes of the thousands of loyal soldiers staring on.
'We must burn the slain,' he whispered through the silver tears. 'We must forever remember those who died this day, and remember the foulness that turned their hearts against us.'
'Sanguinius!' a voice cried from behind. It echoed throughout the chamber, where a million banners hung in the breezeless air, marking every regiment ever sworn to fight and die for the young Imperium of Man.
The Angel tilted his head, the very image of patient purity.
'I thought I killed you, heretic.'
'JARL!'
Wheezing, mumbling, with bloody saliva running in strings from his damaged mouth grille, Jarl staggered around to face his brother.
What burbled from his mouth was a mixture of languages, wet with the blood in his throat. The chemical reek of Jarl's body assaulted Zavien's senses even over the smell of his brother's burned armour and the reek of the slain. The combat narcotics flooding Jarl's body were eating him alive.
Zavien did nothing but stare for several moments after he called his brother's name. The dead were everywhere, piled all across the floor of the church, a slumbering congregation of the slaughtered. Perhaps a hundred of them, all dragged here after the carnage. Perhaps many of them had been found here in worshipful service, and only half the village had needed to be dragged. Trails of streaked, smeared blood marked the floor.
'Burn the bodies,' Jarl said in grunted Cretacian, the tongue of their shared home world, amongst a screed of words Zavien couldn't make out. 'Purge the sin, burn the bodies, cleanse the palace.'
Zavien raised his chainaxe. In sickening mirror image, his blood-maddened brother raised his dripping chainsword.
'This ends now, Jarl.'
There was a bark of syllables, a drooling mess of annihilated words.
The Angel raised his golden blade.
He had been so foolish. This was no mere heretic. Had he been blinded all along? Yes… the machinations of the tainted traitors had shrouded his golden eyes from the truth. But now… Now he saw everything.
'Yes
, Horus,' he said with a smile that spoke of infinite regret. 'It ends now.'
VI
THE BROTHERS MET in the defiled church, their boots struggling to grip the mosaic-laid floor, awash as it was with innocent blood. The whining roar of chainblades was punctuated by crashes as the weapons met. Jagged teeth shattered with every block and parry, clattering against nearby wooden pews as they were torn from their sockets.
Zavien's blood hammered through his body, tingling with the electric edge of combat stimulants. Jarl was a shadow of the warrior he had been - frothing at the mouth, raving at allies that didn't exist, and half-crippled by the lethal battle-drug overdose that was burning out his organs.
Zavien blocked his brother's frantic, shaking cuts. Every time his axe fell, he'd carve another chasm into Jarl's armour. Ultimately, only one warrior was aware enough to know this would never be settled by chainblades.
With a last block and a savage return, Zavien smashed Jarl's blade aside and kicked it from his grip. Its engine stuttered to a halt, resting on the tiled ground. Jarl watched it fly from his grip with delayed, bleeding vision.
Before he could recover, Zavien's hands were at his throat. The Flesh Tearer squeezed, his hands crunching into Jarl's neck, collapsing the softer joint-armour there and vicing into the flesh beneath.
Jarl fell to his knees as his brother strangled him. His gene-enhanced physiology was poisoned by both the curse and the narcotics, and his sight began to darken as his body could take no more punishment.
Darken, yet clear.
Deprived of air, unable to even draw a shred of breath, he mouthed a voiceless word that never left the confines of his charred helm.
'Zavien!
Zavien wrenched his grip to the side, snapping the bones of his brother's spine, and still strangling.
He stood like this for some time. Night had fallen before the warrior's gauntlets released their burden and Jarl's body finally slumped to the ground.
There the madman rested, asleep among those he had slain.
'It is done,' Zavien spoke into his squad's vox channel, his eyes closed as only silence replied. 'Jarl is dead, brothers. It is done.'
HE CHOSE TO finish what his brother had begun. Even in madness, there sometimes hides a little sense.
The bodies had to be burned. Not to purify any imagined heresy, but to hide the evidence of what had happened here.
It was never supposed to happen. Here, or at Gaius Point. They had damned themselves, and all that remained was to fight as loyally as they could before righteous vengeance caught up with them all.
As the church burned, pouring thick black smoke into the polluted sky, the sound of engines grumbled from the horizon.
Orks. The enemy was finally here.
Zavien stood among the flames, immune to them, his axe in his hand. The fire would draw the aliens closer. There was no way he could defend the whole village against them, but the thought of shedding and tasting their blood before he finally fell ignited his killing urge.
His fangs ached as the vehicles pulled in to a halt outside.
No.
Those engine sounds were too clean, too well-maintained. It was the enemy. But it was not the greenskins.
* * *
I WALK FROM the church, the broken axe in my hand.
There are twenty of them. In human unison, impressive enough even if it lacks the perfection of Astartes unity, they raise their bolters. The Sisters of the Order of the Argent Shroud. The silver hulls of their tanks and their own armour are turned a flickering orange-red in the light of the fire that should have hidden our sins.
Twenty guns aim at me.
The thirst fades. My hunger to taste blood trickles back into my throat, suddenly ignorable.
'We were at Gaius Point,' the lead sister calls out. Their eyes are narrowed at the brightness of the flame behind me.
I do not move. I tell them, simply:
'I know.'
'We have petitioned the Inquisition for your Chapter's destruction, Flesh Tearer.'
'I know.'
'That is all you have to say for yourself, heretic? After Gaius Point? After killing the squad of our sister Amalay D'Vorien? After massacring an entire village?'
'You came to pass judgement,' I tell her. 'So do it.'
'We came to defend this colony against your wretched blasphemy!'
They still fear me. Even outnumbered and armed only with a shattered axe, they still fear me. I can smell it in their sweat, hear it in their voices, and see it in their wide eyes that reflect the flames.
I look over my shoulder, where Jarl's legacy burns. Motes of amber fire sail up from the blaze. My brother's funeral pyre, and a testament to what we have all become. A monument to how far we have fallen.
We burn our dead on Cretacia. Because so many are killed by poisons and beasts and the predator-king reptiles, it is a mark of honour to die and be burned, rather than be taken by the forest.
It was never meant to be like this. Not here, and not at Gaius Point.
Twenty bolters open fire before I can look back.
I don't hear them. I don't feel the wet, knifing pain of destruction.
All I hear is the roar of a Cretacian predator-king, the fury rising from its reptilian jaws as it stalks the jungles of my home world. A carnosaur, black-scaled and huge, roaring up to the clear, clean skies.
It hunts me. It hunts me now, as it hunted me so long ago, at the start of this second life.
I reach for my spear, and…
Zavien clutches the weapon against his chest.
It is death itself he grunts to his tribal brothers as they crouch in the undergrowth. The tongue of Cretacia is simple and plain, little more than the rudiments of true language. 'The king-lizard is death itself. It comes for us.'
The carnosaur shakes the ground with another slow step closer. It breathes in short sniffs, mouth open, jaws slack, tasting the air for scents. A grey tongue the size of a man quivers in its maw.
The spear in his steady grip is the one he made himself. A long shaft of dark wood with afire-blackened point. He has used it for three years now, since his tenth winter, to hunt for his tribe.
He does not hunt for his tribe today. Today, as the sun burns down and bakes their backs, he hunts because the gods are in the jungle, and they are watching. The tribes have seen the gods in their armour of red metal and black stone, always in the shadows, watching the hunting parties as they stalk their prey.
If a hunter wishes to dwell in paradise among the stars, he must hunt well when the gods walk the jungles.
Zavien stares at the towering lizard-beast, unable to look away from its watery, slitted red eye.
He shifts his grip on the spear he crafted.
With a prayer that the gods are bearing witness to his courage, he throws the weapon with a heartfelt scream.
THE FLESH TEARER crashed to the bloodstained ground, face down in the dust.
'Cease fire,' Sister Superior Mercy Astaran said softly. Her sisters obeyed immediately.
'But he still lives,' one of them replied.
This was true. The warrior was dragging himself with gut-wrenching slowness, one-armed and with a trembling hand, through the dirt. A dark trail of broken armour and leaking lifeblood pooled around him.
He raised his shaking hand once more, dug the spasming fingers into the ground, and dragged himself another half-metre closer to the burning church's front door.
'Is he seeking to escape?' one of the youngest sisters asked, unwilling to admit her admiration for the heretic's endurance. One arm lost at the elbow, both legs destroyed from the knees down, and his armour a cracked mess that leaked coolant fluids and rich, red Astartes blood.
'It is hardly escape to crawl into a burning building,' another laughed.
'He wishes to die among the blasphemy he caused,' Astaran said, her scowl even harsher in the firelight. 'End him.'
A single gunshot rang out from the battle-line.
Zavien
's fingers stopped trembling. His reaching hand fell into the dust. His eyes, which had first opened to see the clear skies of a distant world, closed at last.
'WHAT SHOULD WE do with the body?' Sister Mercy Astaran asked her commander.
'Let the echoes of this heresy remain as an example, at least until the greenskins take control of the surrounding wastelands. Come sisters, we do not have much time. Leave this wretch for the vultures.'
BLOOD DEBT
James Swallow
THEY ABANDONED THE groundcar at the port gate when blood began to drool from the ventilator grilles. The machine grunted and sighed, the glass in the windows popping as it shifted and changed shape. The two of them ran, boots hammering across the road, shouldering their way through the swarming throng of terrified people.
The woman surveyed the crowds with care. It was not the first time she had been in the thick of a frightened mass, and she knew the capricious nature of a mob's animal mentality. With the right demonstration of force they could be cowed, but just as quickly they might turn murderous. These screaming, weeping, scrambling hordes were heavy with fear. They wanted so desperately to live, and yet she knew that to a man they would be dead or dying before sunset.
She threw a glance over her shoulder and her companion gave her a frown. He had never once looked back at the city they were leaving behind, not from the moment that they had embarked on their headlong flight. In the distance she could see where some of the taller hive towers had collapsed, parts of their structure altering on the molecular level, steel skeletons running like melted butter as the changes touched them. Building that had stood proud and defiant in the most Imperial manners were now shambolic, tattered things, flayed of stone and bearing their iron ribs to the sky. Dots ducked and wove in the air overhead - perhaps carrion birds, or maybe men and women like the ones she had killed to get the car, humans with newly sprouted wings still wet with amniotic fluid.
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