Horus Heresy: Scars

by Chris Wraight

  Had Hasik arranged the rendezvous? If so, why?

  Ilya scrabbled to pull up more data from the cracked screens. With Halji out of the way, she could work more quickly.

  More ships entered augur range – two of them, burning through the outer system at high speed. No markers, no idents, just sub-warp signatures and the telltale flicker of void shield activation. Ilya stared at the signals for a while, unable to gauge where they had emerged from or what they were doing.

  The White Scars fleet was paralysed. Their ships were not moving to counter either threat closing in on them. If what was happening on the Swordstorm was taking place on the other warships, then Ilya could see why – the Legion had turned upon itself, as if hidden divisions had suddenly been exposed everywhere at once.

  Of course, she had played a part in it. The Kaljian’s warriors would have had a harder time getting on board the ship if she had not deactivated the defences over docking bay 567. That had been Halji’s fault – she had never liked to resort to deception, whatever the cause.

  ‘Where is the Khagan?’ came a shout from the far end of the bridge hall – a Space Marine’s voice, filtered through a helm-vox.

  It was a good voice – hard, with Chogorian depth to it, but untainted by rancour. Ilya was instantly glad of the choice she had made.

  ‘He will return, Shiban,’ Hasik replied. ‘This is pointless. We are not traitors – it will all be resolved.’

  Traitors. The word chilled her. She remembered what Qin Xa had told her, and the snippets of information she had gleaned from talking to the Khagan.

  With a twist in her stomach, she knew what would happen next. The stakes were too high to leave things hanging unresolved – the invaders were going to charge again. This time it would not stop, not until only one faction remained on the bridge, traitor or loyalist, whichever was which.

  She couldn’t just watch. It would almost certainly be futile, possibly suicidal, but standing idly by had never been her way.

  With her palms slick with nervous sweat, Ilya prepared to move.

  Hold position, Shiban signalled to his surviving warriors, all pinned down close to where they had burst in at the near end of the hall. Stay in cover.

  ‘I have no wish to kill you,’ cried Hasik. ‘You are out-gunned. Heavily. Let this be an end to it.’

  Shiban turned to see Jochi, who was crouched down in the shadow of a pillar a few metres to his right. It looked like he had taken a hit, and was breathing heavily.

  ‘What do you think?’ Shiban voxed.

  Jochi shook his head. Shiban knew what expression he would be wearing under his helm – a rueful smile. ‘Too many,’ he replied.

  Shiban nodded. ‘Far too many.’

  ‘But you will order it anyway.’

  Shiban ran another sweep of the chamber. They were outnumbered three-to-one, and the defenders were better armed and better placed. It would be a massacre, with no guarantee of getting even halfway to where they needed to be.

  But he might at least make it to Hasik. That would be worth something.

  ‘On my mark,’ he voxed to what remained of his warriors. ‘The throne is the target.’ He heard the slam and click of bolters being reloaded. All around him, his brothers made their final preparations.

  ‘If we are to die here,’ he added, taking up the glaive again and preparing to burst from cover, ‘then we will die fighting. For the Khan, brothers. For the Khan.’

  Ilya jumped to her feet, her heart pounding, and ran into the open.

  ‘No!’ she shouted, ludicrously, as if any of them would pay attention to the sudden intervention of an old woman with no combat training. She stood up, shaking with fear, determined to do something. ‘Why are you doing this?’

  Her words were never heard, not by the assembled White Scars, not even by her.

  A deafening roar boomed through the entire bridge, like a starship engine keying up to burn. An eye-burning light blazed, followed by the lash of energy coiling. The iridescence blew out almost as quickly as it had come, leaving clanging echoes in its wake.

  Ilya blinked hard, her eyes watering madly. By the time her vision had cleared, the bridge looked like a very different place.

  Hundreds more White Scars legionaries stood arrayed in ranks across the outer circle of the bridge, all aiming their bolters at the command throne. The acrid residue of teleportation hung in the air, making the hairs on her neck stand up.

  For a moment longer she remained entirely bewildered. Then she recognised the master-crafted Terminator plate of Jemulan Noyan-Khan, with his retinue of veterans at his back, and carrying a hissing power sword.

  ‘Stand down, Hasik,’ Jemulan said firmly. ‘The attempt to alter our path has failed.’

  Hasik made no move to comply. To Ilya’s eyes the forces now looked evenly matched, which made her heart sink further. Combat between them would rip the bridge to pieces.

  ‘Not at all, brother,’ Hasik replied. ‘It is just incomplete. Do not stand in the way of progress – you do not have the whole picture.’

  ‘No doubt, but this is not your choice to make.’

  ‘It is the only choice.’

  ‘Then it is no choice at all,’ Jemulan replied. All around him, his troops picked out their targets. Ilya felt like shrinking back behind her sensor console – the tension hung heavily, like a thunderhead about to break.

  She started to move, ducking down below the line of cogitator housings and crawling back into something like cover. As she did so, she noticed the teleportation chamber, still operative but a long way away. With her heart in her mouth, she began to move towards it.

  As she did so, she heard the command that she had dreaded, issued from the vox-grille of one of the commanders – she did not even recognise which one.

  ‘So there is nothing more to say. Open fire.’

  The Khan struck first, moving faster than thought, his cloak swirling about him. Mortarion met the blow with his scythe, and a radial wave shot out from Silence, throwing up the ash in swirling clouds.

  The Deathshroud lumbered into range, swinging their own scythes. Qin Xa’s warriors engaged them, charging across the cracked stone and bringing their blades to bear. Neon-blue claws clashed with heavy iron, sending dull clangs resounding across the empty square. Amidst the ruins of Tizca, the two forces slammed together, moving like choreographed dancers as the eyeless faces of old statues gazed down at them.

  ‘I see your mind, brother,’ hissed the Khan, hammering home the attack. ‘You would turn me, or end me.’

  Mortarion grunted as he blocked the incoming dao. He moved far more slowly than the Khan, but everything he did was solid, dense, and indomitable. ‘If you’re stubborn enough not to see the chance here, then, yes – your time is over.’

  The Khan laughed. Wielding his blade again freely felt good. The psychneuein had been a trivial challenge – going up against a fellow primarch was the kind of test he had missed for too long.

  He darted in close, spinning on one boot before thrusting his sword at Mortarion’s midriff. The strike was blocked, but the Death Lord stumbled.

  ‘So slow,’ taunted the Khan. His blade danced, flashing like the lightning above. Every strike was weighted heavily, slicing chunks from Mortarion’s thick plate as if it were corroded scrap. ‘You got everything wrong. Why exchange one master for another? And do not take me for a fool – only one soul may rule from the Throneworld.’

  He heard the clash of blades around him, the soft rush of bolter-discharge and the heavy bang of the shells detonating. More cracks opened up underfoot, glowing red like molten steel. Muzzle-flashes lit up ruined, carven images on ancient stonework, starkly revealing the Prosperine occult devices engraved upon every facet.

  Mortarion rallied, breathing hard. Though his reflexes were slow, his strength was impressive. He had already taken blows that would have felled a lesser warrior and yet seemed barely troubled.

  ‘Your Legion called out,’ he snarled, wielding
Silence in deadening sweeps. ‘You have cells operating in every brotherhood, desperate to serve. All we did was answer them.’

  The Khan laughed again. He felt alive, unfettered, free for the first time in months to act. ‘The lodges, eh? Secret societies? You think that’ll be enough to drag us behind the Warmaster?’

  Mortarion dug in, and his heavy boots sank into the ash. The Khan launched a series of blistering dao-blows, glancing off the Death Lord’s thick pauldrons and sending him reeling.

  ‘I let them meet,’ the Khan said. His blade was moving brutally, smearing with speed and clanging from the scythe. ‘I have always let them. I am not a tyrant, brother.’

  Mortarion started to rally, meeting the Khan’s fury with resolute efficiency. He took a stride back in close, planting his feet widely to close down another incoming stroke. The two weapons twisted and rebounded, sending sparks flying through the gloom. The intensity of it was vicious. Every perfect movement was vindication of the Emperor’s gene-majesty, albeit exemplified in two totally different aspects. The troops battling around them, themselves titans of combat, were reduced to irrelevance, like mortal warriors straying into the quarrels of gods.

  ‘We are all tyrants,’ Mortarion rasped, picking up the pace of his scythe-blows. ‘Do not fool yourself. We were bred for nothing else.’

  ‘Not I,’ said the Khan, whirling around him, moving with an almost unconscious balance. ‘I care nothing for dominion. Never have. You, on the other hand... You. You yearn for it.’

  The Khan drove Mortarion back further, pounding and pummelling him across the square’s margins and towards the edge of the broken pyramid. They reeled together under the shadow of Photep’s Arch, the old entrance to the immense vaults within, now roofless and gaping.

  The Khan felt brief flashes of warp-fire, and guessed that it was Arvida. He heard Qin Xa’s battle-cry, and gloried in it. The keshig-master was a superlative warrior, and he had no fear for him, nor any of the others.

  They could fight now. They knew the enemy. They could see him, and that was enough.

  ‘I deserve it,’ Mortarion wheezed, gasping into his rebreather as he laboured under the assault. ‘I always deserved it. You could have joined me.’

  The Khan did not relent. His blade was like a shard of starlight, fierce and irresistible. ‘Your time will come. You tell me the warp should be forgotten, shut away. How little you know. It will come for you now. Killing you here will be a mercy. I can already see your future darkening, dragging at your very soul.’

  The two of them thundered across the base level of the pyramid, followed at every step by the echoing clash of arms around them. The edifice’s open carcass rose up high above, its broken spars jutting upwards in perfect geometry towards a non-existent apex. The old internal walls, half slumped into rubble and riddled with yawning gaps, twisted away from them in a labyrinth of complexity.

  ‘All futures are dark, now,’ Mortarion replied, swiping savagely and backhanding his scythe into the edge of an exposed archway. The keystone smashed to rubble around him. ‘You have no idea what Horus has become, nor the Emperor. They are both monsters, but you have chosen the wrong one. Horus is a fighter. He is one of us, not some immortal… aberration.’

  The Khan laughed as he pursued him, this time from genuine pleasure. ‘Immortal aberration?’ he mused, dragging his blade down at a sharp angle and nearly severing a thicket of Mortarion’s feeder cables. ‘We all share his blood. What does that make us?’

  More powdered stonework, destroyed by Mortarion’s wild scythe-blows, bloomed in a cloud around them. Bolt-trails whined and punched through the haze before cracking into what remained of the architecture. Uncaring of anything but their own contest, the two primarchs hacked their way towards the pyramid’s core, overshadowed by immense pillars and gaping roof-curves, trading blows of such heft that the earth shuddered beneath them.

  ‘Just what do you think will happen here?’ spat Mortarion, digging in again and halting his backward course. His armour had been hacked into a tattered parody of its former solidity. ‘Do you think you can behead me, like Fulgrim did Ferrus?’

  The Khan missed his aim then for the first time.

  Was that true? Was Ferrus gone?

  Mortarion surged back at him, kicking the hilt of Silence hard into the Khan’s leading leg. The ivory greave-plate cracked, fizzing with energy as the ceramite fractured.

  The Khan veered away from the follow-up strike, nearly losing his footing entirely. He staggered backwards as Mortarion went onto the offensive.

  ‘Oh yes, he’s dead,’ Mortarion rasped. ‘The numbers are against already you. They will only get worse.’

  The Khan glanced upwards, up into the immense voids of the pyramid’s heights. Tiny flecks of glass rained down from the smashed apex, sparkling bloodily from the fires kindling in the fissures below. Prospero’s landscape growled its sullen anger, as though the world itself were outraged at a second duel of primarchs upon its soil. The carbon-dark sky, starless and empty, roiled above the jagged maw of the summit.

  Mortarion’s cloak spread wide, buoyed by hot updraughts from the cobweb of glowing crevasses. For a moment, he looked like some vision of the underworld, a phantom of old Chogoris – consumed by yaksha, eternal and devilish.

  The Khan fell back further, holding his dao two-handed. Mortarion was strong, as strong as the roots of the Ulaav mountains, but he was slow. The two of them were perfectly matched, like two sides of a medal.

  If we fought on the same side, he and I, countering our weaknesses, could anything stand before us? he thought. Even Horus? Even the Emperor?

  He gazed into Mortarion’s pallid face and saw the resentment burning there, just as it did in him.

  He is lost. We have all been betrayed.

  The Death Lord strode closer, sweeping Silence low and hard, his expression curdling into hatred, his sclerotic breath low and rapid.

  ‘Come then, brother,’ said the Khan, bracing for the impact once more, holding position amidst the glass tears of Magnus’s lost city. ‘Let us decide this, you and I. For eternity.’

  Yesugei stood upon the Sickle Moon’s command bridge watching Prospero grow rapidly in the forward view. Lushan, armoured for the coming combat, bellowed orders to the crew, no doubt still convinced that the ship was going to break up around him at any minute.

  The last stage had been the most punishing of all, tearing at the Geller field and ravaging the warp drives. Yesugei had heard the screams of yaksha even in his waking hours. When he went to assist the Navigators, the beasts had been clearly visible in the seething hell beyond the real-view blisters, ramming up against the ship’s warp-wake and scrabbling at the hull as it tore through their domain.

  They had almost lost the Hesiod, but a combination of Henricos’s tech-mastery and the combined efforts of Yesugei and the Navigators had somehow got them through. They had broken into real space at the closest vector possible, after which the engines had burned like miniature suns to bring them into orbit around the dying world. Even from far out, Yesugei felt the psychic terror still resonant on the planet, like a blackened scab over an old and deep wound.

  ‘What of the fleet?’ he asked again, unable to make sense of the data that his sensors were giving him.

  ‘Out of position,’ replied Lushan, disbelievingly. ‘Scattered. No defensive lines, nothing.’

  Yesugei felt deep unease. Some of the White Scars warships were visibly drifting, others moving to intercept one another. None of them were responding to the Death Guard vessels coming in to engage them.

  ‘Bring lances online,’ he ordered. ‘Take us at the Death Guard formation and open fire. Hit them with everything we have.’

  Lushan nodded, and barked orders down the chain of command. Almost instantly, the Sickle Moon’s course switched, taking the ship hard away two points to starboard and thundering towards the closest XIV Legion battleship. The bridge filled with the growl and judder of weapon systems powering up, and
void shields rippled across the forward viewports.

  They had moved efficiently, but they were still slower than the Hesiod – Henricos’s thirst for vengeance drove him harder than all of them. His machine-spare voice hissed over the bridge-comm.

  ‘We don’t have the guns to take them all on,’ he observed.

  ‘Do not need to,’ replied Yesugei in Gothic, watching as the enemy hurtled into range. The Death Guard looked complacent, concentrated on drawing close to the embattled White Scars fleet. ‘Something very wrong. Need only to clarify thoughts of my brothers.’

  ‘What are they doing? It’s like they’re fighting–’

  ‘They will come around.’

  ‘And the Khan? Do you sense him?’

  Yesugei glanced at the dark orb on the screen, now filling half the scopes. He sensed nothing but the residue of some enormous warp-agony, as if the entire population had been wrenched out of their bodies and shriven. The planet was still wrapped in aetheric energies.

  ‘No,’ he said grimly. ‘Not yet.’

  Henricos sent a low grunt over the comm-link, as if that confirmed something he had long suspected. ‘Changes nothing,’ he said. ‘We can still hurt those bastards.’

  Yesugei nodded, gauging the rapidly closing space between their vessels and the enemy. Both the Hesiod and the Sickle Moon were far smaller than the four main enemy ships, and they had escorts already racing to intercept.

  ‘That we can, my brother,’ he said quietly.

  Mortarion’s raw strength was renewed. Facing it full-on, the Khan doubted that any of his brothers, save perhaps Ferrus, could have matched it. The Death Lord absorbed every strike that connected, sucking the power out of the blows like a leech, taking the hits and coming back for more.

  The tenacity of the Death Guard was legendary, as was their ability to absorb punishment and just keep coming. Now, witnessing them in combat for the first time, he appreciated just how true it was. The silent Deathshroud were as implacable as their master, still fighting with the keshig amidst the wreckage. Warriors of both sides had already fallen, their bodies caked in the drifting dust, but the fighting continued around them, bitter and unyielding.