Its skin clung to its skull but loosely, as though ill-fitting and not intended to clothe the skull beneath it. Wire stitching criss-crossed its ashen face and Evlame felt he was looking into the eyes of a madman staring through a mask of stolen flesh.
‘No…’ he whispered. ‘Please don’t… I never did anything to hurt you…’
The leathery-faced monster leaned down and said, ‘I live in pain. Why should you not?’
Travelling through the empyrean was something Honsou of the Iron Warriors never enjoyed, for the placing his fate in the hands of others and the lack of influence he could bring to bear should something go wrong was anathema to him.
The strategium of the Warbreed thrummed with noise, the pounding beat of distant hammers and far-off machines vibrating the deck plates with industrious motion.
The ship had belonged to Honsou’s former master and had been moored above Medrengard for a timeless age. Honsou and his few hundred warriors had travelled from the wrecked fortress of Khalan-Ghol to the impossible landmark of the Crooked Tower in order to claim the vessel as their own.
A twisted spire of jagged black rock, the numberless steps of the Crooked Tower spiralled downwards into the bowels of Perturabo’s deepest forges and soared to the lost stars that orbited the dead world of the Iron Warriors.
They had climbed for an age, each footfall a lifetime and a heartbeat in the same breath, and the blasted earth of Medrengard had fallen away until they climbed to the stars themselves. Blackness enveloped them and a host of starships surrounded them, drifting in the utter dark and still of space.
The sheer impossibility of their physical surroundings had not fazed Honsou, and he had not been surprised when the steep stairs had led straight to the open hatches of the Warbreed.
The mighty ship had once taken the fire of the warmaster to the followers of the false Emperor in days now ancient to those who had once defied them. Its guns had bombarded the last vestiges of life from Isstvan V and its orbital strikes had helped tear open the walls of the Imperial palace on Terra.
Its pedigree was mighty and its history proud, and Honsou could think of no finer vessel to take from the silent fleet berthed around the tower’s summit.
Hissing vapours billowed and mighty pistons wheezed and ground up and down at the edges of the vaulted chamber, its walls arched with great girders of brazen metal and hung with ragged war banners of gold and black.
Cabals of hardwired crew submerged in vats of oxygen-rich oils regulated the workings of the ship and hissing mechanical creatures with multi-jointed legs drifted over the glistening pools with crackling cables trailing into the fluid.
The strategium tapered towards its front, the deck crew stationed here and plugged into the ship’s vitals more like ordinary humans, tending to the ship’s needs as it negotiated a passage between the stars through the swirling maelstrom of the immaterium. At the apex of the strategium stood the hulking, purple-robed form of Adept Cycerin, his mecha-organic flesh and kinship with the raw matter of the warp making him the perfect steersman.
‘How much longer?’ asked Honsou, his voice easily carrying the length of the strategium.
Cycerin turned his massive, machine-bulk to face Honsou, his swollen head buzzing with living circuitry and organic techno-viral strains. Slithering, blackened arms writhed like snakes from the tattered sleeves of his robes, the flesh and machine parts running like waxen mercury to form withered digits like mechanised quills.
Cycerin’s green and yellow eyes brightened with a pulse of irritation as his hands described a series of complex motions in the suddenly misty air before him. Honsou stared at the plotting table before him as the adept’s angular script appeared on the hololithic slate.
As it was every time he asked, the answer was frustratingly vague, but then what had he expected? Travel through the warp was unpredictable, even aboard a ship with a pilot uniquely qualified to ply its treacherous depths and who possessed a sense for the currents of the immaterium keener than the most aberrant patriarch of the Navis Nobilite.
Once, Cycerin had been Adeptus Mechanicus, but following his capture on the far distant world of Hydra Cordatus, he had been elevated from his paltry hybridised form of man and machine to something infinitely greater. Strands of the Obliterator virus had been merged with his augmetics and his fundamental gene structure, rendering him into something post-human and far beyond simple cybernetics.
The techno-virus had made him superior, but it had also made him arrogant.
Honsou’s memories of the Hydra Cordatus campaign felt as though they belonged to a previous life. Much had changed since then and his remembrance of the bloody siege had blurred into one unending hurricane of battle that had fanned the smouldering coal of his resentment into a roaring inferno of ambition.
Schemes of murder circled like carrion birds in his mind, threads woven from fragments of his new champion’s fractured memories and the libraries worth of knowledge in Cycerin’s cybernetic brain coming together to set them on their current course of revenge…
Many aboard the Warbreed thought him mad to pursue such a plan so soon after the bloody battle against Berossus and Toramino, but Honsou knew he would not be satisfied until he had inflicted the most wretched humiliations on the one enemy to escape him.
‘If you want to hurt the fox, first strike at its cubs…’ he whispered.
He resumed his pacing of the deck, his bearing that of a caged predator, his face a mask of irritation and anticipation. It chafed him to have set such grand designs in motion, but then be forced to wait while such mundane concerns such as warp travel forced delays upon them.
‘Pacing won’t make us travel faster,’ said Cadaras Grendel, who stood behind him, his gleaming bolter held lightly in one scarred hand, an oiled cleaning rag in the other.
‘I know,’ said Honsou, ‘but it gives me something to do instead of just waiting.’
‘You mean instead of training with your new champion.’
Honsou stopped in his pacing and said, ‘I tasked Ardaric Vaanes with his training.’
‘And that’s the only reason you’re not down there in the battle deck?’
‘Of course, what of it?’
‘It’s not him,’ said Grendel at last. ‘It’s not Ventris. It has his likeness, but it’s not him.’
‘I know that,’ snapped Honsou. ‘I’m not stupid, Grendel.’
‘I don’t blame you for not wanting to look at him,’ said Grendel, wiping the cloth along the hard edges of the gun. ‘After all, he’s the spit of the only warrior to ever beat you.’
‘Ventris did not beat me!’ shouted Honsou, rounding on his captain of arms, a warrior who had formerly served his enemy, Lord Berossus. Honsou’s axe leapt to his hands, its edge lethal and hungry.
Cadaras Grendel didn’t flinch as the axe came up to his neck.
‘Whatever you say, Warsmith,’ said the warrior, pushing the blade of the axe away with the barrel of his bolter. The muzzle passed before Honsou’s face and he saw a smile crease Grendel’s face as he stared into it. ‘He didn’t beat you, but then… you didn’t beat him either. And it’s your fortress that’s a pile of rubble, eh?’
Honsou turned away from the confrontation, irritated that Grendel had managed to rile him with such ease. Ever since the destruction of Khalan-Ghol on Medrengard, Honsou’s temper had been on a short fuse. The merest slight against his victory over the combined armies of Berossus and Toramino filled his blood with a surge of killing rage.
In any case, Grendel was right.
Each time he looked upon the face of his new champion (the newborn as it insisted on being called) he could see the features of the warrior who’d defied him and then thrown his offer to join him back in his face.
Uriel Ventris and his companion were of the Ultramarines Chapter, but what crime they had committed to be banished to a daemon world in the Eye of Terror he didn’t know. However they had come to Medrengard, they had proved to be resourceful ene
mies.
They had survived the Halls of the Savage Morticians and freed the Heart of Blood, the mighty daemon imprisoned within the heart of Khalan-Ghol.
Honsou took a deep breath and said, ‘By all the twelve sigils of the Rapturous Ruin, you almost make me wish Forrix and Kroeger weren’t dead.’
‘Who?’
‘Former captains who also commanded elements of the Warsmith’s grand company back on Hydra Cordatus,’ said Honsou, before adding pointedly. ‘They’re long dead now.’
‘Did you kill them?’
Honsou shook his head. ‘No, though I would have if they hadn’t managed it themselves.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘Forrix went up against a Titan. He lost,’ laughed Honsou, his good humour restored at the memory of his rival’s obliteration by the great war-machine’s guns.
‘And Kroeger? What did he take on?’
‘I don’t know,’ admitted Honsou. ‘Forrix told me he vanished through some kind of warp rift, but when we broke down the siege works, we found a body in his dugout.’
‘Was it Kroeger?’
Honsou shrugged. ‘Maybe, I didn’t bother to find out. Kroeger was gone, what did I care where? With them both dead, the Warsmith’s army and his fortress were mine.’
‘Until Toramino blasted it from under you,’ reminded Grendel with a viperous smile.
Honsou smiled grimly. ‘Aye, he did, but he hadn’t reckoned with the Heart of Blood.’
‘No one did. Not even you,’ said Grendel, his normally gruff voice hushed at the mention of the ancient daemon. Honsou could well understand Grendel’s tone, shuddering as he remembered rousing the daemon by kicking its head in rage at Ventris’s escape.
‘No,’ he said, ‘not even me.’
Fortunately, the creature had sensed that his flesh had once briefly hosted a creature of the warp and ignored him, instead wreaking its bloodlust on Toramino’s army beyond the walls.
The slaughter and destruction the daemon had unleashed was unlike anything Honsou had ever seen before, its ancient fury deeper than the darkest chasm in Perturabo’s lair. It had reduced everything before it utterly to ruin and Medrengard’s blazing black sun had gorged on the souls released into the dead sky.
‘Let’s hope you haven’t overlooked anything this time, eh?’ said Grendel.
‘I haven’t,’ promised Honsou.
‘We’ll see.’
‘One day I’ll kill you for your presumption,’ said Honsou. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘You’ll try,’ replied Grendel. ‘Whether you succeed… well, that’ll be an interesting day.’
Honsou ignored Grendel’s challenge and asked, ‘The newborn? You said it’s with Vaanes?’
Grendel nodded. ‘Aye, he and his misfits are training it on the battle deck below.’
‘Good.’
‘No,’ chuckled Grendel. ‘There’s nothing good about that thing at all.’
Three warriors surrounded the crouching figure in the centre of the chamber, their weapons raised before them. If their victim felt threatened, he gave no sign, his posture relaxed and his mien unconcerned at the potential violence to be unleashed against him. The three attackers were clad in armour, though no one suit resembled another in colour or repair.
One suit was a battered grey, another a faded white and the last a gleaming black. All that bound the three in any visible form of confraternity were the red crosses painted on their shoulder guards, but even those unifying marks had largely disappeared as paint flaked or was scraped away by battle damage.
Though there were no visible signs of rank, it was clear that the leader of the three was the tall warrior in black armour: Ardaric Vaanes, formerly of the Raven Guard. Vaanes was tall and slender, his bulk massive compared to a mortal, but slight for a Space Marine. Possessed of the strength to shatter bones and bend steel, his speed and poise marked him as more than a simple weapon of brute force.
The warrior to his left, Jeffar San, had once been of the White Consuls, though he now reserved his most bitter hatred for his former battle brothers. Vainglorious masters had stripped his honour from him, yet fierce warrior pride had kept him alive through their attempts to destroy him. Proud and haughty, Jeffar San was a warrior who embodied what it was to be cast from superior clay, his elegant, rapier-like sword held in the guard position.
To his right, Svoljard of the Wolf Brothers – an ill-fated Chapter from the beginning – bounced impatiently from foot to foot, his axe gripped tightly in his meaty fists. Where Vaanes exemplified the swift and sure strike, Svoljard was the wild blow that cut a man in two with a flurry of wild slashes.
All three were killers of men and xenos, warriors whose craft had been honed on a thousand battlefields under a thousand suns and who had faced the darkest horrors of the galaxy.
Yet none could quell the loathing each felt for the crouching figure between them.
The newborn squatted on one knee, his head bowed as though in some meditative trance and his grey flesh reeking of spoiled food. Unlike the warriors around him, the newborn was unarmoured, clad only in the flesh sutured to his muscle and bone.
His fists were clenched at his side and his every breath fought for existence.
‘Begin,’ said Vaanes, twin lightning claws unsheathing from his gauntlets.
Svoljard moved first, howling with an ululating war cry and slashing his axe towards the newborn. His target moved without warning, the newborn leaping from his crouched position to somersault backwards over the blow. Vaanes moved to the side, his claws raised as the newborn landed. Svoljard was exposed, his reckless attack overbalancing him, but the newborn spun away from him and batted away Jeffar San’s swinging blade with the flat of his palm.
Vaanes saw his opening and thrust with his claws, the crackling energy that normally sheathed his blades deactivated for this training session. The newborn swayed aside from the blow and pistoned the flat of his palm towards Vaanes. The former Raven Guard threw himself back to avoid the blow, but was too slow, the spoiled-meat smell of the newborn’s flesh nauseatingly strong as it hammered into his chin.
Even as he reeled from the blow, he knew it had been pulled at the last moment. He shook his head clear of the newborn’s stink, wondering briefly what Svoljard’s preternaturally sharp senses must be enduring. Perhaps that was why he was fighting with such reckless abandon, the better to end this session quickly…
The Wolf Brother howled as he attacked, his axe slashing in complex arcs as it sought to find a home in the newborn’s body. Vaanes cursed as he saw that Svoljard’s wild blows had allowed the newborn to break from being surrounded. Jeffar San fought with precise skill, but his thrusts were being hampered by Svoljard’s frenzy.
The newborn ducked a decapitating sweep of the Wolf Brother’s axe and hammered his elbow into his attacker’s side. Had any normal enemy struck such a blow, it would have barely registered on Svoljard, but ceramite plate cracked under the force of it and sent the Wolf Brother crashing to the floor.
Jeffar San had pulled back to marshal his next attack and Svoljard was completely exposed, his throat there to be ripped out.
But the newborn ignored his fallen enemy and spun to face Vaanes as the lightning claws descended to slash him open. Too slow, the newborn threw up his forearm to block the blow, and Vaanes’s claws tore down his chest, opening his sheath of flesh and laying bare his glistening musculature.
The newborn howled in agony and dropped to his knees as Jeffar San lunged and thrust his blade between his ribs from behind. The tip of the weapon punched through the newborn’s chest and a froth of stinking blood washed down his opened chest.
Svoljard rolled to his feet with a roar of anger and swept his axe high to cleave the newborn from top to bottom, but Vaanes retracted his claws and thundered his fist into the charging warrior’s face. Svoljard crashed to the deck, his face a mask of anger and blood where Vaanes had broken his nose.
‘Enough!’ shouted
Vaanes. ‘It’s over.’
‘I’ll kill you!’ snarled Svoljard, spitting a wad of coagulated blood from between his fanged teeth. ‘You shame me in front of his… pet.’
‘You shame yourself with your anger,’ spat Vaanes. ‘Now clean yourself up before we go again.’
Svoljard spat more blood on the deck, but turned and stalked off to the benches at the side of the deck. Vaanes let out a relieved breath as he watched Svoljard’s retreating back. Without the discipline he had been used to in his time with his Chapter, the Wolf Brother was becoming more feral and uncontrolled, his anger making him more of a liability than an ally.
‘Be careful, Vaanes,’ warned Jeffar San, appearing at his side and running a hand through his long blond hair. ‘One day he will not hold his rage in check.’
‘I know,’ replied Vaanes sourly, ‘but I have you to watch my back, don’t I?’
The White Consul nodded stiffly and sheathed his sword in one smooth motion. ‘I swore an oath to do so on that dead world, did I not?’
Vaanes gave a short bark of bitter laughter and said, ‘We all swore oaths a long time ago, my friend and look where it’s got us.’
Jeffar San did not reply, but bowed stiffly before turning on his heel and marching towards his weapon rack. Vaanes sighed and hung his head as the last of his surviving warriors took his leave.
‘You antagonise the warriors who follow you,’ said a thick voice behind him. ‘I do not think that will foster their loyalty, or is there something I am missing?’
‘No,’ said Vaanes, turning to see the newborn standing behind him. A raw, sucking sound rippled from his flesh as the dead skin that clothed the newborn reknit itself whole once more.
A crawling yellow glow, like the last light of a wounded sun, seeped from the wounds he and Jeffar San had caused, the warp-born energies that had fuelled this… creature’s unnatural growth, keeping him alive despite injuries that would have killed a normal man thrice over.
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