Honsou sprang back from a decapitating sweep of Pashtoq Uluvent’s axe, swaying aside as Etassay’s black sword licked out and sliced into his shoulder guard. Honsou’s black-bladed axe lashed out in a wide arc, forcing both opponents back and the three champions broke from the centre of the arena.
Etassay danced away from Honsou, swords twirling and face unreadable behind the leather mask, while Uluvent hefted his sword in a tight grip, watching warily for any movement from his opponents. Honsou knew Uluvent was the stronger of his foes, but Etassay’s speed was ferocious, and who knew what power rested in his dark blades.
Honsou’s axe was hungry for killing and he felt its insatiable lust to wreak harm running along the length of its haft and into his limbs. Or at least one of them. The power residing in the silver arm he had taken from the Ultramarines sergeant was anathema to the creature bound to his weapon.
This stage of a battle would be where each warrior sought to gauge the measure of the other, searching for signs of weakness or fear to be exploited. Honsou knew he would find neither in these two opponents, warriors hardened by decades of war and devotion to their gods.
Every fibre of Uluvent’s being would be dedicated to killing in the Blood God’s name, while Etassay would seek to wring every sensation from this bout. Winning would be secondary to the desire to experience the furthest excesses of violence, pain and pleasure.
Honsou cared nothing for the thrill of the fight, nor the honour of the kill. This entire endeavour was a means to an end. He cared nothing for the piratical schemes of the Tyrant, nor honouring any one of the ancient gods of the warp.
Etassay made the first move, leaping in close to Uluvent, his dark swords singing for the red-armoured champion. Uluvent moved swiftly, swinging his own sword up to block the blows and spinning on his heel to slash at Etassay’s back. But the champion of the Dark Prince was no longer there, vaulting up and over the blade in a looping backwards somersault.
Honsou charged in, swinging his axe for Etassay, but the warrior dropped beneath the blow and smoothly pivoted onto his elbow, swinging his body out like a blade to take Honsou’s legs out from under him.
Uluvent leapt towards Honsou as he fell, the red-bladed sword thrust downwards at his chest, but Honsou scrambled aside and the weapon plunged into the earth. Etassay’s boot thundered against Uluvent’s helmet and the roaring champion of the Blood God fell back, leaving his sword jammed in the ground.
Honsou pushed himself to his feet and furiously blocked and parried as Etassay spun away from his attack on Uluvent and came at him with a dizzying series of sword strikes. The champion of the Dark Prince was unimaginably fast and it was all Honsou could do to keep himself from being sliced into ribbons. His armour was scored and sliced numerous times and he realised that Etassay was playing with him, prolonging the battle to better enjoy the sense of superiority.
Honsou’s bitterness flared, but he fought against it, knowing that Etassay would punish him for even the smallest lapse in concentration. Instead he forced himself to concentrate on exploiting the warrior’s arrogance. Etassay thought he was better than Honsou and that would be his downfall.
Out of the corner of his eye, Honsou saw Uluvent circling them, waiting on a chance to reclaim his sword with a patience the Blood God’s warriors were not known for. Honsou kept himself close to the weapon, forcing Uluvent to keep his distance. One opponent he could handle. Two? Probably not.
At last Etassay seemed to tire of Honsou and said, ‘Let the other one have his blade. This contest is tiresome without his colourful rages.’
Honsou did not reply, instead turning towards the sword embedded in the sand and hacking his daemon axe through the blade. Uluvent’s sword shattered into a thousand fragments and Honsou sensed Etassay’s petulant displeasure through the studded mask.
Etassay leapt towards him, but Honsou had banked on such a manoeuvre and was ready for it. He hammered the pommel of his axe into Etassay’s sternum and the champion dropped to the ground with a strangled, breathless cry.
Honsou heard Uluvent make his move and turned as he stamped down hard on Etassay’s chest, hearing a brittle crack of bone. Uluvent slammed into Honsou and they tumbled to the sand. Honsou lost his grip on his axe as Uluvent’s gauntlets fastened on his throat. The two warriors grappled in the bloody sand, pummelling one another with iron-hard fists.
Uluvent spat into Honsou’s face. ‘Now you die!’
Honsou rammed his knee into Uluvent’s stomach, but the warrior’s grip was unbreakable. Again and again he slammed his knee upwards until at last he felt the grip on his throat loosen. He managed to free one arm and slammed the heel of his palm into Uluvent’s skull-faced helmet. Bone shattered and the bleeding wound in Uluvent’s neck was exposed, spattering Honsou’s helmet in blood.
Honsou slammed his fist into the wound, digging his fingers into Uluvent’s neck and tearing the cut wider. His foe bellowed in pain and rolled off Honsou, rising unsteadily to his feet and lurching over to his followers to retrieve another weapon with one hand pressed to the ruin of his neck.
Honsou stood, groggy and battered, and set off after Uluvent, snatching his axe up from the ground next to the groaning figure of Etassay. He ignored the Dark Prince’s champion, the warrior was beaten and probably in throes of ecstasy at the pain coursing along every nerve ending.
Honsou felt new strength in his limbs as he followed Uluvent. The warrior had torn off his shattered helmet and Honsou saw his face was hideously scarred and burned. Blood squirted from where Honsou had torn his neck wound further open, but the pain only seemed to galvanise Uluvent as he bellowed for a fresh blade.
Neck wound or no, Uluvent was still a fearsome opponent and armed with a fresh weapon, could still easily kill Honsou. Cadaras Grendel held a wide-bladed sword out towards Pashtoq Uluvent and Honsou held his breath…
Pashtoq Uluvent reached for the weapon, but at the last moment, Cadaras Grendel reversed his grip and rammed the blade into the champion’s chest. The tip of the weapon ripped out through the back of Uluvent’s armour and the mighty warrior staggered as Grendel twisted the blade deeper into his chest.
Uluvent roared in pain and spun away from Grendel, wrenching the sword from his grip and dropped to his knees. Honsou gave him no chance to recover from his shock and pain, and brought his axe down upon the warrior’s shoulder. The dark blade smashed Uluvent’s shoulder guard to splinters and clove the champion of the Blood God from collarbone to pelvis.
Stunned silence swept over the gathered crowds, for none had ever expected to see Pashtoq Uluvent brought low. Cadaras Grendel stepped from the ranks of the Blood God’s warriors to stand next to Honsou as the blazing fire of Pashtoq Uluvent’s eyes began to fade.
‘Sorry,’ said Grendel with a grin. ‘Honsou may be a mongrel half-breed, and even though I know you’ll lead me to a bloodier fight, I think he’ll lead me to one I’ll live through.’
Uluvent looked up at Honsou with hate and pain misting his vision. ‘Give… me… a blade.’
Honsou was loath to indulge the champion’s request, but knew he would need to if there were to be any shred of loyalty in the warriors he would win from Uluvent.
‘Give it to him,’ ordered Honsou.
Grendel nodded and reached down to drag the sword from the defeated champion’s chest in a froth of bright blood. He held the weapon towards Uluvent, who took the proffered sword in a slack grip.
‘And… my skull,’ gasped Uluvent with the last of his strength. ‘You… have… to take… it.’
‘My pleasure,’ said Honsou, raising his axe and honouring Pashtoq Uluvent’s last request.
WITH PASHTOQ ULUVENT’S head mounted on the spikes below Huron Blackheart’s throne, the Skull Harvest was over. Hundreds had died upon the sands of the Tyrant’s arena, but such deaths were meaningless in the grand scheme of things, serving only to feed Blackheart’s ego and amuse the Dark Gods of the warp.
At the final tally, Honsou left New Bad
ab with close to seventeen thousand warriors sworn in blood to his cause. Pashtoq Uluvent’s warriors, and those he had won, were now Honsou’s, their banners now bearing the Iron Skull device.
Notha Etassay had survived the final battle and had willingly sworn allegiance to Honsou after hoarsely thanking him for the exquisite sensations of bone shards through the lungs.
Huron Blackheart had been true to his word, and the victor of the Skull Harvest had indeed benefited greatly from his patronage. As the Warbreed broke orbit, numerous other vessels accompanied it, gifts from the Tyrant of Badab to be used for the express purpose of dealing death to the forces of the Imperium. In addition to these vessels, the ships of the defeated champions formed up around Honsou’s flagship to form a ragtag, yet powerful, fleet of corsairs and renegades.
Battered warships, ugly bulk carriers, planetary gunboats, warp-capable system monitors and captured cruisers followed the Warbreed as it plotted a careful route through the Maelstrom, away from the domain of Huron Blackheart.
The sickly yellow orb of New Badab was swallowed in striated clouds of nebulous dust and polluted immaterial effluent vomited from the wound in real space as the fleet pulled away, and Honsou recalled the final words the mighty Tyrant had said to him. Blackheart had pointed his dark-bladed claw towards Ardaric Vaanes, Cadaras Grendel and the Newborn as they boarded the battered Stormbirds ahead of Honsou.
‘Kill them when they are of no more use to you,’ said the Tyrant. ‘Otherwise they will only betray you.’
‘They wouldn’t dare,’ Honsou had said, though a seed of doubt had been planted.
‘Always remember,’ said Huron Blackheart. ‘The strong are strongest alone.’
IRON WARRIOR
ONE
The planet had no name. Not because it had been forgotten over the countless millennia since it had first been discovered, and not because it had passed into history as a dusty footnote at the end of some ancient chronicler’s archive. It had no name because it had never been given one, its discoverers knowing on some subconscious level that to name this world would bring others to it.
In the wake of the Great Betrayal, explorators seeking out new worlds for the resurgent Imperium of Man had found the world inimical to human life on almost every level. Howling winds swept over a bleak landscape of siliceous dunes, ashen basins of crushed quartz and towering cliffs of basalt and knife-edged obsidian. Nothing lived on this world, and the first men to set foot on its glassy deserts, the shimmering sand crunching beneath their cumbersome exo-armour, felt the planet’s hostility leeching through the heavy gauge plasteel of their environment suits.
Thirteen hours later, six men committed suicide by opening their suits to the atmosphere, and another turned a plasma torch on his fellows. Within the next six hours, another ten men were dead, driven into paroxysms of madness and homicidal rages.
The survivors fled, leaving the planet unnamed and unmarked in the records of the Imperial Cartographae, hoping to spare others the fate that had overtaken them.
The forsaken planet spun in the void, unknown and unvisited.
But such ill-fated places are a beacon to those in the service of discord.
Mountains like a row of black fangs reared from the rocky hinterlands at the edge of the continental dustbowl. Slicing gales of powdered glass billowed from the quartz deserts, and a sky of cracked slate pressed down upon the world like a great hammer about to fall.
Honsou climbed over the edge of the vast depression, his growling transport perched on a rocky ledge a hundred metres below. Screaming winds tore at him with spiteful claws, but power wrought into his bones by ancient craft, and the mechanical strength of his burnished iron armour allowed him to remain upright in the face of their fury.
‘We’re close,’ he said to the four warriors who followed him. ‘She’s here, I can feel it.’
‘No one lives here,’ spat Cadaras Grendel, sealed within battered and scored battle plate the colour of bare iron. Grendel shielded his visor from the swirling particles and said, ‘This is a waste of time, Honsou, there’s nothing to find here.’
‘Frightened are you, Grendel?’ said Honsou, unable to resist baiting the warrior. ‘Never thought I’d see the day.’
‘This is a cursed world,’ said Grendel, keeping a tight grip on his weapon, a blackened melta gun that had sent a thousand souls to their doom. ‘We should leave.’
Towering and powerful, Grendel’s violence was a stark promise, and Honsou was surprised he hadn’t risen to the bait.
Beside Grendel, the Newborn watched their conversation with the keen attention of a student. Beneath the expressionless mask of its helmet, its face was a melange of skin sliced from the dead, its body created in a fusion of stolen genetics and warp science. Its power was greater than any of them fully understood, but its mind was new and easily moulded.
The fine-grained glass had scoured the plates of their armour bare of all colour, insignia and markings of rank. Their shoulder guards had, only hours ago, borne the heraldry of the Iron Warriors, but the lashing tongues of the wind rendered Honsou, Grendel and the Newborn nearly identical.
Nearly, but not quite.
The surfaces of the Iron Warriors’ armour were flensed and dulled by the flying glass dust, but Honsou’s silver arm gleamed like liquid mercury. No sooner was its surface abraded than it was renewed, as though possessed of some dreadful regenerative power.
Nor was it just their armour that differed. Honsou carried himself with an insouciant swagger of brash self-confidence, while Grendel was tensed like a bar brawler on the verge of terrifying bloodshed. In contrast, the Newborn stood unbending in the wind, proud and with an innocence that flew in the face of the brutal angles of its armour.
‘Honsou is right,’ said the Newborn. ‘This world is home to great power. Psychic venom has poisoned it beyond redemption.’
‘Perceptive, isn’t it?’ said Ardaric Vaanes, alone of the warriors not clad in bare iron armour. ‘But you don’t need any warp-sense to know this is a forsaken place.’
Vaanes’s armour was the colour of the blackest night, though it too had been scored bare of insignia and markings by the scouring winds. Once, it had borne the winged emblem of the Raven Guard overlaid with the jagged cross of the Red Corsairs. The wind had obliterated both symbols of allegiance, as though he were a warrior without a master or a past.
‘Indeed he is,’ purred Notha Etassay, the last member of Honsou’s group, a warrior clad in buckled straps that held strategically situated elements of flexible plate close to his body, leaving much of his tanned, spare frame exposed. By rights, the flesh should have been scraped from his bones by the powdered glass wind. A rippling energy sheathed his body, though its protection was far from total. Shallow cuts were carved in Etassay’s skin with every gust of wind, but the lithe warrior seemed to enjoy the sensation. ‘He is a unique creature, one I would sorely love to test my talents against.’
Honsou frowned, unsure of Etassay’s meaning, and unable to read the expression beneath the blademaster’s mask of silver and leather. Etassay was an androgynous beauty of uncertain sex, a hedonist who indulged his every whim of sadism, butchery and masochism. He was also a killer who honoured the art of blades and to whom no secret of swordsmanship was unknown. Honsou had won Etassay’s army at the Skull Harvest on New Badab, along with nearly seventeen thousand warriors of all stripes.
‘You can feel it?’ Honsou asked the Newborn.
‘I can.’
‘Tell me,’ commanded Honsou.
The Newborn cocked its head to one side, as though listening to something hidden within the howling cry of the wind.
‘Rage,’ said the creature. ‘A rage born of betrayal. It withers everything it touches.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Honsou. ‘That’s it exactly, hateful bitterness that sours the very heart of this place. This world is the one, I’m sure of it.’
‘Then let’s get on and find it then,’ snapped Cadaras Grendel.
‘I don’t fancy being withered by whatever it is we’re here for.’
‘Not
what
,’ said Etassay. ‘Weren’t you listening? It’s a person we’re looking for. A woman.’
Grendel bristled at Etassay’s words, his fingers flexing on the grip of his gun. Etassay and Grendel had taken an instant dislike to one another, and Honsou, remembering the Tyrant of Badab’s last words to him, did nothing to dispel it.
‘It’s a woman, right enough,’ said Honsou, setting off into the teeth of the wind, ‘but no ordinary woman.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Vaanes.
‘I’m looking for Moriana,’ said Honsou. ‘The seer who guided the Warmaster.’
They marched through blinding sheets of wind-blown glass, trudging through rolling dunes of the stuff, over craggy ridges of black rock like the spines of buried dragons. Honsou could feel the malice carved into the flesh of this world, and it gave him strength. He knew in his bones that this was the place, but looked for any sign that would confirm it.
The swirling air before him dropped and he saw a low haunch of smooth boulders gathered together in the far distance… like a cairn or burial mound primitive savages built for their dead. He laughed and looked to the sky, silently thanking the dark gods of the warp for leading him to this place.
‘The Hag that dwells in the Bone House,’ he said, feeling his heart beat faster at the sight of a darkened cave mouth amid the boulders. It had been a long road from the Iron Warriors home world of Medrengard, a grim procession of murder and mayhem that had seen a world of the Emperor destroyed and an army gathered to his banner.
All in service of Honsou’s vengeance upon Uriel Ventris of the Ultramarines, the only warrior ever to walk away from him. And if Honsou had interpreted the hidden clues in the ancient books correctly, then the end of that road was almost in sight.
Grendel came alongside him, peering through the mist and ashen wind at the mound of boulders. Vaanes and the Newborn stood apart from the warrior, while Notha Etassay sashayed through the scoring wind with his arms upraised to better enjoy the sensation of glass abrading his skin.
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