by Nick Kyme
There was no sign of Surgit. Scaevolla called out his name.
‘Here!’ The horns of the warrior’s helmet lent him a daemonic appearance as he emerged from the clinging fog carrying the commissar’s head. He sniffed. ‘A disappointing match. His hatred made him clumsy. My blade feels sullied.’
‘A fine fight you’ve led us to, captain.’ Larsus approached, grinning through a mask of drying blood at Scaevolla. ‘You never disappoint. Is our quarry here?’
‘His name is Demetros. The visions were true. He commands the Corpse-Emperor’s forces.’ Scaevolla’s voice became heavy. ‘Lieutenant, do you ever tire of the chase?’
Larsus rapped the image of the Eye of Horus on Scaevolla’s right shoulder pad. ‘Never. So long as we fight, the legacy of the Warmaster lives on.’
It had been during the false Emperor’s Great Crusade that Scaevolla and his men had learned their battlecraft, and bonded in blood and violence. In those days they had been Lunar Wolves, their armour white; innocents blind to the Emperor’s weakness. Then Horus, beloved Warmaster, had cast the scales from their eyes, and they had fought as his devoted Sons to free themselves from the false Emperor’s coils. At the edge of victory, the Warmaster fell, and his Legion had fled to the protective shadows of the warp, where it became known as the Black Legion. To mark the Legion’s sorrow and disgrace, its warriors’ power armour was lacquered black, although the edges of the armour gleamed with gold, for even the darkest night is banished by the gleam of a new dawn. Scaevolla’s men believed that every minion of the Corpse-Emperor they slew brought closer a new golden age for their Legion.
Scaevolla’s memory of those days was scarred by rage and betrayal. The past haunted him with the face of a murdered comrade. The pain had not dulled in… how many years? A hundred, a thousand… ten thousand? Time was exiled from the Eye of Terror, Scaevolla’s life one long dream-like existence until he was spat out into reality to honour his oath.
Larsus broke Scaevolla’s reverie. ‘Captain, why the grim face? Is our small victory not sweet enough?’
‘It’s nothing,’ Scaevolla shook his head to clear his mind. ‘Gather the hounds, lieutenant. Let’s see where the scent has led us to.’
SCAEVOLLA HUGGED THE brow of the hill. Piercing the sea of green fog that roiled in the valley below were uncountable battle standards, laden with gory trophies. The valley seemed to rumble under the advance of the obscured army. The bronze turrets of assault tanks and upper hulls of troop transports, crested with spikes, resembled an innumerable fleet of sea craft ploughing through ethereal waves. A score of monstrous war machines waded among them, each clanking on six steel legs like nightmarish metal spiders. The horde swept towards the horizon where a termites’ nest of Cyclopean buildings rose from the mist like an island. The city’s ziggurats glittered with a million dots of light, their heights vanishing into red nimbus, and a thousand chimneys belched smoke into the sky. Circling the factory-city was a wall that dwarfed even the clanking war machines. Titanic bastions guarded the circuit, their cannons spitting plasma onto the advancing horde. Among the serried grey ranks of troopers manning the defences were phalanxes of power-armoured warriors, distinct in brilliant yellow, proud standards depicting a black-clenched fist on a white field; Space Marines of the Imperial Fists Chapter defended in force.
Larsus, crouched next to Scaevolla, gave a low whistle. ‘A city of ten billion souls. H’raxor wants to build a mountain of skulls.’ ‘No,’ whispered Scaevolla. ‘If he only desired trophies, he would have attacked a less well-defended target.’
Blasts smacked the valley, yellow blossoms briefly parting the mists to reveal a circle of torn corpses, and a tank was hurled into the air ablaze, to land with a ripping explosion.
Scaevolla licked the air. ‘These mists are rich in protein. Perhaps this planet’s manufactorums process the atmosphere into food. The destruction of this world may mean famine for those Imperial outposts it feeds. This is the opening gambit of a major invasion. H’raxor has great ambition. We’ll let him enjoy his petty conquest, as long as he doesn’t interfere with our mission. Our quarry is in the city. I feel it. We must reach him quickly, before the defenders are overrun.’
‘There.’ Larsus pointed at a bronze-plated Land Raider battle tank, festooned with hooks and barbs, advancing at the foot of their hill in support of the army’s reserve. ‘We steal a ride.’
Scaevolla nodded. ‘Get to work, lieutenant.’
While Larsus signalled orders to the squad waiting behind him, Scaevolla removed a small silver discus from his grenade belt and fingered a switch on its ornate shell. Raising the discus to his lips, he kissed it once then spun it at the vehicle below. There was a flash and the tank came to a halt with a squeal of engines, blue sparks rippling across its hull. Scaevolla and his squad pelted down the hill, penetrating the mist. The mutant soldiers hugging the vehicle for cover milled around in confusion, muffled curses escaping the crude respirators clamped around their mouths.
‘Out of the way, scum!’ roared Larsus, felling soldiers who failed to yield. The mutants gibbered as they pushed each other to escape.
Ferox and Icaris vaulted to the top of the vehicle, while the rest of the squad surrounded it. A crewman emerged from a hatch on the tank’s upper hull, blue sparks playing across his brassy power armour. Icaris yanked him out and silenced him with a bolt. Ferox slid through the opening. There followed a muffled roar, then the portal closest to Manex slid open and another crewman toppled out, his bronze armour rent with gashes. Manex peppered him with bolts.
‘Good work, brothers.’ Larsus peered through the open portal. Inside the gore-splattered interior of the tank, Ferox straddled a third crewman, his head snapped back and the fleshy eel extended from his mouth, sucking at the innards of his victim.
‘Inside,’ urged Scaevolla. He followed his squad into the vehicle and pointed at the feeding Ferox. ‘Calm him.’ Larsus eased Ferox from his kill with gentle movements and a soft voice. Already, the eel was shrinking back into Ferox’s throat, its recent meal sloshing onto the floor.
Icaris positioned himself at the controls, the blue sparks that danced across the console sputtering like dying flames. He caressed the array of switches as they flashed back to life. ‘Power returning. Yes, here she comes. I think she likes us; she finds our antics… amusing.’
The portal and hatch clanged shut, the cabin shuddered as the engines roared, and the Land Raider lurched forward. Inside, its inner walls purred and blinked with myriad eyes at the new crew.
THE LAND RAIDER careened across the battlefield, crushing mutant soldiers beneath its treads. Fog clouded the viewports, but the intelligence fettered within the vehicle’s shell guided it towards its destination, a heavily defended gate in the city wall. Halfway across, a missile rocketed into the Land Raider’s hull, and the daemon-spirit keened in agony, but the damage was superficial. Soon the gateway loomed out of the mist, its portcullis buckled and scorched. A semi-circle of twisted mutant corpses defined the killing ground around the base of the gate, into which H’raxor’s soldiers marched, chanting defiantly as they soaked up the defenders’ precious ammunition.
As the Land Raider came into range of the gate’s barbican it suffered sustained fire. Opus emerged head and shoulders from the vehicle’s hatch to rake defenders off the battlements with the pintle-mounted gun, indifferent to the las-fire whining inches from his face and the explosions impacting off the hull. The Land Raider’s las-cannon strobed at the weakened gate, but the portal absorbed the laser fire intact.
‘Ram the gates!’ ordered Scaevolla desperately. Everyone in the troop compartment tensed. Manex inhaled deeply from his toxtubes and Ferox began coughing strings of drool. Scaevolla knew they had to evacuate before the blood lust and the Dark Gods’ gift took hold.
‘Ram them now!’
The Land Raider rattled from a violent explosion and Opus dropped from the firing hatch, a face of burnt flesh, power armour embedded with shrapnel, his
ruined lips mouthing demented lyrics.
Icaris screamed from the controls, ‘The gates are not going to give!’
‘Continue, Brother Icaris,’ yelled Scaevolla. He braced himself. There was a crashing rip of torn metal, and every bone in his body seemed to jar from the impact. The keening of the daemon-spirit raked his eardrums. With a sharp crack, Ferox’s head snapped back, his mutation probing from his throat.
‘We’re through!’ shouted Icaris. ‘Seventy per cent damage to auxiliary reactor, firing systems all down—’
‘Open the hatches!’
‘Impossible… locking rune overridden… she doesn’t like us anymore!’
The eel snaked from Ferox’s gullet. Then, with a feral roar, Manex gripped the rear hatch with both hands and wrenched it open. Green fronds of mist wisped into the cabin. With a single cry, Scaevolla and his squad bounded out of the vehicle.
Scaevolla felt the flow of time cease once again. Manex was down, a shield for his companions, his armour punctured a dozen times. Larsus and Surgit were behind him, their bolters loosing a ribbon of shots as they charged the phalanx of Imperial Fists that opposed them. Sharn was licking the enemy with flesh-melting heat, while Ferox, fully deformed, stretched towards the enemy, yellow gore spurting from a hit to his pulsing eel-muscle.
Scaevolla’s sword was already in his hand, its blade long and slender, a single rune engraved at its tip. Scaevolla had been rewarded with the runeblade Fornax when he had laid the first skull before the floating Altar of the Four Gods on the daemon-world Sebaket. How long ago had that been? Now a pyramid of five hundred skulls marked his success in the hunt. He wondered what divine favour victory would win him this time?
There was only one reward which Scaevolla desired: an end to this eternal chase. The gods drove him without rest to fulfil his vow. While his men fought for the sheer joy of killing, Scaevolla could no longer share their enthusiasm. The deaths blurred into one, dulling the emotion of the kill. His swordplay failed to thrill him, no longer a display of skill but mechanistic rote. He felt hollow. He had prayed to his masters for clemency, for release from his oath, which he had fulfilled five hundred times, but they would never grant him manumission. The only way out was escape.
A bolt-round rebounded off Scaevolla’s chest guard with a bang. The world slipped back into motion, and the wild charge of Scaevolla’s warriors met the stoic wall of yellow power armour. Surgit rejoiced. ‘At last! A foe worthy of my wrath!’
With a juddering retort, the heavy bolter atop the crippled Land Raider came to life as Icaris, who had manoeuvred himself to the gun-turret, pinned down reinforcements trying to enter the fight.
‘Dreadnought!’ Icaris’s heavy bolter shells pattered uselessly against the walker striding powerfully towards the combat, its crushing claws poised to strike.
Scaevolla stepped in front of the war-hulk, sword pointed in challenge. For how long had the withered corpse inside this walking coffin been compelled to cheat death?
‘By the four gods,’ shouted Scaevolla, ‘I will end your misery.’
The Dreadnought, liveried in the heraldry of the Imperial Fists, overshadowed Scaevolla, but the prayer scrolls and relic bones decorating the walker’s hulk would be no ward against his runesword, which could penetrate any earthly metal.
A stray mortar exploded between them.
White light consumed Scaevolla’s vision, then darkness. He was flying. He felt no pain. He panicked. It was not yet time to die! Scaevolla had chosen the manner of his death, and it was not this way.
Scaevolla landed with a crash and fought for breath. His vision cleared to reveal the Dreadnought, unscratched by the explosion, looming over him, fists crackling with energy. The fingers of Scaevolla’s outstretched left hand brushed the hilt of his runesword. With a bestial snarl, a giant lurched from the wreckage of the Land Raider. Opus, his head in tatters, pounded the Dreadnought’s hull with tactical artillery from his autocannon.
Scaevolla’s grip folded around the handle of his sword and he lunged at the reeling Dreadnought, its armour scorching where the glowing runesword penetrated. Scaevolla slid the blade out and leapt back. The Dreadnought’s oculus flashed green then faded to black, and the metal behemoth crashed forward.
Scaevolla raised his blade in salute. Something ancient had just perished. Scaevolla swallowed his envy.
The warriors of the Black Legion had decimated the line of Imperial Fists, though a few persevered despite severed limbs and mortal wounds. One Space Marine lay prone, his legs a crimson ruin, loosing shots from his bolt pistol until silenced by Icaris’s stamping boot. Another, his helmet cloven, his eyes dashed from his face, fought blind, almost decapitating Larsus with his blade until finished by the lieutenant’s chainsword.
Surgit ran up to the wrecked Dreadnought, shaking his fist in Scaevolla’s face. ‘Whoreson! That should have been mine!’ Larsus pushed Surgit aside. ‘Scaevolla, we have to go. Lord H’raxor’s army has broken through.’
The gateway was choked with masked mutants fighting each other to be first through the breach. The defenders in the bastions concentrated their fire on the horde, but for every abomination they felled, two more stepped over the corpse. Behind the seething, dying mass, scarlet-armoured berserk warriors wearing rictus helms chopped through the scum with chainswords, chanting paeans to their bloody god.
Scaevolla’s squad stood in a wide bailey that stretched between the defensive wall and the soaring buildings of the city. From the right clanked a wall of battle tanks to plug the breach. From the left marched lines of gas-masked troopers. Ahead, across the bailey, barely discernable through the fog, yawned the entrance to a manufactorum, the heights of the complex disappearing into red clouds. There was only one way forward before the jaws of flesh and metal closed.
‘Follow me, men!’ Scaevolla sprinted through the obscuring mist for the huge doors.
THE MANUFACTORUM WAS a cathedral of industry. Furnaces burned – altars of hungry flames – and huge vats steamed stinking vapours like sacred censers. Machinery hissed, impatient to be reanimated, and ducts and gantries spiralled up into echoing blackness. Holed by a single melta charge, the doors had proved no obstacle, and neither had the desultory force of factory guards; the innards of forty men decorated the floor.
Surgit spat at the corpses. ‘We ran from an army to face mere factotums.’
‘We did not run, brother,’ retorted Larsus. ‘We are on the hunt, remember. The chaff outside is not worth our while.’ ‘Calm,’ snapped Scaevolla, and Surgit and Larsus backed away from each other. ‘How is Manex?’
‘Fit to shatter more skulls.’ Manex had been dragged to safety by Opus. His armour was pitted with holes and half his face was fleshy pulp. ‘I’ve suffered worse.’
‘Ferox?’
Larsus shrugged. ‘He’ll find us when he’s had his fill.’
‘Sharn, Icaris, ready for battle?’
Sharn bowed, then returned to caressing the white flames of a nearby kill. Icaris had sunk to his knees, cradling the severed head of a factory-drudge.
‘Why do they fight us? We show them our might, yet they refuse to follow our path. We evangelise with sword and fire, but to what end? They perish in their millions for their faith in a dead God-Emperor. We offer the secret knowledge of the stars, yet they prefer to die ignorant. Why, my captain?’ Icaris’s cheeks were streaked with bloody tears.
Scaevolla softly cupped his battle-brother’s chin with his armoured glove. The scars on the young face were testament to his many victories.
‘The gods demand sacrifice, boy. We are the reapers who sate their eternal hunger. These men are mere animals, fit only for the holy pyre; don’t weep for the fate of the weak.’
‘But I must, captain. I will weep until the entire universe bends its knee to the gods.’
Scaevolla admired Icaris’s devotion, but said nothing more. Let him enjoy the lie. Once Scaevolla too had believed it was his vocation to shatter the shackles of order that
chained the galaxy, but he knew from bitter experience that the gods demanded war only for the sake of petty entertainment. Lord H’raxor fought in vain to win glory, for when the gods tired of him, he would be cast down and forgotten. Perhaps Horus’s rebellion, too, had been nothing more than a brief diversion for the gods. Perhaps, at the brink of victory, it had delighted them to see their servant fall and watch his armies collapse into animosity. It was for their amusement that Scaevolla scoured the galaxy on an unending blood-hunt.
As he contemplated the will of his divine masters, unwelcome memories invaded his mind…
…Scaevolla cradled the dying Space Marine, whose yellow power armour was spattered with the filth of battle. Scaevolla’s pale armour was similarly grimed. The surrounding storm of war felt ten thousand years away. Scaevolla looked down at his battle-brother’s face: a patrician’s nose, a powerful chin, the well-defined skull of a noble warrior, defiant even at the approach of death. Silver eyes dimmed as the life drained away, their glassy stare haunting Scaevolla.
‘Aleph, my friend, you could have saved yourself!’ Scaevolla choked on the words. ‘Why did you follow the lies of the False Emperor? Your liege-lord is Horus. You know it, brother. Say it!’
Life beat weakly within the Space Marine, but Aleph’s lips did not move. The silence stoked Scaevolla’s anger.