25 For 25

by Various

  The ‘something’ broke from its crouch in the vegetation at the tree line. A blur of crimson and black, with a chainblade revving. Amalay recognised an Astartes instantly, and the threat a moment later. Her bolter barked once, twice, and dropped from her hands to clatter to the dirt. The gun crashed once more from its vantage point on the ground, a loud boom that hammered a shell into the tank’s sloped armour plating.

  Even as this last shot was fired, Amalay’s head flew clear of her shoulders, white hair catching the wind before the bleeding wreckage rolled into the undergrowth.

  Brialla blasphemed as she brought the flamer turret around on protesting mechanics, and wrenched the handles to aim the cannons low.

  The Astartes was cradling Amalay’s headless body, speaking to it in a low snarl. Her sister was already dead. Brialla squeezed both triggers.

  Twin gouts of stinking chemical flame roared from the cannons, bathing Amalay and the Astartes in clinging, corrosive fire. She was already whispering a lament for her fallen sister, even as she blistered the armour and skin from Amalay’s bones.

  It was impossible to see through the reeking orange miasma. Brialla killed the jets of flame after seven heartbeats, knowing whatever had been washed in the fire would be annihilated, purged in the burning storm.

  Amalay. Her armour blackened, its joints melted, her hands reduced to blackened bone. She lay on the ground, incinerated.

  A loud thud clanged on the tank’s roof behind Brialla. She turned in her restraint throne, the slower turret cycling round to follow her gaze. Already, she was trying to scramble free of her seat.

  The Astartes was burning. Holy fire licked at the edges of his war plate, and his joints steamed. He eclipsed the sun, casting a flickering shadow over her. His armour was black, charred, but not immolated. As she hauled herself out of her restraints, he levelled a dripping chainsword at her face.

  ‘The Flesh Tearers!’ she screamed into the vox-mic built into her armour’s collar. ‘Echoes of Gaius Point!’

  In anciently-accented Gothic, her killer said six whispered words.

  ‘You will pay for your heresy.’

  I watch from the shadows of the trees.

  The Sororitas are tense. While one of them performs funerary rites over the destroyed bodies of their sisters, three others stalk around the hull of their grey tank, bolters aimed while they stare into the jungle through gunsights.

  I can smell the corpses beneath the white shrouds. One is burned, cooked by promethium chemical fire. The other had bled a great deal before she died, torn to pieces. I do not need to see the remains to know this is true.

  For now, I hide, crouched and hidden. The jungle masks the ever-present charged hum of my armour from their weak, mortal ears, while I listen to fragments of their speech.

  Jarl’s trail has grown cold, even the smell of his potent blood lost in the billion scents of this sulphuric jungle. I need focus. I need direction.

  But as soon as I draw near enough to see the sisters’ steel-grey armour and the insignias of loyalty they each wear, I curse my fortune.

  The Order of the Argent Shroud.

  They were with us at Gaius Point.

  Echoes of that battle will haunt us all until the Chapter’s final nights.

  ‘My auspex senses something,’ I hear one of them say to her sisters. I make ready to move again, to taste shame and flee. I cannot confront them like this. They must not know of our presence. ‘Something alive,’ she says. ‘And with a power signature.’

  ‘Flesh Tearer!’ one of the sisters calls out, and my blood freezes in my veins. It is not fear I feel, but true, sickening dread as she uses our Chapter’s sacred name. How can they know?

  ‘Flesh Tearer! Show yourself! Face the Emperor’s judgement for the barbarity of your tainted Chapter!’

  My teeth clench. My fingers quiver, then grip the chainaxe tighter. They know. They know a Flesh Tearer did this. Their wretched slain sisters must have warned them.

  Another female voice, the one carrying the auspex scanner, adds to the first one’s cries. ‘We were at Gaius Point, decadent filth! Face us, and face retribution for your heresy!’

  They know what happened at Gaius Point. They saw our shame, our curse, and the blood that ran that day.

  They believe I butchered two of their sisters here, and now lay the sins of my brother Jarl upon my shoulders.

  Gunfire rings out. A bolter shell slices past my pauldron, shredding vegetation.

  ‘I see him,’ a female voice declares, ‘There!’

  My trigger finger strokes the Engage rune on the chainaxe’s haft. After a heartbeat’s hesitation, I squeeze. Jagged, whirring teeth cycle into furious life. The weapon cuts air in anticipation of the moment it will eat flesh.

  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.

  T
he 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 chorus, 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.