I knew what beast this was, and I spat his name back at him.
‘Ugulhard.’
The warboss turned. His pistol was larger than a heavy bolter. His right arm was encased in a power claw. I recalled seeing this ork leading the first charge on Tempestora.
Did silence fall over the battlefield at that moment? I don’t trust my memory on this point. All my focus was on this foe. But I have a sense of orks and humans pausing as two symbols clashed.
I knew what was at stake. I’m sure Ugulhard did too. He looked down at me, and I saw disappointment in the glitter of those red eyes, ridiculously small in that giant skull. Ugulhard had come to fight the leader who had destroyed his gargants, and found a human no larger than any of the others, and much older. He snorted contempt.
I drew bolt pistol and sword.
Ugulhard grinned. He raised his claw and stepped forward to crush me with a single blow. I charged him, coming in under the blow. The claw punched and missed. I fired bolt shells into his chest plate and stabbed to the right, jabbing my blade into the meat of his gun arm. Ugulhard snarled and staggered back a step. He turned the gun on me. I fired straight into its barrel. The massive pistol blew up. Ugulhard hurled the twisted mass at me and it smashed my shoulder hard enough to spin me around. I moved back, putting some distance between us. He watched me, and his grin was pleased. I was giving him a fight.
The ork’s ruined pistol had struck my left shoulder, but it was my right that ached. The throbbing was back, worse than ever. It threatened to dull my reactions. And when Ugulhard advanced again, each step had a dark familiarity, as if our every move had been choreographed, and I had seen it all before.
Reaching out from a century and half, the winds of Mistral blew against my neck. I felt the grip of the daemon Ghalshannha tighten around my soul. I had lived these moments before. In fragments and premonitions, they had stabbed into my dreams. Now the mosaic was coming together.
Ugulhard swung his claw again. He was slow. I jumped back and stepped to the left. His swing pulverised a crenulation. His momentum kept him turning, and now his back was to me. It was too heavily armoured. I raised my blade to cut through his left arm again.
There was a blur, and Ugulhard whirled around, laughing. His sluggishness had been a ruse. He seized my sword arm with the power claw.
Dream and physical agony merged. I convulsed and dropped my sword. Ugulhard straightened to his full height. He stretched out his arm to show my dangling body first to one army, then the other. He roared his triumph. He clamped down.
My bones cracked. Blood burst from between the halves of the claw. My lips drew back in pain and hatred. My teeth ground together. I hissed in rage, and did not cry out. Laughing, Ugulhard held my left shoulder with his other hand. He cocked his head, waiting to see that I had understood what he was about to do.
He pulled. He crushed. And I came apart.
The pain flared white and ultraviolet. At its centre, as muscle shredded and bone splintered, there was an uncanny liberation. The moment in whose shadow I had lived since Mistral had come, and it could wear at me no longer.
The light of the pain turned to darkness. Unconsciousness came for me, but I rejected it. I had nothing now but my will, and with it, I would kill this monster.
Ugulhard dropped me. I fell into a crouch. Blood jetted from my right shoulder, soaking my flank. The warboss examined my mutilated limb in his claw. I was beneath his notice.
My sword was within reach. I seized it with my left hand. I grasped the steel. I took my pain, and all the agony of burning Armageddon, and I forged them into a single action.
I rose. ‘Ugulhard!’ I shouted. He looked down, surprised. I thrust the blade between the rough seam of his armour and all the way through his throat. His eyes glazed with shock. His knees buckled. I sawed the blade back and forth. His wet choking gave way to the powerful spray of vitae. It fountained over me. Still I sawed, cutting through gristle and bone and my pain and weakness.
I cut all the way through.
I could no longer feel my body. My fingers were growing clumsy. But I held off the black. I dropped the sword and seized the huge skull. I carried it to the edge of the parapet. Now I held my trophy high, brandishing it before the orks.
‘I am Yarrick!’ I shouted in the greenskins’ barbaric tongue. ‘I look upon you and you die!’ And then in cleansing Gothic, I howled my defiance of the great enemy. ‘Do you see, Ghazghkull Thraka? Hades will never be yours! Armageddon will never be yours! Here is where we stop you! Here is where you fail!’
I hurled Ugulhard’s head from the wall. The orks cried out.
And they turned.
And they fled.
And then, at last, I let the dark come.
Months now. Months of fighting above ground and below. Hades burned. It bled. It screamed. But it stood. It would continue to stand. I had vowed it would, and my vow is iron.
I moved through the disused ventilation shaft with Lanner’s squad and the Rachen. There was a nest of orks close by. Their snarls reached us through the wall of the shaft. The maze of the mines and the underhive was a weapon for both sides of the conflict. We moved beneath their camps. They infiltrated the hive.
We had come to punish their temerity once more.
I stopped walking and listened. The orks were just on the other side of the curved wall of the shaft. ‘Remember,’ I whispered, ‘leave one alive.’
‘Why?’ Atroxa grumbled.
‘So it can spread the tale.’
I raised my right arm. My powerful arm. Ugulhard’s claw. With a single blow, I punched through the metal and burst through the pipe. The orks reared back in alarm. The monster had come upon them.
Be the symbol. The needful role of the commissar. I learned that lesson early. But in Hades, I had to be more.
Be the legend.
And now I knew that my name must have meaning for the enemy as well. The orks had their prophet. I would be something else.
I crushed a greenskin skull with the claw. I glared at the stunned brutes.
And as my eye blazed with killing ruby light, I became their nightmare.
About the Author
David Annandale is the author of The Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos. He also writes the Yarrick series, consisting of the novella Chains of Golgotha and the novel Imperial Creed. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.
An extract from Yarrick: Imperial Creed.
1. Yarrick
I watched the deployment embarkation as if seeing one for the first time. There was a strong element of truth to that impression. During my years as a storm trooper I had taken part in many mobilizations, many invasions, but I had always been in the midst of the troop formations – one cog among thousands of others, marching into the drop-ships. Now, briefly, I stood apart from the great mass of the troops. I was on a balcony overlooking the loading bay of the Scythe of Terra. For the first time I saw the full spectacle of a regiment about to enforce the Emperor’s will. The perspective drove home the magnificence of the engine of war that was the Imperial Guard. Below me was the 77th Mortisian Infantry Regiment. The sons and daughters of the dying hive-world of Aighe Mortis stood at attention in phalanxes of geometric perfection. They were no longer individuals. They were a collective entity, a massive fist as clockwork and unwavering in its precision as the limb of any Titan. I saw and understood how right and proper was the anonymity I had known before. I had been completely replaceable. I was still, only now I was required to understand why.
This was what I was learning from my new van
tage point, in my new identity, in my new uniform. The peaked cap and the greatcoat with its epaulettes creating an imposing silhouette, the colours of authority and discipline embodied in the dress black and the crimson collar: this apparel obliterated the identity of its wearer as surely as had my storm trooper armour, or the khaki fatigues of the Mortisians. But where the troop uniforms merged the self into a force-multiplying whole, my garb stood out. Visibility was vital to the commissar. He had to be seen in order to inspire courage and fear. The clothes were the symbols of authority, of righteousness, of discipline. They were what bore the meaning of the rank. The actions that were carried out when they were worn had to be worthy of them, and were crucial to maintaining their power and honour. The actual individual under the cap was irrelevant.
So I thought.
I was not alone on the balcony. I was there with Dominic Seroff. Together we had been the terror of our dorms at the schola progenium. Smiling fate had seen us in the same platoon, inflicting terror of a different sort on the heretic and the xenos. Now, as I answered the calling I had felt for as long as I can remember, Seroff too had donned the black coat. I on the right, Seroff on the left, we flanked a legend. Lord Commissar Simeon Rasp had summoned us to witness the final minutes before embarkation. On a grand podium opposite the hull doors, Colonel Georg Granach held forth to the soldiers of the regiment, praising their faith and zeal, and prophesying martial glory.
‘Tell me what you see,’ Rasp said.
I glanced away from the troops, and caught Seroff looking my way. Each of us was inviting the other to speak first and get it wrong. The set of Seroff’s mouth told me he was willing to let the silence stretch to embarrassing lengths. I knew his canniness. He knew my eagerness. I had already lost. It was simply a matter of recognizing that fact.
Seroff looked too young to be a commissar. He had somehow made it through our dozens of battle zones without picking up a single scar. He still had the face of a joker. With his blond curls struggling to push his cap off his head, I wondered how seriously troopers would take him as a commissar. I sometimes wondered how seriously he took his role himself. The contrast with Rasp bordered on the grotesque. The lord commissar waited, impassive, for one of us to answer. His eyes did not move from the floor of the bay, but I knew he was watching us both. His hair, now invisible under his cap, was a close-cropped and dirty white. His angular features had a youthful strength thanks to juvenat treatments, but they had also been sharpened by long experience. He did have scars. The most noticeable was a harsh ‘V’ that ran the length of his cheekbones, coming to the point just below his nose. It was a souvenir of an encounter with the eldar. The xenos who had branded him had not survived.
I took a breath, bowed to the inevitable, and answered. ‘I see what I did not fully understand before now,’ I said. ‘In the Guard, the individual is irrelevant. It is the mass–’
Rasp raised a finger, cutting me off. ‘No,’ he said. His voice was quiet but drew attention with as much force as if it were drowning out the colonel’s vox-amplified speech. ‘If that were true,’ Rasp said, ‘there would be very little need for commissars.’ He pulled his bolt pistol out of his holster. Holding the barrel in his left hand, he placed the stock in his right, keeping his fingers open. ‘Not one of my fingers is strong enough, on its own, to hold this pistol and fire it.’ He closed his fist, lifted the pistol one-handed. ‘With all of them working as one, I am lethal.’
Seroff frowned. ‘Isn’t that what Yarrick said?’
Rasp shook his head. ‘You are both missing an essential element. If I were to lose even one of my fingers, I could still fire the weapon but my accuracy and my speed would be compromised. Lose the thumb or the forefinger and I will be hard-pressed to do more than simply hold the gun.’ His eyes, a cold blue so pale they were almost white, flicked over each of us in turn, judging whether his instruction was sinking in. ‘Am I making myself clear?’
‘The collective strength is created by that of individuals,’ Seroff said.
‘Ignore the importance of specific positions at your peril,’ I added.
Rasp returned the pistol to his belt. ‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘It falls to us, to you, to preserve the health of the whole by ensuring the proper functioning of the part. And should the finger be gangrenous…’
‘Sever it,’ I said, ‘and take its place.’
Rasp gave a single nod. The lesson was over.
We listened to the rest of Granach’s speech. He had moved on from broad considerations of regimental honour to the specifics of the mission. Or at least, he had pretended to do so. What he said was little different from any number of commanding officer exhortations I had heard, back when I had been one of the thousands on the embarkation deck. Granach struck me as working from a script, one he had trotted out many times before. He spoke with energy and enthusiasm, but his delivery was over-rehearsed. The more I watched him, the more I saw a man discharging a difficult but necessary duty, one he would be happy to see over and done.
Rasp grunted. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I hope you’re noting the colonel’s oratory. I have the greatest respect for his tactical prowess, but he is no rhetorician. What, in your estimation, is the problem here?’
‘Too familiar,’ I said.
A thin smile from the lord commissar. ‘Precisely. How many times have you both heard the same vague thoughts, assembled with very similar words?’
Seroff shrugged. ‘Isn’t it all an inevitable but necessary ritual?’
A single shake of the head, as precise and emphatic as the one nod earlier. ‘Is it necessary that the troops be addressed? Yes. But the address should never be ritualized. Its truth becomes robbed of urgency. It fails to inspire. Have you read the Legomenon Victoriae of Lord Commander Solar Macharius?’
I had. Seroff hadn’t. He tried to bluff by looking very focused and interested, as if he were comparing a Macharian address to Granach’s current effort and would come up with a cogent answer in another few moments.
Rasp wasn’t fooled. ‘Correct that lacuna, Commissar Seroff. You will see the true art of the military speech. Read but one address and you will be already well launched on a new crusade. When you stand before warriors, you must inspire them.’ He made a sweeping arm gesture towards the deck. ‘I know, as do you, that too many of those soldiers are, whether they know it themselves or not, politely waiting for Colonel Granach to finish so they can get on with it. That is not how it should be.’ He favoured first Seroff and then me with a hard look. ‘That is how it must never be when you speak. Your authority will inspire fear in the troops who fall under your eye. This is right and necessary, but it is not enough. The mere sight of you must grant them fire. And when they hear you, they must be happy to give up their lives.’ He paused. ‘At great cost to the enemy, of course.’
‘Of course,’ I agreed.
Rasp listened to Granach a few moments more, then grimaced. ‘Word for word,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘These generalities are death,’ he told us. ‘Except in cases of necessary secrecy, tell these loyal servants of the Emperor why they are about to kill and die. Let them know the stakes. Give them a sense of purpose. Tell them why we are here. You heard General Rallam’s address to the commanding officers. His style is rather too clipped, but he was precise.
‘Commissar Yarrick. Tell me why we are here.’
‘We have come, at the request of Cardinal Wangenheim, to suppress a heretical uprising led by Baron Bartholomew Lom of Mistral.’
A snort. ‘True, but rather bluntly put. If you were speaking to your charges, you would find more of the poetry of war in your soul, I trust. I once heard you when I visited the schola progenium, Yarrick. I know what you are capable of. But yes. We have come to quell the turbulent Baron Lom.’
Rasp looked up, away from the assembly. His gaze drifted to the outer hull doors. He seemed to be staring through them, as if he could see Mistral
turning below.
‘Lord commissar?’ Seroff asked.
No answer at first. There was a faint tightening of his jaw, the only sign of an internal debate. Finally, he said, ‘You are political officers. You know this, but I wonder if you have grasped the full implications of that fact. Your duties are to guard against deviation. The realities will mean rather more. Necessity will drive you to swim in murky waters.’
He fell silent. He hadn’t disclosed anything truly revelatory. He had articulated that which was never said, but understood by all but the most naïve. There was something else he was on the verge of saying. I hesitated before speaking, but as the seconds mounted in silence, I realized that the moment was slipping away. I decided to be direct.
No, that’s a lie. I didn’t decide. I have always been direct. That is my special curse. It is also, I know, why I have been seen as a curse myself. That’s a thought to keep me warm at night.
‘Are the waters of Mistral murky?’ I asked.
Rasp made a noise in his throat, a stillborn laugh. ‘So the local expression would have it. It’s been years since I last set foot on its surface. But I would be surprised if matters have changed for the better since then.’
‘They can’t have,’ Seroff said. ‘Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.’
‘True. And yet…’ Rasp frowned. He thought for a moment, and then his expression cleared. He had come down on one side of a hard deliberation, and was now at peace with his conscience. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘this mission appears to be very straightforward – an insurgency that is beyond the abilities of local forces to contain, but that is nevertheless limited in scope. Our rapid triumph is a certain conclusion, and is therefore not to be trusted. When matters are at their most cut-and-dried is when you must be most wary.’
Yarrick: The Pyres of Armageddon Page 30