Octavia’s smile was more sincere as she wiped her face with her bandana. “He was probably a lot better at this than I am. And he’d had more practice. I’m used to sailing within the light, not through the darkness.”
Hound seemed to digest this. His withered, stitched eyes seemed to stare right at her. “Will you be all right?” he asked.
She hesitated, and realised she wasn’t too tired to cry at all. His concern touched her, tingling at the corners of her eyes. Of all the tainted souls on this ship, it was this abused, malformed little man that asked her the most obvious of questions—the one even Septimus avoided asking, out of his stupid, stubborn politeness.
“Yes,” she said, swallowing back the threat of tears. “I’ll be fi—”
The Exalted’s decree cut across her words. “All crew, remain on station. Reconfigure the immaterium drive for return to the warp.”
She sighed to herself, closing her eyes again.
X
THE FLAYER
They called him the Flayer, for reasons he felt were obvious. It wasn’t a name he cherished, nor was it one he reviled. It was—like so many other things in his existence—simply something that happened in his presence, a matter over which he could exercise no control.
He had unprepossessing eyes that usually failed to display any emotion beyond a distant disinterest, and a face so thin it bordered on gaunt. He worked in his armour, and laboured several times a day to cleanse and reconsecrate the layered ceramite. The scrub cloths always came away reddened by the blood that decorated his armour in random patterns, for his duty was not a clean one. His helm was white, though he rarely wore it on board the station.
“Flayer,” a weak voice pried at his attention. “Don’t let me die.”
Variel turned his cold eyes down to the warrior on the surgical table. The stink of his burned skin and baked blood was a pungent musk, while the warrior’s armour of red ceramite and bronze trimmings was a cracked ruin. For several moments, the Flayer watched his brother’s life leaking out from a hundred cracks.
“You are already dead,” Variel told him. “Your body has just not accepted it yet.”
The warrior’s attempt at a defiant cry emerged as a strangled choke. He managed to grip Variel’s bulky narthecium gauntlet. Bloody fingers smeared filth over the buttons and scanner display.
“Please do not touch me.” Variel gently removed his arm from the dying warrior’s grip. “I do not like to be touched.”
“Flayer…”
“And please refrain from begging. It will avail you nothing.” Variel let his forearm hover over the warrior’s cracked breastplate. The gore-grimed narthecium clicked as it cogitated. The scanner display chimed twice. “You have suffered severe ruptures to one lung and both hearts. Sepsis has saturated your bloodstream with poison, straining your organs to the point of failure.”
“Flayer… Please… I wish only to serve our lord…”
Variel rested his fist by the warrior’s sweating temple. “I know you, Kallas Yurlon. Nothing will be lost when you expire.” Here, he paused, but not to smile. Variel was unable to recall the last time he smiled. Not in the last decade, certainly. “Do you wish the Emperor’s Peace?”
“How dare you mock me?” Kallas sought to rise. Blood ran from the cracks in his armour. “I… will speak… with the Corpsemaster…”
“No,” Variel tensed his fist. “Sleep.”
“I—”
A piston’s snick sounded from the narthecium gauntlet, powering an adamantium drill-bore through the warrior’s temple with a crack, lodging within the brain. Kallas Yurlon immediately sagged, lowered back to the surgical table in the Flayer’s gentle arms.
“You will not speak to Lord Garreon at all. As I said, you are already dead.”
Variel opened his hand, lifting his fingertips from the pressure plate built into the palm of his gauntlet. The bloodied drill-spike retracted back into its housing along the Flayer’s forearm, secure in its pod of sterilising fluid.
He keyed in a short command on his vambrace controls, triggering the deployment and activation of several more traditional tools: a las-scalpel, a motorised bone saw, and the silver claws of a thoracic vice.
Next, he began the task of burning, cutting, spreading bone and peeling back flesh. As always, he worked in absolute silence, reluctantly breathing in the smells of incinerated muscle and exposed organs. The first progenoid came free in a sticky withdrawal, clinging trails of sealant mucus forming gooey strings between the gene-seed and its gaping cavity.
Variel dropped the bleeding organ into a chemical preservative solution, before moving his narthecium’s tools to the dead warrior’s throat and repeating the extraction procedure. He worked quicker this time, his efficiency bordering on brutal. Through a vertical slit in the side of the neck, the Flayer inserted reinforced forceps from his vambrace kit. The cut flesh parted with a leathery rip, freeing more blood and exposing the viscera within Kallas’ neck. The second progenoid node came loose from the sinew with greater ease, trailing a few snapped veins. Variel placed the organ in the same solution as the first and sealed both of them in a glass cylinder.
On a whim, he reactivated the laser scalpel that extended from his bracer. The post-mortem surgery was quickly completed, and Variel peeled away the harvested skin, leaving the corpse staring at the ceiling through a flayed face.
Slowly, his cold eyes as emotionless as ever, Variel looked up. With his duty done, the Flayer’s focus diffused, spreading wide as he let his surroundings filter back into his senses. Around him, there was a carnival of noise: the shouts, the screams, the oaths and curses rising above the blood-stink.
Variel gestured to two medicae slaves, summoning them closer. The Star of the Pantheon had been crudely burned into the flesh of their faces, and they wore aprons streaked with bodily fluids. Their augmetic limbs allowed them to serve as corpse-bearers, dragging warriors in full war plate.
“Take this husk to the incinerators,” he ordered them. As the Flayer watched the humans hauling the dead meat away, he slid the glass cylinder with its precious cargo into the storage pod sheathed to his thigh armour.
Lastly, he cleaned his narthecium with several bursts of disinfectant spray, before drawing breath to speak a single word.
“Next.”
They came for him several hours later, as he’d known they would. The only surprise was that he faced only two. It seemed Kallas Yurlon hadn’t been as beloved by his brothers as Variel had suspected.
“Hello,” he greeted them. His voice echoed faintly in the corridor, but didn’t carry far. They’d chosen their spot well, for here in one of the station’s secondary thoroughfare spinals, few others would hear any screams or gunfire.
“Flayer,” the first one growled. “We have come for Kallas.”
Variel still wore no helm. Nor did the two brother-warriors he faced, and their scarlet and black ceramite was a mirror to his own. He met their eyes in turn, taking heed of the ritual scarification blighting their faces. Both had mutilated their flesh with carvings of the Pantheon Star.
How very telling.
Variel spread his arms, the very image of benediction but for the lack of any warmth in his eyes. “How may I be of service, brothers?”
The second warrior stepped forwards now, aiming a deactivated chainsword at the Apothecary’s throat.
“You could’ve saved Kallas,” he snarled, his bloodshot eyes unblinking.
“No,” Variel lied, “he was too far gone. I gave him the Emperor’s Peace.”
“Deceiver,” the warrior laughed. “Betrayer. Now you mock his shade with such words.”
“We have come for Kallas,” the first Legionary growled again.
“Yes, I believe you mentioned that. I am not deaf.”
“His spirit besieges us, demanding vengeance in his name.”
“Indeed.” Variel moved slowly, not wishing to startle his brothers into attacking, and tapped the dry leathery memento on his
shoulder guard. The skinned, stretched face of Kallas Yurlon stared eyelessly back at them. “Here he is. He is most pleased to see you. See how he smiles?”
“You…”
If there was one thing Variel never understood about many of his brothers, it was their propensity—no, their need—to posture. Each of them seemed to consider himself the philosophical protagonist of his own saga. Their hatreds mattered more than anything else; their glories and the abuses against them had to be spoken of at every opportunity.
Baffling.
As his brother began to utter yet another threat, Variel went for his bolt pistol. Three shots cracked into the warrior’s chest, detonating in a storm of debris, throwing the Legionary back against the wall. Shrapnel cracked against the ceiling light, shattering it and plunging the narrow corridor into darkness. He was already running as the chainsword started up.
Variel blind-fired back in the seconds it took his gen-hanced eyes to adjust, explosions breeding light in flickering stutters as his second volley of shells struck home. He reloaded as he sprinted, slamming a fresh magazine home and weaving around three corners in quick succession. Around the last, he waited, drawing his carving knife.
“Flayer!” the second warrior screamed after him. The thunder of running boots came closer with each heartbeat. Variel’s eyes focussed through the darkness, his weapons heavy in his hands.
His brother rounded the corner to be met with Variel’s dagger punching into the soft armour at his collar. With an exaggerated gargle, the warrior’s forward momentum sent him sprawling, tumbling to the decking in a heap of squealing ceramite and humming armour joints.
Variel stalked closer, his pistol aimed at his brother’s head. His eyes widened at what he saw. The warrior fought his way to his knees, and was dragging the knife from his own throat with pained, voiceless breaths. How very tenacious.
“Your vocal chords are destroyed,” Variel said. “Please stop trying to curse at me. It is embarrassing.”
The warrior tried to rise again. A brutal pistol-whipping put an end to that, breaking his skull with a wet crack. Variel rested his bolter’s muzzle against the back of his fallen brother’s neck.
“And blessedly, I am spared from hearing any ludicrous last words.”
Variel spat acid onto his brother’s armour, where it began to eat into the clenched fist icon of the Red Corsairs.
“I assure you, that was unintentionally symbolic,” he told the doomed warrior, and pulled the trigger.
Lord Garreon was a warrior that—to use a Badabian expression—wore his wounds with a smile. In his case, the expression was far from literal: he smiled about as often as his favoured apprentice, yet he kept his visage with the corruption battle had placed upon it, rather than re-engineer himself with bionics. Garreon’s face was a pale picture of tectonic ruination, the lacing scars serving only to make an ugly man uglier. The right side of his face pulled tight at his temple and cheek—the taut, dead muscles giving him a scarred, eternal sneer.
“Variel, my boy.” His voice was kind where his face was not: a grandfather’s tone, belying the massacres ordered by the ageing warrior’s thin lips.
Variel did not turn to the greeting. He remained as he was, staring through the observation dome at the smoky void and the world turning below. Wraiths, little more than formless mist, drifted past the glass, the spectral suggestion of faces and fingers finding no purchase as they ghosted by. Variel ignored them with ease. The pining of lost souls was of no interest to him at all.
“Hail, sire,” he replied.
“So formal?” Garreon approached, his own armour rattling with its profusion of vials, trinkets and talismans. Variel knew the sound well. Truly, the Apothecary Lord had embraced the Chapter’s allegiance to the Pantheon.
“My mind wanders,” the younger warrior confessed.
“And where does it wander? To the globe turning beneath our feet?” Garreon paused to moisten his lips with a swipe of his quivering tongue. “Or the two bodies in Subsidiary Spinal Eleven?”
Variel narrowed his eyes as he stared at the black world outside the glass. “They were newbloods,” he said. “Weak. Worthless.”
“You left them unharvested,” his mentor pointed out. “Lord Huron would be less than pleased.”
“Nothing of value was lost,” Variel replied. He moved away from the edge of the observation platform, crossing to the other side. Here, the view was a deeper slice of the tempestuous, cloudy void and the metallic bulk of the station itself, reaching for kilometres in every direction. Variel watched the comings and goings of dozens of cruisers for several minutes, as well as the swimming dances of the parasitic lesser ships clinging close to each of them. The warships drifted in orbit around the station, or remained docked at its edges. The lights of the shuttle traffic painted the poisoned nebula with flickering stars racing hither and thither.
“Inspiring, is it not?” Garreon said at last. “To think we once ruled one world. Now, we cradle a horde of systems in our tender grip. Billions of lives. Trillions. That is how power is measured, boy: in the souls one holds in his clutches, and the lives one can end with a word.”
Variel’s grunt was patently noncommittal. “I sense you bring news, master.”
“I do. And it is tied to your wastrel ways.” The edge of a lecture dwelled within those words, Variel knew. “Our lord desires gene-seed. A great genetic harvest, to swell our ranks with fresh blood. He will commit to the siege soon—a battle two years in the making. He bids all of his fleshsmiths to be ready.”
Variel shook his head. “I find it difficult to believe Lord Huron would truly commit to this undertaking. He would not spend the Corsairs so frivolously.” He gestured at the fleet of cruisers drifting around the station. Many bore the black and red armour of the Tyrant’s Own, while others displayed the hues of allegiance to other disgraced Adeptus Astartes Chapters. By far the greatest number were Imperial Navy vessels, their hulls desecrated and branded with the Pantheon Star. “Lord Huron’s forces could break the back of any armada in the Holy Fleet,” Variel added, “but this is not enough to lay siege to a fortress-monastery. We would be obliterated the moment we entered orbit. Imagine, master—all these beautiful ships becoming burning hulks, screaming down through the atmosphere.” Variel snorted without an iota of amusement. “Such a graveyard they would make.”
“You are not a general, my boy. You are a bone-cutter, a flesh-crafter. When the lord desires your perception of his crusades, I am sure he will ask for it.” Garreon’s sneer pulled tighter. “But do not hold your breath in expectation for that day to ever come.”
Variel inclined his head, meeting his master’s eyes at last. “Forgive me. My humours are in flux today. What do you require of me, master?”
Garreon forgave his apprentice with a wave of dismissal, casting the topic from his mind. “Lord Huron has not summoned us, but we will go to him before he does.”
Variel knew the purpose even before he asked. “He suffers?”
“He always suffers.” Garreon licked his lips again. “You know that as well as I. But come, let us ease it again for a time, if we are able.”
Lufgt Huron sat in his ornate throne, armoured fists clutching at the armrests. The great Gothic chamber stood empty but for the Tyrant himself; all of his courtiers, attendants, bodyguards and beseechers sent away while his Apothecaries worked their trade. Variel had seen the expansive hall play host to hundreds of warriors at any given time, despite the fact that this deep-void station was far from the Tyrant’s largest or most opulent bastion. Now, the vast chamber echoed with the sounds of Huron’s ragged breathing and the tri-hum of the three renegades’ war plate.
“Garrlllmmmnnnuh…” the Tyrant drooled. “Garrelllmmnuh.”
“Hush, Great One,” the Apothecary Lord replied, knuckle-deep in Huron’s skull. “I can correct the synapse relays,” he sighed. “Again.”
Variel crouched by the side of the iron throne, his scalpel and micro-forceps pick
ing at the Tyrant’s throat. With each crackling breath, the reinforced hydraulics that mimicked Huron’s neck muscles clicked and clanked. What little flesh remained was atrophied and almost nerveless, lumpy with scar tissue too degraded to bond with synthetic skin. The Tyrant had long ago endured injury to the very edge of destruction, and the mechanical repairs that kept him alive were crude, hideous, loud… but ultimately functional.
They were, however, temperamental.
Variel’s memory, like most of the humans elevated into the ranks of the Adeptus Astartes, was as close to eidetic as mortality would allow. By his reckoning, this was the seventy-eighth instance he had been summoned to tend to his liege lord’s augmetics, not including the initial surgeries performed with Garreon and two Techmarines in order to save the Tyrant’s life.
Those first instances had been closer to engineering than surgery. A third of Huron’s body was reduced to molten meat and burned bone, and in cutting away the ravaged flesh, a great deal more of his mortal frame had to be sacrificed to prepare attachment ports for extensive bionics. The right side of his body no longer existed beyond the clanking grind of Machine Cult ingenuity—all fibre-bundle muscles, piston joints and metal bones fused to the warrior’s armour.
Variel had seen the bio-auspex readings at the time, just as he’d seen them each time since. The degree of pain registered within Huron’s mind was far beyond the realms of human tolerance. Each time Lord Garreon or the Flayer burned out the synaptic relays, dulling their master’s perception of his own agony, it would only be a matter of months before his enhanced physiology compensated for the damage, repairing the nerves enough to transmit pain again. Short of invasive lobotomising surgery that would risk what little brain tissue remained, there was nothing his healers could do to offer a permanent solution.
So he endured. He endured, and he suffered, and he channelled the torment into his piratical ambitions.
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