Hammer and Bolter Year One

by Christian Dunn

  Now Varnica sat among the archives of the Chapter Librarium, surrounded by freshly inked tomes filled with the profane writings of Gunther Kephilaes. Some Chapters would have destroyed the writing on the walls, and compelled any Space Marine who had seen them to cleanse himself with fire or denial until their corruption was gone. But the Doom Eagles were not like those other Chapters. They wanted to understand.

  The Librarium’s scribe-servitors were still transcribing the complex code-language into High Gothic, and filling ledger after ledger with the ramblings that resulted. Varnica had one such book in front of him, leafing through the parade of obscenity. Kephilaes had been a prophet, in part at least, and the endless train of prodigies and omens filled Varnica’s mind with images of stars boiling away and the galaxy burning from core to rim.

  ‘Librarian,’ came a familiar voice.

  Varnica looked up to see Techmarine Hamilca walking among the small forest of servitors that chittered away as they wrote. ‘I had heard tell I would find you here.’

  ‘Where else would one find a Librarian,’ replied Varnica, ‘but in a library?’

  Hamilca smiled. ‘Your levity need be a shield no longer, Librarian. Not while you and I are the only ones to see it. The loss of Novas has affected you more deeply than an Adeptus Astartes is apt to admit.’

  ‘One more trial on the path, brother. One more trial.’

  ‘What did Kephilaes have to say for himself?’

  Varnica closed the tome he had finished scanning through. ‘At the last count, Techmarine, seventeen million people died so he could tell us that a great feathered serpent was going to swallow the sun. And that a plague of cockroaches would devour a great empire. No details on which sun or which empire.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Hamilca, ‘this is a task that could be shared?’

  ‘One mind, I fear, is better than two when it comes to such things. I consider reading Kephilaes’s drivel a penance for losing good Doom Eagles under my command.’

  ‘So be it, Librarian. I and my servitors shall be ready to assist you.’ Hamilca finished making a few adjustments to the scribe-servitors, and the hum of their scribbling autoquills changed pitch slightly. ‘And so, brother I leave you.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Varnica. Hamilca stopped just as he was turning away. Varnica had opened another volume of the heretic’s writings. ‘Here. And here. The same name. A daemon prince. This is a record of its deeds.’

  ‘Kephilaes’ patron?’ asked Hamilca.

  ‘Perhaps. It was one of the most powerful of its kind, one of the brood of the Change God. Throne alive, I fear I shall need the services of the Flagellants’ Guild to purify myself after reading this. It was... it was a plotter without compare. A manipulator. “There was not one living soul without a flaw that he could not widen to a chasm into which that soul would fall. A saint would be prey to this great cunning.”’

  ‘This daemon prince,’ said Hamilca, sitting opposite Varnica and taking a book for himself. ‘It is active now? The Red Night was some form of sacrifice to it?’

  ‘It is possible. There is more. Here – a record of its deeds. It polluted the gene pool of a triad of worlds, so they became barbarians and warred with one another. An obscene tale about Saint Voynara, who before she died gave in to despair and called upon this prince to deliver her. And its masterpiece, the crowning glory... by Terra, what foulness I see before my eyes!’

  Hamilca leaned forwards. ‘Librarian? What is it? What have you seen?’

  ‘It took a Chapter of Adeptus Astartes,’ read Varnica, ‘and it found in them a fatal flaw. It was their pride. That same sin we all commit, brother. Our pride, our weakness. And it turned this Chapter into an instrument of its will, through trickery compelling them to do its bidding while they thought they were doing the Emperor’s work.’

  ‘What Chapter was this?’ asked Hamilca. ‘Many have fallen from grace or disappeared. Is this the truth behind the fall of the Brazen Claws or the Thunder Barons?’

  ‘No,’ replied Varnica. ‘This daemon prince, when its name was spoken, was called Abraxes. The Chapter it commanded was the Soul Drinkers.’

  Charandis

  Ben McCallum

  I

  Prey, drunk and foolish, blundered onward, oblivious and uncaring.

  The scent stung his wet nostrils, sinking hooks into his brain, flaring his bloody instincts. He could taste the blood that ran in their veins even from this distance, a coppery tang that made his lolling tongue ache, and sang up the length of his killing fangs.

  Each step he took betrayed a burning hunger that physically hurt. Claws that were too long slid in and out of his monstrous paws with a lethality he had forgotten how to control. They itched so incessantly, so furiously, with pain that echoed up limbs swollen by the anger that had plagued him for so long.

  Thick ropes of sour drool swung from his open maw as he moved, his lethal bulk passing soundlessly through a woodland that had been blessed by rain only a few hours ago. Water was no longer a relief to him. Each raindrop that fell from the leaves of whispering trees sent spikes of migraine-fierce pain through his leonine skull. A pelt that was once the pearly white of pure moonlight felt heavy on his back, soaked with cold rainwater and caked with a thousand kinds of filth.

  He quickened his pace, his loping gait lengthening into a staggering gallop. The prey-scent intensified, and his nose burned in sympathy. He was close enough to hear the breath in their lungs, and smell the stinging reek of alcohol sweating through their pores.

  Other smells clung to them, too; scents he dimly remembered as city-smells, laden with the promise of glittering spear tips and baying horns. There was a time when he would have shrunk from this scent in favour of softer, less dangerous prey. But now the anger wouldn’t let him. The anger burned in his guts and banished his instincts, compelling him to drown his pain in the hot rush of the kill.

  They were making noises, now. Elf-speech whispered under the trees, their voices softened by the wine that had compelled them to journey out here. The sound lanced into his mind, firing a predator-rage he once knew how to contain. This was wrong. This was not how he was supposed to hunt.

  His quarry stopped, and the low murmur of their soft voices began to grow louder. This prey was not as lethal as the other elf-creatures that moved through the woods like ghosts, but he was not blind to the danger of the metal that gleamed in their slender hands.

  Slowly, agonisingly, he prowled forward, even as the unkind rage knifed arcs of pain into his bleary eyes and screamed at him to lunge.

  When the moment was right, it would be satisfied.

  ‘A Chracian myth,’ Darath said through smiling lips, his thin arms spreading in an expansive gesture. ‘That is all this is, my friends.’

  He spoke the words in the sing-song accent of the Lothern aristocracy, his diction flawless. The bleariness of his dark eyes betrayed his drunkenness.

  ‘Hundreds dead?’ Nesselan slurred, announcing every glass of wine he had put away today. ‘This is no myth, Darath. There is a terror loose.’

  ‘There is no terror here in this Chracian wilderness,’ Darath snapped, the wine fouling his temper. ‘You are a fool to believe so. We are all fools for coming here, through the rain and the wind, hunting for a ghost that does not exist.’

  Darath’s sculpted cheekbones flushed red. Here, in these woods, even as the sun edged ever closer to the distant horizon, he wanted to strike Nesselan. The fool was bleeding the fun from this journey with every word that passed his lips. He had never met an elf so negative in all his days.

  Thyran tried and failed to banish the tension with a false laugh.

  ‘These woodsmen are not liars,’ Nesselan said, crouching low and pressing his fingers to the damp earth, as if this somehow proved the truth of his words. ‘Hundreds, this ghost of yours has claimed over the years. I swear to you, by Asuryan‘s blood, that this beast is real.’

  Darath knew he believed those words. Only hours ago, as they strode in
to the woodland of mighty Chrace, they had been warned off the trail by unwashed, uncouth locals. A great beast, they claimed, was skulking beneath this canopy. Whole scores of men had fallen to its filthy claws. Armed men, too.

  In Darath’s most humble opinion, this tale was a mean-spirited jest by the lesser folk of this barbarian wilderness.

  It simply would not do.

  Thyran held a flask to his lips and drank deeply. The wine was perfection, if a little too sweet.

  ‘Exaggeration, Nesselan, you silly man,’ Thyran laughed, ever the voice of reason. ‘Maybe it does skulk through these trees. This doesn’t mean it has slain so many. This doesn’t mean it can’t die at the tips of our blades.’

  Darath watched as Thyran’s sword rasped from its sheath, feeling a jealous pang at the work of art in his fellow noble’s hand.

  ‘I have sparred with the very best Lothern has to offer,’ he continued, brushing a strand of fair hair from his eyes, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. ‘I promise you, we are in no danger here.’

  Darath filled his lungs to speak, to curse them both for their foolish notions and their uncouth bravado. They were nobles, after all. Maybe the other two were minor nobles, of lesser houses, but the blood in their veins was of privileged stock. They were being ridiculous. They were above this.

  But the words caught in his throat.

  ‘What was that?’ both Nesselan and Thyran said at once.

  All of them had distinctly heard the loud, brittle crack! of a fallen branch being snapped in half. Darath’s fingers, thin digits armoured in gold rings, wrapped around the handle of his sword. His tongue traced a nervous circuit around his lips.

  ‘I told you this was no ghost,’ Nesselan hissed, his eyes wide with fear.

  ‘Be quiet!’ Darath could feel how heavy his breath was, laden with alcohol fumes. They should not have taken the wine with them.

  ‘Do not worry,’ Thyran spoke, sounding infuriatingly composed. ‘I think it was just--’

  The sound that interrupted him was torn straight from a nightmare.

  ‘Charandis,’ Darath breathed, as the lion pounced.

  A small sound escaped the prey’s trembling lips as he thundered from cover in a blur of dirty white fur and scything black talons.

  He associated those three syllables with hunt-kill sensations: the pungent sting of urine in the air; the quickening percussion of a fluttering heartbeat; the cloying fear-musk screaming from their pores; the widening of their dark eyes as their gaze locks with his, a connection between predator and prey.

  He would never know the significance of that frightened little noise. He would never know that the elf-creatures had characterised him as a soul-shaking rumble of deadly thunder, the booming echo of lightning lashing the wet ground.

  To him, it was just a noise they made before they died.

  His paw thundered like the hammer of a wrathful god into the first elf’s fragile skull, pulping bone and flesh. The echo of its snapping neck jarred up through his front leg from claw to shoulder, throwing the elf ten yards.

  His claws snagged on skin, stunting the creature’s flight. It landed in a wet crunch of broken bones, twitching fitfully as it died.

  His head swung to face his other prey, their harsh breathing and thundering hearts like a balm to the disease that was slowly killing him. His eyes were bleary red orbs, locking the two elf-creatures somewhere between fight and flight.

  He opened his jaws and roared. A sound like a volcanic eruption tore from his chest. The fury of a predator king vomited forth in a deafening torrent through fangs that had snatched life from a hundred souls.

  It was only natural that they fled.

  The chase was brief and violent, and his instincts sang with exultant rightness. This was how things were supposed to be. This hunt was pure, lifting him from the ravages of sickness. Blood slicked his claws as he pounded across the wet soil, his breath like rumbling like a summer thunderstorm in his chest.

  He tasted elf blood before the creature even knew it was dead. His fangs crunched through ribs and pierced lung and heart in the time it took for them both to hit the ground. He lashed out with leonine claws at the body beneath him in afterthought, spattering blood against a tree, painting it in wet smears.

  His limbs burned, though unlike the pain behind his eyes, this was wholly natural. Welcome, even. It was the ache of taut muscles and expended strength, the kind to be slept off with a full belly.

  The third creature actually turned. A yard of shining metal sang from its sheath, making a series of panicked slashes. Maybe it actually thought it could survive. Maybe this display of desperate aggression was intended to scare him off.

  It did not.

  The elf was in two pieces in as many seconds. Both fell to the ground. Both bled crimson fountains into the soggy earth. One tried to crawl away, raking its fingers across the earth in an effort to escape.

  Even as the creature burbled a garble of broken syllables, Charandis bellowed another peal of thunder to the skies.

  Everything was as it should be. Everything was normal again.

  II

  ‘You said you were coming alone,’ he says, as if I am not even here. His teeth flash milky yellow in the afternoon sun, his white lips pulling taut against a dozen scars. His tone is even, but he doesn’t look happy. And those scars tell me that saying something… brash, would be unwise.

  Very unwise.

  ‘Is this a problem?’ Alvantir’s voice is confident, yet his hand strays to the oval birthmark blotching his cheek. I know these men make him nervous, and I don’t blame him.

  There are three of them, and underneath the swaying trees they look like kings. Their pointed helms rest in the crooks of their arms, glinting bright silver against the sunlight, each adorned with oval sapphires staring out like cyclopean eyes.

  Their armour is… magnificent. I have never seen craftsmanship like this before; not even on the shoulders of strutting peacocks on the streets of Tor Achare. From steel cuirass to masterfully wrought sabatons, they radiate authority. They lean on their heirloom axes with a casual ease born of confidence; centuries-old weapons gripped by well-oiled gloves.

  But it is what they wear upon their shoulders that sends my heart racing.

  The dead faces of conquered lions glare at me from over their armoured spaulders. The pelts are draped like tattered banners over their armour, frayed in places like forgotten standards, ending in claws the length of my fingers. Their leonine faces snarl soundlessly, the empty sockets of their eyes still narrowed in silent fury.

  It marks the greatest honour a Chracian can earn. It demonstrates the exultant heights to which a lowly woodsman like myself can rise.

  I am… jealous.

  I stand before the Phoenix King’s chosen blades; his loyal shields against which a thousand foes have fallen. The eyes of the White Lions are upon me, and all I can think of is how jealous I am.

  ‘You said you were coming alone,’ the lead elf repeats, his thunderstorm-black eyes locked on Alvantir. The sound of creaking leather reaches my keen ears. I know this to be his grip tightening on the oak haft of his weapon.

  My companion dips his head. I can feel his aching desire to be anywhere but here.

  ‘I crave your pardon, kinsman,’ he says evenly, sweeping a braid of autumn-brown hair behind his ear. ‘He knows these woods unlike any other. Whatever you are looking for, he can find.’

  He looks at me for the first time, and I see nothing but cold, pitiless scrutiny in those dark eyes. I fold my arms across my chest without thinking, shielding myself from his attention.

  He nods, as if satisfied.

  ‘I am familiar with your friend,’ he says to me, directly. His voice is deep, worn raw and gravelly by distant battlefields. ‘But not you. Tell me your name, and we can begin.’

  I incline my head as I speak, but I do not break eye contact.

  ‘My name is Korhil.’

  The scene before us is repugna
nt in a thousand ways.

  Chrace’s forests are famously beautiful, but equally dangerous. A woodsman does not roam beneath the evergreen canopy unprepared. This is why our axes know the kiss of a whetstone every day. This is why our tunics are oiled and treated every time we leave our homes. This is why our fathers spent endless years teaching us the manifold ways of surviving the forest. This is why we are Chrace’s proud children.

  I step over a severed hand bedecked in fabulously expensive rings, fighting the rising urge to empty my guts. Blood paints the boles of trees in dried smears, and innards festoon the forest floor like wreckage wreathed in swarms of black flies.

  The first body lies by a mossy boulder. His features are… gone, but I know him to be a noble by the fine cut of his bloodstained clothes. His arms and legs are bent in ways that defy reason, and the blow that snapped his neck was close to taking the head from his shoulders.

  The second body sprawls near the roots of a powerful tree. This one died as he fled, that much is obvious. His chest is crushed, his broken ribs jutting outward in angles that speak of unthinkable strength. Whatever killed him came back after it had finished, and vented its wrath on the ragged corpse. The coils of vital organs decorate the gnarled fingers of clawing roots.

  The third is in two pieces, and the upper half tried to crawl away. His spine is a jutting cord of bone, black with dried blood and alive with a carpet of flies. His legs bear the ugly lacerations of scything claws and…