Scamander raised his free hand, black with charred blood from his wound. Flame sprayed from his fingers and Borganor grabbed hold of a table leg to keep the burst of fire from carrying him off his feet. He trusted in his ceramite, in the rites with which he had blessed his wargear and the spirit of Roboute Guilliman he had beseeched to enter his heart and make him more than a man, more than a Space Marine. He trusted in the force of his vengeance, the shield of contempt which could spread out from his iron soul and keep him alive long enough to execute the traitor he faced.
Borganor forced himself forward a pace, knife held out in front. Scamander raised his pistol again but Borganor swatted it away.
‘Traitor,’ hissed Borganor. ‘Witch.’
Scamander replied with a breath of fire, a narrow tongue of flame as concentrated as a las-cutter’s beam. Borganor ducked it and rammed the knife up into Scamander’s face. The blade passed up into Scamander’s jaw, ripping through teeth and tongue. The flame sputtered as clot of blood sprayed from Scamander’s mouth.
Borganor leapt forward, a knee on Scamander’s wounded stomach. Scamander fell against the back wall of the archive room, where he was bathed in the burning remnants of centuries of parchment records. Borganor grabbed the back of Scamander’s head and wrenched it up, exposing the Soul Drinker’s throat.
Scamander’s eyes were full of hate. Borganor grinned as he saw the tiniest glimmer of fear there, a twitch at the corner of the eye.
‘Everything you die for is a lie,’ said Borganor, and slit Scamander’s throat.
The Howling Griffon had to push the Soul Drinker’s body up against the wall so the gout of fire that ripped from his torn throat shot upwards instead of into his face. The fountain hit the ceiling and spread, flame like liquid pooling outwards. Then it sputtered as if whatever fuelled it was running out and Scamander fell limp. Fire licked from the corners of his eyes, his mouth, his ears, and smoke coiled from the joints in his armour.
Borganor threw the body aside. He looked around him. The burning room was in chaos, half held by the Howling Griffons, half by the Soul Drinkers. Many Howling Griffons had died to the Soul Drinkers Librarian, but now Soul Drinkers were dying to the numbers and firepower of the Howling Griffons.
Borganor’s fight with Scamander had brought him out of cover. Only smoke and flames concealed him from Soul Drinkers guns.
‘Brothers! The trickster is dead! Let bolter fire be your truth!’ Borganor yelled over the gunfire, standing proud of the fight even as bolter shots fell around him. He snatched his bolter up off the floor and got into the battle proper, hammering volley after volley into the hazy purple-armoured shaped that loomed through the smoke.
‘Onward! Onward! This is but a welcome, my brothers! The celebration is yet to come!’
Sarpedon heard the gunfire, and smelled the smoke rolling in from the reading room. In the heart of the library labyrinth, alongside Captain Luko, he waited for the wave to break against the Soul Drinkers defences.
‘Scamander is lost,’ said Luko.
‘Then we have something to avenge,’ replied Sarpedon calmly.
‘I promised myself that no more Space Marines would die by my hand,’ said Luko. ‘I have made many such promises to myself, but I have a problem keeping them.’
‘You promised yourself peace, Captain,’ said Sarpedon. ‘You will have it. But not just yet. Hold on for a few more moments, for your battle-brothers.’
The first volleys of bolter fire, sharp and crisp, cackled from the interior of the library. The Howling Griffons were in, past Scamander’s forlorn hope and into the death-trap the Soul Drinkers had created for them.
‘At last it will end,’ said Luko. ‘I don’t have to lie any more. Thank the Emperor it ends here.’
‘And we decide how it ends,’ added Sarpedon. ‘How many men can ever say that?’
Luko did not reply. The power field around his lightning claws flared into life, and loose papers on the shelves scattered in the electric charge.
The gunfire rose towards a crescendo as the vox channels filled with bedlam.
‘Side by side with me, brothers!’ yelled Graevus, charging shoulder-first down the narrow corridors of the library. Burning books rained down around him, thousands of words flitting by as pages turned to ash.
Graevus crashed around a corner straight into a Howling Griffon wielding a two-handed chainsword like an executioner’s axe. The blade screeched down and Graevus turned it aside with his power axe, his mutated strength redirecting the blow into one of the bookcases beside him. The chainsword tore into the ancient wood and the Howling Griffon paused for a moment to wrench it free. That was all the time Graevus needed to bring his axe up into the Howling Griffon’s chest, carving through ceramite, ribs and organs as his opponent’s chest was cleaved in two. The Howling Griffon was still alive as he fell but his death was held off only by his fury. His lungs were laid open, a well of blood flooding his bisected ribcage and pouring like an overflowing fountain across the dusty floor.
More charged in behind him. This was the position of honour for the Howling Griffons – the head of the charge, the first men in, who suffered the greatest chance of death but would bring out of the battle the greatest acclaim whether they fell or survived.
Graevus was supposed to have Scamander alongside him. Scamander was dead. Graevus would have to do the killing for both of them.
More Howling Griffons were forcing their way through the narrow library corridors. A burning, armoured form crashed through the bookcase ahead of Graevus – a Howling Griffon, blazing from head to toe, the shape of a flamer-wielding Soul Drinker just visible through the curtain of smoke and flame that surrounded him. Graevus hacked off the Howling Griffon’s head with one slice of his power axe, whirled with the force of the blow and followed up with a lateral strike that shattered the chainblade in the hand of the Howling Griffon who charged around the bend just ahead of him.
Soul Drinkers behind Graevus vaulted over the body of the dead Howling Griffons to get to grips with the enemy. In the confines of the library there was no room for numbers to tell. The battle was a series of duels, vicious face-to-face struggles without enough room even to feint or manoeuvre. It was war without skill, strength and fury the sole factors in victory. Graevus had plenty of both.
A Soul Drinker fell beside him, a plasma pistol wound bored right through him in a charred tunnel. Graevus dived into his killer, slamming him against the bookcase and smashing the butt of his hammer into his face. The stunned Howling Griffon fell to one knee and Graevus cut off one of his arms, the backswing shearing the top half of his head off.
Another Soul Drinker died, shattered body riddled with bolter fire. A long corridor up ahead was swept with volleys of fire from a Howling Griffon with a heavy bolter at the far end. The bookcases were disintegrating and Graevus could see the tally the Howling Griffon had already reaped through rents in the wall. Burning books gathered in drifts around his feet, gutted spines falling while their pages flitted up towards the ceiling on a scalding breath of hot air.
Graevus charged on through the bookcase. It splintered underneath him. Heavy bolter shots erupted around him, filling their air with a thousand explosions. Graevus relied on his momentum to take him through the weight of fire and he slammed into the Howling Griffons warrior, hacking and wrestling as the two fell into the flames.
Graevus let the battle-lust in him take over. It was a rare that he permitted himself to completely let go, to abandon everything that made a Space Marine a disciplined weapon of war and allow the born warrior, the celebrant of carnage, to take control.
Graevus’s mutated hand clamped around the Howling Griffon’s head and dropped his axe among the burning debris. He twisted the Howling Griffon’s head around until a seal gave on his helmet, and the helmet came away.
The Howling Griffon was the image of Graevus himself, a gnarled and relentless veteran, the kind of man that could be trusted to hold any line and execute any order when
the fire came down.
These are our brothers, thought Graevus.
They are the same as us.
The thought broke through Graevus’s battle-lust. He tried to force it down but it would not be quieted.
Graevus took a step back from the Howling Griffon. The Griffon, disarmed with his heavy bolter lying down in the wreckage, scrabbled away from Graevus. Graevus picked up his axe, not taking his eyes from his opponent.
‘Fall back!’ shouted Graevus. ‘Fall back! To your lines! Fall back!’
An instant after Graevus gave the order, the library in front of him erupted in flame and ash. Heavy weapons hammered through the bedlam. The Howling Griffons had brought their big guns up.
Their first attack was to drag the Soul Drinkers into the fight, to bog them down in melee. The second was to shatter the cover of the library and fill the Soul Drinkers positions with burning ruin, to open up enough space for the Howling Griffons to use their numbers to their fullest.
Ordinary soldiers could not have done it. The men of the first line would have been at fatal risk from the heavy guns of the men behind them. But the Howling Griffons were not ordinary soldiers; the first Space Marines in trusted in the aim of their battle-brothers.
The library was torn apart. Graevus forged through the flames, kicking shattered wooden bookcases out of his way and shielding his face from the thousands of burning books falling as thick as a blizzard. Lascannon blasts lanced through the chaos, glittering crimson and shearing through everything they touched. Fat white-hot bursts of plasma fire ripped out of the smoke.
Graevus saw the form of a fallen Soul Drinker at his feet. He grabbed the downed brother by the shoulder guard and dragged him after himself as he ran. The Soul Drinkers had fortified choke points and firebases further in and Graevus saw one of them up ahead, guarding a wide corridor with toppled bookcases and heaps of broken furniture as a barricade. The Soul Drinkers behind it – Graevus recognised Sergeant Salk among them – waved Graevus over and he vaulted the barricade.
The battle-brother he had brought with him had been shot in the thigh, hit by a lascannon blast. The leg was hanging on solely through the tangled strips of torn ceramite that remained of his leg armour. Graevus could not tell if the Soul Drinker was alive. Other Space Marines dragged him down out of danger.
‘They’re burning us out!’ shouted Graevus to Salk. ‘Big guns and flamers!’
‘Then we are the gun line!’ shouted Salk. ‘We’re ready!’ He handed Graevus a bolter, no doubt taken from a wounded or dead Soul Drinker who had no more need for it. Graevus nodded, checked the movement of the bolter, and took his position kneeling at the barricade. His left hand was his trigger hand, because his mutated right was too large to fit a finger into the trigger guard.
Howling Griffons stalked through the smoke. It was impossible, with the smoke rolling thick and dense, to tell now where the remnants of the library stood, where they burned, and where they had been completely shattered. The air was too thick and toxic for a man to breathe; only the lung augmentations of the Space Marines kept both sides from choking. Visibility was well below bolter range.
Graevus could see the red and yellow livery of the Griffons, smudged and filthy through the haze and soot, reduced to a contrast between light and dark forming the quartered design the Griffons wore on their armour. Half a dozen approached down the fire point’s field of view.
‘Fire!’ yelled Salk. The Soul Drinkers at the barricade, six or seven of them including Graevus, opened fire. They rattled through half a magazine of bolter rounds each, pumping shells into the armoured shapes advancing on them.
Some fell, cut down. Others stumbled, alive but wounded. All who still lived returned fire and the barricade shuddered as the thick wooden slabs were chewed through, a layer of cover getting thinner with every half-second. Explosive shells threw handfuls of splinters into the haze and Graevus gritted his teeth against the stinging rain that fell against his face.
Salk swapped out a magazine. A Soul Drinker had slipped down to the floor beside him.
‘It’s not bad,’ said the Soul Drinker. Salk clapped a hand to the wounded Space Marine’s shoulder, then turned to fire another volley.
Graevus strained to see through the smoke. The wounded were being dragged away. A bookcase had been toppled for cover and the Howling Griffons were regrouping. Soul Drinkers up and down the line were sniping at movement but the Howling Griffons would not attack in ones and twos. They would advance again, coordinated to move as one.
‘This is no battle,’ said Graevus. ‘This is not warfare. This is just…’
‘Attrition,’ said Salk. ‘We killed Mercaeno. They all made an oath to avenge him. They’re willing to spend a few of their lives if that means they are the ones who get to kill us. They have more bodies than we do. That’s what it comes down to.’
‘It’s no way for a Space Marine to fight,’ snarled Graevus. ‘By the Throne, they could starve us out if they wanted. They don’t have to die.’
Salk looked at Graevus, uncertain.
‘They don’t have to die!’ repeated Graevus. ‘Our Chapters are brothers! On Nevermourn it was different, but here there is no need to fight! What does it matter to them how we are killed? None of us are leaving the Phalanx alive, this battle is needless murder!’
‘They made an oath,’ said Salk. ‘Mere logic cannot compete with that.’
‘Let none mourn the losses,’ said Gethsemar. ‘Let no sorrow cloud the celebrations of our victory. Bring joy, my brothers, as you bring death.’
In the shadowy confines of choristry chamber, the Angels Sanguine had gathered to pray. The chamber was lined with servitor choirs, the corpses of gifted singers transformed into machines that could sing for days on end without need for maintenance. On the Phalanx they were used in rituals of contemplation, when the deeds of Rogal Dorn were matched against every Imperial Fist’s qualities and achievements. Now they were silent, their hairless heads bowed on their metal shoulders, the lungs stilled.
Gethsemar’s war-mask glanced between his Sanguinary Guard, as if he was speaking a silent prayer that only each of his brothers could hear. Then Gethsemar drew his glaive, a two-handed power weapon with a blade of polished blue stone.
‘We are ready,’ he said.
‘Thank Guilliman for that,’ said Siege-Captain Daviks.
Daviks’s Silver Skulls and the Angels Sanguine had gathered in the choristry chamber because it adjoined the library. Daviks’s warriors, skilled siege engineers, had already set up the demolition charges on one wall. The sound of gunfire came from beyond it as the Howling Griffons alternately advanced through the burning ruin of the library and swept the chaos with heavy weapons fire.
‘You see no art in war,’ said Gethsemar. ‘And if a Space Marine’s life must consist of nothing but war and the preparations for it, that means there is no place in your lives for art at all. So sad, my brother. So sad.’
‘We live with it,’ replied Daviks.
‘This is Borganor!’ came a voice over the vox-channel. ‘We have them engaged! Now is the time!’
‘Very well,’ replied Daviks. ‘We’re going in.’
Daviks gave a hand signal to the Silver Skull holding the detonator. The Space Marines backed off and knelt, turning away from the wall, and the charges went off. They were shaped to direct the full force into the wall and it disintegrated, leaving a huge black hole from floor to ceiling. The shockwave and debris toppled many of the servitor choir, once-human components spilling out.
Gethsemar’s Angels Sanguine charged in before the debris had finished pattering onto the floor. Smoke boiled out past them and the gunfire was louder, the yells of orders overlapping with the cries of pain as Space Marines fell.
Daviks followed Gethsemar. His squad was a siege engineer unit, armed with bolters and demolition charges, while Gethsemar’s was an all-out assault unit. Gethsemar soared forward, his jump pack hurling him horizontally down the narrow alley of bo
okcases that confronted him. His Sanguinary Guard were equally nimble with their jump packs, jinking around the tight corners with bursts of exhaust, their feet barely touching the ground. A Soul Drinker watching the rear of the library was cut down as Gethsemar roared past him, his power glaive slicing the sentry’s arm off before another Sanguinary Guard finished the job with a downward cut that nearly bisected him.
The first Soul Drinkers were reacting to the sudden second front opening up in the library. Daviks swapped bolter fire with Soul Drinkers who ran around the corner in front of him, scattering books in the volley of bolter fire his squad kicked out in reply. Two Soul Drinkers fell and Daviks paused in his advance for long enough to put a bolter round through the head of each. A Silver Skull did not take death for granted. It was his way to be sure.
Gethsemar fell back past a corner up ahead. His golden armoured body crashed against the bookcase behind him.
‘Gethsemar!’ yelled Daviks into the vox. ‘What is it?’
The thing that lumbered around the corner after Gethsemar was an abhorrence that Daviks’s senses could barely contain. Composed of screaming heads gathered in a roughly humanoid shape, its lumpen shoulders brushed the ceiling of the library. The terrible cacophony that keened from it was enough to all but stun Daviks, filling his mind with the awful sound of pain and grief distilled. The thing’s hands were bunches of withered and broken human arms, arranged like fingers, and its head was a yawning maw ringed with bleeding jawbones. In its throat, thousands of eyes clustered. The thing stamped a pace closer to Gethsemar, trailing masses of entrails and tangled limbs in its wake.
Daviks’s squad opened fire, covering Gethsemar as he scrambled out of the beast’s way. Bolter fire thudded into its hundreds of heads but it did not falter. It turned to Daviks, mouth yawning wide as it roared, and a gale of utter foulness shrieked around the Silver Skulls.
Hammer and Bolter Year One Page 110