by Various
'One way or another, Bokari, it will be.'
After any battle, there was a period of observed silence. A time to remember the fallen. A time to take pride in a hard-fought victory. Most Silver Skulls retreated to the chapel on board whichever ship had brought them to the warzones. Some remained in their own cells, meditating or scribing accounts of the battle. This time, there was something else that required Lord Commander Argentius’s attention.
He strode through the corridors and walkways of the ship, his heavy footfalls muffled by the soft leather boots he wore when he was not armoured. Wherever he walked, subordinates bowed and crossed their hands over their chests in respect. He commanded the awe and might of not only his Chapter, but all who served the Silver Skulls unto death.
He reached his destination, ducking his head to pass in beyond the threshold of a door that he could barely squeeze through. The room’s occupant looked up, grunting a greeting. He did not bow before the Chapter Master. Instead, the Chapter Master bowed before him.
‘Away with you, boy. Stop all that bowing and scraping.’ The wizened husk of a man moved slowly with the aid of a silver-tipped cane, settling aching bones down on the chair beside the inking bench.
At seventy years old, Ignatius had been Cruor Primaris for more than five decades. Gifted beyond any artist on Varsavia, examples of the man’s work were carried on the bodies of Silver Skulls warriors across the galaxy and admired by many. Denied ascension in his youth, Ignatius fought the wars of the Imperium through exquisite pieces of art that told stories he yearned to be a part of. More slowly now, though. Argentius knew that it hurt the man beyond measure to hold the beautifully hand-crafted inking needles for any length of time in his arthritic hands, but the work remained exquisite.
‘Sit down, boy. Get that tunic off. Let’s see the damage.’
Boy. Only Ignatius could get away with that kind of insubordination.
Argentius tugged off the heavy linen tunic, sitting down. Ignatius’s rheumy eyes scanned the broad, muscular back. The olive complexion was marred by countless battle scars that sketched unsightly valleys and mountains across the flesh. The ridges caused Ignatius’s lips to purse. Not because of the evidence of injury, but because they distorted the otherwise perfect imagery he had already drawn and re-drawn countless times on the living canvas of Argentius’s back.
‘Turn around. Let’s see the rest.’
Argentius shifted position until he was facing the Cruor Primaris. The flat, fused ribcage of his chest was smooth and hairless and the tattoos from his back curled around his sides and across the stomach. There was not much room left, but a patch remained. All the Silver Skulls left a patch for their last story, the one which would recount their final battle and go to the mausoleums of Pax Argentius with them, were they fortunate enough to be returned for interment.
‘How is it looking, Ignatius?’
Ignatius smacked his lips together as he considered his answer. ‘I can cover the worst of it,’ he eventually replied. ‘Alas, I’m afraid that the moment you triumphed over that ork warboss may now have to feature a few additional orks. To cover the new scars here…’ He traced a finger across the Chapter Master’s back, ‘and here.’ His fingers ran lightly across the depiction, a beautiful rendering of a great battle that captured perfectly the moment Argentius’s flail wrapped itself around the neck of the warboss.
‘Telling the world that I destroyed more greenskins than I actually did? Lies, my old friend?’
‘Not lies, my lord!’ Ignatius’s indignation was palpable. ‘An artistic liberty. Besides, more orks is probably closer to the truth.’
‘Flattery, old man?’
‘Truth.’
A comfortable silence fell across the room as Ignatius began the task of restoring the masterpiece to some semblance of glory. The needle whirred softly, injecting ink rapidly beneath Argentius’s flesh, bringing to life the faded distortion of the great battle.
For years this relationship had existed, master and servant, and it was built on mutual respect. But Ignatius was an old man, while Argentius was functionally immortal. The tattooist’s life was a flash in the grand scheme of a Space Marine’s existence. The Chapter Master sighed softly, making no sound.
‘Is your mind troubled, boy? Unburden your load.’
‘I fear that I cannot, Ignatius. Not this time.’ Every sitting was the same. More than receiving a tattoo, these sessions were a soothing balm in the tempestuous turmoil of Argentius’s war-filled existence.
‘There may be precious few times more that you can,’ said Ignatius. He pursed his lips, leaning back to study his progress. ‘This is going to take more than one session. Three, maybe four sittings. Ryall will complete it if I am unable to.’
‘You will complete it, Ignatius. That’s an order.’ Something cold ran down Argentius’s spine.
‘Now then, boy. You may be great and powerful, but even you can’t order a dying man to keep living.’ Ignatius let out a wheezing laugh and slapped a hand against Argentius’s back.
The painful nakedness of the truth was glaring and Argentius felt a keen pang of separation spear him. The disease that ate Ignatius away from the inside was in its final stages, so Apothecary Malus had told him. There was little that could be done for the old man other than to keep the pain at bay. He’d refused rejuvenat treatments. ‘I was not destined for the honour of ascension,’ was his calm argument. ‘I will accept the destiny my mortality brings.’
So he bore tests, diagnosis and treatments with astonishing grace, humbling others with his strength and pride. In Argentius’s eyes, the mortal exemplified all that the Silver Skulls stood for. This tattoo would be his last piece. It was fitting that it should be on the Chapter Master’s skin.
‘Now, can I finish?’ Ignatius steadied himself, focusing on the ridges in the skin, concentrating and dragging ink through the needles into the big warrior’s back. With the deft ease of a true artist, he turned unsightly scar tissue into ork flesh. Argentius knew that when he finished, there would be a superb recreation of his great triumph there for the world to see. In that image the battle would live on, recounted for all time by a man who had assured his immortality amongst the warriors of the Silver Skulls.
I am dead.
The vigil must go on. It must not end, for a single instance of laxity or distraction could prove fatal to my battle-brothers. So here I stand, a dead man clad in silver-grey ceramite and fortified with fathomless will, watching and waiting atop this poisoned hill.
My jump pack weighs upon my back; I do not consider it. My bolter, crimson-lined and marked with honour-signs, is forever in my hand; I do not think of it. My Chapter’s grave sigil, a bleak skull against the wings of an angry raptor, is the heaviest thing I carry this day; I do not begrudge it.
I am Brother-Sergeant Suhr Tarikus, born of the desolate crags of Gathis, a warrior of the Doom Eagles, sworn son of great Aquila and remade in his image… And as I have said, I am dead.
I was dead the moment my boots touched the blighted dirt of this ashen wasteland of a world, the instant I stepped off the deck of the Thunderhawk and took my first mask-filtered breath of alien air. My squad, my brothers too, all standing with me. All dead.
I was dead when we battled to rescue the Order of Our Martyred Lady at the fall of Zhodon Orbital. I was dead in the Battle for Soule and the boarding action that took the star cruiser Burned Figure from the Thousand Sons. Dead on Merron, Aerius and Serek. Almost so in the void and again when I was imprisoned for a time on the fourth world of the Dynikas System. Aye, I am indeed dead, but by the grace of fate and the Emperor’s will, I have yet to be killed.
And this is what I think upon as I wait out the vigil. It has been thirty-three days now, Terran standard calendar. On this world, time runs a little faster, sunrise and nightfall speeding past me as I allow myself the respite of half-sleep, my brain partitioning itself to rest one lobe while the other remains alert.
I will stand sentinel fo
r as long as it takes. An eon, if I endure so. Out there, across the fog-soaked plains and in among the gnarled stonetrees, the enemy is lurking. They cannot hold their fire forever. It is not in their nature. Eventually they will come, they will show their faces and I will be here. I will see them. I will kill them, and this world will become thick with the ghost of death, thick enough that those with eyes to see will read it in the clouds and the tracks of glassy sand.
I have undertaken many pilgrimages to war-worlds and places of great tragedy. It is the way of the Doom Eagles, and others never understand. Our cousin Chapters, even those of our parent Legion, the Ultramarines, do not see as clearly as we do. They think us morbid souls to a man, obsessed with death. I have been asked why the Doom Eagles grub in the dirt of failed wars and brutal betrayals, why it is we each seek out a relic of those atrocities and covet it as if it is precious. I say that it is precious, as life is precious, as death is eternal and inescapable. For only in the knowledge of how wars are lost and how treachery rises can we ever know how to defeat such things when they come again, as perpetual as sunrise and nightfall.
I know this, because the gift my Chapter gave to me when I joined the Adeptus Astartes was clarity. I understand. I am dead. I have always been so, from the moment I first slipped from my long-passed mother’s womb. All life is born dying, trapped in the teeth of entropy. This is not fatalism or ennui that colours my thoughts. It is certainty. It is truth.
I am dead, and so are my enemies. The question only remains as to which of us will succumb first. I am a spectre sheathed in meat and bone and metal, already fading, the moment of true oblivion always within reach.
This is what makes me free of doubt. It is what means that I know no fear. A dead man has nothing to lose, so he strides into battle to claim not just victory over his foes, but the one thing for which he forever strives. I am dead and I go to war to take back my life.
I have yet to find it, and perhaps I never will. Perhaps this is the dawn that will be my last, thirty-three days of vigil and silence ending in fire and blood. If I am to be killed, then let it come. I will not pass without sounding the echo of my ending for all to hear. And when the moment is upon me, the relic I will leave shall be the bright and shining brass of spent shells from my bolter, or the jagged splinters of my blade in the heart of the foe, catching light of alien suns. Gathis will remember my name, even if it is called a hundred light-years from the shores of black sand, where I took my first steps toward this day.
I see movement.
And at last they come, the enemy. I see them emerging from the treeline in fell rows, the dull glitter of their weapons in the mist. They are many, and they are fuelled by the desire for our deaths. But they are fools, and the trap laid for them by the Doom Eagles is now sprung; the hills they thought to be barren and devoid of threat are not.
My vigil ends thus; muscles that moments before were frozen solid by chem-shunts and blood control now flash back into life and I burst into motion. The camo-cloak that shrouded me from their gaze snaps away and catches in the wind, freeing me to fight. My bolter rises, and I have so many targets to choose from.
The air fills my lungs and I speak for what seems like the first time in an age. Only two words, the battle cry of my Chapter. Two words that promise all the fury and fire that only the Emperor’s angels of death can provide.
The shout echoes down the hillside. ‘Woe betide!’
And with it, my brothers rise to join me. Hundreds of foxholes and hide-pits explode into sight, Doom Eagle upon Doom Eagle breaking out of their concealment, swords and bolters and missiles at the ready.
My jump pack burns and now I am in the foggy sky, my bolter crashing as shot after shot screams down into the enemy lines, ending their paths wherever they stand.
Gravity takes me at the apex of the powered leap, and I fall toward the war.
My enemy is dead, and so am I. But I will make them take that fatal embrace a thousand times over before it claims me.
‘Again.’
A prickling heat presaged the actual fire, followed a split-second later by the stench of his flesh burning.
The prisoner strapped down to the stone slab convulsed, his pelvis thrusting upwards in response to the pain. His wrists and fingers twisted, struggling against their bonds. His legs thrashed impotently in the manacles fastened to his ankles.
‘Don’t struggle,’ the voice warned. ‘Struggling only makes it worse.’
There were three others in the room with the prisoner. One, his actual torturer, never spoke. He carried the burning brand, the fork at the end of it blazing like a tiny sun. Another observed, keeping back and out of the weak light shining from above. The few glimpses the prisoner managed to snatch in his throes of agony suggested that the observer had his arms folded and shifted irritably.
The third, the one who had spoken, rasped and stayed close. His eyes were coals, smouldering red, the mirror image of the branding iron’s business end. He and the observer were hulking, armoured in war-plate that growled and whirred as they moved, as if some animus of their draconic namesake was still trapped within and trying to escape.
‘I will kill you both!’ spat the prisoner, baring his fangs and snarling.
The third nodded, his black armour rimed a dusky orange from the forge-flame being pressed to the prisoner’s exposed skin. It burned again, inscribing a line in his flesh, drawing pain.
‘He is savage,’ said the observer after the torturer had ceased. The torturer was smaller, dressed in robes rather than battle armour. He would die last, the prisoner decided.
‘How many did he kill?’ asked the observer.
‘Seven. He killed seven brander-priests before I took him,’ the black-armoured warrior replied.
The observer muttered something in response to that fact. The figure could not hear the exact detail, but the tone suggested disbelief.
‘Are you certain this is right? He is savage,’ repeated the observer.
‘A monster,’ said the third, leaning in close to talk to his prisoner. ‘Are you ready to submit to the rite of pain?’
Deep, heavy breathing, with a growling undercurrent, answered. Cold, dark eyes like chips of flint regarded the third. He smiled.
‘You want to gut me, don’t you? Even now, you are working to release yourself from your bonds, planning your escape?’
For a few seconds there was no response, then the figure nodded. Slowly. Certainly.
The black-armoured warrior laughed, hollow and echoing in the solitorium. The torturer was about to advance when he raised a hand, stopping the human.
‘This isn’t working.’
‘Then what do you suggest, Elysius?’
Elysius had been talking to himself, and hadn’t expected a response.
‘You need him, Agatone,’ he answered. ‘If you’re going to hunt, this one will be of great use. But not before the rite.’
‘Then what do you suggest?’ Agatone repeated his previous question.
After a moment of silence, Elysius said, ‘Out. Both of you.’
The human brander-priest obeyed at once, bowing his head and shuffling out of the chamber. Agatone was more reluctant.
‘What are you going to do, Chaplain?’
‘Teach him.’
Agatone lingered.
Elysius never let his gaze waver from the prisoner, though he turned his face a fraction towards the captain behind him.
‘I said out. You might captain the Third, Agatone, but here in this solitorium chamber, I am in charge.’
Sensing a change, the prisoner began to relax, though his breathing was still frantic, heightened to battlefield intensity.
‘And what if he kills you?’ Agatone nodded at the prisoner. ‘You’ve seen the state he’s in. Even when he’s not under the branding iron, he’s still a savage creature.’
Elysius smiled again. ‘No captain, he isn’t. He’s much worse than that. Now, please leave.’
Agatone was out of obj
ections. He did as Elysius asked, leaving him alone in the dark with the monster.
‘Just you and I now,’ Elysius said once Agatone was gone.
‘Your mistake.’
‘I think not.’ The Chaplain picked up the branding iron left behind by the human priest. The coals of the brazier in which it was kept hot crackled and spat as it was pulled free. ‘Stings, doesn’t it?’
‘Not as much as my claws will.’
Elysius chuckled mirthlessly.
‘Very well then,’ he said. ‘Time to earn your rite.’
A sub-vocal command issued through his gorget quick-released the manacles on the prisoner’s ankles.
The prisoner laughed, ‘You’re really going to regret this…’
A second command released the collar fastened to the prisoner’s neck.
Rotating his wrist, Elysius swung the branding iron around as if it were a sword, leaving fire trailing in the dark behind it. His other arm ended in a stump at the elbow. His prisoner would think him disadvantaged, crippled even. That would be his mistake.
‘Come then. Show me.’ Elysius released the last bindings, the straps and chains spilling loose in a flood of leather and metal. Before his bonds had even hit the floor, the prisoner was up. He sprang off the slab and launched himself at Elysius with a roar.
The Chaplain cuffed him with a well-timed uppercut that stunned his jaw and sent the prisoner sprawling back with his own negated momentum. Then he advanced, lunging with the branding iron, searing flesh.
Screaming, wrathful, the prisoner tried to fight, but Elysius butted him, shattering his nose. Dazed, the prisoner swung, bone claws extending from his forearms. Elysius parried with the iron, smacking the claws away to deliver a second burning brand. He dodged an overhead slash and heard bone scraping metal as he brought his armoured knee up into the stomach of the prisoner, who gagged and spat.
Elysius kicked him over, lashing out with the brand again and again.