by Nick Kyme
When he was a sword length away, Zartath whirled around.
‘Broth–’ The Techmarine stopped short as the searing fire of the bone blade coursed through his chest and out of his back in radiating tremors of agony. He cried out in pain, but his voice was half-strangled and came out as a gasp. Reaching up, Exor grabbed Zartath’s shoulder in support, in trembling accusation and tried to meet his gaze.
Wild, dark eyes of pure fury looked back. There was no recognition in them, no guilt or remorse. Whatever was gnawing at Zartath’s mind was still there, embedded in his psyche. Exor staggered, the heat of the wound dulling and turning to ice as he contemplated how close to death he was again. The ice floes he felt in his blood spread to Exor’s back then his limbs, until every part of him that was meat and bone became as cold as the metal of his bionics.
This must be how the world feels to give yourself fully to the Omnissiah, he thought, imagining the cybernetic tutors of his Martian training but seeing the snorting, snarling image of the monstrous warrior he called brother in front of him instead, staring with unrestrained hate. Exor realised it wasn’t meant for him. It was fuelled by something else.
In Exor’s head, the keening was fading but in Zartath’s it had reached a deafening fever pitch he could no longer resist.
As the bone blade withdrew, a spurt of dark blood jetted from the wound. Internal bleeding. Organ damage. He didn’t need his power armour’s biological data stream to know he was in trouble. Exor was released but found his legs could no longer support him. He collapsed, the culmination of his injuries felling him.
Awareness dimming as his body began trying to shut itself down, Exor fought to stay conscious but slipped into such delirium he could not be sure of what he saw next. Memory, reality and fiction began to blend. Something emerged from the pit, hauling itself over the edge from a cocoon of metal. Striated by age, withered by entropy, the drop pod must have shifted to this place over time, moving in vermicular fashion through the slowly disintegrating layers of the underhive.
Its siren call was weak, and needed time to infect its followers and make them fanatical. Even then, releasing it from its prison would have taken years. It was the blood, leaking into the pit from its prison, siphoned by its desperate acolytes and fashioned into an elixir that promoted strength, resilience, even escape from death. Exor could think of few species whose blood was capable of such wonders.
From out of the pit emerged a figure armoured in heliotrope purple. Whether it was the presence of such august enemies that drew it forth, or some other incredulous coincidence, Exor would never know. They simply had to kill it.
Flayed skin hung in ragged strips from its war-plate. Fetish chains strung with shrivelled ears and fingers looped around shoulder guards and greaves. Its face was scarred like the men and women who had freed it and its eyes were dense chasms of fresh-remembered hate. No pupils, just two orbs of incarnadine red. There could be no mistaking a warrior of the old Legions.
A Traitor Space Marine, trapped in Molior for years.
It rose up to its full height, flakes of debris breaking off from its body and cascading downwards like shed skin. Years of accumulated dust and grit spilled from the joints of its armour. Wrenching free transfusion pipes it had attached to its exposed skin, it drew an old and scarred sword from a dusty scabbard.
The challenge it uttered was in a language Exor didn’t know, but used words and sounds that set his teeth on edge.
Zartath faced the warrior, lathered in a feverish sweat, his chest and shoulders rising and falling with heavy breaths.
A few strides separated them.
Bone-blades against tainted steel – who knew what curses were bound up in that traitor’s sword?
Spitting back a guttural retort in his native tongue, Zartath lunged at the pallid-skinned warrior.
It was then his enemy spoke, truly used its voice…
A nerve-shredding discord sawed through Exor, forcing back alertness such was its strength and amplification, so loud it almost transcended sound and turned it physical.
Zartath opened his mouth to scream but his voice was swallowed by the terrible clangour resonating through his skin, flesh and bones. He sank to one knee, clutching his fractured eardrums as the true power of the keening was unleashed. The traitor’s siren call, that which drew the weak-minded and the easily influenced to the traitor’s service and bent them towards its emancipation, had become a weapon. It was killing Zartath.
Slowly dying, but defying his enhanced biology’s attempts to put him into a regenerative coma, Exor struggled back to his feet. Fellowship to the Martian Priesthood came with the acceptance of a simple rubric – flesh will ultimately be surrendered to the machine; the machine is perfection. Exor arrived on the red world a being of flesh and blood and left partly cyborganic. His hand was a bionic; both his eyes were augmented, the corneas replaced with synthetics incorporating targeting matrices and enhanced magnification; part of his left side, his shoulder and hip were also mostly machine. Last of all was his auditory cortex – both ears and the minuscule bones inside, drum and ear canal too, had been manufactured in the forge temples of Mars.
The drumming in his skull, the latent power of the keening, had abated in preference to a more direct attack: one Exor could filter out. As he disengaged his hearing, a momentary deafness overcame him. The pain in his vibrating bones still hurt, but the paralysis from the auditory overload lifted.
Out of ammunition, his knife lost when he had first fallen, Exor used the only weapon he had left. Himself.
Scrambling, lurching bodily with every ungainly step, he threw all of his considerable mass at the Traitor who turned, seemingly dumbstruck at the insanity of the reckless attack.
The old sword swung around, hefted with less speed than it might once have been, the warrior’s muscles stiff and mildly atrophied from his long confinement. Instead of spearing the Techmarine through the sternum, it cut into his clavicle and sheared against the edge of the bone.
Agony of a thousand white-hot needles impaling his raw nerve endings shot through Exor but not enough to stop him. He careened into the warrior, hearing armour split, bone crack as it yielded to his machine-borne strength.
The discord abated and Exor hit the ground as his eyesight began to darken. But through an ever-dwindling corridor of shadow, he saw the hunter take his prey at last. As the traitor tried to rise and reassert his dominance a shaft of yellowed bone, the bloodstains on it dark like oil, impaled his gullet. A second pierced his eye socket. For three seconds he trembled and then was still.
Like a flood rushing to fill a crater, darkness swamped Exor’s sight. His hearing came back briefly, restored by some instinctive physical signal. Nothing at first, but the ambient rhythms of the underhive. It stayed like that for minutes, Exor clinging on.
Breathing, initially heavy but eventually more even, drifted through the mental fog of unconsciousness. It touched Exor’s face, wet and foetid with the stench of raw meat.
An untamed beast will be a slave to its instincts. It cannot think, it cannot reason, it can only react, survive.
‘Get up…’
The words were so distant, like whispers from the summit of a well, they seemed imagined.
‘Get up and let me carry you…’
A man decides, makes choices – he lets his conscience guide him and the fact he has a higher nature. His own survival is secondary to those he would consider as kin.
‘Let me carry you, brother…’
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Nova-class frigate, Forge Hammer
Amongst the fire tides, time was fluid. It flowed as easily as the burning waves Xarko swam against.
Unmoored from reality, slipping free of temporal concerns was all too simple. The tides were aligned to the aetheric plane, a place not so easily bent to mortal geography and chronology. Time here flowed diff
erently. Diurnal and nocturnal, these cycles had no bearing in such an uncertain realm. Enter at the nascent dawning of the universe and a moment later emerge to find it inert, surrendered to the inevitable rigours of entropy. But to the contrary, enter in the twilight years of creation and find yourself returning to worlds in youthful bloom only seconds later. Life, matter, existence, all of it could be altered in course by the pervasive nature of the warp.
The fire tides were the warp, and the warp the fire tides.
As an accomplished student of the arcane, Xarko knew of the tacit relationship that existed between the two sides of the veil – the real and the unreal – and the metaphysical implications of that relationship. Geography mattered, timing and context mattered. What to the uninitiated and the ignorant might appear random was a scheme of near-incomprehensible complexity to those with enough esoteric knowledge to discern it. To behold the entire tapestry was to invite certain madness and dissolution, but to perceive a strand, a thread or two of the weave… That came as close as anything not unborn could do to navigating the vagaries of the tide.
Xarko sought such a thread, and swam in pursuit of it. He had been afforded but a glimpse, a narrow aperture through which he could perceive past, future and present colliding together in a fateful continuum. Life. Death. Rebirth. Over and over again. He knew that in attempting to locate what he had seen before in the tides he risked great danger. Only a psyker of considerable ability and confidence would ever trawl this incorporeal sea. Looking had a habit of resulting in finding, except not always the thing you wanted to unearth. Not only life, but the soul was also at stake. Things… creatures with old names, and hunger that was older still, hunted eagerly for the warmth of souls.
Amongst the fire tides, these creatures were the black slivers. As Xarko swam, his body locked safely away in his sanctum aboard the Forge Hammer, he felt the predators lurking at the edge of perception, threatening his mind and soul.
Wary after the last time, the predators did not attack immediately, as if waiting for a better opening or a vulnerability to present itself. Xarko was determined to show them neither, so he swam on. He had passed beyond the chamber, penetrated the first wall and had emerged into the twilight fire sea that so closely resembled the Gey’sarr or the Acerbian from back on Nocturne. It varied with every fresh tide.
For a time there was nothing beyond the usual susurrus of voices, the chronology of the universe laid out for him to listen to and observe. Faces, images wrought from fire, materialised in the deeps but were not the one Xarko was seeking.
He went further, pushing his body even though rationally he knew it was his will he exerted. Physical strength meant nothing here, but manifested anyway as a way for the mind to make sense of what it was experiencing. To an untrained mind, it would appear terrifying, even impossible. The fire would seem to burn and the mind would close in on itself. Some who chose to swim the tides had not returned. Their faces were mirrored in the waves now, stretched taut in expressions of agony and despair. Their bodies were long gone, rendered to ash in the true mountain. Some lived on in a catatonic state, watched over by the brander-priests and shackled in Prometheus’s deepest cells.
Still the resonance of what he had experienced before eluded him. He went deeper and the black predators began to converge as they sensed Xarko’s mental reserves draining. Strong currents tugged at his body as Xarko went further and further. One sharp pull threatened to drag him into an unseen well, the tendrils of a maelstrom that had begun to swell out in the distance. Pouring more effort into his strokes, Xarko managed to get free of it but was badly shaken and needed a moment to recover.
The predators chose their moment, striking fast and stabbing barbed hooks into Xarko’s flesh. He screamed, pain knifing into his skull as the hooks dragged. He thrashed, kicking out with his legs and managing to dislodge one of the fiends. He kicked again, the equivalent of a mental push, and thrust away from his twin assailants.
Arm over arm, breath sawing in and out of his lungs.
The tides heaved and pounded at his bones. Xarko was nearly at the end of his resilience but he fought on, knowing the black predators were behind him. Strong tendrils of current pulled at his limbs, and he realised the maelstrom could be his escape. He let the currents take him, surrendering to their will. As he was flung past his pursuers, taking cuts from their blades, he saw a face appear in the fiery spume. Half its skin was ravaged by scars, not the branding marks of the solitorium but a wound that had changed its complexion. Here was the thread Xarko wanted, fleeing from his grasp as he was pulled away by fate and his own weary mind.
No.
The word echoed in Xarko’s mindspace, calmly delivered but powerfully resonant. It shook the dark sky above the ocean, and tore strips into it with arcing jags of crimson. Pulled under, Xarko felt the bite of the predators once more and as he turned in the maelstrom’s ferocious undersea spiral, the face dissolved and was replaced by the insistent drumming of his heart…
Thud.
Thud.
The beat became a rap of knuckles, hard against metal. Despite his nausea and disorientation, he could hear the desperation in the sound. Sensation was slow to fade. Psychic echoes clung to the corporeal realm and Xarko struggled to detach them. Visions bled into reality, of the fire, the dark predators. He could smell their spoiled flesh, hear their sibilant whispering grating against the metal of the chamber. With a singular effort, he closed his mind to it, denying a foothold to the voracious denizens of the fire tides. The sanctum resolved, a fire-black circle surrounding him. Steam and smoke rose from his bare flesh.
It took a few seconds to marshal his disorientation and remember exactly when and where he was.
Alive, awake and restored to the physical plane, Xarko tried to stand. He collapsed, grimacing in pain at fresh wounds on his back and torso, souvenirs from his encounter on the other side.
Someone was hammering on the door to his sanctum. Even weakened, he managed to reach out with his mind, touch the surface thoughts of those closest to him and know something aboard the Forge Hammer was terribly wrong.
On instinct, he activated a distress beacon to their forces on Sturndrang, hoping they would hear it.
‘I’ve swum too long…’ Xarko hissed, reaching for his armour with shaking hands.
Makato would not have the deaths of these brave men and women on his conscience. The weight of guilt he bore was already heavy, and he had no desire to add to it.
‘Jedda, Halder, Navaar, Bharius.’ He said each name aloud to honour the promise he had made. They were just the ones he knew. Many others had died to protect this ship, to protect him. Makato hoped someone would remember them and their noble sacrifice.
‘I go to join you soon…’ he murmured to the walls of the empty corridor.
Makato was standing alone outside the blast doors to the bridge. Behind him, on the other side of two metre-thick reinforced ceramite and adamantium, were twenty-eight armsmen and fourteen bridge crew. No captain sat upon the command throne, but consoles were manned and the ship was still in the hands of its crew. Never in all his years of service had it been otherwise.
Swearing on the souls of his father and grandfather, Makato vowed that would not change this day, this hour, this moment.
He knew though that the moment had run out.
Every effort had been made to slow the Renegade Astartes but they had advanced through the ship inexorably, their path bringing them to this nexus where Makato was now standing.
He saw the first of them, their sergeant, appear in the low light at the end of the corridor. Scarcely twenty-four metres separated them but Makato felt no fear.
Instead, he slowly stripped off his uniform, removing the jacket and vest beneath until he was standing naked from the waist up in boots and breeches.
‘Shang’ji Hiroshimo!’ he said and drew his ancestral sword to cut a shallow wound acros
s his chest, honouring his father.
The black-armoured warrior was approaching with three others when Makato drew a second cut.
‘Shang’ji Yugeti!’
Again the blade sliced his chest, bisecting the first wound, honouring his grandfather.
He stepped forwards, entering a fighting stance with his sword held up and behind him. With the words of his native lands echoing into silence, Makato saluted the leader of the renegades.
He stood no chance, but if he was fated to die, to rejoin his ancestors then he would do it his way, on his terms.
Feeling the rough cord of his father’s old braid between the fingers of his off-hand, Makato muttered a prayer to the Throne, and prepared to meet his death with honour.
Snarling at the sudden scent of fresh blood, Urgaresh signalled a halt.
‘What are we waiting for?’ snapped Skarh. ‘Cut him down and be done with this.’
‘No,’ murmured Urgaresh. ‘We are not animals, not yet.’
He alone advanced, dropping the bolter he had scavenged, uncoupling the clamps that bound the cuirass of his armour to his body. Greaves and vambraces hit the deck with a loud clatter, obscuring the dense thud of Urgaresh’s purposeful footfalls. Gauntlets next, they clattered with the many plates used to form their fingers as they hit the floor.
‘I see you, warrior,’ said Urgaresh, coming to a stop and standing a few metres from the mortal. ‘And accept your challenge. Never let it be said,’ he snarled, revealing sharp incisors, ‘that the Black Dragons are without honour.’
With the sound of tearing skin and the light patter of blood hitting metal, Urgaresh slid his bone blade from its fleshy sheath.
The man raised his chin arrogantly, or perhaps it was defiance. The subtlety of mortal gestures was often lost on the Black Dragon.
‘I am Kensai Makato, grandson of Yugeti, son of Hiroshimo,’ he declared without fear or hesitation.
Urgaresh smiled ugly, a shark’s smile that never reached his cold, dead eyes.