by Nick Kyme
Vorshkar’s eyes narrowed. ‘Let me show yo–’
A flash of light overloaded Va’lin’s optics, rendering him blind. In the second of vision he was afforded before blackout, he saw Vorshkar thrown onto his heels, his neck snapping back as he unleashed an agonised scream.
It was the last sound Va’lin heard as he faded – his body shutting down, his mind suddenly awash with visions of the fire canyons.
Rest, the figure in his dream said again.
None can come back. Zantho’s words resounded, echoing the Promethean belief in the Circle of Fire. None can come back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Heletine, Canticus, inside the ravine
Elysius dragged Drakgaard’s prone form across the battlefield, Her’us and Vervius guarding their retreat. These two were the last of their kind – the rest of the Serpentia were dead. Not even their bodies could be recovered. The battle was over, the Imperial forces defeated. Tenacity met its equally potent counterpart in a Nocturnean’s cultural psychology, pragmatism, and lost.
Fight on and they would certainly be destroyed utterly. Retreat now and regroup, at least they could muster whatever was left of their forces and salvage some kind of military response.
With Drakgaard incapacitated, command fell to Elysius, and the Chaplain had no hesitation about giving the order to fall back. Most not clad in drake-scale armour already had, though precious few Cadians were left alive to be ashamed of the fact.
Armour had come in from the east, a ragged assembly of Space Marine tanks under the charge of Sergeant Zantho, battered and bruised from shouldering their way through the rubble of a city. Elysius could not comprehend how many vehicles Zantho had lost or what sort of damage had been done to the ones that were currently bombarding the heretics to curtail any meaningful pursuit, but would have laid oaths that it was grievous.
‘We are clear of the third vector, brother-sergeant,’ voxed Elysius, his bionic arm and power glove making light work of hauling Drakgaard up the slope.
‘Understood, Brother-Chaplain,’ came the reply from Zantho a moment later.
Three more seconds elapsed before the area of the ravine Elysius and the remains of the fire-born had just evacuated was engulfed in a hail of explosive shellfire.
On the opposite side of the battlefield, the Sisters of the Ebon Chalice were still engaged in a fighting retreat themselves. Of the promised reinforcements, a vast Ecclesiarchy warhost, only these Seraphim had answered the call. There was no time to question that now, but Elysius was determined that if he lived he would have an answer, one way or another. The betrayers, whoever they were, would be punished.
As he reached the ridge line, a Rhino armoured transport was waiting with a rough bodyguard of fire-born outside it firing off shots into the ravine to deter any last ditch attacks. Elysius got Drakgaard aboard, sending him off with Her’us by his side in the troop hold. A Thunderhawk was waiting to take them back to Escadan, one of the few that could still fly.
Elysius stayed behind with Vervius to oversee the retreat. The Chaplain’s jaw clenched at the sight and the thought of such utter defeat.
‘Chaplain,’ uttered Vervius.
Elysius turned to face him.
‘You are bleeding, sir.’
Elysius looked down at the many wounds he had sustained that had penetrated his battleplate. In truth, it was a ruin and in dire need of a Techmarine’s ministrations.
‘It’s a small matter, brother,’ Elysius replied, lifting his gaze to the ravine again. ‘Upraise the banner, Vervius,’ he said as the last few survivors made it to the ridge line and safety, ‘let our enemy know we are defiant even when we are beaten.’
Elysius spared a last glance in the direction of the Seraphim who were now embarking aboard transports. These few had defied whatever order had condemned the rest of the Imperials to defeat. By blood or torture, if it was necessary, he would find out who gave it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Nova-class frigate, Forge Hammer
Xarko’s strength was at its end. He saw the kine-shield flicker once and then dissipate. Alone in the access corridor, exhausted to the point of collapse, he faced down the four Black Dragons who had come aboard the ship intent on murderous vengeance.
Every fractional movement was bone-gnawing agony, but Xarko still drew his sword. The edge crackled with ionic charge. He doubted he could do much with it beyond lift it.
‘Don’t make me kill you.’
The sergeant in war-ravaged black plate laughed, seeing through the weak facade.
‘I shall not afford you the same courtesy, Salamander,’ he replied, exposing the sharp fangs in his snarling mouth. ‘You sealed your fate when you murdered our captain.’
Xarko frowned.
‘Murdered? You are mistaken. No blood has been shed on this ship that you did not bring about yourselves.’
‘Liar!’ spat a warrior with bone nubs jutting from his ugly pate. Another beside him snarled, clenching and unclenching fists that ended in calcified blades. The fourth was a cold storm. He’d lost an eye but the one that remained was like a chip of ice as it regarded the Librarian, and he carried the Prime Helix of the apothecarion.
‘Who are you? What are you doing aboard this ship?’ Xarko asked, stalling.
Silencing the beasts in his retinue, the sergeant came forwards.
‘We are the wrath,’ he declared in a menacing undertone, ‘here to claim our vengeance…’ As he raised his bone blade to strike, a stentorian voice echoed from the opposite end of the corridor.
‘Trouble yourself no further with him,’ said Adrax Agatone as he moved into the light with bolter raised, ‘you have much worse problems now.’
The captain had returned with a small war party. Sergeants Lok, Clovius and five other warriors all armed. One of them stepped in front of Agatone, seeing the familiar trappings of the infiltrators aboard the Forge Hammer.
‘Brothers…’ said Zartath, disbelieving. ‘Who sent you?’
The sergeant’s anger bled away instantly and he took a knee. So too did the others he had brought with him.
‘Don’t you know us?’ asked the sergeant, seemingly confused by Zartath’s attire but more concerned that he didn’t recognise them. ‘I am Urgaresh. This is Skarh, Haakem.’ He gestured to each in turn.
‘Thorast, my lord,’ uttered the Apothecary.
Zartath sneered, confused. ‘Lord? I am no one’s lord.’
Urgaresh rose to his feet. His eyes narrowed. ‘We are your wrath,’ he said. ‘And have searched long and far.’
‘To what end, warrior?’ Agatone interjected, reminding the Black Dragons of his presence and the bolters aimed at them.
‘To find our captain,’ said Urgaresh, as all eyes fell on Zartath.
‘Do you trust them?’
Agatone looked up from his vigil and met Issak’s gaze.
‘They boarded my ship and killed several of its crew. No, I don’t trust them.’
They were sitting in the darkened confines of the Forge Hammer’s apothecarion, the unconscious form of Exor laid down on the medi-slab in front of them. Vitals were steady but the wound he had taken from the traitor’s sword in Molior was grievous. Given the extent of the injuries and Exor’s augmentations, Agatone considered they might have been better off with an enginseer rather than a ship’s medic.
‘What will you do with them?’ asked Issak.
Agatone looked down again. The Black Dragons had been incarcerated in the brig. They went willingly, in part due to Zartath’s presence but also on account of the sheer number of bolters levelled at them.
Zartath had no knowledge of them, and had spent every moment since his brothers’ imprisonment watching them from an observation chamber. Agatone resolved to go and check in on him after he had finished visiting Exor.
‘Why did
you come with us, medicus?’ he asked, answering Issak’s question with one of his own.
‘Because you allowed it.’
Agatone looked up at that.
‘It was more than that,’ he said. ‘And don’t tell me you just wanted out of the hive.’
‘I won’t. I experienced something in the archive, a sense of being there before but not knowing when or how. It led me to a name.’
Agatone raised an eyebrow, questioning, and Issak continued.
‘It was amongst the wreckage in the archive. The uppermost level before we got in the lifter. I don’t know why I was drawn to it, but I was. I think it was what your errant warrior and his companion were looking for.’
‘What name?’
‘Draor.’
CHAPTER FORTY
Heletine, beneath Solist
Angerer awoke to pain and an alarming lack of feeling in most of her body. The lids of her eyes were heavy and difficult to lift, so what she saw when she first tried to open them came in slivers.
A dark chamber, somewhere underground and lit by flaming torches…
The brooding presence of my monstrous captor, hulking and vile as it regards me from the back of the room…
Warriors, clad in armour, the same traitors we met at Solist…
A wretched figure, robes clinging to her body, knelt and praying before me…
She is hunched, shivering, but does not relent in her murmuring benedictions.
Looking up at me, our eyes meet and I recognise the kinship in them.
It is Revina. It is my sister. And she is praying for me.
‘Reunited with your sister,’ uttered the monster, its voice resonant. ‘How long has it been?’
Angerer glanced at it but only glanced. To do anything more would be to invite damnation. She tried to focus on Revina, on her sister. Despite her conditioned revulsion for the witch and the heretic, Angerer had tears in her eyes when she answered.
‘Years…’ she said, her tone low and faint, ‘it has been years since I last saw my sister.’
‘I forgive you,’ said Revina. Her voice had recovered, losing the reedy croak from when she had been staked down in the desert.
Angerer had no words. She warred between familial compassion and what was demanded of her by the sacred creed of the Ecclesiarchy.
Suffer not the witch and the heretic to live.
It was tattooed across the back of Angerer’s partially shaved scalp, just above the nape of her neck, scribed in High Gothic.
‘I forgive you, Maelisia.’
No one had called Angerer that name since before the Adepta Sororitas.
‘And I am so sorry…’ said Revina, bowing her head.
Incredulous for a moment, Angerer found her voice stronger. ‘For what?’
Belatedly, the canoness realised she was pinned. Her limbs, waist and neck were shackled to some kind of wrought iron edifice. It stank of old blood and the foulness of decay, but was impossible for her to see whilst she was bound to it.
Rage supplanted pain as Angerer fell back on her training. All those hours of excoriation and penitence had honed her into something more and at the same time less than human.
‘Release me!’ She snarled at the monster, spitting her zeal from cracked lips.
‘I too have siblings I wish to be reunited with,’ it answered, stepping into the light and letting the lambent glow from the torches wash over it.
It wore a thick sheath of war-plate, but rather than fit perfectly over its body like the armour of a Space Marine should, it was stretched and malformed like wax exposed to heat. Between the glossy black plates, pale ivory trimmed with ocean green peeked through like an aperture into another world. Its face was false, the simulacra of one of the Emperor’s Angels rendered into artistic stillness.
‘Unlike you,’ said the monster, coming in close so Angerer could smell the corpse-stench of its breath and feel her skin prickle at the proximity of its unnatural aura, ‘I won’t cast them out. They are lost. Your sister,’ it gestured to Revina, whom Angerer glanced at, ‘is going to help me find them.’
Its eyes briefly changed from two pure black voluminous orbs to having corneas, retinas and irises. Perhaps it was her pain-fuelled imagination, but Angerer swore there was something vaguely lupine about them.
‘I was formerly a Wolf,’ the monster confessed, tearing open Angerer’s thoughts as easily as it would her flesh. ‘One of Luna…’ it said resignedly, ‘but no more.’
‘Sister,’ Angerer was weeping, her wrath and despair colliding ambivalently, ‘what have you done?’
‘What I had to do,’ Revina replied calmly, though her eyes betrayed the depth of anguish she felt for her sister, ‘what I was born to be. If you didn’t want me to see, you should have taken my sight.’
‘Would that I could, dear sister.’
The monster clamped a meaty gauntlet around Angerer’s chin, forcing back her attention.
‘Strange, isn’t it, that only when we are faced with losing something or someone do we appreciate its true value.’ There was scorn in its voice now, and Angerer suspected some part of it despised her for what she had done to Revina.
‘She has a gift, your sister,’ the monster went on, though it did not loosen its grip which had begun to wear at Angerer’s jawbone. ‘I shall see it used to bring about a reunion between my brothers and I. They are here… somewhere, and blessed Revina and her witch-sight are going to peer beyond the veil for me, so I can know exactly where, so I can determine where in the skein of the flesh-world I need to make my cut.’
Revina was a seer, an augur of sorts. Her latent gift had been discovered in her infancy, manifesting as an uncanny ability to know things before they had happened. The first time had been the death of their mother. A virulent illness had destroyed her from within, eating the poor woman alive whilst her children could only watch. Revina wept. Once on her own, before her mother had passed, and again with her sisters – both for the parent she had lost and the orphan life as part of the Sisterhood they were about to be forced into. She had seen everything.
Though she was only a child, Revina saw the drill abbot arriving at their domicile before he had arrived. Through her sorrow she was afforded a glimpse of him.
Later, when the three sisters had been inducted to the Order of the Ebon Chalice as neophytes, Revina had lost the penitent cup she used for prayer and ablution. Without it she would have been severely beaten and chastised by her superior. Her tears revealed the location of the cup, sparing her the lash but eventually opening her up to more serious censure. It was Angerer who had discovered her ‘taint’, and Angerer who brought her to the attention of the then canoness. Once Angerer had been cleared of any suspicion, her genetics deemed pure, it all but assured her rise to prominence in the order but condemned her sister at the same time. Laevenius rose with her, whilst Revina languished in a cell, her existence known only to a few, a dirty secret the order kept at its heart. It was a circle that shrank to two when the old canoness died and Angerer replaced her.
Decades old, the memories resurfaced like fresh wounds. It might have been the presence of the monstrous warrior or just pent up and repressed emotion. The revulsion, the disgrace of having a mutant for a sister and the purifying vindication she felt when she had exposed her to the order. It was empowering.
‘Witchling!’ Angerer cursed Revina, tears streaming from her eyes now, ‘Laevenius and I should have strangled you as a child.’
But Revina was no longer there. She had been ushered away by the monster’s warriors. Angerer turned to it instead, hawking a gob of phlegm onto its pristine, false face.
‘Abomination!’
‘I wasn’t always,’ said Faustus, and tightened his grip until the Sister’s jaw broke. His name was no longer Heklion Faustus, it was Gralastyx, daemon lord of the Eye.
&
nbsp; Lufurion watched the brutalisation of the woman with detached interest. He kept to the shadows, out of Gralastyx’s immediate sight and gathered with his trusted warriors, ostensibly strategising. These three had been hard to find. Amongst the Children of Torment and the remnants of his own Incarnadine Host, Lufurion had discovered entire nests of betrayers. But these three he had fought with, bled with, pledged oaths with. It wasn’t brotherhood – he had abandoned that long ago, but it was something close.
‘Reports are coming in,’ uttered Klerik, keeping his voice low, ‘Vorshkar has led the army to victory against the Imperials.’
‘I heard he was injured in the act,’ whispered Juadek.
‘No need to sound so conspiratorial, you idiot,’ snapped Klerik, looking askance at the Black Legion warriors standing to attention around the chamber and waiting on their master.
‘It has been agreed,’ said Lufurion. ‘We deliver the daemon’s kin and he will give us the witch. From there we part ways.’
Preest angled his head up slightly.
‘He knows, Preest,’ Lufurion told the sorcerer.
‘Can we trust him, though?’
‘Of course not,’ Lufurion told him, ‘but his mind is no longer entirely his own. He’s a slave to that thing he has become, but he’s also driven by sentiment and an outdated sense of fraternal honour.’
‘A true son of Cthonia then,’ laughed Juadek.
‘So he claims, yes,’ Lufurion replied.
‘Are we certain we still need the witch?’ asked Klerik. ‘In the wake of Vorshkar’s triumph we could take our ships and be gone.’
Lufurion looked to the sorcerer again. ‘Preest says we do.’
All eyes went to him for an explanation.
‘Our brothers we sent to Sturndrang are all dead.’
Juadek leaned in, a sour look on his face as he regarded the sorcerer.
‘You’re sure?’
Preest gave him a disparaging glance.
‘I spoke unto a servant of the Eye,’ he said, as if it were a rudimentary thing he was describing and not a rite of incredible difficulty and peril.