by Nick Kyme
‘Claimed by the warp then?’ asked Klerik. ‘I had wondered what happened to Ryos and the others.’
Preest shook his head. ‘They arrived, only several years ago.’
‘Temporal displacement,’ said Klerik. ‘The tides really didn’t favour them, did they?’
‘Something else killed them,’ Preest continued. ‘Even now their souls are in torment.’
‘And I have no desire to join them,’ said Lufurion, nodding to Gralastyx as the daemon allowed his prisoner to sag in her chains. She would not die yet – he still had use for her.
The gathering parted swiftly. Preest would be needed to ‘encourage’ the witch’s auguring. His mortal worm would assist, the one that still lived. As the sorcerer was summoned by one of the Black Legion warriors, Klerik hung back to whisper in Lufurion’s ear.
‘We both went on bended knee before the Warmaster. We pledged oaths in front of Devram Korda. If they discover our plan to betray them, the daemon will be the least of our worries.’
Lufurion smiled, the patchwork of his stitched face straining to perform the gesture.
‘We always knew it would come to this. Either Ryos and the others found the archive on the hive world or we secured the witch. Ryos is dead, so that leaves us. I’ve seen her work. She’ll give us what we seek.’
Klerik’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is it real?’
‘Ten thousand years ago, it was.’
‘But can it do what Preest claims?’
Lufurion gave the facial equivalent of a shrug. ‘Something that old, with that kind of provenance… We’ll have to acquire it to find out.’
‘They’ll hunt us. The drakes, what’s left of the Iron Tenth… Abaddon.’
Lufurion smiled thinly. It was a viper’s smile, deadly. ‘You sound scared, Klerik. Have I misplaced my faith in you?’
Klerik didn’t respond to the threat. He knew Lufurion was just testing him.
‘I merely point out the list of our enemies should we pull this off.’
‘If we do, Klerik,’ said Lufurion, ‘with the storm we’ll unleash, none of them will matter anymore. They’ll all be too busy… drowning in their own blood.’
EPILOGUE
A future truth…
Kinebad struck up the lamp’s igniter and a stark light lifted the darkness. Old stone, layered with dust, was revealed. The chamber was based on a hexagonal structure, a vast outer ring that led to increasingly smaller ones.
So far, Kinebad and his companion had passed through five circles. He hoped the sixth was the last.
The lamp hissed and flared, reacting to something in the air, before settling into a pulsing glow that gave off an actinic stench.
‘That thing reeks foul,’ uttered a deep, belligerent voice behind Kinebad.
Kinebad was stooped over, trying to avoid a section where the ceiling had partially caved in. Dust cascaded languidly from the gap with the natural shifting and settling of the stone above. It did not look as if it was going to come crashing down any time soon – in fact, this place barely looked disturbed in years – so Kinebad was content to proceed.
‘It’s phosphor,’ he said.
Kinebad turned the lamp on the speaker to reveal a tall, thick-set warrior clad in loose-fitting carapace. The grey armour was bespoke and had sigils on it scrawled by the wearer in ash. A mesh layer underneath the plates hinted at a muscular frame, far larger than that of an ordinary human man. The hood attached to the mesh was drawn up over his head, but couldn’t conceal his eyes. They were fiery red, burning like hot coals.
‘Sadly, it is also necessary,’ answered Kinebad. ‘Despite my many gifts, I don’t have your enhanced sight or physiology,’ he said, and took the lamp light off his protector.
He didn’t need protection, per se. Kinebad was trained: both armed and unarmed, and in a variety of fighting disciplines. He carried a folded long rifle in a case cinched to his back and a snub-nosed automatic pistol, the Redoubter, in a holster on his left hip. His right thigh was strapped with a mono-molecular kaisen blade. It was a relic, as well as his birthright, from an ancient human dynasty.
Compared to the other warrior’s heavy slugger that he had strapped across his immense back and shoulders, Kinebad’s weapons were practically an arsenal. He had offered to furnish his protector with better materiel but had been refused. Repeatedly.
The light picked out the details of the chamber. It was mainly granite but there was also some ouslite, marble and even obsidian, though the volcanic glass had tarnished over the ages. The air was cold too, and it made the light grainy. The slightly brisk atmosphere was in sharp contrast to the world several hundred metres above them. On the surface of Draor, it was a blisteringly hot night and the sulphur rain was falling in sheets.
Kinebad had searched for this world and then this chamber, or series of chambers, for almost half a decade. Using the power and influence granted him by the rosette he carried beneath his armoured tunic, he had scoured obscure histories, references on forgotten parchments and proscribed knowledge vouchsafed by the Holy Ordos of Terra. A common archeotech could not have come as close as he – likely they would have been silenced for even asking the question. But here he was, on the very threshold of a significant discovery. Shogu master he might be, but it was the beating heart of a scholar and a theologian that fed the blood around Kinebad’s veins and gave him vigour.
‘What is this place, witch?’ asked the warrior, casting about his surroundings as bare stone gave way to lapidary inscription.
Kinebad had moved beyond the sixth ring and was into the seventh. A pair of columns separated it from the rest, between them the only entrance. Faded frescoes had been worked into their smooth stone but the meaning had all but been obliterated by time and entropy.
‘I do wish you wouldn’t call me that.’ Kinebad moved further, slowly casting the lamp around to find his footing. There was much debris on the ground, which made crossing the chamber slightly hazardous.
‘It’s untrue?’ The warrior sounded nonplussed.
Kinebad turned his gaze on him. A scrutinising lens flicked from under his headgear across his right eye. It gave off a faint whirring sound as the analysing rings calibrated.
‘It’s derogatory.’
‘I didn’t think you had me in your company for my manners.’
‘Your bearing suggested nobility, Scar-borne.’
‘You say that like it isn’t my name.’
‘I know it isn’t. It’s what the overseers called you on Sturndrang, a slave name. Are you a slave?’
‘To you, witch… no.’
Kinebad laughed. ‘You’re fortunate I have need of you.’
The warrior named Scar-borne took a step forward. In the light from Kinebad’s lamp, he seemed to increase in size. And threat. The shadows across one side of his features deepened, his face a cleaner version of the volcanic glass in the chamber.
‘Am I? Am I really, inquisitor?’
There was a brief moment when Kinebad felt the irresistible urge to reach for a weapon. But even with an arsenal as formidable as his, and with all the dynastic training from his shogu instructors, good sense told him this would be a mistake.
Scar-borne was testing his boundaries again. He harboured a deep anger, a sense of injustice and volatility Kinebad had found useful, but occasionally it needed marshalling.
Not rising to the bait, he turned away and went back to his work.
A large circular hall stretched in front of the inquisitor, held up by more columns. And something else…
‘There,’ Kinebad hissed, and gestured to a shaft of light.
An opening high up in the vaulted ceiling fed back to the surface almost three hundred metres above them. Thin veils of sulphur rain were coming in through the gap and hissed against an obelisk as they struck it. The obelisk was marble, three metres high and
its six faces each carried an illustrated slab of varicoloured minerals. At the summit there was a statue of a massive warrior, similar in build to Scar-borne, and another, smaller warrior kneeling down in front of the first.
They looked like ancient knights, armed and armoured as such.
From the look of the breach in the ceiling it was recent, and rather than diminishing Kinebad’s find, the caustic action of the rain was actually revealing the begrimed tablets around the obelisk. Script had begun to form at the base of each. A closer inspection revealed the language to be old, some form of archaic Gothic no longer spoken in the Imperium.
As a student of history, Kinebad had mastered many dead tongues as well as the extant conjurations of languages that had evolved over time. Though obscure, he found he could read what had been inscribed on the tablets.
‘You asked what this place is,’ said Kinebad, as he knelt by the tablet that was facing the entrance and therefore in his line of approach. The image on the tablet was of the same warrior depicted by the statue, his gauntleted fist held up in triumph. ‘It is history, Scar-borne. It is legacy and the truth concerning a myth ten thousand years old.’
‘You’re wrong, inquisitor,’ said Scar-borne, his voice darkening as he drew the heavy slugger from his back.
This time Kinebad turned, his right hand reaching for Redoubter out of instinct and conditioned reflex.
It would be too late. Scar-borne had him cold. The ugly maw of the slugger seemed to gape and mock. Little more than a blunderbuss, it would, nonetheless, shred the inquisitor’s storm coat, light body armour and flesh.
‘We had an agreement,’ he snapped, more a reminder than a threat.
‘Down,’ said Scar-borne.
Kinebad obeyed.
Thunder shattered the silence of the temple, broke it apart with two raucous booms of the warrior’s massive cannon.
Hot viscera splashed against the inquisitor’s storm coat. He looked around, still crouched down, and saw the steaming bodies of two skels. The wire-furred canines shone black in the half-light, their mail coats glossy with their exploded blood and innards. Massively muscled, with fur as resilient as mail and the unerring silent approach of the very best apex predators, skels were a deadly xenos breed. They were also the dominant and prevalent form of life on Draor.
Scar-borne went over to both carcasses, stamping down on their skulls with an armoured boot.
‘It’s a lair,’ he told Kinebad, before thrusting an outstretched finger at the opening. As the light came in, the summit of a ziggurat was revealed. ‘More skels will fill this place within the hour. Whatever you need to do, do it quickly.’
Skels were also adept climbers, their long dewclaws strong enough and sharp enough to gain purchase in solid rock. Before planetfall, Kinebad had conducted extensive observation of the indigenous xenos population. That learning had proved extremely useful in getting them this far.
Kinebad gave a mute nod of thanks in Scar-borne’s direction as he remembered the many reasons he had offered him a position with his group.
Turning, he began to read.
‘On the eighteenth day of Nureg, the Guardian of Terra did alight on Draor…’ Kinebad began.
Scar-borne’s gaze went to the statue, the great armoured warrior. There was something familiar, archaic about the design of his battleplate.
‘…and there was a great star-fire in the heavens as seven ships of gold descended.’
The fabled landing described was depicted on the second tablet.
On the third was a host of warriors, knelt down in fealty.
‘And, lo, did the men of Iron kneel to his will and the will of the Avenging Son.’
On the fourth tablet was a huge figure wearing a politician’s robes and carrying a heavy book under the crook of one mighty arm. His head was arrayed with a laurel wreath and a white ‘U’ symbol served as a clasp for the garments he wore in place of his armour.
‘He brought his word and his bond, but it was the gift of bone the men of Iron took heed of.’
The fifth tablet depicted the so-called ‘Guardian’ handing a box to one of the men of Iron, a leader judging by his sword and banner.
‘And so reunited with their patriarch was a pact with the men of Iron sealed and the Imperium of Man reunited.’
A skull, its eyes rendered in dull, lifeless jet, dominated the final tablet and it was there the inscribed legend ended.
‘Never again would it be put asunder.’
Kinebad was shaking. He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead, despite the chill.
‘Do you know what this means?’
Throughout the recitation, Scar-borne’s gaze had not left the statue. Now it fell to the inquisitor.
‘They raised a monument,’ he said, ‘the people who once dwelled on this world.’
‘Almost ten thousand years ago, yes they did.’ Kinebad shook his head, scarcely believing what he had discovered. ‘This is real Imperial history, Scar-borne, from the days of the War.’
‘There have been many wars. I’ve fought in several.’
‘The Heresy War that ended the first Great Crusade.’ When Scar-borne’s interest wasn’t piqued by Kinebad’s rhetoric, the inquisitor grew irritated. ‘It was a formative period in your Chapter’s history.’
Now it was Scar-borne’s turn to be angry.
‘I have no Chapter,’ he said. ‘Not anymore.’ Scar-borne’s shoulders slumped as he briefly relived bitter memories. ‘I am unworthy of it,’ he added quietly, allowing his gaze to fall.
As Kinebad revisited each tablet, pict-capturing with his scrutinising lens, he heard Scar-borne speak from the other side of the obelisk.
‘Why have I never heard about any of this before? I know my Chapter’s history. I have read of every battle the Legion fought in, and studied them. But this… I have no knowledge of this.’
‘Even I was ignorant of it. History is full of lacunae, especially after so many millennia. Much is lost, like the people who raised this monument and committed this truth to indelible stone for others to find. Here we are unearthing some of that truth, the same truth that our enemies seek to use.’
Recording the image of the final tablet, Kinebad walked back around the obelisk to find Scar-borne looking right at him.
‘The cult you and I destroyed on Sturndrang. That was not the end of it?’
‘It was the beginning.’
Scar-borne shook his head and scowled, gesturing to the obelisk.
‘Do you even believe this?’
Kinebad’s gaze, much like his conviction, was unwavering. ‘I believe we are a step closer to achieving our ends and finishing the Incarnadine Host for good.’
The vox-link in Kinebad’s ear crackled, interrupting them.
‘Go ahead, Skaed.’
A woman’s voice answered, patchy but still audible across the feed. Torrential rain served as a backdrop behind it.
‘Indigenes are moving in. So we need to be moving out. Right now.’
A brief break in connection prompted Kinebad to crouch and press the receiver bud in his ear. ‘Skels?’
‘Hundreds of the ugly bastards, and some larger xeno-forms we haven’t seen before.’
‘Effect egress at once, Skaed. I want you on the Reckless and back with Heckt immediately.’
‘I am in no immediate danger, inquisitor. My vantage is still good. I could provide you with some cover.’
‘Unnecessary. Scar-borne is with me.’
‘That is what concerns me.’
‘Retreat to the Reckless, Uanda.’
Uanda Skaed gave the affirmation tone and cut the link.
Scar-borne was racking two immensely large shells into the breach of his slugger.
‘I knew she didn’t like me.’
‘Do many?’
‘No.’
Kinebad raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t know why you favour that monstrous cannon. It’s badly weighted, the aim is poor and the reload slow.’
‘Because it kills whatever it hits.’ Scar-borne grinned and one side of his face, one that was severely scarred, contorted into a terrifying scowl. ‘We have an understanding, it and I.’
‘So it seems.’
Through the gap in the ceiling, the howling had begun.
‘We need to move,’ said Kinebad.
Scar-borne nodded and led them out.
Outside, the deluge intensified. Sulphur rain was lashing straight down in burning little tears of acid. The refractor field generated by one of Kinebad’s several rings flickered with the constant hammering of the rain. Scar-borne had no such protection. He did not need it. His armour was acid-proofed and his skin was inviolable against it. He endured the heat too. Kinebad used his psychic gifts to maintain a comfortable temperature; Scar-borne was simply used to hotter.
Underneath the tumult of the storm, the low howling of the skels was just audible.
A flash of lightning cut a jagged path through the night sky. It lit up a barren landscape, a place of ruination and a people long since deceased. Skels dominated now and their eyes flashed like hungry sapphires as they gathered in packs around the inquisitor and his warrior.
Scar-borne counted almost three hundred skels. The larger xeno-forms Skaed had mentioned were further back and harder to make out. Porcine perhaps, with an almost simian gait? When encountering the alien, it is mankind’s natural instinct to try to make sense of it, to look for parallels within his own sphere of knowledge. But one cannot impose the natural upon the unnatural, the familiar on the alien. The things waiting for them out in the rain adhered to no natural template. They were monsters, but Scar-borne knew monsters and their kind very well indeed.
‘You expect me to fight all of them?’
‘I know you probably would,’ said Kinebad, producing a small lozenge-shaped object from his many trappings, ‘but I had something less messy and more effective in mind.’