‘The Emperor protects,’ exhausted, Thorolf rolled off his opponent’s corpse and stumbled to the exit.
‘Space Marine... I live,’ the tau cried out as Thorolf moved past him.
Thorolf stopped and closed his eyes, ‘In His sight.’ Straightening, he turned and walked to the tau. ‘No xenos, you do not.’
The tau looked up, his eyes full of confusion, ‘I... I thought we had a bond, as warriors.’
‘If that were true, I would be as guilty of heresy as those I hunt.’ The Space Marine raised his blade.
Thorolf ran his hand up over the smooth metal of his cell wall, bringing it to rest on a blackened, pockmarked section. Closing his eyes, he traced the contours, his fingers remembering how he’d made each of them. Thorolf’s thoughts turned to the strangled cries of the chrono-gladiator as its retarded throat tried to give voice to its death. He spat on the wall. The metal hissed under the saliva as the acid liquid burned a fresh imperfection into the metal. Satisfied, Thorolf knelt in prayer and offered thanks to the Holy Throne and God Emperor that he yet lived to continue his mission.
Thorolf stared uneasily at the hunchbacks. Their childlike, smiling faces jarred with their weeping skin in a way that made Thorolf wish was able to adjust his eyes the way he could the optic lenses of his battle helm.
He had little way of knowing how long it had been since his fight with the chrono-gladiator, but he was certain it wasn’t time for another appearance in the arena. Perhaps, he thought, this was an oddity of the tournament. Since his imprisonment, he knew that time had flowed strangely. It seemed fragmented and inconsistent, days indistinguishable from hours, seconds stretched out that they might fill eternity. He sighed, through gritted teeth; time was yet another constant that the eldar had taken from him. Running his hand across the black body suit that they had replaced his power armour with, Thorolf visualised the armoured grooves of his sacred breastplate, his fingers able to trace the line of every chink where the reinforced ceramite had been tested in saving his life. Inwardly, the Space Marine promised himself that he would don his armour again.
He looked past his jailors towards the open cell door and waited for the bastardised female to enter. She did not.
A body flew from the darkness beyond the door, hurled like a doll by someone or something far stronger than even the stimm-pumped chrono-gladiator. It landed hard on the floor between the hunchbacks, twitched and coughed up a smattering of blood. Thorolf took one look at the prone figure, immediately recognising the enhanced musculature of a fellow Space Marine. Without a word the hunchbacks turned and exited, the door locking behind them.
Thorolf moved to check the figure’s vitals –
‘Stay back,’ the new arrival snarled through bloodied teeth and pushed his torso off the ground.
‘Easy, brother, we are both playthings of the same captors. I bring no harm.’ Thorolf spread his hands in conciliation and retreated to the far wall.
The Space Marine seemed appeased, and slid back against the opposite wall. ‘Where are we?’
Thorolf looked at the naked Space Marine, studying the tapestry of angry scars that criss-crossed the pale flesh of his torso. Tell-tale puncture marks studded the Space Marine’s body, souvenirs left by the pain racks that had tortured his nervous system. Thorolf felt his muscles bunch as he remembered his own ordeal at the hands of their jailors. By contrast, the newcomer’s face was untouched; baring none of the signs of warfare Thorolf would have expected to see on one of the Emperor’s shock troops. It reminded Thorolf of the hunchbacks, wracked of body and beautiful of visage. His mind recoiled at the twisted work of the eldar surgeons.
‘We are on Damorragh,’ Thorolf spoke with hushed clarity, like a preacher consoling his flock. He sought the beads of his faith as he spoke but they had been stripped from him along with the rest of his wargear when the eldar had taken him. The warrior monk sighed and made a mental note to beg the Emperor’s forgiveness for uttering the xenos word. ‘It is an arena world of the pirate eldar.’
The newcomer was about to speak when Thorolf interrupted him, ‘I think brother, it is my turn to ask a question.’
The other Space Marine nodded.
‘Who do you serve?’
Anger flashed across the Space Marine’s face, ‘And why is it that I should tell you? Which Legion do you serve?’
‘I seek no advantage over you, brother. I am Thorolf Icewalkdr, son of Russ.’
‘Space Wolf,’ the Space Marine spat, doing a poor job of hiding his distaste for the children of Fenris. The newcomer considered the other Space Marine. It seemed at odds with what he knew of Russ’ descendants that Thorolf had spoken so plainly rather than aggrandising his Chapter in a torrent of audacious boasts. ‘You speak well for a berserker.’
Thorolf felt the Space Marine’s eyes on him. He wondered just how bestial he must look to him, his hair twisting in blood-matted locks down to his shoulders, an unkempt beard clinging to his face.
‘Now,’ Thorolf’s voice hardened, ‘I would know who it is that shares this cell.’
‘I am Ecanus of the Dark Angels.’
Thorolf stared the Dark Angel in the eyes; he could detect no taint of Chaos upon him. ‘I fought alongside a Dark Angel once.’
‘What?’
Thorolf lowered his eyes, ‘Ramiel was my first cell mate. He was a mighty warrior. I honour him with each breath I take in the arena, my body a monument to his legacy.’
‘Where are your fangs, wolf?’ Ecanus snapped, distracted.
Thorolf clenched his teeth in annoyance, ‘It would bid you well to watch your tone, son of Jonson.’ He paused and rubbed a hand against his mouth, ‘Their infernal surgeons took great joy in filing away my lord’s gift. A pain and an affront I will wash clean with blood.’ Thorolf let his gaze drift to the kill markings on the wall.
Ecanus followed his gaze. ‘Leave it to a Space Wolf to tally kills. You and your brethren’s idea of honour is more akin to the feudal barbarism of backwater savages.’
Thorolf’s face softened, ‘It is not glory that they recount. Each mark serves to remind me of the penance I must face when this is over.’
‘This will never be over, Wolf. I have emerged champion from two of these infernal games, only to find myself here, at the beginning of a fresh nightmare.’
‘In death brother, in death shall it be over.’
‘Hmm,’ Ecanus sniffed. ‘Perhaps it will be you and I who fight next.’
‘Perhaps,’ answered Thorolf softly. ‘The eldar take great pleasure in watching the arena tear apart the bond of brotherhood.’
‘Ramiel?’
Thorolf nodded, ‘I killed him.’ He met Ecanus’s gaze. The Dark Angel brow was creased with rage, his eyes murderous. ‘Fear not brother, should we make it far enough in this forsaken tournament then I have no doubt that we shall be pitted against one another. You will have your chance to restore Ramiel’s honour...’ Thorolf shuffled down onto the ground and closed his eyes, ‘but for now, there are plenty enough xenos and mutated abominations for us to dull our blades on.’
The grind of gears and rattle of chain-fed levers woke Thorolf. He could have enabled his Catalepsean Node to cut in; allowing parts of his brain to switch off while the others maintained alertness. But in truth he needed to rest fully. The demands the recent past had placed on his body were nothing to what his mind had been forced to endure. He sat up as the brass door to his cell ground open. A lithe figured entered, the symmetry of her long, curved limbs and perfect bosom at odds with the vertical grille that replaced her face. Thorolf stayed on the ground as two of her kin entered, and flanked her to either side. They were badly hunched, the musculature in their chest’s overdeveloped to such an extent it threatened to snap their backs. Their bodies were revolting, sheathed in a sickly skin with pores that dripped with virulent toxins. Yet by the standards of most cultures their faces would have been considered beautiful.
‘Stand.’ The female hissed the command through
her grille-face.
The word rasped through the air, both distorted and clear. Had it not been for his Lyman’s Ear, which worked to filter out the harshness of the sound, it would have ripped into Thorolf’s skull like a saw blade. As it was, he felt wetness on his cheeks as blood trickled from his ears. He stood and waited for the hunched males to step forward, keeping his gaze fixed on the perverse ugliness of the female as they shackled his wrists with heavy chains.
‘Follow.’ The female turned sharply, her barbed hair cutting the air as she exited.
Thorolf ground his teeth as he fought against the nausea her voice induced, and allowed himself to be led from the cell by the hunchbacks.
The corridor stank of death. On the battlefield, Thorolf had smelt almost every death imaginable: the acrid taste of dirt mixed with bone as explosive rounds blew men apart; the sharp tang of laser fire as it lanced through their flesh; and the choking smell of promethium that burned them to ash and boiled away the air they breathed. But the death-smell in the corridor was far more putrid than anything a soldier was capable of inflicting on his enemies. The air tasted of depravity, of death wrought for the enjoyment of butchers. Thorolf tried hard not to breathe too deeply, his enhanced senses choked by the reek of dozens of foul toxins and pollutants. Down there, in the depths of an alien contrived hell, you died over a long time, when elaborate tortures had broken your spirit, and decay and rot had wasted your body. Death here was not a means to an end, an acceptable part of winning a war. It was manufactured for its own sake.
The hunchbacks led Thorolf along a snaking corridor of tarnished metal and smooth stone, lit by ghoulish faces that hung from the ceiling like lanterns. The eyes and mouths cast a drab light on the studded panels of the walkway. Each time he’d been led from his cell, Thorolf had tried to get his bearings. He’d tried to keep track of the twists in the corridor by counting the lanterns, then by remembering the shape of the other cells they passed. But it was no use, each time the corridor looked different, turned in a different direction. It was as impossible to fathom as it was for him to deny the hundred years of training and instinct that forced him to continue to try.
At the bottom of a metal incline, the female turned and spoke, ‘Stillness.’
Thorolf remained where he was as the hunchbacks ambled forward and removed his chains.
‘Go,’ the female motioned towards the ramp with an elongated arm that ended in knife-like fingers.
Thorolf fixed his gaze ahead and started up the incline. The surface, which at first had seemed smooth and featureless, was covered in an intricate design and script; carved into the metal with a craftsmanship that Thorolf doubted even his Chapter’s finest artisans could match. Blood ran in the relief between the symbols, tracing a grim outline around them. Thorolf felt his pulse quicken as he realised the arena he was about to enter was of more significance than the ones he’d fought in previously. At the top of the ramp Thorolf was met by an enormous circular metallic door large enough for his Chapter’s holy Land Raiders to drive through two abreast. He waited.
With a whisper, the circular door opened, its petal-like segments peeling apart to reveal an equally massive spiked gate. Light flooded in, and Thorolf was forced to cover his eyes until they adjusted. Then came the noise, a thunderous cacophony of jeering voices calling Thorolf to battle.
‘Within dark and forgotten regions hide the enemies of the Emperor. Be resolute. You have received his gifts so that you may enter such places and cleanse them,’ Thorolf let the mantra slow the beating of his twin hearts, and ease the tension from his shoulders.
The gate vibrated angrily as unseen machines hoisted it up into the vaulted ceiling. Thorolf took a long breath and strode forward; whatever it was that awaited him, he would bring it the Emperor’s forgiveness.
Thorolf stepped onto the arena floor, a steel platform covered in coarse, spiked gravel, to an explosion of noise from the crowd. He ignored them, thankful for the heat of the planet’s three suns as they burned down on him. The coliseum was by far the largest he had fought in. Tiered galleries surrounded the fighting pit, towering up into the blood-stained sky to where even Thorolf’s enhanced eyes could make out no more than a vague outline. No wall separated the crowd from the gladiators, allowing a privileged few to be sprayed with the blood of a combatant as an opponent’s blade opened his flesh. Between each row of seated spectators a pole of spiked iron stood in the ground, the head of a fallen gladiator impaled upon its tip.
At the opposite side of the arena, Thorolf saw his opponent – an ork. He had killed hundreds of the green beast’s kin on the field of battle, given the order to bombard thousands more out of existence from the deck of an orbiting battle-barge. But here, without the protection of his blessed armour, the cleansing rounds of his boltgun or the reassuring weight of the crozius arcanum, the hulking greenskin seemed a far harder proposition. Even hunched, the beast stood head and shoulders above Thorolf. Stood upright, it would have been double his height. The Ork gripped a makeshift mace in each of its oversized fists, metal poles with stone blocks chained to their tops.
Thorolf hefted the saw-blade he’d taken from the armoury in his right hand. ‘Pit the might of your faith against the strength of the foe and you will cease their onslaught,’ Thorolf knelt in prayer, sanctifying his temporary weapon the way he would have honoured his own battlegear.
The air above the centre of the arena sparked and distorted. Thorolf turned his attention upwards as the light folded in on itself creating a dark spot from which an obsidian balcony materialised. The platform was devoid of any thrusters, and Thorolf assumed it was held aloft by the same advanced anti-grav technology the eldar used on their skimming battle tanks. The crowd fell silent as the doors stood in the centre of the balcony swung open.
A single figure emerged onto the platform. Thorolf recognised him by the blood-soaked flesh cloak that hung across his shoulders. The Orator, the grotesque narrator of Damorragh’s arenas, was clad in crimson armour that dripped with thick blood pumped over its surface by hidden nozzles. With the skin of his bald scalp scraped back in a taut flesh-lock, his eyelids pinned back to reveal pallid, weeping eyes, and his mouth sewn shut by barbed wire, he was as frightening a spectacle as anything the arena could muster.
‘Citizens of Damorragh, warriors of the Bladed Lotus, raise your blades and kneel,’ the Orator’s lips stayed sewn shut as he spoke. Instead, the hundreds of ghoulish faces impaled around the arena gave voice to his words, their lifeless jaws moving in unnatural unison.
A hundred thousand barbed weapons glinted in the sun as the assembled masses obeyed.
‘Archon K’shaic,’ the Orator made a sweeping gesture with his arms, flicking blood from his armour into the air. The droplets hung suspended for a fraction too long, a morbid collage painted with the blood of the archon’s enemies. To Thorolf they formed a crimson serpent, and he felt his insides bunch at the unnatural liquid.
K’shaic stepped through the doors to deafening applause; the interlocking plates of his midnight black armour shifting like scuttle beetles. The blood-master of the depraved arena world raised a gauntleted hand and took his seat at the front of the balcony.
Once more, the Orator spoke through the mouths of the dead. ‘Here in Xelaic Prime, most blood-spattered of our inglorious amphitheatres, the tournament of the Razor Vein dawns. Let us greet it with the blood of a lab-grown man-thing and the entrails of a barbarous ork.’
Thorolf tried to block out the voices, but they washed over him in a nauseous wave that flooded his mind. He looked around for some way of silencing them but saw no cables or antenna linking the heads to the Orator. Thorolf dared not think of the debased technology the aliens used to accomplish such a bonding with the dead.
‘Emperor protects,’ he said, turning his thoughts away from the macabre.
From across the arena, the ork bellowed a thunderous roar, its mouth opening wide enough to swallow Thorolf’s head whole. He remained kneeling and closed his
eyes. Enraged by its prey’s insensate reaction, the greenskin beat its chest and charged towards the Space Marine. Thorolf felt the ground tremble under the ork’s quickening footsteps. It rushed onward, and his nose picked up the beast’s foul breath. Thorolf shifted his weight to the front of his feet. The Ork’s sweat filled his senses. He heard the crunch of gravel as the beast turned on its foot, swinging a mace at his face. Thorolf sprang up and backwards in a tight arc, his blade flashing out to slice up the ork’s midsection and rip though its eye. The beast howled and stumbled backwards.
Thorolf landed and rolled sideways, away from the ork’s enraged thrashing. On his feet, he darted inside the beast’s reach, chopping its right hand off at the wrist with a downward stroke. Turning in place he brought it back up to block the mace held in the ork’s left, though the force of the blow threw him flat on his back. Thorolf rolled sideways as the ork brought a foot down to trample him, reaching up to cut the tendons behind the beast’s knees. Unable to stand, the ork fell forward, catching itself on its remaining hand. Thorolf leapt to his feet and dragged his blade two-handed through the ork’s neck. Showered in blood, Thorolf tore his blade free, locking eyes with the archon as the ork’s head flopped backwards onto its shoulders.
‘Our stances are not as dissimilar as I would have expected Space Wolf; you fight with more grace than I credited you with.’
Thorolf had no idea how Ecanus had observed his fight with the ork, and he was too weary to investigate further, ‘Ramiel. I fought many bouts alongside him.’ Thorolf eased his body onto the ground, ‘A true warrior must learn from his allies and adapt to his enemy.’
Ecanus said nothing.
He was awake when they came for Ecanus. Though his eyes were shut, Thorolf had allowed his Catalepsean Node to keep part of his brain alert, forgoing a measure of rest to keep a mind on his new cell mate. Judging by the stench, a pair of hunchbacks had entered the cell, though Thorolf didn’t detect the female. He picked up a new scent as a harsh male voice ordered Ecanus to stand. It reminded Thorolf of the deep rumble the deceleration thrusters on a drop-pod made seconds before impact. He felt pressure build in his ears until he was sure they would burst. Fighting the urge to vomit, Thorolf continued to listen as the hunchbacks shackled the Dark Angel, chains rattling as they led him off into the corridor. Thorolf waited for three breaths but the door didn’t close.
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