Another voice fell silent. And another. And another. And another.
Unholy blood hissed and steamed against my armour. I was killing by sound and psychic sense now – wherever I heard a noise no human could create, my storm bolter barked in that direction; wherever I sensed sentience without a soul, I crashed the weaponised head of my stave against it.
+Hyperion,+ Malchadiel’s voice echoed through the threads of linked minds. He sounded weak. +Hyperion, I can’t see.+
I risked it. I risked turning to him. A momentary pulse of focus into my stave overcharged it, forcing the power cells to shout out a sonic charge of repelling energy. The Neverborn shrieked and fell back, and with the precious seconds it bought me, I turned my helm on dense Terminator neck-servos to face my brother. I couldn’t see much myself. I wasn’t sure what he hoped from me.
He was down. I could see that much through the streaming gore. He was down and we were leaving him behind.
Galeo must have sensed something. +Hyperion,+ he sent, quick and cuttingly sharp. +Stay with us.+
My refusal was wordless, but no less obvious. I threw my stave as a spear, sinking it into the ground by Malchadiel as he struggled to rise with the creatures digging their spines into back and shoulders. A second’s concentration duplicated the flare of overcharged power cells, blasting Mal with a wave of kinetic force. A surreal wave of reeking red fluid splashed aside in the same moment. Blood. I hadn’t realised until then: we were wading ankle-deep in blood too thick for the ground to drink with any speed. Between the slashing rainfall and the foulness leaking from the enemy, we were flooding the craters across the plain.
He reached for the stave, using it for support as he hauled himself to his feet. The second greatest surprise of the day hit me then, a bolt from nowhere. Galeo didn’t bleed disappointment at my disobedience. Castian stood right with me. Dumenidon slammed back to back with me, warding me with his blade while I summoned my stave. Galeo and Enceladus killed the creatures making a second surge for Malchadiel.
+What about our orders?+ I sent, already too tired to speak.
Galeo responded by opening his mind. Beneath his weariness was the truth: he’d not known Malchadiel had fallen, he was too focused on advancing. He thought my lapse had been nothing more than a flicker of wandering attention.
+Well done,+ he sent as we regrouped. +And to the warp with our orders. We’re dead anyway. Fight. Kill. Let’s get this done.+
Everywhere around us was the clash of blades, the crash of bolters. I saw Atrayon of the First Brotherhood disembowelled by something made of claws and bone and hate. I sensed Furus of the Eighth snap out of the communion, as a Neverborn with bronze blades for arms cleaved his head from his shoulders. I saw Dymus of the Seventh Brotherhood fall with an ivory horn through his throat. His voice didn’t fade from the furious chorus – it only grew louder, harsher, as he gargled across the vox in vocal disunity. One of the Neverborn ended him before he could rise again.
Throne, we were so close now. The Great Beast screamed in the vascular downpour, charging faster than anything of such size could possibly move. In a fist large enough to curl around a Rhino tank, it gripped a long blade of blackened bronze that seethed in the storm. Runes I couldn’t read writhed along the tainted metal, changing with every fall of the sword – perhaps with each life it ate.
And each time it fell, it shook the ground and stole more voices from the communion. How many of us remained alive, only a minute after manifesting here? How many of the Cruor Praetoria remained alive to stalk through our ranks?
I couldn’t say. I had no idea. None of us did.
Another aspect of open warfare is the dust. Two armies throw up a blizzard of filth from the ground that must be seen to be believed, all born of marching boots, scuffing feet and grinding tank treads. The dust becomes another enemy to be faced; acting as a thief of calm, robbing a force of all cohesion and leaving individuals scattered, separated from their kindred. I’d read about it so many times in the archives, but experiencing it myself defied all former imagining. Without my psychic gift, sensing what shape in the murk was a brother and what was a soulless husk, I’d have been as blind and lost as any mortal. Perhaps even as panicked. I say that with no shame.
As we drew nearer to the Lord of the Twelfth Legion, even sparing a second to cleanse the gore from my eye lenses made no difference. We were as good as blind, fighting shadows and marching to face a silhouette. Eye lenses cycled through vision modes to compensate, corrupted by intermittent static.
I saw the first squad reach the Great Beast at last. They reached its knees, even in Terminator plate. I saw them raise their weapons, each blade and stave wrapped in layers of lethal lightning.
I heard the sky tearing itself apart. I heard the screams of men going mad, kilometres away. I saw the black-and-bronze blade fall.
III
Their names were Korolos, Taymul, Jesric, Nyramar and Justicar Gauris. Sagas and legends alike fall back on classic imagery; they will often describe certain deaths with the simple analogy of foes despatched with the same ease of a man crushing an insect.
But a man must take aim at an insect – he must exert at least a modicum of effort to see it dead. I saw no such effort, here. Those five knights were wiped from life with the ease of a man wiping sweat from his brow. The Lord of the Twelfth Legion scarcely even seemed to pay attention to them – when the immense, keening blade swung, the beast was already turning to face other foes. Chain and cable tendrils thrashed as the daemon moved – a dirty simulation of a mane of hair. The thing never even saw my five kinsmen die.
But I did. The beat of the Great Beast’s wings made it possible, gusting the dust cloud aside for that briefest of moments. I saw the knights of Squad Hargrian take flight, spinning and soaring into the air above the embattled horde, three of them bisected and all five of them suddenly silent in the communion’s song.
The dust swirled back before the bodies fell. I never saw where their rag doll remains landed.
Malchadiel’s storm bolter burst one of the last creatures remaining in front of us. +They never even had the chance to unleash their power,+ he sent.
+I know.+ Some of the Neverborn’s acidic blood was digesting the soft-armour joints of my ceramite, making it even harder to focus. When the beast turned again, its fire-eyed gaze raking over us, I realised that I had mere seconds left to live.
This was how I would die. Here. Now.
I felt nothing at all. At least, nothing beyond a sudden urge to laugh.
Shells were bursting against the behemoth, striking it from every angle. Sacred bolt shells, inscribed with holy writ and blessed against the foulness of the warp. Strings of viscera arced from its exploding flesh.
Galeo lifted his storm bolter. Ours rose alongside his in perfect unity, and Castian added its fire to our brothers’.
It was the last thing we ever did together.
IV
+Now.+
Every knight still standing unleashed their power at Captain Taremar’s silent cry.
The enemy host was forgotten. The devil-lords of the Cruor Praetoria – if any still walked among us – were ignored. They were lesser threats, relatively speaking, that lesser warriors could deal with.
Angron. Lord of the Twelfth Legion. This was why we’d come.
With blessed shells already bursting threads of wet gore from his body, the fallen primarch withered beneath our unified assault. I was shouting as I raised my weapons; we were all shouting, out loud and in each other’s minds.
The most common manifestation of psychic power is the phenomenon often referred to as witch-lightning. Coruscating arcs of the crackling, jagged energy washed over the Great Beast’s red flesh, ripping like razors and shedding splashing gouts of stinking, searing blood. Atop this base expression of rage, we fed our own energies into the weaving of sixth-sense sorcery hurled up at the colossus.
No Grey Knight displays the exact same gifts as his brothers. Try to conceive of
the actual manifestation of a species’ wrath and defiance. That’s what we threw against the Blood God’s chosen champion. Slices in reality cleaved open in the sky and across the ground, vortex-strong, sucking in the nearest Neverborn and even pulling at the Great Beast itself. Smoke and blood from its wings and armour were drawn away in a sucking rush, pulled back behind the veil where all of the creature’s foulness belonged.
Other knights, lacking the gifts of such mastery, attacked with gleaming blades, their psychic strength fed into the sacred steel to burn with the divine light of banishment. Nemesis-creed weaponry was anathema to daemonkind, as surely as our own souls were, and every sword and hammer meeting Angron’s flesh elicited fresh agony in the enraged godling. They scarred it, bruised it, shredded flesh from broken bones – yet seemed to have no effect at all.
Telekines in our ranks – of which Malchadiel was merely one – protected the rest of us with shimmering domes of repellent force, resisting the beast-lord’s great blade. Such manifestations of holy protection still burst like bubbles after the second or third strike. Angron’s screams shook the entire sky, redoubling the blood-rain in a scything downpour, burning at the kine-shields our brothers held above us.
The beast itself was a savage, hideous blur. Its blade moved faster than the eye could follow, cracking down to blast light-flares across force domes or carve without pause through entire squads. Nothing pure remained in our communion, now. Too few voices rose in defiance, and each of them was coloured only by concentrated rage.
My own gift manifested in the way that had always been easiest for me to express. Fire. It streamed from my fists, blanketing the primarch’s wings with the clinging tenacity of naphtha, sticking and dissolving all it touched like an acidic second skin. Other pyrokines unleashed the same corrosive spillage – we were melting the thing alive.
More than that. We were carving it to pieces, breaking it apart, incinerating it and dissolving it, all at once.
It laughed.
It laughed, and kept killing us.
V
Dumenidon was the first of Castian to fall.
One moment he was with us. The next he was gone. I think, when it happened, I actually felt him reach for me. I can’t be sure.
The beast was laying about with its blade, its edge crashing aside from the straining, flickering domes of kinetic force. It burst through another, reaved through the knights beneath it, and immediately turned to another threat.
Us.
Eyes of black fire bored into the five of us, and the blade descended less than a heartbeat later. The crack of it striking Mal’s kine-shield was the same thunder of a warship entering the warp between worlds. A second blow, a third, a fourth…
Mal was on his knees, shouting wordlessly across the vox.
+KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT+ he pulsed in an agonised flow.
On the fifth blow, the kine-shield shattered with another thunderclap. Malchadiel collapsed. Dumenidon fell with him, crushed into unrecognisable ruin by the blade. Just like that, he was gone, leaving a hole in my mind.
The blade rose and fell again.
+HYPERION+ came Galeo’s voice.
I caught the blade.
Not with my hands. With my mind. I locked that grievous, immense sword immobile with a surge of desperate focus, keeping it trembling in the air above us. Waves of psychic force turned the air into a heat mirage around my armour.
+Do… something…+ I managed to send.
Enceladus and Galeo threw their swords as spears. Both sank deep into the beast’s wrist, and both immediately caught flame, igniting the creature’s unholy blood. It still didn’t release its hold on the blade.
Angron roared. Without a force barrier, the sound blasted across us with dreadful physicality, tearing parchments and tabards from our armour and sliding us all back in the sloshing, blood-drowned mud.
I gave everything I had left. Absolutely everything. With my hands raised, I slowly curled them into fists, pouring body and soul into my sixth sense clutching that blade. They wouldn’t close completely. They just wouldn’t.
My vision blurred. I felt saliva trickling from the edge of my mouth. My muscles went into cramp, and my hearts started to beat ragged.
I was killing myself with this. The focused depletion of life force, channelled into psychic energy. But I was already dead, so what did it matter?
In the air above us, the black blade cracked.
And everyone froze.
The sound was as stark and alien as a laugh in the middle of a funeral march. Even the Lord of the Twelfth Legion hesitated, huffing a stinking breath in disbelief.
I swear, the loudest sound on that battlefield was me screaming into the vox. I felt psychic hoarfrost riming my armour, densest on my outstretched hands. My eyes lit with ghost-flame, painless but still blindingly bright, purely as an overspill of psychic energies.
+Hyperion…+ I heard Galeo whisper. He may have said more. If he did, I didn’t hear it.
I closed my hands, made them fists.
Above me, the blade shattered. Cursed black bronze blasted across the field of battle, raining on the just and unjust alike. Several shards tore gashes across the daemon’s skin, or lodged into his flesh. There came a roar, the likes of which defied reality. It had no place outside a nightmare.
And I was on my knees without knowing when I’d fallen low.
+Mal,+ I sent to his prone body, not knowing whether he was alive or dead. +Mal. Mal. Mal…+
Galeo and Enceladus drew closer. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know anything any more – I couldn’t see, I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t speak.
The last thing I remember of the battle was Captain Taremar’s voice, cutting right to my core.
+Angron,+ he called. +Justice comes. Turn, beast, and face me.+
SEVENTEEN
BLADEBREAKER
I
‘This one’s still alive.’
The voice was what woke me. It was too deep to be human.
Something jerked my head, pulling at my helmet. I opened my eyes in time for my retinal display to fall dark, unpowered as my helm was dragged clear.
The sky above was a bruised grey. Gone was the sanguinary richness that had covered the heavens above the battle. The air smelled of burned hair and dirty coal fires. It tasted just as sour.
I was alive.
Cold, but alive.
‘Easy, brother,’ said the same voice. It sounded familiar this time, though still too low to be fully human. ‘Can you stand?’
The figure moved where I could see him, offering me an armoured hand. I took it – we gripped wrist to wrist. Every movement of my joints sent dull, weary throbs through my bones, not quite sharp enough to be called pain.
The leaping silver wolf on his breastplate might be something worn by many warriors in his Chapter, and the wolfskin cloak was lost to incineration, but I recognised the Fenrisian runes on his helm and the axe slung over his back.
‘Brand,’ I tried to say. I had to swallow and try again, my tongue was so parched. ‘Brand Rawthroat.’
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘The one and only.’
Standing was a trial in itself. My legs shook with unfamiliar weakness. I kept blinking, trying to clear my eyes and make them focus. It wasn’t working.
‘Bladebreaker,’ another voice said nearby. I turned to see another Wolf picking through the bodies. He grinned at me. ‘Good to see you still breathing, Bladebreaker.’
Brand chuckled, as low as an avalanche and no friendlier, either. ‘Now there’s a name worthy of a saga or two. Will you live long enough to hear them, knight? You look like a kraken chewed you up and shit you back out.’
I felt like it, too. I gestured to his scorched, bloodstained armour. ‘You look little better.’
‘That’s the truth,’ Rawthroat agreed.
My eyes were clearing, though they revealed a vista devoid of any joy. The Neverborn had dissolved away, leaving little trace beyond grotesque stains on the
ground. Silver-clad bodies lay everywhere else.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Please, no.’
Galeo was the first one I recognised. He lay twenty metres from me, missing one arm and both legs beneath mid-thigh. Hs breastplate displayed the killing wound – it was cracked and split around what looked like a spear thrust.
I couldn’t run to him. My armour’s damaged servos wouldn’t allow it. Instead, I limped closer, dragging a leg that wouldn’t bend. Gunships flew overhead, some from the Wolves, others from the Imperial Guard. I ignored them all.
+Galeo,+ I sent, knowing it was futile even as I said it. I couldn’t sense anything from him, and that’s when I realised why I felt so strangely cold and hollow. I couldn’t sense any of my brothers. Malchadiel, Galeo, Dumenidon, Enceladus… all had fallen as silent as Sothis, unreachable no matter how I focused.
My fingers rested on my justicar’s bare throat.
His storm bolter wouldn’t reload. He shouldn’t have thrown his sword. He needed it now. Accursed gun. Accursed–
The spear lanced into him from behind, a heavy, scraping pressure that bored its way into him. He bit back the scream, even as the things drove him to his knees. When it snapped through his breastplate, amazingly, he felt a sigh leave his lips, akin to the relief after a ripe boil is popped and drained of fluid.
They were taking him to pieces, hacking at his armour with their jagged blades. He–
I lifted my fingers away. I’d seen enough, and the dozen enemy dead carpeting the earth told the rest of the tale. Rawthroat was still with me.
‘How long was I unconscious?’ I asked.
‘How am I supposed to know? I spent most of the battle on the other side of the enemy horde, carving the bastards to pieces. What do you remember last?’
‘The blade. I remember breaking the blade.’
Rawthroat removed his helm, showing a face pockmarked by old scarring. His hair was likely once black; now, from his thinning crown to the curving moustache linking to his sideburns, it was iron grey streaked with white. He seemed to pull his helm clear purely so he could hawk and spit.
The Emperor's Gift Page 22