‘We are close now. And several of our kin-squads draw near. Come, brothers. The prize is almost ours, then this siege can truly begin.’
‘Wait,’ Uzas said. ‘I hear something.’
To say they arrived in orderly formation would be to do them an injustice, for the warriors’ cohesion far exceeded anything seen in the Blood Reaver’s attack force. In pristine ceramite of blue and white, matching the halved heraldries of ancient Terran knights, a single squad of warriors threw themselves into cover at the far end of the corridor. Their movements were utterly economical, ruthless in their soldierly precision, taking positions in total silence but for the growl of armour and the crack of bolter stocks against shoulder guards as each of them took aim.
Their leader was unhelmed, his stern features moulded into a mask of absolute resolve. Even over the distance, Talos knew that look, and could recall when he’d worn it himself. The defiance in the warrior’s gaze made the prophet’s skin crawl. Here was a man that believed in his cause. He felt no doubt, no hesitation, no temptation to wrack his mind in the futile second-guessing of sworn duty. His life was unclouded by broken oaths, and the legacy of mistrust and confusion that drifted in the wake of every betrayal.
Talos saw all of this in the time it took the warrior to raise his chainsword – a single second spent recognising the eyes of one who lived his life according to Talos’s own long-abandoned convictions.
He heard Mercutian say, in rare Nostraman gutter-tongue, ‘Oh, shit.’
The prophet and his brothers moved in a unity of their own, despite no signal passing between any of them. Clutching weapons tightly to their chests, First Claw stepped into the hulking shadows of the Terminators.
‘Kill them,’ Huron sneered, already advancing in a halting, hitching stride. His Terminators followed, leaning forwards into onerous runs, keeping pace and enclosing their lord, shielding him with their armoured bodies. Their tread was enough to send an arrhythmic pulse through the ground.
Ahead of them, the brother-sergeant chopped the air with his howling chainblade, and the Marines Errant filled the corridor with a demolishing hail of bolter shells.
Detonating shells burst against the layered ceramite, shrapnel clattering against the walls in gritty hail. Even protected as they were in their armour, the Corsairs growled and cursed.
First Claw kept themselves in the Terminators’ wake, shadowing their steps, letting the Corsair elite wade through the enemy fire. Xarl’s snigger came over the vox, and Talos felt himself grinning.
‘You’re doing fine, brothers,’ Cyrion mocked the Corsairs over the squad’s secure vox-channel. The gore-scent was buried now, hidden beneath the chemical tang of bolter discharge and the powdery reek of fyceline dust.
‘Fight,’ one of the Terminators growled in a grey-voiced drone of vox. ‘Fight, you spineless Nostraman bastards.’ First Claw didn’t answer, though their helms gave subtle clicks, betraying the laughter they shared in private. As the Corsair warrior reloaded his storm bolter, a shell cracked against his helm, shattering both tusks and earning a pained grunt.
The sound of so many bolts striking home was a rainstorm on a roof of corrugated iron. Over the din, Talos heard the Marines Errant sergeant give that ancient cry, ‘For the Emperor!’
Ah, the whispery tendrils of nostalgia. The prophet smiled again, even as the warrior in front of him buckled and crashed to his knees, finally felled by massed bolter fire. Talos moved in the same moment, slipping into another Terminator’s shadow, sharing the living, cursing cover with Mercutian.
‘Charge!’ Huron screamed the order in two voices, when the vocaliser built into his throat took over from his damaged vocal chords. His warriors powered forwards, lowering their bolters and hefting energised mauls.
‘We should take these fools everywhere,’ Cyrion suggested.
‘Blood...’ Uzas whispered over the vox. ‘Blood for the Blood God.’
Xarl blind-fired around the bulk of the Terminator he was using as a shield. Talos and Mercutian joined in, and the prophet risked a glance around his reluctant protector’s shoulder guard. He saw the Marines Errant falling back in supreme order, abandoning their dead, still pouring out half a squad’s worth of fire.
Tenacious dogs, these Marines Errant.
Their sergeant was down, his legs stretched out slack and useless, while he used his own body to defend two of his men crouching behind him. The two warriors dragged him back as they fired over his shoulders, their gunfire adding to the meticulously clockwork crack, crack, crack of his pistol.
One of them struck Huron. They all heard the thudding kick of a bolt shell hitting home, and the crumpling burst of the reactive shell exploding against armour. The warlord staggered back between the members of First Claw. He had a single moment to curse the Night Lords for their apparent cowardice, and the fact he sensed the truth was written in a sneer across his features: he knew full well each of them was smiling behind their skulled helms.
The instant passed. Huron threw himself back into the relentless advance, raising his mechanical right arm as if to warn the Marines Errant away before they committed some grievous error. In the claw’s palm, the spokes of an eight-bladed star led to a gaping, charred flamer nozzle, dripping colourless promethium fuel in its crudest, stinking raw form.
The Marines Errant broke ranks at last, only for their retreating forms to become statuesque silhouettes in the flooding wash of white fire. One of them unleashed a chemical torrent from his own flamer, dousing two of the Corsairs in corrosive splashes of liquid fire.
Girded in the technological marvels that comprised each suit of Tactical Dreadnought Armour, the Terminators shrugged their way through the flames.
But the Marines Errant burned. They roared as they died, fighting as they dissolved, lashing out with weapons fused to melting fists. With their armour joints liquefying, running under their ceramite plating as molten sludge, the last Marines Errant crashed to the ground.
The Corsairs kicked the burning husks aside, and marched on.
‘We are close,’ Huron growled between clenched steel teeth. ‘So close.’
He turned to the Eighth Legion warriors, to berate them for their pathetic show of timidity, to encourage them to push on and fight harder, so that they might all earn this great victory together. But when he turned, the hallway was empty but for the Marines Errant he’d killed. Flames still licked at exposed patches of skin. Bolters were reduced to pools of grey slag, halfpuddled on the stone.
The Night Lords were gone.
An astral congregation came together in the skies above Vilamus. For some time, Variel was content to watch the gathering from the observation deck of the Corsair warship Misery’s Crown, likening the drifting cruisers to sharks, assembling at the first scent of blood in the black water.
These were his brothers, and this mighty armada was the greatest embodiment of all they’d achieved together. Below them, powerless and unprotected, was their greatest prize yet.
The Pride of Macragge drifted past, another stolen ship, its repainted hull proudly bedecked in blasphemous symbols of brass. Variel spent several minutes watching it sail by, observing the Pantheon Stars carved into the warship’s armour plating.
The deck vibrated beneath his feet as the Crown shivered in the planet’s upper atmosphere, settling into a low orbit. He could make out the Venomous Birthright at the flotilla’s edge, orbited almost parasitically by its support fleet. The lesser cruisers burned their engines hard to keep up with the warship as it coasted around the Red Corsair cruisers, unleashing its formidable weapon batteries on the deactivated orbital defences. It was hardly alone in this spiteful act of aggression; several vessels followed their own flight paths, reducing the missile platforms and defence satellites to wreck and ruin.
Debris flared briefly in the void as it crashed harmlessly against the Birthright’s shields, splashing gentle kaleidoscope ripples through the shimmering field of energy. Shoved by the momentum of their de
struction, several of the large installations tumbled into the atmosphere in a slow motion that seemed almost graceful. Variel watched them burn and spin, dissolving in atmospheric fire as they fell to the planet below.
He turned, finding what he sought almost immediately. Midnight against the nothingness, the Covenant of Blood was a long-bladed spear at the armada’s heart. The winged skull of Nostramo stared from its battlemented aftcastle, its eyeless gaze leering across the fleet to meet the Apothecary’s stare.
Variel was still watching the Eighth Legion warship when the drop sirens started their industrial caterwauling. He turned from the observation portal, affixed his helm in place, and tuned into the melee of clashing, crashing voices.
‘This is Variel.’
‘Flayer, this is Castallian.’
‘Hail, Champion.’
‘I have been trying to reach you, brother. Lord Huron has succeeded.’ Bootsteps, clashes and clanks in the background. ‘Where are you?’
‘The... The gene-seed vaults are still exhibiting signs of terminal flux in the cryogenic process. We cannot receive and store plunder from the surface with them in this condition.’
‘What do you mean, “still”? I don’t understand.’
No, Variel thought. Of course you don’t.
‘I have recorded no fewer than thirteen specific notations in the last month, citing that our ship’s vault is unacceptably temperamental.’
‘Apothecary, I need a solution immediately. The Chapter is deploying as we speak. Vilamus’s defences are broken, and we are needed on the surface.’
Variel let the silence run for ten long, long seconds. He could almost hear his captain squirming.
‘Flayer?’
‘I have destroyed the servitors responsible for the improper rites of maintenance, Champion. You have nothing to fear; the Tyrant will assign no blame to you.’
There was a pause. ‘I... am grateful, Variel.’
‘I need time, Castallian. We are one of the only vessels capable of transporting what we steal, and I have no desire to stand before Lord Huron with the confession that we allowed laxity to destroy a quarter of the genetic treasure harvested from the world below.’
Another pause. ‘I am placing my trust and my life in your hands.’
‘Not for the first time, brother. I will join you in the second wave. Good hunting.’
Variel waited for exactly one minute, counting the seconds in his head. Vox-channels scrambled as he tuned through several frequencies.
‘This is the Flayer,’ he said at last. ‘Do you know that name?’
‘My... my lord,’ the voice replied. ‘All know that name.’
‘Very well. Secure an Arvus shuttle to be launched the moment the starboard docking bay is clear. I need transport to the Venomous Birthright.’
‘As you command, Flayer.’ Variel heard the officer speaking off-vox, making arrangements. The transfer of personnel from ship to ship during such an operation was hardly an anomaly, but it required some creative planning with the gunship fleet launching and the hangars so crowded by crew.
‘Deck commander?’ Variel interrupted the man’s organising.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘I perform this duty for Lord Huron himself. If you fail me, you will be failing our master.’
‘I will not fail, sir.’
Variel killed the link, and started walking.
‘The Corsair fleet is moving into drop formation, my lord.’
The Exalted said nothing. It merely watched.
Malek of the Atramentar followed his master’s gaze. ‘Talos was right. The first phase was laughably easy.’
Garadon replied, the other Terminator clutching his massive warhammer in both hands, as if ready for a more immediate threat.
‘Easy for us. I’m sure if he’d entrusted his Red Corsairs to infiltrate the fortress, they’d have wasted hours on uncoordinated killing sprees. Do you underestimate our Claws’ finesse, brother?’
Malek just grunted for an answer.
The Exalted snarled its first order in some time, sending mortal bridge officers moving to obey. ‘Launch Thunderhawks to retrieve the Claws.’
With a smile, or as close as the Exalted’s twisted jaws ever came to one, it looked at its bodyguards. ‘See what we have done here,’ it murmured. The creature exhaled slowly, the sound a mimic of a dying man’s last, difficult breath. ‘See how we brought a storm to a weatherless world. Underbellies of dark-hulled warships form the clouds. The rain is the burning hail of a hundred drop-pods.’
‘It begins,’ the creature said.
XXI
DEFIANCE
They came to another four-way junction.
‘I hate this place,’ grumbled Mercutian.
‘You hate everything,’ Cyrion replied. He thudded a fist against the side of his head, trying to restart his failing retinal display. ‘My hololith is still stuttering.’
Talos levelled his Blood Angel blade towards the eastern corridor. ‘This way.’
The walls were shaking now. Huron had surely succeeded, stripping Vilamus of the power it needed to activate its last outer defences. The tremors in the air could only be the first wave of drop-ships coming down, and drop-pods hammering through brittle stonework.
‘Huron will be heading for the gene-vaults,’ Mercutian voxed. ‘That won’t be a fast fight, but we’re still not exactly blessed with an abundance of time.’
Talos vaulted a wall of bodies, no doubt left by an eager Corsair Terminator team on their march to the primary generatorum.
‘He’ll have to smash through a hundred Marines Errant,’ the prophet said. ‘They know why that scarred bastard is here now, and they’ll be massing to stop him.’
First Claw was doing what they did best whenever a fair fight threatened to engulf them: they were running in the opposite direction. Talos led the pack in their headlong sprint.
‘He’ll divide his forces to split the remaining defenders. If the Marines Errant are in this subdistrict, the Red Corsairs will be bleeding for every step they take. Some enemies need to be divided before they can be conquered.’
Xarl laughed. ‘When did you start paying attention to battle briefings?’
‘When there was a chance I’d be caught up in something as foolish as this.’
A squad of serfs spilled into the hall from a side chamber ahead. Their tabards displayed the falling star of the Marines Errant, and by Talos’s reckoning, you didn’t need to be a prophet to see that was a bad omen.
Las-fire slashed past them, into them, leaving ugly charcoal marks on their armour. First Claw didn’t even slow down – they blew through the troops like a winter wind, leaving tumbling bodies and severed limbs in their wake.
The Angel blade hissed and spat, its power field incinerating the smears of blood along its length. Each died in a flicker of smoky flame, evaporating to leave the weapon cleansed only seconds after it last took life.
Uzas stumbled, slowed, and broke ranks.
Talos cursed, looking over his shoulder. ‘Leave the skulls,’ he voxed.
‘Skulls. Skulls for the Skull Throne. Blood for the–’
‘Leave the damn skulls.’
Uzas complied, dragging himself away from the bodies and sprinting to catch up with his brothers. Perhaps the sense of urgency broke through his maddened perceptions, because Talos doubted his brother had obeyed out of a sudden ability to actually obey orders.
Septimus couldn’t help it. He could never help it when he sat in this seat, always finding himself grinning like he had as a child – the boy who wanted to be a pilot.
Maruc checked his buckles in the co-pilot’s throne. He was having a great deal less fun.
‘You can fly this, right?’
Septimus spoke a smooth flow of Nostraman through his boyish smile.
‘Is that a yes or a no?’ Maruc buckled the last strap.
Septimus didn’t answer. He reached a hand to his earpiece. ‘Blackened, primed for l
aunch. Requesting clearance.’
The short-range vox snapped back a crackling reply.
Meanwhile, the gunship started to shake in sympathy with its own howling engines. Outside the reinforced window, the hangar was immersed in a concert of commotion, half-blanketed in rippling waves of heat exhaust. Maruc saw servitors staggering clear of the launch deck, loading trucks with empty claws retreating from the grounded flyers, and several Thunderhawks shivering with the whining build-up of their rear boosters. Each of the gunships seemed aggressively avian, unnecessarily so, with their sloping wings and leering noses. Each of them had a beast’s wings painted on their hull armour, following the lines of their mechanical pinions. Septimus’s craft, Blackened, had a crow’s skeletal wingspan painted along the sloping metal, reaching to the wingtip gun turrets.
In all his life, despite working around finger-chopping, limb-mauling, eardrum-breaking industrial death traps, he’d never seen an angrier looking machine than a Thunderhawk gunship.
‘I’m not in love with flying,’ he admitted.
Septimus had one gloved hand on the flight stick, and the other on one of the many levers spread across the console.
‘A strange thing for you to only mention now.’
The first gunship rose on a crest of polluted heat-shimmer. To Maruc’s eyes, it was a graceless thing, a metal beast that wobbled in the air, its engines howling too loud.
Then came the sonic boom. A flare of white fire left him blinking; a bang that resonated like thunder in a cavern had him flinching; and the gunship tore forwards into the visible slit of space at the hangar’s far end.
Not graceless at all, he thought. Throne, these things could move when they wanted.
‘Blackened,’ crackled the vox. ‘Good hunting.’
Septimus grinned again.
The bulkhead opened to reveal three robed serfs. The clenched claw icon of the Red Corsairs stood out in expensive gold-thread weave upon their chests. Their hoods were up, but their heads were lowered, bobbing in obsequious respect.
‘Greetings, Flayer,’ the first said. ‘Welcome to the Venomous Birthright.’
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