‘Two,’ Imano said, grinning as he wiped the sand from his shoulders.
They were both stripped to the waist, their massive torsos criss-crossed with scars, their chests heaving with exertion.
Ragris cursed as he pushed himself up, dusted the sand off his hands, and went immediately back to the opening stance.
‘Again!’ he said.
Imano laughed. He was the master of this kind of battle. ‘You do not need to prove anything,’ he said.
‘Again!’ Ragris spat.
Imano strode into the ring, feigning indifference. Ragris came at him like a python. It was over in a matter of seconds, Ragris lying flat on his back again.
He cursed and punched the floor.
‘How did you do that?’ he said.
Imano laughed. He did not give away his secrets.
‘I will not stop until I have beaten you,’ Ragris said, as he dusted his shoulders off once more.
‘It could be a long time,’ Imano said.
‘I can do it.’
Below them, in rooms just above the gateway, Olbath of the Aurora Chapter stood in his fighting pit and wiped the sweat from his eyes. He was not satisfied. Again, he told himself, as he went through his Chapter’s attack drill, pacing to the end of the long chamber and taking up his stance.
He slowed his breathing down and concentrated on the energy within himself. Control the power within you, his Chapter taught. Learn the strength of the quiet. The resolve of the silent. The patience of the leopard. There were a hundred and eight steps to the drill. The upper cut, the pommel drive, the explosive break, the feigned sting, the mantis strike.
Olbath ran through the drill three more times before he was satisfied, then turned to see Cadvan leaning against the wall.
The Storm Giant’s presence irritated Olbath. The irritation gave him an edge as he worked through the last moves, harder and faster now, and at the end he slammed his pistol back into its holster and rested the chainsword on his shoulder pad.
‘I wish you would not do that,’ Olbath said.
Cadvan did not care. ‘Nervous?’
Olbath made a non-committal sound.
Cadvan smiled. ‘This is your first battle with the Deathwatch?’
Olbath was used to Cadvan’s taunts.
‘It is,’ Olbath said, and stuck out his chin defiantly. ‘So?’
Cadvan was the largest Space Marine Olbath had ever seen. The red-haired warrior looked down on him and smiled. ‘There was another warrior from the Aurora Chapter once. His name was Kalgah. He fell against the Great Devourer.’
Olbath was not sure what kind of response was called for here. ‘I did not know him.’
‘No,’ Cadvan said. ‘You would not. But he saved me, and Storm Giants do not forget such things. Understand?’
‘No,’ Olbath said.
Cadvan laughed and turned to go. At the doorway he turned and spoke seriously, for once. ‘Let me know if you ever… need a brother at your side.’
Then he was gone, and Olbath was not quite sure what had happened.
Atilio the Ultramarine strode the empty corridors with an almost obsessive manner. He had been stationed here for nine years and this was the third watch fortress he had been attached to, and the loneliest. But he found peace in movement.
He could not wait to return to his Chapter, to Ultramar, to see once more the shrine of Roboute Guilliman. To thank him for deliverance. But he quelled this yearning. It did not help a warrior fight.
On the seventh toll of the bell, he passed Harath the Salamander on his way back from the forge.
‘Greetings, brother,’ the Salamander said. ‘I was looking for you.’ He held something out in his dark hand.
Atilio took it and saw immediately what it was: a bolt round with the name ‘Branstonio’ upon it.
‘He was of your Chapter. You should take revenge for him.’
Atilio’s fingers closed about it. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
It was an exercise in persistence, ‘Last’ Leonas thought, tattooing a Space Marine. No sooner was the skin cut than it healed into thick scar tissue. You had to cut deep, he’d found, and rub caustic black powder into the wound.
Leonas sat cross-legged on the floor of his chambers and tested the point of the knife against his thumb. His enhanced musculature made his skin taut as a drum skin. He began to chant the Song of Tollon, the Master of Sanctity, who bore Lorgar’s Bane in battle, and pressed the knife into his flesh.
It was both painful and slow, but it helped focus the mind as he worked his flesh.
All the other rooms on this side of Westkeep were locked and empty, so when he heard footsteps from the far end of his corridor, he knew they were coming to his chambers. He also knew they belonged to Konrad, the Black Templar. His footsteps had a distinctive heel-clip note as he walked.
Konrad cast a slight shadow as he stood in the doorway.
‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.
Leonas blew on his skin as the scab formed. He did not bother to look up, but said, ‘Tattooing my arm.’
‘I heard the Black Consuls kept strictly to the Codex?’
‘They do,’ Leonas said.
‘There is room for such tribal markings?’
‘There is now,’ Leonas said, lifting a round flap of skin away, so he could mark it before it healed. The caustic salts stung, but not all pain was evil, he’d found. He pressed it down for a few seconds to let the Larraman cells seal the wound, then he inspected his handiwork.
Konrad came into the room. ‘What name?’
‘The name of an impetuous fool named Razlon.’
‘If you did not like this warrior, then why tattoo yourself with his name?’
‘Because I swore I would do so,’ Leonas said. He had almost finished the outer rim of the disc upon his arm. He pressed the flap down for a few seconds, and looked up. ‘Why are you here, Black Templar?’
‘You are part of Kill Team Faith now. I like to know the warriors that serve with me.’
Leonas nodded. That made sense. He carefully ground the point of his knife back to a razor’s edge.
‘The edge is lost so quickly,’ he said. ‘You have to keep honing it, don’t you find?’
‘Are we talking blades or warriors?’
Leonas laughed. ‘Both.’
‘So tell me. I know nothing about the Black Consuls.’
‘You say it as if it is our fault. You are from the Black Templars?’
Konrad nodded. ‘I am.’ He turned to show his shoulder pad with its distinctive cross and sword icons.
‘Second Founding, from the gene-seed of the Imperial Fists?’
‘Yes,’ Konrad snapped.
Leonas looked up from his tattoo. ‘See, I know all about your Chapter. But you know nothing of mine. We too were Second Founding. Our warriors were brought from the seventy-second Chapter of the Ultramarines. As a home we were given the star fort Noctis Obscurum, which once guarded the skies above Macragge. Our commander was Arrias Cordos, who was known as the Bane of Lorgar. He earnt his name in the Cleansing of the Orbstar. He pursued our foes through the Orbstar System, leading his Chapter from the Noctis Obscurum.
‘We were a crusading Chapter like your own. One of twenty Chapters named the Astartes Praeses. I can see that at least you have heard of them. We each made a solemn vow to guard the Eye of Terror, to take the fight to the greatest enemy of mankind. Our foe was not the xenos, but our former brothers, who had turned to evil.
‘Our home, the Noctis Obscurum, was almost impregnable. Or so we thought. But one year our Chapter was lured out to fight, and our star fort was infiltrated by the dark eldar. They found a way aboard as we made a jump through the warp. None of us knew they were there. While the Chapter was fighting, they overpowered the skeleton crew and overloaded the w
arp drives.’
He blew on the cut.
‘Our Chapter came home, victorious, to find their home, their armoury, their history was gone.’ He blew once more. ‘All this happened before my birth. When I was young there were still a few members of the Chapter who remembered the Noctis Obscurum. It was our experience with the dark eldar that brought us closer to the Deathwatch. We sent some of our greatest warriors to the Deathwatch, and they brought all their expertise against the xenos.’
‘But it was not the dark eldar who wiped you out?’
‘Oh no. They did not. That happened later. We had many enemies, some older than the dark eldar. We found our foe, the Infidus Imperator, once the flagship of the Word Bearers, in orbit around the planet of Yearsli. We brought them to bay at last at Goddeth Hive. As we broke down the final defences, the traitors ignited the reactors within the hive. In the explosion, half the planet was broken away and our entire Chapter was lost, including the axe of our founder, Lorgar’s Bane.’
Leonas looked up. He had almost finished the image above Razlon’s name. It was a tau sept mark. ‘You are wondering how I survived. I was not there. I was on pilgrimage to Macragge. To the shrine of Roboute Guilliman,’ he said. ‘I remember standing by his tomb, looking at the face, and I thought of all the stories I had heard. All the dreams that our gene-father had for our race. The light, the beauty, and the vision he had. And I console myself with that. When I die and my Chapter’s story is finally done, then we will have left the galaxy a less dark place than it might have been. And that light still shines. That hope. It is all we have left. The battle for the good of mankind.’
‘The Greater Good?’ Konrad said. He chuckled at his own joke. ‘You sound like the foe.’
Leonas remembered his time with the xenos. How they had tried to break him.
‘Yes,’ Leonas said. ‘The Greater Good.’
For a long time Konrad did not speak.
‘I have seen that there is a black mark against your name,’ the Black Templar said.
Leonas smiled as he rubbed black into his wound. ‘Ah. So that is why you are here.’
‘If you join my kill team I have to know what transgression you committed.’
Leonas blew on the scab as it sealed the wound. ‘I wanted vengeance.’
‘Do not speak in riddles.’
‘Three years ago I was on a mission in the Cellebos Warzone when I heard that a high-ranking demagogue of the Word Bearers was fighting there. I took my kill team without orders to hunt him down.’
‘And did you find him?’
Leonas looked up and caught the Black Templar’s eye. ‘Yes. He had horns where his mouth had been. He was a dreadful, twisted thing, more terrible to behold than any xenos I have seen, because once he was like us. We could barely make out what he was saying. He no longer knew what was true and what was false. Whatever he had been, he was now debased. He was a mad, mewling thing by the time I put a bolt round through his skull.’
Leonas ground the edge of his knife once more. ‘So, as a punishment I was sent here, to the Eastern Fringes, on the far edge of the universe, far from all that I knew. And now, I fight xenos.’
He inspected his new tattoo, and then held it out for the Black Templar to admire.
‘Very detailed,’ the Black Templar said, in a tone that was forbearing of such deviant behaviour. ‘But it is a xenos marking.’
‘It is,’ Leonas said. ‘It is the mark of the Sept Ke’lshan. I put it there so I will remember.’ Leonas tapped the side of his head. ‘I have so much to remember. So many debts I have to repay. I am the last, remember.’ Leonas turned to show his back. It was covered in script. Names, Konrad realised as he curled his lip in disgust. Leonas’ back was covered with names.
‘The names of the nine hundred and eighty-four of our Chapter who died at Goddeth Hive,’ Leonas told him. He turned back to Konrad. ‘On Cyclopeia the gangers had a tradition of writing the names of their dead gangers on their bodies. We brought this tradition back when our brothers were lost.’ He turned his shoulder towards the Black Templar.
Konrad gave a snort. ‘Who will bear your name on their skin?’
Leonas laughed. ‘Me,’ he said, and tore open his top to show his own name in curling Gothic script emblazoned across his chest.
The Black Templar frowned. ‘But does that mean…?’
‘Yes,’ Leonas said. ‘I’ve already died.’
Konrad laughed at that. He put a hand out. ‘You are welcome among us, Brother Leonas. I hope the dead fight well.’
Part Two
The Hunt
Chapter Thirteen
It took nearly a week for the Valete to drift towards the target, power systems barely functioning. Now, at last Kill Team Zeal’s Corvus Blackstars were within range of Proth.
Moaz Khileni was going in first. A bandolier of jammers slung about his chest, he crouched in shadows as the Corvus lifted off from the landing bay, the fuselage rattling as it passed through the airlock and out into the vacuum of space.
Only when he felt the craft rattle as it slipped into the high atmosphere did he stand. His mission was to disable the listening stations that covered the planet. He had to move carefully to avoid banging his jump pack on the roof of the craft.
‘Approaching the southern pole,’ the Dark Angel, Cadmus, said.
There was a hiss of wind as the rear landing ramp lowered. Moaz stepped forwards to the edge of the opening and looked down. They were flying above the equatorial range, where the landscape was brown and dusty. It soon gave way to tundra and the brilliant ice fields of the polar regions. From this high the sky was distinctly curved, a blue nimbus ringing the horizon.
Moaz had seen many battlefields and planets in his eighty-four years. Most of them had started off like this: the view of an unknown world seen from the open doorway of a Stormraven or Thunderhawk. Entering from high orbit with nothing but a jump pack was what the Raven Guard excelled at. It was what they were made for. To strike from the sky, when most enemies looked towards the land for their foes.
Moaz stepped to the edge and felt the ramp shudder beneath his power-armoured footsteps. The emptiness seemed to suck at him, to beg him to step forwards and embrace it. They were passing into night now, the land below turning dark until all that was left was the blue nimbus and the shadowed mass of the planet.
‘We’re approaching drop zone,’ Cadmus voxed.
There was no answer. Moaz had already embraced the void and was falling head first into the night.
Moaz accelerated to thousands of yards per second. At a height of two miles he began to reach atmosphere and the temperature readings in his suit climbed. Friction began to heat his power armour. The black paint started to burn. Black on black, it did not matter. That is why we wear the black, one of his Scout masters had told him when he was learning the ways of the Raven Guard.
As he fell he stabilised his fall until his arms and legs were flung back, like the barbs of a black arrow. In the earth, he could make out the dry beds of ancient river systems. The meandering channels ended in the vast white salt pans. His enhanced vision searched for a suitable canyon and found one within moments. Three hundred feet deep, funnelling out into a dry river bed.
From a height of one mile, the gap towards which he was falling was nothing but a black line. It grew slowly at first. He was falling at a hundred yards a second. Seventeen seconds until impact.
He altered his body shape as effortlessly as a raven would adjust a tail feather and he started to veer towards the gap. He changed direction again, lining up with the narrow mouth of the canyon, always adjusting, altering, aligning.
He counted down the seconds to impact. Five, four, three. The canyon was only four yards wide. Moaz wobbled as it rushed towards him, filling his vision.
Moaz overloaded his retros, blasting back against his momentum. He hit a
projecting rock and pulverised it, then bounced twice more before landing so hard his chin hit his knees. His vision went dark for a moment as the blood drained from his cranium, his muscles tensing in response, both hearts slowing momentarily as amber readings flashed inside his helmet and he forced blood up and around his body.
An unaugmented human would have died from organ failure at the shock of that deceleration. Moaz Khileni shook himself and rose slowly. He checked his readings, got his bearings within seconds and started towards his first target.
It was only twenty miles distant. He slipped out of the canyon mouth. He was a shadow.
Moaz found the first listening station three Terran hours after landing. The tower rose twenty feet into the air, with four splayed feet and a cupola sensor scanning the skies above the planet. He twisted the first of the jammers from his bandolier, engaged the power, set the timer and then slipped it into the housing.
By the second morning he had attached a jammer to another fifteen sensor towers. By the fourth day he had travelled nearly a thousand miles. By the time he reached the north pole he would have covered a corridor a mile wide across the whole planet. The tau thought that they had shrouded their world with sensors, but when the timer clicked in, the jammers would create an area over which the tau would be entirely blind.
And along that strip would come their doom.
Chapter Fourteen
LOCATION: TAU WORLD SH’ANSHI
At the same time as Moaz landed at the southern pole, a tau craft touched down at the base named M’Yan’Ral.
The silhouette of a fire warrior wearing a well-worn black leather greatcoat like a cloak from his shoulders appeared in the doorway, and all across the flats of the hastily erected starport facility there was a hush from the assembled fighters and earth caste engineers.
Shas’vre Ch’an drew in a short breath through his thin, leathery lips as he leant on his staff. Sh’anshi was a bleak place, he thought, as he took in the four low mountains that surrounded Base M’Yan’Ral, then the ice-flats, the kroot camp, the planetary defence turrets and the low domes of the tau training station, with its triple rings of mobile defence.
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