Lysander watched the bout begin, Kaderic charging into Givenar, lunging a shoulder into Givenar’s midriff and bundling him to the ground.
‘These are not your men, Lysander,’ said Lycaon.
Lysander did not reply. Though he had known it was true, he had not heard it said out loud.
‘Captain Venharts was not greatly loved,’ continued Lycaon, ‘for he was crude and forthright of word. But the First respected him, and they knew him for he served as their captain for more than thirty years. When he was lost they mourned him keenly. You are not Venharts, for good or for ill, and they do not look to you as they did to him. Does that dismay you, Lysander?’
Lysander had been tested by the Chaplains of the Imperial Fists a thousand years before, as the Chapter reckoned it, through novicehood and at every stage of his rise to a captain’s rank. He knew when he was being tested again, and Lycaon knew he knew. ‘Dismay? No, that is too strong a word. I understand what they feel. They are not my men, but I am not yet their captain, either. The First Company I knew was lost with the Shield of Valour. That will change, for the bonds that hold us together are forged in battle. If there is anything Malodrax will give us, it is battle.’
Givenar was better on the ground than Kaderic was on his feet. The two rolled over, Givenar with a forearm across Kaderic’s throat, trying to choke and submit. But Kaderic was stronger and he forced a knee underneath Givenar’s body. He levered Givenar off him, throwing him to the ground, leaping to his feet and wrapping an arm around Givenar’s neck from behind.
The brothers of Kaderic’s squad cheered. Kaderic bared his teeth at them in a savage smile. Givenar tapped his hand against Kaderic’s shoulder – the choke was in, the blood cut off to the brain, and Givenar had to either submit or let himself fall unconscious. Kaderic let Givenar go and stood, beat his chest, and accepted the offered hands of his squadmates.
‘What happened to the Vorel?’ asked Lysander.
‘You do not know?’ asked Lycaon. ‘It is recorded in the Chapter archives, I am certain.’
‘There was shame enough in speaking to the Chapter of how the First was lost,’ said Lysander. ‘If the Vorel prospered without our intervention, if Imperial subjects suffered at their hands, it would not be conducive to rebuilding my place in the Chapter.’
‘The Vorel predated on the frontier worlds for a century and a half,’ said Lycaon. ‘The declaration of Xenos Horrificus was well deserved. A Crusade was called against them and the Guard and Navy shattered their empire. Some still surface as mercenaries, but they are dying out.’
‘I see,’ said Lysander.
‘The blood of the Vorel’s crimes stains the hands of the Iron Warriors.’
‘I need no more reasons to kill Thul,’ said Lysander. ‘But for that, too, he will pay.’
The second bout’s competitors were lining up. Gethor and Antinas looked as unalike as two Space Marines from the same Chapter could. Gethor had yet to lose the handsomeness that some novices brought with them, and which was inevitably worn away under scars and years. Antinas was as ugly as sin, scorched and scarred all over, his kill-markings covering his back, chest and upper arms in dark-brown High Gothic lettering. His hands were huge and gnarled and he clenched and unclenched them as the two circled, ready to strike.
‘We will march on Kulgarde next,’ said Lycaon. ‘The ground is rough and broken. Kho tells me that to the north is more cover, where we can travel unobserved should news of our arrival have reached the Iron Warriors. Do you concur with this course?’
‘It will slow us down,’ said Lysander, glad the conversation had turned to matters of battle. ‘But we must assume word has reached Kulgarde that Shalhadar is dead and the Imperial Fists killed him. Have you considered my suggestions for breaching the fortress?’
‘I have,’ said Lycaon, ‘and I will decide on them closer to the time. They are unorthodox.’
‘Any plan has to be if it is to succeed,’ said Lysander. ‘We cannot besiege Kulgarde with the force we have. A million Imperial Guard might not reduce its defences. Perhaps with a Titan Legion we could march on the walls directly, but we lack such a luxury.’
‘So I understand,’ said Lycaon. ‘But I would see for myself what we are facing before deciding how Kulgarde will fall.’
Antinas was stronger by far. He grabbed the younger competitor by the thigh and flipped him onto his back, throwing his head back and yelling at the sky. His squadmates echoed him. Gethor scrabbled to his feet and ducked back, crouching. Antinas beat his chest and advanced.
‘We must kill Kraegon Thul,’ said Lysander.
‘I will not return to the Phalanx if he lives,’ replied Lycaon. ‘And a lifetime of shame will accompany any of us who does.’
Antinas darted forwards, too quickly for a man of his size. He knocked Gethor’s guard aside and headbutted Gethor, catching him on the eye socket. Gethor reeled, dropped onto his back, rolled away and staggered upright again just out of Antinas’s range. Antinas pressed on, swinging at Gethor with blows hard enough to knock the younger man out. Gethor kept moving, swaying from side to side, desperation on his face as each swing came closer to leaving him in the dirt.
Antinas lunged, driving the heel of a hand forwards, hard enough to shatter a jawbone. Gethor dropped onto his back, locked his feet around Antinas’s leg and tripped the bigger man up. Antinas landed heavily and Gethor was on him, locking one arm behind his back, forcing a knee into his spine and wrenching his head back.
‘Your neck is broken,’ gasped Gethor.
‘So it is,’ said Antinas, breathing heavily.
Gethor stood unsteadily, backing off as if uncertain how Antinas would react. The onlookers were quiet, for they were not used to seeing Antinas losing either. Gethor had got him in a simple neck lock that, had Gethor’s intentions been lethal, would have let him twist Antinas’s head around and back so the vertebrae of the neck separated. It was a good way to kill someone. Even a Space Marine needed his brain attached to the rest of his body.
Antinas laughed. He jumped to his feet and grabbed Gethor in a bear hug. He hoisted him up off the ground and onto his shoulder, parading him like a conqueror’s trophy.
‘See!’ cried Antinas. ‘That’s how you kick an old dog!’ he pointed at the Land Speeders where the bodies of the fallen were stowed. ‘Despair not, brothers!’ he called to them. ‘You leave your Chapter in good hands!’
The Imperial Fists cheered. They patted Gethor on the back as Antinas carried him around.
The final bout saw Gethor facing Kaderic. It was quick. Kaderic forced Gethor into a test of strength, and Kaderic had more. He wrapped his arms around Gethor’s waist, lifted him up and threw him down. Gethor struggled with skill and determination on the ground but Kaderic had the better of him from the moment the bout had started. When they were done and the winner was certain, with Gethor’s arm locked behind him in such a way that Kaderic could have broken it at will, the two dusted themselves off and shook hands. Kaderic, as champion, dedicated his victory to the fallen and thanked them for looking on, as was the right and proper form.
‘Brothers!’ ordered Lycaon. ‘Our fallen are honoured. Kho, take the point. I will ride with you. March out!’
Once there had been so much life in those broken lands that it had bubbled up from the ground, reaching up towards the skies in a soaring canopy. That jungle had been dead for an aeon but it had been stubborn enough to leave its mark, and while the leaves had withered in a past age the skeletons of the trees remained. The petrified forest stretched across a great swathe adjoining the north of the rocky broken desert. It was dense and pathless, and the sun’s discoloured light struggled to make it through the jumble of stone branches overhead.
Roosts of hardy, leathery creatures clung to the branches in their thousands, scouring the forest for the tough life forms that found a way to survive there. What life there was served only to accentuate the death that had fallen on the jungle in a distant catastrophe, one of the m
any that had punctuated Malodrax’s history.
Kho’s Land Speeders flew at canopy level, weaving between the splintered boughs, relaying their position to the sergeants of the squads marching through the petrified jungle below. They made slow progress by their standards, for underfoot the ground was tangled with stony roots and the terrain rose and fell as if something had heaved it up from beneath. Deep caves yawed in hillsides and choked valleys dropped down to pitch-darkness. Raptors circled overhead, used to treating anything that walked into the jungle as a meal in waiting.
‘I do not like the smell of this place,’ said Lysander as he picked his way through the roots alongside Kaderic.
‘This whole planet is hardly pleasing to the nose,’ replied Kaderic. The bruise on the side of his face, inflicted by Gethor in the wrestling bout, had already turned a purple-black and begun receding.
‘It smells of ash,’ said Lysander. ‘As if it were burned yesterday, not thousands of years ago.’
‘Perhaps it was,’ said Kaderic. ‘They say a world held by daemons may not even obey the rules of time. Would that we had a battlefleet and the Exterminatus to be deployed. All of Malodrax would stink of ash then.’ Kaderic paused and looked at Lysander. ‘Has it changed?’
A thousand years had passed in real space since Lysander had come to Malodrax. He had no way of knowing how much time had passed down there since he had travelled to the Phalanx and returned with the strike force. ‘It looks the same,’ said Lysander. ‘But I cannot be certain. This world likes to deceive, I think.’
Movement caught Lysander’s attention. It was above them, among the branches of the stone trees. It scurried out of his sight a split second before he could focus on it, but he had an impression of claws and lizardlike hide – and worse, of familiarity.
‘What was it?’ said Kaderic.
‘Hold our position,’ said Lysander.
‘Hold!’ ordered Kaderic over the vox. ‘Captain, we may have enemies down here. We are drawing in and investigating.’
Lysander’s bolter was in his hands. He hopped up onto the stump of a shattered tree and peered through the stone trunks in the direction the creature had disappeared.
‘Antinas, Kollus, go with the captain,’ said Kaderic to the two closest Imperial Fists. ‘Lysander, could it be an animal?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Lysander. Antinas and Kollus were alongside him as he moved carefully through the jungle towards a rootbound gulley ahead. Antinas’s flamer was held in front of him, the flame flickering in its nozzle. Kollus trained his bolter across the jungle.
‘Watch overhead,’ said Lysander. ‘It could be above us.’
Kollus saw it next. He spun on the spot and loosed off a short burst, throwing shards from the tree trunks.
‘Did you hit it?’ said Lysander.
‘No,’ said Kollus.
Lysander took off between the trees. He had followed the movement, too, a scaly dash of motion down between the fork of a tree’s branches. He leapt the gulley, hitting the far edge chest-first and scrambling back to his feet.
It was ahead of him. It was almost the height of a man, squatting down on its haunches. Its body was fleshy and sagging, its belly pale and its hide scaly. Its silhouette was lumpy and malformed and its mouth was half insect and half reptile. It bared the nest of mandibles it had in place of teeth and hissed at him.
Lysander had seen something very like it before – this one was more mature, adapted to survive here on its own, but the resemblance was unmistakeable.
The creature darted at him. Lysander lunged right at it, spearing his chainsword forwards. It was used to forcing other predators to back down – perhaps here it was the top of the food chain. Lysander’s chainblade punched right through it, spraying green-black gore as its teeth chewed out through its back. The thing was spitted on the chainblade as neatly as a carcass turned over a fire.
Antinas reached him a moment later. ‘What is it?’ he said.
‘One of the brood,’ replied Lysander. He flicked his chainblade and the creature slid off the blade, a gory ruin bored right through it.
‘More of them,’ voxed Kollus. Lysander turned to see Kollus on the far side of the gulley. Movement was flickering around him as the brood-creatures scampered among the trees or between the roots at ground level. As if brought out by the smell of their fellow creature’s blood, they were suddenly infesting the jungle all around. Kollus snapped a couple of volleys, catching one of the creatures and bursting it in a shower of gore. ‘They’re just animals, captain. Are they of any concern?’
‘They are,’ replied Lysander. ‘It is not them that concern me. It is what might accompany them.’ He switched to the command vox-channel. ‘Chaplain Lycaon, we’re holding position. We have been found.’
Beneath the ground they had followed the Imperial Fists, a great host of them. The honeycomb of tunnels beneath the petrified forest had let them follow their footsteps – literally, for they were adapted in the darkness to sense the footfalls from the ground above, and thirty heavy armoured Space Marines did not move quietly.
They were members of a species that had lurked there for thousands of years, hunting in the darkness and emerging above ground when the pickings below were lean. They had evolved rapidly as Malodrax changed, their slovenly genetics easily slipping into new forms to let them survive extremes of heat, cold or seismic activity. The result was their sagging, bloated forms, the mishmash of lizard, insect and vermin that made up their features, and a crude but effective intellect. They were intelligent scavengers, predators of opportunity, and prey that could demonstrate an extreme of cowardly cunning.
That day several of them, a scouting caste of unusual perceptiveness, had emerged into the wan sunlight to follow more closely the new arrivals in the petrified forest. Their generations passed by rapidly for their lives were short, and so the image of those enormous figures with their golden armour and the sigil of the clenched fist was by then a legend passed down by their forebears.
One day those warriors from another world would return, they had been told, and those warriors would have to die. Because the mother had told them so.
The strike force drew in tight, knocking down trees into makeshift barricades. The Land Speeders were landed in the centre, ready to hover up around canopy level and spray the surrounding forest with heavy bolter and assault cannon fire. The Imperial Fists manned their defences as the darkness drew in, making of their surroundings a fortress according to the principles of siege warfare.
The last two hours they had been followed. Hundreds of the predators had scurried through the trees watching them, corralling them, and the Land Speeders reported far greater concentrations following the strike force as if herding them towards a location where they could be trapped and killed.
It was the Imperial Fists way to take a stand at a time and place of their choosing. If an enemy desired a battle they would have it, but on Imperial Fists terms. And so Chaplain Lycaon had given the order that the Imperial Fists would dig in and face the enemy there, on a low rise that served as the most defensible position for miles around.
‘They are more organised than they appear,’ said Lycaon as he watched Squad Kaderic at the barricades. Kaderic’s men were the front line, with Gorvetz’s Devastator squad in the centre of the camp and Lycaon’s command squad ready to charge in where needed. ‘Malodrax does love its little games. It gives our fellow travellers the faces of animals so we will think them animals, but they are born soldiers. They have by their very nature the instinct of a soldier.’ He pointed to a rush of movement to the south, where a multitude of scurrying bodies glinted in the paltry moonlight. ‘They send their weakest forward, to test our guns. They learn there of our effective range and of the weight of our firepower. A classic tactic when one has numbers to spare.’ Lycaon switched to the vox. ‘Kaderic, let them get to half-range, then shoot them down.’
The creatures were permitted well within bolter range before Kaderic gave the order to f
ire. Standing beside Lycaon, Lysander could see the attackers were far larger than the scouting creatures the strike force had first encountered – they were the size of a man, hunched over as they ran rapidly on all fours through the broken ground and tangles of tree stumps. A volley of fire sliced through the first dozen or so and the others fell over their dead or turned aside in panic, making for all the better targets.
‘Single shots!’ ordered Kaderic. ‘Woe to the man who thinks these things are worth more than a bolter shell each!’
It was a swift and bloody business. The attack was cut down in a few moments, and a handful of surviving creatures limped off into the darkness.
‘I suggest,’ said Lysander, ‘we weather what they throw at us and break out after dawn, when they are drained and exhausted.’
‘You would not fight them here to the end?’
‘No, Chaplain. Every moment we delay gives Kulgarde more time to learn of our path and prepare for our arrival.’
‘Could these things answer to Kulgarde?’ asked Lycaon.
‘I can only say I hope not.’
From the forest to the north loped an alpha, just beyond bolter range. It was upright, taller than a Space Marine, its filthy, sagging body giving way to sinews around its shoulders powering its forelimbs, clad in chitin as if it had been fitted with a suit of armour. It shrieked and howled at the sky, and the forests around it seemed to seethe with movement. The weak light found wet mandibles and glossy scales everywhere in the shadows. The full part of the predators’ power was drawn up around the Space Marines’ encampment.
‘What sport this will be!’ voxed Kaderic from the barricades. ‘I would take my blade to them, Chaplain, if I could!’
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