by Dan Abnett
The blood and eyes would have been meaningless even had they been spared from careful, bladed desecration. In private, he would draw the gladius strapped to his shin plating and scalp this poor fool.
All Nautakah Arnogaur needed was the brain.
V
Mere hours later, Xavec burned. Smoke from the manufactorum-city’s corpse plumed high into the sky, turning day to night for kilometres around the city limits. Every breath of air tasted of molten metal and scorched dust. Grit lined every tongue and tooth of those who fought within its boundaries, while skin and steel darkened in the greasy, clinging smog from the burning promethium processors.
When night fell, indistinguishable from the choked day, Urdeshi armoured companies still duelled with Blood Pact tank battalions in the city’s rubble-strewn streets. The rattle of small arms fire cracked against impervious hulls. Grenades clanged and burst uselessly against sloping armour plating. Packs of desperate, scavenging Blood Pact troopers swarmed over Urdeshi vehicles and dragged their crews out to be gutted in the open. In payment, tech-priests from the falling forge spires commanded ranks of lobotomised minions at avenue junctions, incinerating the Gaur’s armoured lines with cannonades of the ancient and profane Martian weaponry.
Nautakah paid very little heed to any of this. To the Arnogaur, the fall of a critical Mechanicus foundry-city and one of the costliest battles on the surface of Urdesh was a distant secondary concern. He moved through the ruins alone, axe in one hand and bolter in the other, hunting for the Strygora.
Bio-details played out across his left eye lens while crude auspex readings scrolled across his right. Both displays were layered with aimless target reticules struggling to find purchase in the endless dust. An aerial map of Xavec formed a square of useless static at the very edge of his vision, its feed cut off by the storm of dust rising from the streets like the city’s own ghost.
Silhouettes charged him – brave silhouettes indeed – with bayonets turning their empty lasrifles into crude spears. They ran and stabbed and shouted about how the Emperor would protect them. Nautakah proved the error of that claim. His axe fell seven times, and seven Imperial Guardsmen added their lifeblood’s flow to the rivers of red that ran beneath the foundations of the Skull Throne.
The last of them was the bravest of all: this Throne-loyal soul crawled along the paving stones despite his body having been cleaved in two at the waist. With a prayer on his dusty lips, he reached for his fallen pistol.
Such heroic nonsense, Nautakah thought, grinding the soldier’s skull into wet shards beneath his boot.
Where the streets were clogged by hammering, bucking tanks raining shells upon each other, the Arnogaur weaved between their revving bodies and clambered over their hulls, distractedly slaughtering the Imperial commanders who had raised their heads to get a better view of the battle. He exhausted his supply of grenades by dropping them into open hatches or fusing them to Imperial hulls as he passed by.
Always moving, always moving, listening to the scramble of vox chatter as he hunted.
Blood Pact channels were bare of the fevered ranting Imperial propaganda promised to its own cowardly herds; the voices passing back and forth over the Pact’s secure channels were almost mechanical in their cold efficiency. Orders were delivered and acknowledged. Positions were relayed and clarified. Casualty figures came in infrequent spurts, always followed by mournful prayers and chanted hymns. Nautakah listened to several feeds at once, using the chorus of voices to triangulate his location in relation to the rest of the Archon’s forces and piece together a picture of the wider battle.
The picture he pieced together was a curious one, for it told of a city damned to the grave rather than conquered for territory and materiel. Entire infantry and armour divisions were being spent in storm-swift advances through the most heavily defended districts rather than being deployed in typical, disciplined grinds. The spaceport’s landing platforms were being annihilated, their foundations and support columns blown out from under them. No containment teams were moving to secure and soothe the burning fuel refineries. The opposite seemed to be true: the bodies of the fallen on both sides were being dragged back to feed the flames. The habitation-barracks and spire armouries weren’t being besieged and claimed, they were being razed to the ground with no thought of all the Mechanicus secrets and valuable slave flesh being lost.
So be it. If the Archon wished Xavec to burn, then it would burn. Urdesh was a forge world. It had a hundred such cities. Nautakah’s place as an Arnogaur burdened him with more divine concerns.
VI
‘Hal-ur-Rakash,’ the three priests chanted at his approach. ‘Hal-ur-Rakash.’
Hal-ur-Rakash. It translated poorly into Gothic and Nagrakali alike, but the sentiment was clear enough even in the language of the blood-mad when coupled with the reverence in their eyes. Walker in Misery they called him, in preaching voices cracked hoarse by the dust.
The three priests, clad in sewn-together scraps of pale human leather and butchers’ aprons, presided over a soothsaying of their own devising. Dozens of Blood Pact menials and thralls – mutilated human slaves wretched past the point of Nautakah’s consideration – tumbled the stripped bodies of Guardsmen off the edges of a gantry bridge reaching over a steaming valley of dark metal and belching smoke. The bridge was impressive in scale, a thing of black iron running for three kilometres over the city’s central heat exchange chasm. Piles of Guardsmen would go over, dropping into the rising greasy steam, down and down and down into the coolant turbines and flame vents of the subterranean factories below.
The Blood Pact’s gore mages watched the flares in the roaring fires, reading the future in the flames.
Nautakah was struck by the image and its echoes to older, no less sacred shamanism, when clans of the Sanguinary Worlds would feed the bodies of their slain warriors to the daemons that supposedly lived in the dark places of their primitive worlds. He’d witnessed such rites many times, though always as an outsider. His home world was far, far from the Sanguinary cluster. Far, in truth, from the Sabbat Worlds themselves.
‘Hal-ur-Rakash,’ the kneeling, praying priests greeted him as he drew near. ‘Hal-ur-Rakash. Remain, we beg. Your presence invites the flames to burn all the brighter.’
He turned his helmed face down upon them, these stick-thin holy men praying to the spirits of blood and fire. The twin crests that marked his helmet were daemonic horns in the occluding cloud of grit that had swallowed the whole city.
‘I bear a divine mandate,’ he replied. His voice was as low and rough as tank treads slurring over broken rocks.
That set one of the priests into a wheeze of ugly laughter, pressing his grimy hands to his scar-branded face.
‘Vanity and lies and self-exaltation! The God of War cares not from whence the blood flows!’
‘That may be so,’ Nautakah allowed, ‘but the Archon cares a great deal.’
With those words he crossed the bridge, leaving the deaconry of the naked dead to their fire games.
VII
The Strygora thundered along the broken road, grinding the shattered rockcrete surface flat beneath its treads. There was something bestial in its advance, something implacable and alive about the way it bulled through the manned barricades lying in its path. Incidental shots from lasguns sang their useless, scorching song against its armour plating, ignored by the battle tank and those guiding its wrath.
Once she had been the Punisher-class Leman Russ battle tank Daughter of Sabbat, and before that she’d carried the forty-eight-digit serial code denoting her home forge and date of creation. Her weapons of old had degraded over time, with the Gatling cannon being pulled from the turret housing and replaced by brutal, booming autocannons once the crew could no longer scavenge enough ammunition to make her original loadout worthwhile. The three lascannons had suffered the same fate, eventually discharged by corrupt power generators
that failed all attempts at retrofitting by Blood Pact mechnicians. She’d lost range but none of her lethality, with each of the three lascannons replaced by heavy flamers bound to great, stinking copper tanks sloshing promethium.
A single unlucky shot through her hull could ignite the whole crew in liquid flame, so they’d bolstered her already dense armour with layered plating stripped from half a dozen other Blood Pact vehicles over the last few years.
Her crew was cradled in the stifling womb-heat of her god-blessed hull. Sweat ran down their tattooed faces in diamond trails, looking more like tears as they trickled along the iron of their hook-nosed, snarling grotesques.
In the cramped confines of the tank’s turret, Kereth and Maugr worked in unison – the former loading heavy shells with his Pact-marked hands, the latter with his face pressed to the gunnery sight for so long his back had adopted a permanent bend. Maugr licked the insides of his grotesque as he stared into the distorted blue tracking display, closing both of his hands around the jury-rigged handles on the gunner’s periscope when he deemed the time was right.
‘Brace,’ he called down into the crew compartment. Next to him, Kereth slammed his gloved hands to the turret’s sides, holding tight. Strygora’s stabilisers were shot to absolute shit. Been that way for over a month now, since the fight at Forge Theria. Bloody mechnicians.
Strygora kicked all around them, bucking back and lifting half a metre off her front treads as both ill-fitted autocannons boomed.
‘Reload,’ Maugr called. ‘Jashan, bring us down to half-speed once we clear the next junction. They’re falling back in a feint.’
Kereth moved at once: hauling, lifting, sliding the next shells home. Below them both, Jashan steered Strygora with his control columns, blinking sweat from his greasy, thinning hair out of his eyes. Manoeuvring in the dust was as much luck as judgement – the Blood Pact tanks advancing through the district slammed into one another with skull-rattling frequency in the narrower streets.
Somewhere above them, a horn shook the sky with its bland industrial whine. They felt it shivering through the hull plating and it brought a chill to their sticky flesh.
Titan.
Maugr dragged his grotesque off and strapped a rebreather over a mouth full of diseased teeth. Within three seconds of the horn’s cry he was up and out of the hatch, straining to see through the dust.
Around him were the squat, stepped pyramids of Xavec’s foundries, the hollow hulls of slain tanks, and…
…there.
The god-machine came out of the dust in an ungainly stride, straight-backed and ignoring the souls beneath its iron tread. The ground shook with its steps, but the loudest sign of its passing was the steel-stressed whine of protest, its huge metal joints crying out across the district. What little illumination managed to pierce the dust cloud finally died as the Titan eclipsed the anaemic moonlight.
Maugr ducked back inside and slammed the hatch closed.
‘One of ours,’ he called down. He didn’t know if that was true – their scanners were dead and the dust was too thick to make out any details, but the fact the Warlord hadn’t hammered them into oblivion with its immense cannons lent credence to the possibility.
The entire tank rattled as the Titan stepped over them, its foot driving into the rockcrete avenue with a crash of shattering stone. Each footstep made another crater for the Blood Pact’s armour to drive over or around.
Orders came, crackled and delayed by flawed vox, for the column to hold position while the Titan passed. Maugr relayed it, shouting below.
All of Strygora’s boys had taken the Pact together last year, slicing open the knuckles of their right hands on Archon Gaur’s ancient armour. All of them had come from the Guard, defecting with the other survivors of the Barakan 12th Armoured. On that day, Daughter of Sabbat became Strygora, and her hull was streaked red with bloody palm prints, marking her as one of the Gaur’s loyal children.
Only Erec hadn’t been Guard. No, Erec – their new sirdar appointed to keep them in line – had liked to remind them that he was ‘pure’ Blood Pact, born to the tribes behind it all, spending his childhood skinning animals and worshipping blood, fire, the sun… and the War God alone knew what else. Erec, who’d never hesitated to break bones or lash bare throats with his leather flail when his ‘mongrel crew’ didn’t follow orders fast enough. Erec, their noble sirdar, who’d crippled Ferlmann with a construction hammer and had him surgically attached to his flamer cradle down there in the crew compartment. The rest of them helped Ferlmann as best they could, but the poor legless bastard was starting to rot in his harness, his flesh lousy with sickness rashes and bedsores, getting infected worse and worse over time. His hands were practically fused to the handles of his flamer.
Poor dead Erec, floating face down in the muck where he belonged.
‘It’s gone,’ Maugr called out as he stared down the static-ruined gunsight. ‘The others are moving–’
His declaration was interrupted by a resonant clang of metal on metal, coming from the roof and sending shivers through the hull. For one cold-blooded moment, Maugr thought a smaller Titan – a Warhound, maybe – had given them a little love-tap as it passed by.
That’s when a polite knocking sounded from the hatch above.
Maugr drew his pistol and checked his grotesque was back in place. His gloved hand had just brushed the release handle when the hatch cover tore free of its corroding hinges, letting the dust and darkness spill into the tank’s interior.
A figure in immense ceramite armour marked with the brazen holy sigils of the God of War stared down with slanted emerald eye lenses, and reached in to curl its armoured fingers around Maugr’s throat.
Kicking and thrashing, unable to breathe, the crewman looked into the barbarous, toothed faceplate of Nautakah Arnogaur’s crested helm.
‘Blood Pact,’ the fallen Space Marine snarled in calm, vicious politeness, ‘do not kill Blood Pact.’
VIII
The pain engine buried in the back of his brain thrummed now that he had his prey in his clutches. He could feel the nails biting deep, sending their tendrils of poison electricity into the meat of his mind. Revolting pleasure flooded him, pulling at the strings of his nervous system with practiced fingers.
The man in his grip fought and kicked, childlike in his helplessness. Nautakah had no time for such futility.
‘You heard me,’ he said, as politely urbane as before. By now he was well skilled at keeping the thrills of neurochemical rapture from affecting his speech. ‘Now answer the accusation.’
Generously, he loosened his grip on the human’s throat in order to facilitate this battlefield trial.
‘I am Blood Pact!’ the soldier gasped. ‘For the Archon! For Gaur!’
How disappointing, thought Nautakah. Hours of hunting, ending with such uninspired and patently false promises.
‘Words,’ Nautakah replied. ‘Words from behind a mask you do not deserve to wear.’ He ripped the grotesque from Maugr’s face, hearing the leathery snap-rip of tearing flesh with it. The strap hadn’t broken on one side, and it had torn one of the human’s ears from the side of his head.
Well. No matter. Nautakah hurled the screaming man from the top of the tank, sending him to the broken earth of the rockcrete avenue in a bone-cracking, lifeless tumble.
The Arnogaur aimed his pistol into the tank’s hatch, at the stinking dregs of humanity cowering in its sweaty confines. The salt-smell of soiled clothing and unwashed flesh rose almost thick enough to be a fog.
‘Reverse,’ Nautakah ordered. ‘Drive over your brother’s body.’
‘My lo–’
The bolt pistol kicked, driving a shell home into the driver’s spine and blowing the man apart with a boom loud enough to shatter the survivors’ eardrums. Viscera and human meat painted every inch of the tank’s insides, dripping in a trickling rain f
rom the roof. What remained of the driver, which was precious little of anything above the waist, slid from the control throne with the slumping thump of wet flesh.
For Nautakah, it was like looking down into the guts of some great beast.
‘Drive over your brother’s body,’ he ordered the others once more. He doubted they could hear his words – their ears were already beginning to bleed after the bolt shell detonated in such close confines – but he suspected his meaning was clear.
One loader clambered down the ladder, sinking with a cringe into the gore-wet driver’s throne. The tank gave several unhealthy chokes as its gears dragged on a stalled clutch.
‘You are boring me,’ Nautakah warned them. The tank moved, reversing in a stuttering shunt, rolling over Maugr’s corpse and turning it to red paste along the left track.
The four surviving soldiers – one of them was crippled and surgically bound to his gun-station, Nautakah noted with vague disinterest – looked up with wide, defiant eyes. They weren’t without courage, and they were to be commended for that, and none were foolish enough to draw their side arms.
‘Choose one of you,’ he ordered them, holstering his bolt pistol and revving his chainaxe.
Perhaps the loader was the only one capable of hearing the order, or perhaps he was the only one with the backbone to sacrifice himself for the good of his brethren. Whatever the truth, it was he who climbed the crew ladder to his execution.
Nautakah offered him a hand to help him up. He was considerate like that.
‘I will take your skull back to Overlord Gaur. The others may go with the Blood God’s graces to whatever afterlife awaits them in Khorne’s realm. In a moment, I will leave their bodies burning in the stinking tank beneath our boots. It will make for an apt funeral pyre. But for your courage, you will be the memoriam of your traitorous crew.’
The World Eater delivered his judgement with a politeness that knew no limit, then added, ‘This is an honour, albeit not a grand one or one you will have a chance to enjoy. But it is an honour nevertheless. Try to remember that when the axe falls.’
