‘What if one of the Sons of Horus sees these?’ asked Varren.
‘They won’t,’ said Bror. ‘And if they do, so what?’
‘Well, won’t they just erase them?’
Loken had wondered the same thing, but Bror just shrugged. ‘They will or they won’t. No use worrying about it.’
Loken heard a sound, like a palm slapping on pipework. He halted and dropped to one knee with a fist in the air.
‘What is it?’ hissed Nohai.
‘Thought I heard something.’
‘Severian? Anything ahead?’
The vox chirruped with burbling static. There’d been a lot of that the closer they’d moved to the vessel’s prow. Voitek said it was the increased density of machine-spirits, but Loken wasn’t so sure, though he couldn’t have named what he thought it might be.
‘Don’t you think I’d have said so?’ answered Severian.
‘Is that a no?’
‘Yes, it’s a no. Now shut up and let me work.’
They passed into the forward galleries, taking one of the service tunnels that ran the length of the ship. Following Cayne’s plotter towards the prow, Loken realised that this portion of the ship was one he had seen before.
Or, more accurately, it felt like somewhere he’d visited.
He paused to make sure he wasn’t mistaken.
No, this was one of the places, a lonely forgotten pocket within the ship’s layered superstructure. Dark now as it had been then, brackish water drizzled from conduits bolted to the roof. The remains of burned down tapers floated in oily puddles.
‘Something wrong?’ asked Varren.
‘I can’t say,’ replied Loken.
Varren grunted and moved ahead. Loken let Nohai and Tyrfingr pass him. Rubio paused at his side.
‘You’ll tell me if you start hearing things, yes?’
‘Of course,’ said Loken.
They moved on, entering, as Loken had known they would, a stagnant, vaulted space of old echoes and drifting flakes of ash. Iron bars framed the interior and numerous empty oil drums lay scattered throughout, spilling grey mulch over the deck.
The pathfinders circled around Severian and Cayne, who knelt in the centre of the space, conferring softly over a map hastily scrawled in the ash.
‘Where are we?’ asked Nohai. ‘This doesn’t look like anything worth marking. I thought the plan was to seek out places of importance.’
‘This place is important,’ said Loken. ‘More than you know.’
‘It’s just a hold,’ said Rubio, wrinkling his nose. ‘It stinks.’
‘This is where they first met, isn’t it?’ asked Qruze.
Loken nodded.
‘Where who met?’ asked Voitek.
‘The quiet order,’ said Loken.
‘The what?’
‘A warrior lodge,’ said Rubio, circling the chamber. Scaffolding still clung to the walls, ribbing them like steel bones. Discarded dust sheets hung like unpainted banners, as though a host of craftsmen might return at any moment. ‘This is where it began, the corruption.’
‘No,’ said Loken. ‘It began long before this place, but here’s where it took root.’
‘Were you a member?’ asked Severian.
‘No. You?’
Severian shook his head. ‘After my time. What about you, old man?’
Qruze pulled his shoulders back, as though offended by the notion. ‘I most certainly was not. When Erebus brought it to the Legion I didn’t know why we needed such a thing. Said so then, and I say so now.’
Loken moved through the space, thinking back to the time he’d attended a meeting with Torgaddon at his side.
‘I came here once,’ said Loken. ‘Not this space exactly, but one just like it.’
‘I thought you said you weren’t a member,’ said Bror.
‘I wasn’t. Torgaddon brought me here, thinking I might want to become part of the order.’
‘So why didn’t you?’ asked Varren.
‘I went along to see what sort of things the order did,’ said Loken. ‘A warrior of my company had... died. He’d been a member and I wanted to see if the order had anything to do with his death.’
‘Did it?’
‘Not directly, no, but even after I’d seen that it looked like nothing more than a harmless gathering of warriors, I felt there was something off about it. They’d gotten too good at keeping secrets, and I couldn’t bring myself to entirely trust any group that shrouded itself in that much secrecy.’
‘Good instincts,’ said Rubio.
Loken nodded, but before he could answer, Rama Karayan dropped from the scaffolding lining the walls. A Space Marine in full armour was a considerable weight, but he managed to land almost soundlessly.
‘Get into cover,’ said Karayan. ‘Someone approaches.’
They came in groups of three or four, mortal men in masks and heavy, hooded robes. Loken watched them assemble around what he’d at first assumed to be a defunct conduit hub. Roped down tarpaulin covered it, but when the first intruders to the chamber cut the ropes and pulled the covering away, Loken saw how wrong he’d been.
This wasn’t a lodge space, at least, not any more.
He groped for the word.
Temple. Fane.
An altar lay beneath the tarpaulin, a blocky plinth of dusty, baked ochre clay that looked oddly familiar. It took him a moment to recall where he’d seen stone just like it.
‘Davin,’ he whispered. ‘That altar stone, it came from Davin.’
Severian looked up as he spoke, shaking his head and placing a finger to his lips. The devotees continued to arrive, silently and reverently, until the space was filled with over a hundred bodies.
No words were spoken, as though they were about some solemn business. Some knelt before the altar, while others righted the toppled oil drums and relit the fires with rags, sheafs of paper and vials of viscous oils.
The fuel took hold swiftly and the heat of the flames soon warmed the chamber. Shadows swayed on the walls, cut and sliced by the bodies moving in time to some unheard music.
At last a group of eight appeared, marching a partially naked figure towards the altar. His physique was clearly transhuman, bulked out with muscle and sub-dermal bone sheaths. A long chasuble of purple cloth draped his shoulders and hung to just below his waist.
Severian tapped two fingers against his eyes and then pointed them towards the naked figure with his eyebrows raised.
Loken shook his head. No, he didn’t recognise him.
The figure was led to the altar, where he was bound with chains to the deck. The chasuble fell from his shoulders, and only then did Loken see the Ultima tattoo on the legionary’s scapula.
The warrior was of the XIII Legion.
Loken looked across the space to where Rubio was hidden. He couldn’t see him, but a barely perceptible movement in the darkness showed that he too had seen the warrior’s tattoo.
‘Why doesn’t he fight?’ whispered Loken, and this time Severian answered.
‘Drugged maybe? Look at his movements.’
Loken did and saw Severian was most likely correct. The warrior had the slack features of a sleepwalker. His arms were loose at his sides and his head sagged over his chest.
With the Ultramarine bound to the deck, the robed figures began a droning chant of garbled syllables, a collision of unsounds that Loken’s auto-senses registered as piercing static like insect bites.
At the height of the chant, another figure entered the chamber, this one just as genhanced as the bound warrior. He too was robed and hooded, but Loken instantly recognised him by his purposeful stride and swaying shoulders.
‘Serghar Targost,’ he said. ‘The lodge master.’
Loken’s fingers curled around the hilt of his chainsword, but Severian reached down and clamped his hand around its pommel. He shook his head.
‘He has to die,’ said Loken, as Targost scooped a handful of ash from a blazing drum and pressed it again
st the bound warrior’s chest.
‘Not now,’ said Severian.
‘Then when?’
Targost lifted a short bladed sword from beneath his robes, a gladius with a hemispherical pommel. The Sons of Horus did not favour the gladius. Too short and too mechanical. More suited to warriors who fought as one entity.
Its blade glittered dully as though sheened with coal dust, and Targost used it to cut radial grooves in the captive’s flesh. The Ultramarine did not cry out, whether due to his own fortitude or an induced fugue state, Loken couldn’t tell.
‘When?’ demanded Loken. Too loud. Heads turned upwards, searching the darkness. They were invisible, but Loken held his breath as the lodge master continued his ritual mutilations.
Severian’s eyes blazed with anger, then flicked over to the highest point of the scaffolding across the chamber. Loken could see nothing, just a confluence of girder and roof. A place the flames cast no shadow where they ought to.
‘Karayan?’
Severian nodded. ‘Let him take the shot.’
It irked Loken that someone not from the XVI Legion would get to kill Targost, but Severian’s logic was sound. He released the sword hilt and opened his fingers to show assent.
‘Be ready with that blade,’ said Severian. ‘No one gets out.’
Severian looked up to the shadows and tapped a finger against the centre of his helmet, right between the eye lenses.
He held up three fingers. Two. One.
A muted muzzle flash lit the shadows and Rama Karayan’s outline flickered against the roof. Loken paused just long enough to see Targost fall before pushing himself out from hiding.
He dropped seven metres and landed with a booming thud that buckled the deck plate. His sword roared from its sheath as he waded into the cultists. The blade’s teeth ripped them up, chewing meat and bone and robes with every slash and downward cut.
Loken raced to the arched entrance through which they’d entered and stood like a mythical sentinel barring a hero’s passage onwards. But these were no heroes, these were the scum of humanity, flotsam and jetsam swept up by the promise of easy gain offered by the corrupt powers at work within the Legion.
Unfit for war, all they could do was chant and pray and spill more worthy blood to corrupting alien powers. They came at him in a rush, with curved blades or clubs sourced from debris around the ship’s degenerating interior.
He let them come and cut them down without mercy.
The other pathfinders dropped into the midst of the cultists. Varren’s chainaxe hacked a bloody path. Voitek’s servo-arms lifted men from the deck and pulled them apart like a cruel child with a captive insect. Tyrfingr fought with his bare fists, roaring as though raucously brawling with trusted comrades.
Loken lost count of how many he killed.
Not enough, but eventually there were no more to slay.
He was blooded from head to foot. Through the entirety of his killing fury, he felt the presence of another at his shoulder, like a fencing master guiding his every strike. The sound in his helmet was hoarse, echoing, though he was not out of breath.
He blinked away the seconds the slaughter had taken.
Rubio stood amid a pile of corpses, his fists wreathed in killing fire. Cayne’s axe was dripping with gore, and Severian cleaned his combat blade on the robes of a headless corpse. Bror Tyrfingr spat blood not his own and wiped an elbow over his smeared chin.
Qruze and Cayne warily approached Serghar Targost, but Loken ignored the fallen lodge master. Instead, he went to help Ares Voitek and Nohai with the captive Ultramarine. While Voitek’s servo-arms cut through the chains binding him to the deck, Nohai knelt beside him, lifting his head and pressing a hand to the side of his neck.
‘What have they done to you, my friend?’ asked Rubio, tearing off his helmet. The light no longer danced in the crystalline matrix around his head, but the fire in his eyes was banked high.
‘You know him?’ said Loken, seeing recognition in Rubio’s eyes.
‘Proximo Tarchon,’ said Rubio. ‘An officer of the Twenty-Fifth Company. We marched with them on Arrigata, when Erikon Gaius led us.’
Loken recalled that blood-soaked world all too well. He glanced up at Varren and saw he too remembered it. But now was not the time for past regrets.
‘How in the Throne’s name did he end up here?’ asked Loken.
Rubio knelt beside the swaying captive and said, ‘How do any of us end up where we are? Chance, bad luck? The Sons of Horus must have taken him in battle.’
‘So Ultramarines are letting themselves get captured now, are they?’ said Varren, picking the blood from his axe-teeth.
Rubio shot him an angry glare, but didn’t waste words with the former World Eater. Instead, he turned to Altan Nohai.
‘What have they done to him?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Nohai, sliding a data-slug into the threaded sockets cored into Proximo Tarchon’s body. ‘Powerful drugs most likely, but I’ll know more soon. Don’t worry, we’ll get him back.’
Rubio’s fingertip followed the cuts made in Tarchon’s flesh, and Loken felt distinctly queasy at their precise nature.
‘You recognise these?’ asked Loken.
‘I have seen similar markings in primitive tribal cultures the Thirteenth Legion were forced to eradicate during the early years of the Crusade,’ said Rubio, his fists clenched and his voice betraying the depths of his fury. Cold fire shimmered at his hood, and Loken’s breath misted.
‘What are they?’ he asked.
‘Precursors to evocation.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means maleficarum,’ said Bror Tyrfingr, jerking a red thumb back towards Targost. ‘The dead one was trying to raise a wight of the Underverse and clothe it in this one’s flesh.’
‘A simplistic way of putting it,’ said Rubio, holding up a hand to forestall Bror’s rising choler, ‘but essentially correct.’
‘And this isn’t his first time,’ growled Bror. ‘Look at the cut lines. No hesitation, no mistakes. He’s cut them before. On too many other bodies, many other times. Lucky for this one we were here.’
Loken left them to it and returned to where Qruze and Cayne knelt beside the body of Serghar Targost.
The lodge master lay on his back, his hood ripped away by the passage of Karayan’s custom shell. What was left of his head was a splintered mass of leaking brain matter and bent metal fasteners. Bone hooks dangled from flaps of skin and skull fragments. One eye was a pulped scrap of exploded tissue, the other a blood-filled orb that wept red tears.
‘Too easy an end for you,’ said Loken.
‘Samus is here,’ said Targost and sat up.
Qruze fell back on his haunches as the lodge master’s fist punched into Cayne’s throat, tearing through the gorget seals with his bare hands. The former Iron Warrior didn’t have breath to cry out as the ruined, dead thing ripped out the ropy, meat-pipes of his throat.
The blood spray was catastrophic. Life ending.
Cayne fell back, vainly trying to stem the flood as Targost got to his feet. A black flame in the vague outline of a skull filled the ruined space where Targost’s head once sat.
‘Samus is the man next to you,’ he said.
Sabaen Queen burned fiercely, pillars of thick black smoke boiling from the Stormbird’s gutted interior and drawn up to the cavern hangar’s roof. The other gunships were just as useless. Melta bombs had turned their engine cores to slag and handfuls of kraks and frags smashed every control mechanism in their cockpits to scrap metal.
The thirty Ultramarines who’d survived the slaughter watched their escape from Molech’s surface burn to ruin. Their Rhinos idled behind them, engines coughing and retching as they too died.
Arcadon Kyro stood defiantly before the inferno of his own making and planted an Ultima vexil of the XIII Legion next to him, the one thing he had saved from Sabaen Queen’s interior after emptying it of weapons and ammunition.
>
His helmet was mag-locked at his waist and the ribbed arms of his experimental servo-harness were folded at his shoulders.
Tears streaked his ash-smeared features.
‘What did you do?’ said Castor Alcade in disbelief.
‘What I had to,’ replied Kyro. ‘I did it because you wouldn’t.’
Didacus Theron marched towards the unrepentant Techmarine, but Alcade held him back. Bad enough that legionary was fighting legionary, but for Ultramarine to fight Ultramarine? Unthinkable, even in a time when such thoughts were the norm.
‘You’ve killed us all,’ said Theron. ‘You’ve dug our graves on this miserable rock.’
‘A miserable rock entrusted to us by the Emperor,’ Kyro reminded him. ‘Or have you forgotten the oath we swore?’
‘I have forgotten nothing,’ said Theron.
‘You’ve forgotten where the power of your oath comes from.’
‘Then remind me.’
‘That by making it you ask the Emperor to bear witness to the promises you make with an expectation of being held accountable for how you honour them.’
Theron wrapped his hand around the hilt of his sword. Alcade knew that with but a moment’s provocation, he would draw it and strike Kyro down. Theron was Calth born and bred. Rough and ready, but with a nobility of heart that was all that kept him from killing Kyro where he stood.
‘My home world is burning,’ said Theron. ‘But Ultramar can still be saved. This world is lost. What will it achieve if we all die here? How does that serve the Emperor, Kyro? We are His Angels of Death, and this war against Horus has upset the board.’
Theron reached up to the scorched oath paper fluttering at his shoulder guard where a melted seal of wax affixed it to the curved plate. He tore it off and threw it aside.
‘An oath to die in vain is no oath at all,’ he said. ‘Calth needs us and you have kept me from her.’
‘Trying times don’t negate our duty to keep an oath,’ said Kyro. ‘They demand it, even more than when it’s easy to keep.’
Theron drew his sword, knuckles white.
Alcade took a breath. This had gone on long enough.
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