by C Z Dunn
‘Serpicus estimates their numbers to be in the low millions. Navy vessels are pounding the larger concentrations while Balthasar leads Fifth Company and the Astra Militarum regiments in hunting down the smaller warbands. Between our attention and the infighting that has broken out among the xenos ranks, the campaign should be finished within days.’ The psychic projection of Ezekiel was uncannily realistic, as if his physical form were present on board the troop transport.
‘How has Balthasar fared?’ Danatheum asked. ‘I had not expected leadership to be thrust upon him so soon. Is he ready to ascend?’
Ezekiel had already seen the path laid out before the first sergeant, the glory he would win for both himself and the Dark Angels both as part of the Chapter and away from it, and had decided upon his recommendation.
‘Balthasar is a consummate warrior and leader, but his route to the ivory requires him to don the green of the Fifth for a while longer yet.’
Danatheum arched an eyebrow. ‘I see your powers of divination have returned,’ he said with a grin.
‘How did…’ Ezekiel began. ‘Turmiel.’
‘I admit that placing young Turmiel under your tutelage was as much about him keeping an eye on you as you passing on your knowledge, but no, he did not inform me of your diminished foresight.’ Danatheum shook his head and smirked before adding quietly, ‘Keeping secrets from the Chief Librarian? That boy has a bright future ahead of him.’
‘So how did you know?’
‘My psychic gifts might not be as bountiful as yours, Ezekiel, but I consider my perception unmatched among the brothers of the Librarius. I’ve known that your future sight was blind ever since you returned from Korsh.’
‘And yet you told nobody else? You still allowed me to accompany the mission to Honoria?’
‘I had to be sure.’
‘Sure of what?’ said Ezekiel.
‘Sure that you were ready to assume the role of Grand Master of the Librarius.’
‘I don’t understand. You are Chief Librarian. There is no role to assume.’
‘I am merely a caretaker. This position was always destined for one worthier than I.’
‘But you are worthy, Grand Master,’ Ezekiel implored.
Danatheum scoffed. ‘Worthy? Take a look around, Ezekiel. Two brothers of the Ravenwing dead and scores more wounded while the Nephrekh Dynasty persists, spreading their dominion from sector to sector, reawakening yet more of their kin.’
‘You lost a battle, but the war continues and you live to fight another day.’
‘The necrons numbered in their hundreds yet still I led us to defeat, while you? You defended an entire world from millions of orks and drove them back into the void. In centuries to come, which of these campaigns do you think stories will still be told about, still lauded in the Chapter’s annals?’
‘Our losses were great too. The Mechanicus forces were completely wiped out, hundreds of thousands of Guardsmen and Imperial citizens died, not to mention the brother Dark Angels who laid down their lives. I was dead, Grand Master, dead for hours and even after I came back, I had lost an eye. We achieved a victory, but it was hard won.’
Danatheum stared intently at Ezekiel’s augmetic. ‘Yes, the eye…’ he said softly before reverting to the original subject. ‘It does not matter how hard it was to come by the victory, how much blood was shed in the winning. It is only the end result that counts. I could continue to lead the Librarius and no doubt record victories along the way, perform some deeds of note… Or I could hand the role over to you who is destined for greatness in everything he does. I do not need vast powers of divination to know which choice is the right one.’
‘And what if I refuse?’ Ezekiel said indignantly.
‘You cannot,’ Danatheum said. ‘I have already informed Lord Azrael of my decision and he accepts and endorses it. You are the new Chief Librarian of the Dark Angels, Ezekiel.’
Ezekiel sighed contemplatively then forced a grim smile to his lips. ‘Though I accept your decision, I do not have to agree with it. You honour me greatly with your words and deeds, Master Danatheum, and those words and deeds are still valued greatly by the Chapter. My first act as Grand Master of the Librarius is to name you as my second and, like myself, you have no choice but to accept.’
‘I would be honoured to serve you, Grand Master, but you are getting a little ahead of yourself,’ Danatheum said. ‘There are still the formalities to be observed. Lord Azrael has commanded that we are both to return to the Rock so that the Ceremony of Ascension can be held.’
‘Of course,’ Ezekiel replied. ‘But there is something I have to do first.’
Postlude
The fires of Korsh burned brightly, fuelled by the blood of daemons.
Rephial and Serpicus had done their best to patch up bodies and wargear in the weeks since the Battle for Honoria, but the brothers of Fifth Company still bore the marks of battle as they slew the infernal denizens of the death world. Scores of chittering dog-like creatures fell to bolter and blade while winged horrors circled above them, any getting too close to the Dark Angels shot out of the sky, their corpses incinerated in the channels of lava that bisected the planet’s surface.
At the head of the Space Marine force, Turmiel shone like a beacon in the warp, daemons drawn like moths to his flame. Alongside him, Balthasar, Serpicus and Rephial slaughtered with impunity, their swords and armour slick with filthy ichor, carving a path to their target. High above, at the top of a stone spiral stairway, perched the daemon that had robbed Ezekiel of his foresight and left him for dead, its beaked head slowly moving from side to side, watching the massacre below it unfold with disinterest.
‘Go!’ Balthasar yelled to Turmiel as they reached the base of the stairs. ‘We’ll hold them off here.’
The Librarian took the stairs two or three at a time, quickly eating up the distance between him and the daemon, only breaking his stride to fire off psychic lances at the winged beasts that tried to halt his progress. Stopping a few metres from the apex, Turmiel drew his force sword and pointed it at the daemon towering over him. It looked down on the Librarian, its avian eyes blinking rapidly.
‘And what do you want, Dark Angel?’ the daemon asked, boredom evident in its tone. ‘Has Ezekiel sent you here to slay me?’
‘No,’ Turmiel answered. ‘I’m merely the distraction.’
The daemon stopped blinking. An instant later the tip of a force sword tore through its breast.
‘Now, Turmiel. Just like I taught you,’ Ezekiel called out from behind the dematerialising daemon.
In the weeks since Honoria, the young Librarian had been sequestered away with the newly elevated Grand Master in the deepest recesses of the Sword of Caliban honing one aspect of warpcraft in particular. Focusing his power through his blade, Turmiel issued forth a psychic net, trapping the daemon on the material plane.
Ezekiel leapt down to join Turmiel on the stairway, sheathing his own ichor-slick blade. Trapped and at the mercy of two Space Marine Librarians, the daemon laughed.
‘And what do you think this achieves, Ezekiel?’ it scoffed. ‘You cannot hold me here for long. The boy is already wavering.’
A thin trickle of blood flowed from Turmiel’s nostril, spilling over his top lip.
‘Turmiel will hold you here long enough to answer my questions, daemon.’
‘And what if I choose not to answer them?’
‘You’ve already answered my first,’ Ezekiel said. ‘The very fact that I was able to mask my presence from you and put you in this position tells me that you no longer possess the power of foresight. The powers you used to show me the future after I died on Honoria, they were stolen from me, weren’t they, daemon?’
‘Very astute, Ezekiel,’ the daemon chuckled.
‘So why did you return them to me?’
The daemon stopped laughing
. ‘I didn’t give them back to you. The Eye gave them back to you, but you knew that already too, didn’t you, Ezekiel?’
Ezekiel held his hand up to the crude augmetic fitted to his head. ‘Those futures you showed me. I didn’t have the eye in any of them, therefore none of them will come to pass, am I right?’
‘So little time and yet you choose to ask the wrong questions,’ the daemon said, shaking its head.
The trickle of blood from Turmiel’s nose had strengthened to a flow. ‘I cannot maintain the shackles for much longer, master,’ he said.
‘Then enlighten me, daemon. What question should I be asking?’
‘Where did the eye come from?’
Ezekiel laughed now. ‘I already know. It was taken from one of the fallen Vostroyans on Honoria.’
‘Master…’ Blood had begun to seep from Turmiel’s tear ducts.
‘And where did he get it from?’ the daemon said, eyes narrowed. ‘The technology it employs is so primitive that it predates the Imperium. Do you really think he was the first bearer of it, the tenth, the hundredth even?’
Turmiel coughed up blood. The flow of warp energy from his sword sputtered.
‘But most importantly of all,’ the daemon said, its form starting to fade. ‘Where did it come from originally? Who made it, Ezekiel? Who made your eye?’
His powers giving out before his body, Turmiel collapsed onto the stone steps, the psychic shackles disappearing. Ezekiel crouched down to check on his pupil. To his relief, Turmiel was still conscious.
‘Did you get the information you required, master?’ Turmiel spluttered through bloody lips.
Above them, the final vestiges of the daemon were reabsorbed into the warp, its unblinking eyes fixated on Ezekiel the last part of it to fade away.
‘No,’ Ezekiel replied, helping the young Librarian to his feet. ‘Only more questions.’
About the Author
Domiciled in the East Midlands, C Z Dunn is the author of the Space Marine Battles novel Pandorax, the novellas Crimson Dawn and Dark Vengeance and the audio dramas Trials of Azrael, Ascension of Balthasar, Terror Nihil, Bloodspire and Malediction, as well as several short stories.
An extract from Slaughter at Giant’s Coffin.
From out of the darkness, they came.
The blunted prow of the battle-barge Heart of Cronus split the veil of reality first, the strange angle of her re-entry a testament to the haste with which she had been hurled into the warp. The great ship juddered and pitched to starboard with the sudden deceleration, even as her escort frigates began to emerge about her. Strike cruisers and destroyers all jostled for the clear void as they tumbled from the empyrean, proximity alarms wailing and countless helmsmen fighting to bring their vessels back under control.
It was shambolic. Frantic.
Mortal voices, strained by emotion, echoed back and forth across the open vox; each shipmaster cursed the apparent ineptitude of his peers as the fleet spread out into what might pass for an operational grouping.
Nonetheless, in the fierce light of the Miral star, their transhuman masters tried to carry themselves with as much dignity as they could muster. To anyone who might have been watching, it was a most unusual sight – that of a mighty Space Marine Chapter humbled and brought low by its foes, its brothers resisting the urge to lash out at one another in despair.
Though there had been many amongst them who had truly believed that such a day would never come, the gaze of the Great Devourer had settled upon the galaxy once more. A new wave of tyranid hive fleets had crept into the Eastern Fringe under the cover of unprecedented human unrest, and with the return of the xenos had come the horrifying realisation that in fact mankind might never truly be rid of them.
And now, Sotha was no more.
Great and noble Sotha. The fortress-monastery at Mount Pharos. All gone – consumed by the foul, living tide of Hive Fleet Kraken.
But, like little more than ghostly shadows of their former selves, the Scythes of the Emperor lived on. They reeled from the death of their home world in a way that few beyond the Adeptus Astartes could ever truly appreciate.
The loss was shameful. It was inexcusable.
It had wounded them more deeply than anything else ever could.
The alert klaxons on the bridge were finally silenced as the Heart of Cronus swung into its high anchor approach. The acrid tang of burned-out circuits hung in the stagnant air, the main filtration system having been one of the many lost to the fire, and the deck plates around the command throne were sticky with retardant foam residue. Ragged and scorched crewmen, most still wearing their emergency breath-masks, blearily clung to their duties.
With a tortured grind of gears, the central blast doors slid open to reveal the strobing darkness of the corridors beyond, and Captain Thracian limped through. His proud, transhuman features were marred by an expression of utter defeat.
‘Fleet Master Zebulon is dead,’ he announced, coldly. ‘My brother-captain’s injuries were too severe. There was nothing they could do.’
Thracian’s black-and-gold power armour was scorched, and his cloak hung in tatters behind him. Each laboured stride sent dull pain shooting up his right side. As he passed the empty throne, he spared it only a single reluctant glance.
‘Shipmaster Devanti’s condition is critical, but he lives.’
The news brought a stunned silence to the human crew. It was not unexpected, but the reality of hearing it from a senior Chapter officer took it from a fearful rumour to stark, inescapable fact. Thracian wondered how many more truths would make that transition in the minutes, hours and days to come, under the circumstances.
He halted before the cracked, static-laced screens of the forward oculus. The left-hand pane was dead. So were the hololithic overlay projectors. ‘Tactical report,’ he called out to no one in particular, tying back the lank strands of his hair. ‘This is not my ship, but I would have a full appraisal of our location and disposition.’
A female serf-lieutenant with a hastily bandaged gash across her forehead stepped forwards, a data-slate in hand. Before the armoured Space Marine, she looked even more fragile and haggard, but her manner was firm.
‘We have arrived at the Miral System, my lord, as per Captain Zebulon’s original order. Seems we gave the local monitor patrols quite a scare – they weren’t expecting us, and our dispersal pattern was… a little sloppy. As a formality, they’re relaying our ident-codes to the Militarum outpost on the second planet now, for verification. We’re updating our horologs to the local mean time, although that loses us something like nine weeks, even after relativity adjustment.’
‘And how many ships made the jump with us?’
‘Information is still sketchy. We estimate no more than twenty-five vessels, based on the faint carrier signal transmissions from beyond the system-edge. About a third of them are apparently drifting without power, or have zero vox-capability after making the translation.’
Thracian furrowed his brow, prickling the superficial burns on the side of his face. ‘Only twenty-five. Less than a quarter of the Chapter fleet.’
The lieutenant nodded wearily, scrolling through the numbers. ‘Aye, lord. We had visual contact with at least another twelve before we entered the warp, but they are presently unaccounted for. It’s possible that…’ She sniffed, wiping dried blood from her top lip. ‘It’s possible that some may yet find their way here, but without long-range comms we’ll never know where the rest might end up.’
Glancing up at the crazed oculus, Thracian lowered his voice a little. ‘And what of the xenos hive ships? Could they have followed us?’
‘Highly unlikely, my lord, although we do have reports from the Dromea Bathos, the Pale Rider and the strike cruiser Atreides of continued action against tyranid boarders.’ The lieutenant paused for a moment, then continued. ‘Forgive my boldness, but Brother
-Codicier Spiridonas might be better able to advise you on the matter of further pursuit.’
‘Aye. Perhaps.’
A few muted cries of alarm went up across the bridge. Out beyond the viewports, two of the stricken Chapter vessels – by their markings, the Ionia and the listing, battle-scarred destroyer Light of the Pharos – had drifted too close together. Thracian watched as the Pharos collided with the other ship, its dorsal ridge tearing a hole in her flank and spilling debris and flash-frozen atmosphere into the void. Other vessels close to the impact began to pull away, their shipmasters wary of being drawn into a cascading wreckage storm.
Cursing, he returned his attention to the fragile-looking lieutenant.
‘What is your name and rank designation?’
She straightened a little, although Thracian noted that she stopped short of actually standing to attention.
‘Hannelore, my lord. Serf-lieutenant, second class.’
‘You know this ship, Lieutenant Hannelore. Take me to the Navigator chambers.’
The undercroft spaces of the Pale Rider had become a charnel house. The stench of slaughter was heavy in the air, carrying with it the acidic reek of xenos bio-weapon discharge and other, even less wholesome smells. The ship had suffered badly at the teeth and claws of the invaders, though her crew were exceedingly lucky to be counted among those who had managed to flee the death of Sotha.
It was not clean fighting. It was cramped, and chaotic, and far too many had died, for so little gain. Fatigue dragging at his limbs, Culmonios shook the blood and ragged flesh from the teeth of his chainsword before whirling around to hack into another of the scuttling beasts as it leapt for him.
‘Brother,’ came a heaving, breathless voice over the short-range vox, ‘this is Nimeon. We have them contained. Port side, compartment nine.’
