Brothers of the Snake

by Dan Abnett

  'It was black.'

  'A black hound? Brother, that's an ill omen!'

  Priad looked at his Apothecary and realised the older man was joking. He grinned back.

  'Now I'm happy to see that,' Khiron said. 'Too much glowering from you of late.'

  Priad raised his eyebrows and Khiron tutted. 'Don't start,' Khiron told him. 'When I asked if your heart was clear, I meant clear of disdain. Damocles wronged you, Priad, and you were right to whip us up and down that glacier. And maybe we're still not clean enough in honour. But we're sailing to war now, for better or worse. In the fire of combat, Damocles will need you clear hearted and strong in leadership. No grudges, no ill will.’

  'I hold no grudges.’ Priad said.

  Khiron shrugged. 'Yet, if you do, set them aside, Take them up again when we return to the fortress, for all I care. But leave them here for now.’

  'Your counsel is appreciated but unnecessary. I am clear of purpose, black dog or no black dog.’

  Khiron nodded. There was a sound of bare feet on decking, and two more figures emerged from the deanimation vault, naked and stretching. Eibos and Laetes, Apothecaries of Ridates and Pelleas squads respectively. They nodded to Priad and Khiron as they dressed and set about the business of preparing for their men. 'It's good to see Ridates re-formed.’ Priad said. 'It pleases me.’ Khiron replied. 'The name should not fall into disuse. Brother-Sergeant Seuthis has wrought those men into a good unit.’

  'Speaking of ill will...' Priad murmured. Khiron smiled. He had been Apothecary to the old Ridates squad, and in that service, his career had almost ended in disgrace.

  'There's none at all.’ he said.

  One by one, the Snakes returned to life, ministered to by their Apothecaries. Priad left Khiron in charge of the animation, and wandered down to the barge's embarkation hall, where the teams of armourers and servitors were laying out the preparations. In long, burnished rows, the cases of Mark VII power armour stood on their racks, gleaming in the lamp light. Weapons were being cleaned and oiled, and munitions laid out across the scuffed deck to be sorted and counted. Boy slaves ran the munition lines, marking out tallies in chalk on the floor.

  Hammers and drills sounded along the wide bay as final refits and alterations were made to plate sections and mechanisms. The Techmarine Suprema and his apprentice checked and blessed every item of wargear, from the smallest digital components of gauntlets to the massive Rhino transporters as they were cradled up onto the deck, klaxons hooting from their hoists. From hidden practice ranges came the rattle of test firings. Servitors ran back and forth, conveying each man's weapon in turn to the practice ranges for certification.

  Steam presses thumped, and sparks billowed in the heat-wash of portable forges. The air was filled with the scents of hot metal, coals, oil and pumice, thermite, exhaust fumes and human sweat. Priad breathed it in. It was the smell of war, and he revelled in it. He walked over to his own armour, and ran a bare hand across the polished grey ceramite. It shone like glass, and in its surface, he saw the bustling activity of the embarkation deck reflected. A small, dark shape flickered across it, and Priad turned, expecting to see a black dog running in and out of the armour rows, chasing corn flies. But it was just a boy slave with an armful of munition caskets.

  Petrok appeared, talking with the Suprema. The Librarian was clad in an ice-white chiton, but his face was pale and his eyes dark. He noticed Priad and came over.

  'Fit for war?' he asked.

  'If war awaits.’ replied Priad.

  'Most certainly. I'll brief all the sergeants presently, but this you should know. All hell's shaken loose on Ganahedarak. I've been monitoring the transmissions. Our brothers are cut off, and surrounded. The greenskins number more than we can imagine.'

  'How can twenty-five squads of our phratry be cut off?' Priad asked.

  'Like a swimmer in mid-ocean.’ Petrok replied. 'Unfathomable as it seems, the greenskins are at war with themselves. This is not the incursion Seydon assumed. This is something else. A civil war, if the swinekin have enough civilisation in them to deserve the term. Two hosts, uncountable, out for blood. Humankind is merely caught up in the middle.'

  'What is the purpose, the cause?' Priad asked the Librarian.

  'My friend, I do not even begin to understand what makes an ork an ork, or why such a thing exists in this cosmos, or what his living purpose is. They are xenos and inscrutable. But this war of theirs will take many human worlds into the furnaces of hell with them unless it is checked.'

  'And can we check it? With only five squads?'

  'I'm working on that,' said Petrok. 'Let's get to the soil fast, and taste things there. Once I'm in vox-range with the Chapter Master, perhaps we can evolve a plan.'

  Petrok paused and looked into Priad's eyes. 'I dreamed about you again. You and the jaws. It's most perplexing. There's a meaning there, but I'm damned if I can draw it out.'

  'I dreamed too.’ Priad said, slightly embarrassed to be mentioning it.

  'You did? What of?'

  'Nothing significant. Khiron says I'm not to worry about-'

  'Let me be the judge. What was in your dream?'

  'A meadow, and a black dog.’

  'And?'

  'That's it. A meadow, and a black dog.’

  'Does that mean anything to you?'

  Priad shook his head.

  'Have you ever owned a dog? Have you ever trained dogs?'

  'I've used dogs in war a number of times. Against primuls, as we were taught. But...' 'Think on it.’ Petrok said.

  IX

  The battle-barge Temerity put into high anchor and surveyed the bright face of Ganahedarak and the multitude of dark satellites that drifted like beetles in its lower orbits. Upwards of twenty hulks and crag-craft circled the planet like vultures.

  At Petrok's command, the relief company made the drop in Thunderhawks, screaming down low across the southern continent. In the north, smoke had spread out to stain vast regions of the atmosphere, striating the sky with lho-brown slicks of soot.

  There was no way in to the north. Communicating with the kings of the south, Petrok arranged for his force to set down on the plains outside an ancient city called Pyridon, some two hundred kilometres west of the main warzone.

  The climate there was brisk and bright. It was planting season. They marched from their landers into the city, seeing vast crowds gathering outside the walls as if in welcome.

  These were not adoring masses, turning out to rapture the coming heroes. This was overspill, millions of ragged refugees fleeing the war, congregating around the city in their plight. The crowds looked at the gleaming armoured giants with dull, uncomprehending eyes as the Snakes marched through. Some screamed prayers or benedictions, others hurled abuse and jeers. Some threw missiles of trash and gnawed bones.

  The city was a ramshackle place of terracotta towers and clay-built slums. The narrow streets were teeming. The warriors, reduced to a double line to push through the stinking press, had to activate their guidance locators to make sense of the place. The only landmarks were the occasional looming temples, brick and clay edifices in great disrepair that were filled with statues and crumbling shrines. No one seemed to remember who the temples had been raised to. The identities of gods and dignitaries had long faded, yet no one had considered demolishing them.

  The thoroughfares were packed with wagons, contractors, citizens, beggars, priests and mourners, mules, servitors, merchants and soldiers. The soldiers were beaten, broken men in threadbare armour, their speartips blunt and twisted, their laslocks out of charge. They were survivors fleeing the End War.

  That, the Snakes of Ithaka learned, was what they called it. The End War. A catastrophic combat that would split the sky and the world and bring an end to Ganahedarak. This was the finality of fire the elders had long prophesied. This was Ur Maggedon.

  Only the broken soldiers seemed to notice the Ithakan file. They saw the gleaming Snakes and turned their faces away, ashamed of
the fortune that had washed them up in that place. Petrok stopped a number of times to converse with officers and take intelligence, but little was forthcoming.

  Like all the others, Priad was used to being noticed, especially when he went abroad in his full case of plate. Now he towered over the passing crowd and drew not one look. No one was afraid or impressed. They had all seen too much, too much exhaustive horror, and their capacity for fear or even awe was wrung out of them. Three of the kings of the south awaited Petrok in a decomposing palace at the heart of the city. Weeds sprouted from the flagstones of the courtyard, and the sumptuous plasterwork was flaking from the walls. Empty windows stared out like skull sockets. The kings were slovenly men, attended by dirty slaves and sullen womenfolk. They had nothing to tell, except that they repeated the fact that roundhouses had been built to accommodate the phratry. Directions were given, with no little urgency, as if the kings longed for the Iron Snakes to leave. They seemed unduly preoccupied with the roundhouse halls they had constructed in the open country, as if that was their part of the bargain over. They had built bastions to house the warriors, now would the warriors please rid them of this menace? Wasn't that how the undertaking worked?

  Petrok dismissed the kings of the south, and they shuffled away with their miserable retinues. Alone in the courtyard, Petrok gathered the five squads and conducted the Rite of the Giving of Water, dripping Ithakan brine from his tubular copper flask.

  He had almost finished when a great commotion broke out in the city around them. Pyridon itself seemed to quiver and shake at the din of voices and running feet. Horns sounded above the clamour.

  The enemy had been sighted.

  The city trembled. Stampedes boiled down the winding streets as people attempted to flee to the south. Beyond the teetering walls, dust rose as the hosts of refugees broke and ran into the farmland outside the city.

  Petrok, the very flagstones beneath him vibrating from the shock of a million running feet, studiously completed the rite.

  'Plans can wait.’ he said, refraining from mentioning that he was still unable to raise the Chapter Master on the vox. 'War visits us, and we must make it welcome.'

  In the dry, stubbled fields north of the city, a wall of dust was approaching. In it, hulking shadows shambled and plodded. Howls echoed across the valley, accompanied by the rumble of motors and war engines. There was no estimating numbers or context.

  Petrok brought the relief force out in front of the city's clay wall, and fixed a position along a trackway at the head of the cultivated land. A single line: Pelleas, Ridates, Damocles, Laomon and Nophon. The Snakes stood like steel statues in the hard afternoon light, watching the dust approach. Inside their armour, the brothers flexed massive limbs tight-bound with straps of leather and linen, dusted with fine powder and anointed with oils. Apart from those men who bore specialised weapons, every warrior carried a bolter and a combat shield, as well as a sheathed warblade. The teams of armourers and attendants, all in loose, light armour, waited behind the line with munition reloads and bundles of sea-lances sharpened for war.

  The dust line drifted closer. The roar and cry grew louder.

  At Petrok's command, the armourers' boy slaves ran the line, planting a sea-lance, base-spike down, into the earth behind each brother. Some had pennants fluttering from them. The squad standard bearers raised their double-looped crests and fixed them to their shoulders. Aekon made sure Andromak's standard was fitted correctly in place.

  Five proud double-snakes glittered in the sunlight.

  Squad channels clicked open, each unit on a separate frequency, with a command override on the common channel. The sergeants spoke to their men, coaching, assuring, priming. Goront of Pelleas told his men of past glories and of glories yet to come. Seuthis explained to the jittery, eager newcomers of Ridates that this was the day they had been born for. Ryys of Nophon reminded his squad that Nophon had never left a battlefield in defeat. Lektas of Laomon, reining in the enthusiasm of his own inductees, told a story about the primarch that made them clap their shield fists against their leg plates.

  'Damocles,' Priad said over his link, 'the Emperor knows why we're regarded as one of the Notables. According to the trench, you're all much, much braver than me. And I say you'd better prove it to me now, or even that damned trench won't be deep enough to hide you from my displeasure.'

  He raised his lightning claw, so they could see the electricity spark and crackle off its burnished talons.

  'For Terra, for Ithaka, and for Damocles!'

  X

  The greenskins came into view, swathed in their dust cloud.

  They were charging, pounding forward across the dry fields, shaking the ground with their leaden footfalls. They were vast creatures, every bit as big and robust as the giants facing them. Priad felt a knot of wonder that for the first time in twelve years, for the first time in his life, he was squaring up to an enemy that matched him, kilo for kilo, muscle for muscle.

  Everything about the greenskins was oversized. Their paw-like fists, their shoulders, their snouts and yawning, howling maws. Fat lips, slabby cheeks, rotten teeth like pegs, ears as twisted and frayed as bat wings, laced with studs and rings. Some wore pot-black horned helmets, iron caps encrusted with antlers or ox horn or the curled spikes of rams. Others sported tusks the size of short-swords, curving upwards from slavering lower lips. They snorted and grunted and roared as they came on, hunch-backed, billowing rank breath and spittle ahead of them.

  And they weren't even remotely green. Their rushing bodies were draped in pelts and animal skins, or shawls of mauve fibre, or cloaks of rusting chainmail. Crude armour of hide and tin cased their limbs and torsos, and bangles and necklaces danced along with their momentum. Some wore scalps and teeth and even clattering skulls as trophies. All of them had caked their flesh with war paint, with dyes of red and black and a sugary pink that dazzled in the sun. They were gaudy and bright, black and red like glowing coals, like the embers of a still-burning fire tipped out of the grate, rushing out across the hearth stone.

  In their beringed fists: cleavers and axes, pikes and halberds, mauls and bitten blades rank with dried blood, the pommels and hilts streaming chains of beads and human fingerbones. Some carried firearms – crude bolters and broad-nosed cannon. As they closed in, a ponderous avalanche of metal and meat, they began to fire.

  Shots tore past the waiting Snakes. Missiles shrieked in the air. Hard rounds burst and shattered off armour and shields, denting and tearing the smooth curves of perfect, polished plate. The random flash and spark and crack resembled a munitions store accidentally touched off.

  Twenty metres. Ten.

  Aim for the heads! And fire!' Petrok cried. The fifty ready guns of the phratry let rip into the oncoming tide.

  Bolters chattered. Plasma guns whined and spat. Flamers retched and spewed.

  Death rushed out to greet the storming greenskins. The front of the line went over, tumbling, thrashing, ichor spurting into the air from bursting bodies. Those in the second rank trampled the bodies of the first underfoot until they too were brought down by the relentless fire and met the same fate under the hobnails of the third rank, and the fourth.

  The bodies piled up, limp and wet, crushed to an oozing pulp by the weight of numbers behind. Ork feet slipped on compressed corpses, struggling for purchase. A wall began to build as the greenskins, the Painted Ones, scrambled to ascend the growing litter of dead to get at the shining human line. A stench of death, a cloying mix of decomposed vegetation, slime and stomach acid, filled the air. The feral enemy warriors clawed through the dead limbs and entrails of their fallen comrades in a stupefying frenzy to meet the human foe. They hacked through the blubber and flesh of the dead, only to be killed by the next salvo of bolter fire.

  Centimetre by centimetre, this wave of the dead, the dying and the still alive was crawling towards the Ithakan line, until there was no longer any time for the phratry to reload again.

  'Close combat!' Pet
rok ordered. He stood at the centre of the line, the mighty warblade Bellus raised in his mailed fist.

  The Snakes tossed their bolters onto the ground behind them, where the armourers could reach them, and plucked their sea-lances from the soil.

  'Address!' Petrok bellowed.

  The lances, all fifty, swung forward, glinting in the bright light, and lowered as one to face the enemy, staves clattering and clinking. The brothers brought their combat shields up and hoisted their lances above their right shoulders.

  'Strike!' Petrok yelled.

  The flowing torrent of swinekin, breaking the air with their howls and violating it with their odour, reached the Ithakan wall. The Iron Snakes began to stab forward with their lances, repeating powerful overhand thrusts that punched their lance tips into chainmail and leather hauberks and meat. The hafts shivered from the multiple impacts. Dark blood the colour of rubies jetted into the roiling dust.

  There was a jarring moment of impact, an actual crash of bone and metal, as the ork horde piled into the Iron Snakes. The shock force caused a few of the brothers to step back and brace themselves, but the line held firm. The lances began to jab and jab with renewed vigour. It was impossible to miss, so dense was the press of orks at their shields. Lance tips gouged through shoulder plates, through helmets, pinned limbs to bodies, burst gore out through backs. It became increasingly hard to wrestle the lances free.

  The pressure increased. Greenskins at the back of the torrent shouldered in to reach their enemies, impelling forward those ahead of them with their shoves. Many corpses remained upright against the Ithakan shields, pinned by bodyweight and unable to topple. Some orks began to clamber over the heads of the front ranks in their enthusiasm to sample combat.