by Ben Counter
He strode through the forest, lashing left and right with his sword. Men fled before him as if he were a natural disaster darkening the horizon in front of them. Some stood to fight, and those who tried were gifted a dismemberment with his chainblade, or were grappled and held against Karnikhal’s molten armour so they burst into flames and were released, screaming and dying, to run at random among their fellow soldiers.
Karnikhal’s own soldiers followed in his wake, leaping on the enemy fallen and tearing them apart. They used the metal blades with which each man had replaced his left hand and forearm. They painted themselves in blood, then moved on to find the next kill.
The painkillers flooded through Karnikhal. His full strength unfolded and he knocked half a dozen men away from him with a great sweep of his blade. Severed heads and limbs rained down. Karnikhal roared with the sheer exhilaration, with the great tide of adrenaline pumping through his hearts.
A shadow passed overhead. Karnikhal looked up to see the iridescent scaled belly of the Warp Serpent coiling overhead.
Hate rose in Karnikhal. It was barely caged. But it could not break out. Pacts had been made.
‘You! Poxy worm!’ bellowed Karnikhal. ‘Do you come to steal my kill? The blood shed here is mine! The skulls I take belong to the throne of Khorne!’
The Warp Serpent’s sinuous body unravelled until its enormous head looked down at Karnikhal. ‘Stay your hand, Six-Fingered One,’ said the serpent, its forked tongue flickering between its lips. Two of its eyes focused on Karnikhal, the other two observing the battle around him. ‘I have no designs on your pretty pile of bodies. I bring word.’
‘Word? What use is talk when there are warm hearts to be stopped?’
‘From her.’
‘From Legienstrasse?’
‘From Legienstrasse.’
Karnikhal felt the cold, bloodless bindings around him, invisible but impossible to ignore. They surrounded his soul. They were the work of cowards, of sorcerers, and they wrapped around him and forced him to do their will. He could forget them when the blood was flowing and the skulls were falling. But not now. Not when her name was invoked.
‘What is her bidding?’ growled Karnikhal.
‘To Krae,’ said the Warp Serpent. ‘The city lost to Opis’s history.’
‘Abandon this fight?’ replied Karnikhal. ‘What is at Krae that can equal the bloodshed of this battle?’
‘She cares not for blood,’ replied the Warp Serpent. ‘But I have no doubt there will be a great deal of death. And she demands it, Six-Finger.’
‘What has she demanded of you?’
‘To serve as her messenger, for I am the swiftest creature on Opis. To gather a force of champions at Krae. She seeks a victory there that will decide Opis’s fate.’
‘Its fate is decided!’ roared Karnikhal. ‘It will drown in blood! I shall reap an ocean of it, and drown a million captives there in honour of Khorne!’
‘Your words,’ said the Warp Serpent drily, ‘mean less than these worthless souls you kill so gleefully. You will obey. You have no more choice than I. I will see you next at Krae, Six-Finger.’
The Warp Serpent slid off into the sky, rippling through the columns of smoke rising from the battlefield.
Karnikhal looked down at the ruined bodies around him. His armour was starting to sear, lines of pain forming along his arms and legs to mirror the streams of molten metal that always ran down his armour’s plates. He drove his chainblade into a moaning Guardsman who was trying to gather his entrails back into his abdomen – the blade sawed through his chest and the recognition of his death caused his implants to dull the growing pain just a little.
‘There had better be death,’ said Karnikhal Six-Finger. ‘There had better be blood.’
‘You lost control of one of your own,’ said Lysander. It was an accusation. The Thunderhawk pitched slightly as it made a course change, heading back from the mountain range to Khezal and Sigismund Point.
‘Do not pretend that no Space Marine has ever left the fold, Lysander!’ replied Lady Syncella. ‘How many of our targets have been renegade Space Marines?’
‘But that is what happened,’ pressed Lysander. ‘You lost an agent. Legienstrasse is an Assassin gone rogue.’
Lady Syncella raised an eyebrow. ‘That is one way of putting it,’ she said.
‘Captain!’ said Gorgythion from the cockpit. ‘Tchepikov is signalling us.’
‘Tchepikov?’ Lysander did not try to hide his annoyance. ‘What in the hells does he want of us?’
‘Operation Starfall is reporting major troop movements towards Krae.’
‘Krae’s abandoned,’ said Lysander. ‘The intelligence briefing stated no one has lived there for a hundred years.’
‘It was abandoned overnight,’ replied Gorgythion. ‘Most of the city is intact. It’s got a spaceport. Thought it might be–’
‘She’s there!’ interjected Lady Syncella. ‘Our operation here was to flush her out into the open. To force her to flee Opis, and then strike at her when she made to escape! The spaceport of an abandoned city is too obvious a choice for her, but she is desperate. We almost killed her once and she is afraid. That is where we will find her, Captain Lysander.’
‘How many men have died to drive this rogue Assassin out of cover?’ said Lysander.
‘Too many to let them die in vain,’ said Lady Syncella. ‘Our combined force is enough to take her down.’
‘And our combined force will do just that,’ said Lysander. ‘This absolves the Assassinorum of nothing, Syncella. But we will fight alongside you for as long as it takes to kill her.’
‘Good. We must make speed to Krae. Legienstrasse may be desperate but she will have a plan in place. There will be allies with her and they will grow in number with every hour.’
The Thunderhawk pitched again as Gorgythion turned it onto its new heading. The coast hurtled past below, lashed with the white-capped waves of a coming storm.
‘It will be rough flying,’ said Gorgythion.
‘Not as rough as the landing,’ replied Lysander. ‘Syncella, if we are to kill Legienstrasse, we must know how. No more secrets. Which Temple trained her? What can be done?’
‘That is a complicated question,’ said Syncella, and Lysander could not read from her expression if she meant any humour. ‘I believe the telling of one of the Assassinorum’s most closely-held secrets must now be allowed. Let me explain to you, captain, just what Legienstrasse is.’
When Tchepikov reached the command deck, the medical servitor was still trundling behind him. Its fingers were divided into several dexterous manipulators, each as fine as a centipede’s leg, which were working on knitting the broken bone of his arm closed. A skin of medical gel covered the open incision, the muscle visible as the white bone was carefully rebuilt layer by layer. Intravenous lines hooked Tchepikov’s veins to the bottles and pumps set into the servitor’s torso. His greatcoat hung off his shoulder and he put his officer’s cap on as he approached the comms helm.
The naval intelligence officer manning the helm saluted Tchepikov. Tchepikov could not return the salute, and the officer looked uncertain for a moment.
‘You said the code had been received.’
‘Yes, commander,’ said the officer. Her eyes flickered to his damaged arm, then back to his face. ‘Encryption vermilion. Marked priority.’ She handed Tchepikov the data-slate on which the message had been transcribed.
‘Krae?’ he said. ‘Bloody Krae? There’s nothing there! I have thousands of men dying on the Starfall front and now I am to divert them to defend a pile of stones!’
‘Sir, I…’
Tchepikov didn’t notice the officer had spoken. ‘Do you see?’ he yelled, waving the data-slate in the air. ‘It’s not enough that I am defied to my face, on my very ship! The lords above us want my soldiers to dance and die to their tune!’
Most of the officers on the command deck kept their heads bowed, eyes fixed on the pict-screens or stack
s of reports in front of them.
‘But that is all we do,’ said Tchepikov. ‘Someone else plays, and we dance.’ He swept aside an armful of papers from the conference table, revealing the heavily annotated map of Operation Starfall’s front. Reports of battles and casualties were coming in from points all along the line. The enemy was fighting here for its own sake – not to capture ground or defend a position, but to bring the Imperial army to battle and force it to fight for survival when it could be helping to bulldoze the resistance in Khezal and Rekaba.
‘Despatch to the 90th Algol Siegebreakers, Colonel Messk. Disengage and redeploy to Krae. Fully motorise for speed. Take vehicles and armour from other regiments if needs be.’ He looked around at the comms officer. ‘Tell Messk that he is to let my right flank collapse and bring the whole line down, because that is how the dance goes.’
‘Commander,’ said the officer, and her fingers tapped on the console as she transmitted the orders in rapid war-code.
Tchepikov pushed the medical servitor away as it rolled after him. He pulled its delicate fingers away from his arm. The medical gel came away with this and he flexed his fingers, teeth gritted, as he let the blood flow.
Krae was a good choice for an escape.
It was abandoned. No one officially lived there, and those that did so unofficially numbered no more than a few hundred outcasts and scavengers picking over the well-plundered ruins left behind by Krae’s evacuation. Much of the city had fallen into ruin, but the forest had left the great expanse of the city’s spaceport mostly intact. The spaceport was inland from the rest of the city, a series of great rockcrete circles punctuated with control towers, maintenance hangars and refuelling stations. All the automated functions had long ceased but it could still be used to launch or land a spacecraft, albeit one which needed a more competent crew than the average.
All one needed was the spaceship.
Fifty minutes after Commander Tchepikov had given his order, contact with the Raging Sky was lost.
Legienstrasse was a creature who planned ahead. Not just for one eventuality, but many, so the groundwork was laid for several potential plans to deal with all the likely turns of fate. With every move, several redundant plots were left unfinished, their preparations unused. They were not wasted. Their existence had helped make success a certainty. They had played their part.
The King of Crows had been adapted from Opis’s folklore, as had several other useful legends and customs. Masquerading as the King of Crows had turned out to be the most expedient method of escaping Khezal, but it had not got Legienstrasse all the way to the northern part of the continent where preparations had been made to depart Opis quietly and invisibly. Instead, Legienstrasse had activated a fallback plan. It was almost as good as the previous several options, with the only drawback being that it could not be accomplished entirely beyond the notice of the Imperial forces that had come to Opis to find Legienstrasse.
The Raging Sky had been compromised some decades before Inquisitor Kekrops had begun the crusade that led him to Opis. It was an armoured troop carrier, one of several in the sector battlefleet that, due to the need to transport men and materiel quickly to an embattled planet such as Opis, would certainly be used by Imperial forces if they attacked the planet. Because of this the Raging Sky, and a number of other ships, were seeded with cultists who believed that they were doing the bidding of the Emperor who had been reborn in the form of an infant girl. This cult had been created by Legienstrasse and a sect of useful psykers, native to Opis, that she had gathered to help her in her exile. Visions were transmitted into the minds of trainee crewmen who were then placed on the Raging Sky to let their cult grow and recruit further, always with frequent visions sent by Legienstrasse to ensure they emphasised the need for secrecy and loyalty above all else.
On some ships, the cult (which was known by various names, including the Children of the Later God and the Eternal Stair) was purged by the commissars of the sector fleet. On others the cult died away, its members poached by other cults which had developed among the battlefleet’s crews independent of Legienstrasse’s influence. But Legienstrasse knew that on some ships it would survive, and on the Raging Sky, it did.
To Legienstrasse, it was a message sent through arcane channels to the psykers now fighting alongside the forces opposing Operation Starfall. To the brothers and sisters of the Thirteen Pillars, as the cult named itself on the Raging Sky, it was the apocalypse.
They had waited for years for the day to come when the voice of the infant Goddess-Emperor spoke to them more directly than ever before, and told them to undertake their sacred mission. They had known since the cult’s foundation that their task would see them taking over the ship and landing it in the spaceport at Krae, there to witness the apotheosis of the Goddess-Emperor as she arose and took her place on the throne of mankind.
The Master of the Watch, a mere initiate of the cult but the one who held the highest shipboard rank, was given the task of beginning the great work. He drew his dress laspistol on the bridge and shot the ship’s captain in the back of the head. His second target was the ship’s commissar, who he shot several times in the chest, fatally, before the security battalion troops on the bridge finally reacted and martyred the Master of the Watch in a hail of shotgun blasts.
This was the catalyst for the rest of the great work. The mess was sealed off with two hundred and fifty crew inside, and the whole deck was decompressed to hard vacuum. The most difficult task was to take the engines, where the tough engine-gangs had resisted infiltration by the cult. The devotees of the Thirteen Pillars broke open the armoury, shot down the gangers who tried to rush them and offered the rest the option of serving the cult or dying.
The bridge held out for an hour before las-cutters were hauled up from the engine decks and used to cut through the ceiling. The short and bloody gun battle left twice as many cultists as officers dead, but it did not matter how many were made martyrs as long as the great work was completed.
The Goddess-Emperor smiled on them as the Thirteen Pillars, named after the commandments that Legienstrasse’s psykers had implanted in them, took over the controls of the Raging Sky and aimed it towards the cloudy surface of Opis.
‘There’s the ship,’ said Scout-Sergeant Orfos, pointing at the glimmer among the dark-grey clouds.
Lysander followed the Scout’s gaze. From the top of the apartment block he had an excellent view of Krae. The northern quadrant of the city was a patchwork of exposed rockcrete and tumbledown buildings, broken up by banks of dense coniferous forest. Mossy gulleys criss-crossed the ruins, marking where the city’s grid of canals and sunken roadways had run. Here and there were hints of the city’s past – an equestrian statue crowning a half-fallen dome, a series of pillars that once held up a long-vanished glass roof, a great stone book that had once dominated the entrance to a vast gallery and now lay half-buried in greenery. A few of the landmarks were still visible – the Illuminated Gate, with its marble blocks cracked and its intricately painted scenes peeling and defaced. A trio of grand towers, the Three Princesses, once centres of philosophy and now lopsided death-traps due to collapse at any moment. The huge artificial waterfall, the Descent of Dreams, reduced by time to a dry stone shelf hung with straggling vines.
Above the city, Lysander followed the path of the ship towards the grey circles of the spaceport. ‘Our quarry does not disappoint,’ he said. ‘The timing will be close. What of Imperial forces?’
‘Enriaan reports armour making all haste along the city’s north-western outskirts,’ said Orfos. ‘They’ll get to the spaceport before we do.’
‘And the enemy?’
‘Not yet. Most likely they’re already there.’
Gorgythion on board the Gilded Pyre had detected the presence of surface-to-air sensors as soon as the Imperial Fists and Assassins had breached the perimeter of Krae. With the whole strike force loaded onto just two Thunderhawks, Lysander could not risk continuing to fly in case Krae�
�s air defences had been activated by Legienstrasse’s allies. The Imperial Fists would make the rest of the way on foot, about nine kilometres of urban ruin. Lysander had Squad Kirav, Septuron’s assault squad and Ctesiphon’s tactical squad, Orfos and his Scouts, Librarian Deiphobus and Champion Ucalegon. That was the whole Imperial Fists force on Opis, save for the two Thunderhawks, the Gilded Pyre and Peril Swift now grounded at the city’s outskirts, and Vindicator Squadron Sthenelus which was still embattled deep in Khezal.
Orfos offered Lysander a pair of magnoculars. Lysander took them and peered through them in the direction of the spaceport. No sign of enemies, but lights burned among the buildings clustered around the landing pads. He scanned along the city’s outskirts and picked up the cloud of dust kicked up by the engines and tracks of the Imperial Guard speeding towards the battle.
‘If we are wrong,’ said Lysander, ‘if this is a ruse, we might never find her.’
‘We are not wrong,’ said Lady Syncella. Lysander turned to see her standing behind him on the rooftop, her dress fluttering in the wind. It was cold, and the dress was rather tattered after the Blood Eyrie, but she had not changed it.
‘You sound certain,’ said Lysander.
‘We have calculated every action that Legienstrasse might take,’ said Syncella. ‘This is one of them. She was foiled in her attempt to escape as the King of Crows, and she has not failed to get what she wants for many decades. It is an unfamiliar feeling for her. She is desperate. She has called off her longer-term plans and used one that will get her off this planet quickly.’
‘When we reach the spaceport,’ said Lysander, ‘I need to know that you and Agent Skult will fight as our allies. Not as a third party. As our allies under my orders. Can you promise me that, Lady Syncella?’
‘When it comes to open warfare, Lysander, I have no complaints about deferring to a First Captain of the Adeptus Astartes. I request that you allow myself to take the kill.’
Lysander smiled without humour. ‘Of course. The Assassin must have her kill. Even if Legienstrasse was dead, it is a dishonour not to take her head with your own hand.’
