Betrayer

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Enough, girl. You’re still alive. The ship’s still in one piece.’

  She stepped from the protection of Skane, Esca and Kargos, until she was right before the Triarii, staring up at him with narrowed eyes. Her head reached his chestplate. Barely.

  ‘We lost over two thousand crew to the Thirteenth Legion’s bolters, you stupid whoreson. The Ultramarines knew where to board us, and where to strike. Two thousand men and women dead because you wanted to chase glory down there in the dust. Not slave-deck dregs and war fodder, Delvarus. Trained, vital crew from the command and primary enginarium decks. We sustained enough internal damage over several systems that the Conqueror won’t function fully until she’s been drydocked for a month or more. Am I making myself clear, you arrogant swine? You have your orders. Now get out of my sight.’

  For a moment, it looked as though he’d refuse. In the end, Delvarus inclined his head in a nod, saluted her with a fist over his heart, and led his men away.

  ‘I’m going back to the bridge,’ she told Esca. ‘Thank you for doing… whatever it is you did. With the bolt shells, I mean.’

  The Librarian bowed, his ravaged and restitched face in its usual hideous calm. ‘Hunt well, captain.’

  She looked around the battle-damaged crowd of World Eaters around her, with their weapons in their hands. How many people had died with a scene just like this as the last thing they ever saw?

  ‘Thank you, all of you.’ They each nodded, only dispersing once she walked away.

  On one of the gantries overlooking the hangar deck, a figure three times the height of a legionary stood in contemplative silence, still the way only statues and corpses can be, for he was a little of both. He watched and learned, and in knowing, he began to plan.

  Perhaps sensing something, the Codicier Esca turned and looked up at the secondary loading platform, where Lhorke stood alone. He raised a hand in greeting to the former Legion Master.

  Lhorke returned it, raising his iron fist.

  For a time, the Chaplain lay in the gloom, recovering from the trauma of transit. His abiding memory was of a sun’s death, shrieking its radiation across the void, painting a whole world with poison. Despite the chill bathing his body, the thought brought forth a sense of contentment. It was good to serve. It was even better to serve well.

  He lay there, with his heartbeat serving as a metronome for the passing of time. When the shakes abated, he rose to his feet, casting cursory glances over his undamaged armour. Even his parchment scrolls were intact. An omen?

  Yes. Surely.

  A good omen.

  The grilled deck clanked beneath his boots as he made his way through the arched halls of the Fidelitas Lex. The first menials he saw were two slaves in Legion tunics, whispering in an alcove, sharing smuggled power packs. The trivialities of mortal life and the human communities aboard the warship meant nothing to him. Even so, he was polite and reserved. The application of violence to reach one’s ends should be used as a scalpel, not a bludgeon.

  They heard his armour, his bootsteps, and tried to run. He stopped them with his measured, considerate voice. No sense harming them. All he needed was the date.

  ‘Wait,’ he asked them. ‘What is the flagship’s chronometric count?’

  They told him, and he felt the press of tension ebbing. Calth was no more than a week ago. Good. Very good.

  It was evidently their turn to speak, for the two cowering slaves abased themselves, praying to him as the messenger of the gods. One of them risked a beating by touching the holy Word inked onto parchment and bound to the Dark Apostle’s armour.

  He let them live unharmed. He even blessed them in the names of the Four, and wished them long and faithful lives.

  ‘Thank you, great one,’ whispered the first.

  ‘May the gods bless you,’ the second wept. ‘My Lord Erebus.’

  TWELVE

  A Legion’s Leaders

  My Brother, My Enemy

  Salt the Earth

  The four gathered together in the Peregrinus Basilica, with the three coming straight from Armatura to join the one who had prayed among the stars. The fleet drifted above them, spreading out in high orbit now the battle was over. Debris littered the void, still a danger to navigation, and the armada’s captains pulled their vessels back to avoid collisions with the graveyard of Ultramarines hulks.

  Lorgar was out of his armour, clad in a hooded red robe – a simple garment, woven from the silk of Colchisian desert worms, sporting no decoration or embellishment. The priests from before the tempestuous faith wars of Lorgar’s homeworld had worn something similar. The hood was raised, leaving his features in soft shadow.

  Angron, Khârn and Argel Tal still wore their battle armour – each suit emitting the unhealthy crackles and fuzzes of abused servos. The knee joint of the primarch’s bronze gladiatorial wargear sparked when he put weight on it. Khârn’s white armour was stained grey by dust and dirt, with frequent splotches of gore marking the ceramite in placidly hypnotic dappling. Argel Tal’s armour bore the same bruises, though the holy scarlet hid the damage far better. He kept moving his arm, bending the elbow with a nasty grind of fibre-bundle cabling, to keep the joint from seizing.

  The formality seen so often in other Legions was absent, here. On a golden plaque by the chamber’s black iron altar, Colchisian runes stated in elegant script: ‘Here all stand equal beneath the gaze of the gods.’

  Lorgar passed among the bookshelves, letting his fingers stroke over the spines of the leatherbound books in their neat rows.

  Argel Tal and Khârn shared a look; Lorgar’s hand was pale skin turned golden by runic tattoos once more. No sign of the plasma burns marked his flesh.

  ‘Twenty-six worlds have fallen,’ said the Bearer of the Word to his brother, his son, his nephew. ‘Armatura was one of the last. The others, it seems, can be accounted as the warp delaying our fleets. But the numbers begin to reach us now and this is where we stand. Twenty-six worlds slain, their populations butchered, their pain manifesting as prayer in the Empyrean.’

  Angron glanced up, his bloodshot eyes not soothed by the dark, nor by the slow dance of the two Legions’ ships above.

  ‘What of Calth?’

  ‘Calth makes twenty-seven,’ Lorgar amended.

  ‘No.’ The World Eater’s struggle to concentrate was like a war being waged across his ruined face. A war fought in twitches and tics and slow, low growls. ‘No, I mean the storm. You said there was a warp storm at Calth. It isn’t spreading like you promised.’

  Lorgar continued reading the books’ spines as he walked. ‘The song hasn’t yet reached its crescendo, but clearly the analogy is lost on you. Imagine instead that all of this slaughter as a monument. A pyramid. It won’t be complete until the capstone is placed. Only then will it point to the stars.’

  Angron grunted in annoyance. Khârn sighed.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ Lorgar chuckled. ‘In terms a child would understand? Everything we do here reverberates through the warp, but a veil still divides our realities. A ritualised supplication will release the energies we are harnessing, opening the way for the warp to spill through into the material realm. At Calth, Erebus and Kor Phaeron killed a sun to serve as their ritual’s capstone. When enough of the Five Hundred Worlds burn, I will fashion a capstone of my own. But it must be much, much grander than the slow death of Calth.’

  He held up a healed finger, silencing their questions before they could be voiced. ‘Don’t ask what, for I don’t yet know. A death of monumentally symbolic importance, most likely.’

  Angron grinned at the idea. ‘How casually you speak of destruction now. Horus would be proud.’

  Lorgar’s reply was a polite smile.

  ‘What next, my lord?’ asked Argel Tal. His dual voices behaved strangely in the cathedral. The near-human voice, resonant and low, echoed around the chamber. The da
emon’s purring hiss did not.

  ‘We divide the fleet again. Once we’ve recovered our forces and materiel from the surface of Armatura, and once the population’s remains are consecrated according to the patterns of the Pantheon, we will move on to the next world. But we will no longer need this armada. The Blessed Lady and the Trisagion are fleets unto themselves and no world in all of Ultramar is defended like Armatura. With the war-world dead, we are free to move in smaller fleets.’

  ‘And then?’ Angron pushed.

  ‘And then, my brother, we will simply do it all over again.’

  The World Eater clacked his teeth, biting the air. ‘With your king-ships and our two Legions, we could simply kill Macragge.’

  ‘True,’ Lorgar conceded. ‘Though I’d ask why that would even matter. The XIII recruits from everywhere across the Five Hundred Worlds. Macragge’s death would be meaningless symbolism. There’s also the matter of Guilliman himself. He already sails the stars in pursuit of us, you know. My astropathic choir sings of Calth’s retribution, riding the warp’s wind.’

  Khârn finally spoke up. ‘Killing Macragge will do nothing. It is merely one world among the Five Hundred.

  ‘But it’s a symbol,’ said Argel Tal. ‘I agree with Lord Angron. We should annihilate Macragge next.’

  ‘It’s a waste of time,’ Khârn replied. ‘A symbol of what? What will its death prove that Calth and Armatura have not? Calth was a symbol of hope for the future – Armatura was their most heavily defended bastion-world for training and recruitment. We’ve proved any point we needed to make, and smashed any symbols that matter. If we need to kill populated worlds, then so be it. We have thirty fleets laying waste to Ultramar, let’s not exalt Macragge as anything more than a distant globe of uninspiring rock.’

  Angron looked back to Lorgar, a sliver of drool marking the edge of his mouth. ‘Just cast your damn spell,’ he told his brother. ‘Shroud Ultramar in the chaos you promised. Spread the storm and be done with this foolish magic.’

  Lorgar winced. ‘If you ever say the words spell or magic in my presence again, Angron, I may have to kill you for unforgivable ignorance. We are dealing with the metaphysics that underpin reality – the very foundations of creation – not the capering of fools conjuring coins from behind children’s ears.’

  The World Eaters primarch pulled a book from the closest shelf and fanned the pages, not reading a word. ‘We are dealing,’ he said flatly, ‘with foolish mysticism.’

  Lorgar’s irritated smile was visible beneath his hood. ‘Listen and learn.’

  He spoke a single word, scarcely more than a whisper, but it threw Angron and the others from their feet with a hurricane-blast of wind. Three bookshelves exploded, quite literally blasting apart in a storm of splintered wood and powdered parchment. Khârn managed to arrest his skidding tumble by jamming his fingertips between two marble flagstones. Argel Tal and Angron crashed past him, their armour shedding sparks as they scraped over the cream-coloured stone.

  The wind from nowhere vanished as suddenly as it arrived. Khârn was first to his feet.

  ‘I-I know that tongue,’ he said to Lorgar.

  ‘I doubt that, Khârn,’ replied the primarch with surprising gentleness.

  ‘Argel Tal spoke it,’ he said, ‘on Armatura.’

  ‘Ah. Then you do know something of its power.’ Lorgar waited until his brother and son rejoined them from across the chamber. ‘That, my brother, is what I mean. Reality obeys certain laws. Gravity. Electromagnetism. The nuclear forces. Cause and effect. If I breathe in, my body converts air into life, unless I am too weak or diseased for the process to continue. There are millions of laws that are unknown to all but the most enlightened. Magnus knows many more than even I, but I have learned enough. It is not magic.’ He fairly sneered the word. ‘It is manipulation of the infinite potential that is the source of all realities. A blending of components from the universe of flesh and blood and the divine realm of pure aether and emotion.’

  Angron was silent several moments, his brutal face troubled.

  ‘That noise you made,’ he said finally. ‘That “word”. What was it?’

  ‘It is for the best that I do not speak it again,’ said Lorgar, smiling sardonically. ‘The books I just destroyed were very valuable, and I’d rather not lose more of them.’

  Seeing his brother’s expression, Lorgar’s smile became more sincere. ‘Some words and sounds shake the foundations of reality. For example, the concept and sound of a hundred and one blind men choking and gasping as they all drown at the same time serves as the name of a certain daemonic princeling. Compressing that noise and its meaning into a single sound can be enough to draw that entity’s attention and render it easier to summon. The word I just spoke was… similar. I see the question in your eyes, and yes, I can teach you this tongue.’

  Khârn spoke without meaning to. ‘That’s how you’ve healed yourself.’

  Lorgar nodded, though he didn’t pull the hood back. ‘It is. The pain, however, was indescribable. Were I mortal in the usual sense I’d be dead from the attempt alone. Reknitting skin and muscle meat is easy enough in principle, but everything comes at a price.’

  Lorgar took the tome from Angron and placed it back on one of the surviving bookshelves.

  ‘We are about to be interrupted.’

  They all turned as the great double doors opened. The figure that entered wore the ashen black of the XVII Legion’s Chaplains and carried a silver crozius in one hand. His helm was held in the crook of his other arm, leaving his scholarly, solemn features bare. Helmetless, he couldn’t entirely hide his surprise when he saw who stood with his primarch.

  ‘My lord,’ said the newcomer, bowing deeply to Lorgar.

  ‘Erebus.’ Lorgar beckoned him closer. ‘The suffering of Calth’s sun and the millions who died on the world itself rings through the warp. The secret song heralded your deeds.’

  ‘I am pleased, lord.’ Erebus offered Angron a respectful bow; Khârn and Argel Tal received glances and nods. ‘Calth succeeded beyond all expectation.’

  Lorgar bared a thin crescent of porcelain-white teeth in a subtle smile. ‘Success beyond expectation? Truly? Then I would ask, if this is the case, why does the warp’s melody not sing of such an outcome?’

  Erebus’s stern eyes flickered to the others gathered by his primarch. ‘We should speak, my lord.’

  ‘We are speaking, Erebus.’

  Again, the flickered glance. ‘Alone, sire. What we speak of may not be for… the uninitiated.’

  Lorgar smiled, the expression as paternal and patient as any living soul had ever been and could ever be. ‘Just speak, First Chaplain.’

  They all saw it. The moment Erebus stood straighter, guarding himself, sensing something was wrong. Angron grinned at the warrior-priest’s discomfort. Khârn and Argel Tal stood in resolute silence.

  ‘The Ruinstorm is born,’ Erebus stated.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Lorgar. ‘But tell me of this grand success you spoke of. And where is your ship, Erebus? Where is Destiny’s Hand?’ Lorgar looked heavenwards, where the fleet lay at rest in the black sky. ‘Strange that I cannot see it.’

  Erebus smiled, his thin lips paling as they pressed together. ‘I believe she sails with Kor Phaeron and the Infidus Imperator.’

  ‘Of course. And Kor Phaeron no doubt orbits Calth in victory, yes? He has sacrificed my brother Guilliman to the Pantheon, has he not?’

  ‘Sire–’

  ‘Calm, Erebus. I only wish to share this moment of triumph with you. So. Calth has fallen, the Ultramarines are finished and Guilliman is dead. That was, after all, the expectation of success that you claim to have exceeded. So you are to be commended. I’ve been worried that you’d failed to kill my brother, lost half the fleet I granted you to an Ultramarines counter-attack, and abandoned tens of thousands of my sons and mortal servants
on Calth’s irradiated surface while you fled into the Maelstrom.’

  Erebus swallowed and said nothing.

  ‘But that would be leaving them to die,’ Lorgar continued. ‘Never to be reinforced. Never to be recovered. All those Gal Vorbak who spent months of their lives fasting, praying, scarring their flesh in preparation for a chance to taste the Divine Blood… They’d be lost, wouldn’t they?’

  Angron was chuckling now, taking a leering amusement in the whole scene.

  ‘Sire…’ Erebus began.

  Lorgar raised a hand. ‘I don’t blame you, Erebus. Have no fear. You achieved the base level of success that was required of you.’

  ‘My lord, Kor Phaeron calls for reinforcement.’

  The primarch turned his head away, the silk cloth of his hood rippling gently. It took several moments for Khârn to realise Lorgar was laughing.

  ‘Reinforcement,’ he chuckled. ‘The very idea.’

  ‘The Ultramarines are pursuing our survivors.’

  Lorgar returned his gaze to his son’s rigid face.

  ‘I’m sure they are. That’s what happens when you run away – your enemies give chase. He is dreaming if he believes I’ll whore ships and lives away to save him from a fate he worked so hard to earn. When next you speak with him, convey my regards and inform him that my lack of sympathy is the price of his failure. You’re dismissed now, Erebus.’

  ‘Sire,’ Erebus said for the third time, bolstering his resolve. ‘We still have much to discuss. What of Signus Prime?’

  ‘That name again.’ Lorgar’s gold-flecked eyes narrowed. ‘I care nothing for Signus Prime. It is a fool’s errand.’

  Erebus’s solemn confidence reasserted itself in his half-smile. ‘The Warmaster and I are confident–’

  ‘Erebus,’ Lorgar interrupted with a sigh. ‘You will not kill the Angel. You will not enlighten his Legion. Do you think you know my own brother better than I?’