Betrayer

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  She could easily imagine just how Khârn had improvised, no doubt taking a hammer to the skulls of the mica dragons in the Legion’s Museum of Conquest, and stealing the teeth for use in the weapon’s resurrection. She was willing to wager a year’s pay that was what he’d done.

  Of course, that triggered a darker thought – one she and her officers had lamented many times over shots of whatever spirit served as a nightcap in the officers’ mess. Their pay, such as it had been, came from Terra. Rebellion had its downsides.

  Vel-Kheredar walked ahead, turning to face them and walking backwards without effort or concern.

  ‘You wished to speak with me over matters of vessel repair and weapon birth?’ The tri-eyes clicked closed and back open, in imitation of a rare blink. ‘This is uncharacteristically tedious of you, Captain Sarrin.’

  She gave him her best smile, which was a weapon indeed. ‘You’ve been with the primarch from the beginning.’

  ‘Affirmative. In the interests of perfect clarity, I was disappointed at my appointment to the Twelfth Legion flagship. I was in contestation for assignment to the Seventh or Tenth Legions, but Kelbor-Hal – blessings upon his sacred wisdom – chose to the contrary.’

  Lhorke grunted something as he followed. Some echo of Legion rivalry, perhaps. Lotara kept looking up at the backward-walking Archmagos Veneratus. The mustering hangar was tomb-quiet, but for the sounds of the trio’s passing.

  ‘You were with the first surgical team that examined Angron’s implants, all those decades ago.’

  ‘Affirmative.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  Even without looking, Vel-Kheredar effortlessly paced around a stack of crates. ‘My findings are easily accessible in the fleet’s archives.’

  ‘I’ve read them,’ Lotara nodded. ‘But there’s no mention of any degenerative effects the implants might have.’

  The tech-lord watched her in silence for several ticks of the augmetic metronomical machine that ran in place of his human heart. When he spoke, it was with reluctance.

  ‘You are unsanctioned.’

  She started, as if slapped. ‘I’m what?’

  Vel-Kheredar didn’t answer. He diverted his attention to Lhorke. ‘You were present at the time, Legion Master. You are aware of what I found.’

  The Contemptor thudded along the deck, shoulders rolling side to side. ‘The archives say nothing of degeneration. But what I’m aware of, Archmagos, is that each time I rise from slumber, the primarch is worse.’

  The priest inclined his head, but it didn’t seem to be in agreement. ‘Worse is a value measurement laden with relativistic emotional perspective.’

  They passed beneath the staring eyes of the Warhound army, each head lowered as if to scent their trail as they passed, or wipe them from existence with a sweep of their weaponised arms.

  Lotara wouldn’t let Vel-Kheredar shake her loose. ‘The World Eaters whisper it. Khârn has said it a dozen times or more, these last ten years. The records of compliances in the last century show a steady increase in our own casualties, as well as civilian losses. How many tactical briefings has Angron left before finishing, racked with head pains he never admits to? How many times has he failed to follow battle plans, only to lead the Legion in a frontal assault against the densest resistance, heedless of our own losses?’

  She almost glared at the slender priest. ‘Tell me, in the context of the last twenty years, that he’s not getting worse. I’ve been with the fleet a fraction of the time you have, and I can see it clearly.’

  Vel-Kheredar emitted an annoyed blurt of code. ‘I can confess to observing a degree of undesirably erratic behaviour in Lord Angron’s actions.’

  ‘Oh, stop being so damn vague,’ she scowled. ‘Did you find anything in the Nails that suggested this… degeneration?’

  ‘You are unsanctioned.’

  Her scowl deepened. ‘Will the Nails kill him?’

  ‘You are unsanctioned.’

  Lhorke emitted a vox-growl of his own. ‘Is Angron dying?’

  ‘You are unsanctioned.’

  ‘I’m flag-captain of the World Eaters fleet, and Lhorke is the former lord of the Legion. How can we be unsanctioned? We have the highest clearance.’

  ‘With respect, captain, you do not. Neither of you does.’

  She breathed in through her teeth. ‘How can we get sanctioned?’

  He hesitated that time. ‘You are unsanctioned.’

  ‘Who ordered you to keep your silence?’

  He answered immediately. ‘The Omnissiah.’

  Lotara hissed a triumphant Yes. Now they were getting somewhere. It wasn’t about getting the right answers, it was about asking the right questions. Vel-Kheredar’s orders were no doubt extremely, evasively specific. He wanted to talk, but a thin line of direct obedience needed to be… danced around.

  ‘The Emperor–’ she began.

  ‘Correction,’ stated Vel-Kheredar. ‘The Omnissiah, avatar of the Machine-God.’

  ‘Fine, fine. But the Emp– sorry, Omnissiah, demanded you sequester some of your findings?’

  ‘You are unsanctioned.’

  ‘We can guess,’ Lhorke rumbled.

  ‘What I can’t guess,’ Lotara mused, ‘is why?’

  ‘Easy enough. Morale within the Twelfth. We were a broken Legion back then, one of the last to find our lord. Bad enough that we were burdened with the only primarch to fail in conquering his homeworld. If we’d also discovered he was doomed to die before the Crusade’s end, it would have annihilated what little morale remained.’

  Lotara looked up at Vel-Kheredar. ‘Is that why?’

  ‘You are unsanctioned,’ he said.

  ‘Were you absolutely certain the Nails would cause degeneration?’

  ‘You are unsanctioned.’

  ‘Well… was it just a hypothesis that you didn’t want leaked?’

  Vel-Kheredar’s tri-eyes whirred as they refocused. ‘What I did or did not wish leaked is irrelevant. My personal preferences play no part in the equation, captain.’

  ‘The Emperor, then. When you reported to him, did you know degeneration was a certainty, or was it just a possibility?’

  ‘You are unsanctioned.’

  ‘And the Emperor ordered you into silence.’

  Another hesitation. ‘He did. I defer to the wisdom of the Machine-God.’

  Lotara glanced up at Lhorke by her side. ‘Now we know.’

  The Dreadnought looked down at her. ‘Nothing we couldn’t have guessed.’

  She gave him a look. ‘Not all of us were walking and talking a hundred years ago, Lhorke. The fact the mystery exists is all the proof I need. This is the reason Russ came for you, on the Night of the Wolf.’

  ‘One of many reasons.’

  She let that slide. ‘Archmagos. Will the World Eaters implants kill them in the same way?’ She licked her lips, feeling them suddenly dry. ‘Will they kill Khârn?’

  The robed priest seemed distracted, his eye lenses panning up one of the motionless Titans as it stood ready to walk again.

  ‘Their implants are primitive copies of the malignant original,’ he said. ‘They erode stability and damage the subjects’ capacity to reason. They impinge on higher brain function by rewriting emotional responses. However, they are not fatal – not degenerative in the terminal sense. The most important aspect of their implantation that they share with the original Nails is that they cannot be removed without killing the host, or – at best – inflicting severe and irreparable brain damage. But they are not, as you say, likely to kill Khârn. Or indeed any World Eater.’

  Captain Lotara Sarrin punched a fist into her open palm. ‘The things you learn,’ she smiled, ‘with a little curiosity.’

  Vel-Kheredar click-ticked in amused disapproval. ‘There is an ancient Terran proverb regarding c
uriosity, flag-captain. It involves felines and murder, thus I confess it makes little sense to me.’

  ‘I have a better one: “The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance”.’

  ‘Intriguing.’ The priest nodded. ‘A sentiment close to my heart. Who spoke those words?’

  ‘One of the Thousand Sons, apparently. Khârn quoted it to me once. I liked how it sounded.’

  Vel-Kheredar returned to his personal chambers, craving the respite of solitude. Iron gargoyles leered down from the high walls, and his menials scattered before him, preparing the forge-fires in case he wished to work.

  And he did, of course. He always wished to work. His chamber was more a foundry than anything else. His stalk-legs clanked on the deck as he moved to the workbench facing the panoramic window.

  ‘Remove shields,’ he commanded. Activated by his voice, the three-metre-thick armour plating blocking the windows started its laborious withdrawal. At first there was nothing but a slit of burning brightness, widening as the armour retracted. Soon enough, the warp’s boiling, thrashing light played havoc with the chamber’s shadows. Angels and devils danced across the walls, most cast by the leering gargoyles carved into the architecture. Most, not all.

  Vel-Kheredar stared into the chaotic depths of the immaterium, occasionally letting his three eyes take picts for later reference. Though a baseline human would likely have been driven to madness by the sight, he did this often, and found the results hauntingly quaint. In many of the still images, he thought he could make out human faces in the murk. They were screaming, always screaming.

  Vel-Kheredar set to work. He reached for the blade Gorechild with one hand, drawing his tools closer with the other.

  But distraction reigned. The mortal captain’s questions drifted through his mind, looping like a corrupted playback.

  He’d never actually met the Master of Mankind, but the Palatine Aquila had marked the sealed scroll handed to him by Malcador the Sigillite. A message from the Emperor’s own hand. He had it still – for who could ever disregard such a relic? – stored in his encrypted safe.

  He kept faith with the secrets he was told to carry, though he never really saw what harm they might inflict. It was only a supposition, anyway. Back then, any hint of cerebral cortex degeneration was nothing more than an untested hypothesis.

  He’d made an educated estimation, though. He’d made it while the primarch was still rendered somnolent by Malcador’s touch, and after the XII Legion’s Techmarines and Apothecaries had been ordered away. That made it Vel-Kheredar’s turn, and he’d done his examinations over the course of seven hours, all under the Sigillite’s watchful eyes.

  ‘I cannot be certain,’ he’d confessed finally to the man who was somehow both ancient and ageless at once. ‘But I can make an estimation based on the little data available.’

  Angron had grunted, shifting in his sleep upon the surgical slab. Vel-Kheredar had flinched back, in an unwelcome and accidental display of unease.

  Yet time was proving him correct. The primarch was, to use Lotara Sarrin’s crudely effective word, worse. Less human – if he could ever have been called such – in his responses, and increasingly slaved, emotionally and physically, to the Nails. A slow degeneration, slow enough that the erosion could be ignored for the first few decades. It had been easy to deny the Wolves, to refuse them and to fight them. Things weren’t quite so noticeable then as they’d since become. Deterioration set in quicker in the following decades, but the spread of the Crusade fleets made management of resources and punishing the wayward something of a fool’s dream. Reports didn’t always make it back to Terra. With thousands of expeditionary fleets, it mattered little.

  And now they were all at war. The slow erosion had become a catastrophic decay, as the primarch’s rages burned hotter and lasted longer now he was truly free of the Emperor’s leash.

  Vel-Kheredar held no grudge against the one he called Omnissiah. Ultimately, whether he truly was the avatar of the Machine-God or merely an extraordinarily knowledgeable false prophet, it mattered little. Horus and Kelbor-Hal had declared him a false messiah, and as always in matters of empire-building, politics and military power came before the truth. They weren’t mighty because they were right, they were right because they were mighty. History would be, as it always had been, written by the victors. In this case, it wasn’t just history at stake, but the metaphysical truth: victory determined just who was divinely born and who was a false god.

  The Archmagos deployed secondary arms from beneath his robes, letting them unlock and uncoil from where they’d formed his ribs. Each of these new hands had thin, prehensile filament-tendrils, much more adept at finer machine work than his too-human fingers.

  Gorechild. Every weapon had a soul, and this one’s was a shrieking, wrathful thing trapped in the toothless blade.

  It didn’t pain him to violate XII Legion tradition regarding the ill luck of abandoned weapons, for two simple reasons. Firstly, they broke their own laws all too often in the heat of a battle. Necessity was forever the bane of tradition.

  Secondly, he didn’t believe their foolish superstitions for a moment. He liked Khârn, though. The Eighth Captain was a difficult soul to dislike.

  Bathed in the hellish light of the Sea of Souls, the Archmagos Veneratus – lord of a city-state on distant, sacred Mars – worked alone on an axe that had been cast aside by a genetic demigod. He cast occasional glances to where the sketched plans for a new weapon lay on the edge of his desk. A great black blade, to be forged for a primarch’s hands.

  They would reach Nuceria soon. May whatever gods were true have mercy on the souls that were there when the fleet arrived.

  FIFTEEN

  Warnings

  Brotherhood

  The ninth time the Conqueror translated from the warp without warning, Khârn received word from Argel Tal aboard the Lex – a short-range vox-pulse, ship-to-ship – requesting that he come aboard the Word Bearers flagship at once.

  Intrigued, he’d done exactly that. Kargos had wanted to come, as had Skane, but Khârn refused permission to both of them. They had enough difficulty getting on with the Word Bearers at the best of times, and with tensions running hot after Armatura’s cities finally fell, it was anything but the best of times.

  What had really taken Khârn aback was that Esca, of all his warriors, had also asked to accompany him. The Codicier had seemed hesitant and worried, but that was nothing new where Esca was concerned.

  ‘I sense something foul aboard the Lex,’ he’d confessed.

  ‘That is no way to speak of our brother Legion,’ Khârn had said with a tired smile. The Nails gave a half-hearted pulse, as if punishing him for trying to enjoy a moment without an axe in his hand. He knew, objectively, they didn’t function like that, and it was almost certainly the Codicier’s presence that was aggravating his implants. Even so, it was hard to deny the coincidence.

  ‘I know we are far from close,’ Esca said, ‘but you are still my commanding officer. Be careful, captain.’

  Khârn hadn’t replied. He’d not known what to say.

  So he went alone. He went alone and listened to Argel Tal make a case for madness.

  Khârn remained aboard the Lex as both flagships tore their way back into the warp, but with their destinations the same, it meant little.

  The brothers spoke together in the foul serenity of the Lex’s winding corridors, which were forever home to chanting voices carrying through the ship’s metal bones. Sometimes Khârn heard weeping around a corner ahead, only to find the passageway empty when they reached it. Sometimes it was screaming, or earnest hymns sung in a language he couldn’t understand. Argel Tal seemed to notice none of it, and if he did, it never bothered him.

  Khârn used the edge of his boot to nudge an abandoned lasgun, left to rust on the deck. Half the corridors they travelled through were thick with detr
itus and the mess of the foulest inhabitation. In several, they’d already stepped over corpses. Most showed the marks of the knife-wounds that had ended their lives, but Khârn had also seen signs of strangulation and gunshots.

  ‘Why has the Lex become such a den of filth?’ he asked.

  ‘Most of our ships look like this now. Too many new, faithful souls coming aboard. Their filth and waste spreads, as does sickness in the lower decks, where the cultists live herded together like beasts.’

  Khârn heard the sneer in his battle-brother’s voice, despite the fact that Argel Tal’s features remained hidden behind his helm. Khârn shook his head.

  ‘It’s a disgrace.’

  Argel Tal nodded. ‘Maybe so, but it’s difficult to manage. Our fleet’s holds are swollen with faithful mortals. Once we reach Nuceria, we’ll transfer the remaining crew and slave-castes to the Trisagion. Lord Aurelian wishes it to serve as his new flagship.’

  Khârn cursed in Nagrakali. Nuceria. That was a host of fresh trouble just waiting to dawn.

  ‘What of the Lex?’ he asked.

  ‘I believe Lorgar means to make it a gift,’ the Word Bearer replied.

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘To me.’

  They walked in silence a little longer, listening to the sounds of the ship. ‘It’s either cursed or haunted,’ said Khârn, trying to smile.

  ‘Both,’ confirmed Argel Tal with weary seriousness. ‘Thank you for staying aboard. I need your blade by my side for this.’

  The World Eater fought to keep the concern from his face. The one thing Argel Tal loathed above all was pity.

  ‘You cannot mean to try it,’ Khârn said. ‘It can’t be done, not that it matters. The intent itself borders upon depravity.’

  The Word Bearer gave a grunt that could mean everything at once or nothing at all.

  Khârn carefully kicked another dead body out of the way. Clad in rags, it flopped against the wall with a dull thud. The entire ship stank of the freshly dead and the sickened living – it wasn’t quite the ripe scents of decay or disease, but carried elements of both.