Betrayer

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Corruption. The word came to him unbidden. That’s what Khârn could smell. Corruption.

  ‘A few more decks,’ said Argel Tal through tightly gritted teeth.

  ‘You don’t even have her bones,’ Khârn said. ‘You told me devotees stole them.’

  Argel Tal grunted again, this time spicing the sound with speech. ‘Where do you think we’re going, brother? What do you think we’re going to do?’

  They’d descended through the ship’s filthy innards for more than an hour. The stench only grew stronger, setting Khârn’s teeth on edge.

  ‘Argel Tal,’ he said gently, as they traversed the chanting darkness. ‘I’m concerned for you. For your Legion.’

  ‘Spare me,’ the Word Bearer replied. As if reading Khârn’s thoughts – a possibility the World Eater didn’t disregard – Argel Tal turned his helm towards his brother. ‘I need no pity. I chose this path and I walk it willingly.’

  Khârn breathed in the ship’s rank air. ‘Have I ever argued against the wisdom of you allowing a xenos parasite to share your body?’

  ‘Daemon, Khârn. It is no mere alien.’

  ‘Call it what you will. I’ve allowed it thus far, haven’t I?’

  Argel Tal’s eye lenses were ice-blue in the gloom of the bowel-corridors. ‘Allowed it? What a curious choice of words.’

  ‘I could have killed you by now. I could have killed you to free you of the thing you call Raum, but I haven’t. For better or worse. I’ve trusted you. I’ve let you abide in your faith.’

  A brief screech of wrenching ceramite split the air, and Argel Tal stumbled. Silver light burned for a heartbeat’s span in his eye lenses.

  ‘Do not threaten us.’

  ‘Us?’ Khârn asked.

  ‘Me,’ Argel Tal amended. ‘Don’t threaten me.’

  ‘I’m not threatening you. Stop for a moment. Stop.’ Khârn gripped his brother’s shoulder guard. ‘Take your helmet off.’

  He heard Argel Tal grunt again. ‘I can’t. It’s been this way since Armatura. The Change isn’t… reverting all the way, as it once did.’

  Khârn was implacable and unmoving. ‘Does Lorgar know?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Argel Tal countered. ‘Come. We have to retrieve the Blessed Lady’s bones.’

  Khârn watched the other stride onwards for a moment before once again falling in step alongside him.

  ‘How do you know where to find her remains? Haven’t you been hunting for months?’

  Argel Tal muttered something.

  ‘What?’ Khârn asked.

  ‘I said, Erebus told me where to find her bones.’

  The World Eater’s mouth fell open. ‘What’s wrong with you? How is this anything more than the crudest manipulation?’

  ‘We know it’s a trap.’ Argel Tal snarled, stopping suddenly. ‘It changes nothing. We have to bring her back.’ The Word Bearer breathed slowly, calming himself. ‘I have to bring her back.’

  He turned to walk ahead, but Khârn tightened his grip, halting him in place.

  ‘All these accusations of the Nails killing Angron, and the implants ruining our Legion,’ the World Eater said, ‘and yet you’re warping before my eyes. I’m worried about you – about the whole Seventeenth. Your ship reeks of some unnameable malaise. You’re planning to raise the dead by giving your friend’s corpse to a man you despise, purely so he may commit some impossible act of necromantic superstition and bind you into his debt. Tell me, brother, am I doing my duty to you if I just allow this? If I help you with it?’

  Argel Tal shrugged free of the other warrior’s grip. ‘Times change, Khârn. We all walk the Eightfold Path now, whether we keep our eyes open or move in ignorance; whether we desire this journey or not.’

  The Eightfold Path. More religious madness.

  Khârn hesitated within himself. If it was just superstitious nonsense, why then did the words seem so familiar, the way one remembers a dream for a few precious moments after waking? For a tantalising instant, the hallway’s repellent stench felt stronger. He heard a woman’s scream in the distance. She sounded young.

  ‘I hate this ship,’ Khârn said, adding a curse in Nagrakali. ‘I’ll come with you for this, but I do not trust Erebus. I can’t imagine why you suddenly do.’

  Argel Tal was free, but didn’t keep walking. His fevered need to move forwards seemed to have abated.

  ‘I don’t trust him,’ the Word Bearer said in his dual voices, ‘but you’ll have to forgive me the desperation of a little hope. If he can bring her back…’

  ‘But at what cost?’ Khârn sighed. ‘What price will you have to pay?’

  Argel Tal started walking again, slower this time. After a long moment, Khârn followed.

  ‘I am not going into this blind,’ said the Word Bearer eventually. ‘Erebus is not without his weaknesses. He can be out-thought, and outfought. It’s worth the risk, brother.’

  Khârn said nothing. He let silence disagree on his behalf.

  ‘And there’s something else I need to tell you,’ Argel Tal continued. ‘Erebus was his usual serpentine self about it, hinting and suggesting rather than speaking it outright, but he wants you dead.’

  Khârn cocked his head, unsure he’d heard properly. ‘Me? We’ve crossed paths once or twice in the last decade. Why would he consider me a threat?’

  Argel Tal thought carefully before speaking again. ‘I detest him, but I can’t deny his genius. His mind works on a hundred levels at once and he sees the thousand different futures from every action he takes. Somehow, at some point in one of those many possible futures, your actions will lose us the war. If you die now, you won’t be there to influence the Siege of Terra.’

  Khârn felt the sudden need to check his weapons: the plasma pistol and the replacement chainsword he’d taken from his personal armoury.

  ‘That’s what he told you?’

  ‘That’s what he told me.’ Argel Tal led them down a curving staircase, far too ornate and gothic to belong in the stinking underdecks of a Word Bearers capital ship. ‘I believe he hoped I’d be the one to kill you, out of affection for him and respect for his vision. But Calth rather leeched the last of my admiration for my former master.’ Argel Tal looked over at Khârn as their bootsteps echoed into the dark. ‘Just be careful.’

  ‘You’re the second brother to warn me with those words tonight,’ said Khârn. ‘Esca was the other.’

  Argel Tal nodded.

  ‘You treat your Librarians shamefully, you know. Esca deserves better.’

  Khârn laughed for the first time in days. ‘Lessons in morality from–’

  ‘From a man with a daemon in his heart,’ Argel Tal finished, smiling behind his faceplate. ‘I know, I know.’

  The two warriors came to a sealed bulkhead set against the left wall. The Word Bearer stroked his hand across its surface.

  ‘Wait here. Kill anyone who tries to escape.’

  Khârn looked at him as if to check he was serious, then nodded. ‘You owe me for this.’

  ‘You owe me for saving your life at Therakan. This will make us even.’

  ‘Therakan was three decades ago. And you still owe me for Jurade.’

  Argel Tal grinned and turned the bulkhead’s locking ring with one hand.

  ‘This won’t take long.’

  He was right. It took less than seven minutes.

  Khârn stood outside the chamber, listening as the people were – for want of a better word – culled. Meaty thumps and cloth-ripping tears heralded every blow Argel Tal landed on the worshippers within. Never once did he hear the Word Bearer demand an answer or explanation. Never once did he hear them resisting, either. In his mind’s eye, he imagined ranks of ragged humans kneeling in concentric circles around a central pulpit or altar, shrieking and praying and gasping and weeping as they were slaughtered.


  Perhaps they accepted their fate and welcomed passage to the afterlife. Perhaps terror kept them in place.

  Candlelight bled faintly through the open slice of the bulkhead door that Argel Tal left ajar. Amongst the Colchisian cries and murmurs, he made out several repetitions of Great Lord, Great Lord. The twin tang-smells of blood and urine soured the air.

  Just as six minutes passed, everything fell silent.

  Before the seventh minute, Argel Tal emerged from the chamber, awash with blood and carrying a body. Whatever was left of the woman after a year of decay and many months in the reverent care of the cultists had been wrapped in a black silk shroud. The grave-smell was raw and sharp and thick enough to taste. Khârn leaned back as it washed over his senses, and reached for the helm locked to his belt. Once he was behind the familiar aura of targeting locks and inhaling the odourless air of his armour’s filtration systems, he spoke again.

  ‘How many were in there?’

  ‘A hundred and three.’ Argel Tal was already moving, cradling the shrouded corpse like a sleeping child. ‘Come on.’

  Vorias and Esca waited where they weren’t welcome, but kept a respectful distance. Beneath them, the vehicle hangar was given over to several circles of World Eaters cheering on their kindred, who fought bare-chested or in bodygloves. An inactive procession of Fellblades and Land Raiders lined the walls, their turrets pointing open-mouthed at the warriors whose colours they shared.

  The two Librarians remained apart, watching from the balcony deck above the hangar. Just distant enough so that none of the warriors below could sense their presence through accidental implant malfunction.

  Vorias, eldest of the remaining Librarian coven, had worked with Kargos, Vel-Kheredar and the others in trying to determine just why the Nails reacted so poorly in the presence of psychic minds, but the line of research was abandoned when they had come to realise the context of their work: no one cared. No one but those cursed with a sixth sense. Besides, their efforts had always ended in vain, and killed too many ‘loyal’ World Eaters who were unfortunate enough to be near the unstable Librarians.

  The primarch brought few traditions from his world into the Legion, but a mistrust of anything ‘unnatural’ was one of them. Soon enough, all of the Nail-bearing legionaries were spitting onto the deck before their own Librarians, to ward off the ‘bad luck’ of being near them.

  How quickly superstitions were adopted into fact. Primitive, thought Vorias, primitive and so very sad.

  Nothing had changed his perspective in the decades since. Quite the opposite, in fact. What followed was the gradual deterioration of any sense of brotherhood. With the death of kinship often came the death of loyalty, but Vorias was gene-born into the XII Legion and he’d be one until the day he died. He didn’t hate them for the way they scorned him, nor did he resent them for the way they spurned his talents as something dangerously worthless. He understood it perfectly. His presence caused them pain, and the Legion had no need of his psychic gifts. Even before Nikaea, such powers had never been factored into Angron’s battle plans, as blunt and uncomplicated as those plans were.

  Vorias was sanguine, accepting the truth beneath it all: he wasn’t one of them. They were World Eaters. He was a War Hound. The Legion had moved on and left him behind with his ever-diminishing coterie of gifted brothers.

  He watched Esca watching the melees below and felt the stirrings of a melancholic smile. The Codicier flinched at the hardest blows and twitched at the best strikes, as if landing them himself.

  ‘You wish to join them?’ the older warrior asked.

  Esca’s answer was a question of his own. ‘You don’t?’

  Vorias had a thin, aquiline face with eyes the same green as Terra’s extinct forests. It was in all ways a scholar’s face, the face of a man not easily riled to rage, which was true to his temperament. He was one of the few souls – human, legionary, or otherwise – with no desire to let his face reflect anything but the absolute truth of his feelings and thoughts. Those who kept his company admired that about him. His detractors considered it one of his many flaws.

  ‘I used to,’ he admitted, leaning on the railing as he watched the warriors below. ‘I used to crave the fellowship, the hot-blooded rush of running with the pack. But you and the others are enough for me, Esca. We need to appreciate what we have and strive for what we can achieve, rather than reach for what’s denied to us.’

  Esca grinned, though his ravaged, sutured face made it more of a grimace. ‘Sounds very passive, Lectio Primus.’

  ‘Passivity implies apathy or cowardice,’ the slender warrior corrected. ‘I’m merely a realist.’

  They watched the fighting below for another few minutes. One of the matches ended with first blood and riotous cheering. In the aftermath, Delvarus stepped into the circle, carrying his meteor hammer, already whirling the deactivated morning star in readiness.

  Esca nodded down to indicate the Triarii captain. ‘Evidently, Lotara freed him from his quarters.’

  Vorias gave a thin-lipped smile. ‘The flag-captain knows her trade. She shamed him in the finest way: she showed him as a warrior that couldn’t be trusted by his brothers. Very artfully done. Now we get the dubious pleasure of watching him seek to prove himself again, the only way he knows how.’

  Below them, Delvarus was roaring into the crowd, baying at them, building their cheers for the fight to come. Like many World Eaters, Delvarus was inducted from a planet conquered in the Legion’s earliest decades rather than from a specific homeworld. No Legion except the Ultramarines was as diverse, coloured by so many shades of skin from so many different worlds. Where the Word Bearers were uniformly dusky-skinned from the desert world Colchis, and the Night Lords were pale from their years on sunless Nostramo, the World Eaters reflected a diversity of flesh overruled by the bonds of brotherhood.

  Delvarus was unhelmed and unarmoured for the pit-fight. His dark skin marked his genesis in the jungles of whatever planet he’d once called home, and he bared iron teeth at his kindred, demanding one of them step forwards and face him.

  ‘His popularity seems unaffected,’ Esca pointed out.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Vorias replied.

  Skane was the first to step forwards. The Destroyer’s pale skin showed an unhealthy lightning-storm of veins and blood-bruises staining his flesh, from proximity to his own toxically lethal weaponry. His neck was collared in dark metal, forming armour around his augmetic throat. An aggressive cancer had stolen his vocal chords, but Kargos had given him new ones.

  ‘First blood?’ Delvarus growled at his brother. For years, but for the rarest bouts, first blood was almost all they ever asked of him.

  ‘Third blood,’ Skane replied, and lifted an inactive chainsword.

  The fight was painfully, though not shamefully, brief. Skane went down to third blood in two minutes, losing to Delvarus without the Triarii captain even breaking a sweat.

  Before Skane had even picked himself up, another World Eater stepped forwards to take his place. Delvarus was still laughing.

  ‘First blood?’ he asked again.

  ‘Third blood.’

  The fight went the same way. As did the next, and the next, and the next. As did the one to follow that.

  By the seventh fight, Delvarus was breathing heavily, his skin beaded by effort. ‘Who’s next?’ he cried over the hamstrung brother at his feet. ‘Who’s next?’

  ‘Third blood,’ said yet another World Eater, lifting a stilled chainaxe.

  This fight went to four minutes, ending with Delvarus smirking through the cheers. Tradition stated no warrior should fight more than eight bouts in a single night, else he attracted accusations of arrogance and vainglory, putting himself above his brothers. The Triarii cast his meteor hammer to the deck, raising his fists in triumph. The cheers, however, had stopped cold.

  Delvarus turned t
o leave the circle and rejoin the crowd, but the World Eaters didn’t part to make way for him. One of them, a warrior with a face almost as badly sutured as Esca’s, thudded chest to chest with the Triarii.

  ‘Third blood,’ he said to Delvarus. There was a chainsword in his hand.

  ‘I’ve done my eight,’ the warrior grinned.

  ‘Third blood,’ the World Eater repeated, and shoved Delvarus back into the circle.

  The Triarii reclaimed his flail, hesitating a moment before setting it whirling again. His eyes were utterly untouched by the amusement plastered across his dark features.

  Above all of this, Esca started to smile.

  Three more fights ended just as the first eight had. Delvarus was no longer amused, and no longer trying to leave the circle. He knew where this was going.

  Another fight. And another. And another – on this, the fourteenth, Delvarus’s opponent raked the motionless teeth of his chainaxe across the Triarii’s bicep, drawing first blood. In a rage, Delvarus retaliated with first, second and third bloodings in as many swings.

  ‘Next,’ he breathed through clenched teeth, looking out at the ring of his brothers who stared at him in silence. He was panting now, no different from the breathlessness of the front lines. Legionaries were gene-engineered to fight for days on end against human and inhuman enemies alike, but on even ground…

  When brother fought brother in a place as brutal as the XII Legion’s fighting pits, the rules changed with the game.

  He beat the next opponent, and the next, and the nine that followed those. With cramping muscles, he put his twenty-fifth opponent down on the deck and caught his heaving breath.

  The twenty-sixth was tied at second blood for a dangerously long time. His opponent landed a lucky kick to his chest after almost half an hour of duelling, and Delvarus staggered back against the wall of World Eaters. Where duellists were usually pushed back into the fight with cheers and good-natured jeers, he was shoved unceremoniously forwards in vicious silence, almost stumbling over onto his hands and knees. He recovered in time to block the descending blow, his flail’s chain wrapping the incoming sword and tearing it from his foe’s fingers. Delvarus cannoned a fist into the warrior’s face, breaking his nose and winning on third blood at last.