Betrayer

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  He drew his blade and rested a hand on Argel Tal’s shoulder guard. ‘Brother, nothing is worth this foulness.’

  Argel Tal never had a chance to reply. The moment Khârn finished speaking, Erebus voiced a single word: an unknowable command in that jagged, alien tongue. The skeleton on the altar rattled, shivered.

  And then, with no lungs or vocal chords, it started screaming.

  In the tormented years to come, on the rare days Khârn possessed enough self-control to speak – let alone tell the tale of that night’s events – one of the few things he remembered with clarity was the way the choir died.

  Fifteen men and women, raking at their own flesh with dirty fingernails and ritual knives, came apart where they stood. They burst as if shattered by the invisible hands of gods. Some of their ruined flesh was contained by their clothes, the rest slopped across the chamber. The sound of their sanctified demise was somehow porcine – a squeal of piggish panic coupled with the fatty splash of wet meat falling to the floor. Their innards rained over the altar, bathing the writhing skeleton in the viscera it so utterly lacked.

  As if in sympathy, the iron drums slowed to one gigantic heartbeat, rather than battering mercilessly to represent many.

  Dappled in gore, both Khârn and Argel Tal stepped back from the grotesque performance – the World Eater wiping his gauntleted fingers over his faceplate to clear his eye lenses; the latter staring at the resurrecting corpse through blood-streaked vision.

  Erebus ignored the howling aetheric wind and the lamenting of souls caught in its grip. He raised his voice, aiming his crozius maul at the revenant on the altar, commanding it to reclaim its place in the world of flesh and blood and bone and steel.

  Khârn saw the still-screaming corpse lift a hand – a claw of bone now articulated by fresh, bloody meat – before the chamber plunged into absolute darkness. The blackness was an entity itself, too deep and true to be the mere absence of light. His thermal vision cycled live, showing nothing. His echolocation sight clicked active, showing the same. No matter what his retinal display did to compensate for the sudden blindness, he was left in the dark.

  His blade came up en garde, revving and chewing air. Something smashed it from his fists; he hoped it was Argel Tal.

  The screaming became more human, echoing around the chamber rather than through Khârn’s mind. Blessedly, it ceased tearing at the Nails in his head.

  He heard bare feet on the hard deck, and a young woman’s hoarse shrieking finally falling into wet breathlessness. He heard, beneath all else, a rheumy dripping that conjured thoughts of carcasses hanging in an abattoir.

  When his vision returned, it was almost with reluctance, more like emerging from an ink-cloud than merely opening his eyes. Shadows recoiled from each of them, dissolving away in the candlelight and leaving ripples through the pools of blood. Not a single candle had been extinguished by the wind, or in the blackness that followed it.

  Erebus stood by the altar, his expression one of immortal patience. Indulgence, even.

  Crouched in the corner, naked but for her burial shroud and the scraggly protection of her hazel hair now blood-darkened to black, Cyrene Valantion shivered and stared at Khârn and Argel Tal with wide eyes the colour of burnt auburn.

  She looked at them. She saw them.

  ‘You’re not blind,’ Argel Tal said in a stunned whisper. Not ‘You’re alive’, or ‘Are you all right’. Shock had hit him, and hit hard. ‘You’re not blind,’ he said again.

  Cyrene kept shivering, kept staring, and kept her silence.

  Word of her return spread like grassfire through the Word Bearers flagship. Mere minutes after they left Erebus’s chambers, mortal crew were crowding the halls, calling her name, desperate to touch her skin for luck, or steal a scrap of her burial shroud as some funereal token of the Pantheon’s favour.

  Cyrene stared out at all of this with mounting horror. Before her murder in the skies above Isstvan V, she’d sailed aboard the Word Bearers warship De Profundis for over forty years. All the while, she’d been hailed as a living icon of the Legion’s past, one of the last survivors of the Perfect City, annihilated on the Emperor’s orders to punish the XVII Legion for their misplaced faith. The primarch himself had wept upon meeting her – the single, slow tear of a demigod’s sorrow – and asked her forgiveness. That story, too, had spread with the tenacity of unchecked flame. All the more fervently for the fact it was true.

  Her life was a lesson for the Legion to remember, and an acknowledgement of its guilt. She was also a treasure to be protected, finding a place within the XVII Legion the way men and women of faith and courage had been finding places among holy armies since time out of mind.

  She’d listened for four decades, hearing the confessions of Word Bearers, Imperial Army soldiers, and the thousands of human crew of Argel Tal’s warship. When the 301st Expeditionary Fleet linked up with other armadas prosecuting the Great Crusade, Word Bearers officers from other fleets always sought time in her presence, unburdening their hearts and consciences of the past’s sins and the treacheries yet to come. She listened for almost half a century, hearing and forgiving the trespasses of the only Legion ever to fail the Master of Mankind, and the first Legion to learn of the truth behind reality.

  She’d learned that truth with them. She was as faithful as any Word Bearer, and plainly more pious than most.

  Rejuvenat surgery kept her young, strong, and a frequent figure for immortalisation in the statues and stained glass windows that decorated the cathedrals and monasteries of so many Word Bearers warships.

  But she’d lived those years without ever once seeing a single warrior or worker that came for her blessing. The Ultramarines incendiary weapons took her sight when they erased the Perfect City from existence. Cyrene watched her city die to an orbital bombardment many times brighter than her world’s sun, and the flash burns to her corneas and optic nerves had never healed. She’d refused augmetic replacements, for reasons of faith and the hope that her own eyes would heal.

  Not once had she ever seen the interior of the vessels where she’d led sermons and taken countless confessions. She’d never seen Argel Tal, nor Khârn, nor even Lorgar. Her only experience of seeing any Space Marine in the flesh was watching the sons of Guilliman executing rioters and marching the population of the Perfect City from their homes, to minimise casualties before the skyfire began.

  Now, in the corridors aboard the Lex, Khârn was glad he’d stayed for the ritual and its aftermath. He led the way back to Argel Tal’s arming chamber, fighting back the zealous crowds lining the halls. Argel Tal kept her close, guarding her with a drawn blade held crosswise before her. He’d allowed the Change to come, and shielded her with his great wings – those red-black pinions he’d been forming over the course of the year since Isstvan. They horrified Cyrene, that much was obvious; she was overcome by the immensity of everything around her.

  ‘Get back,’ Khârn warned the tide of humanity crushing itself against him. Grimy hands sought to push him aside in their fervency. There were even Word Bearers in the throng, chanting the Blessed Lady’s name, heralding her as the Saint Reborn.

  ‘Get back.’ He snarled the words, backing them up with a kick to one man’s sternum. Bones broke in the human’s chest, and the blow shoved him down to the deck, surely to die beneath the smothering tread of his fellows. Khârn felt a nasty little smirk take hold; Argel Tal was right. This wasn’t a game of selective morality.

  Between the calls of Cyrene! Cyrene! and Blessed Lady! he heard a softer voice from behind, a girl’s tremulous whisper.

  ‘Who are you?’

  He risked a glance back, just as he threw an elbow into a Word Bearer’s faceplate, sending the warrior staggering. Cyrene was pale, anaemically so, though whether from the potent stench of her entombment shroud or the insanity of her ordeal, Khârn couldn’t be sure.

  ‘It’s m
e,’ he told her. How many times had they met? How many times had he listened to her and Argel Tal debate faith, philosophy, or the nature of the soul? He’d never believed a word of it back then, but tonight’s events forced an unpleasant re-evaluation upon his scepticism. He’d let her touch his face to feel his features; he’d even let her run her fingers over the scar at the back of his head, the only wound that wouldn’t fade, where his Nails had been implanted so many years before. He’d told her of the Nails and what they did to his brain.

  But here, now, she didn’t know who he was. She was looking at him, seeing him and not recognising him, rather than feeling his face or knowing him by listening to his voice.

  ‘Khârn,’ he said to her. ‘I’m Khârn.’

  She stared at him, at the mask over his face. ‘You’re Khârn?’

  He had no chance to reply. The crowd pushed against him hard enough to almost press him back into her. Khârn lashed back with his chainsword, tearing the closest human in half. He felt sick, fighting cold like this. The Nails pulsed – not with pain but with a tantalising stroke of warmth that set his heart racing – offering pleasure drip-fed into the emotional core of his brain if he’d only let go and butcher with impunity.

  ‘Back away,’ he growled. ‘Back away.’

  He swallowed the urge, battered another two humans aside, brained a third with the hilt of his chainsword, and crashed his fist full into another worshipper’s face, snapping the man’s head back and sending him to the deck.

  It wasn’t enough. The tidal push came on, humans squeezing past him, even slipping between his legs. Sheer numbers overwhelmed him, forcing the thought into his mind of peasant farmers with pitchforks dragging an armoured knight from the saddle. He’d seen that once, on a grainy hololith pict-feed, and it had left him laughing hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. It seemed somewhat less amusing now. Khârn banished the flicker of distraction and gave in to temptation. He gave in to the Nails, no different from the way an exhausted traveller surrenders to sleep. He simply stopped fighting it.

  Pleasure came in an immediate trickle, revving as surely as the chainsword in his hands. Killing was exhilarating the way nothing else could be, and the Nails played their neurochemical game to make it so. He knew, in his moments of dull, grey peace, that when the Nails sang they stunted the serotonin in his brain to encourage instinctive aggression, just as he knew they deadened emotional response and electrical activity to anything but the flow of adrenaline. Amongst the archeotechnological whims of the Butcher’s Nails, these were the effects his Legion had detailed most extensively in their long-abandoned studies.

  All that cold and considered knowledge meant little. The pain engine in his skull forced him to enjoy killing above everything else, and all the calm-voiced hypothesising about the whys and wherefores changed exactly nothing. Even the comfort of brotherhood paled – one of life’s few remaining pleasures outside of battle. So Khârn killed, just as his brothers always killed, because killing meant feeling something beyond slow, unfocused spite.

  And as always, with the promise of pleasure came the burn of overworked muscles. Between the Nails and the combat stimulants swimming through his bloodstream, he fought harder, moved faster, struck with more fury. Pleasure was the reward for every swing of the blade.

  Word Bearers were joining the worshippers now, decorum overcome by their zealous faith. One of them came at him with a chainsword of his own – Khârn cannoned his elbow into the warrior’s throat, slashing his blade across the exposed power cables on his foe’s thigh, and then reached to grasp at a human woman seeking to run past him. He balled his fist in her hair, breaking her neck with a single sharp pull.

  Yet nothing he did could stem the tide. For each of them he knocked back or bludgeoned to death, more of them crawled or squeezed past in the press of bodies. The sheer amount of frantic humanity stole most of the room he needed to swing the blade or throw a fist.

  The first sign of respite came from the rearmost ranks, with agonised wailing preceding the grisly smell of burning pork. Smoke, gritty enough to blacken the tongue, misted its way through the corridors, accompanied by the storm’s-breath fssshhh of flame weapons unleashed in the closest quarters.

  What little Khârn could make out of the firebursts set his lips peeling back in a snarl owing as much to laughter as to rage. The flames were green: licking tongues of vital, phosphorous jade. He knew the nature of that fire, as did any soul that had fought alongside or against Argel Tal’s Chapter of Consecrated Iron in the year since their honoured founding.

  Froth stung at the edges of Khârn’s mouth. Saliva ran down his chin, acidic enough to hurt. He took one man’s arm off at the shoulder, killing the poor human with a backhanded slap to the face before the man could even scream. Behind him, he heard Argel Tal’s energised blade thrumming left and right, buzzing as it fried the blood trying to stick to its sacred steel. Argel Tal killed while holding Cyrene in one possessive, protective arm, his weapon needing no chain-teeth to chew. The Custodian-blade’s force field rent organic matter apart, going through bone as easily as flesh.

  The two warriors turned with unspoken understanding, herding the terrified woman between them, standing back to back against the horde. Both of them lashed out with blades, boots and fists. Argel Tal had the advantage of his wings, slamming them against mortals, throwing them from their feet.

  ‘I see the jade fire,’ Khârn called over his shoulder. About time, he silently added.

  ‘Now stay alive until they reach us,’ the Word Bearer grated in reply.

  Khârn’s chainsword lodged halfway through a man’s torso, slipping from his grip where blood made his clutch treacherous. The blade’s teeth clicked, caught against the bone. Khârn left it on the deck, sheathed in meat where it belonged, and resorted to killing them with his armoured hands.

  It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  It was fair to say that few Word Bearers had ever impressed Khârn. They waged war with zeal – passion’s unhealthy cousin – and their chanting advances beneath morbid banners and divine sigils were difficult to admire. In some battles, a Word Bearers force could be relied upon to cleanse and purge every enemy soul, and salt the very earth on which the foe had lived. In others, they would crumble into praying, murmuring regiments and lose themselves in torture or some other ritual debasement to appease whatever gods they believed were watching. If there was a way to predict their inclinations before battle was joined, Khârn hadn’t yet discovered it.

  Even the Gal Vorbak, Argel Tal’s daemon-blooded brethren, were as much animals as men. Few of the so-called ‘Blessed Sons’ restrained themselves to the degree shown by their former commander, and most were petty warlords over their own squads and hosts, ruling in their daemonic form more often than not, issuing commands not from the Legion, but from the Pantheon.

  The exception to Khârn’s hesitant disgust with the XVII Legion was the Vakrah Jal. The Chapter of Consecrated Iron rose from the ashes of companies devastated on the killing fields of Isstvan V. Argel Tal had gathered hundreds of leaderless warriors and given them unity from ruination. Forsaking his oaths to the annihilated Chapter of the Serrated Sun, he gained Lord Aurelian’s permission to raise a new Chapter in its stead.

  Many of them were berthed aboard the Conqueror, given the honour of duelling in the fighting pits. Only a few hundred remained aboard Fidelitas Lex, but they were making themselves known at last.

  They were the bearers of the jade fire, and they went to war behind faceplates of burnished silver.

  These were the warriors incinerating their way through the crowded corridors.

  His boots slopped through the pools of sticky wreckage that remained. Where the floor was iron grille-work, molten flesh and metal dripped through the holes, trickling down into the nameless dark between decks. Khârn was fighting off the familiar disorientation of coming down from the N
ails, but he was aware enough to note the caution in the Vakrah Jal’s movements as they approached him. Several cut right past him to reach Argel Tal and Cyrene, but a few lingered, not entirely certain of his temperament.

  One of them risked touching him, resting a hand on Khârn’s back-mounted power pack.

  ‘Captain?’ the warrior asked. ‘Do you require an Apothecary?’

  Khârn moved away from the warrior’s touch. ‘No. My thanks, though.’ His eyes were warm and weighty, threatening to close. He felt as if he could sleep for a week. Curse this damn ship – even the Nails pushed heavier on his mind here, leaving him weaker in the aftermath of their soaring song.

  The warrior stepped back, his boots thudding in the organic slush as he deactivated and sheathed his curved Colchisian blade. A moment later, Khârn heard the telltale hiss of the Vakrah Jal’s wrist-mounted flamer ports shutting down. The pilot lights snapped out of existence with twin sparks. The sight almost made the World Eater grin. Nothing but the Mechanicum’s priceless best for the XVII elite.

  ‘Eshramar,’ he said to the Vakrah Jal sergeant.

  ‘Sir?’ The warrior turned his silver faceplate back to Khârn.

  ‘You melted half of this hallway,’ the centurion pointed out, and it was no exaggeration. The Vakrah Jal’s alchemical cling-fire had dissolved long swathes of the deck and turned the walls to slack, cooling sludge. Although the ventilators battled the spoiled-pork stink and the clouds of smoke, there was only so much air filtration could hope to achieve without hours to work on this mess.

  ‘We also saved your life,’ Eshramar pointed out. His voice was a vox-drawl, but there was no hiding the amusement. ‘Ungrateful Twelfth Legion bastard.’

  The Nails’ bite was just fresh enough for Khârn to find that funny. His implants allowed him a smile, still stinging pleasantly from the adrenaline in his bloodstream.

  ‘Brother.’ He turned to Argel Tal. ‘We have to move. More will come.’