Betrayer

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Lotara Sarrin dreamed of her brother – of his death in her youth, when he’d sickened and died beyond even her father’s infinite financial resources. It was the first time in her young life she’d realised that you couldn’t heal all problems by simply hurling money at them. Towards the very end, she’d hated seeing her brother at all, and the years did nothing to soften the bite of that shame. He’d raved and cried, looking dead already, staring at them with sunken yellow eyes and shivering from a host of malfunctioning organs.

  Many nights that month, she dreamed of that writhing boy, and when her insomnia was at its least merciful, keeping her awake for days on end, she heard him crying in the air ducts.

  Angron cared nothing for the Conqueror’s command, trusting it to the officers trained for the task; he cared similarly little for his warriors’ training, trusting the centurions to handle the mundane aspects of Legion life. Several times, he was seen in the company of Vel-Kheredar, entering or exiting the Archmagos’s forge-chambers. Other times, he walked the wide halls of the Conqueror’s war museum, pausing for long conversations with the archivists when his skull’s aches allowed him the patience to do so. When he spent any time among his men, it was never with any preferred Chapter or company; always with his attention divided between them. The Conqueror housed precious few of his Legion, while the rest were engaged in the pacification of Ultramar, and those present saw more of their primarch in that one month than they had in the several years before. He drank with them, watched their gladiatorial duels, laughing as they laughed and sharing the warmth of brotherhood in a way few primarchs enjoyed with their men.

  Lorgar’s seclusion was one of effort and focus, rather than disgust at the nearness of others. He’d taken to transcribing the melody behind the veil, writing with ink and quill upon the walls and floor of the basilica in a language that was and wasn’t the jagged rune-lore of Colchis. Magnus came to him once more, to speak of the stars and the nature of reality in the realm where gods and mortals meet. Lorgar never looked up from his transcriptions; never even noticed his brother’s manifestation. All that mattered was the song. He felt it as much as heard it now – it was a wind against his skin and a drumming in his bones. You could take a thousand orchestras on a thousand separate worlds, using instruments and melodies known only to those cultures, and you would still never come close to the scale of the orchestral undertaking playing through Lorgar’s mind. It wasn’t one song, it was a billion songs playing over each other, and it was his place to listen and ensure every note hit its beat. He heard trillions of men, women and children dying in every way it was possible to die. He heard the death-scream of whole worlds, as their surfaces burned and their cores cried out under the strain. He heard it, felt it, and wrote and wrote and wrote.

  By the time the Lex finally fell from the warp in Nuceria’s system, he was left wondering if this was what madness felt like. Was this madness? Would he know? Did the insane ever know they’d fallen so far?

  He didn’t stop writing, though. The cathedral was a canvas of runic text, senseless in how often it was overwritten, and although he slowed in his scrawls he didn’t quite stop.

  Not yet.

  Skane dreamed of home, and spent many hours watching medical diagnostic hololiths picturing the exact radiation degeneration of his body over the years. He was offered the chance to leave the Destroyers. He refused.

  Delvarus dreamed of a redemption denied, and fought twice as hard in training to defy the possibility.

  Kargos inspected the gene-seed vaults, indulging in a momentary melancholy at the names etched across the cryo-storage units. When he dreamed, he dreamed of past victories. The warp’s touch never seemed to play on him as it did on others.

  Cyrene Valantion, She Who Lived Twice, dreamed of swimming through fire, chased by howling daemons clawing at her ankles. Her own screams woke her each night, sitting bolt upright in her new quarters, sheened with cold sweat. Some nights, she could hear the Vakrah Jal guardians outside her door ordering worshippers to clear the area. Other nights, she woke to see Argel Tal sat hunched with his back to the door, the sword that killed her in his hands. His cold blue eye lenses burned through the gloom as he watched her. The two of them would while away the following hours in quiet talk, with him telling her of the last year’s warp journeys after Isstvan, and her swearing she remembered nothing of the year she spent dead.

  For her sake, he said he believed her.

  Argel Tal himself spent much of his time training with the Vakrah Jal, or being ignored on his daily attempts to speak with his primarch. With the Conqueror repaired, there were fewer chances to cross over to meet with Khârn.

  As for Khârn, he never told anyone of his dreams, if indeed he had any at all. He pushed his men harder than ever before, amalgamating several broken companies to reform his own. His focus was on Nuceria. Specifically, on surviving Nuceria. Despite the world’s undeniably soft defences, he couldn’t shake the threat of discomfort severe enough that it felt like a premonition.

  Argel Tal’s warning stayed with him, to the point where he considered killing Erebus and simply being done with all thought of it. Kargos considered it nonsense – ‘I cannot believe you are even giving this consideration, captain’ – and Skane considered it hilarious. His augmetic throat laughed like a Rhino tank changing gears.

  Twenty-seven days after the Conqueror and the Fidelitas Lex left Armatura in ashes, they broke from the warp at the edge of Nuceria’s system. The Trisagion was waiting for them.

  Lorgar looked up from his scrawling, saw the distant world turning in the night, and shuddered. Here was his conduit to release the energies of a hundred massacred worlds and bathe Ultramar in holy fire. Here, on the planet where Angron was raised, Lorgar’s brother would face the most vital choice of his life.

  And as always, it would come down to blood.

  EIGHTEEN

  Field of Bones

  Betrayer

  A Simple Order

  Oshamay Evrel’Korshay of the Thal’kr Kin-Guard was making her rounds when the sky caught fire. She walked the city walls at sundown, speaking with her artillery crews and line captains, never kind but never unfair, always preferring professional distance to any shared warmth. Better to be admired than loved. Her artificial arm whirred and purred smoothly, obeying at will. She’d lost her flesh and blood limb nine years ago, during the trench fighting of the Last War. Since then, that name had become something of a sour-tasting joke. The War to End All Wars hadn’t been the last after all. With the city-states changing sides so often, she honestly wasn’t sure if they were all fighting a different conflict, or if the Last War merely spread down the years, its boundaries and bitterness changing with the seasons.

  When the fire-rain first showed in the sky, trailing down between the evening’s first stars, her first thought was that their enemies were doing the impossible. Somehow the Great Coastal Union was attacking Desh’ea from the air, despite lacking all resources and munitions to do so. What political shifting had taken place to allow it? Had they unearthed one of the First Kingdom’s arsenal-crypts deep under the coastal waves, or buried beneath the mountains? Impossible. There could be none left, every site had been dug up or dredged centuries ago.

  Even so, the very first thing she did was activate the telemetry unit built into her uniform’s metal epaulette. Its single light started blinking urgently, trading electronic panic with its main cogitator elsewhere in the city.

  ‘General,’ said one of the wall-gunners at her side. ‘Is it the Imperials?’

  The Imperials, he said. Like a curse.

  ‘We are Imperials,’ she pointed out, still watching the comets fire-trailing down.

  He shrugged. Compliance had held on Nuceria since their grand-parents’ days, but the Imperium was a distant master at best. There’d been no visiting vessels since the Emperor – praises upon him, Lord of Old Earth! – ended the Gladiato
r-King’s Rebellion over a hundred years ago. Like so many worlds in the nascent Imperium, Nuceria was left alone as long as it paid its tithes in loyalty, coin, iron and flesh.

  ‘Maybe they’ve come back,’ he said, and she pitied him for the hope in his eyes. ‘They’ve come back to end the Last War.’

  ‘We don’t need their help to end the Last War.’ She trotted out the old trope without a thought, speaking on instinct. How many times had the Praxury, and his father before him, told his war council that they would never send to the Imperium for aid? Not even the forces of Ultramar, rumoured to be so achingly close by, would be summoned for assistance.

  ‘It must be the Imperials. The Alliance has no weapons capable of… whatever this is.’

  Sirens started wailing across the city, warning of an incoming air raid. The sound was so alien it almost made her laugh, though her smile was a peeled-back thing, unpleasantly grim.

  ‘Give me your magnoculars,’ she ordered. He did so, and she aimed them high, staring up at the teardrop pods streaming contrails of flame through the heavens.

  ‘Is it them?’ the man asked. ‘The Imperials?’

  ‘Wish in one hand,’ she told the soldier, handing back his viewfinder, ‘and crap in the other. See which hand fills up first.’

  The general made her way to the war room, generously deploying her scowl to move any junior officers out of the way. The Palace Praxica was a monument to excess, with reskium metal and black marble displayed in such quantities that they crossed the border into garishness from the moment one entered the first receiving chamber. Oshamay had no patience for yet more statues of lithe dancing girls or another mural of past Praxuries standing triumphant over battlefields where they’d never even drawn a pistol or blade.

  When she entered the war room after making her way through the palace’s crowded corridors, a sea of salutes and wide eyes awaited her. She returned the only salute that mattered with her own robotic arm.

  ‘Our one lord,’ she greeted Praxury Tybaral Thal’kr of the First House, Protector of Desh’ea, Imperial Magnate of Nuceria.

  He waved her closer, his eyes as wide as those of his servants and soldiers. Blue eyes, like his father. Dark hair, like his mother. Somewhat drowned in his purple robes of office, and clutching the aquila-topped reskium sceptre as though it were a weapon to save his life. Perhaps it would, if this really was the return of the Imperials.

  He would be thirteen years old next month. Assuming, Oshamay thought, that we all survive until next month. Or the next hour.

  ‘General Evrel’Korshay,’ the Praxury greeted her. ‘The sky is crying fire. It’s a sign.’

  ‘Yes, our one lord. A sign, as you say.’ Her heart sank upon seeing him. What they really didn’t need, on the edge of this crisis, was their mad little cockroach of a king slowing them down with his idiocy. ‘With your permission, I’ve mobilised the Kin-Guard, and–’

  ‘No.’ The frightened boy controlled his voice to perfection, no surprise given his endless elocution training. If she couldn’t see the fear in his eyes, she’d never know from his firm voice that he was on the edge of terror.

  ‘Our one lord,’ she said, careful not to glance to any of his courtiers and other officers for support. ‘The city is about to come under attack.’

  ‘You do not know that,’ he pointed out. He limped over to the map table, messy as it was with scrolls, wincing at the gout he’d developed years before and never managed to fight off. ‘I believe the Imperials are returning to end the Last War.’

  Oshamay didn’t know what the pods of fire that rained down from orbit actually were – such a technological marvel was far beyond her frame of reference, and had no mention in the city-state’s archives. Even so, when they began to light up the sky, she needed no help guessing what was going on.

  ‘Using transport pods for either men or materiel suggests assault, our one lord. If they came in peace, surely they’d land with a little less vim.’

  She saw the doubt in his eyes. It lasted a moment, replaced almost immediately by a calcification of confidence. Heaven forbid the mad little lord ever doubted himself.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, they are merely arriving with as much grandeur as would be expected.’

  ‘Then I shall mobilise the Kin-Guard as a ceremonial effort to greet them, our one lord.’

  He nodded to that, unaware that Desh’ea’s soldiery had already been mobilising for ten minutes.

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘We have reports of several craft coming down in the Desh’elika Mountains, far from the main army. With your permission, I’ll send outrider skimmers to investigate.’

  The boy waved acquiescence. ‘As you say. I shall receive the Imperial emissaries in the throne room. Come with me, general.’

  Oshamay bowed and obeyed.

  Khârn walked across the field of bones, listening to the ghosts in the wind. This high in the mountains, the wind had a howling edge. All too easy to hear the voices of the long-lost and ancient dead in its breath. They weren’t high enough for year-long snowfall, but Khârn looked up, and for a moment he was a boy again, climbing the jagged peaks where he was born, feeling close enough to touch the stars. The world that had been his cradle was halfway across the warring galaxy, but not even the Nails could steal his short-lived smile at the clear, clean memory.

  The primarchs walked ahead of their shared pack, paying no attention to the mixed grouping of Khârn’s Eighth Company and Argel Tal’s immolators. Behind the squad, two Thunderhawks still glowed hot from daggerish atmospheric dives, steaming in the cold mountain air.

  Bones decorated the alpine tundra. Bones with no cohesion and little suggestion of form or function. A century of weathering had eroded them to nubs and slivers, but here and there among the open graveland, the eye was drawn to something recognisably skeletal.

  Khârn reached down to pick up what remained of a skull. His armoured fingertips scratched across its timeworn surface with a gentle whisper. From what was left of its structure – the side not planed smooth by the wind and rain – it had belonged to a male.

  ‘Don’t,’ warned Argel Tal, coming to stand with him.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t touch anything. The skull. These bones.’ His brother’s helm nodded towards Angron, then looked back at the skull in Khârn’s hand. ‘This tomb site is your primarch’s heart, pulled open and laid bare. Look at him.’

  Khârn did so. Angron’s back was to the others. He was swaying on his feet, thick fingers twitching. A keening, mournful whine left his clenched teeth – a sound of vulnerability without weakness; the sound of indescribable pain vocalised in bestial simplicity.

  ‘Tread lightly,’ Argel Tal added, ‘and touch nothing.’

  Khârn crouched, replacing the skull where he found it. It stared up, accusing him with its one eye socket. With the edge of his boot, Khârn rolled it over, leaving it exactly as it had been before his interference. When he spoke again, his voice was pitched low, despite speaking over a personal vox-channel.

  ‘Angron should have died here. This is like walking through a memory that never happened.’

  Argel Tal walked around a boulder with a pile of bones at its base. ‘I can still smell the blood that watered this worthless soil.’

  ‘That’s your imagination,’ Khârn told him.

  Argel Tal didn’t answer.

  Angron had wept once, and only once, in all the years of his life. He remembered it well, for it was his first memory outside the stifling confines of his gestation tube. He’d pulled himself from the sundered warmth of his birth-pod and into the freezing mountain air. All he could see was red, and all he could taste was his own blood. The wounds across his body froze as soon as he crawled free, ice-burned and cauterised, after a fashion. He was a boy, just a boy, and he was bleeding all over.

  They’d come for
him then. Spindly shadows, quick as the wind, howling and laughing and cursing in a language he couldn’t follow.

  He’d killed them. Of course he’d killed them. The moment he sensed them drawing near, he smelled the metal of their weapons and struck at them, without knowing any more than that the metal-scent meant danger and death.

  He’d beaten several of them to death with a rock the size of his fist. Others had tried to run, but the bleeding boy had chased them over the tundra, bringing them down and tearing at their throats with his fingers and teeth.

  But he’d wept that day. Not because of his attackers, whoever they were. Not because of the pain of his wounds, though he was but a boy, and none would judge him harshly for crying a boy’s tears at the wounds he’d suffered.

  No. He’d wept upon his first emergence from the pod because of the wind against his skin. Even as the gale bit his injuries with cold teeth, the feeling of freedom brought tears to his eyes. In all the decades since, he’d never shed a tear, until now. Two saltwater droplets, freezing to his mangled face the moment they trailed down.

  Angron mourns his fallen brothers and sisters

  ‘All dead,’ he said softly. ‘My brothers. My sisters.’

  Lorgar approached, careful where he walked, doing all he could not to disturb the sacred ground.

  ‘What did you name your enemies?’ he asked.

  ‘High-riders,’ Angron replied. ‘We called them high-riders, for how they stood above us, watching us die in the arena’s dirt.’

  ‘The high-riders took their dead with them,’ said the Word Bearer. ‘There aren’t enough bones to be the remains of both armies.’

  ‘My brothers and sisters,’ Angron said again. ‘I swore I’d stand with them. We would die together. Life had never seen such fighters, Lorgar. Klester, riding her shriekspear. Jochura with his strangling chains. Asti, Little Asti, stealing knives to throw and cut and stab. His grin warmed the cold nights. Larbedon, who lost his arm to gangrene, shouting for the high-riders to follow if they dared. He had my back, as I had his. We’d slip on the gore together, grinding the fallen beneath our boots.’