Betrayer

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Say it.’ Angron shook the man, dropping him to the floor with the clang of breastplate on stone, and the snap of one leg bone. The officer cried out until Angron leered down at him, iron teeth wet with strings of saliva. ‘Speak.’

  ‘The army died to a man. Angron-Thal’kr left them to die–’

  ‘No. No! That was never my name. Never! I refuse that slave name!’ Angron crushed the man’s skull beneath a boot, smearing the wreckage across the stone. ‘Can no one speak the truth? Can no one remember anything but lies?’

  He turned on the crowd, still raving, crashing his chainswords together. ‘I never ran! You filthy high-rider dogs. Is nothing sacred? Is nothing spared from your vileness? You are murderers, and the sons and daughters of murderers. Slavers, and the sons and daughters of slavers. We burned your cities! I stood and breathed in the death-smoke of Ull-Chaim on the finest day of my life. I pulled out the princeling’s eyes. Pop and crunch and scream, scream, scream.’

  His voice rose, manic in imitation of a man dying in woeful pain. ‘No, Angron, no! Please! Mercy!’

  Lorgar watched all of this in silence. Khârn could scarcely believe the other primarch stood so impassively.

  ‘Sire–’ Khârn began, but Angron slapped him aside with the flat of one chainblade. It hit with the force of a forge hammer, hurling him back against Argel Tal and Eshramar, who awkwardly caught and righted him.

  ‘I never ran. Never. The Emperor… Hnnngh.’ The effort was monumental, but Angron let the chainswords fall idle, no longer gunning their motors. He was silent for a long while.

  ‘Khârn,’ he said at last, his voice a grating hiss. ‘Argel Tal.’

  The Eighth Captain stepped forwards, as did the commander of the Vakrah Jal. ‘Sire?’ they asked in unison.

  Angron looked up, his gaze one of old hurt and dull, emberish fury. He didn’t glance at the warriors – instead, he raked his eyes over the gathered courtiers, no longer recognising them as people at all.

  ‘I want every World Eater and Word Bearer to heed a simple order.’

  ‘Anything, sire,’ Khârn said.

  ‘Speak, and it will be done,’ said Argel Tal.

  Angron looked back to the cowering child on the throne – the last living remnant of the bloodline that had owned and mutilated and ruined him.

  ‘Kill everyone in this city.’ Angron closed his eyes. ‘Then kill everyone on this world.’

  NINETEEN

  Dead Eyes

  Perpetual

  A Thinker’s War

  There would be no great war for Nuceria. Nor, much to Lotara’s guilty disappointment, would there be any bombardment. She spent the days on the Conqueror’s bridge, watching the orbital cartography, seeing the cities burn beneath the tide of the two Legions and their Audax forces. They only had twenty thousand legionaries down there, but when you were dealing with warriors of that calibre, ‘only’ was a relative statement. Several hundred could take a world in months. Several thousand barely needed a week.

  Lhorke had made planetfall with them, leaving Lotara with a curious feeling of isolation. She’d grown used to the former Legion Master remaining by the side of her throne this last month, offering his grinding, veteran observations on everything that took place. She wondered if he’d paid this much heed in the years he’d been lord of the War Hounds, standing by the thrones of her predecessors and rumbling with advice and criticism whether or not it was sought.

  She’d tried playing cards with him at one point to pass the time during their month in transit. Lhorke was, she learned, a very sore loser, and his massive gauntlets precluded a card player’s finesse. In the end, they’d had to use a servitor to hold his cards. He only played once, and not for more than two minutes.

  ‘This is ludicrous,’ he’d stated, and that was that.

  When he’d announced he was making planetfall, she’d let her raised eyebrow ask the question for her.

  ‘War calls,’ he’d answered.

  ‘And this has nothing to do with you not trusting Angron?’

  ‘War calls,’ he’d said again. And that, also, was that.

  Desh’ea had fallen first. She’d watched it die, in the familiar way that civilisation burning always looked shamefully beautiful from orbit. The two Legions marched through the streets, massacring the population, bringing death to every slaver, and every man, woman and child that had ever tolerated slavery in their society. Her one and only transmission from Angron had come when Desh’ea was blanketed in the smoke of its last breath. He’d looked more alive than she could recall, and yet his eyes were deader than ever.

  ‘Justice,’ his hololithic image had said, fiercely intense. ‘Vengeance. Every slaver dead. Every wretched soul that ever cheered at the gladiator games. Every one. All of them, Lotara.’

  She saw Lhorke behind the primarch, stomping past, crossing her field of vision. A Fellblade trundled by afterwards, making the image shake.

  ‘Will every city face the Legions?’ she’d asked.

  ‘Every city.’

  Lotara had feigned a casual air, pretending to toy with a data-slate. She didn’t like looking into his unfocused eyes. Despite his vitality and the fire in his voice, Angron stared like a corpse, tensing with Nails-pain. She feared whatever had happened in the Praxury’s throne room had damaged what remained of his mind still further.

  ‘What of Lord Aurelian’s plan?’

  ‘Soon. Hnnh. When the cities are dead. They will burn. They will be funeral pyres for my brothers and sisters, one hundred years gone. Then we can deal with Lorgar’s madness.’

  She shivered at his voice, glad she was two hundred kilometres above him. ‘Good luck, Angron.’

  He’d grinned then, pleased at not being called ‘my lord’ by her for once, even as a joke. The image blanked a second later. That was the first night.

  Now, six days after arrival, she paced the bridge, hoping for something – anything – to do. On the surface, with the city of Meahor being assaulted at sunrise, part of her wanted to be there to see it with her own eyes. Part of her – the much shrewder, wiser part – wanted to be nowhere near.

  She stood by Lehralla’s console table. The crippled girl smiled down at her, with those watery, fey eyes of hers.

  ‘My captain,’ she greeted Lotara in a soft voice.

  ‘Scrymistress,’ Lotara replied. ‘Do you ever get bored?’

  ‘No, captain.’ And for a wonder, the halved girl seemed to be sincere. ‘Never.’

  Lotara gave a soft laugh and moved on. She was by Vox-master Kejic’s array of frequency controls and transmission stations when the bridge’s southern doors rolled open on their sonorous tracks. Several heads turned; the main crew thoroughfare was from east to west, and few used the southern doors.

  Tarn, her Master of Astropaths, stood in the entranceway. Blind as all astropaths were, their sight stolen to magnify their powers, his milky eyes were wide beneath his white hood.

  ‘Captain,’ he said. ‘I hear something.’

  Lotara hid her sigh behind a false smile, hoping it would steal the edge from her tone.

  ‘Tarn, if you’ve come to give me another lecture on Lord Aurelian’s great song, you have my permission to turn around and leave me in peace.’

  He clutched at his medallion of office with skinny hands, his fingers gnarled by gout.

  ‘No, captain. I hear something approaching.’

  Across the bridge, Lehralla turned on her plinth, the cables leashing her to the ceiling lashing like snakes.

  ‘Warp nexus,’ the girl called. ‘Warp nexus in the fifth meridian. Hololithics activating.’

  Lotara sprinted to the central hololithic table as it flickered into life.

  ‘What’s coming through? All eyes on the nexus. Track it and codify it at once.’ The wait was agony as she stared at the hololithic rune flickering in
the air, waiting for it to resolve. A warp-wound, that much she knew. A ship breaking back into reality.

  ‘Scry-locked,’ Lehralla said in a distant voice. ‘I see it.’

  Lotara saw it a moment later. The rune resolved, showing a transponder code; then several transponder codes; then several more.

  ‘Prime weapons and shields,’ she said calmly. ‘All crew to battle stations.’

  Her face appeared in ghostly resolution at the edge of Khârn’s retinal display. In profile, as always, from the pictfinder mounted on the side of her throne.

  ‘This is Captain Sarrin to all ground forces. The Thirteenth Legion warship Courage Above All has broken warp at the system’s edge, at the head of a void armada. Their outrunners will be in range to engage in nine minutes. All Legion forces, get back to your drop-ships and landers for immediate withdrawal.’

  The city Meahor stood defiant on the horizon. The two Legions had lined up in siege formation, ready for the grim march towards the walls. Audax’s Titans were with them, row upon row of Warhounds standing above the massed infantry and their armour divisions. Vindicators, Land Raiders, Fellblades, Mastodons – entire tank divisions, awaiting the order to roll forwards at dawn. No swift, clean attack for the cities of Nuceria. Each of them so far had watched their demise come rolling closer in a tide, and died when the World Eaters and Word Bearers pulled their walls down. Meahor would be the last. Now it seemed to be spared, minutes from the order to march.

  ‘Lotara,’ Khârn voxed back, knowing every legionary, Titan crew member, and skitarii in the ranks could hear him.

  ‘Centurion,’ she replied. She looked eager, eyes narrowed, a huntress ready for any tricks her prey might play.

  ‘Extraction is impossible. Can you keep them at bay?’

  ‘Khârn,’ she said with a sigh, then seemed to recall the fact every single soul on the surface could hear what she was saying. ‘Captain, you have no conception of the host sailing its way into lance range. We outweigh them and outgun them, but we’ll still die deaths from a thousand cuts. If you can’t withdraw, then take the city now. Find cover, because they will break past us, no matter what I do up here.’

  ‘Understood.’ Khârn looked down the line of several thousand Space Marines in scruffy formation. He raised his axe, ready to give the signal to advance.

  ‘Wait,’ said a voice of gargling gravel.

  ‘Sire?’ Lotara replied. She looked away across the bridge, her voice distorting for several seconds. ‘Feyd, are those fighters in the sky?’ She turned back. ‘Angron, with all due respect, hurry up.’

  ‘They want us,’ the primarch replied. Khârn could see his gene-father back in the ranks, standing atop a Bloodhammer super-heavy assault carrier, both chainswords in his hands. ‘They want us dead. That means proof. It means planetfall. We’ll take the city and force them down to dig us out. Repel bombardment, at all costs. Do you understand me? Repel bombardment, even at the cost of the ship.’

  ‘Understood,’ Lotara said, and her image died in the retinal displays of every legionary on the surface.

  Lorgar’s voice was a gentle interruption over the shared vox. ‘Guilliman is up there.’

  ‘Hnngh. I know. The vengeance of Calth is coming at last. Warriors of the Twelfth and Seventeenth Legions! Take the city! Charge!’

  As the sun rose over the Jehzr Plains, the Legions tore their way overland, to bring down the walls of Nuceria’s last city and use its ruins as a fortress.

  Aboard the Fidelitas Lex, a slender young woman walked through the mausoleum, approaching her own tomb. Her skin was dusky – a desert tribeswoman’s tan – and her long hair fell in soft brown curls, neither dark nor light but a healthy, earthy compromise between the two. She wore a robe of Word Bearers red – that unmistakable blood-claret darkness – cut in a flowing shape that clung to her waist and flared outwards from there on down. She looked a little like a bride, and a little like a priestess.

  The ship shook beneath her. Another battle. How many battles had she lived through on the De Profundis, seated in the quiet of her chamber while the walls shook and the decks vibrated from cannonfire? You could get used to anything. That was the sad truth.

  Her Vakrah Jal guardians waited outside the chamber, four of them in all, ready to incinerate any mortal or Word Bearer that sought to lay a hand on her or bar her way. With Argel Tal on the surface, she’d decided it was time to come see herself as she’d been… before.

  When she passed the statue of Xaphen, she dared to reach out and touch its breastplate, unconsciously echoing the gesture Argel Tal always made here. He’d told her how Xaphen died. He’d even shown her the weapon that did it, and admitted the secret of how he’d managed to break the gene-coding to activate his stolen relics.

  Blood. Didn’t it always come down to blood?

  Her skin crawled as she caught sight of her own statue from the corner of her eye. Even without looking at its details, the thing’s presence spread the taste of bile over her tongue.

  Bracing herself, she walked towards it. A robed servant stood by the pedestal, tending to the three braziers at the stone lady’s bare feet. Unless a senior Word Bearer decreed otherwise, the Hall of Anamnesis was often populated by menials and thralls tending to the monuments.

  The sight of herself graven in stone felt much worse than she’d imagined. She didn’t want to look at it, let alone touch it. The sculptor’s artistry was undeniable, but therein lay the problem. It looked too real. It wasn’t a stylised statue raised in honour of her deeds. It was a tomb marker, a monument to her death. And it was blind – the stone girl’s eyes wreathed in a sculpted blindfold. That was doubly unnerving, though she wasn’t sure why. She’d spent most of her life blind, and in the month since her rebirth – what Cyrene hesitantly called her ‘reawakening’ – she had spent many hours in her chamber alone, lights dimmed and her eyes closed, listening to the ship around her. It felt more natural than seeing the million things she’d lived amongst and never witnessed before.

  Despite herself, she touched the statue’s outstretched hands, fingers to fingers, flesh mirrored perfectly in stone. For a churning moment, she wasn’t sure which one of them was really her: the reborn girl or the statue of the dead one. Both, perhaps. Or neither.

  ‘It’s a very fine likeness,’ said the robed servant. She started at the sudden voice – Argel Tal had told her the mausoleum thralls took a vow of silence upon pain of death. He kept his face hooded, but she saw the edge of a smile in the shadow. ‘I’m sure you don’t miss the blindfold, though.’

  Her blood ran colder; he’d not spoken in Gothic or Colchisian. The words were Uhturlan, the dialect of the Monarchian city-state where she’d been born on distant Khur.

  ‘Show yourself.’

  He did. He wasn’t particularly handsome, nor was he especially youthful. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, edging towards middle-age, and like anyone spending their lives aboard the vessels of a war-fleet, he looked like he’d lived hard for those decades.

  He was also, without a shade of doubt, not what he was pretending to be. His eyes were bright and alive and full of laughing lies.

  ‘Don’t,’ he warned her. ‘Don’t shout for your guardians.’ A moment later he added, ‘I could see you were about to.’

  She’d been about to turn to see if there were any other thralls nearby, but she didn’t scare so easily as to shriek for her Vakrah Jal purely because of a deceitful rogue trying his luck. And she had a ritual qattari knife strapped to her thigh, beneath the flowing robe.

  ‘How do you speak the tongue of a dead city?’ she asked, folding her arms beneath her breasts, hugging herself as if cold. Hearing her language, seeing this statue… It was surreal enough to drive her to distraction.

  ‘I speak any tongue I put my mind to.’ His eyes locked to hers with sincerity, but without threat. ‘Pardon me for saying so, but you’re b
reathtaking in the flesh. I have an avowed weakness for dusky women.’

  He wasn’t putting her at ease, but something in his voice was more palatable than the solemn reverence in almost every Word Bearer’s tones. Even Lorgar, upon seeing her again, had been awestruck and priestly – praying for her soul and naming her resurrection a miracle. He’d not commented on Erebus’s role in her rebirth, and never once tried to ask any of the questions so many others came to her with. Lorgar didn’t ask her if she recalled being dead, or what it was like beyond the veil. She suspected it was because he already knew.

  All Lorgar had done was kneel before her, bringing himself close to her height, and kissed her closed eyes.

  ‘I once apologised for my sins bringing the fire that blinded you,’ he had whispered. ‘Now I apologise for them bringing the blade that harmed you. My heart sings to know you breathe again.’

  She’d wanted to reply, but in a primarch’s company, she did what so many humans had done and would continue to do. She stared, shivered, and tried not to weep at his majestic, impossible presence.

  Understanding her breathless indecision – as he always seemed to understand those beneath him – Lorgar had released her with an apologetic smile.

  ‘Go in peace, Blessed Lady. You were always a gift to my Legion, and my sons have missed you. Anything you ask of me will be yours.’

  Here, in the mausoleum, Cyrene blinked to banish the memory.

  ‘Whatever you’re trying,’ she said to the false thrall, ‘you’ll have to try harder.’

  ‘This is just the opening volley, I assure you. We have to talk, Cyrene.’

  She scrunched her nose at his pronunciation. Sy-Reen. Despite speaking her native language, his pronunciation held traces of Gothic clumsiness, and Gothic wasn’t kind to her name.

  ‘It’s Sih-renny,’ she replied.

  ‘Forgive me, John was always better at languages.’

  ‘Who’s John?’

  ‘A friend. An idiot, but a friend. It doesn’t matter – he’s busy. I was sent here, for you. We have to talk.’