Lorgar held his tongue. Everything had changed after Isstvan. In the hours after the massacre, as he’d sat alone and let his face bleed from Corax’s murder-talons, he sensed the shifting of fate behind the veil. The futures rewiring themselves, new pathways of possibility opening up. In this last year, he finally felt himself taking the mantle of the man he’d always meant to be. He even, in his less humble moments, hungered to face Corax again. Things wouldn’t play out so perfectly in the Raven Lord’s favour next time – of that, Lorgar was sure.
‘The Mark of Calth.’ Guilliman made the title into an accusation. Reserved dignity even flavoured his wrath: he refused to fall into the emotional madness of a berserk killer, instead fighting with a fury that burned cold.
Guilliman slammed his hands together, catching the falling maul with a harsh whine of protesting energy fields. Holding it there, he looked past their joined weapons and into his brother’s eyes.
‘Look at me. Look at my face. Do you see the Mark of Calth?’
His patrician’s features were handsome in a stately, stern way, even when twisted by anger, but he could never be considered as made in the Emperor’s image to the degree that played over Lorgar’s tattooed visage. The only difference between Guilliman now and the Guilliman that had stood in the dust of Monarchia was a fine threading of dark veins along the primarch’s throat and cheeks – scarcely noticeable to any but those who knew him best.
‘Void exposure.’ The Ultramarine refused to release the weapon, despite lightning dancing down his heavy gauntlets. Lorgar gripped Illuminarum’s haft as the energy rippled down its length, biting at his gloved hands and setting fire to the parchments bound to his shoulder guards. ‘Void exposure when you killed one of my worlds, and the fleet above it.’
Lorgar didn’t spit back with harsh words. He shook his head, pitting his strength against his brother’s.
Guilliman’s statesman smile played across his features. ‘You’ve changed.’
Lorgar grunted at his brother’s accusation.
‘So everyone tells me.’
This time, it was Lorgar who disengaged. He pulled Illuminarum free, and suffered a fist to the sternum for taking the risk. The blow sucked all the breath from his body, cracked his breastplate, and left him with a bloody smile at the poetic justice. He’d cracked his brother’s breastplate in the Perfect City and now the favour was returned. Fate really was laughing at him.
‘First blood to me,’ Guilliman said.
The pity in that voice was acid in Lorgar’s ears. He tried to speak, tried to breathe, and could do neither. The song had never sounded more wrong.
Guilliman’s hands scrabbled and skidded across his armour, seeking a stranglehold to end the fight quickly. Lorgar repulsed him with a projected burst of telekinesis, weak and wavering with the song still so de-tuned, but enough to send his brother staggering. The maul followed, its power field trailing lightning as Lorgar hammered it into the side of Guilliman’s head with the force of a cannonball. There was a crack that wouldn’t have shamed a peal of thunder.
‘There’s your Mark of Calth,’ Lorgar replied, backing away to catch his breath. Air sawed in and out of his lungs. He could already taste blood – Guilliman’s blow had broken something inside him. Several ribs at the very least, and likely something more vital. He dragged in a breath, and exhaled it as blood down the front of his armour.
Both primarchs faced each other beneath the grey sky, one bleeding internally, the other with half of his face lost to blood sheeting from a fractured skull.
‘Enjoy that scar.’ Lorgar fought for his smile. ‘It will be with you until your dying day.’ He threw his arms wide, taking in the dying city. ‘Why chase me, Roboute? Why? Your fleet will fall against the Trisagion and you’ll die down here.’
‘There is a difference between confidence and arrogance, cur. Surely someone has told you that.’
The Word Bearer spat blood again. ‘But why come? Why come at all?’
‘Courage.’ Guilliman stalked forwards, ignoring his wound, and he didn’t need to struggle for a smile – it came as easily as breathing. ‘Courage and honour, Lorgar. Two virtues you have never known.’
They moved west, fighting every inch of the way, engaged in running battles with the Ultramarines who also withdrew before the coming tidal wave.
A concept often stated in the war chronicles Argel Tal studied was the notion of a warrior ‘fighting as though possessed’. Possessed, in most cases, by some unquantifiable warrior spirit, the desire to defend one’s homeland, or just to echo the essence of legendary ancestors.
Argel Tal was possessed, in the truest sense of the word, and without the parasitic symbiosis he shared with Raum, he doubted he could have kept up with Khârn. From the moment Argel Tal left Erebus’s side, he’d spent the battle in his daemonic form, too hard-pressed to exult in his strength and hating the credence he was giving to his former master’s prophetic warning. He kept telling himself it was a lie even as he acted to prevent it becoming truth.
The Eighth Captain of the XII Legion leapt fully into the visceral, laughing joy of battle, chainswords howling and tearing, wearing the blood-spray of defeated foes as medals across his white armour. He was scarcely even Khârn any more. Argel Tal’s daemon-granted sixth sense was a stunted and mulish thing, but he could rake a mind for its surface thoughts easily enough. With Khârn, he sensed nothing but a rage hot enough to scald the thoughts of any who pried into it. Familiarity taught him to recognise the Nails’ bite, and to leave well alone.
Keeping Khârn alive so far had been a crusade to match the fevered hours of Isstvan V. When Argel Tal came too close, he risked being carved open by his brother’s blades. Seven times already Khârn had attacked him in blind rage, and each time it took longer for the World Eater to realise what he was doing and turn back to the closest enemy.
When Argel Tal strayed too far, he’d lose sight of Khârn in the swarming chaos of the running street battles. Easy enough to claw his way up the side of a building to get a better view of the fighting, or take to the air on his fleshmetal wings, but each time marked him out as a target to the Ultramarines below.
He didn’t know how many he’d killed. Not enough, evidently. They kept coming.
Enough, Raum had seethed in the thick of it. The Slayer does not need us. Fight with the Vakrah Jal.
I will not risk you being wrong. I’ve failed every brother I had. Khârn is the last.
You have me.
You are madness made manifest. Argel Tal ripped his spear from the chest of a dying Ultramarine, ramming it back down through the warrior’s throat. You are Hell in my bloodstream.
Khârn was somewhere to the left, chopping his way forwards. He’d been laughing, of all things, even as he moved ahead of his sword-brothers, carving deep into a crowd of Calth-scarred Ultramarines.
Argel Tal had seen the danger that Khârn hadn’t. The Word Bearer spread his wings and kicked off from the ground, landing on the warriors seeking to outflank his brother. The first Ultramarine died with Argel Tal’s spear through his helmet, rammed clean out the back of his skull. The second and third fell to the Custodian blade – cleaving one in two, severing the other’s arm and half his head in a badly-angled blow.
The searing burst of bolter shells savaged his wings and back. Argel Tal turned with a bellow far too low to be human, and reached for the legionary with his twisted, gnarled claw around the warrior’s throat. The Ultramarine’s valiant attempt to fire again ended when the commander of the Vakrah Jal’s faceplate warped into something wolfishly metallic, and broke the Macraggian’s head in its fanged maw.
Another blade had raked across his back. Another bolter shell cracked into his shin with the force of a thunderclap. Argel Tal ignored every wound he took, clawing his way closer to Khârn. Were the Ultramarines seeking Khârn’s blood because they were slaves to some prophesi
ed fate? Was it as prosaic a truth as that they simply recognised his officer’s crest, or his heraldry, and wanted him dead? Or was Argel Tal imagining it all, fuelled by Erebus’s whispered prediction? What hope was there of knowing in this chaos?
He couldn’t remember how long ago that had been. Five minutes. Fifteen. Fifty. The sun was up, a sliver over the horizon. Blood of the gods, this world turned slowly.
Steadily and undeniably, they were growing outnumbered. For all he knew, the Trisagion and Conqueror were as dead as the Lex, and the Ultramarines had an open run to the planet.
He saw the helms of World Eaters he’d known this last year, training and fighting at Khârn’s side. He saw Lhorke, forever where the fighting was thickest, devastating all that stood in his path. When his spear slipped from his grip, lost in the tempest, he relied solely on his Custodian blade. When that was shattered against a Terminator’s thunder hammer, he let his bestial claws lead the way. They sang like honed steel, dripping with alchemical fire from his leaking wrist-flamers. There was no pain. For that, he thanked Raum.
Across the vox, Audax was calling for aid. Several World Eaters officers resisted the Nails long enough to guide the flow towards breaking out to the west, but it could hardly be considered a unified front line.
He prayed for Cyrene, beseeching the laughing, murderous gods not to toy with her soul. Another failure – bringing her back only to lose her again.
Khârn truly was the last of his closest kindred he hadn’t yet failed, and the World Eater mattered more than any other. Khârn was as Argel Tal once was: still untouched by the warp, not yet hollowed out by the cancerous kiss of a daemon stealing his consciousness and igniting his blood at will. Raum was a blessing and a curse, for despite the strength the daemon offered, the Word Bearer wouldn’t wish this gift on anyone else.
He thought he saw Skane die. There was the briefest moment when his eyes flickered down the embattled line and his muscles bunched to run to the Destroyer sergeant’s aid. Skane, marked out by his black armour, was on his knees in the dirt, raising an arm that ended at the elbow.
Argel Tal resisted the urge, deflecting another chainsword coming for Khârn’s shoulder guard. The centurion looked over his shoulder, and for a moment Argel Tal thought the Nails had relented enough to allow Khârn time to catch his bearings. The truth came a half-second later, when Khârn lashed out at him with a twinned blade. The Word Bearer parried, snarling as the block cost him another cut to his arm from an Ultramarine in the press of armoured bodies.
‘It’s me,’ his wolfish faceplate snapped back at his maddened brother. ‘Fight the enemy, you maniac.’
Whether he understood or not, Khârn turned to the closest Ultra-marine and disembowelled the warrior with both blades.
Argel Tal fought on, defending the frenzied brother who scarcely even knew he was there. But then, it was never written that redemption came easy, nor that it would always be recognised.
He had time to wrap his claws around the throat of his next foe before the vox flared into shouting activity. Argel Tal looked to the east, where the Lex’s legacy was making itself known at the coast. He saw the tidal wave bearing down on the far side of the city, and thanked the gods that the battleship had come down in a drift. If it had struck like a spear and lanced into the crust, half the planet might have shaken itself apart. At least this way, an already dying city would just add another layer of ruin to its memory.
From the vox-reports, the grey seawater hit the coast with unimaginable force. It was high enough to pound against three- and four-storey buildings, breaking them apart in the deluge, adding huge stone blocks to the vehicle-cluttered flood lashing through the streets. Towers toppled into the drink, broken at their foundations. The entire coastal district was swept clean from the city in a single blow, the bodies of Nucerian natives and shattered habitation blocks carried westwards by the tide.
The land drank it up, fought it back, but still the water kept coming. By the time it reached the embattled Legions at their fallback positions, it was a waist-high encumbrance that fouled light tanks and devastated the effectiveness of their allied skitarii.
Argel Tal fought on, sloshing through the saltwater, always following Khârn.
Khârn didn’t seem to notice it at all. He pushed ahead, wading through the deep water as if it wasn’t there.
The coffin-ship of Legio Oberon was by far the largest lander that Guilliman’s fleet had managed to get past the sundered blockade. Its retros threw up a great cloud of alkaline dust, mixing in with the gritty smoke cloud already sent up by the city battle.
The term ‘coffin-ship’ was that rarest of titles: Mechanicum slang that wasn’t coded or binaric in nature. An ugly name for an ugly vessel – what touched down at Meahor’s western edge was a fat-bellied whale of a ship, its bulbous hull streaked with scorch marks from atmospheric entry. Its deployment ramps had taken a full five minutes to lower to the ground, on hydraulics loud enough to carry over half of the city. Preparing any Titan to walk was a solemn and involved ritual requiring hundreds of souls, but an Emperor Titan was an enterprise far beyond what was required with the lesser-pattern god-machines.
Within the shell, the Corinthian stood bound and leashed in place by thousands of fibre-cables, magnetically sealed into position between three gantried pylon towers. The structures required to board the Mechanicum walker and hold it in place were little different from the support towers once used to launch rockets to Luna in the dull ages of Man, when such things were laughably considered an achievement.
Depowered as one, the binding cables came loose in a whipcracking cascade, freeing the Titan to walk at last. Each of the giant machine’s legs was a bastion in its own right, crewed by skitarii detachments of weaponised cyborgs. Its splayed, clawed toes were wide stairs leading out from the defence-towers of its legs.
Corinthian’s first step shook the ground. Its second annihilated the city wall and three tall buildings, grinding them into dust. A war-horn sounded, almost a sonic weapon in its own right, announcing its presence. The Imperator’s right arm would level an entire city district if it was allowed to fire once. Its left arm would chew through half of any army it faced. Above all of this, above even its skull-headed cockpit – which in turn was large enough to be more of a command deck – the Corinthian carried a fortress on its shoulders, with anti-air cannons and laser batteries lining the battlements.
The last sound of its cacophonic preparation ritual was the dragon’s roar of its heart-core powering up to battle readiness. Searing liquid fuel washed through its veins, pushed out from the heart, and the magnetic coils of its plasma arm started the lengthy process of charging. If it fired, they were dead. They were all dead.
‘Beautiful,’ Audun breathed, watching the majestic avatar of the Machine-God take its first steps of freedom. They were closing on the city’s edge, and Corinthian was already visible, towering over the hab-blocks. The floodwater lapped at the giant’s foot-claws, not troubling it at all.
Syrgalah ran in a lurching hunch, leading her packs through the deluged streets; ignoring the Ultramarines firing up at them from below, accidentally crushing dozens underfoot. World Eaters land speeders slashed alongside them, bulked out for troop transport. Several of the Warhounds were serving as steeds themselves, their armour plating crawling with whole squads of Destroyers and assault troops clinging on as the Titans ran. Each Titan’s footsteps sent up great splashes of saltwater – the tidal wave had settled, but refused to recede. It was here to stay; the city Meahor would end its life a flooded wreck as well as a destroyed one.
‘So very beautiful,’ Audun sighed, unable to take his eyes from the steel giant. ‘We have to take it alive.’
‘You think the Twelfth will bear that in mind?’
‘We can only pray they do, Moderati Bly.’ A moment’s concentration activated Audun’s personal vox-link to every one of his Legio’s Tita
ns. ‘This is the Princeps Ultima. In the Omnissiah’s name, the Corinthian cannot be allowed to fire. You all know what to do. This is the breed of battle that Audax was born for. Ursus claws ready, brothers and sisters. Let the hunt begin.’
There was another moment of relative silence in the cockpit. He found himself swallowing.
‘Nicely said, sire,’ Toth ventured.
Keeda nodded. ‘Just like the old man.’
Audun Lyrac, master of a hundred war machines and several thousand augmetic warriors, felt his cheeks heat up. He mumbled thanks his moderati pretended not to hear, to spare him further embarrassment.
Of all his titles, given in glory or earned in infamy, Angron most despised being named the Red Angel. The Imperium already had an Angel in Sanguinius, and Angron had no desire to ape the fey mutant that commanded the IX Legion. For all his flaws, he was his own man, and took pride in that above all else.
Lorgar knew Angron loathed it, yet it was among his brother’s most fitting titles. When the World Eater burst forth from the Ultramarines ranks, his armour was a shattered wreck, and both of his chainswords spat gobbets of ceramite armour plating and scarlet gore. After hours in the crush of the front lines, Angron was plastered with the blood of the slain – more than bloodstained, he was bloodbathed.
On his chest hung a bandolier of skulls taken from the mass grave at Desh’elika. Blood painted them as surely as it marked Angron. Even through the Nails’ pain, that pleased him. He wanted his brothers and sisters to taste blood once more. He’d carried them with him across Nuceria, letting their empty eyes witness the razing of high-rider cities.
The World Eater launched himself at Guilliman, with his ruined face contorted to be perfectly reminiscent of an angel lost in murderous hatred. Lorgar and Roboute both turned in the same moment – one of them to meet this new threat, the other to welcome it.
Lorgar’s breath caught in his throat. Not because he was exhausted – though he was – and not because he was relieved to see Angron breaking the deadlock – though, again, he was. His breath caught as his heart started pounding in fierce thunder, falling in perfect pitch with the warp’s song once more.
Betrayer Page 35
