Betrayer

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  It’s Lorgar.+ Esca thundered a boot into another Ultramarine’s chest, hurling the legionary back into his brethren. +The power’s coming from Lorgar.+

  Vorias fought with staff and blade, spinning both in arcs of lightning-wrapped metal.

  No. The power is coming from the warp. Lorgar is bringing it through.+ A bolt shell took the Lectio Primus in the back of the leg, driving him down to one knee. Vorias’s cry of pain was a silent sigh, pulsed across the link. Esca and another Codicier, Damarkien, fought their way to their wounded lord and mentor, fighting to protect him as he rose.

  Esca risked a glance to the sky. The clouds themselves were lost in a slow swirl, darkening to form the un-colours seen only in the warp. With no place on this side of reality, they manifested as a hundred impossible shades of black, each one swarming with the thrashing suggestions of trapped, shrieking souls.

  What is he doing?+ Esca asked. +What’s happening?+

  I cannot breach Lorgar’s barrier of will,+ Vorias sent to them. +His strength is immense.+

  Esca reached out with his senses. The moment he drew near the Bearer of the Word, a hurricane’s force repelled him back.

  The Communion,+ he said.

  We’ll die,+ Ralakas whipped the thought back. +There are hundreds of our Legion here, and not one of them will defend us while we leave our bodies prone.+

  Esca wouldn’t be swayed. +The Communion could break through,+ he insisted.

  Vorias’s face, aged but strong, was lined by effort. ‘Perhaps,’ he admitted aloud.

  That was the moment the sky tore open. Stormclouds formed from the ghosts of a hundred murdered worlds began to rain blood on the dead city below.

  Lorgar lifted his head to face the bleeding, weeping sky. The sanguine rain washed over him, warming his skin, filling his mouth. He didn’t stop chanting, speaking the true names of countless Neverborn in a breathless stream, demanding that they devote their energies to his will.

  So much power. Power defying description, defying comprehension. Reality mangling itself to his desire, the power wielded as easily as opening one’s eyes, or lifting a hand. This was the game of the Four gods. They dealt with power on this scale each second of their existences, but they lacked the corporeal presence to carry out their designs in the material realm. Metaphysics was an unkind master, even to the Powers Behind All.

  A beam of screaming sunlight lanced from the tortured heavens, casting its poisoned luminescence across Angron and Guilliman. Shadows lengthened beneath every warrior, beneath every building and tank, twisting into the flickering images of writhing, reaching human silhouettes. The screaming came from everywhere: every shadow-soul across the city was wailing in the rain of blood. They danced like smoke and fire, crawling and cavorting in their hunger to reach the Eater of Worlds.

  The crescendo of the warp’s song, played through an instrument of perfect, depthless fury. No purer emotion than rage. Angron himself had said those words. Once the pain had passed, perhaps he’d even agree with them once again.

  Angron himself still fought Guilliman, standing above the kneeling Ultramarine. Had he even noticed the storm of blood streaming from the sky in a red torrent? Sparks sprayed from Roboute’s raised gauntlets as he struggled to ward off blow after blow. He was beaten. He was down. Wounds painted him, a palette of proud defeat. Even now, his warriors were fighting to retrieve him. With the scarring across his armour and the sense of pain bleeding from his mind, Lorgar reckoned his brother would be lucky to ever walk again.

  Angron looked little better. Already an icon of mutilated majesty, huge rents and gashes marked his flesh from the knuckles of Guilliman’s gauntlets.

  Now. It has to be now.

  Lorgar focused his concentration on the triumphant form of his mutilated brother, calling for the Neverborn to answer in kind. He locked Angron’s muscles, setting fire to the synapses in his brain. He stole the chance at a killing blow, fuelling the World Eater’s rage even higher. The screaming began: a melody of murdered worlds, finally singing in the material realm.

  History repeated itself. Another primarch crawled away from Angron’s wrath – another brother who’d come into an inheritance without being cursed, without being torn from his roots and left to mourn what might have been. There was no pleasure in beating them. The rage never faded. It only deepened, turned rancid by bitterness. The hoped-for serenity of battle fled from him, deserting him with the hollow promises of a false lover.

  Hatred offered no victory. Nothing did.

  Even those he defied and destroyed… even they pitied him.

  Forgive me. I tried to tell you. All of us dance to the warp’s tune. Even you, Angron.

  This time, as Guilliman – rather than Russ – dragged himself clear, the World Eater staggered back himself, clawing at the ruin of his face and chest. He was tearing at his own armour and flesh, ripping it away in fistfuls, screaming a sound that no living thing should be able to make.

  Flesh and bone, blood and soul, his body vibrated with the warp’s tidal rhythm. It rang through every atom – every subatomic particle – of his divinely-wrought form. Billions and billions of screaming souls.

  And with their cries came the pain.

  The first spasms wracked their way through Angron’s sinews, turning his blood to quicksilver, then to lava and at last to holy fire. His cries of thwarted rage were tainted by an agony beyond comprehension. His body started tearing itself apart, growing, rising. Perfecting, after a lifetime of broken torture.

  Lorgar stared at his brother’s agony with guilty joy.

  You were always the conduit, No one else hates the way you do, with the same depthless strength. No one else feels such pain, violated by life’s treacheries. It had to be you, in the deepest moment of rage and sorrow. There could be no other conduit.

  Guilliman was escaping into his sons’ defiant phalanxes, retreating in enviable unity as they waded down the flooded roads. Lorgar saw the expression of disgusted awe on his brother’s face as the wounded Ultramarine stared at Angron atop the mound of dead sons from all three bloodlines. The XIII Legion still fired even in retreat – their shells crashed against Angron’s bared muscle-meat, staining his skinless flesh black, bursting gouts of blood into the air.

  A drumbeat. The gunfire was just a drumbeat, adding to the great song’s crescendo. Bolts thudded into him, blasting viscera free in sloppy arcs. They did nothing at all. Angron had transcended corporeal pain, in the grip of heavenly torment.

  Lightning struck him. Even Lorgar hadn’t expected that.

  Thunder pealed, forming another part of the great song, and more bolts of lightning snapped down from the bleeding sky, igniting the World Eaters primarch, the corpses at his boots and the very earth around him. The fire burned red, formed of flickering, writhing ghosts. The lives of those lost, in exchange for his.

  The blood rain fell harder, hotter now – hot enough to fog and bleach the paint from the cracked ceramite of countless warring warriors. Lorgar never ceased his chanting, naming the Names, calling upon them to obey as they’d promised. He’d given them oceans of blood and worlds aflame. Now they owed him. He’d sold trillions of lives in exchange for one. Let it never be said that Lorgar Aurelian wasn’t a loyal brother.

  The inferno that had been Angron of the World Eaters raged unchecked. Doubt’s first kiss touched Lorgar in that moment; he couldn’t make out anything through the sanguine blaze. Was Angron even within that conflagration? Had the gods annihilated him, in reparation for some flaw in the great song? He reached out with his psychic sense, questing towards the bale-flame. All he could hear was the wailing of the unfairly slain – their rage, their agony. This was the song he’d composed from fire and genocide, playing now for his brother’s salvation.

  He felt another presence in that moment: something inhuman and vastly more powerful than any mere psychic soul or ghost of Ultram
ar. This was a voice he couldn’t tune out, and for a moment of absolute ecstasy, he believed one of the Four had come to bless his efforts.

  I am no god. The voice was softened by amazement, but nothing could conceal the power in its sepulchral tones. I am the Communion.

  The name meant nothing to Lorgar. Aid me! he demanded of the presence.

  Sadness preceded the reply. I see now. I see everything. You are killing our father.

  I am saving him! Ascension! That is how worthy he is in the eyes of the Four!

  Lorgar Aurelian, said the voice, we will not allow this.

  And just as they’d let themselves drift from their bodies, they pulled Lorgar from his.

  He was falling.

  He was falling into the tides behind the veil, into the song itself. The melody was a much harsher, acidic tune on this side of reality. It washed over his flesh, burning and boiling, running into his mouth and filling his lungs. He rejected this invasion, channelling his concentration into a repelling force. It did nothing. If anything, it made the fire-water sear hotter against his body.

  Lorgar raked his hands against the un-colours of the warp, forcing sense to the senselessness. Vision resolved into something a flesh and blood mind could process in a realm of the unreal.

  He wasn’t falling. He was being pulled down, deep under the blackest tides. He was drowning, with his crozius in his hands.

  And then, light. Something that blazed with its own inner light dived after him, chasing him down.

  A World Eater.

  No. A War Hound. The armour was a serene pale blue marked with white. On its shoulders reared the red dog of war: that old, abandoned symbol, consigned to the vaults of memory.

  The War Hound matched the primarch in size, even without its corona of cauterising light. The two figures met as they fell together, axe against maul, the sound of psychic iron on psychic iron sending ripples through the tides of unreality.

  ‘You are an echo,’ Lorgar told the ghostly warrior. ‘A revenant. A nothing.’

  The warrior turned in the swirling black. ‘I am the Communion.’

  Their weapons met again and again, sending the same ripples out into the Sea of Souls. Each time they crashed together, the warp itself screamed in answer: faces melted out of the fire-water to deliver their shrieks, then sank back into the primal matter from whence they came.

  The War Hound’s helmet was an older design, calling back to more innocent, easier days when the Imperium’s ignorance allowed its people to feel safe. The sight of it made Lorgar laugh.

  ‘You are a relic,’ he told the warrior.

  ‘Our Legion has suffered more than any other, Lorgar Aurelian.’ The low voice was a knight’s cold and righteous threat. ‘Enough. Enough. You will not corrupt our lord.’

  ‘I am saving him!’ Lorgar spoke through clenched teeth. He was weakening in the tides, still falling, knowing his body lay motionless back on Nuceria. He could imagine its armour and skin being inked dark by blood from the storm.

  This battle was a contest of wills, perceived as the mortal mind allowed it. Their weapons clashed again. The War Hound pushed against him, but the dissipation of strength was an affliction they both had to bear. Clawed hands reached out from the turbulent water. Lorgar repelled them with a snarl and psychic shove of concentration. The War Hound suffered their assault, his whole being focused solely on Lorgar. Trails of smoking white blood streamed away from the wounds clawed in the Communion’s antique armour.

  ‘You tried to drown me in the warp.’ Lorgar was smiling now. ‘But I am just as strong here. I am the archpriest of these powers, little ghost.’

  The War Hound sagged, its shoulders straining against the locked weapons. Weaker, weaker. A growl left its throat.

  Then it struck faster than even a primarch could follow. It came apart, discorporating into the black water. Lorgar’s maul sliced the tides, all resistance gone. The War Hound reformed in Illuminarum’s wake, its hands at the Word Bearer’s throat.

  The psychic manifestation of his crozius slipped from his hands, vanishing the moment it left his fingers. Lorgar wrapped his own hands around the War Hound’s neck, struggling to breathe despite neither of them needing to do so in this place. Instincts died hard.

  As they fell in that killing embrace, tumbling through the tides, Lorgar looked into the War Hound’s eye lenses and saw just what he was fighting. It wasn’t one spirit beneath that helm. It was a gestalt of souls.

  Another smile creased his lips, more an amused grimace than a grin.

  ‘Boldly done, though,’ Lorgar hissed. ‘Very clever.’

  He released his grip, ramming his hand into the War Hound’s breastplate, right through and into the psychic meat beneath. The warrior tensed, stunned, its grip slackening but not falling free.

  Lorgar closed his hand into a fist. Something burst within the warrior’s body.

  ‘Who was that?’ Lorgar shouted over the roaring sea. The War Hound’s corona of light faded, no longer throwing back the gloom with such intensity. ‘Was that you, Esca? Ralakas? No, I still sense you both in there…’

  Lorgar punched his other fist home in the warrior’s chest. The corona dimmed further as he burst another sphere of searing liquid in his grip.

  ‘Lhorke…’ The War Hound struggled feebly, almost shaken loose by the current. More hands were clawing for him now. ‘Lhorke…’

  Lorgar opened his eyes to the slick rainfall, hauling himself to his feet. The inferno still blazed – had any time passed at all? – and he still saw nothing of his brother within its blazing core. Weakness seemed to follow him back through from the warp, sinking into his flesh and binding there. He was wearier than he’d ever been in his life.

  The Communion died in his mind. The primarch felt it quite literally crumble apart in some untouchable psychic diminishment, and in its place, the bolter fire began.

  There was a grinding snarl of powerful iron joints, and the jagged stabs of shells bursting against his armour. Something eclipsed the shaft of spectral sunlight. Something taller than a primarch and twice as broad.

  ‘My Legion has suffered enough,’ boomed a mechanical vox-voice. A huge claw crashed against Lorgar’s breastplate, throwing him from his feet. ‘Now we must endure corruption as well? Was madness not enough of a curse?’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Destiny’s Hand

  From the Fire

  Blood for the Blood God

  Khârn fought in the blood rain, butchering skitarii along the battlements. The fortress on Corinthian’s back was already drenched in the downpour, with blood sluicing from the gargoyles and rain gutters to fall to the city below. Looking over the edge revealed blood waterfalls streaming in cascades, as well as the packs of Audax Warhounds now moving free from their ambush. With the Imperator Titan’s bridge crew dead – Kargos swore he’d be keeping the princeps’s skull as a trophy for his tally – nothing remained bar purging the skitarii castle on the god-machine’s shoulders. After the leg-towers and the savagely outnumbered defenders on the command deck, the fighting was thickest here in the fortress. The defenders mustered from their barracks for a last stand, despite the fact they’d already lost the battle for their Titan.

  Skitarii cybernetics ran the gamut of contextual usefulness and lethality. The Legio Oberon’s fleshsmiths and mechnicians had a penchant for augmenting their war-slaves’ arms with heavy rotary cannons, which gave off the powdery reek of fyceline as they chattered with the bloom of muzzle flares.

  Khârn cleaved his way through them, his retinal display lighting up with damage warnings and runes marking his left knee-joint as compromised to the point of instability. Smoke trailed up from the egregious gunfire pockmarks covering most of his armour. These rotary cannons lacked penetration, but they made up for it by sheer volume of fire.

  The battlements were wide, more like gantries
and iron bridges than anything like a fortress from a feudal world. The bloody downpour left the metal platforms slick and treacherous.

  With the last of the skitarii slain, the World Eaters went through the cowering slaves and brain-dead servitors lingering in the habitation quarters. While the Legio’s indentured servants begged and cried out as they were butchered, the cyborged slaves simply stared in slack-jawed apathy.

  Lacking any more enemies, the World Eaters took to the battlements, raising their axes and yelling their triumph to the blood-red sky.

  The colour of that sky was all Argel Tal could focus on. Red. Not grey. Lorgar was working his will across the city, and Erebus had been proven wrong.

  Khârn dies at sunrise on a world of grey skies. In every future I’ve seen, he dies as dawn lightens the sky. And he dies with a blade in his back.

  But Khârn lived. He’d not died during Nuceria’s infinitely protracted dawn, and the skies were no longer grey. There’d been no blade in the back.

  Argel Tal’s armour had been left as beaten and worthless as that of the World Eaters he was with – but where theirs required maintenance and repair, his was already healing in slow, scabby regeneration. Raum had fallen quiet the very moment the last slave had wheezed his final breath. With no one to slay, the daemon coiled up in irritated respite.

  He made his slow, bleeding way to the battlements, where Khârn was looking over the city. The blood-storm was filling the flooded streets, turning the invading waters red. The entire city seemed to be drowning in blood.

  ‘Gunships inbound,’ said the centurion. His helmet was a cracked ruin, and Khârn pulled it free, blinking in the blood rain. His pale face was a mess of bruises, in every colour it was possible for a bruise to be. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked. ‘What is this storm?’

  ‘Lorgar,’ Argel Tal replied. ‘This is the Ruinstorm, finally released.’

  ‘It’s horrific. It isn’t what I expected.’

  The Word Bearer lifted his shoulder guard in a shrug. ‘It’s exactly what I expected.’