by Nick Kyme
Only a special blade could cut a primarch’s flesh, one that contained the essence of another primarch. The Asirnoth knife sat innocuously in its sheath, a weapon so sharp it could part even the Lord of Drake’s hoary scales.
Quor Gallek followed the spoor of the sisters. He had unleashed them, coaxed them onto the Charybdis, and they had not disappointed. Finding the narrowest crack was all it took. The shipmaster made for an easy mark, the assumed form of his dead kin the ideal simulacrum with which to torment and deceive.
It was weakening Quor Gallek, though. He felt the tether against his soul draw tight. Soon it wouldn’t matter. He could release it before the line snapped and return to the Monarchia with whoever was left. He just needed to reach the primarch’s sanctum…
Quor Gallek was arrested from his thoughts by the sight of a legionary standing in his path.
He was armoured in grey and bore no discernible mark, at least not one that Quor Gallek recognised.
The Preacher slowed, a hundred paces separating them but the distance closing with every step he took.
‘You are no Salamander,’ he said, his hand straying surreptitiously to the bolt pistol holstered at his hip.
‘Nor you,’ uttered the strange, grey legionary.
Quor Gallek cocked his head just slightly.
‘Something familiar about you, though. Who are you, legionary? Whom do you serve?’
‘Kaspian Hecht,’ he replied, and unsheathed his sword. ‘I serve Lord Malcador.’
‘That’s interesting… As what?’
Hecht gestured to the Preacher’s sidearm. ‘You could draw that, but I’ll shoot you if you do. I am faster, and an excellent marksman.’
Quor Gallek lifted his hand away, showing Hecht his splayed fingers.
‘Why don’t you? What haven’t you killed me already?’ Quor Gallek’s eyes narrowed. Something about how this one moved, his tone, if not his actual voice.
Fifty paces separated them.
Hecht rolled his shoulders back, the auto-reactive guards adjusting to let him. He cricked his neck, left then right.
‘Because I need the exercise. I killed another legionary before in a shoot-out. I’m owed a duel.’
Twenty paces remained as Quor Gallek lengthened his stride.
‘Blade to blade then?’ he asked, unsheathing his sword. He twisted the haft and one blade became three, turning the sword into a short-handed trident. ‘Very well, but I hadn’t expected to find another Word Bearer aboard this ship.’
Five paces.
Hecht faltered. ‘What?’
Quor Gallek took him off-guard, smashing aside Hecht’s hasty parry and plunging his trident blade through pectoral armour and into the meat of the grey legionary’s upper chest.
He sneered. ‘Narek of the Word.’
Hecht fell, stunned, grunting in pain and not just from the deep wound in his body.
Quor Gallek twisted the blade, churning flesh before yanking it out with an arc of blood.
Hecht bellowed in agony, sinking to one knee.
‘I am…’
The sword fell from his grasp.
‘Whatever they did to you,’ said Quor Gallek, wrenching off Hecht’s helm, ‘it went deep, but didn’t quite take.’ He seized his chin, pulling Hecht’s face up into the light. ‘You look very different, brother, but it is you.’ He leaned close. ‘I can feel it, Barthusa Narek. I do not forget one of my own.’
He let Narek go, as if discarding him. The stricken legionary could do little more than stare dumbly.
‘A pity that Elias got to you before I could.’
‘Stop talking,’ said Narek, slurring as the carefully closeted parts of his mind unravelled and spilled out into one another. ‘And just finish it.’
Quor Gallek regarded him for a moment, deciding whether to end the traitor’s miserable existence. ‘What did you feel?’
Narek grunted in confusion. Quor Gallek’s face twisted.
‘The fulgurite, you idiot! What did you feel when you touched it? What did it do to you, Narek? Why have you renounced the Word?’
‘It did nothing but open my eyes to the truth.’ He laughed, a slow snigger at first that quickly became raucous mockery.
Quor Gallek smashed the hilt of his blade into Narek’s left temple, rendering him unconscious. Grimacing, he felt the tether pull against his soul.
Degat would have what was promised. Quor Gallek owed him that. Not yet, but soon. And then the Word would be rid of Barthusa Narek.
Quor Gallek left him there unconscious. His prize almost within reach, he had no more time for traitors.
Forty-Five
No redemption without fire
Battle-barge Charybdis, generatorium
Xathen had expected his brothers to be dead. Through the crowd of burning Word Bearers, he saw that one of them was dead, Zonn’s head lying separate from his body. He had never really understood the Techmarine, his cold logic so divorced from Xathen’s burning volatility, but he had been a Salamander. A brother.
Just like my Aethonion brothers, lying dead on the black sand, a sea of foes around us, knives in our backs…
Death demanded vengeance.
In the lower decks, Xathen had succumbed to an ague of the mind. Zadar and Kur’ak lay dead because of it, because of him.
Failure demanded atonement, but there was no redemption without fire.
Xathen meant for the Word Bearers to burn in it.
‘Torch them!’ he roared, his voice merging with the deep incendiary bellow from the firethrowers.
Their armour scorched black, but still vital and wrathful, Mu’garna and Baduk unleashed a swathe of burning promethium.
Xathen was blackened too. His flame gauntlet had been damaged, so he shouldered his boltgun instead. Taking headshots through the heat haze and pluming smoke felt too merciful.
After the first four went down, helmets cracked open and eye lenses shattered by the violent detonations, Xathen stowed the bolter and drew a pair of blades.
The left hand held a kaskara, the broad blade-tip shining in the light; the right hand, a serrated knife almost the length of the warrior’s forearm.
‘Do not relent!’
Mu’garna and Baduk did not intend to, advancing to intensify the conflagration.
Xathen cut down any warrior emerging from the firestorm who was more or less upright and cogent. He plunged the kaskara into the slatted mouth-grille of one Word Bearer, hearing a satisfying gurgle of blood as the blade punched through the back of the warrior’s neck and gorget. Another blundered onto his knees, still burning, half choking until Xathen raked the knife across the warrior’s throat.
Cooking blood spurted out over the Pyroclast’s forearm to anoint his breastplate.
It felt baptismal, washing away the shame of what he had done in the lower decks. It could not restore his impugned honour, but it could salve some of his anger.
A pair of warriors staggered through the carnage, lit eye lenses carving through smoke so they could see the aggressor in their midst.
One raised a bolter, so Xathen flung his knife into the warrior’s eye. The retinal light died in one, then flickered and died in the other before the Word Bearer collapsed onto his front.
The second had only a chainsword, his sidearm holster torn up and empty.
Blade-teeth burring, it was hard for Xathen to discern the muttered Colchisian curse.
Xathen’s sudden shoulder charge put the Word Bearer on his heels, and he weaved aside from the flailing retaliatory blow to ram the kaskara up through the abdomen and out the back of the neck.
‘I don’t speak traitor,’ he spat into the auditory receiver of the warrior’s helmet as he kicked the body away to release his blade.
He slowed only to yank his knife out of the other dead legionary’s eye,
gradually interspersing himself between the traitors and the mouth of the generatorium tunnel as Mu’garna and Baduk herded the others away.
Gargo was back there, crawling on his belly, awash with blood from a cleaved arm and Zonn’s severed neck.
‘Kill him…’ rasped the black-smiter, hauling himself up into a sitting position and clawing what looked like a breacher charge to his chest.
Xathen nodded, his blood up, slowly swirling around each of his blades in a loose grip to shake off some of the gore and redress the heft of both. A sword burdened by blood was an impediment he could not afford, especially when he saw the beast of a legionary coming for him.
‘Vulkan…’ he cursed, wishing he had kept the bolter.
Degat strode through fire, heedless of how it seared the bare skin of his arms. He only needed the Word – it would grant him strength and the fortitude to overcome pain, fatigue and the other concerns of weak men.
He saw one such man before him, festooned with guns and blades as if they would make any difference to the outcome of this fight. His tools were simple, a bolt pistol, holstered at his hip; a chainblade growling in his clenched fists.
What need had Degat for an arsenal when he had his faith in the Word?
The attack had been unexpected. It had caught them off-guard. He conceded he may have revelled too much in the humbling of the two warriors sent to stop him, but he had felt insulted and needed to impart a message.
Driven from the generatorium by the fire, and the breacher left behind in its tunnel mouth, the current situation presented an impediment to his mission.
Unconcerned by the blaze slowly cooking his legionaries behind him and the reinforcements that had followed from the decks above, he surveyed the carnage around the tunnel mouth.
‘You murder well, drake,’ he said, ‘cutting down men like swine as they stagger blind from the fire, spitting up their guts and choking on fumes. Noble.’
‘My brother tells me you’re next. Are you the one who took his arm?’
Degat nodded. ‘And I shall return for the other. It will anoint my banner. You, however…’ He stabbed his blade tip at the Salamander like an accusing finger. ‘You I shall split from groin to crown and leave steaming in a pile of your own offal.’
‘I owe you a death.’
‘You want to cut off my arm and my head, I understand.’
‘As long as you’re dead, it doesn’t matter.’
‘Enough talk.’
Degat charged.
The Word Bearer was strong. Xathen felt the impact of the warrior’s first blow against his guard. Even in battleplate, the sheer power translated all the way to his shoulder, jarring it hard.
He was also fast.
No sooner had the first hefty blow fallen than a second came in.
First high, one-handed. And then again, but in a two-handed grip. It pushed Xathen’s defence down, making any counter ineffective.
The third blow hewed into Xathen’s left, and he deflected it with one of his blades, still unable to bring the advantage of having two weapons to bear.
A fourth the legionary fashioned as a thrust and this broke Xathen’s guard, scoring a rent down his right side that went all the way to the mesh beneath his battleplate. The warrior was formidable. A monster. He knew the Word Bearers were zealots, but he had seen few fighters in that Legion who expressed that zealotry in a martial fashion.
Xathen felt hard-pressed just to stay in the fight, let alone win it.
‘Are you tiring yet, drake?’
Xathen answered through clenched teeth. ‘Thought you said enough talk.’
The Word Bearer should have been tiring. Every swing was brutal, with nothing held back.
Warriors simply did not fight like that, not even transhuman ones. With the exception of World Eaters, perhaps. Something was driving him, a dark vitality that had no end, fuelling the warrior’s limbs until Xathen was left hacked apart.
Three further heavy hits rained down, one after the other. Each shook bone. A crack slithered down the kaskara’s blade, presaging its destruction.
Exploiting a moment’s hesitation from the Word Bearer, Xathen lunged with his serrated knife and found a sheath for it in his enemy’s stomach. It went deep, and he tried to turn it but was backhanded into near senselessness.
He reeled, watching almost detachedly as he lost his grip on the knife, skull ringing. It stayed embedded like an ugly nail hammered through metal and flesh.
It hurt him, Xathen could hear it in the warrior’s heavier breathing, but it didn’t slow him.
The chainblade hewed in again, growling for blood.
Xathen took the blow against his shoulder guard, letting it slide and scrape against his forearm, trusting in his armour to shield him long enough to act before it chewed through to skin then bone.
He hacked down with the kaskara, deep into the vulnerable neck seal.
The chainblade kept on spinning, spitting up sparks and metal slivers. It stank with friction heat and burning. It raked his arm, ripped out chunks of cabling, bit into mesh.
Xathen wrenched his blade out and struck again. This time it bit hard and evinced a shout of pain.
A savage punch to the gut felt like it cracked his rib-plate. The headbutt that followed did split the front of his helm. The visual through the retinal feed crazed instantly. A second blow took off a chunk of the faceplate, exposing Xathen’s right eye. It bled badly, spoiling his vision, and he staggered as consciousness threatened to desert him when he needed it most.
The chainblade bucked loose from his ravaged greave at the same time, but the Word Bearer was far from deterred or satisfied. He kicked Xathen hard in the stomach, doubling over the Salamander, who then fell into the tunnel mouth.
Xathen passed out for a few seconds, and by the time he came around the Word Bearer was standing over him, chainblade held aloft to end him. Xathen held up the kaskara to try to turn the fatal blow aside, but saw he clutched only a stump of hilt and piece of sword. The other half was still embedded in the Word Bearer’s vulnerable neck joint, having stuck after Xathen’s second blow.
Stunned, he hadn’t realised the weapon had broken off.
It offered no defence.
He scrabbled around, knowing he had moments to act, and clutched a pistol-shaped object. Aiming it at the Word Bearer, Xathen pulled the trigger and hoped it was something dangerous.
His aim was slightly wide of the mark, but a bolt of plasma speared through the warrior’s leg, searing bone and flesh, almost crippling him. It was enough to make him recoil.
A hollow scream echoed in the tight space between the deck and the generatorium, and Xathen swore his thanks to Zonn and the plasma torch the Techmarine had carried amongst his many trappings.
The Word Bearer was chanting, coughing up a guttural, monosyllabic litany of old Colchis. As a ward, as a curse, Xathen had no idea. It didn’t matter.
‘I’ve told you already, enough talk,’ he snarled, the pain clenching his jaw tight, and fired again.
Forty-Six
Adrift
Battle-barge Charybdis, Librarium
A shriek tore from the hull, too raw and too tortured to be just metal. If Circe still clung to the reins of the Charybdis, it was only by her fingertips as the Ruinstorm took its toll on every worn shred of the ship’s armour. It had been this way ever since they had reached Ushamann’s Librarium. The Geller field must still be intact; they would have known if it were not. Even in the sanctuary of the Librarium, they would have known.
No, this was the Ruinstorm slowly battering them into annihilation. Everything was trying to kill them, to stop the Salamanders from reaching Nocturne. In his heart, if not yet his head, Numeon knew this was because what they were doing mattered. Vulkan’s resurrection was not only important, it was fated. Why else would so many dark forces be alli
ed against them?
Amidst the klaxon wails, Numeon marshalled his thoughts. The generatorium or Vulkan? Vulnerable and exposed, both the Charybdis and the primarch were in danger. Orhn and Ran’d were both worthy legionaries who would defend Vulkan with their lives, but the manner of their enemy was insidious and capable of breaching even the staunchest defence.
‘Sirens,’ Adyssian murmured, his eyes on the shadows of the Librarium as if expecting them to birth some fiend of his darkest nightmares. If the Geller field failed, they would. And it would look like his dead daughter at first, but only at first.
Esenzi clutched his hand, as much for her own reassurance as for her shipmaster’s.
Ushamann nodded to Numeon.
‘Go,’ said the Librarian, fatigued and irritated. ‘If they bring down the Geller field, it will take those sirens seconds to infiltrate our hull. It might as well be air for all the protection it will offer us.’
‘Are they sirens, Ushamann?’ Zytos asked. Like the others he was rearming and reloading.
Ushamann sounded bitter. ‘They lured us, didn’t they? Seduced us with their song and laid us bare upon the rocks for their masters to slaughter. Just go. I will keep the mortals safe.’
Ushamann had fashioned wards at every aspect of the Librarium. Some he had carved, others were described in ash. Every sigil broke the Edict of Nikaea, but reason and abstinence would not protect them from what lay beyond the Geller field. The sigils might.
‘Superstition is winning against science, brother,’ Numeon told the Librarian.
‘It has won, Numeon. The fight was over the moment Horus turned.’
Numeon wanted to ask if Ushamann meant that philosophically or if he was referring to the war. In the end, he unsheathed Draukoros and gave the order to move out. It slid noisily, hungrily, from the scabbard. The fangs along its killing edges shone in the blood-red light of the Librarium.
Another tremor hit and Numeon had to brace himself against a bulkhead, his gauntleted fingers digging into metal.
