War Without End

by Various

  ‘You are hurting me,’ gasped Letae, eyes brimming with tears. ‘Please, let me go. Before the monitors see us–’

  But that was a fruitless wish on his part. A pair of machine-birds fell from the smoky dimness over their heads with tungsten talons bared, ready to snare them both. Fans of emerald laser light washed over the deck around them, termination trackers finding the two men as clearly as if they had been naked upon a landscape of pure snowfall.

  The monitors dived, each emitting a metallic shriek. Kell pushed Letae away and the act saved the man’s life, although that had not been the Assassin’s intention. Letae’s bare throat missed being sliced open by slashing claws, the passage of them so close that he felt the air being cut in their wake.

  The second machine-bird was diving for Kell’s eyes to gouge them out and open the meat of his face. He dimly regretted leaving his spy mask in the hide. The Assassin hardly ever wore the thing anymore.

  He went low and spun out of the old cloak’s clasp at his neck, making the material flare out into a half-circle of shadow. The mechanical misjudged and tried to arrest its dive, turning it into a swooping bank, but Kell was ready. He snapped the cloak back around and caught the machine-bird in its folds, smothering the avian drone before it could power away back into the air. He snared it inside the cloak, swinging it around by the thick hem of the old battle garment, and smashed it into the deck. Without hesitation, Kell ran forward and stamped on the writhing, squawking shape under the black cloth, vicious and wild with each blow from his boots. He killed it in short order.

  The second bird was harrying poor Letae, cutting and swatting him with the blade-tip edges of its wings. It reacted to the death of its mate by abruptly ignoring the deckhand and turned all of its raptor’s ire upon Kell. A winged lance of metal, plastek and animal flesh bolted through the air towards him, and the Assassin snarled as he came to meet it.

  Kell had the crude knife in his fist as the thing went for his throat, and he rolled with the impact as it raked its claws over his chest. Screaming with anger and pain, Kell cut his free hand to ribbons as he used it to grab hold of the machine-bird’s body. His other hand came up in a blur and he stabbed the drone through its torso, over and over, causing processing fluids to spurt in arcs across the iron deck plates. He kept stabbing until he was sure it was dead, and by then his hands were a ruin of cut meat, black oil and thick blood.

  Letae recoiled from Kell as he took a shuddering step towards him. The crewman was so full of fear, he realised. It coloured everything about him – it was the air in his lungs, the water to his lips. Kell felt a writhing, sickly disgust at the other man’s very existence, as if each indrawn breath that the menial took was somehow an insult.

  The Assassin did not question where this bile had come from. That did not occur to him. Instead he shouted at Letae, shouted at him until the other man ran away.

  ‘Go, you pathetic mongrel! I do not want to look upon you, do you understand me? Take your words and go away!’ He spat onto the slick deck. ‘If you come back, if you show your face here again and it is not with word that Horus yet lives…’ Kell’s words rose to a crescendo, ‘then I will gun you down where you stand!’

  Letae fled, seemingly unable to believe that he had not died here, and in the wake of his echoing footfalls Kell slumped to the floor and looked at his ruined hands.

  With slow, agonised motions, he dragged the dead cloak to him and began to cut it into uneven strips that could be wrapped around his palms and fingers. As Kell did this, he strained to listen for the whispering of the Vengeful Spirit, for some fraction of knowledge that the monster was still alive, and that Malcador’s men had failed…

  And that thought made him smile. The Sigillite too could taste the bitter wine of disappointment.

  The greatest weapon in our arsenal is the oldest, the purest, the easiest to bring to hand. But by turns it is the hardest to master. Each killer must acknowledge a singular truth. You are not unique. You are not special. You are going to die and nothing will prevent that from happening. With this fact accepted and known, comprehend that you are the weapon, and that your unblunted cutting edge is sacrifice.

  And so he took aim, putting aside the bits of broken memory that accreted in his thoughts.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ Letae cried. ‘I have never told anyone about our meetings. I have always been loyal, like you! Always, even though they did such terrible things to me…’ He crawled forward a step, seeing the pistol and stopping, thinking better of it. ‘You… You made me stronger, Master Kell. I knew that if you were down here all these years, I could resist them too. And it has been so hard…’

  Years? Kell was shocked by the revelation. That could not be right. It was only days since the guncutter Ultio had fled Dagonet, no more than weeks at the longest. How could it be years?

  The Assassin shook his head. He would have remembered that. It had to be a lie. The whispers would have told him otherwise.

  He bared his teeth in a wild grimace. ‘You know, don’t you?’

  Letae shook his head, confusion in those watery eyes again. ‘I know… What I have seen… That Horus is alive…’

  ‘Not that!’ Kell bellowed at him. ‘The whispers told me about the Warmaster! That’s not what I mean, and you know it!’

  ‘Wh-whispers…?’ Now Letae was looking at him as if he were spouting the ravings of a madman. Couldn’t the deckhand see? Did he not understand?

  Kell came closer and pointed his Exitus pistol at the man’s heaving chest.

  Letae raised his hands in submission. ‘I beg you, please do not do this. I don’t know what you are talking about. You’re speaking in riddles! I thought it was just your isolation down here, but you’re–’

  ‘Tell me who it is!’ Kell demanded, ignoring the man’s entreaty and gesturing sharply at the dank air. ‘The whispers keep talking, they won’t leave me to sleep. They told me what I have to do with you.’ He shoved Letae with the barrel of the pistol, forcing him up and out on to the gantry. Below them, the cables sang as the endless trains of coolant wagons went back and forth.

  Letae looked up at him, imploring. ‘It was too much for you, wasn’t it? That’s the truth. I see now. This place…’ He nodded at the wall. ‘The Spirit broke you.’

  ‘Tell me!’ He was screaming it, heedless of any chance that he might be overheard by some distant aura-scanner. ‘I want the one who whispers to me! Where is he?’ His hand was sweaty where he clasped the gun, and he kneaded the grip, squeezing it until his knuckles were white.

  The deckhand shouted back. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Tell me who Samus is!’

  He did not recall where the name sprang from. It felt alien on his lips, as if forced up from his throat by something he could not control.

  But it was a moot point. In his fury, Kell lost focus for a moment and his finger twitched. Even as the last word was leaving his lips, the Exitus pistol accidentally went off and a ragged-edged wound burst open in Letae’s belly. Blood, bone and intestinal matter made a wet slick where they were blasted out of the crewman’s back and across the deck.

  He had not meant to kill him – at least, not at that moment. But now it was done, just as the voices had told him that it would be.

  With a shaky sigh, Kell gathered up the corpse and set to work on it with the knife. Into the dead man’s torso he carved a single word, making the cuts deep and clear.

  The word was LUPERCAL.

  As a final flourish to the deed, he fished out the golden aquila charm that had belonged to his forgotten sister. It was tarnished now, the lustre dulled, the spread wings of the icon scratched and pitted. He fastened it around Letae’s skinny neck and dragged the body to the edge of the iron cliff.

  Time passed. He waited until the right transit, for the correct cargo wagon to pass beneath. When it did, Kell pitched the corpse out so that it fel
l true. Letae landed on the head of the cable-car, sprawled there like a broken doll, and the wagon carried him away in the direction of the far-off dais. It would not take long for the dead man to be discovered.

  The spilling of blood. In retrospect, it seemed obvious to Kell. That was the way of things now aboard the Vengeful Spirit, and within the ranks of those who defied the Emperor. It made sense that the lure should be baited in such a way.

  Kell remembered the mythical stories he had read as a child, fanciful tales of how monsters could only be summoned from their netherworld realms by a ritual shedding of vitae. Sacrifice, he recalled, was also a weapon.

  He returned to the hide, holstering the pistol along the way. Once in his concealment, he unfurled the old cloth and breathed gently upon his sniper rifle, bringing the weapon to life.

  The rifle’s one and only round slid silently into the open breech, and Kell settled in to wait for what he knew was certain to happen. He waited, and eventually the whispers returned.

  Feel no pity. That emotion is a corrosive, tormented and acid thing that can hollow out purpose and righteousness. Do not pity the target for whatever path has put them before your gun, no matter how misguided or tragic. And do not pity yourself for the acts you are asked to commit in the name of righteousness. It weakens you, and when the time comes, it will make you hesitate.

  And at last, the Warmaster was in his sights.

  He has stood there. He will stand there.

  It seemed as if Kell blinked his eyes, and it was so. Through the circular window of the telescopic sight, surrounded by a halo of projected windage measurements, range-findings and atmospheric data, he was suddenly there.

  How much time had elapsed, or how long he had waited… None of that mattered any more.

  Horus Lupercal, the Emperor’s fallen son and the lord of this vessel. Kell did not have the words to describe the titanic being before him – an immense presence that seemed to radiate out across the distance towards the Assassin, pouring through the scope’s eyepiece and in danger of overwhelming him.

  How was that possible? His will became frozen and, curse his weakness, he actually hesitated. Kell had never known such a thing in all his time as a killer in the Clade’s name.

  That time seemed very far away, though, and this – what was happening in the moment – was so close and so real and so very, very powerful.

  Horus stood considering the corpse of Letae, where it had been deposited at his feet. The huge man-shape assembled out of iron and armour was nodding, as though he had expected to see what lay before him. He was reading the letters of his honorific etched upon dead flesh. He was holding a tiny golden thing between the armoured tips of his thumb and forefinger.

  Kell’s weapon told him that it was ready to fire and the scope dialled in the last few notches until the Warmaster’s eye filled the image. Kell knew that the gun was shaking in his hands, but the Exitus rifle’s stabilizers amended the tremors. He took a breath, released half of it.

  Horus turned and looked directly at him.

  Kell’s will broke and he ran screaming, but only inside the halls of his own tortured thoughts. Out in the domain of flesh, he completed the act by muscle-memory alone, and at last he pulled the trigger.

  The Warmaster smiled as he plucked the bullet from the air, as delicately as if it were a butterfly alighting on his hand.

  flawless

  ephemeral

  execute

  immortal

  clarity

  loyal

  dissent

  punish

  sacrifice

  pity

  truth

  The whispers became a roar – a shouting, wordless hurricane that tore at Kell’s ears. He bolted to his feet, feeling giddy, the air about him turning dense and syrupy. He moved like he was underwater, dragged backward by ghost-force and thickening streamers of time. The remnants of the cloak, now little more than a cowl, fell away from his shoulders and spun out into the void beyond the iron cliffs. He lost the rifle, the spindly weapon suddenly becoming dead weight in his ruined hands. It clattered to the deck, the sound of its landing upon the metal plates abruptly lost in a concussion of displaced smoke.

  Light of a dirty amber hue washed over the hide and the gantry, briefly dazzling the Assassin. It drew his gaze towards its source, like gravity exerting its pull upon a planet.

  Everything seemed golden. The dead metal, the corroded iron, it all glowed under a blooming shroud of illumination. Too late, Kell understood that it was not the brass dais he had seen in the poison-dream.

  It is here. It has always been here!

  A leviathan moved into view as the light faded, and the Assassin turned as a great shadow fell across him.

  He has stood there. He will stand there.

  Magnificent and malignant, a figure that was swathed in darkness but also luminous and brilliant towered high above him. He saw a face that no sculptor could ever have hoped to capture, an aspect that could have been handsome but now was marbled by cruelty. An immense clawed hand clacked and flexed, extending one single adamantium talon to point at him.

  ‘You are Eristede Kell,’ said Horus. ‘You ought to be dead.’ He dropped the spent shot from the sniper rifle at his feet. ‘Why are you here, Assassin?’

  ‘I am here to slay a monster,’ he managed.

  ‘As am I,’ rumbled the Warmaster, and a shadow of something bleak crossed his face. Around him stood a halo of legionaries, each resplendent in armour detailed with arcane runes and fearful fetishes. None of the others moved, no weapons were drawn. They stood back to give their lord room to do as he wished.

  Horus came forward, absently snapping the discarded rifle in two beneath the tread of his huge ceramite boot. ‘Make no mistake this time. It is I.’

  Kell nodded stiffly, remembering the warrior he had shot dead on Dagonet. Luc Sedirae, Captain of the 13th Company of the Sons of Horus. He had been so certain that his target was the Warmaster himself, so eager to end Horus’s life and the insurrection with one shot, just as he had on a hundred other worlds. But this was not that kind of war. He had been a fool to believe that it was.

  Horus beckoned Kell with the claw. ‘Do it, then. Take your final chance to end me, mortal.’ He tipped back his neck, exposing a patch of his bare throat. ‘Here, I will help you.’

  ‘How…’ It was a monumental effort for Kell to force every word out of his mouth. ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘Many voices whisper to me,’ smiled the demigod. ‘And I remember the names of all who have tried to stop my heart. It keeps me… humble.’

  Kell’s hand dropped to the butt of the Exitus pistol at his hip. The action was reflexive, even as he knew that it would be futile to follow it through to the end. But he could not stop himself – it was as if he were a player upon a stage, set on a path towards the story’s end that he could not alter.

  ‘I saw you…’ Kell managed. ‘When the poison was in me… I saw something…’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know how.’

  ‘This vessel belongs to me, Assassin. Iron and bone, body and soul.’ Horus opened his claw to the air. ‘I know everything that transpires on this ship. The Spirit speaks to me. I see with all her eyes.’

  The serpents. Kell saw them again in his memories, felt the burning of their bites all over him, and shuddered.

  ‘Blood summoned me.’ The Warmaster inclined his head towards the distant dais where Letae’s corpse still lay. ‘I came to you, little man. Think how rare that is. I came to you. So the matter can be ended.’

  Kell slowly drew his pistol. ‘I’ve lost everything that mattered to me because of you.’

  ‘Not so.’ Horus gave a slight shake of his head, ignoring the weapon. ‘I did not send you here. I did not force you to risk all on a mission that could only fail. The end of Terra and my father is inevitable, Kell. You see that, d
on’t you? Perhaps only now, at the end? He was the one who sent you here. He sent you to perish, and for what?’ For a moment, the Warmaster seemed genuinely sorrowful at the waste of it.

  Kell wanted to cry out in despair, a sudden surge of powerful emotion burning in his chest as the great warrior’s words touched a truth buried deep inside him. He struggled to keep it silent. Horus looked at him and saw it, though – saw through him as if he were glass.

  ‘My father’s Sigillite wretch dispatched your execution force, and others since. I have turned them all away. Assassins are a tool of the weak. Are you no better than that, Eristede Kell?’

  His control melted away, and Kell screamed at the top of his lungs, putting every last fraction of his energy into bringing the pistol to bear. He squeezed the trigger over and over, putting explosive Infernus rounds in a spread across the Warmaster’s chest. Horus turned his face away, shielding it with one armoured gauntlet, but made no other move.

  He weathered the brief, shrieking firestorm, and when the wicked flames dissipated there was nothing to show that his armour had taken even the lightest kiss from the Exitus pistol’s discharges.

  Kell’s heart sank and he waited to die.

  Horus came to him, and still the Warmaster’s warriors did not move even a fraction to give reprisal for this attack upon their liege-lord. The primarch took the spent weapon from Kell’s hand with surprising gentleness, and loomed over him. ‘You see?’

  ‘I see,’ Kell managed, swallowing a sob. I am broken, he told himself. Useless and defeated. ‘I beseech you, lord. End it swiftly.’ He heard the echo of poor Lartae’s words beneath his own.

  But when the killing blow did not fall, Kell looked up and saw Horus watching him intently. ‘Do you know what you are?’ asked the Warmaster. ‘Have you ever wondered how many threads of possibility pass through you? Think, man. Think about how many destinies have been changed by your gun. That is something that has power.’ The cold steel talon rose to touch lightly upon Kell’s chest. ‘In this world and the next, there is a nexus of fates surrounding you. Millions of lives changed in the wake of your assassin’s bullet. That trails behind you, yet you are forever blind to it.’