Reinez jumped down onto the rock that pinned N’Kalo in place. N’Kalo was not quite beneath the surface but little more than his ruined face could be seen above the water. Reinez stood and took his hammer off his back, holding it with both hands, the well-worn head of the weapon aiming down at N’Kalo’s face.
Reinez drove the hammer down at N’Kalo. N’Kalo forced his sword out from below the rock and slashed the hammer aside. Expecting an impact and off balance Reinez fell forward, landing face to face with N’Kalo.
The other Adeptus Astartes had by now gathered on the bank of the river and they watched as the two Space Marine wrestled in the water, Reinez trying to force N’Kalo’s head below the surface, N’Kalo trying to wriggle from under the rock and bring his sword to bear. The thunder hammer lay in the water, abandoned, as Reinez went at N’Kalo with his bare hands.
The watching Space Marines parted as Vladimir joined them. He stood on one of the flat rocks that made up the rapids, no expression on his face.
N’Kalo hurled the rock away. Reinez had to jump back to keep his own legs from being trapped under it. N’Kalo slammed the pommel of his sword into Reinez’s side and kicked out at him, trying to drive him against the stone wall carved by the waterfall. Reinez spun, locked N’Kalo’s sword arm in the crook of his elbow and ripped the sword from N’Kalo’s hand. Reinez threw the sword aside and it disappeared under the foaming water.
Both Space Marines were bleeding now. N’Kalo’s armour was dented from the impacts, to the extent that it was as much a hindrance to his movement as protection. Reinez’s nose might have been broken, judging by the blood spilling down his chest, black against the dark blue of his breastplate.
When the two closed in and locked up in a wrestler’s clinch, every Space Marine watching knew it was for the last time. N’Kalo was a fine combatant, but his wounds, more severe on the inside than the outside, drained the strength from his limbs. Reinez had been fighting for the last few years without any battle-brothers at his side, learning to survive by his wits alone, with fists and teeth if need be. Reinez pushed N’Kalo down onto one knee, wrenched one of the Iron Knight’s shoulders out of its socket, and dropped into a shoulder charge that smashed N’Kalo into the riverbank.
N’Kalo could not raise his free arm into a guard. Reinez slammed his fist into N’Kalo’s face.
‘They will cast you out!’ roared Reinez, his fist hitting home again. ‘They will banish you! You will know my pain!’
Reinez punched over and over. Ultra-dense Adeptus Astartes bone fractured. N’Kalo’s cheekbone caved in, then his jaw. One eye socket was stove inwards, half-shutting his eye. Bloody skin clung to Reinez’s knuckles.
‘Outcast! Pariah! You shall be no man’s brother!’
‘Stop,’ said Vladimir.
Reinez did not stop. Another half-dozen blows rained down. Broken teeth clotted the blood that oozed from N’Kalo’s shattered mouth.
The boot that cracked into Reinez’s face belonged to Captain Lysander, who had stepped out of the watching crowd at a signal from Vladimir. The blow caught Reinez by surprise and he fell backwards off N’Kalo, sprawling in the water.
‘I said stop,’ said Vladimir.
Reinez scrabbled to his feet, wiping the back of one gauntlet across his face to remove the worst of N’Kalo’s blood. ‘You see?’ he gasped. ‘The Emperor lent me strength. Dorn has spoken. The duel is over.’
‘It is,’ said Vladimir. ‘My brothers, the apothecaries among you attend to Captain N’Kalo while the Phalanx’s own medicae staff are summoned. I must have him conscious to present his evidence.’
‘Lord Vladimir!’ protested Reinez. ‘He was defeated! The duel was won! I demand N’Kalo’s silence as is my right by victory!’
‘The duel is won, Reinez,’ replied Vladimir, ‘but you may claim no victory. We are not at war, and Captain N’Kalo is not your enemy. In showing such brutality to him, even at the moment you became the victor, you abandon all semblance of honour. In an honour-duel, that is as good as a physical defeat. You have forfeited the duel, and Captain N’Kalo is the winner.’
Reinez stood speechless in the rushing river as the Space Marines on the bank picked up the winner and carried him off to the apothecarion.
The first thing Sarpedon noticed as he was led to the dock again was the Iron Knight without his helm. He had encountered the Chapter once before but there had been no way of telling, beneath the feudal helm, if the Iron Knights’ commander was the same Adeptus Astartes he had spoken with on Molikor. Now, there could be no mistake. It was the same man.
Half of N’Kalo’s face was still hidden, this time by medical dressings covering fresh wounds. The rest, however, was that familiar mask of burn tissue, and the one visible eye was the same glassy prosthetic.
Sarpedon tried to hold N’Kalo’s gaze, but he was shoved into the accused’s pulpit by the Imperial Fists who had escorted him from his cell, and found himself looking at Lord Vladimir.
‘Justice Lord,’ said Sarpedon before anyone else could speak. ‘I would know of my brothers.’
‘They are safe and well,’ said Vladimir.
‘And Daenyathos?’
‘He is captive, like them. And like them, he has not been harmed.’
‘I know that I am to die here, Lord Vladimir. I wish to speak with my battle-brothers before that happens. And I must have leave to speak with Daenyathos, even if only to ascertain that the dreadnought you hold indeed contains him. My Chapter thought him dead for thousands of years. I must at least see for myself that he lives.’
‘What you ask is a luxury that cannot be afforded to the condemned,’ replied Vladimir. ‘The nature of your crimes means that you cannot be given the chance to conspire further with your fellow accused. Such requests are denied.’
Sarpedon did not argue. It was a motion he had to go through. He had to show that he had not given up, not completely. It was a feeble gesture among so many warriors, but it was made.
‘Brethren,’ began Vladimir. ‘During the last adjournment the matter of the Soul Drinkers’ defence was decided. Commander N’Kalo?’
Sarpedon realised that among the assembled Space Marines, he could not see Reinez.
N’Kalo stepped forwards. ‘Brothers,’ he said, and Sarpedon recognised the grating voice of an improvised vox-unit. It was hooked up to N’Kalo’s dented breastplate, amplifying the voice that struggled to get past his shattered jaw. ‘I must speak to you of a world called Molikor.’
Hunted
John French
Thaddeus blinked and his world vanished in a scream. Blind darkness surrounded him, caged him in a dream of pain. Then light and sensations came in a burning rush: a white room, a wide face, eyes glowing red in the dark cave of a hood, the ground splitting with cracks of fire, the wetness of tears, anger like a red storm, a ringed hand, then darkness and silence.
He blinked again and was looking an enemy in the eyes. They were black eyes that glittered from a blunt hairless head, jagged patterns burned into the flesh. The man’s body was a massive slab of hard muscle, covered in tarnished armour and stained ochre fatigues. His head was cocked as if Thaddeus had stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence and the man was waiting for it to finish. Rusted metal lined the walls around them, their surfaces scratched with evil runes and lit by the fever yellow light of a glow-globe. The air reeked of blood, sweat and raw meat. Every detail told Thaddeus that he stood in a lair of the enemy, and with an enemy in front of him.
A frown creased the man’s face and his mouth began to move, forming a question. Thaddeus slammed a fist into his throat. The man gave a strangled cry, staggered, hit the grime-smeared metal wall behind him and exploded forward with a roar, trying to drive Thaddeus off his feet with raw strength. Thaddeus pivoted an instant before the charge struck, grabbed the man’s head in both hands and felt his brute power slide past him as he twisted. With a loud snap, the man’s body crashed onto the metal floor and was still.
Shak
ing with adrenaline, Thaddeus looked at the corpse at his feet. Sinuous tattooed patterns and eight-pointed brand scars covered the dead man’s skin. He looked at his own hands. Tattoos spiralled around his fingers and palms; they were the marks of ruin and blasphemy, like those on the hands and arms of the man he had just killed. Thaddeus ran his hands over his body, feeling the scars on his scalp and face, the beaten metal of a breast plate and the saw-toothed blades at his waist. Panic surged through him and he fought to keep it down. Who was he? Inside his mind a locked door opened and memories returned: he was a servant of the Imperium, a warrior in a war of shadows and lies. The realisation was like the touch of a cool hand on his head: comforting, removing doubt. He knew where he was and what he had to do: he was in the heart of enemy territory and far from help. He had to reach a vox-caster, transmit an extraction location to Imperial forces and reach that location at any cost. Beyond this driving need there was something else, something always just beyond his grasp, always out of sight in the labyrinth of his mind.
‘Lost in the land of the damned,’ he muttered to himself and began to run. He passed through narrow tunnels ducking into the shadows as figures passed him. He saw the scars patterning their skin, heard the cruel tongue in which they muttered to each other. The air pulsed to the hiss-thump of air processors shifting foetid air.
When he reached the communications room he slid a long, serrated knife from a sheath and banged on the door until it opened. A renegade trooper in dark fatigues looked out; a fabric mask covered his head, bloodshot eyes wide behind grimy glass eye-holes. Thaddeus could hear static and fragments of distorted noise spilling from the room. It was small and rank with the smell of sweat and ozone, consoles lined the walls, the light of readouts pulsing to the sounds from speaker grilles. There was a moment of stillness the length of a heartbeat.
Thaddeus’s first movement was a backhanded cut with the knife that took the renegade in the throat, severing his neck to the spine. Warm red spray splashed his face. The man collapsed, blood bubbling dark on the floor. Thaddeus stepped forward with the momentum of the cut. Terror and fury flowed through him; he could feel its acid touch in his guts and a copper tang in his mouth. He was screaming. A spindle-limbed man with a face like a dried corpse stood, a laspistol in his hand. Thaddeus heard a crack and felt the shot burn across his temple. He stepped to the outside of the man’s gun arm, reversed his knife and rammed it into the neck. The body jerked as the man died and Thaddeus yanked the blade out in a thick spray.
He stood in pooling blood, gasping air as the rage receded and fear returned. Lurching to the console he examined the equipment, frequencies and ciphers flashing through his mind. His hands moved over controls without guidance, sending the location of the Fallen Spire far out in the no-man’s-land beyond the underground fortress in which he stood.
He picked up the renegade’s laspistol and stripped power cells from the corpses. The jagged marks and eight-pointed stars cut into the men’s skin made him retch. He thought of the killing rage that had surged through him; its touch had been alien, like someone touching the inside of his skin. It made him feel tainted, unclean, as if the marks on his skin were scars on his soul. He shook the thought off and pushed himself to his feet again. The one thing that was certain was that if he were to live, he had to reach the Fallen Spire. He stepped out of the chamber, pulled the hatch door shut and began to run.
From the highest tower of the Imperial command fortress Colonel Augustine Tarl looked out on a ruined world. It was sunset, but the sky remained the dull tan of a soiled funeral shroud. From here he would have once looked across a string of hives, their sides rising liked armoured mountains into a cobalt sky. Seismic charges and plasma warheads had reduced those hives to a sea of torn metal and ash that extended to the horizon like a frozen sea; its wave crests ragged edges of metal, its troughs filled with spreading shadows. They were called the Murder Wastes; the vast no-man’s land in the war between the Imperium and the forces of Chaos on Hranx.
‘Admiring the rewards of hubris, colonel?’ Inquisitor Sargon said from behind Tarl who turned and snapped a sharp salute. Tarl was tall, with a broad face, bright blue eyes and a strong jaw. It was a face full of confidence, the type of face that inspired trust. Clad in the gloss-red armour of an Inquisitorial storm trooper he stayed at attention as the inquisitor advanced towards him.
‘At ease, colonel,’ said the inquisitor. He was shorter than Tarl, broad-shouldered with a big pockmarked face. Bronze plate armour glittered under a heavy robe of deep purple.
Tarl tried to adopt a casual stance as the inquisitor came to stand next to him; it was difficult to relax in the presence of this man who had the power to kill billions with a word.
‘You summoned me, my lord,’ said Tarl.
‘Yes I did. I am giving you a mission that will be the most important of your service.’ The inquisitor’s voice was a bass rumble like the grating of stone. Tarl kept his face impassive but he felt a jolt of anticipation run through his gut. ‘I am trusting in your nature and abilities. The Imperium is trusting in them too.’
‘I understand, my lord,’ said Tarl.
The inquisitor twitched his lips as if at a joke.
‘Not yet, colonel, but you will.’ The inquisitor leaned on the tower’s parapet, his red bionic eyes staring out at the darkening world from within his deep hood. ‘An hour ago we received a signal on a long unused frequency.’ A hand, thick with rings, emerged from under the sleeve of the inquisitor’s robe and handed a brass-framed data-slate to Tarl, who took in the information on its surface with a glance.
‘A set of location coordinates in the Murder Wastes and a single word: Thaddeus?’ Tarl looked up at the inquisitor.
‘You are to take an assault carrier and go to that location. Take a handpicked squad of storm troopers.’ The inquisitor turned away from the parapet to look at Tarl. ‘There you will find and retrieve a man in my service.’
Tarl looked back at the signal data displayed in glowing green symbols on the data-slate.
‘These analysis readings indicate that the signal came out of the renegade’s fortress zone; probably transmitted using enemy equipment.’
‘Yes, the signal came from within the enemy stronghold.’
‘It is not a trick, a lure?’
‘No. It is victory.’ The inquisitor smiled at the puzzled look on the colonel’s face. ‘How long have we been fighting here, Tarl?’
‘At least a decade, my lord.’
‘Too long, and we have paid too high a price.’ The inquisitor gestured at the land below the fortress tower. Tarl knew what the gesture meant: he had been here when the Imperium had levelled the hives hoping to destroy the rebellion within. The Chaos renegades led by the Alpha Legion had been prepared, and had buried themselves beneath the ground in a subterranean fortress complex they called the Pit of the Hydra. There they survived and endured while the Imperium burnt its own flesh to try and kill a disease that had already spread. If Hranx did fall then the Alpha Legion would have secured a gateway for its corruption to spread into other sectors and kill other worlds. The Imperium was caught in a snare: unable to yield and unable to destroy its enemy.
‘And this man will win the war, my lord?’ asked Tarl.
‘Our forces are infiltrated by Alpha Legion agents. They are serpents in our midst, killing us with a thousand bites. How many of our operations and offensives have been blown or crippled? And while they rob us of our strength, theirs grows.’ The inquisitor turned and placed his hand on Tarl’s shoulder and looked directly into his eyes. ‘The man you are to retrieve is a servant of the Imperium who has infiltrated the renegades and remained hidden within them for several years.’ Tarl allowed his shock to show on his face.
‘How is that possible?’
‘His personality and memories have been replaced with a constructed identity so that he is incapable of giving himself away.’ The inquisitor let his hand drop, looked away from Tarl. ‘He has believed that
he is one of them. Under particular circumstances he is conditioned to shake off his false self and return to us.’
‘What circumstances, my lord?’ Tarl asked, though he thought he knew. The inquisitor smiled revealing silver-inlaid teeth.
‘He was conditioned to return to us once he had learned the identities of the agents the Alpha Legion have infiltrated into our forces,’ he said.
Night was falling when Thaddeus heard the howl of the hunters at his back. It rose in a harsh, high note gathering replies and echoes until it was a wailing chorus calling him to oblivion. He had known that his flight would not go undiscovered, and so once above ground he had run hard, knowing that every stride was a moment stolen from death. He knew the hunters were close; they had tasted his scent on the wind and they howled in anticipation of the kill.
The cries of his pursuers faded as Thaddeus scrambled up another slope of jagged rubble, his hands bloody from a thousand sharp edges. In the distance the Fallen Spire rose above the Murder Wastes like the broken tip of a god’s spear thrust into the ground; a far-away promise of safety. He slithered down a slope of ash into a wide valley, its bottom filled with debris and blade-like shadows; a hundred paces away a wide pool of liquid glittered like a dark mirror. A gust of dry wind brought a thick chemical stench to his nostrils from the pool’s surface.
Thaddeus began to move across the floor of the valley, running from cover to cover, ash rising from his footsteps. A whisper-soft sound of movement reached his ears; he glanced behind and went very still. Long, lean shapes were slinking down the side of the valley where he had been. Each was humanoid but moved close to the ground on reverse jointed-legs and long arms, their muscles taut under pale skin. The hunters had found him. They were human mutants selectively altered by the renegades to hunt the Murder Wastes. They were blind and stalked by scent, tasting the air with long tongues. Thaddeus gripped the butt of his laspistol. He could count at least three of them and knew there were more. They would be fast. He watched one of them pause on a lip of rubble he had passed seconds before. The hunter crouched, its elongated head turning from side to side, its long tongue flicking between needle teeth.
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