Deathwatch: Ignition

by Braden Campbell, Mark Clapham, Ben Counter, Chris Dows, Peter Fehervari, Steve Lyons

  Setorax knew it would be a mistake to succumb to rage. He had to tune out all distractions, had to focus. He had to see past his enemy, aiming not for where it was but for where it was about to be. He had to be like the farseers and divine the future.

  His knife sliced open the warlock’s stomach. It staggered away from him in abject surprise. It dropped its blade, and reality distorted around its raised hands. It must have known it was finished. It was gathering the sum total of its being together for one final, devastating assault upon its executioner.

  He lunged after it, ignoring the shooting pain in his hip, his bolt pistol firing. The warlock jerked and howled and toppled backwards. It lost control of its psychic energies, writhing in their excoriating grip. Blood leaked from its eyes and nose.

  Setorax left the xenos to die in agony. He was painfully exposed here, and the Exodites’ leader must be close by.

  He heard footsteps marching towards him. The warlock he had beaten at the edge of the clearing was bearing down on him. He cursed himself for not finishing it off, until he saw that the spirit stone it wore against its chest was glowing white.

  He heard a rustle of fabric behind him. Another dead warlock – the first one he had killed – struggled out of the tent he had left it in. Its throat gaped open, it was caked in congealed blood, but it came lurching at him all the same.

  This was something he hadn’t seen before, and he wondered if – he prayed that – it might be an illusion. Either way, there was no point in fighting already-dead foes. He could be fighting them forever. He fired his final blind grenade at his own feet. As its cloud of darkness enveloped him, Setorax ran, but not too far. He relied on the scans his auto-senses had already taken to guide him across the encampment. He asked himself, if he were the eldar farseer, where would he be hiding?

  It would want the best possible view of its surroundings. It must also have had sightlines to the warlocks whose life forces it had rekindled.

  He circled another tent. He had to tread especially carefully, because he couldn’t see its ropes until they were stretched across his calves, on the verge of being wrenched from their moorings. He could hear the two reanimated warlocks feeling their way around blindly, searching for him. He heard nothing of their master.

  It might have slipped away, of course; it would have been stealthy enough. Or it was holding its position, still and silent, waiting for the unnatural fog to lift as it had lifted before. It could be listening for Setorax, just as he was listening for it. He’d have done the same thing in its place.

  He crouched and levelled his bolt pistol, although he could see no target.

  The fog cloud began to disperse, slowly, on the breeze.

  He could make out a few shapes now: some real, some illusions caused by the shifting smoke. He could see the large, elaborate silhouette of the Exodite tent at his shoulder. He could see the knotted tendrils of a scrubby bush at his foot, but the twisted faces that leered out of it were purely imaginary.

  He could see a figure ahead of him.

  He waited for it to become clearer. It was crouched at the far corner of the tent. It was looking across the encampment, with its back to him. It wore a farseer’s robes, finer than its fellows’, and a headdress fashioned from some beast’s antlers. It was female, he realised, snow-white hair flowing down its back.

  It was almost perfectly framed in Setorax’s sights.

  But he waited an instant too long.

  The farseer moved as he fired. His bolt-round grazed its shoulder rather than, as intended, detonating inside its skull. Grunting in pain, it fled behind the tent. Setorax cursed to himself as he sprang after it. It had been a long hunt, too long to let his prey escape him now. As he rounded the tent, however, he saw that he had made a mistake. The farseer wasn’t running.

  It was standing, waiting for him, flanked by its reanimated warlocks. It was bleeding, clearly in severe pain, but its eyes blazed with hate-fuelled resolve. It was summoning the power of the warp to deal with its tormentor.

  Setorax didn’t have time to aim his bolt pistol. He simply emptied its magazine in the eldar’s direction while he could. Then, a small sun exploded inside his head and his muscles turned to rubber. He was dimly aware of his gun slipping through his numbed fingers as the world turned a fiery shade of red, and then black.

  Blessed silence returned to the forest, like a blanket settling over it.

  Setorax returned to his senses, lying face down in the dirt. He felt as if someone had sliced open his scalp and pounded his brain with a hammer. He lay perfectly still for some time, letting the silence soothe him. He listened for sounds of movement around him, but could hear nothing.

  He had been out, according to his armour chronos, for just a few minutes. He wasn’t sure how he had survived at all. Mere strength of will? Perhaps he had gunned down the eldar farseer before it could train its full power upon him?

  When at last he lifted his head, he was greeted by a welcome sight.

  The farseer lay dead alongside him. The revenant warlocks had fallen too, presumably when their master had perished but, crucially, before either one of them could finish off their helpless enemy.

  The Emperor had been with him today. The sounds of the battle, however, must have carried far and wide. Setorax should have slipped away from the encampment while he could, but something stopped him: an instinct, again.

  He heard a droning voice, and suddenly he realised that it had been there all along. It came from somewhere among the trees, somewhere to the north.

  He approached the voice with caution. Drugs from his armour’s reservoir had numbed the pain from his injured hip, but it was still weak and his right leg dragged behind him a little. He would have to do something about that: patch up his fractured armour, so it gave better support. Later, he told himself.

  He came upon a cluster of crystal formations. He had mistaken them for tree stumps from a distance in the twilit greyness. He could now see several more of them, stretching ahead of him like trail markers. He picked out fresh tracks between them.

  Were there more Exodites ahead of him, Setorax wondered? If there were, they must have heard the battle too, and known he was nearby.

  He almost mistook the farseer for another formation, before realising that it was the source of the voice. It was sitting cross-legged in the dirt, unmoving. It had its back to him. A dozen wraithbone runes danced in the air in front of it, glowing white. As Setorax watched them, their lights faded and they clattered to the ground.

  The farseer’s chant had tailed off. In a scratchy voice, without turning its head, it said quietly, ‘You may as well show yourself. I cannot harm you.’

  It spoke in High Gothic, with no hint of any accent. Setorax, for reasons that he couldn’t define, believed the xenos. He remained in the shadows all the same. He aimed his bolt pistol at the back of the farseer’s head.

  ‘I saw you,’ said the farseer, ‘in my visions. Time and again, I cast the runes, and always they showed me the same: a fleeting shadow at the edge of my perception. I tried to bring you into focus, but time and again you slipped away from me. With each casting, I divined victory over the human invaders, and yet–’

  ‘You,’ Setorax breathed. ‘You are their leader. The farseer I fought at the encampment–’

  ‘She would have been their leader tomorrow,’ the eldar sighed. ‘I am old, far older than one of your race could possibly imagine.’

  Setorax eyed the hunched figure.

  ‘You are old,’ he agreed, ‘and unprotected.’

  ‘Yes, I am. And you have your duty to your god on his golden throne. I have already accepted my fate. I see you clearly now. I know you for what you are. Yours is the silence that fell upon Yme-Loc. Yours is the shadow of death, for all of my kin.’

  ‘Yes.’ Setorax’s finger began to tighten around his trigger.

  ‘I only pray our deaths will satisfy you.’

  He hesitated. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘No l
onger do our warriors fight to repel the invaders,’ said the farseer. ‘They give their lives only to delay your advance. They hope to buy time for our warlocks to save the World Spirit.’

  Setorax had heard the term before. ‘The crystals?’

  ‘The spirits of every eldar that has lived and died in this forest. They are the reason we returned here, when your settlers began to wreak their destruction. Break the crystals, and our ancestors lose their tethers to this realm. You condemn them to the hell of the warp, to be devoured by She Who Thirsts.’

  ‘But you can save them?’ asked Setorax, uncertainly. He remembered the first farseer he had killed, the ritual it had been performing.

  ‘Take our lives if you must, they are of little consequence to us. But I beg of you, Edryc Setorax, if your emperor has left you any compassion at all in your hearts, spare our immortal souls.’

  The old xenos fell silent, then. For a moment that stretched into many minutes, nothing stirred in the darkening forest.

  Setorax crept up cautiously behind the eldar. He kept his gun trained on it, as indeed he had done all along. It didn’t move, didn’t even appear to breathe. As he drew closer, Setorax saw that his first instinct about it had been right. There was no eldar there at all. There was only a twisted, shapeless slab of crystal, to which his eyes had ascribed a curved spine and a bowed head, in the gathering gloom.

  A dozen wraithbone runes were scattered in the dirt in front of it.

  Setorax crouched beside the crystal. He pressed the barrel of his bolt pistol up against it. He peered into the crystal’s depths, as if he might have found the farseer lurking in there somehow, staring out at him with a mute appeal in his eyes.

  Then he holstered his weapon, pushed himself to his feet and turned away. He had completed his mission, done his duty. The crystal was no threat to him, no impediment to the Imperium’s goals. He had no reason to squeeze the trigger.

  And it would have made too much noise.

  Setorax made good time back through the forest.

  Night had fallen, so it was easier for him to pass unseen. He also knew the lie of the land now. He avoided the crystal formations in case more warlocks were conducting their rituals among them. Let them do what they have to do, he thought.

  Nor was there much chance of encountering Exodite warriors. They were still busy keeping the Imperial Guardsmen at bay. By morning, he thought, most of them would be dead, while the rest would have faded away into the shadows.

  In the meantime, the sounds of a smaller, closer battle – even more hard-fought, if that was possible – drifted to his ears from the south-east. His kill team had walked into the eldar ambush, the second one; although, thanks to him, their attackers were unlikely to have been completely prepared for them.

  The sounds made it easier for him to pass through the forest unheard.

  The flashes of gun muzzles, gouts of flame, the sparks of swords against armour, lit up the night ahead of him. Setorax came up behind an eldar scout, firing arrows from behind a tree at the edge of the melee, and snapped its neck.

  He took over its vantage point. He watched and waited.

  His battle-brothers were outnumbered six to one, pinned down but fighting furiously. He saw Inquisitor Gravelyn surrounded by eldar warriors, bellowing litanies of battle as he swung his hammer tirelessly.

  Brother-Epistolary Malkus had thrown up a psychic shield to deflect incoming arrows and shuriken. Brother Delassio, his own jump pack burning hot, was blazing a swathe through his enemies with a hand flamer. Eldar bodies were mounting up as the jungle burned.

  Two brothers had already fallen, however, and as Setorax watched, Brother Torgo almost became the third. He was about to be crushed between a pair of charging dragons. Setorax raised his bolt pistol. He targeted one of the dragon’s riders, hoping at least to shake its control of its mount. Torgo, however, saw what was coming and leapt out of the impact zone with a quarter-second to spare. Setorax stayed his hand. He didn’t have to reveal himself yet.

  It wasn’t long before his moment came, however.

  The remaining Space Marines rallied behind the two Librarians, who hurled bolts of psychic energy from their hands, and the tides of battle slowly shifted. A knot of eldar withdrew to the edge of the battlefield, and they had their backs to Setorax. He fired his jump pack and was among them in an instant.

  The force of his arrival scattered them. His knife cut down three warriors before they knew he was there. He had punched a hole in the eldar’s skirmish line, and his brothers on the kill team poured into it. He had probably saved their lives. Again.

  He would make that point when, inevitably, Gravelyn challenged him to justify his actions today. He would explain how he had changed the course of the war on this world. He wouldn’t mention using his kill team as bait in the process.

  Then, no doubt, the inquisitor would write a scathing report for his watch captain, which, no doubt, would be utterly disregarded. The Deathwatch knew what a valuable asset they had in Edryc Setorax. So, as far as his faults – his withdrawn nature, his disregard for authority– were concerned, nothing would be said.

  There would be only silence.

  Deathwatch 9: The Walker in Fire

  Peter Fehervari

  The priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus claimed that teleportation was instantaneous, but nothing was certain in the warp, least of all time. Sometimes an instant swelled in a traveller’s perceptions, extending into a fugue state that could last subjective seconds, minutes or even hours. For most travellers the fugue was a maelstrom of bewildering fragments seeded from their souls, each piece gone before its meaning could be divined. For a few it offered flashes of insight that dissolved like gossamer threads at journey’s end.

  For Garran Branatar, the passage brought only shame.

  Once more he walked the temple-lined avenues of Gharuda, scorching white marble to black with the sacred fire of his bonded weapon. He had crafted the heavy flamer with his own hands and refined it over many years, perfecting it with the devotion of a true artisan. His kinship with the weapon ran deeper than blood, for it had been forged in the fires of his soul. It grieved him to belittle their bond with the unworthy foe they faced today.

  Tainted by terror, Gharuda’s Imperial guardians had surrendered to the xenos raiders who preyed on their world, offering up their own ­people as slaves or sacrifices so they might escape the same fate. They were contemptible, yet Branatar took no pride in their cleansing. He knew every battle-brother in his squad shared his disdain, so they scoured the shrine city with sombre, subdued efficiency.

  ‘This is no work for the Sons of Vulkan,’ Athondar said, striding alongside him, ‘least of all for a Firedrake.’

  Though his fellow warrior’s face was hidden beneath his helm, Branatar sensed the frown there. Despite his ferocity in battle there was a kindness about Athondar that was rare even among the Salamanders, a Chapter that had always enshrined the protection of Mankind at its heart. Some battle-brothers saw Athondar’s sensitivity as a weakness, but Branatar believed it elevated his comrade, bringing him closer to the ideal of their lost primarch.

  ‘We are burning out a viper’s nest of xenos collaborators, brother,’ Branatar said to his comrade. ‘In time the human worms who survive may become dragons who honour the Emperor.’

  Then the game changed.

  As the Salamanders turned onto the promenade leading to Gharuda’s basilica, the sky was riven by angry traceries of viridian light. Moments later a shoal of dark vessels slipped from the multiple rifts like predators of the deep sea, their forms sleek and spiny, as though woven from broken black bones bound with thorns. The xenos had returned to claim a final tithe…

  The moment distended, then shattered into a thousand mirror images of memory as the teleportation fugue burned itself out.

  ‘Some souls are beyond redemption,’ Athondar said, a heartbeat before Branatar’s world dissolved into white light.

  Tamas Athondar had first sp
oken those words five years ago, shortly before he died.

  But death had not silenced him.

  Sarastus was a world shrouded in perpetual night. The darkness wasn’t caused by some anomaly of cosmic geometry, for there was nothing eccentric about the planet’s form, mass or orbit. No, there was curse upon Sarastus, old and devoid of bite save for the blight of absolute darkness, but that had been enough to sour the world’s soul.

  Carceri, the largest of the planet’s hive cities, was a hunched ziggurat of manufactories and tenement vaults, cold and silent, but not quite dead. Things that had once been human haunted its precincts, clinging to a half-life of hunger, hate and the dim memory of something more.

  It was this last and cruellest misery that drew the ghouls to the roof of a nameless hab-block when they sensed a tremor in the immaterium, for they scented disorder as flies scented carrion flesh. For a time they scrabbled about the empty expanse, hunting for the nagging wrongness that had lured them there. Some raised their cataract-encrusted eyes to the broken sky, as if to invoke the blessing of a god even blinder than they. A thrill of blissful terror ran through the pack as the warp tremor grew stronger…

  The radiance burst among them like a compressed supernova. Despite their blindness, the ghouls recoiled and fled from the light, chased by a swirl of tortured air as the portal swept a path clear to make way for something new.

  Moments later, five shapes were silhouetted against the light. They stood rigid as iron statues while traceries of energy played about them, drawing flickering reflections from their helmet lenses. Though they were man-like in form they would have been giants among normal men. Their armour was painted black save for the shoulder pauldrons, whose emblems both united and divided them. While the left pad of every warrior bore a stylised ‘I’ cast in silver, the right ones differed in colour and design.

  Abruptly, the portal winked out and darkness swept over the intruders.

  ‘Kill Team Sabatine, switch optics to full-spectrum night vision,’ a voice commanded inside Branatar’s helmet. The timbre was clipped and precise, identifying a speaker who was entirely grounded in the present.