That halts him. He glares at me, and a fleck of spittle shines on his hanging lip like a jewel.
‘There is still time,’ I say, knowing the danger it places me in. I begin to wonder if this encounter was foreseen after all. ‘The devices have all been destroyed, but I can replicate their functions. I can heal your mind. I can remove the implants and give you back your sleep. I can take away the fire that drives you onwards, the fire that goads you to the acts you abhor. Even now, I know that a part of you still abhors what you have done.’
The spittle hangs, trembling, on his unmoving flesh.
‘I can help you, brother. I can heal your mind.’
He remains locked, frozen in indecision. If I had been Corvidae, I could have seen the paths of the future bisect within him, one going left, one going right. He is at the juncture now, what the ancients called crisis. He has the power to choose, to pull back or to plough on. I cannot intervene. The slightest nudge now will unleash the inferno, one that would toss me aside like dried brush in the hurricane.
I dare to believe in him for the space of a heartbeat. He looks at me, and I see the vindication of my guesses. He is lost in a universe of pain, one that is only temporarily forgotten in the action of killing. I know that my words have reached the sliver of his old self that still endures. I know he can hear me.
And so we remain, alone, locked away somewhere in the ruins of Prospero, a tiny mirror of the battle of wills taking place all across the galaxy.
And for that single heartbeat, I dare to believe.
‘Witch!’ he roars then, and the spittle flies from his lips. ‘You cannot heal this!’
Like a prey-beast springing away from the spear, he drags up a cry of tortured rage, shaking his head from side to side, flailing sweat from the bronze skin. He balls his massive fists, and I know they will come for me soon. His face contorts into a vice of bitter anguish, the expression that it will surely wear for millennia hence if I cannot stop him now.
He has chosen.
I cry aloud words of power, words I had forgotten existed until this moment. I am weak, crippled by the rigours of my captivity, but the lessons of my long conditioning are strong.
I am Athanaean, a master of the hidden ways of the mind, and there are more weapons in the galaxy than fists and blades.
My bonds shatter, freeing me to move. I rise from the chair, wreathed in the blazing light of the unbound aether, ignoring the protests of my broken limbs.
He comes at me then, the Eater of Worlds, and there is murder in his red-rimmed eyes. I have hurt him by exposing the source of his anguish, and I know then he will not stop until I lie dead and my blood paints every wall of this cell.
But we are on my world, the wellspring of my Legion’s ancient power, and the very dust of Tizca fuels my mastery of the warp. I am more powerful than he guesses.
He howls, this ruined abomination, as he thunders into strike-range. I meet the challenge, and my conscience is clear.
I cannot cure him, so I will have to kill him.
Arvida arrived at the landing site just in time.
Just in time to see the corpses of the pilots being dragged across the ground, leaving furrows in the sharp-edged dust. Just in time to see the krak-charges being laid around the flanks of the lander. Just in time to hear the rasping laughter of victory from the berserkers who’d stormed the vehicle.
There were twenty-seven World Eaters clustered around the empty crew-bay. One of them lay in the dust, his armour punched open from bolter impacts. The only other casualties were the two Thousand Sons who’d been left to guard it. They hadn’t stood much of a chance.
Arvida ducked down, keeping hidden behind a tangled hedge of semi-melted girders thirty metres away. As he watched, the helms of his brothers were torn off. Their exposed faces were punched, over and over again. The heads lolled lifelessly, turning into raw lumps of gore and gristle under the pointless barrage. The World Eaters laughed some more, cheering as each fist hit home.
Arvida turned away. He felt angry enough, but not towards Angron’s warriors – they were just savages, and had long ago ceased to be capable of anything more than boneheaded thuggery. His real anger was directed towards Kalliston, the one who had led them here against his counsel. The captain had always had too much faith in the providence of fate. The very idea that Magnus might have been fallible, that the primarch’s leadership might have been badly misguided, was anathema to him. Clearly it had been. They should have remained in space, searching for more survivors before heading into the emptiness of the void to recover. Prospero was nothing but a graveyard.
Even so, that left much to be explained. Arvida might have understood if there had been Wolves on Prospero, but World Eaters were another matter. Had the two Legions been acting in concert? Had all the other Legions turned against the Thousand Sons? If so, then why now? And for what reason?
The World Eaters began to strip the rest of the armour from their captives, and the desecration of their bodies began in earnest. Whoops and roars filled the otherwise tranquil air as they set to work.
Arvida glanced at his helm display. His squad were all gone, their life-signs inactive. He was alone, facing an enemy he couldn’t hope to contest.
The safest course of action would be to retreat, to flee back through the silent streets and wait for something to turn up. He knew he would have to withdraw soon enough, but the senseless barbarism in front of him offended his highly-developed sense of pride in the rules of war. His Legion had never broken them.
He rose from cover and drew his bolter up in a single, flowing movement. As he took aim, he saw the path of the shell that he would fire snaking into the future, and took some solace from the certainty of the kill. He squeezed the trigger, then turned and sprinted back into the shadows.
Arvida didn’t see the captain of the World Eaters collapse to the ground, his helm carved in two by the detonation of the bolt-round, but he heard it. Then he heard the roars of anger, and the thud of four dozen boots as the warband wheeled and charged towards the source of the shot.
He ran, keeping his head low, ducking and weaving through the thickets of blasted iron. The noise of the pursuit echoed in his ears, harsh and brutal. If they caught him, he’d be lucky to suffer a quick death.
Arvida upped the pace, pushing his body into a new burst of speed, barely noticing the skeletal buildings rush past in the night. He knew it had been reckless to fire that shot. Stupid, even.
But, and just for a moment, it had felt good.
His strength is breathtaking. It is as if every aspect of the Legiones Astartes has been stripped away in favour of that single facet. His fists move in blurs of speed, backed up by the prodigious power of his massive body. He has no weapon, but that scarcely seems to matter. He is used to carving up his foes with his hands.
He is always attacking, always looking for the way in. I parry as best I can, holding him back by attacking his only vulnerable part. I see his mind now as it will become in the future – a cauldron of seething, perpetual violence. The brief window I had on another Khârn has closed, and the corrupted half is all that remains. I can hammer away at that, flexing my telepathic muscles as he flexes his unnaturally stimmed physical ones, though I fear my attacks have little bite.
He wades through warp-born attacks that would floor a lesser adversary. I know I must be hurting him, but he brushes it off. Perhaps there is no pain I could inflict that is greater than the one he inflicts on himself.
‘Witch!’ he roars again, coming at me in a barrelling, swaying charge.
I leap to the side, crashing against the metal walls of the cell, only evading his outstretched hands by finger-widths. I unleash everything I have then, a whirling torrent of memory-scorching agony capable of ripping the sanity from a man and dissolving it like magnesium in water.
But there is so little sanity to rip away, an
d he barely stumbles.
I make use of the gap I created, and throw a heavy punch at his exposed head. My fist connects. It is a well-aimed blow, and impacts with all the force I can deliver. His skull rocks back and blood joins the trails of saliva in the air.
Then I am moving again, evading the furious response. He is like a whirlwind, a morass of hurtling limbs. I feel a heavy thud as his boot rises, catching me on my hip. There is a jarring crack as my pelvis fractures.
I scramble away from him, sprawling face-down to the floor. Another foot connects, breaking the femur in my trailing leg. Out of my armour, I have so little defence against attacks of this quantity and magnitude. The absurdity of my defiance is laughable.
I roll over onto my back, spinning away from a floor-breaking fist-plunge.
Khârn towers over me. Froth spills from his lips, and his eyes bulge from their swollen sockets.
It is my pity that has doomed me. Pity is the only emotion he can no longer tolerate, the one that reminds him of what he once was. If I had not offered to cure him, perhaps I would have lived. Perhaps he would have persuaded me of the righteousness of his cause, and I would have joined the movement that he says will liberate the galaxy.
It is that thought that persuades me I was right to try. As I gaze up into the mask of trembling fervour above me, I see what fate would have awaited me as a part of that dark crusade. He has lost himself, and what remains is now much less than human.
His clenched gauntlet swoops down, hitting me square in the face. The bones, already weakened, crunch inwards. I feel the back of my head drive a dent into the metal floor, and the hot stickiness of the blood in the well as it rebounds out again.
The world tilts, rocking on an axis of nausea. I only dimly feel the second blow, cracking into my ribs. My body becomes a chorus of pain, resounding in discordant polyphony.
Through blood-swelled eyes I see the fist coming that will finish me. It is fitting, to witness the cause of my own death. As a loyal son of the Imperium, I never wished for more than that.
I have time for only one more thought before the end comes.
I gave you the choice, Khârn. When the murder and madness are over, you will have the leisure to reflect on that. You could have turned back.
That knowledge, I know, will haunt him. I dread to think what he will become when his rampage ends and he is forced to confront that.
I can guess. I guess that he will become uncontainable, and will turn on whatever force has sought to channel his rage for its own purposes. None shall master him, for he has lost mastery over himself.
When the fist lands, that is what I am thinking. There is no comfort in it. And, of course, there will be no comfort in anything again.
Arvida kept moving. The dead city was crawling with World Eater kill-squads, roving through the empty hab-blocks like underhive murder-gangs. For the time being, he was ahead of them. He knew Tizca better than them, and remembered the intricate pattern of its streets perfectly. What was more, his future-sense still lingered, warning him away from taking wrong turns and preventing fatal mis-steps.
It wouldn’t last forever. Sooner or later, he’d have to rest, to sleep, to find something to eat. His enhanced constitution could stave off that need for days, but not forever. The Wolves had burned Prospero almost completely to the ground, so there would be meagre hunting ahead.
His only chance of survival would be to stay in the city, evading the predators and searching for some kind of transport off-world. He assumed the Geometric was still in orbit, though his attempts to send a signal had failed. The ship was not without its defences, though it would struggle against a well-crewed World Eaters warship.
So. The options were limited, and the odds long.
Kalliston had been a fool. Coming back to Prospero had been a predictable error, one caused by excessive faith in the primarch. Arvida had never shared that faith, not even when the Legion had been intact. Whatever cataclysm had occurred here had been beyond Magnus’s power to prevent, so it was folly to retain faith in his stratagems. Any survivors from the sack of Prospero were alone now, a scattered band of warriors cast adrift on the rip-tide of the galaxy like the spars of a ruined galleon.
Arvida had no idea how many of his brothers still lived. Perhaps there were hundreds. Perhaps he was the only one.
He reached the end of a long, shallow climb away from the mass of the central conurbation. Arvida turned then, looking back the way he’d come. He had a view far across the centre of the city. Under the starlight, the fields of glass glittered with a pearlescent sheen. It was beautiful.
The City of Light.
He paused for a moment, lost in the vision of what had once been. Nothing moved. Even the drifting clouds of smog were still, suspended in a rare moment of calm.
Only one certainty remained. Arvida knew, as only a Corvidae could know, that death would not find him on Prospero. That was no consolation for what had been lost, but at least it lent the task of planning his next move a certain urgency.
He would survive. He would discover the true causes of his Legion’s destruction, and live to fight them. He would neither pause nor stumble until everything had been revealed to him, everything that would give him a weapon to employ.
‘Knowledge is power,’ he breathed.
Then he turned away from the scene, and stole quickly back into the occlusion of the ruins. As he went, the dim red light of the angry magma fires caught on his shoulder-guard, exposing the serpentine star set about the black raven-head of his cult discipline.
Then he was gone, a shadow among shadows.
The Face of Treachery
Gav Thorpe
Artificial eyes scoured the firmament, seeking a telltale reflection of radiation, looking for a pinprick of light, searching for the merest hint of heat in the coldness. The enemy were out here somewhere, lurking in the shadow of Isstvan VI’s rings. Ice and dust particles provided ample cover for a starship, a hindrance compounded by the residual plasma clouds and radiation from the battle just fought.
Six vessels prowled the void. At their head was the battle-barge Dedicated Wrath, its flotilla of two strike cruisers, one grand cruiser and two destroyers spread across hundreds of thousands of kilometres of space. They approached Isstvan VI warily, unsure how many of the enemy had escaped the initial battle. Plasma reactors on idle, they drifted out-system by inertia; what power they were expending directed to the banks of scanner antenna jutting from their prows.
On the bridge of the Dedicated Wrath Lieutenant-Commander Nigh Vash Delerax fixed his stare on the main screen. The huge display dominated the wall of the main bridge, covered with an anarchic maze of surveyor data and scanner sweep returns. Isstvan VI loomed large in the display, its gold and blue rings shimmering coldly in the faint light of the system’s star.
‘Industrious reports possible scanner return in quadrant eight-theta,’ reported one of the aides at the scanning console behind the Legiones Astartes commander. He was non-Legiones Astartes, though his body showed signs of augmetic surgery and his left eye was a bionic replacement that twinkled red in the bright glow of his screen. ‘Too big to be an asteroid, though possibly an uncharted moonlet.’
Delerax moved his gaze to the top of the screen, to the area mentioned. It was pointless, he realised; even his augmented eyes would not spot something before the systems of the battle-barge, especially since the visual display he looked at was itself a construct based on that data. If the Dedicated Wrath could not see the enemy, neither could he.
‘Tell Industrious to close to within fifty thousand kilometres of the source,’ said Delerax, pulling his eyes away from the screen. ‘Move Justified Aggressor to a triangulating point.’
‘Affirmative, lieutenant-commander,’ said the aide.
The thought that he might have found his prey sent a buzz of excitement through Delerax. He had spent
many days fruitlessly searching the outer reaches of the Isstvan system and had almost come to believe that the enemy were not here at all.
His pre-cortical implant responded to his change of mood. With the tiniest of vibrations, the device triggered a wave of chemicals through Delerax’s brain. Immediately every sense was heightened. He could smell the sweat of the men at the consoles, the oil from the machinery. He could taste the static from the display screens and feel the soft currents of air from the overhead ventilators. The blue and white of his armour seemed brighter and every hiss, bleep and breath across the bridge echoed in his ears.
‘Industrious confirms contact,’ the aide said excitedly. ‘Positive transmission identification. It’s a Salamanders ship, strike vessel classification.’
‘At last!’ Delerax let out his pent-up frustration with a shout. He turned and stomped across the bridge towards the communications desk. ‘Signal the whole flotilla. Manoeuvre for immediate attack. Transmit the following to the enemy: This is Lieutenant-Commander Delerax of the World Eaters. Stand down your weapons and prepare to be boarded. Non-compliance will result in your destruction. You will receive no further warning.’
‘They’re making a run for it,’ the scanning officer called out. ‘Cutting away from Isstvan VI, gaining speed.’
‘Flotilla move to intercept,’ said Delerax. ‘Target engines at earliest opportunity. If they get away, you will answer to me!’
The World Eater’s implant was in full battle-mode now, sending jolts through his adrenal system, gearing up his whole body for the coming fight. The sensation was a curious blend of clarity and euphoria: a general sense of well-being that pleasantly dulled the lieutenant-commander’s thoughts while his instinctual reactions raced away, filling him with a barrage of sensation.
As the World Eaters flotilla powered up their engines the Salamanders cruiser turned out-system and darted for its next patch of cover – a cloud of asteroids some five hundred thousand kilometres from Isstvan VI. Like a pack of hounds the ships of the World Eaters gave chase, the more powerful engines of the Dedicated Wrath pushing the battle-barge to the front of the pursuit.
Age of Darkness Page 21
