The World Eaters howl below – not like wolves, but fanatics. It’s the lack of anything feral that makes it so sickening to hear, so much more of a threat. A beast’s howl is a natural thing. A fanatic’s cry is something of anger and tormented joy in equal measure, born of spite and twisted faith. He turns back
to the stunted stone pillar.
You’ve followed my voice for a hundred days and nights. You’ve made foes of brothers and cousins alike, just as I asked. And now you stand before the stone that sinners once carved in my image. You’ve proven yourself in every way I asked of you. You are worthy of this union. What now, Sharak? What now?
‘I’m ready,’ Sharak says. He bares his throat in a symbolic gesture, and pulls his helm free. He can hear the rattle and grind of ceramite over rock.
The World Eaters are almost upon him.
The Joining is different each time. Once, it was a hammer blow to his sternum, as if the daemon wriggled its way through an invisible puncture hole into his body. Another time, it came as a burst of consciousness and sensuality – perceiving shadows of lost souls moving at the edges of his eyes, and hearing whispers on the wind from entire worlds away. This time, it strikes with heat, with a burning itch across the skin. He feels the Joining physically at first, a welcome violation of his flesh despite the bleeding and choking. It hurts down to his bones, weighing them down, driving him to his knees. His eyes turn next, hardening in their sockets, fusing to the bone behind. He taps them, scratches them, pulls at them… They are stones in his skull, edged by spines pushing from his face.
The strength is narcotic in its intensity. No combat drugs, no stimulant serum can match the energy feeding the fibres of his muscles. He starts to claw at his armour plating, no longer needing its protection. Ceramite peels away in chunks, making room for the chitinous ridges beneath.
Sharak looks past the pain, refocusing, seeking to calm his racing hearts.
Control. Control. Control. It’s only pain. It won’t kill him. It can be overcome. It…
It hurts. It hurts more than the agonies of all past Joinings. It hurts to his core, beyond his flesh, hurting past the aches in his bones and into something deeper and truer and infinitely more vulnerable.
A lesson here, the voice says. Not all pain can be controlled.
Sharak turns, screaming through a mouth now crammed with knife-teeth.
His jaw barely obeys him. His voice strangles off, killing the cry, and becomes someone else’s laugh.
And not all enemies can be beaten.
Fear – fear for the first time in his life – floods through his organs in an
adrenal rush.
Erekan Juric, captain of Vaithan Reaver Squad. Las-fire slashes past him, ionising the air he breathes and leaving scorched smears across his armour.
He ignores the incidental beams, firing back at the humans with his bolter kicking in his fist. The turbines on his back are heavy, broken things that no longer breathe flame. They stutter and sigh, exhaling smoke and bleeding promethium.
At his boots, his brother Zhoron is cursing him and thanking him, all at once. Juric drags Zhoron by the backpack, hauling him metre by metre up the gunship’s ramp. Both of them leave a snail’s trail of fluid along the ridged metal: Zhoron leaves a path of his blood from where his legs now end; Juric leaves a dripping track of leaking oil and fuel, with spent shell casings clanging down on the metal ramp by his boots. In the gunship’s cargo bay, hastily loaded crates wait in ramshackle order, with wounded warriors in abundance.
‘Shersan,’ he voxes. ‘Go.’
‘Yes, captain,’ comes the confirmation, flawed by vox-crackle. For a moment, Juric smiles, even under enemy fire. Captain. An echo of an era when the Legion still had a structure; from the time before they were hunted like dogs by those they’d failed.
With a shudder, the ramp starts its grinding rise. The gunship kicks, lifting off the ground on a cloud of engine wash and swirling dust. Juric releases Zhoron, tosses his empty bolter into the gunship’s waiting cargo bay, and starts running.
‘Don’t,’ his downed brother warns through pained hisses. ‘Erekan. Don’t do this.’
Juric doesn’t answer. He drops from the rising ramp, thudding back down onto the rocky ground, breaking stones beneath his boots. In his fists, both weapons whine as they accrue power in unison: the curving axe shivers with lightning dancing over its silver blade, while the plasma pistol trembles with the heating of its spinal coils. Bursts of gas relieve the pressure from muzzle vanes. It wants to fire. He knows this gun, and he knows its will. It wants to fire.
The humans are upon him now. He faces them at the heart of the burning fortress, while evacuating gunships rise into the grey sky. The first is a
woman, her face a canvas of fresh scars, invoking gods she scarcely understands. Two men run behind her, armed with salvaged twists of metal, their violated flesh different only from the woman’s in the cartography of their mutilations, but the same in intent. A mob charges behind the three leaders, screaming and chanting, killing each other in a bid to reach him.
Faith gives them courage, but their zealotry has driven them past the point of self-preservation.
Juric starts butchering them, saving the overkill of his pistol for what will surely come afterwards. Swing after swing takes him through the rabble, his axe never ceasing. Blood flecks his eye-lenses, and sizzles as it burns away from his energised blade. These lives are meaningless.
‘Kahotep,’ he breathes the name through his helm’s vox-speakers. ‘Face me.’
The reply is a psychic pulse of distant mirth. + Now why would I want to do that?+
Juric puts his boot through the chest of the last man standing, and runs even as the body falls. Another shadow darkens the sky as a gunship judders overhead, before the concussive boom of its engines lift it into the storm. As if in sympathy for the falling fortress, rain starts in a hissing torrent. It does nothing to fight the fires.
Breathless, Juric asks the vox: ‘Who’s still on the ground?’
Name-runes and acknowledgement pulses flicker across his retinal display, along with a chorus of voices. The stronghold will fall before the hour turns, and half of his men are still inside its sundered walls.
He crosses the courtyard, leaping the green-armoured bodies of his dead brethren, heading to one of the last remaining buildings. The defence turrets are silent now, all as broken as the battlements. Thousand Sons gunships, stark and dark in the rain, drift over the tumbled plasteel walls. Their battle tanks rumble in through holes torn in the stronghold’s barricades. With them come phalanxes of the walking dead, directed by unseen hands.
‘Kahotep,’ he says again. ‘Where are you?’
+Closer than you think, Juric.+
Yet another shadow blacks out the sky, this one cast by a vulturish gunship of old indigo and worn gold, not fleeing in shame but bearing down in triumph. Juric throws himself into the vague cover of a fallen wall, his eyes activating retinal runes on his eye-lenses.
‘I need anti-armour fire in the southern courtyard. Do we have anything left?’
The responses aren’t encouraging. At least more of his men are escaping.
That’s what matters.
The Thousand Sons gunship burns the air with heat haze from its engines, hovering above the courtyard. Its spotlights cut down through the darkness, raking over the desecrated ground.
+Where did you go, Son of Horus? I thought you wanted to face me. Was I wrong?+
The gunship’s landing claws bite into the earth, grinding bodies beneath their weight. As the engines cycle down, the ramp beneath the cockpit starts to lower, a maw opening to breathe warriors into war.
Juric watches the Rubricae march forth. His targeting reticule leaps from enemy to enemy, detecting mismatching life signs that suggest everything and conclude nothing. Are these men alive or dead? Both, perhaps. Or neither.
‘Vaithan, to me.’
Three runes flash in response. It’l
l do. It’s enough.
He wills his jump pack to fire, but the turbines’ response is a shudder and a shower of sparks. He’s grounded, and will need to do this the traditional way.
Unopposed, three seconds is all it will take to close the distance. Four or five if they land more than one hit, which is likely.
Thayren strikes from above, landing boots-first into the phalanx of the walking dead. Dusty ceramite breaks beneath his impact and two automatons in the blue and gold of the Thousand Sons go down to the dirt, falling with no sound of protest.
Juric starts running the moment Thayren lands. For all his flaws, which he considers many and varied, he’s no coward. The Rubricae’s bolters bark in his direction the moment he rises into sight. Whatever independence death stole from them, it left them able to aim. Each explosive hit is a horse kick to his body, blasting ceramite shards away and sending him staggering, cursing the loss of flight. Temperature gauges flicker in alarm as his armour starts to burn with blue witch-fire.
He finishes the first by taking its head, cleaving the stylised warhelm free.
Dust bursts from the neck in a thin cloud, with the smell of tombs best left untouched. With the breath of dust comes a faint, relieved sigh. Juric doesn’t
see the headless body fall; he’s already moved on, axe leading the way.
Thayren duels two of the enemy, easily weaving aside from their heavy, precise swings. Juric is almost at his brother’s side when protesting engines herald the arrival of Raxic and Naradar. Both hit the ground amidst the Thousand Sons formation, chainblades revving, bolt pistols crashing.
Juric staggers again, down on one knee. His axe falls from his grip. The witch-fire washes over his armour, refusing to burn out, digesting the ceramite and eating into the softer joints.
‘Zhoron!’ calls one of the other Reavers. Even through the pain biting at his joints, Juric tries to tell them it’s futile. The Apothecary is already gone, evacuated on the way to Monument.
He tastes the acid of his own spit on his tongue, and hears the sorcerer’s voice in his mind.
+This is how a Legion dies.+
The warship sits silent in space, her reactor cold, her engines dead.
Battlements line her spine in a protrusion of castles and spires, with thousands of powerless gun turrets aimed up into the void. She drifts alone at the heart of an asteroid field, suffering occasional impacts against her scarred armour, each slow crash adding to the asymmetry of her scars.
She once carved her name through the galaxy at the vanguard of humanity’s empire, a bloodthirsty herald of eminent domain. She once hung in the skies of Terra, laying waste to mankind’s cradle. Now she lies still, abandoned in hell, hidden from those who covet her.
Her spirit is a tight, tiny essence in her inactive core; the only iota of sentience and life within the immense hulk. This soul, as true as any human life despite its artificial genesis, slumbers in the infinite cold. She waits to be reawakened, but holds no hope it will ever happen. Her sons fled her decks, leaving her here to grow frigid and silver with ice crystals, so far from the light of the closest sun that the star is nothing but a pinprick in the night.
She dreams a warrior’s dreams: of fire, of pain, of blood soaking across steel while great guns roar. She dreams of the Many that once lived within her, and the warmth they took when they left.
She dreams of the times she broadcast her name to lesser vessels, shrieking Vengeful Spirit as she crippled and killed her enemies.
She dreams of the last words spoken in her presence, ordered in the low
growl of the one who’d come to command her. She knew him, as she knew all of the Many. He’d stood before her machine-spirit heartcore, a massive clawed hand against the glass of her brain. Her mind filled the cavernous chamber, shielded and armoured in dense metal. Liquids bubbled. Engines groaned. Pistons clanked. The sound of her thoughts.
Abaddon, she’d said to him. We can still hunt. We can still kill. You need me.
He couldn’t hear her. He wasn’t linked, so he could neither hear nor respond. She knew that had been intentional. He was deafening himself to her, to make the abandonment easier. He’d spoken the final three words, then. The last words she heard with the clarity of consciousness.
‘Shut her down.’
Abadd–
Ezekyle the Brotherless, a pilgrim in hell. He stands at the edge of a cliff that reaches impossibly high into a sky the colour of madness and migraines, and he looks down at the armies warring below. Ants. Insects. A crusade of souls the size of sand grains, half-lost in the dust churned up from the hammering of so many thousands of boots and tank treads.
His armour is a patchwork panoply of scavenged ceramite, repaired countless times after countless battles. The armour he wore in the rebellion is long-since abandoned, left to rot aboard the warship he exiled into the ether.
His weapons from that war are likewise gone: his sword broken in some nameless skirmish years ago, and the claw he stole from his father left at the Legion’s last fortress, the bastion known to the Sons of Horus as Monument.
He wondered if they still left the weapon on display with the Warmaster’s stasis-locked remains, or if they’d given in to their fevered hungers and fought over the right to be its bearer.
There was a time he’d be down there with them, waging war at the vanguard, maintaining a steady stream of orders and listening to a flow of positioning reports, all the while killing with a smile in his eyes and a laugh on his lips.
From this distance, he has no hope of discerning which companies are embattled, or even if either side holds to any of the old Legions’ structures.
Even a cursory glance through the dust clouds is enough to betray the most obvious truth: the Sons of Horus are losing once more, against an enemy
horde that vastly outnumbers them. Individual prowess and heroism means nothing down there. A battle can break down into ten thousand duels between lone souls, but it isn’t how wars are won.
The wind, always a treacherous companion in this realm, carries infrequent scraps of shouted voices from the valley below. He lets the sounds wash over him without guilt, as unconcerned for the screaming as he is for the way the wind drags at his long, loose hair.
Ezekyle crouches, gathering a fistful of the red sand that serves this world as worthless earth. His eyes never stray from the battle, instinct pulling at him despite having no investment in whoever lives and dies.
Far below him, gunships crow and caw above the battlefield, adding their incendiary spite to the dusty frenzy. Titans – at this distance no larger than his fingernails – stride through the choke, their weapon fire still bright enough to leave thread-thin blurs across his retinas, each one a little slice of razored light.
He smiles, but not because of the battle. What world is this? He realises he doesn’t even know. His wandering takes him from planet to planet, avoiding his former brethren when he can, yet now he stands upon a world watching hundreds of his brothers dying, without even knowing the planet’s name or what they sell their lives to defend.
How many of the men screaming and fighting and bleeding down in the valley would he know by name? Most, without a doubt. That, too, makes him smile.
He rises to his feet, opening his fist. The lifeless, glassy dust glitters away in the wind, catching the light from three weak suns before spreading in a thin burst, lost to sight.
Ezekyle turns his back on the battle, and leaves the cliff behind. Footprints mark his passage, but he trusts the wind to breathe his tracks into memory before anyone catches sight of them. He looks to the horizon, where seven vast stepped pyramids rise into the sky, shaped by hands neither human nor alien, but wrought solely by divine whim.
In this place in space, on every world he walks, desire and hatred forge the landscape more reliably than mortal ingenuity or natural tectonics. He’s crossed bridges over oblivion, threaded between islands of rock hanging in the void. He’s explored the tombs of xenos-breed kings an
d queens, and left priceless plunder to lie untouched in the dark. He’s travelled the surface of
hundreds of worlds in this realm where the material and the immaterial meet to mate, scarcely paying heed to the extinction of the Legion he once led.
Curiosity drives him, and hatred sustains him, where once anger was all he needed. Defeat cooled the fires of that particular forge, however.
Ezekyle Abaddon, no longer first captain, no longer a legionary of the Sons of Horus, keeps walking. He’ll reach the first great pyramid before the first of the three suns sets.
THE TALON OF HORUS
by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
When Horus fell, his Sons fell with him. A broken Legion, beset by
rivalries and hunted by their erstwhile allies, the former Luna
Wolves have scattered across the tortured realm of the Eye of
Terror. And of Abaddon, greatest of the Warmaster’s followers,
nothing has been heard for many years. Until now...
Find this title, and many others, on blacklibrary.com
SARCOPHAGUS
DAVID ANNANDALE
The true measure of my enemy’s threat isn’t just in the brute force at his disposal. Nor is it fully captured in the tally of victories and defeats. What lies behind events? Why are some actions taken and others not? The answers to those questions can reveal a power even more deadly than armies of millions could imply. Ghazghkull Thraka had annihilated our forces on Golgotha. What that showed of his means and ability was bad enough, but that he released me had even worse implications.
Sometimes questions alone point to dark revelations.
I was in Anaon, south of Hive Tartarus. It was a smaller hive on the coast of the Tempest Ocean. I had come for two reasons. One was to inspect the maritime defences. The fate of Helsreach still hung in the balance, and we had to prepare against the possibility of a second invasion from the water.
The other reason was symbolic. That had always been an integral part of my duties as a commissar: to represent something more important than the individual in the uniform.
I never meant to become an icon, but circumstances were circumstances.
Crusade & Other Stories - Dan Abnett Et Al. Page 18
