Once, a bright and promising future had beckoned, and it had seemed that anything was possible. Humanity was at the epoch of something incredible, a new golden age, and the Legions were there at the forefront of it, carving it out with bolter and chainsword. They’d had a purpose then. There had been a reason for what they did.
He glanced over at Argus Brond. He too seemed lost in his own private reflections, his brow furrowed.
The universe had been a simpler place in the early years of the Great Crusade. The darkness of Old Night had been dispelled, and the insular shackles that had constrained humanity for so long were thrown off. For the first time in millennia, humanity began to look out beyond the borders of its own fears, staring out into the universe with bold aims and the purity of a singular purpose. And at the vanguard of the crusade that rippled out from Terra had been the newly formed Legiones Astartes. Among them, feared and respected even then for their ferocity and brutality – and their unshakeable discipline, something that was now lost to them – was the XII Legion. The War Hounds.
When the pain engine in his head was not tightening the screws, blinding him to everything but their insistent urge, Dreagher recalled the optimism of those halcyon days. He knew the Nails had deadened him inside, painting his memories in colourless tones, draining them of intensity, yet still what remained made him mourn for what the Legion had lost.
All that optimism had long been trampled to dust and whisked away on the winds of fate. Hope had turned to despair. What had been golden had been revealed as fool’s gold – a shining veneer that concealed a rotting, poisonous core.
It could so easily have been different. He looked around at his Legion, disintegrating around him, bleeding itself dry, tearing itself apart, and he despaired, thinking of what might have been.
It would have been easy to pinpoint the start of that decay as the moment when Angron had been reunited with them. Other Legions had already been fighting alongside their own primarchs for some years by that point. How many countless hours had Dreagher and his comrades spent in awed speculation about the traits and martial skills of their own gene-sire?
Whatever they had expected, it had not been the broken, damaged thing that was delivered to them. And yet it would be too easy to blame him for the Legion’s degradations.
Yes, it had been in emulation of and at the insistence of Angron that the Legion was subjected to the self-same psycho-surgery that had so damaged the psyche and state of mind of the primarch. That this was the prime cause of the Legion’s devolution was unarguable. Nevertheless, Dreagher believed it was all too easy to lay the blame at Angron’s door. So also was it too simple to regard the Nucerians, those long-butchered fools who had so damaged Angron in the first place, as the instigators of the World Eaters’ decline.
No, Dreagher pointed the finger of blame for the Legion’s fate at one individual, and it was not his primarch: it was the being that he had once called Emperor.
In denying Angron his death, denying him his honour, the Emperor had damned the XII Legion to a slow death.
It would have been a bitter blow for the Legion never to have known or fought alongside its primarch – but Dreagher couldn’t help but think it would have been preferable to what had come after.
Dreagher was torn from his reverie by a click in his gorget. Incoming vox from the bridge. Stirzaker.
‘Initial augur sweeps read negative, Dreagher,’ said the cracked, thin voice of the ship’s flag-captain. ‘I cannot see either of them. It would seem that neither of them wishes to be found.’
‘Keep trying,’ snarled Dreagher, killing the connection. ‘Where the hell are they?’
‘Ruokh could have accessed the tertiary lift shafts,’ said Argus Brond. The captain was tap-clicking the screen of the auspex built into his left vambrace. He looked up. The green light emitted by the screen gave his brutish face an unhealthy, eerie sheen. ‘If he’s loose in the sub-decks, he could be anywhere. He knows we are hunting him.’
‘We have to find him before Baruda does. Do we know if he has made any more kills?’ said Dreagher.
‘There have been no reports of further casualties,’ said Brond.
‘That’s something at least,’ said Dreagher.
‘For now,’ said Brond, returning his attention to his screen. Dreagher heard accusation in his fellow captain’s voice. Brond had spoken against Ruokh on more than one occasion.
An incoming vox-alert sounded.
‘What is it?’ growled Dreagher.
‘Baruda,’ said Brond.
Chapter 3
Skoral Wroth was voidborn. She had come into the universe screaming and fighting, born in the lower hab-decks of the Defiant. She’d been fighting each of her thirty-two Terran standard years of life since.
Her mother had died in labour; Skoral had been huge, even then, and her mother little more than a child, slender and ethereal. The beatings Skoral had received from her father, a mean-spirited sub-level graft-welder with narc addiction, had ended only after Skoral had caved in his head with a wrench. She’d been seven years old.
A few years of running riot with a kill-gang through the underdeck had ended with her own gang turning against her, its barely teenaged leader judging her a threat. She had knocked out two of them as they had come for her in the night, broken the jaw of another and killed one, sticking him with the blade he’d brought to cut her thread, but they’d overcome her. They had left her to die, hanging from a chain-noose in the ship’s lower starboard sump depths. That was where Dreagher had found her.
He’d carried the unconscious girl up to the main decks and dumped her before Khurgan. The Apothecary had worn an expression that suggested his captain had just deposited vermin in his apothecarion. In a sense, he had.
‘What is that?’ he had said.
‘You said you wanted a medicae aid,’ said Dreagher. ‘Teach him.’
‘You want this tending your legionaries?’ said Khurgan, flatly.
‘He’s strong and has a warrior’s spirit. He will do. If he doesn’t show any aptitude, dispose of him. There are plenty more where he came from.’
‘I’m not a boy,’ Skoral had snarled up at Dreagher. ‘And I’m not afraid of you.’
An ugly sound croaked from Khurgan’s throat at that. Only later had Skoral learned that he had been laughing.
‘You are a bad liar, girl,’ Dreagher had said. ‘I can taste your fear.’
Then he had clipped her lightly on the side of her head with the back of one immense hand. The blow had sent her crashing over a trolley of medicae implements, sending them flying. She hit the ground hard.
‘I like her,’ she remembered hearing Khurgan say, just before the darkness had surged up to claim her. ‘She does have a warrior’s spirit.’
The Legion blood on her hands and arms had dried to a brown crust. The iron-stink of it was making her feel sick. She was hurrying now, thinking of the chem-showers. All she wanted to do was get herself clean.
Her bracelet chimed, vibrating slightly. Maven. She ignored it. She could speak to him later. Right now, her main priority was finishing off her duty here and cleaning herself up.
She keyed in her access code and let the emergent needle prick her thumb. A perfect droplet of blood rose from the tiny wound. She smeared it on the plexglass assessor plate. The plate retracted and a light began to flicker, accompanied by a faint clicking sound. Both stopped a moment later.
A servitor embedded in the door frame, almost completely concealed amongst the pipes and cabling, turned its emaciated head, its movement robotic and stilted. It had no eyes. In their place were wires and capacitors.
‘Greetings Skoral Wroth, Medicae Assist Third Class,’ it said, its monotone voice crackling from the vox-speaker embedded in its throat. Why its jaws clicked open and shut while it spoke was anyone’s guess. Its own larynx had long been removed.
‘It
’s Skoral, not “Score-al”, idiot thing,’ she said. The servitor did not respond – to do so was not in its programming – and it retreated back into the fold of pipes and ribbed cables.
The articulated planes of the iris door slid soundlessly open, revealing an armourglass-sided chamber beyond. She stepped through, followed closely by a pair of lobotomised medicae servitors. They pushed two humming grav-pallets before them, a World Eaters corpse on each.
The doors hummed shut behind them, sealing them within.
‘Commencing cleansing protocols,’ said a mechanised voice.
With a sharp hiss, the contained space was suddenly filled with a cold, blinding white cloud, bursting from tiny nozzles set in the floor and ceiling. The cloud dissipated almost as quickly, and the inner iris doors to the apothecarion secundus glided open.
Skoral walked into the room beyond.
‘Put them in the cold chamber,’ she ordered the servitors.
She set her bloodied narthecium on a counter top, and moved straight to the armourglass-fronted cells against the back wall to look in on her charge. He sat motionless, as always. She picked up a data-slate, and slid her fingers across its surface, checking for any alteration in his condition. Nothing.
Skoral moved back to her bloodstained narthecium, and detached the heavy vial holding the gene-seed she’d just extracted. It came away with a hiss. The glass canister was cold to the touch.
She entered the gene-vault, shivering at the sudden temperature drop as the door hissed shut behind her. Every surface was covered in a sheen of frost. It looked as though diamond-dust had been liberally sprayed within the room. She fogged the air with every breath.
It did not look like much, but this cramped, icy vault represented the future of the echelon. Held here was the genetic material of two hundred and seventy-six legionaries – soon to be two hundred and seventy-eight. It wasn’t much – merely a tiny fraction of the losses that the echelon had suffered – but it was something. Without these genetic building blocks, creating more legionaries to replace the heavy losses the XII Legion had suffered was impossible.
She walked quickly down one of the vault’s aisles and slotted the vial holding the precious gene-seed into a vacant slot. She tapped a sequence of keys in response to a series of prompts, skipping the information she did not know. She could come back to that later.
After the final prompt, a frosted glass panel slid down in front of the vial of gene-seed, sealing it inside. A green light clicked on below it, and a small screen lit up: Khrast.
She tapped a key, and the gene-bank column tracked upwards, until another vacant slot presented itself before her. She secured Saal’s gene-seed within, and entered his details. The name ‘Saal’ appeared upon the small screen as she completed her work.
In truth it was satisfying to have been in a position to put names to the gene-seed. Too many of the screens blinked ‘Unknown’.
Skoral turned and made her way out of the gene-vault. She was bone cold, the sub-freezing temperature having chilled the sweat upon her skin. She rubbed her hands together and blew on them, trying to warm them.
She was tired and sore, and ravenously hungry. Before going to the galley, however, she needed to wash. The chem-showers were calling to her.
She exited the gene-vault, which sealed behind her. She was halfway across the apothecarion’s floor when she jolted with shock, suddenly realising she was not alone.
A legionary stood nearby, staring into the armourglass cell that held her charge. He stood as motionless as a statue – nothing truly human could be that still.
She froze.
The legionary was armoured in heavily worn black war-plate, its surfaces pitted and scarred. Rad-damage. Those plates were bound in razor wire.
The World Eater’s pallid head was utterly hairless, exposing a mess of contorted scars criss-crossing across his scalp – she’d stitched more than a few of those herself – along with his ugly, jutting cranial implants.
Inwardly, Skoral swore. She recognised him instantly, of course.
Ruokh.
The Blood Priest. That was what they called Baruda now. Once, he had been a Chaplain, given that honour after the Edict of Nikea, but that was a different, earlier time. Now it was plain to see where his allegiance lay.
Baruda stared at Dreagher, unblinking. The oily stink of aggressor-stimms and kill-pheromones were coming off him in waves.
They were standing within an arming deck. Nine World Eaters surrounded Baruda, weapons held loosely in their hands. Argus Brond was a few steps back, arms folded across his chest.
Neither Dreagher nor Baruda held weapons, but that could change in a second.
‘The Destroyer has murdered his own brothers, and yet it is I that am being held here like a prisoner, while he is still loose,’ said Baruda. ‘Why?’
His face was narrow for one of the Legion, sharp and hawkish. The sides of his head were shaved short, exposing the moribund death tattoos and blood-cult emblems engraved into his scalp. The rest of his hair was clumped together in thick, blood-matted dreadlocks. Tied together with strips of leather, it resembled a barbarous version of an officer’s helmet crest.
Bones strung on strings of sinew hung around his neck and were wrapped around his wrists, jingling dully as he moved. The cult emblem representing the Blood Father was painted upon his forehead in dried, flaking blood.
One of Dreagher’s eyes twitched to see such blatant reverence.
‘You know why,’ said Dreagher. ‘I will not have more blood spilled this day. The ship is being scoured, from top to bottom. Ruokh will be found.’
‘Every drop of blood spilled is an offering to Kharanath,’ said Baruda. ‘Who are you to deny Him?’
‘I care only for the Legion,’ snarled Dreagher, ‘not for your so-called god.’
‘The Lord of Skulls is your god as much as mine,’ said Baruda. ‘It matters not that you deny it; your soul is already pledged to Him. Let me take Ruokh’s head. Let me take it in honour of the Brazen Lord.’
‘The Brazen Lord,’ hissed Dreagher. ‘The Blood Father. Kharanath, the Lord of Skulls. Listen to yourself! The Legion has never needed gods to pray to. That is for the weak.’
‘The gods never answered before,’ said Baruda. ‘There is no point fighting it. We all walk the Eightfold Path, now. We are but thralls of the Blood God.’
‘Those are the words of a zealot,’ said Dreagher. ‘You sound like one of preachers of the Seventeenth Legion.’
‘There is much we could have learned from our brothers of the Word Bearers. They saw the truth before any of us, though they wilfully obfuscate simple truths with dogma and pompous, needless ritual,’ said Baruda.
‘Enough,’ snapped Dreagher. ‘You will not convert me to your insane, nonsense faith. Not now, not ever. And this is not the time for such a discussion.’
‘No, it is not,’ said Baruda, matching Dreagher’s venom. ‘Now is the time when Ruokh should be bled. Give him to me.’
‘I will deal with him,’ said Dreagher. ‘It is not your place.’
‘That is where you are wrong,’ said Baruda, his hand closing around the haft of his chainaxe.
Above Skoral, one of the lumen strips buzzed loudly.
For a second she considered backing from the room, but she knew that he could scent the sudden spike of adrenaline coursing through her, even if he had not heard her come in. To flee from him would be akin to running from a wild beast – even if not hungry, the sight of prey fleeing would impel the predator to chase.
Moving slowly, she reached down and pressed a button on the side of her bracelet. A tiny light on it began to blink.
He turned. Jagged red tattoos crossed his pockmarked, heavily scarred cheeks and chin – an imitation of the primarch’s Desh’ean gladiatorial tattoos. The whites of his eyes were a sickly, irradiated yellow, and his head was hairless; another effect of the rad-weapons the Destroyers bore to war. It was strange how it was his complete lack of eyebrows and lashes that Skoral found his most unnerving feature, given the rest of his appearance.
‘He will not wake,’ he said. She could see his black metal teeth when he spoke. His own had long ago fallen out – another symptom of rad-sickness. ‘He is as lost to the Legion as Angron.’
‘Your captain believes otherwise, lord,’ said Skoral, moving cautiously forward, keeping several benches and tables between them.
Ruokh shrugged. ‘Dreagher needs something to believe in,’ he said. ‘He needs his life to have meaning. It is the only way he can continue.’
‘We all need something to believe in, my lord,’ said Skoral.
Ruokh shrugged again. ‘My cells are utterly irradiated. You know as well as I that it is only a matter of time until the cancers consume me. This body,’ he said, gesturing at himself, ‘should be virtually immortal, and yet I’m dying. Perhaps that is why I see things as they are. Ungh.’
The Destroyer clenched his eyes shut, and pressed a fist against them. Skoral froze.
‘There is no meaning to our lives,’ said Ruokh. ‘None of this matters. Accepting that is… comforting.’
‘Dreagher is looking for you, lord,’ Skoral said quietly. ‘You should turn your vox on. Tell them where you are.’
Ruokh glanced over at the bodies of Saal and Khrast. The servitors were in the process of transferring them from the grav-pallet to one of the apothecarion’s cryo-chambers.
‘I killed them, didn’t I,’ Ruokh said.
‘Yes,’ said Skoral.
‘There will be repercussions for that,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
Ruokh grunted in pain again, once more pressing a fist into his eye. Skoral glanced down at her bracelet. The light there continued to blink.
Khârn: Eater of Worlds Page 4
