I pushed clear of the void-carnage, running before a pack of hunters until the black sun loomed on the forward augurs and its pale world swam before it. The comm-lines swelled with incoming messages, alliances were formed, bargains struck. We learned the names of new warbands, culled from old Crusade-era monikers, and they were already fragmented and re-forming, seething like molten metal on an anvil.
In the earliest days, we had been called the ‘corpse grinders’ by those who despised our way of war, and so that became our name again, taken in anger and incomprehension. We raised our own tower on Medrengard and ringed it with the artillery once used to level the Carrion Emperor’s walls. Then we entered the power games of the daemon world, watched over by our deranged Father, who remained either unable or unwilling to intervene and caught up in resentments that we would never fathom.
That was when I met Kurr again for the first time since the long flight from Terra. I had taken my warriors out onto cracked glass plains, hunting the daemons that we bound to our machines. Not for the first or last time, we were drawn into the battles of other warbands, and the skies sang with the laughing screams of the neverborn. Lightning the colour of entrails lashed across the tilting earth, and we were surrounded by a force more than three times our strength. I expected to die then. I ordered our formation, swearing to damn the souls of as many faithless as I could before the end, and the taste of defeat in such a cause was bitter on my lips.
But I was cheated of that. In the endless shifting tumult of those pointless wars, we were not alone. Warriors of the old Legion burst out of the fog, breaking the enemy cordon. Then it was a true fight, as hard as any we had prosecuted. I lost my old comrades, but I gained new ones, for Kurr had known it was us. He fought like a demigod, crashing through ranks of warriors with his chainsword whirling around him.
We came together in the heart of the fighting, and by then, I knew that we would win, and that I would see more black-sun dawns on Medrengard.
‘Warsmith,’ he acknowledged, lowering the bloody tip of his blade.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘We are the siegemasters. There will be other worlds to conquer.’
Then we were fighting again, cutting the heart out of our own Legion, purging the weak or the unlucky.
He was right. In time, there would be other worlds for us to reduce, crushing the hope out of them as the Imperium weakened, but I was never easy with him after that. The life-debt weighed on my shoulders, so when the time came, I sent him on his own missions, keeping him at distance, and that worked for us for a long time.
All until Harrowar, when he finally went dark.
For the first time on this cursed world, I detect warriors of my own kind. They detect me too and come to meet us long before we arrive at the location our sensors tell me he must be at. The snow is falling fast now, gusting jerkily as if pulled by daemonic fingers. Since leaving the heavy transport behind, thirty kilometres south of here, we have waded through it, thigh-deep in places. Even now it cakes our pauldrons, melts against the heat of our power packs, drips in slushy trails in our footfalls.
They emerge from the permanent night of this latitude, twelve of them, all bearing bolters. Like the mortals they command, the sign of the warband is on their chests, scraped in molten metal in place of the old aquila. They do not salute. Shohvaz and the two others of my retinue draw their own weapons, but I make no move.
I am their Warsmith. I am Kurr’s Warsmith.
‘Warsmith,’ says one of them, his voice clipped by the extreme cold. His helm visor is rimed with frost, his greaves streaked with bloody ice. I recognise him then: Skarrak, one born of the gene-ranks on Medrengard before the schism. He has served with Kurr for a long time, just as all the others here have.
‘You know why I am here,’ I say.
Skarrak nods. ‘He knew you would come, eventually.’
I try to gauge the balance of their loyalty. They have been with him for decades, fighting a war that should have been over a half-century ago.
‘Tell me of him,’ I say.
Skarrak almost replies. Then he changes his mind, gives a signal, and the bolter muzzles drop. ‘He waits within,’ he says, falling back to reveal the edifice beyond.
It takes me a while to perceive it, lost in the murk and the driving snow-flurries. Then I see my mistake – I have taken its black face for the night sky, but it fills that sky, up and up into the storm, a wall of sheer ebony. My vision adjusts, and I see the buttresses, the octagonal towers, the gates and the guns. It resembles nothing so much as the primarch’s tower on our own home world, crusted here with a shield of ice, splitting the winds like a thrown dagger.
I cross a single bridge, a narrow span across a gulf that goes down into eternal dark. Shohvaz and the others remain at the inner gate on my command, and I pass under the heavy lintel alone. Within, all is echoes and emptiness, and the cold is crippling even through my battle-plate. I press on, my boots clanking on stone. I pass through galleries, vaults, silent halls. Eventually I reach the centre, below the level of the ice, a single chamber buried deep, impervious to the world outside.
He is standing there, face hidden by the old helm, the chainsword still in his hands. A hololith of Harrowar spins slowly in the gloom beside him. Other things lurk in the shadows – maps etched on bronze plate, schematics, skin-bound books piled high and slowly freezing into ice-mush.
‘Well met, Bakulos,’ he says.
His voice has changed. It is not just the age – that affects us all – but the resonance. It has gone, dried out like stretched leather.
‘You knew I would have to come, sooner or later,’ I say. I do not reach for my weapon yet, though I judge I will have to kill him. We have never fought before, so it will be interesting to see which one of us is the stronger.
‘No, I thought you might forget me,’ Kurr says, drily. ‘But we never forget, do we? So yes, yes, you had to come, chasing me down.’
I look at the hololith. It shows all of the siege lines, ringing the entire hemisphere, enclosing hive-clusters and city-states. To maintain it, he has created an empire of his own, sucking in men and materiel and hurling it against walls that do not fall.
‘Look at it,’ Kurr said. ‘I am only doing what we have always done.’
‘You were ordered to destroy this world,’ I say.
‘True.’ He shuffles closer, and I smell the acrid mix of armour oils and physical sweat. He has daubed his plate with something – blood, maybe – and it glistens in the cold. ‘Another void-rock, spoiled and sucked clean. Then we move on, and they come back after us, and they rebuild, and we are all sapped a little more.’
He extends a hand towards the hololith and traces the lines of the trench systems. ‘So I remain true to what we were. We guard, we watch. That is what our Father forgot, and it turned his mind. We should never have wished for what the others had – there was a reason we were not trusted.’
I find I cannot take my eyes off the hololith. Kurr has lost none of his artistry, and his tactical placements are impeccable. Beautiful, even.
‘You could end this in a month, brother,’ I say.
‘And that would finish everything. Bakulos, look at this and tell me it is not perfection. My commanders come to me and say ‘When will we launch the attack, lord?’, and I try to show them that it is not yet done, and more building is needed. I think they see it, sometimes, but some have had to be… corrected. I try to teach them. I tell them ‘Not yet. Not until all is done.’ I think they are seeing that now.’
I look at him. Green lith-light bathes his battered helm.
‘I came to end this,’ I say.
Kurr chortles, a sound that limps from his vox grille, drained of the old humour. ‘Or you will end me. Is that what you think will happen here?’ He draws closer to me, and I hear the rasp of his near-frozen respirator. ‘Gaze on it, Bakulos: a s
iege that never ends, that is never lifted. We breed our armies, they breed theirs, all into endless suffering, locked tight in formations that span horizon to horizon. I made it. This is what we wanted, and the Eye rejoices – there is nothing finer.’
His hand rests on the grip of the chainsword, but mine is still empty.
‘I came to give you a chance,’ I say.
‘No, you came to see what I had become. So now you have seen it, what comes next?’
I move instantly, crashing my fist into his throat. He must have known the blow was coming, but it sends him staggering and give me time to draw my bolter.
I sense his shock – he really believed I could be persuaded – and I fire, point-blank, at his helm. The reactive shell explodes as it impacts on the cranial shielding, dropping him. For a moment I think that has done it, but he powers back up, the blades on his sword whirring, his helm cracked open.
‘I built perfection,’ he snarls, lurching towards me.
I pull away, firing again, but he swerves clear and swings the blade at my neck. I seize his wrist and brace, holding the blurred teeth just above my gorget-seal. His breathing is ragged, wet with frenzy, and I sense his strength.
I drop the bolter and punch with my free fist, smashing the lump of it into his helm-lenses. Still, he leans into the chainsword, bearing me down, and I punch again, then again, harder and with an edge of desperation. Blood flies across my own vision, and my fist connects with flesh now.
Finally the chainsword falls away, skidding and snarling across the floor in a welter of sparks. Kurr collapses, his face a pulpy mess. I catch a glimpse of old, old flesh amid the pumping blood, as grey as the ice of Harrowar.
Once I am sure that he is dead, a feeling of sudden emptiness wells up within me. Our fates have danced around one another for ten thousand years, intersecting across time like the junctions of his trench lines.
I look back at his work, picked out in the translucent green of the hololith projection, and see again how flawless it has been. He has created stasis, two forces locked together with no hope of release. It could be eternal here, the slow suffocation of all souls, just as we were charged with in the Crusade. We had resented it so much then, fuelling the change of allegiance, feeling that we were wronged.
I am only doing what we have always done.
I hear noises from outside the chamber. Skarrak enters, and Shohvaz. They look at me, and at Kurr’s corpse, and I can sense Skarrak’s raw hope.
‘Then we attack now,’ he says, relieved. ‘We end this.’
All over Harrowar, I imagine them saying the same thing, once they know the truth. Those with the wit left to realise it will know that their nightmare can be over: the cities will be stormed, smashed into dust, and we will move on.
I cannot take my eyes from the hololith. I cannot take my eyes from Kurr’s vision, and I see for the first time that it is incomplete.
Shohvaz takes a step towards the generator. He wants to shut it down.
‘I can give the order,’ he growls. ‘We have the forces in place.’
I know we do. Kurr always had what he needed, but that was not the point.
There are gaps in the siege-lines. They could be extended, given time and effort, and that would make the vision complete.
I can sense their impatience. They want action now.
So I do not look at them as I speak, for I am already planning, something I have not done in this way for a long time. I wonder if this is how it started for him.
‘Not yet,’ I say. It will be beautiful when it is finished, and I already know where the digging will start. ‘Not until all is done.’
About the Author
Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Scars, the novella Brotherhood of the Storm and the audio drama The Sigillite. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written the Space Wolves novels Blood of Asaheim and Stormcaller, and the short story collection Wolves of Fenris, as well as the Space Marine Battles novels Wrath of Iron and Battle of the Fang. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, including the Time of Legends novel Master of Dragons, which forms part of the War of Vengeance series. Chris lives and works near Bristol, in south-west England.
The Lords of Chaos gather their forces...
The Call of Chaos echoes across across the Mortal Realms and into the grim darkness of the far future.
Two new serialised supplements, and new fiction for Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Age of Sigmar.
Collect them all and answer the Call of Chaos.
A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION
Published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-021-5
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