I stagger back, sucking in burning air. Blood and ichor leaks from my mouth with each agonising breath. He’s faster than me, and though it pains me to admit it, I’m getting slower with every cut. I can feel darkness prickling at the edges of my vision.
But this whole fight I’ve been cornering him, trapping him. He can’t escape. I lower my head and charge.
I expect him to flee. Instead he charges me. I reach for him, but miss.
Agony burns through me as his power sword rams through my body and bursts out my back.
And I laugh in his righteous face.
I laugh because I remember the last time I thought I was going to die, fighting my old lieutenant for the soul of the Reborn long, long ago. This hurts, but it’s not enough to kill me. Not even close.
The Dark Gods have made me strong.
My pincer snaps closed, leaving his sword and arm dangling from my stomach.
The enemy captain stares at me, his disbelief matching my exultancy.
I ram my pincer completely through him, pinning him to the wall like the insect he is.
He coughs hot blood into my face. I breathe deep, tongue roving to savour it. It’s… wonderful.
‘You know,’ I growl, drawing him close. ‘I was once a Guardsman. Like you.’
‘I’m nothing like you,’ he gurgles out in a blood-slick growl. ‘I’d never spit… on my oath… to the Emperor.’
I almost chuckle, to think that I once was so assured of my delusions, so zealous despite my ignorance. I’d pity him if I thought he hadn’t had countless opportunities to turn to the light, only to willingly remain in darkness.
‘Your blindness has made you weak, slave,’ I proclaim, twisting my claw in his gut. ‘Had I remained in my ignorance, worshipping a corpse, I would’ve died long ago.’
The light is leaving his eyes, his flesh greying with blood loss. He forces his dying face into a defiant scowl. ‘Death… doesn’t frighten me… heretic.’
Pathetic.
‘And why is that?’ I sneer back.
Blood dribbles from his slack mouth. ’I’m not afraid… My father was a Guardsman… He died… fighting scum… like you…’
At that moment I suddenly realise he’s wearing a blue jacket. I know that jacket…
I know the name on the lapel.
I chose it.
Nicolai Petrov.
I’m…
No, no, no, no, no.
By the Pantheon…
…I’m on Kelbra.
I suddenly see the captain’s face clearly, as if waking from a nightmare. Had I been blind? Why hadn’t my eyes been working? Why?
It’s me. Or half of me. Of what I was.
The captain looks up at me. Blue eyes, grown old too quick. Black hair, like… like Misha’s. The face of a boy grown into a man, twisted in anguish. He can’t be older than I was when I’d gone to Tarshish.
He knows his life is over, and all that’s left is to die.
‘S-son?’ I try to say.
I search his face, desperate to see some spark, some sign that my son recognises me. But there is nothing but disgust in his eyes, pure, righteous hatred burning through the agony.
‘Die… monster…’
I try to speak again. Nothing but stringy bile leaks from my ruined jaws.
The light fades from his eyes.
‘No!’
I wrench my claws out of my son’s belly. His eyes close as he collapses.
I can only howl as I try to gently cradle him, but my arms, my hideous, warped arms, can barely hold him. Acid tears burn down my face.
‘I’m sorry!’ I scream. ‘They promised me! They promised!’
The door to the command centre bangs open. More Kelbrans flood in, guns drawn. They fire. Bullets, beams, bolts rip through me, blowing me apart. It hurts worse than anything I’ve ever felt, and I wish it were a thousand times worse. My arms go weak. My boy slips from my grotesque hands. I try to crawl to him, but I can’t.
Misha takes my hand, guiding it to where Nicolai’s kicks are the strongest.
Darkness devours my eyes. I see suffering and horror beyond imagining. For the first time since Tarshish I hear the voices clearly.
I hear laughter.
About the Author
Nicholas Wolf is an author, artist, and occasional musician. He’s written science fiction for several publications and ‘Reborn’ is his first Black Library story. He lives and works in Arizona, with his family.
An extract from Honourbound.
Commissar Severina Raine slides a fresh magazine into her bolt pistol with a hard click. She has replaced the eight-round magazine four times. Thirty-two shots fired.
Six of them to execute her own troops.
Raine has fought many wars on many fronts across the Bale Stars, and almost all of them have been against the Sighted, or their splinter cults. She has seen the way they turn worlds with whispers and false promises. The way they set workers against their masters, and guards against those that they are meant to protect. It’s what makes them dangerous. When you battle the Sighted, you battle the people of the Bale Stars too. Scribes and soldiers. Priests and peacekeepers. The poor, the downtrodden, the ambitious and the reckless. For some of those that serve with her, that knowledge is too much. For some it is just fear that means they find the trigger impossible to pull. No matter the reason, they will find themselves looking down the barrel of her pistol, Penance, in turn. Just like Penance, Raine is made for the act of judgement. For the instant before the strike of the hammer and the burst of flame. She understands what it means to pull the trigger, and what it makes her. She is not driven by anger, or malice. That would undermine her purpose, which is the same no matter the crime.
To eliminate weakness.
Raine crouches down and takes Jona Veer’s ident-tags from around his neck. They will not be sent back to Antar as with the honoured dead. They will be disposed of at the end of the fight on Laxus Secundus. His name will go with them, to be forgotten in time by everyone but her, because Raine never forgets the dead, honoured or not.
‘Commissar.’
The voice belongs to Captain Yuri Hale. It’s rough-edged, like he is. The captain of Grey Company is tall, like most Antari. Three deep, severe scars run down the left side of his face from hairline to chin. The Antari call him lucky because he managed to keep his eye. They say he must have been graced with that luck by a white witch, or by fate itself. Raine doesn’t believe in luck. She believes that Yuri Hale survives the same way the rest of them do.
By fighting for every breath.
‘More power spikes from the inner forge,’ he says.
Raine puts Veer’s tags in her pocket, where they clatter against the others, then she gets to her feet and looks to the dust-caked screen on the auspex kit Hale is holding. When the regiment first entered the forges, more than six hours ago, it was registering soft spikes. Now the peaks are jagged, with the regularity of a great, slow heartbeat.
‘Whatever the Sighted are doing in there, it’s burning hot,’ Hale says, and he frowns. ‘Kayd’s been picking up enemy vox too.’
‘On an open channel?’
‘Aye, it’s as if they don’t care if we hear it.’
‘Anything of use?’ Raine asks.
Hale’s frown deepens, and it pulls at the scars on his face. ‘The words were Laxian. Kayd reckons they said something like “it draws near”.’
Despite the arid heat of the forge, Raine feels a distinct chill at those words. The tactical briefing two days prior had been clear. The primary forge on Laxus Secundus is an invaluable asset, both tactically and logistically, and not just because of the super-heavy tanks built there, but because of what waits in the inner forges. High Command did not disclose the purpose of the machines that Raine and the Antari would find t
here, only that they must not fall into Sighted hands. That for the enemy to use them successfully would be catastrophic, not just for the battle inside the forges, but for the war effort across Laxus Secundus and the crusade front.
‘We are running out of time,’ Raine says.
Hale nods. ‘And support too. Blue Company are pinned down on approach to the Beta Gate, and Gold have yet to reach the inner forges. I’m calling the push now, before the Sighted can send whatever draws near against us, or we lose everything we’ve bled for.’
‘Understood, captain,’ Raine says. ‘We will not fail.’
Hale glances to where Jona Veer lies dead. Raine knows him well enough to see what he is feeling by the set of his shoulders, and the way his eyes narrow. Hale is disappointed. Ashamed, on the boy’s behalf. Raine also knows that, despite all of Veer’s failings, it is hard for Hale to accept judgement against one of his own.
‘Is there anything else?’ Raine says.
Hale looks back to her. ‘No, commissar,’ he says. ‘Not a thing.’
Then Hale gets to rounding up the Antari, voxing orders to the rest of his company pushing up through the machine halls. They have orders to fulfil, traitors to silence, and those machines to retake.
And her judgements are something that Yuri Hale knows better than to question.
Lydia Zane can feel the touch of death on every inch of her body. It makes her ache, skin to bones. The Sighted are doing something in the forges that casts a long shadow. Something that echoes in the immaterium like a scream. It has been the same for Zane since the moment she set foot on Laxus Secundus, death’s long shadow clinging to her.
Like that damned hateful bird.
It is sitting there now, talons crooked around the rim of a girder. It is so very still, that bird. She has not yet seen it blink. It never cries, or ruffles its feathers. It just sits still and stares.
On the pillar below the bird’s perch is a symbol, daubed in blood. The smell carries to Zane even over the heavy stink of smoke. The symbol is a spiral surrounding a slit-pupilled eye. The mark of the Sighted. The rings of the spiral are just a hair off perfectly spaced, and it makes the breath in Zane’s lungs thinner, looking at it. The Sighted who painted the symbol lies broken at the foot of the pillar. So very broken. He is clad in fatigues and feathers, his skin inked with iridescent, metallic tattoos. The Sighted was one of the flock hunting Jona Veer through the machine halls. Zane caught sight of him slipping into the shadows between the half-built tanks during the gunfight. He thought himself hidden, but he was wrong. There is no hiding from Zane, because she does not need footprints or line of sight or even sound in order to hunt. She followed him into the darkness by the stink of his traitor-thoughts and came upon him painting the spiral and the slitted eye.
And then she broke him.
Zane winds her fingers tighter around her darkwood staff. The psionic crystal atop it hums. One at a time, bolts pop out of the pillar and join the objects floating in the air around Zane. Tools. Rivets and screws. Empty shell casings. Splinters of bone. They drift around her absently. The floor tremors under her feet as the panels start to bend upwards. Zane tastes blood, running thick over her lips. Blood on the pillar. Blood that makes up the painted eye at the centre of the spiral, unblinking.
Just like the bird.
‘Zane.’
She turns away from the bird and its black eyes and the way it never blinks them. Commissar Raine is standing there with her pistol drawn, but not raised. A threat in waiting. Zane finds she cannot speak. It is as if her lips have been sealed by all of that blood. The objects circle her like a storm, with lightning arcing between them. Raine does not flinch.
‘Control,’ Raine says, the word carrying clear.
The pistol does not move. The barrel is round and dark, like the eye painted in blood. Like the eyes of the bird. Like Raine’s eyes, unblinking.
‘Control,’ Zane slurs.
More blood finds its way into her mouth.
‘Tell me about the tree,’ Raine says.
‘About the tree,’ Zane says, her voice a rasp. ‘The singing tree.’
‘And why is it called the singing tree?’ Raine asks.
Zane blinks. Against the back of her eyelids she sees it. The singing tree standing on the cliff’s edge, the roots curling over it like the bird’s talons around the girder. The bone-white branches reaching up to meet Antar’s thunderhead sky.
‘Because that is where we would go to sing to Him on Earth,’ she says. ‘Because it was as close as you could get to the heavens.’
‘And He spoke to you there,’ Raine says.
‘In the rustle of the leaves,’ Zane says.
‘What did He say?’ Raine asks.
Zane feels the ache in her bones lessen. The objects orbiting her begin their fall to earth.
‘That I will be tested,’ she says. ‘And that I must never break.’
Metal objects clatter off the metal floor, and it sounds like a storm.
‘Lydia Zane,’ Zane says, finishing the ritual words. ‘Primaris psyker. Graded Epsilon. Eleventh Antari Rifles.’
The cables connecting to her scalp click as they cool. Zane wipes her hand through the blood on her face, painting a red streak up the back of it.
‘Apologies, commissar,’ she says, bowing low. ‘It is this place. The darkness in it.’
‘The Sighted?’ Raine asks.
‘I know the shape of their darkness,’ Zane says. ‘This is different. Things are changing.’
‘If you see anything, tell me,’ Raine says.
Zane knows that she means foresee, not just see, but it still feels like a cruel joke given the bird. The bird that she has been seeing for months now, since she walked the crystal tunnels on Gholl. The bird that she will speak of to no one, especially not to Raine, because to do so would be to invite death.
Because Zane knows that, like every instant of her life so far, the bird is just another test, and that she will not break.
Sergeant Daven Wyck waits until the commissar has gone after the witch before he fetches Jona Veer’s rifle. He knows better than to do something like that in front of her. That it’s better not to draw her eyes at all if he can help it. Around him, the rest of his Wyldfolk are securing the area at the end of the assembly line, watching for Sighted movement in the smoke. They tend their rifles and replace spent powercells and share out grenades and charges. Clean their bloodied combat blades on their fatigues. Wyck slings Veer’s rifle over his shoulder by the strap, then takes his knife and his grenades too. Veer hadn’t used even one of them. So stupid, not to shoot, or act at all.
Even more so to get found out.
‘Really, Dav?’ Awd says.
Wyck gives his second a look. The sort that says shut up.
‘He isn’t going to use them, is he?’ he says.
Awd looks as though he’s smiling, but it’s just the way the burn scars tug at the skin of his face. His eyes aren’t smiling at all.
‘You’d truly leave him with nothing for where he’s going?’ Awd asks.
Wyck looks down at Veer’s body and remembers the way he spoke, with that lilt of the Vales. It’s the same place that Wyck grew up before he was tithed to the Rifles, all deep black lakes and tangled forests. It’s a big place, with the people spread thin. Wyck didn’t know Veer then. He didn’t know him now either, not really, but he was kin all the same. Even if he was a coward, and a stupid one at that. Wyck stoops and puts back the knife. Awd’s right. He can’t leave Veer with nothing for when judgement comes.
‘There,’ he says. ‘Now it’s up to him to answer for his deeds.’
Awd nods. ‘As we all will, in death.’
Wyck shakes his head. ‘Death will have to catch me first,’ he says.
That makes Awd laugh so hard he starts to cough, a wet hacking sound from
deep in his chest. It’s the flamer he carries that makes his lungs rattle that way. All the ashes from the fuel and the things he burns.
‘Death will have to be lucky,’ Awd says. ‘Sharp soul like you.’
Wyck smiles, but it doesn’t go deeper than his teeth. He curls his hands into fists. They ache from fighting. From every trigger pull, every swipe of the knife. From throwing punches and breaking bones. That ache doesn’t stop him wanting to fight, though. To cut and shoot and kill. If anything, it makes him want it more.
‘Wyck.’
He turns to see Hale standing there. The captain definitely notices the extra lasrifle and the grenades, but he says nothing about either. Wyck has known Hale a long time. Longer than he’s had to call him captain.
‘We are pushing the Gate,’ Hale says. ‘I need your Wyldfolk up front.’
The order is no surprise. Wyck runs his twelve-strong infantry squad fast and sharp, so Hale always puts them in the teeth of it.
‘Aye, sir,’ Wyck says. ‘I wouldn’t be anywhere else.’
Hale claps him on the shoulder and for the sparest instant Wyck’s instinct is to react as if he’s been hit. He has to consciously stop himself from throwing a punch at his captain and force himself into stillness. It’s the adrenaline, mostly.
‘Fire and thunder,’ Hale says.
Wyck thinks about the way his blood burns and his heartbeat rolls like a drum and the old words seem almost funny. He has to stop himself laughing, just like he had to stop himself throwing that punch.
‘Fire and thunder,’ he says, instead.
Click here to buy Honourbound.
A Black Library Publication
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.
Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by John Michelbach.
Reborn © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Reborn, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
Reborn - Nicholas Wolf Page 4
