‘That’s the idea,’ replied Lupercal.
‘Aren’t triumphs usually held after a campaign?’ asked Noctua, and the First Captain shot him an angry look. The delay his wounding at the hands of a mortal had caused Ezekyle was something the First Captain wasn’t going to forget in a hurry.
‘Unless you’re one of the Phoenician’s rabble,’ said Kibre.
‘It’s symbolic, Grael,’ said Horus. ‘When we left Ullanor it was as the Emperor’s servants. When we leave Molech we will be our own masters.’
Something in the Warmaster’s tone told Noctua that wasn’t the whole truth, but a warning glance from Aximand advised against pursuing the matter. He nodded and hid a grimace of pain as it felt like someone was plunging an ice cold blade into his chest.
‘Grael?’ said Horus, pausing and giving him a sidelong glance.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘My own fault.’
‘No argument there,’ grunted Ezekyle.
Horus nodded and they resumed their march.
The Apothecary who’d treated Noctua at battle’s end had all but demanded he remove himself from the order of battle and submit to heart-implantation surgery. Noctua had refused all but the most basic attention.
He forced himself to keep up, feeling the cold blade of pain twist deeper into the empty cavity within his chest. Feeling another’s eyes upon him, Noctua turned his gaze from the Warmaster to the warriors lining his path.
Ger Gerradon grinned at Noctua in a way that made him want to put a fist through his face. Fully-helmed Luperci with static-filled eyes surrounded Gerradon, many more than Noctua had seen during the assault on Var Crixia.
How far had Maloghurst and Targost gone in seeking volunteers to become hosts for these flesh-eating warp killers?
Gerradon looked over his shoulder and raised his eyebrows.
You will be one with us soon, the look said.
Neverborn.
Unburdened…
‘Did you know you and this city share a name, Ezekyle?’ said the Warmaster, as they approached the reviewing stand. Noctua turned from Ger Gerradon and tried to shake the thought that he was looking at his future.
‘We do?’ asked the First Captain.
‘Abaddon, I mean. Ezekyle was said to be an ancient prophet, though it seems he might simply have been a witness to Old Earth’s first encounters with xenoforms. I’ve found several mentions of an Abaddon,’ he said. ‘Or Apollyon or Avadon, depending on whether you’re reading the Septuagint or the Hexapla. Or was it the Vulgate? So many versions, and none of them can agree.’
‘So who was Abaddon?’ asked Kibre. ‘Or don’t we want to know?’
Horus paused at the foot of the steps to the reviewing stand.
‘He was an angel, Falkus,’ said Horus. ‘But don’t let the term mislead you. Back then, angels were soaked in blood, the right hand of a vengeful god who sent them into the world of men to lay waste and kill in his name.’
‘Sounds just like you,’ said Aximand, and they all laughed.
Horus ascended to the stand, but the Mournival didn’t follow. This was their place, invisible in the wings while Lupercal basked in adulation. Noctua took a moment to look out over the assembled legionaries.
The Warmaster’s sons stretched as far as the eye could see. At least sixty thousand Space Marines. By conventional reckonings of numbers, it was a paltry force with which to conquer a world.
But this was the XVI Legion, the Sons of Horus, and this was more than enough. It was practically overkill.
The Warmaster took centre stage, Worldbreaker and his talon raised high. The Deathbringer Warlord Titans loosed deafening blasts from their warhorns and the thousands of legionaries pumped their fists in the air at the sight of Lupercal.
‘From a world of darkness, I did bind daemons and death-doers in the form of wolves.’
Horus swept his maul down and night became day as the Reaver Titans surrounding Avadon opened fire with every one of their weapon systems. They rained down a continuous barrage of lasers, rockets and plasma until the city and all living things within were consumed in a fiery holocaust.
Vox-links broadcast the Warmaster’s voice through the horns of the Titans, and his pronouncement shook Noctua’s bones.
‘So perish all who stand against me.’
‘Iacton,’ said Loken, standing at the door to Tarnhelm’s crew compartment. Since entering the warp, the Knights Errant spent most of their days gathered around the long table, swapping exploits and expertise. Ares Voitek was repeating a story of his Legion’s assault on a nomadic fleet of xenos and humans. His servo-arms described the manoeuvres of several starships.
The story petered out as they saw Loken.
‘Garviel,’ replied Qruze. ‘If you’ve come to finish the job, I’ll not stop you, lad.’
‘I might,’ said Bror Tyrfingr.
‘I’m sorry I missed it the first time,’ sniggered Severian.
Loken shook his head. ‘I’m not here to fight you.’
‘Then what do you want?’
‘To live up to the words I said to Callion Zaven.’
The former Emperor’s Children legionary looked up at the sound of his name, his attention momentarily diverted from the polishing of his hewclaw blade.
‘What did you say to him?’ asked Qruze.
‘I told him that we had enough enemies before us without looking for them in our own ranks.’
‘Then why did you almost kill Iacton?’ asked Cayne.
‘Shut up, Tubal,’ said Varren, replacing bladed teeth on his axe that hadn’t lost a fraction of their lethal sharpness.
‘What?’ said the former Iron Warrior. ‘It’s a valid question.’
‘Not the point,’ replied Ares Voitek.
Qruze nodded and swung his legs out from beneath the table to face Loken. Aboard ship, the legionaries went without armour, and Loken saw the corded strength within the Half-heard’s frame like tempered steel or seasoned heartwood. He wore a sleeveless bodyglove and tan fatigues tucked into knee-high black boots.
His face bore little trace of Loken’s assault, just a slight discolouration of the skin around his right eye.
‘Good words,’ said Qruze. ‘Hard to live up to when trust is in such short supply, eh?’
‘For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,’ said Loken, taking a seat at the table.
Qruze waved away his apology and poured himself a beaker of water. He poured Loken a drink, which he accepted. ‘I’ve been waiting for that beating ever since I found out you were alive, lad.’
‘There’s just one thing I don’t understand,’ said Loken.
‘Just one?’ grunted Qruze. ‘Then you’ve a better grasp of things than me. What is it you don’t understand?’
‘If Lord Dorn told you to keep Mersadie’s existence secret, why did you tell me about her on the prison fortress?’ asked Loken. ‘You could have just boarded Tarnhelm, and I’d have been none the wiser.’
‘Secrets have a way of coming out,’ said Altan Nohai. ‘In that place, in that time, it was right that Iacton spoke.’
Qruze nodded. ‘I’d gone to Titan with Lord Dorn to kill a man.’
‘Who?’
‘Solomon Voss, you remember him?’
Loken nodded. ‘I never met him, but I had heard the name around the Vengeful Spirit.’
‘A good man. Too good. I think that’s why Lupercal kept him around for so long before sending him back to us. Voss had done nothing wrong, but we couldn’t let him live. Horus knew that, knew it would weigh heavily on whoever swung the blade. And like Altan says, secrets have a habit of coming out. The bigger they are the more likely they’ll come out just when you don’t want them to.’
‘What does Solomon Voss have to do with Mersadie?’
Qruze leaned over the table and rested his arms on the table.
‘I’m going to be very clear so there’s no misunderstanding,’ he said. ‘We few are heading back to face the Warmaster. The ch
ances of us making it back alive are virtually irrelevant. I thought you deserved to know she was still alive before we left.’
Loken sat back, his face stony. ‘Will Lord Dorn kill her too?’
‘I think he considered it.’
‘What stopped him?’ asked Rubio.
‘You’re the maleficarum,’ said Bror Tyrfingr. ‘You tell us.’
Rubio shot Bror an irritated glance, but Ultramarian virtue kept him from trading insults with the Fenrisian.
‘Compassion,’ said Zaven, setting down his sword. ‘Not a virtue I’d expected from the Lord of the Fists, but perhaps he’s not as hewn from stone as we all thought.’
Qruze said, ‘It pained the primarch to execute Solomon Voss, more than you know. Another tally to add to Lupercal’s butcher’s bill. More blood on his hands.’
They lapsed into silence until Loken withdrew the presentation case Mersadie had given him. He placed it on the table and slid it across to Qruze.
The Half-heard recognised it and eyed the case warily.
‘What’s that?’
‘I don’t know. Mersadie said I had to give it to you.’
‘Well open it for Throne’s sake,’ said Varren, when Qruze made no move to touch the box. ‘Don’t keep us all in bloody suspense.’
Qruze flipped open the case and frowned in puzzlement. He lifted out a pressed disc of hardened red wax affixed to a long strip of yellowed seal paper.
‘An Oath of Moment,’ said Tubal.
‘It’s mine,’ said Qruze.
‘Of course it’s yours,’ said Bror. ‘Loken just gave you it.’
‘No, I mean it’s mine,’ said Qruze. ‘I made this, back in the day. I know my own seal work when I see it.’
‘To what action does it oath you?’ asked Tubal Cayne.
Qruze shook his head. ‘No action. It’s blank. I made this in the days leading up to the Isstvan campaign, but I was never oathed for that fight.’
‘Did you give it to Mersadie?’ asked Loken.
‘No, it was in my arming chamber,’ said Qruze, turning the seal over in his gnarled hands. ‘Did Mistress Oliton say anything about why I was to have this?’
‘She said to remind you that you were the Half-heard no longer, that your voice would be heard louder than any other of the Legion.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Ares Voitek.
‘Damned if I know,’ said Qruze. ‘Garviel? What else did she say?’
Loken didn’t answer, staring at the suggestion of a hooded shape in the shadows he knew none of the others would see. The figure shook his head slowly.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘She didn’t say anything else.’
FOURTEEN
Apollo’s Arrow
Engine kill
Elektra complex
Ophir belonged to the Death Guard. Its refineries, mills and promethium wells were now slaved to the will of Mortarion and the Warmaster’s Mechanicum cohorts. The fires had been contained, the damage repaired, and within ten hours of the XIV Legion’s assault, Ophir’s infrastructure was fully functional.
Squadrons of tankers were assembled, filled with precious fuel for the fleets of Land Raiders, Rhinos and battle tanks rumbling on cracked permacrete aprons. Ten thousand Legion warriors stood ready to march westward to the fields of battle, but there was a problem.
Nine thousand kilometres of dense jungle.
Nine thousand kilometres of rocky crags, undulant hills, ridged spines and plunging river basins. Like the Arduenna Silva of Old Earth, Molech’s generals believed the jungles of Kush to be utterly impenetrable and thus only an ancient curtain-wall warded against assault from that axis. Its local name was the Preceptor Line. Orbital augurs revealed negligible Imperial presence upon it.
But where the generals of Old Earth had been proved wrong, those of Molech were right to believe the jungles an impassable barrier. The terrain was bad enough, but killer beasts dwelled in its steamy interior; roving azhdarchid flocks, territorial mallahgra or predator packs of xenosmilus.
And those were the least of the great monsters rumoured to dwell in the jungle’s dark heart.
A solitary Rhino drove out from the hundreds of Death Guard vehicles rumbling at the jungle’s edge. Unremarkable in appearance, its hull was old and scarred with damage. Its cupola-mounted bolters were missing, and the heraldry of the Death Guard looked to have been burned off in the fighting to seize Ophir. It passed between the high towers raised to keep watch on the jungle and vanished from sight.
The lone vehicle followed the line of an old hunting trail once used by House Nurthen until the last of that line had been slain when a bull mallahgra tore his Knight apart during mating season. Overgrown and unfavourable to anything other than a tracked vehicle, the trail was just about practicable.
The sound and vibration of its engine couldn’t help but attract attention. A pack of spine-backed xenosmilus stalked the Rhino, a muscular blend of sabre-tooth and crocodile, with chameleonic fur and a voracious appetite for flesh.
The pack leader was a monstrous beast with spines like spears and fangs like swords. It matched the Rhino in bulk, and its hide rippled with dappled shadows of the jungle and fleeting shafts of sunlight. As the Rhino followed the trail along the edge of a rocky slope, the pack sprang its trap. Three beasts ran in from the side. They shoulder-barged the Rhino, clawing its hull and gouging the metal with yellowed claws.
The pack leader leapt from hiding and paws like sledgehammers bludgeoned the vehicle from the trail. It tipped onto its side and rolled down the slope into what had once been a river basin.
Now it was a killing floor.
The rest of the pack charged in, tearing at the upturned Rhino and peeling its armour back like paper. Before they could completely wreck the vehicle, an enlarged hatch slammed open in its side and a bulky figure stepped onto the dry basin.
Encased in a fully-sealed exo-suit intended for the internal maintenance of plasma reactors – and which had been the precursor to Terminator armour – the figure was snapped up in the pack leader’s jaws.
Hook-like teeth deep in the beast’s jaws sawed into the layered adamantium and ceramite. Heavy plates groaned, but the monster didn’t taste flesh. Roaring in anger, the xenosmilus swung its head and threw the figure at a tumble of boulders. Rock split, but the armour held firm.
The Rhino’s occupant rose smoothly to his feet as if being flung around like a rag doll by enormous predators was of no consequence to him. The pack abandoned the Rhino and formed a circle. Caustic saliva dripped from their jaws.
The armoured warrior reached up and snapped open a complex series of locking bolts and vacuum seals. He removed his helmet and dropped it to the ground. The revealed face was in constant flux between life and death, the skin rotting to carrion meat and restoring itself between breaths.
‘Pack hunters?’ said Ignatius Grulgor. ‘Disappointing. I was hoping for some of the bigger beasts.’
The xenosmilus didn’t attack. Their spines stood erect as they smelled the corruption on this prey-thing. Bad meat even the scavengers wouldn’t touch.
The tall reeds surrounding Grulgor died first, a spreading wave of death that turned the ground black with rotted vegetation. He exhaled toxins, plagues, bacteria and viral strands once banned in an earlier age, but which man’s greed had allowed to endure.
His every breath turned the air into a lethal weapon.
The pack leader collapsed, coughing necrotic wads of dissolving lung matter. The flesh melted from its bones in an instant, a time-lapsed pict-feed of decay run in fast forward. The pack died with it as Grulgor extended the reach of the Life-Eater, growing exponentially stronger with his every breath that wasn’t breath.
The jungle was dying around him. Trees collapsed into decaying mulch in a heartbeat. Rivers curdled to dust and vegetation to gaseous ooze.
He was ground zero, patient zero and every vector imaginable.
His touch was death, his breath was death and his ga
ze was death. Where he walked, the jungle died and would never know growth again.
Ignatius Grulgor was the Life-Eater given sentience, a walking pandemic. A god of plague to rival the Nosoi of Pandora’s folly or the terrible Morbus of the Romanii.
What had once been impenetrable jungle was dissolving like ice before the flamer. Thousands of hectares sagged and flowed around Mortarion’s reborn son like melting wax.
Ignatius Grulgor retrieved his helmet and returned to the Rhino, which now sat in a morass of cancerous vegetation. His warp-infused flesh was easily able to right the vehicle and its tracks slammed down on a sopping carpet of purulent matter.
Where before he could see barely ten metres in any direction, now the horizon receded into the distance as he spread his rampant corruption to its farthest extent.
Ignatius Grulgor climbed back into the Rhino and continued driving west over a pestilential wasteland of decay.
Fifty kilometres behind, the Death Guard followed.
The floor of Noama Calver’s Galenus was awash with blood, spilling from side to side with every manoeuvre her driver was forced to make. Constructed from an extended Samaritan chassis, the interior of the Galenus was equipped with a full surgical suite and twenty casualty berths.
Every one of those berths was filled twice over. About a third of the soldiers they carried were dead. Kjell kept urging her to ditch the corpses, but Noama would sooner throw herself out the back than abandon her boys like that. Her surgeon-captain’s uniform was supposed to be pale green, but was soaked in blood from the chest down. Ruby droplets dotted lined mahogany skin that was too pale from too little sleep and too many long days in the medicae wards. Eyes that had seen too many boys die were heavy with regret and remembered every one of them.
The Galenus Mobile Medicus was a heavy tracked vehicle as wide and long as a superheavy. But unlike pretty much every other superheavy she knew, it had a decent kick to its engine. That could usually get the wounded out of harm’s way, but there were still plenty of things that could move faster than them.
Nothing she could do about that, so instead she concentrated on the matter in hand.