Few on the Sisypheum had skill enough as trackers to hunt a warrior of the Raven Guard, so he took risks and chose the routes with the fewest places in which to hide. He paused in his travels through the ship, clinging to the upper reaches of an access corridor, fingertips wrapped around a flexing duct pipe. Sharrowkyn watched two warriors of the Iron Hands pass beneath him. Morlock veterans.
Tough, hard, brave survivors.
Survivors like him.
No, not like him, the Iron Hands had one thing denied to him.
They had the confraternity of their brotherhood. Nykona Sharrowkyn was alone.
Pulled from the hellstorm of betrayal on the brink of death by Sabik Wayland, Sharrowkyn had escaped the slaughter of Isstvan V by the narrowest of margins. Wounded nigh unto death and with no way off world, there had been little choice but to escape with the shell-shocked survivors of the X Legion. The Iron Hands had wanted to fight, to die alongside their fallen primarch, but Ulrach Branthan’s last order had been to escape, to regroup, to survive.
To fight back.
Sharrowkyn remembered little of those early days, his wounds too grievous, his body too broken. His abiding memory was of a gravel-voiced form looming over him in the apothecarion of the ship he had been taken aboard.
‘You will not die, Raven Guard,’ the voice had said. ‘Do not let the weakness of flesh betray you, not when you have survived so much. I took a blow from the Phoenician, yet I live. You will live too.’
The authority in that voice was absolute, and Sharrowkyn had obeyed. He had lived, and he had healed, but he was alone, cut off from his Legion and ignorant of what had become of his gene-father.
The Iron Hands knew their primarch was dead, and this had annealed their flint hearts into something unbreakable. Sharrowkyn knew nothing of Corax’s fate. Had he escaped the massacre or was he some bloodied trophy pinned to a banner pole, a totem like the head of Ferrus Manus?
Comfort and strength could be taken from certainty, a measure of closure to allow the healing of scars on the heart, but with his primarch’s fate a mystery, Sharrowkyn could only exist in a twilight limbo, caught between hope and despair, steadily diminishing as his imagination conjured ever more terrible fates for his lost father.
Was it better to be ignorant of Corax’s fate, or would it be kinder to know he was dead?
It was a question he had spent many months considering, but was no closer to answering. Only certainty could provide respite, but amongst the shattered remains of their Legions, certainty was in short supply.
The Morlocks moved on, oblivious to his presence, and Sharrowkyn swung silently down to the deck. A gladius slid from its frictionless sheath without a sound as Sharrowkyn moved down the corridor, finding patches of shadow where mortal eyes would not notice the deeper darkness within, exploring every nook and cranny of the proud starship.
Sharrowkyn felt the air grow chill, and knew he was near the apothecarion. With senses attuned to the micro-sounds that preceded motion and presence, he heard the whisper of something approaching the other side of the door. He leapt for the opposite wall, springboarding up and onto the suspended tangle of twisting, collimated pipes and ducts of hissing iron and sagging rubber. He eased into its concealing darkness, making himself one with the shadows and scaling down the power outputs of his armour, a ghost of blackness amid the gloom. The door slid open, letting out a sigh of frozen air and the creak and scrape of abutting plates. The sounds of armour at the other end of the corridor beyond the door told Sharrowkyn that Septus Thoic stood guard at Branthan’s stasis chamber. Footsteps clanged on the grilled floor, and even before Atesh Tarsa emerged, looking haggard and marrow-tired, Sharrowkyn had known it would be him.
The Salamanders Apothecary took a moment to rub the heels of his palms against his eyes, those crimson orbs that made him so hard to read. Without pupil or imperfection to give them a measure of character, Tarsa’s eyes were as blank as the lenses of a Legion battle-helm. He let out a breath of pure exhaustion as the door slid closed behind him, and Sharrowkyn felt a stab of sympathy for the Salamander.
Charged with keeping a dead man alive, it was his task to prolong the agonies of a warrior who deserved peace and an end to his suffering.
Tarsa looked up and smiled. ‘Is there something wrong with the floor?’
Sharrowkyn was so surprised he almost let go of his handholds.
There could be no doubt about it, Tarsa was looking right at him. The gladius shivered in his hand, ingrained instincts screaming at Sharrowkyn to drop on his discoverer and end him, but Tarsa was not the enemy. Instead, he sheathed the short-bladed sword and dropped to the deck. He rose from a crouch and cocked his head to one side.
‘You saw me,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ replied Tarsa. ‘Who else would I have been speaking to?’
Sharrowkyn looked into Tarsa’s red eyes, blank as polished garnet, but could see no augmetics, which would have gone some way to explaining Tarsa’s sighting of him. Sharrowkyn was more interested than annoyed, though it irked his professional pride to have been detected so casually.
‘I’m not normally so easily discovered,’ he said.
‘I’m sure,’ agreed Tarsa, ‘but when you see as the Fire-born do, there is little that escapes our notice. Especially in the darkness.’
‘Every legionary sees well in the darkness,’ said Sharrowkyn.
‘Not like we do,’ said Tarsa, turning to move on down the corridor. ‘Walk with me a while?’
Sharrowkyn nodded and matched step with the Apothecary, unconsciously mimicking the timing of Tarsa’s stride to mask his own.
‘It must be hard for you,’ said Tarsa. ‘Being here, I mean. On a ship not of your Legion.’
‘It’s not your Legion either,’ pointed out Sharrowkyn.
‘I know. It is hard for me, so I assume it’s hard for you,’ said Tarsa, and Sharrowkyn saw their route was taking them to the Sisypheum’s refectory.
‘It is difficult,’ he admitted, grateful for the understanding. ‘I am alone and know nothing beyond these walls. It is… not easy to be apart from the Unkindness.’
‘The Unkindness?’
Sharrowkyn touched the white-winged raptor on his shoulder guard. ‘A colloquial term my Legion sometimes uses when we gather in any numbers.’
‘Ah, I see,’ nodded Tarsa with a tight-lipped smile. ‘Legion argot. We have similar terms, based on the customs of the seven sanctuary-cities.’
‘Tell me one,’ asked Sharrowkyn.
‘Very well,’ said Tarsa, pausing to think of one he could tell. ‘The folk of Hesiod once used the term Hell-dawn to refer to a time when the ash banks broke and the sun burned.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘The Hell-dawn heralded the coming of the dusk-wraiths.’
‘Dusk-wraiths?’
‘The gloaming kin of the eldar,’ explained Tarsa. ‘Every time at that inauspicious hour they would come to reave and enslave. They took men, women and children as spoils for their torture ships, but in the end they were crushed by Vulkan in a great battle at Hesiod’s gates and cast from our world forever. The Hell-dawn was ever a time to be feared, but with the end of their raids, we took the term back and made it our own. It is now a Salamanders deployment tactic, a sudden terror assault into the heart of an enemy formation.’
‘I like it,’ said Sharrowkyn.
Tarsa nodded at the appreciation as they reached the refectory. He held out his hand to Sharrowkyn, who took it gratefully.
‘You are not alone, brother,’ said Tarsa. ‘The Iron Hands saw their gene-father die and it gave them fresh purpose. But you and I? All we have is scorched earth and uncertainty.’
Felix Cassander squeezed his eyes closed and tried to shut out the wet, animal sounds coming from Navarra. He had thought a legionary could endure any pain, but his time in Apothecary Fabius’s vivisectorium had shown him the naïvety of that belief. He found he could no longer measure the passage of time, for
there was never any change in the forlorn gloom in this abode of the damned. Drugs and pain kept him quiescent, wrapped in a swaddling fog of distorted perceptions. He existed in a netherworld of screams, laughter, weeping and the butcher’s sound of blades hewing flesh. Sometimes he saw what was happening, and wished he hadn’t. Sometimes his imagination painted a more vivid picture.
The vivisectorium was a place of diabolical surgery, where Fabius and his flesh-hooded servitors removed and replaced limbs and organs with wet meat parts from other organisms that bore no relation to their new host. Navarra had become a test bed for all manner of limbs: hindquarters covered in russet fur, spring-loaded insect legs, bladed arms with chitinous exoskeletons amputated from some towering arachnid creature or whipping tentacular appendages with needle-toothed mouths that dripped acidic bile.
With every physiological rejection, Fabius would hiss in frustration and remove the offending appendage for incineration. The loathsome contraption that hung from the ceiling seemed to watch Cassander as Navarra struggled against the bonds, dripping its vile black fluids to the floor where they writhed like slippery eels of inky sentience before drooling down the blood-clogged drain.
Nor had Cassander been spared Fabius’s attentions.
Where Navarra’s broken frame was a perfect chassis on which to suture new and exotic body parts, Cassander’s healing body was a fully-functioning biological factory in which to test Fabius’s creations at cellular depths. Pathogens, retroviruses, gene-splices and pluripotent bacterial cultures were introduced to his metabolism via piston-driven injections directly to the heart and the results observed and recorded.
Molten rivers of infected blood raced around Cassander’s body, each polluted branch and venous highway carrying microscopic invaders that attempted to dismantle him at the genetic level. But each attempt met with failure, for the Emperor’s great techno-biological work was too cunning and too subtle to be undone by synthetic diseases of mere men, no matter how inventive their attack. Though Cassander’s genhanced body recovered from each assault, the pain of being the battleground for such a hard-fought viral war was almost beyond endurance. He lost any sense of time in hallucinogenic deliriums, wracked with agonising spasms and burning with raging fevers that left his skin too hot to touch.
With each successful resistance, Cassander’s body was left purged and hollow, a shell of its former glory, yet still able to rebuild itself with the nutrient-rich fluids pumped into his system, readying him for the next round of attack. His body could repair almost indefinitely, but his mind was suffering the trauma of constant pain and anguish. Yet each time Cassander felt the flayed ruin of his sanity slipping closer to the abyssal plunge into madness, he pulled himself back with hate for the nightmare surgeon inflicting these horrors upon him.
Fabius took great relish in the suffering he caused, asking after the precise nature of his pain and the exact details of each area of localised infection. Cassander told him nothing, and his only solace in this place of torment was the look of bitter frustration on Fabius’s face.
‘You will break eventually,’ said Fabius. ‘Everyone who comes here always does, even the ones who come willingly. Though, it has to be said, you have resisted longer than most.’
That gave Cassander a moment of pride.
‘I wonder why that might be so,’ mused Fabius.
Cassander had slipped away at that point, awakening an unknown time later to hear Navarra screaming as Fabius stripped out his secondary heart and replaced it with a glistening, pulsating thing that looked more organism than organ. Navarra had no limbs to thrash in pain, but his screams spoke of the unimaginable agonies he suffered.
At length Navarra quietened, his breathing ragged and raspy with mucus as he slipped into unconsciousness. Beneath the splint cage, Cassander saw his brother legionary’s chest was a mass of uneven sutures, each one raw and infected. The skin at his ribs rose and fell with undulant motion, as though questing tendrils slithered beneath his flesh. Cassander fought to hold his bile at bay at the idea of some alien parasite sealed within his body.
Fabius straightened from his labours, his back to Cassander, but a number of the waving appendages of his spine-mounted device were aimed in his direction. Cassander had no doubt they could alert the lunatic surgeon if he so much as made a move against him.
And in the unknown quantity of time since he had been brought here, throughout the screaming misery of his infections, he found that the idea of making a move against Fabius had become less of an abstraction and more of a potential plan. Cassander’s convulsions and lunatic thrashing had stretched and loosened his bonds to the point where, given a window of opportunity, he might be able to break them.
Just thinking about snapping his tormentor’s neck gave him a sense of warm contentment. All he needed was one arm free and he could loose the rest of his bonds without difficulty. He flexed one arm fractionally, feeling some give in the previously immovable strap securing him to the slab.
Fabius turned towards him with his skull-stamped rictus grin, and spoke as though no time at all had passed since their last discourse, scratching idly at his tapered chin with a black, claw-like fingernail.
‘Perhaps your resistance is something to do with your Legion’s unique genome. Is your dour dependability woven into your very gene-seed? Something deliberately bred into you, a personality trait embedded at conception… Might that be it? What do you think, Felix?’
Cassander could not remember revealing his name to the surgeon, but supposed he might have screamed it to him in a fugue state of contagion.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I have no training as an Apothecary.’
‘Oh, I am aware of that,’ said Fabius, slapping a comradely hand on his shoulder, eliciting a gasp of agony. Every pain receptor hovered just below the surface, alive to the prospect of awful, overloaded sensation, a side effect of Fabius’s ‘medicines’.
‘Why?’ said Cassander. ‘Why do this…?’
‘Why would I not?’ countered Fabius. ‘Especially now that Horus has forced Alpharius to furnish me with the secrets hidden away for centuries in the Emperor’s deepest vaults. I have all the pieces I need to open a door to treasures undreamed. And you will be my key. Think of it, together we will be at the forefront of the creation of a new breed of genetic post-humans, beyond the paltry things the Emperor made of us. We will be gods, divine beings, invincible and immortal.’
‘You are a madman,’ hissed Cassander. ‘How could you ever have been of the Legions?’
‘A madman?’ sneered Fabius, leaning in. ‘I will create a race of gods and you dare to call me mad? I will be the father of a new race of hyper-men, new beings of numinous perfection against whom the Emperor’s warriors will be adjudged no better than primitive apes.’
‘No,’ said Cassander, bunching a fist. ‘You won’t.’
Fabius laughed, a thin, reedy wheeze channelled through dusty pipes that had long since had any need for such a sound.
‘And what is to stop me, Felix Cassander? You?’
‘Yes,’ said Cassander, ripping his arm from the slab with a roaring surge of hate.
His bicep swelled with simmering power, and he slammed his fist into Fabius’s jaw. The impact sent Fabius sprawling across the floor of the vivisectorium. The Apothecary landed badly, striking his temple against a mortuary slab, his legs twisted beneath him and the weight of his Chirurgeon parasite bearing down on him. Cassander wasted no time in applying his strength to his other arm, quickly freeing it with a burst of adrenaline and raw power.
His head pounded with the sudden activity and his heart burned with white heat in his chest at the exertion. The suspended creatures of the ceiling-mounted surgical device shrieked in their gestalt amalgam voices, a blind wail of panic and fury. Fabius shook off the effects of the blow and shouted for his servitors, but Cassander had already freed his legs and swung them from the slab.
His body was weak, but still strong enough to do what neede
d to be done.
Fabius rose to his feet, backing away from Cassander’s unsteady advance, his pale skin a mask of blood, his black eyes glittering like shards of coal on snow. Incongruously, he was smiling. A shadow darted to Cassander’s right and something stabbed into his side, a needle-quick injection from a whipping, tentacle arm.
Cassander snatched at the arm and ripped it from the creature in a wash of brackish blood and chemical effluent. It wailed and he spun on his heel, driving his fist into the heart of the thing. Slippery cables or arteries writhed beneath his hands, warm and pulsating with sickeningly organic motion. Cassander pulled a handful of glistening ropes of intestine from the creature and a wash of stinking fluids flooded from its ruptured body. The suspended monster’s screams fell silent as the conjoined internal structure of its hideous body died.
Fabius backed away from Cassander, but he followed the demented Apothecary on unsteady legs. Hate was giving him strength, but exhaustion and banked pain were draining him with every second that passed. Cassander lurched after Fabius, feeling toxins coursing through his body. Strangely, the effect was already diminishing, and he felt a moment of small victory.
‘Your poisons don’t work any more,’ he hissed. ‘You made me immune to them.’
Fabius had backed into the farthest corner of the room, a shadowed region the firelight did not illuminate.
‘Nowhere left to run, Apothecary,’ said Cassander.
Fabius didn’t answer and reached into the shadow to lift something hung on the wall.
It was a sword – a primitive thing with a blade of napped flint and a fashioned hilt of gold. It caught the light strangely, as though dusted with powdered diamond, the blade chipped and looking far too short for the handle.