Meduson

  'The Legion was expecting us, yes?' asked Azedine.

  Marr had no answer for him.

  He hadn't expected a triumph to match Ullanor. He'd hoped, but hadn't really expected Horus Lupercal to be here.

  He'd hoped a few companies of Sons of Horus at least.

  Four warriors stood at the far end of the apron. Three were known to him as brothers, the fourth a stranger. At their number, Marr felt a twinge of unease. Nothing he could identify, just a ripple of sourceless disquiet.

  First Captain Ezekyle Abaddon was impossible to mistake.

  Tybalt Marr, 18th Captain of the Sons of Horus

  Towering and brutal, his shaven head and swishing topknot made him unique among the XVI Legion. Cleaving close to Abaddon was Falkus Kibre, his enormous warplate making his already massive frame even larger.

  The third warrior's face was cold and humourless, sharply angled and patrician in mien. Like the Warmaster, but without the dynamism of Horus Lupercal. A true son, saw Marr, but one that was unknown to him.

  But in the face of Little Horus Aximand, Marr had his first real shock. He did his best to hide it, but the look on Aximand's face told him he hadn't been successful.

  Little Horus held out his gauntlet before he could say anything.

  'Welcome to Dwell, Tybalt,' said Aximand, his disfigured face moving as though the muscles beneath his skin were being worked by invisible strings. Still recognisably a true son, but somehow entirely other. Marr couldn't decide whether Aximand now looked more or less like their sire.

  'Little Horus, what—' said Marr, but Aximand shook his head.

  'Another time,' said Aximand. 'Let's just say that steel forged on Medusa has such a fine edge, and leave it at that.'

  'As you say,' agreed Marr with a slight incline of his head.

  'So the Either returns to us,' said Abaddon with what was probably meant to be a grin, but came off looking more like the death mask on Azedine's mortuary blade. 'Or is it the 'Or', I could never tell you two apart…'

  Anger touched Marr at Abaddon's poor attempt at humour.

  'You never did have any skill at jests, did you, Ezekyle?' he said. 'Verulam died on Davin's moon. So I'm not the Either any more, and I'm certainly not the Or. Now I'm just Tybalt Marr. Captain Tybalt Marr.'

  Abaddon's brow furrowed, but he refrained from rising to the barb, much to Marr's surprise.

  Before that changed, Aximand took a step towards him and put a hand on his shoulder guard. He gently, but firmly turned Marr towards the polished ochre stone of the Mausolytic.

  'We meet in a liminal space,' he said. 'A place where life and death are not so far apart as we might wish. It's fitting we remember the dead as we knew them. Ezekyle meant no disrespect to the memory of Verulam. Did you, Ezekyle?'

  'No,' said Abaddon through gritted teeth. 'I did not.'

  Aximand nodded and stepped back. 'You see? The restoration of the Mournival has given Ezekyle fresh reserves of empathy and humility.'

  That made Marr smile until the full import of Aximand's words hit home. That explained the vague unease he'd felt when he'd seen there were four of them.

  The others saw the realisation in his eyes.

  'He didn't know,' said the unknown warrior. 'Of course, how could he?'

  Marr rounded on him, taking in his inferior rank.

  'Who are you, and why are you talking to me as though you're my equal?'

  The warrior gave a curt bow, barely enough to show respect.

  'Apologies, Captain Marr, I offer all respect,' he said. 'My name is Grael Noctua of the TwentyFifth Warlocked.'

  'You're just a squad commander,' said Marr.

  'Yes,' said Noctua. 'For now.'

  'And you're Mournival? All of you?'

  Noctua nodded, and Marr saw a cold glimmer of a ruthlessly calculating intelligence. He wondered if the others had seen it.

  'We needed our confraternity restored,' said Aximand. 'Now more than ever.'

  Marr nodded, the muscles in his jaw tight as tension cables in a Stormbird's wing.

  'And Lupercal?' he said. 'He approves?'

  'He does,' said Abaddon, and Marr felt the knife in his back twist just a little deeper.

  Falkus Kibre stepped forward and clapped both gauntlets on Marr's forearms. He and the Master of the Justaerin had never been close, but Marr had always respected Kibre's honest and brusque tothepoint manner.

  'It's good to have you back,' said Kibre. 'Took your time disposing of a few ragamuffin survivors, eh?'

  'You didn't vox ahead to tell them?' asked Scybale. 'Tell them what you did.'

  'Tell us what?' asked Aximand.

  Marr took a breath and said, 'That a warleader of the Tenth Legion named Shadrak Meduson was alloying those ragamuffin survivors into a fighting force of not inconsiderable strength. We destroyed his fleet at Arissak.'

  Almost immediately, Marr knew something was wrong when he saw the confused reaction to his pronouncement.

  'No, Tybalt,' said Aximand. 'I'm afraid Shadrak Meduson is very much alive.'

  He should have died.

  That was the thought uppermost in Marr's mind as he watched grainy pictcapture of the Iron Hands' Fire Raptors strafing the Dome of Revivification with gunfire. Highvelocity shells tore through its latticework structure, detonating the cryotubes within and wrecking mechanisms thousands of years old.

  The Fire Raptors circled, their centreline and waist turrets braying with explosive fire, and the tower upon which the dome sat erupted like a flaming geyser.

  Horus, Mortarion and Fulgrim were in that dome.

  A meeting of brothers undone by an attempted decapitating strike.

  If it hadn't been directed at his own primarch, Marr would have admired such a gutsy approach. Especially in the wake of the White Scars' abortive assassination attempt.

  To have lain in wait for so long displayed a level of patience Marr had hitherto not encountered in his dealings with Shadrak Meduson. The boarding action he'd led aboard the Crown of Flame had taught Marr much about the man: his cunning, his determination and his resilience. Also recklessness and the exploitable desire to strike back hard.

  But patience? No, that wasn't a virtue he associated with the warleader of the Iron Tenth.

  Could Meduson be alive? Might he have escaped the slaughter in the Arissak System? It had been so comprehensive a defeat, so thorough in its bloodletting, that it seemed impossible anything could have escaped. He'd watched Meduson's flagship die, seen its guttering hulk tear itself apart in a lethal torsion of reactor detonations and warp implosions.

  Marr shook his head and returned his attention to the pict capture, the swaying feed coming from a servitor drone attracted by the sudden noise and light.

  When the end came, it came suddenly.

  One of the gunships crumpled as though being crushed in the inescapable gravity of a black hole.

  Then Horus Lupercal was there.

  Marr's breath caught in his throat.

  He'd watched this a dozen times already, and still the power of the Warmaster was astonishing. He leapt onto the prow of a gunship hooked by a chain hurled by the Death Lord. With one sweep of Worldbreaker, Lupercal demolished the Fire Raptor's prow, before vaulting onto the last enemy craft and breaking its spine.

  It was the most incredible thing Marr had ever seen.

  The pict capture exploded into static as Sons of Horus gunships finally arrived on station and shot down anything that didn't bear the Eye of Horus. Marr reached forward. He toggled the ivory switch to loop the broadcast and sat back on his bench seat as the image of the dome reconstituted itself in veils of light.

  Marr sat in the central courtyard of what might once have been a wealthy merchant's villa, but was now just an empty marble shell. It sat on the upper slopes of the rift valley, within walking distance of the Mausolytic Precinct, wherein Horus Lupercal was said to be communing with the frozen dead of Dwell.

  Marr had brooded within the villa for five days
, the knowledge of Shadrak Meduson's survival having robbed him of the triumphant news he was to deliver. Small wonder the primarch made no time for him.

  Two dozen dataslates lay scattered on the blackveined flagstones of the courtyard, each filled with notations of enemy actions over the last three years, spreading out from Isstvan. He'd studied them obsessively for those five days and his eidetic memory was fully conversant with everything they contained.

  Marr picked up the nearest and scanned its contents again.

  Acts of sabotage, supply lines cut, fuelling asteroids destroyed and a host of guerilla engagements where enemy forces had attacked, fallen back then attacked again.

  Raven Guard through and through.

  The random nature of each strike, and, more tellingly, its isolation from the others, had kept Marr kept everyone from registering their importance. But when viewed as being part of a greater whole, the faintest hint of an implacable, resolute and indefatigable will became apparent.

  An iron will.

  Marr saw nothing definitive, but each morsel was a tantalising breadcrumb that pointed to one inescapable conclusion.

  Shadrak Meduson was indeed alive.

  Not just alive, but raising his threatened storm with new skills and a new level of cunning alloyed in the fire of his apparent destruction.

  Meduson's supposed defeat had come in the shockspasms following Isstvan V. The Iron Hands warleader had fought as he'd always fought, the only way he knew how, gathering whatever resources he could to assemble a fresh fighting force.

  That was the way of the X Legion. If a machine broke down, they did whatever it took to get it working again, replacing broken parts with whatever came to hand. Meduson had taken that credo to its logical extension by incorporating squads from the Salamanders and Raven Guard into his formations.

  And it had very nearly worked.

  Marr had destroyed Meduson's agglomerated fleet, but the scattered, ad hoc flotillas in the outer reaches of the system had taken much longer to hunt down.

  In the end, the survivors had been too broken, too dispersed and too psychologically shattered to endure the ferocity of Marr's vengeful prosecution. Of course, there had been elements that evaded destruction, but he'd believed them to be minor irritations and barely worth notice.

  The assassination attempt on Dwell was the prism that threw an entirely new and dreadful light on that belief.

  He reached down and lifted a clay amphora of wine that had somehow survived the city's fall and which he'd found halfempty in the basement. It was too thin and watery to his tastes, but just drinking it stoked a fire in his belly as his genhanced metabolism countered the alcohol.

  The wine tasted sour, but everything tasted sour just now.

  MARR WANDERED THE empty halls of the villa, drinking from the amphora and letting his mind consider the idea that the random attacks on forces sworn to the Warmaster were not random at all.

  He had to take his suspicions to Horus Lupercal, but needed to be absolutely sure that what he believed was beyond doubt.

  Too much certainty and he would be viewed as paranoid, jumping at shadows and seeing threats where none existed. Too little and Lupercal would dismiss him out of hand, relegating him to the rear echelons of forgotten warriors whose names history wouldn't bother to remember.

  But hadn't that already happened?

  How many more times could he be passed over? How many more times could he be ignored? The Either and the Or, two nicknames blithely indifferent to the individual heroism of Tybalt Marr and Verulam Moy's achievements.

  Marr knew how the Legion viewed him. Precise, efficient and workmanlike. Steady, but without the glories won by men like Sedirae, Abaddon or, apparently, Grael Noctua. Even Marr's magnificent victories in the low mountains of Murder hadn't changed that perception.

  He remembered standing in the strategium of the Vengeful Spirit during the early stages of the war on Murder.

  Loken had been there, spitefully leaving him to the droning attentions of Iacton Qruze. The old warrior had been a relic from a bygone age of the Legion, a man whose counsel was rarely sought, but always offered.

  'I won't be the halfheard,' said Marr, making his way down a carpeted hallway in the upper levels of the villa, a passageway replete with portraits that bore unmistakable genetic links.

  Only the most recent picture had no date of death beneath it. A woman shawled with rich fabrics and draped in expensive jewellery stared back at him, handsome with rich living and what looked like subtle flesh sculpting.

  'Did you own this fine dwelling?' he asked the portrait. 'How did it feel to have it taken from you? To have your dreams crushed under the boots of the Sons of Horus?'

  The portrait was, of course, silent.

  'Are you even still alive? Perhaps you fled to the interior countryside to wait out the war. Maybe you took refuge in another of your holdings, or in the household of a friend.'

  Marr stepped away from the portrait and hurled the amphora at the wall. It shattered and soaked the picture, drenching it in wine that dripped in garnet droplets from its gilt frame.

  'It doesn't matter!' he roared. 'Whatever became of you, you are nothing now. Whatever your achievements, they are as dust in the wind. All your labours, all your dedication, blood, sweat and tears… all shed for nothing.'

  He turned as he heard a door opening below. Footsteps on marble. Too heavy a tread to be anything other than a legionary.

  'Tybalt?' shouted a voice, echoing through the villa. 'Are you in here?'

  He made his way back through the villa to the head of a fine set of marble and ouslite stairs that split apart midway down their length to curve groundwards in opposing symmetrical arcs. Below was Little Horus Aximand, standing in the centre of a mosaic floor of coloured glass tiles that depicted bucolic scenes of Dwell's pastoral antiquity.

  'What do you want?'

  'To talk,' said Aximand. 'As old friends do when they meet after long absences.'

  Marr made his way down the stairs, much as the lady of this house must once have done when receiving guests.

  Aximand waited patiently, his new face regarding Marr quizzically. Belted at his waist was a huge blade of Cthonian bluesteel, its edge notched and badly in need of repair.

  'I want you to know that I put your name forward,' said Aximand. 'For the Mournival, I mean.'

  'But I was rejected.'

  'Ezekyle knows you are a good man, and coming from him that is a superlative compliment.'

  Marr reached the bottom of the steps.

  'But he still rejected my appointment,' said Marr. 'Which goes some way to explaining why he didn't tear my head off when I insulted him on the landing field.'

  Aximand nodded. 'I'd urged him to be sympathetic. After a while he agreed.'

  Marr grinned. Little Horus Aximand had been a true friend to him over the years, but this latest wound in his pride was going to take more than consoling words to salve.

  'Why was I rejected this time?' asked Marr. 'And please, don't try and sweeten the balm.'

  'Very well. Ezekyle didn't think you had the stomach for the job,' said Aximand.

  Marr ground his teeth at so casual a dismissal.

  'He kept pushing for his own men,' continued Aximand. 'Choleric types like Kibre, Targost and Ekaddon, but we needed balance. I hoped you would be the one to bring it, upon your return.'

  'Balance?' asked Marr. 'And yet you let the Widowmaker in? I wonder if you properly understand the concept of balance.'

  'You know Ezekyle,' said Aximand with a shrug. 'Once he gets an idea in his head, it's next to impossible to shift.'

  'So that's why you made the overture to Grael Noctua? One of his, one of yours.'

  'Something like that,' said Aximand, and Marr caught a trace of something else, some other reason behind Aximand's suggestion of Grael Noctua, something he wondered if Aximand himself even understood.

  He sighed and said, 'I'd offer you some wine, but I think I just smashed
the last amphora in Tyjun.'

  'Shame.'

  'No, it wasn't very good.'

  Aximand smiled, and even with his new face, its warmth was genuine. 'So what are we to do if not drink as warriors?'

  'You brought a sword,' said Marr. 'We could fight.'

  'Would that help?'

  'Help with what?'

  'To balance your humours,' said Aximand. 'Because it looks like they need balancing.'

  'Aye,' said Marr. 'There's a courtyard at the centre of the villa, that should suffice for an arena. Take up that monstrous blade of yours and we'll fight.'

  ' MournitAll,' said Aximand.

  'What?'

  'My sword, it's called MournitAll'.

  'I know how it feels,' said Marr.

  II

  'RIDICULOUS,' SAID ABADDON, dropping the dataslate to the gleaming obsidian table. 'That's what they want you to think.'

  They gathered in one of the sepulchral audience chambers of the Mausolytic, a place where the citizens of Dwell could meet and commune with their ancestors. Octagonal, with semicircular alcoves spaced at regular intervals around the wall, the gloomy and sombre chamber had been appropriated by the Mournival for their newly instigated meetings.

  At Marr's request they gathered to hear his suspicions of the growing threat of Shadrak Meduson.

  Aximand sat before a glowing hololith, the light throwing the bruises on his cheek and swollen eye into sharp relief.

  Their sparring in the villa had been a brutal, punishing affair, of which Marr had taken the honours. Cathartic and not a little liberating, Aximand had been proven correct in that it had balanced Marr's humours.

  Little Horus studied an entoptic rendering of interlinked icons.

  Each one was the location of an attack on their or their allies' forces, with a spreading chain of outcomes linking to other attacks and their consequences.

  It looked so much like a web Marr half expected to see the image of a glowing spider at its centre.