The Tithe

Ben Counter

On the horizon stood the greatest man there had ever been, the gilded giant that was Rogal Dorn. He had led them across this bleak wasteland, fighting through the host of cultists and degenerates thrown into their guns by the traitors of the Iron Warriors. Now the Scouring was almost done with this world, the Iron Warriors were nearly driven out and the poor fools who still believed in Horus and his heresy would be swept from another planet.

Brother Scoiven trudged through the knee-deep ash. He had seen his target fall, shot through with a round from Scoiven’s Stalker-pattern boltgun. The battle was swift and ever-moving, the fighting reduced to isolated bursts of gunfire, and clear targets were rare. Scoiven had taken the shot faster than thought, and it had hit.

The Iron Warrior’s gunmetal armour had not stopped the Stalker round punching through his throat. The ash was churned purple-black by the blood that had left him already.

‘You will pay,’ gasped the Iron Warrior, his voice metallic and strained through the faceplate of his helmet. ‘Whatever you do, wherever you go, you will pay.’

Scoiven drew his combat knife as he wrenched the helmet from the traitor’s head. ‘My debt is cleared,’ he said. ‘Your payment has already been taken.’

Scoiven plunged the blade under the Iron Warrior’s jaw and felt the heat of his enemy’s lifeblood as it flowed.

The sky above was bottle-green, the swirls of nebulae visible through the dense clouds. This world was poisoned. Its atmosphere, its water and the aliens who lived there were poisoned. The blade that had caught Scoiven in the gut as he killed the last of them had forced a venom into his veins that even a Space Marine’s constitution could not hold off.

‘In the primarch’s time,’ growled Scoiven, ‘the xenos fell to us like wheat before the scythe. No battle-brother would ever have suffered such a damned insignificant death.’

‘Dorn is long gone, brother,’ said the Apothecary as he hooked another cylinder of humours up to the needle in Scoiven’s vein. It was true. The primarch had been lost on the Sword of Sacrilege, that cursed ship, and only his bones remained in the hands of the Chapter.

Scoiven held another bone, that of the Iron Warrior he had killed on the wasteland world while Dorn still lived, lifetimes of men ago. It felt warm in his hand and strangely heavy – a shoulder blade cut from the enemy’s body after the battle, worn on a leather strip around Scoiven’s neck through the centuries that followed. It was a reminder of who he was and who the enemy were. It was in his hand now and he felt his grip weakening.

‘You are not long for this life,’ said the other battle-brother attending to Scoiven, a Techmarine in rust-red armour. ‘Decisions must be made. You have fought for over three hundred years and you are the eldest of all the Imperial Fists. There are few now that breathed while Dorn did. Such a loss is beyond counting.’

Scoiven turned to the Techmarine, Forge-Brother Malkanos, but even that movement hurt. ‘What are you saying?’

The Techmarine and the Apothecary exchanged glances. ‘Ancient Kulgatha was lost to the accursed eldar at Venomspire Ridge,’ said Malkanos. ‘His sarcophagus yet lies empty. It is ill fortune to leave a Dreadnought idle for long, especially when a battle-brother worthy of its use lies mortally wounded. But we cannot inter you without your leave, Brother Scoiven. We know you as a man of pride, a warrior who would wish to pass on to the End Time and fight alongside Dorn as a whole man instead of living on crippled within a Dreadnought. But if you choose interment and life as an Ancient, our Chapter will not lose your battle-wisdom for many centuries more.’

Scoiven clenched the Iron Warrior’s bone in his fist, and it took the last of his strength from him. There were a million of them out there, a billion, an untold horde of enemies that begged for death.

‘Do it,’ he said.

The steel of his body was cold and clad in ice. Scoiven’s right arm was a massive hammer, a siege weapon that could bring down a fortress. His left was a battery of rocket launchers. When he walked, the forges of Phalanx shook.

The chill clung to him, as if he had not quite outrun death. But the strength, the power, the sheer destructive force to be unleashed on the enemies of mankind – that was compensation. This was not an unbearable tomb, the living death that some said was the fate of those interred in a Dreadnought. Yes, he was crippled in body and would never leave the machine’s embrace, but Brother Scoiven was still a weapon in the hand of Rogal Dorn, and by the Emperor that was worth any sacrifice.

The chill grew deeper. Scoiven checked the runes of the Dreadnought’s power readout, projected onto his retina, but the power plant and life support were running normally. Icy fingers ran up what remained of his body, across the skin of his torso, now sallow and puckered inside the steel sarcophagus, and around the inputs where cables pierced his chest and skull.

A face appeared, not a projection but there, inside, with him. It was a skull, wrought from pitted and bloodstained iron, locked into a permanent grin. It was the skull that might have sat beneath a face Scoiven remembered from a lifetime ago, one lying in the bloody ash waiting for the death blow.

You could not resist taking a trophy of me, it said. I lay within that shard of bone for three hundred years. I was patient. And now I have something new to haunt.

Scoiven tried to cry out, to scream, but his vocal cords had been removed. He could not move as the cold crept over him and immersed him.

‘I told you that you would pay,’ said the Iron Warrior.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Counter is the author of the Soul Drinkers and Grey Knights series, along with two Horus Heresy novels, and is one of Black Library’s most popular Warhammer 40,000 authors. He has written RPG supplements and comic books. He is a fanatical painter of miniatures, a pursuit which has won him his most prized possession: a prestigious Golden Demon award. He lives in Portsmouth, England.

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