Trophies

Cavan Scott

Brother Grissan dreamed of his death. He always knew how it would be. Chainsword in hand, the din of battle in his ears. From the moment he had been initiated into the ranks of the Death Spectres, Grissan had been convinced that when he was finally struck down, he would take his enemy with him. A glorious day. The stuff of legends.

Then he awoke, every pain-receptor on fire. A fevered groan slipped past his chapped lips, the blistered skin tight across his face. Without a functioning Mucranoid, all sons of Occludus were susceptible to extreme heat, but exposure was the least of the Space Marine’s concerns. He could barely move, his body hanging limply from the tree. For a second he couldn’t remember where he was, what had led him here – or why pain was lancing through his back.

Then it all came flooding back.

Grissan forced his sunburnt eyelids open, grimacing at the sudden glare. A face stared back at him, closer than expected. He recognised it immediately. Old craggy features and tattooed skin. A native of this accursed world.

The Space Marine stared into the eyes of the dead man.

His name had been Matana.

‘Leave now,’ Grissan ordered, his bolter’s sights resting between the tattooed man’s eyes.

The native just laughed, the sudden noise sending birds flapping from the jungle canopy. The maniac was going to ruin everything.

‘You same as me, yes?’ the tribesman asked, placing a gnarled, arthritic hand against his narrow chest. ‘Same as old Matana?’

‘I am nothing like you,’ Grissan insisted, his finger tightening around the trigger.

Matana chuckled again, leaning heavily on his staff and look around the clearing. Grissan followed the interloper’s gaze, his eyes flicking to the bodies of the gutted dire boars.

‘You set bait,’ the man observed, waggling a bony finger at the Space Marine. ‘You hunter, like Matana. You want trophy.’ His abnormally large eyes narrowed. ‘You want sanilu.’

Matana had been correct. Grissan had wanted a trophy, but not for himself. From the moment he had heard of the sanilu, Grissan was obsessed. The creatures had spread throughout the Ghoul Stars eons ago, terrorising the indigenous people. Children lay awake at night, having been told that the sanilu would take them unless they were good, but even the adults watched the skies. Hideous, chimera-like beasts, the sanilu were more than just a cautionary tale. With the body of an ape, leathery dragon-like wings and a barbed, poisonous tail they had been hunted to extinction – or so everyone thought. Grissan had heard whispers to the contrary, nothing more than rumours at first. The last sanilu in existence was said to stalk the primitive forest world of Ashon. It swept down silently from the treetops to grab its prey, spiriting them away to its nest, high in the mountains of Kapec Tarn. Grissan had pledged there and then that he would travel to Ashon and slay the alien. The eradication of an entire xenos species in the Emperor’s name. The holiest of quests.

Tracking the creature to its hunting ground was simple enough, as was capturing the dire boars. He had opened the animals with his combat knife, daubing the glistening entrails over his power armour. Matana had been right – he was setting bait.

Himself.

The savage had appeared from nowhere. Grissan was almost impressed. No one ever crept up on him. It was the only reason that he had given Matana the chance to walk away.

‘Many come,’ Matana babbled, leaning on his staff. ‘Many hunt sanilu. Many die.’

‘Not I,’ Grissan spat. ‘The last of the sanilu will be mine. It is the Emperor’s will.’

Matana’s thin lips drew up into a wry smile.

‘The last?’ he repeated, before snorting with derision. ‘You want last of sanilu?’ The wizened native threw back his head and rocked with laughter. ‘You not like Matana at all. You are fool.’

A bolt through the brain had finally silenced the idiot.

But it had been too late.

The sanilu had struck before Matana’s body even hit the ground. Grissan had twisted, bringing his bolter to bear, before grunting in pain. The Death Spectre had removed his helm earlier in the day, wanting to rely on his own senses rather than the power armour’s many instruments and auguries. A mistake. The sanilu’s barbed tail had scraped across Grissan’s cheek, his body immediately dropping into convulsions as the toxins had ravaged even his augmented physiology.

Holy Terra, the beast was as tenacious as it was strong. Each beat of the gargantuan wings was accompanied by an animalistic snort. Remarkable as it was, who would have thought the sanilu could fly the dead weight of a Space Marine up the side of a mountain? Grissan’s muscles twitched, his limbs no longer responding, so focused instead on their destination. At least he could still move his eyes.

Shrubs covered the mountainside, but there was something odd about the narrow trees that jutted out of the crags. The branches had been stripped away, leaving nothing but stake-like trunks, each crowned with a jagged, vicious-looking point.

As they drew nearer, he could see why. The trunks were far from empty. Each was lined by the impaled carcasses of the sanilu’s victims. Some were nothing more than skeletons, blackened by the sun. Others had flesh still clinging to their bones. It was a larder, high above the forests – but that wasn’t the end of it.

The bodies were more than just food.

They were trophies.

The pain of the spike puncturing his back had been unbearable, but was nothing compared to the trunk pushing a path through his innards. The point bursting from his left shoulder had almost come as a relief. The animal had been lucky, the spike slipping between his armour’s plating. A human would never have survived the trauma, but Grissan was a Death Spectre, the personification of death itself. His moment would come.

He had no idea how long he hung from the tree, drifting in and out of consciousness as his augmented organs fought the sanilu’s poison and repaired the damage caused by the impaling. The fact that Matana’s corpse had yet to discolour told him that it hadn’t been long. The sanilu had obviously retrieved the hunter while Grissan was sleeping. No use in letting meals go to waste. Good. Let it wear itself out flying its spoils back to the nest. In the meantime Grissan needed to try to keep himself awake. If his Sus-an Membrane sent him into a restorative coma, no one would be on hand to administer the chemicals needed to bring him out of hibernation. All would be lost.

Wings beat in the thin air. The monster was returning. Grissan let his head loll forward, gambling that the sanilu wouldn’t expect its prey to survive the impaling. It had never encountered a Space Marine before.

Grissan’s nostrils filled with the creature’s pungent musk, the sound of flesh being ripped from Matana’s bones telling him why the sanilu had returned. Time to feed. He had guessed right. The sanilu had made straight for the native. No ceramite armour to prise away from the old man’s corpse.

No lightning claws.

Clenching his teeth, Grissan forced his left arm up, grabbing the spike covered in his own dried blood. He couldn’t help but cry out as he swung his body around, his power-gauntlet’s adamantium claws cracking with energy as they arched through the air. The sanilu reacted, but too slowly, the blades slicing deep into its hair-covered side.

The creature bellowed in pain, its pronged tail lashing out, but this time Grissan was ready. He let go of the trunk, grunting as gravity shifted his body an inch or two back down the spike, and grabbed the tail, holding it tight with gloved fingers. The end of the deadly appendage curled around Grissan’s forearm, but this time the quills found only armour, impervious to their toxins.

Panicking, the sanilu threw itself into the air with just one beat of its wings. Grissan retracted his claws but refused to let go of the tail, even as he was yanked roughly from the spike.

‘No pain,’ he hissed through clenched teeth. ‘I am death incarnate. I will feel no pain.’

The sanilu screeched, its wings thrashing frantically, kicking at Grissan with curved talons. The Death Spectre considered striking again, dealing the killing blow, but could see there was no need. His weight, and the injury he had already hammered home, was all that was needed. Above him, the creature was gasping for breath, blood running freely from the four wounds in its side, dousing Grissan’s face.

‘All shall fall beneath the Emperor’s might,’ he barked, spitting the creature’s foul cruor from his mouth. ‘From the daemons of the warp to the devils of the air.’

With a final cry, the sanilu faltered, its wings missing a beat and it tumbled, pulled down by Grissan’s sheer bulk. The stake pierced its stomach before bursting from its back in a red haze. It slid down the trunk, wings flapping desperately before slowing and falling still, the creature’s breath rattling in its chest.

And then it was over, Grissan swinging from the lank tail, staring into the creature’s lifeless eyes.

‘Victory,’ Grissan grunted, although the word tasted worse than the sanilu’s blood in his mouth.

It took an age for Grissan to make his way down the mountain, scrabbling down the scree-covered slopes. His injuries meant he had to keep stopping, gasping for air in the thin atmosphere.

And all the while he could hear mocking laughter in his ears.

He could remember the glee on Matana’s face as the old hunter revealed that there was another nest, maybe two hundred kilometres to the east. The sanilu Grissan sought hunted alone, but was far from being the last of its kind. There were others. Possibly an entire family group.

‘Fool, fool, fool,’ Matana had chanted until Grissan had pulled his trigger.

‘I will have the last laugh,’ the Death Spectre yelled down at the forest, letting his body slide down to rest on a ledge. ‘My quest shall continue, the last of the sanilu will die at my hand.’

He just needed to recover first. The sun was blazing down and his body was so, so tired.

‘It will be a glorious day,’ he croaked, his head pitching forward. ‘The stuff of… stuff of…’

Grissan’s bloodstained chin rested on his chestplate and he slept, forever.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cavan Scott has written novels, audio dramas, short stories and comics based on such popular series as Doctor Who, Judge Dredd, Highlander and Blake’s 7. Recent short stories have appeared in Titan Book’s Encounters of Sherlock Holmes and Snow Book’s Resurrection Engines anthologies. He is currently working on a new fantasy trilogy. 'Doom Flight' was Cavan Scott's first short story for Black Library

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