Savage Weapons

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

‘In raising these men to watch over mankind, we have bred a legion of inhumans whose sole purpose is to defend that which they no longer understand. Their duty, borne with pride; their curse, carried with grace – but let it never be forgotten what we have done to Caliban’s finest sons. Unending Imperial ambition has not bred warriors with the warm hearts of men, but angels with the cold hearts of weapons.’

No soul so changed will recover what was lost. No weapon so savage can be wielded without cost.’

– The Verbatim, Lutherian Amendments,
Chapter I: These Savage Weapons

I

The beast never dies in his dreams.

He watches it slink through the trees, keeping its sinuous body low to the ground, its movements fluid enough to be sickening and boneless. Its ears rake back flat against its head, while its clawed paws are silent on the deep snow. The creature hunts, eager but passionless, its dead cat’s eyes glinting with emotionless hunger.

The boy takes the shot, and the shell goes wide.

With the cold air split by the crack of gunfire, the beast twists in the snow, ghost-light on the ground as it snarls at its attacker. Quivering black spines rise from the denser white fur at its back and neck, an instinctive defensive response. A tail lashes behind the beast in threatening rhythm, coiling and thrashing in time with the boy’s own heartbeat.

For a moment he sees what the elder knights all claimed to see – a sight he’d always believed to be the lies of ageing warriors girding their fading legends with false poetry.

Yet there it is in the beast’s black eyes, something beneath the raw desire to survive. Recognition stares back at him: a crude intelligence, malicious despite its feral simplicity. The moment shatters as the creature vents its anger. Something between a lion’s burbling snarl and a bear’s hoarse roar rings out in the cold air between them.

The boy fires again. Three more shots echo through the forest, disturbing the snow bundled on branches above. Shivering fingers seek to reload the primitive pistol, but the beast’s sinewy weight pounds into his chest, hurling him away, throwing him down onto the frost. In the same moment the boy hits the ground, he feels the chunky shells scatter from his grip, spilling out onto the snow. The beast’s bulk on his back saps his strength as well as his breath. What little air he drags into his abused lungs reeks of the creature’s foetid exhalation, and a hot, wet mist of stinking tumour-breath washes over the back of his head. Whatever the beast is, it’s rotting from within. Saliva runs in a slick string from the beast’s jaws, spattering onto his bare neck.

Corswain swings over his shoulder, hammering the body of his pistol against the beast’s skull. Bone gives with a muffled crack, eliciting a whine that’s almost feline. As the creature rears in response, the boy scrabbles across the snow, regaining his feet in a staggering run. Steel whispers as it slides from his sheath, a sword almost as long as the boy is tall, clutched in two shivering hands. As the beast stalks closer, he sees the malign hunger in its eyes cool to a feral wariness. It’s afraid now, or at least cautious. Flakes of snow drift onto the blade, freezing into diamonds wedded to the steel.

‘Come on,’ the boy breathes the whispered words. ‘Come on...’

The beast leaps, striking his chest with the force of a stallion’s kick, and he’s down again. This time his sword spins from his grip, stabbing into the snow like a grave marker. The ache in his chest is a dull, creaking crackle, as if his lungs are filled with dry leaves. He knows his ribs are shattered, but there’s almost no pain at all.

The boy strains under the creature’s weight, his young muscles bunched taut as he struggles to strangle through the thick fur. The spined quills pierce his fingers and the backs of his hands, each one tipped by beads of clear, stinging venom. His hands tremble as the toxins attack his blood.

When he coughs, steaming bile gurgles from his mouth in a bitter rush. The puke hisses onto the snow, eating holes in the frost with acidic eagerness. The boy barely notices his useless hands falling away from the beast’s neck, nor how they curl into arthritic claws.

Convulsions wrack his whole body no more than three heartbeats later. The venom has him now. A scream leaves his lips as nothing more than a silent mime.

Slowly, everything starts to whiten, to fade away. He feels himself dragged, body scraping over the snow, but other, truer sounds begin infiltrating his thoughts: the sound of a ticking fan blade in a labouring air filtrator; boot-steps on the deck above; the omnipresent rumble of live engines.

At last, he opens his eyes.

It plays out like this each time he sleeps. The beast never dies in his dreams.

II

His mind wandered during the morning vigil. As Corswain knelt with his brothers, his head bowed against the hilt of his sword, he gave all the appearance of another knight in dutiful reflection of the coming crusade. In truth, he dwelled in memories. His thoughts flew home to a world that hated him.

Caliban.

The name brought a smile to his lips, hidden by the hood that cast his features into shadow. Caliban, that lethal haven of burning summers and vicious winters; where the unending forests permitted no sunlight to fall beneath their boughs, and every ancient tree defended itself with poisonous sap for blood; where every beast hunted with killing talons, mythic agility, or acidic venom. Biting insects spread plagues that left entire settlements silent and lifeless within days. Chittering clouds of locusts descended over the land year after year, annihilating villages and towns in their wake.

Orders of knights shared the grim duty of burning devastated settlements with each yearly cycle around the sun. On Caliban, the number of names inscribed upon the rolls of the dead matched the lists of the newborn. Imperial ledgers coded the world In Articulo Mortis, ‘at the moment of demise’, with the slang tag of ‘Death world’. Corswain had laughed when he first saw those words written in an archive.

The scribes’ notations damned the world as a worthless globe deserving no further colonisation. It was rendered exempt from paying Imperial tithe even when all other worlds began to suffer such demands from the fledgling usurers of Terra, and pledged itself only to sell its sons into willing slavery in the Emperor’s First Legion.

On and on the negative declarations went, citing brutal weather conditions that would affect sensitive orbital communication satellites; continental forests useless for lumber because of the unsafe biochemistry in the world’s flora; and screeds of lore decreeing Caliban’s fauna among the most predatory yet found on any colonised world – from the lowliest vermin that showed no fear of humankind to the great beasts that mercifully stood on the edge of extinction.

Corswain knew it was all of that and worse. But it was also home, a home he’d not seen in three long decades. A home he no longer believed he would ever see again. His smile in the morning vigil was both secret and bittersweet.

Alajos called to him once the reverence ended. The other knights filed from the chamber of reflection, their white surplice robes not enough to cover the battle scarring that ravaged every suit of black armour.

We have been fighting this war for two years, and I recall each day, each night, every order to draw steel and every shell fired in anger.

Two years. Two years since Horus committed his first act of insanity. Two years since the VIII and I Legions both found themselves ordered into the void, feuding over possession of an entire subsector. Neither side gave ground without taking it back elsewhere. Neither side charged without leaving a vulnerable flank open to assault. Neither Legion lost a battle when their progenitors led them to war.

Two years of civil war. World against world, fleet against fleet, brother against brother.

‘Hail,’ Alajos greeted him.

Corswain nodded in reply. ‘Is something amiss?’

Alajos, like his brothers, wore his full armour beneath a clean surplice. The hood was up, leaving his features in shadow.

‘The Lion summons us,’ he said.

Corswain checked his weapons. ‘Very well.’

III

The lord of the First Legion sat as he so often sat these nights, leaning back in an ornate throne of ivory and obsidian. His elbows rested upon the throne’s sculpted arms, while his fingers were steepled before his face, just barely touching his lips. Unblinking eyes, the brutal green of Caliban’s forests, stared dead ahead, watching the winking dance of distant stars. Every so often there’d be the slightest betrayal of movement: the rise and fall of his armoured shoulders, or a moment taken to blink and shake his crowned head in silent dismissal.

The warlord’s armour was the same rich, unspoiled black as the void into which he stared. Sculpted across his breastplate and greaves, rearing lions formed from red gold – that rarest of metals dredged from the dusty crust of Mars – bared their teeth at a diligent and devoted bridge crew. He wore no helm while he sat in repose, yet the mane of ashen blond locks was bound back in a tight horsetail to keep his face free of distraction, and a simple silver circlet adorned his tanned brow. This last trinket sported no ostentation, being nothing more than an echo of tradition from the disbanded knightly orders of the Lion’s adopted home world. By such simple crowns were the knight-lords of Caliban once known.

Alajos and Corswain approached the throne as one. In perfect unity, they drew their blades and kneeled before their liege. The Lion watched their obeisance with impassive eyes. When he spoke, his voice was the grind of thunder at the horizon – it could never be mistaken for human.

‘Rise.’

They rose as commanded, sheathing their swords in twinned movements. Alajos remained hooded, ignoring the bustle of the command deck around them, his hidden eyes focused only on the enthroned warlord. Corswain stood more at ease, arms crossed over his breastplate, his armour enlivened by the thick, white fur pelt draping down his back. The skinned beast’s fanged head draped over his shoulder guard, forming the cloak’s binding.

‘You summoned us, my liege?’

‘I did.’ The Lion remained seated with his fingers steepled before his lips. ‘Two years, little brothers. Two years. I can scarce give it countenance.’

Corswain allowed himself a smile. ‘I was thinking the very same thing no more than half an hour ago, my liege. But what causes you to dwell upon it?’

Now the Lion rose, leaving his long blade and helm resting on the throne’s arched sides. ‘It is not because I share your impatient nature, Cor. I assure you of that.’

Alajos snorted. Corswain grinned.

‘Come with me,’ the Lion said, his tone neither kind nor cold, and the three warriors moved to the holo-lithic table at the heart of the command chamber. At the Lion’s order, a robed servitor triggered the projectors into life, bathing them all in the ethereal green half-light of flickering holo-images. The patchwork display hovering in the air before them showed the suns of the Aegis Subsector, each with their child worlds. Heraldor and Thramas flashed brighter than any other, both systems marked by a messy display of Mechanicum symboliser runes.

Corswain saw nothing new. A long crescent of pulsing red worlds marked the spread of systems locked in open rebellion; these were the worlds existing in defiance of the Imperium, flying the banners of Horus Lupercal and the Mechanicum of Old Mars. Entire solar systems in breach of the Emperor’s will, opposing just as many systems crying for Imperial aid and Terran reinforcement.

‘Parthac fell earlier this evening,’ the Lion gestured to one of the systems ringed by Martian glyphs. ‘The Fabricator-Governor of Gulgorahd reported his victory four hours ago.’ The primarch’s subtle mirth would be invisible to all but his closest kin. ‘He was less elated when I informed him that his push to take Parthac left Yaelis open to attack. The rebels took Yaelis less than an hour ago.’

‘He overcommitted.’ Corswain watched the flashing glyphs before looking to his liege lord. ‘Again.’

Alajos spoke before the Lion could reply. ‘Did he tender an apology for failing to heed your words when you promised this is exactly what would happen?’

‘Of course not.’ The Lion leaned on the table, his fists on the smooth surface. ‘And that is not why you are here, so spare me the righteous indignation, even if it is fairly placed.’

‘Contact with the Imperium?’ Alajos let hope filter into his voice.

‘No.’ The Lion brushed his gauntleted hand through the flickering hololithic image, seeming to drift deeper into his own thoughts. ‘No, our astropaths are still rendered mute by the warp’s turbulence. I believe the last recorded contact is currently listed as four months and sixteen days ago.’ The warlord’s cold green eyes never wavered from the holo image. ‘Two years of void skirmishes, two years of planetary sieges, two years of global invasions and worldwide retreats, orbital assault and shipboard evacuation... and we have a chance to end it at last.’

Corswain narrowed his eyes. He’d never heard the Lion speak in possibilities before. Always, the primarch spoke with a pragmatist’s tongue guided by an analytical mind, his every wartime utterance drenched in logic, with all sides considered before any remark left his lips.

‘Curze,’ Corswain ventured. ‘Have we located Curze, my liege?’

The Lion shook his head. ‘My venomous brother,’ he gestured to the hololith again, ‘has located us.’

The hololith wavered, crackling audibly as it re-tuned to present another image. ‘One of our outrider vessels, the Seraphic Vigil, received this message from a deep-void beacon left in its patrol path.’

Corswain read the distorted words, silently mouthing them as he did so. They made his skin crawl. ‘I don’t understand,’ he confessed. ‘One of the Lutherian Amendments to the Verbatim. And an unpopular one, at that. Why leave this for us to find?’

The Lion’s murmur of agreement sounder closer to a feral growl. ‘To bait us with mockery, using words Curze likely believes are apt. The beacon was set to transmit coordinates in addition to this message. It appears my beloved brother wishes to meet at last.’

‘This can only be a trap,’ said Alajos.

‘Of course,’ the Lion agreed easily. ‘And yet we will sail into the beast’s jaws this once. We cannot spend eternity butchering one another’s warriors the way we have these last years. If this crusade is ever to end, my brother and I must face one another.’

‘Then continue the hunt,’ Alajos insisted. ‘We catch their fleets–’

‘As often as they catch ours.’ The Lion spoke through closed teeth, his armoured shoulders rising and falling with his heavy breath. ‘For twenty-six months I have chased him. For twenty-six months, he has fled from me, burning worlds before we arrive, crippling supply routes, annihilating Mechanicum outposts. Every ambush we plan, he slips from our fingers, wriggling away unseen. For every victory we claim, Curze gifts us with a loss in return. It is not a hunt, Alajos. If a primarch does not fall, this will be war without end. And neither he nor I will fall without death bestowed by a brother’s hand.’

‘But, my liege–’

‘Be silent, Ninth Captain.’ The Lion’s voice remained measured and low, but cold passion, almost feverish in its intensity, burned in his eyes. ‘We are one of the last loyal Legions left at full strength in the Imperium, and we are alone in the void, seeking to hold the entire kingdom together while all other eyes turn to Terra. Do you think I have no desire to stand with Dorn on the battlements of my father’s palace? Do you believe I wish to linger here in the silence of space, piecing together the shards of this shattered empire? We cannot reach Terra. We tried. We failed. That war is denied to us by the warp’s treacherous tides. But the rest of the galaxy is falling dark, and we may be the only living Legion that bears the Emperor’s light out here among the stars.’

The Lion straightened again, his eyes still fierce with suppressed emotion. ‘That is our duty, Alajos of the Ninth Order. And our Legion has always done its duty. We must win this war. An entire subsector with its forge-worlds bleeding their genius and materiel into surviving, rather than supplying other Imperial forces. The knight worlds do the same, as do the harvest worlds, the host worlds, the ore worlds. The sooner we complete this crusade, the sooner every Imperial sector is bolstered by its efforts, and the sooner we sail to join forces with Guilliman.’ He sighed at this last declaration. ‘Wherever he may be.’

Corswain remained silent throughout all of this. When the Lion’s last words trailed off, leaving the promise hanging in the air, the knight cleared his throat to speak.

‘I understand why you will rise to Primarch Curze’s bait, my liege. But why did you summon us?’

The Lion exhaled slowly, indicating a world on the hololith at the edge of the Eastern Fringe. ‘The coordinates mark this system. I cannot risk the entire Legion fleet abstaining from the crusade on a fraternal whim.’ Here, he grinned – a smile nothing like his subtle, sincere smirk. This was a tiger baring its fangs. ‘I will take a single company and a handful of warships, with a small support fleet. Enough to repel and evade treachery if it strikes, but not enough to risk losing any ground in this pitiful, eternal deadlock if it is all nothing more than a false trail.’

Alajos saluted immediately. ‘The Ninth Order will be honoured to serve as your personal guard, my liege.’

‘And I am honoured to be served by them.’ The Lion nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Cor. You seem thoughtful, little brother.’

‘What is this world’s name?’ Corswain asked.

The Lion consulted the data-screen mounted on his side of the table. ‘Tsagualsa. Listed as barren and unsuitable for colonisation, with no evidence of settlement during Old Night.’

‘So we are summoned by a blood enemy to a dead rock at the galaxy’s edge.’ Corswain glanced at Alajos. ‘If the entire Night Lord fleet is there, you may cross blades with Sevatar a second time.’

The captain lowered his hood, revealing his devastated face. Most of his ruined visage was marred by lumpen scar tissue and discoloured synthetic flesh that hadn’t healed cleanly at the seams. His teeth were blunt steel pegs affixed into reconstructed gums.

‘Good.’ Alajos narrowed his eyes – practically the only unflawed feature on his face. ‘I owe him for this.’

IV

The strike cruiser Vehemence translated in-system alone. It burst into the silence of realspace on grinding, protesting engines, braking as it slowed from the warp rupture in its wake. Momentum desistors fired along the ship’s prow and central spine, lesser brake-engines howling to slow the warship’s forward flight.

In space, it came to a slow crawl in noiseless elegance. On board, the shaking hull coupled with the screaming engines made for a scene altogether less graceful. Hundreds of sweating crew members in the enginarium chambers worked to maintain the immense plasma furnaces, while uniformed officers on the command deck called and demanded status reports from every section of the ship. The Lion’s throne on board the Invincible Reason was a grander affair than anything on the bridge of the Vehemence, and rather than take the captain’s position, the Lion allowed Captain Kellendra Vray to ostensibly remain in command of her vessel. While she sat in her smaller throne, her greying hair bound in a severe ponytail, the Lion stood to the side with his arms crossed over his breastplate as he stared at the oculus screen.

Tsagualsa turned in the void before them: grey, bare, granted only the thinnest cloud cover over its visible hemisphere.

Corswain and Alajos stood away from their lord, watching the world themselves. ‘Permission to speak freely, my liege.’

The Lion nodded, not taking his eyes from the oculus. ‘Granted, Cor.’

‘The enemy has summoned us to a purgatorial shithole.’

The Lion’s lips curled. To the humans nearby, it was a cold sneer. To his warriors, it was the ghost of amusement. ‘I will be sure to include that in the rolls of honour for this campaign. Auspex?’

An officer by the auspex station conferred with the three robed servitors hardwired to the console. He called over to the Lion a moment later. ‘The planet reads as lifeless, my lord – a thin atmosphere, tolerable but devoid of any mass life trace. The soil appears to be faintly irradiated, a natural phenomenon. A fleet with Legiones Astartes code returns is stationed in high geocentric orbit on the planet’s sunless side.’

‘Such literal creatures,’ the Lion growled. ‘Fleet size? Disposition?’

‘Counting for long-range auspex unreliability and warp echoes, it looks like seven vessels. One cruiser and six support ships, all in abeyance of standard formation protocols.’

The Lion rested his hand on the pommel of his sheathed blade. ‘When our support translates in-system, hold a loose formation on approach. Master of vox-officers, when we are in range, hail the enemy cruiser.’

The Angel fleet, modest as it was, arrived piecemeal over the course of the next three hours. When the final destroyer, Seventh Son, drifted into formation with the gathered ships, the Vehemence powered up its engines and guided the flotilla closer to the dead world.

‘We’re already being hailed,’ the master of vox-operators called out. ‘Audio only.’

The Lion inclined his head at the man. A moment later, a soft voice breathed over the bridge speakers, flawed by vox-crackle.

‘Well, well, well. Look what stumbled into our system.’

‘I know that voice.’ The Lion’s tone was ice itself. ‘Cease your barking, dog, and tell me where I will find the master that holds your leash.’

‘Is that any way to greet a beloved nephew?’ The soft voice broke away into short chuckle. ‘My master makes ready to walk the surface of the world below, for he expects you to meet with him. To prove our good intentions, our fleet will move out of orbit, beyond the range necessary to fire on the surface. Meanwhile, scan the world yourself. In the northern reaches of the largest western continental plate, you will find the foundations of a fortress. My primarch will meet you there.’

‘This still reeks of an ambush,’ Alajos warned.

The Lion didn’t reply. Instead, he answered the vox-voice. ‘What is to stop me firing on those coordinates from orbit?’

‘By all means, do just that. Commit to whatever course of action it takes to ease your suspicions. When you have ceased panicking and firing into the shadows, please inform me. I will ask my lord to wait until then.’

‘Sevatar.’ Corswain had never heard the Lion pour so much threat into a single name.

‘Yes, uncle?’ the soft voice chuckled again.

‘Tell your master that I will meet him where he wishes. Inform him to limit his honour guard to two warriors, for I will be doing the same.’

The Lion drew a thumb across his throat, signalling the vox-channel’s termination. Those cold eyes turned upon his closest two sons, and he reached for his helm. ‘Alajos. Corswain. Come with me.’

V

He hated doing this.

‘Permission to speak freely, my liege.’

The Lion stood in full armour now, his features masked by the snarling helm with its angular crest of splayed angel wings. The helm’s slanted red eyes emanated disapproval even before the Lion’s rumbling baritone left the speaker-grille.

‘Not this time, Cor. Focus yourself.’ The sword at the Lion’s hip was as tall as a Legiones Astartes warrior in full war plate. The primarch’s left hand rested on its hilt, his posture somewhere between the piratical grace of a gunslinger and the cautious reverence of a knight preparing to pull steel.

Corswain kept his silence, bolter loosely clutched in his hands. The chamber around them was almost devoid of Gothic ornamentation, its ceiling and walls instead given over to the cabled, thudding engineering of Mechanicum teleportation generators. Several of the rattling engine pods vented near-continuous gushes of steam for no reason Corswain could comprehend.

‘Begin,’ the Lion ordered. At the chamber’s edges, cowled tech-menials cranked levers and manned great bronze wheels, turning them on squealing mechanisms. As they worked, each one chanted a different numerical line of a binary cant, like some bizarre mathematical sea shanty.

The engines started to judder, whining as they cycled up to engage. On a raised platform above the flat chamber deck, a choir of nine robed astropaths sang with closed eyes. Their Gregorian chants were at eerie odds with the blurted coding issued forth from the menials.

Corswain truly loathed travelling like this. Seat him down in the deployment bay of a Stormbird gunship screaming through low atmosphere and into the face of enemy fire rising up from the ground, and he wouldn’t think twice. Buckle him into a drop-pod and spit him from the bowels of an orbiting ship to plough into the soil several kilometres below, and he’d do his duty without a whisper of complaint.

But telepor–

VI

–tation was something else.

Even before the flash of white-gold faded, he felt the world’s wind pushing against his armour with weak breaths, strong enough to do no more than tear at his surplice and the oath scroll bound to his shoulder guard. His bolter was up and ready in the seconds it took for his vision to clear of the chemical-scented mist from their teleportation. Artificial thunder from displaced air echoed in his ears, filtered to tolerable levels by his helm’s autosenses.

The aura of coiling mist would’ve lingered longer but for the breeze. Corswain took a moment to feel the hard earth beneath his boots, to assure himself that he was whole and complete. With teeth gritted and skin crawling, he panned his bolter across the vista before him.

Dusty wind gritted against his visor as his gunsight followed the horizon. They’d materialised in the heart of a crater, spanning at least a kilometre across in all directions. Black stone foundations jutted from the ground – too new to be ruins, they were low walls and pillars that would form the basis of a huge building above. The Night Lords were building something here. A fortress... but the work crews had evidently been withdrawn to make way for this meeting.

Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.

‘Clear,’ he called, in the same moment Alajos called the same.

The Lion moved to one of the black rock pillars, stroking a gauntleted hand down its sculpted side. Corswain doubted it escaped the primarch’s notice that the stone was clearly quarried off-world and brought here for use.

‘Do you hear something?’ he asked.

Alajos turned to the primarch. ‘The wind, my liege.’

Corswain didn’t answer at first. Could he hear something beneath the wind clawing at his helm’s receptors? Something beyond his own slow breathing and the machine-beat of his pulse tracker at the left edge of his retinal display? With a blink-click, he disabled his active retinal screen.

The world’s breath howled on.

‘Just the wind, sire.’

‘Very well,’ the Lion replied. ‘Now we wait.’

VII

On the strike of the third minute, a second sonic boom of displaced air heralded the enemy’s arrival. Corswain looked into the nexus of spreading mist as the ship’s atmosphere teleported down with the enemy dissipated into the wind. His lenses didn’t filter out the light fast enough, and in the wake of the transition flare, Corswain had to blink to clear his aching eyes. Tears came unbidden, not from pain or torment, but as the biological response to soothe the irritation.

The Lion anticipated his movements, for he said ‘Weapons down, little brothers,’ as soon as the knight felt his muscles bunch.

‘Yes, my liege,’ Alajos murmured, displeasure raw in his tone.

Corswain swallowed his awe at what stood before him. A cadaverous god, in midnight clad, each armoured finger ending in a charged blade the length of a scythe. Black hair at the mercy of the world’s winds streamed back from a corpse’s face. Chained skulls rattled against war plate etched with runic writing rejoicing in past massacres and celebrating atrocity against the empire of humanity. This husk of nobility, this emaciated wraith now no more than the shadow of a prince, bared teeth filed to fangs as he opened his arms to the Lion, offering a welcoming embrace.

‘My brother,’ hissed Konrad Curze, Lord of the VIII Legion. His was a viper’s smile, just as predatory, just as brazen in its hunger. ‘I have missed you.’

The Lion hesitated. He raised his hands to his collar, unlocking the helm’s seals hidden there, and pulled the helmet free. An expression of naked surprise marked his features, yet his face was still an angel’s countenance – not the beatific, handsome lies of ancient religious myth, but rather the truth of Terran artistry: a face that could’ve been shaped from tanned marble, emerald eyes with soulful depths, contrasted by a mouth that would forever struggle to show emotion.

To Corswain’s eyes, Curze was pathetic, ghoulish, in comparison. A wretched husk facing a knight-lord, claws against a prince’s sword.

‘Curze?’ The Lion asked, his resonant voice softened by disbelief. ‘What has happened to you?’

The Night Lord ignored the question, speaking with insincerity rich enough to make Corswain’s teeth ache. ‘Thank you for coming. How it warms my heart to see you.’

The Lion drew his blade in a slow, clean movement. He neither brought it en garde, nor threatened the other primarch. Instead, he clutched it in both black gauntlets, the crosspiece hilt before his face as he stared at Curze above the quillions.

‘I will ask you this once and once only: Why did you betray our father?’

‘I would ask you something in return, brother,’ Curze answered with a grin, his filed teeth on display. The clawed primarch’s eyes were unhealthily bright, rich with a secret sickness. ‘Why did you not?’

The Lion lowered his blade to end the salute, knightly respects now paid. ‘Our father has charged me to take your head back to Terra.’

‘Our father said nothing, for he hides within his dungeons, collecting the secrets of the universe and sharing them with no one. Lorgar and Magnus have seen everything our father sought to hide, so do not carry a precious little lie as your shield, Lion. You are Dorn’s hound, running here to the Eastern Fringe because he ordered you.’ Curze licked his filed teeth. ‘Come, brother. Let us at least do one another the service of being honest. I know Dorn.’ Here, the Night Lord gave his cadaverous smile again. ‘He sent you to do that which he feared to try himself.’

‘I did not come to duel with words, Konrad. I came to end this crusade.’

The Night Lord shook his head, his pallid face grey in the weak moonlight. His lips were the only colour on his visage, and even they were a bloodless blue. ‘Speak with me, brother. Listen, reply in kind, and then decide if we must continue this war.’

‘You will not sway me with your traitor’s tongue.’

Curze nodded, utterly unsurprised. His vile facade cracked for a moment, revealing the warrior he’d once been – perhaps never pure, never free of torment, but capable of emotion beyond this condescending bitterness. The strain lines of pain faded from his brow, and the serpent’s sneer left his lips. His voice was still raw, still ruined, but now carried an edge of sorrow. ‘I know. So what harm is there in speaking together, this one last time?’

The Lion nodded. ‘Wait here,’ he ordered his sons. ‘I will return soon.’

VIII

The two Night Lords had no need to introduce themselves, for their identities were known throughout the million-strong ranks of the Legiones Astartes. Both wore helms with painted-skull faceplates; both bore armour trophies of oversized skulls and Dark Angel helms hanging from their war plate on bronze chains; and both stood at ease, watching the warriors from the First Legion through red eye lenses. One of them leaned on the haft of a long halberd, a weapon he was renowned for. The other held a bolter at rest, a cloak of black weave draped over one shoulder and down his back.

‘You look familiar,’ the first warrior spoke. He nodded his head towards Alajos. ‘We met at Kruun, did we not?’

Alajos’s voice barely rose above a growl. ‘Aye. We did.’

‘Yes, I recall the moment now.’ The Night Lord chuckled whisper-soft, and mimed a two-handed chop with his halberd. The deactivated chainblade atop the spear’s haft was over a metre long, grinning with its stilled teeth. ‘I’m surprised you survived, Angel. It was careless of me to allow that. How is the face?’

Corswain moved to rest his hand on his brother’s bolter. He spoke over their helm-vox, so the Night Lords wouldn’t hear. ‘Be calm, captain. Don’t let him wound you with childish words.’

Alajos nodded. He spoke as Corswain moved away. ‘It has healed well. Your flawed carving did sting for several minutes afterwards, though.’

‘That’s good news. It is wise of you to wear the helm this time, cousin. The last time I saw your face, most of it was a wet ribbon of flayed flesh stuck to the ground by my feet. My brothers in the First Company enjoy the tale, for it was the first time I’ve ever started to skin an Angel while he was still alive.’

Alajos grunted in reply, his hands fairly twitching with the need to raise his bolter and open fire. ‘I will kill you, Sevatar. On my life, I swear it.’

‘Cousin, cousin, cousin... I outrank you, do I not? That’s First Captain Sevatar to you, little Angel.’

‘Peace,’ Corswain voxed. ‘Peace, brother. Vengeance will come, and be all the sweeter for this moment.’

This time, the cloaked warrior spoke. ‘You. Angel in the fur. Do you know me?’

Corswain turned to them both. He felt the wind pick up, ruffling the white fur cloak around his shoulders. ‘Yes, Shang. I know you.’

‘The skinned animal you wear as a trophy. I’ve never seen such a thing. What manner of creature is that?’

Corswain grinned. ‘It’s the beast that never dies in my dreams.’

‘Is that some crude Calibanite poetry? We had few poets on our home world, but their works would have made you weep. Our tongue lends itself to melodic prose very gracefully.’

‘Nath sihll shah, vor’vorran kalshiel,’ Corswain said, in fluent Nostraman. Shang and Sevatar shared another laugh.

‘Your accent is brutal,’ Sevatar admitted, ‘but that was nicely done. It will be a shame to kill you both when the time comes. You have my oath here, on VIII Legion soil, that we will make trophies from your helms. You deserve nothing less.’

‘How comforting,’ Corswain chuckled with them. ‘I have a question of my own.’

Sevatar performed a mocking little bow. ‘We are at your service, cousins.’

‘Your gauntlets,’ Corswain said, and left it at that.

Sevatar held up his free hand, as he continued to lean on the halberd with the other. The gauntlet was at odds with his midnight armour – where the war plate was deep, dark blue and marked by streaks of lightning, his gauntlets were painted arterial red.

‘A mark of shame in our Legion,’ the Night Lord’s voice still betrayed more amusement than regret. ‘A warrior’s gauntlets are marked this way when he has failed the primarch gravely enough to warrant death. He will wear the stain of failure on his hands until his execution, at the hour of the primarch’s choosing.’

Corswain watched the enemy captain through the filter of retinal target locks. ‘A curious custom.’

‘Perhaps. But so is hiding your armour beneath cloth robes.’

Corswain felt himself grinning again. ‘A knightly tradition from our home world.’

Sevatar nodded. ‘This is a gang tradition from ours. The hands of traitors and fools were tattooed red by their families to show them as deathmarked. A sign that no gang or family would tolerate grave failure, but that the condemned still had labours to perform before they were allowed to die.’

‘So which are you, a traitor or a fool?’

The Night Lord’s voice revealed his own smile, even if his soulless helm did not. ‘Both.’

Alajos was losing his patience. ‘Why do you revel with these wretches, brother? And what did you say in their snake-tongue?’

‘I told them that I knew they mated with pigs.’

‘Madness. Do they have no honour? Why would they laugh at such an insult?’

‘Because they are not knights. They possess honour of a kind, it is simply different to ours.’

‘Perhaps you should spend less time in the archives learning the tongues and traditions of murderers.’ Alajos’s tone carried more than a hint of reprimand. It was almost an accusation.

‘And what of “knowing one’s enemy”? Balance your humours, I am on your side, remember.’ Corswain turned to the west as the primarchs stalked back, moving slowly, still speaking in low voices. ‘The Lion returns. Be ready.’

Alajos grunted again, his mood too sour to bother with words.

IX

The warriors fell silent as their lords returned – still distant, but close enough to be heard. The Lion acknowledged his warriors with a curt nod. They responded with salutes, forming the sign of the aquila over their tabards. Curze ignored his sons, still addressing his brother.

‘Horus himself charged me to speak those words to you,’ he said. If the Night Lord had seemed cadaverous before, now he was practically exhumed. The primarch’s eyes, with what little white actually showed around the black pupils, were inhumanly bloodshot. His gaunt features were dusted with a faint sheen of cold sweat, and a trickle of dark blood ran from his nose. He wiped it away on the back of his gauntlet. ‘Savage weapons, one and all, too dangerous to be wielded without cost. That is all history will see of us. Even you, Lion. Even you.’

The Lion shook his crowned head. ‘You underestimate our father’s empire.’

‘And you overestimate humanity. Look at us. See how we’ve duelled for the last two years out here in the void. A crusade between two Legions and countless worlds that is still only just beginning. You have chased me for two years, across a hundred battlefields, and why do we meet now? Because I allow it.’

The Lion conceded to that with a slight nod. ‘You hide, like vermin fleeing the coming of dawn.’

Curze shrugged, the barest rise of one shoulder guard. ‘You will never reach Terra in time to defend it, brother. The warp will not let you. This crusade will not let you. I will not let you. Do you think the archives of future generations will look upon you kindly for your absence?’

Curze paused in his diatribe, wiping away a fresh trickle of blood. ‘Or will the human descendants of this Imperium look to your legend and whisper of doubt? Will they ask why you were not present to defend the Throneworld, and speak likely lies that perhaps the Lion was not as loyal and true as the mighty, perfect Rogal Dorn? Perhaps the Lion and his Dark Angels waited in the deepest reaches of space, watching, listening, and deciding to join the fight only when an obvious victor emerged.’

The Night Lord’s eyes glinted again, with both amusement and sorrow. ‘That is your fate, Lion. That is your future.’

‘Forgive me, brother.’

Curze tilted his head. ‘For what?’

Corswain was watching both primarchs yet still never saw what happened, such was the speed of the Lion’s movements. One moment the two brothers were speaking – the Lion’s features cast down in contemplation, Curze’s eyes fever-bright as he promised an ignoble fate. The next, Curze’s features twisted into a taut rictus of pain, blood running between his clenched teeth. The Lion held tight to the grip of his blade, buried to the hilt in his brother’s stomach. More than a metre of shining, bloodstained steel thrust from the back of Curze’s armour.

‘For such a dishonourable blow,’ the Lion whispered into Curze’s pale, bleeding face. ‘I do not care who knows the truth now, tomorrow, or in ten thousand years. Loyalty is its own reward.’

The Lion pulled his sword free. The Night Lord fell back.

At the same moment, the chainblade atop Sevatar’s halberd snarled to life.

X

Corswain vaulted a low wall and crouched behind it, taking aim over the top. His visor display realigned, targeting reticule skipping left and right, locking onto nothing. Sevatar and Shang had vanished as soon as the first blow fell. Alajos and Corswain had raised their weapons, issuing a challenge to empty air. The Lion was already following the retreating, limping Curze, leaving his two warriors behind.

Alajos pinned himself to a pillar now, his breathing coming over the vox. ‘I didn’t see where they went.’

‘Nor I,’ Corswain confessed. ‘This is Corswain of the Ninth, to the Vehemence. Respond, Vehemence.’

‘Vray of the Vehemence.’ How calm she sounded. Corswain almost laughed.

‘Ware treachery in the heavens,’ he said. ‘We’ve engaged the enemy.’ Corswain caught sight of the Lion through a small forest of pillars, advancing on the retreating Curze, their weapons crashing together several times a second.

‘Do you require a teleportation recall?’ the mortal captain’s reply came back.

Corswain risked another glance over the wall, but saw no sign of Sevatar or Shang. They’d gone to ground in the foundations of the fortress, out of sight but not out of mind.

‘No. We need to move. You won’t be able to maintain a recall lock.’

Alajos stared around the stone column. ‘Let’s go.’

Corswain followed, keeping low, trusting the wind’s roar to mask the sounds of his boots on the ground.

XI

The primarchs duelled, heedless of their sons’ hunt. The Lion’s blade wove an exquisite dance, while pain acted as Curze’s catalyst. The Night Lord ignored the bloody wound in his belly, letting his arcane genetics quickly seal the injury shut. He fought as he always fought – like a killer backed into a corner. Brutal scythes slashed from their housings on the back of the primarch’s oversized gauntlets, and the air rang with the clash of metal against metal, with the fizzing crack of opposing power fields.

The Lion wrenched his blade back, the silver steel breaking through the air in lashing chops, blurring into a crescent that reflected the moons above. Each carving strike crashed against Curze’s blocking claws. Both warriors moved beyond mortal capability, with speed that defied sight. Yet one was a knight, the other merely a murderer. Curze’s grin was a brittle facade at the best of times. Now it turned to glass.

‘We never sparred, did we?’ the Lion sounded almost bored, his words still carrying over the vox. Every few seconds would see a new cut ripped open in Curze’s armour or slashed across his face. He was fast enough to avoid death at the Lion’s hands, but not skilful enough to flawlessly defend against every attack.

‘I never cared for swords,’ Curze weaved under the carving blade, thrusting out with both claws. The Lion tilted back, his balance executed to preternatural perfection. Curze’s claws shredded the ivory tabard, barely scratching the layered ceramite beneath.

‘There exists nothing of elegance inside you.’ The Lion turned the blade in his hands, parrying another dual-claw strike with his single blade. ‘And nothing of loyalty. For a time, I considered you my truest brother. No others grew untouched by civilisation, only you and I.’

Curze licked his sharpened teeth, eyes narrowed with effort. ‘You should be with us, brother. Even your own Legion senses it. The First Legion’s strife is not unknown to the Warmaster.’

‘There is no strife.’

Their blades locked in that moment, Curze catching the Lion’s sword in the net of his linked claws.

‘No?’ The Night Lord spat the word as a curse. ‘No risk of the fair Angels falling? When did you last walk upon the soil of Caliban, oh proud one?’

The Lion smiled – the first time Curze had ever seen it – but the movement of his brother’s lips still did nothing to warm his statuesque visage. Stone gave off more warmth than that smirk. He gave no answer beyond the smile.

Curze returned it, just as insincere, just as lifeless. In that moment, he stopped fighting, ceased his measured duelling, and leapt at his brother with a howl. Where the warring primarchs had represented the pinnacle of human possibility in warfare, now the Lion’s poise, skill and grace counted for nothing. They brawled as brothers, rolling across the ground, hands at each other’s throats.

When the tumbling ended, Curze knelt atop the Lion. Pinkish saliva sprayed from his pale lips as he bore down on his brother, claws clasped to strangle, to inflict that most slow and intimate of murders, when slayer and slain stare into each other’s eyes.

‘Die,’ Curze breathed. Desperation ruined his voice, rasping it from bleeding lips. ‘You should never have survived that tainted world you call home.’

The Lion’s armoured hands grasped his brother’s throat in mirror response, but the Night Lord’s advantage was crystal clear. Curze shook the Lion’s neck in his fists, cracking his brother’s head against the rocky ground again and again and again.

‘Die now, brother. History will be kinder to you this way.’

XII

He was getting farther ahead, weaving through a forest of stone columns and rockcrete walls, far enough for Alajos to warn him, ‘Caution, brother. We’re being hunted.’

‘Why haven’t you summoned the Ninth Order?’

Alajos grunted in response. ‘I already have. A drop-pod assault will still take seven minutes to reach us.’

Corswain moved to another pillar, his eyes gleaming red and his tabard turned cream in the gloom. ‘I’m going to help the Lion.’

‘Corswain...’ Alajos warned again. ‘He needs none of our help to slay that ghoul.’

‘I saw him go down into the dust.’ Corswain risked another glance. The fortress’s foundations were a forest of stone columns and walls, and the wind whipping through the crater stole any hope of hearing the Night Lords’ armour thrumming.

‘What did you see?’ Alajos’s voice came more hesitantly now, ripe with doubt.

‘The revenant leapt at the Lion. They went down into the dust.’ Corswain listened to the wind clawing at his helm, muffled to dull buffeting. ‘I think I see them. Cover me.’

‘Wait!’

He didn’t wait. He sprinted through the construction site, falling under fire almost immediately. Shang. It had to be. Corswain weaved through fire from his left, ignoring Alajos’s warning cries. Several shells struck home, ripping chunks from his war plate and sending black armour shards cracking against the stone walls. Each detonating shell kicked like a warhorse, knocking him off-balance, but he could focus on nothing but the Lion lying in the dirt, his slack neck in a heretic’s grip.

The enemy fire ceased. Alajos was breathless over the vox, ‘I’ll... kill Shang.’ The audible clashing of blades served as percussion to the words. The captain already battled the Night Lord. ‘Behind you!’ he threw another warning over the vox.

As Corswain tore closer to the prone figure of his liege lord, the snarl of a chainblade throttling up came from behind. He didn’t turn as Sevatar finally made himself known, never breaking the headlong sprint.

‘I can outrun him,’ he whispered into the vox. The chainspear’s growl was already fading. His hearts thudded as hard as a warhorse’s hooves on the snowy ground. Around pillars, over low walls, he sprinted and weaved, doing all he could in case Sevatar opened fire.

Behind him, only silence. Over the vox, the crash of blade on blade.

‘Brother,’ Alajos voxed, ‘keep running.’ The tone of his voice was enough to make Corswain turn, though he didn’t slow down. After vaulting another wall, he looked over his cloaked shoulder just in time to see his captain die.

XIII

Alajos was many things beside his rank of Ninth Captain: a loyal son; a dutiful knight; a gifted tactician; and a warrior with a head for the detailed logistics of planning and organising a crusade force. He was also one of the finest swordsmen in the First Legion, and had once lasted almost a full minute in a spar with his primarch.

He suspected the number of Legiones Astartes warriors capable of besting him numbered fewer than twenty across all the Legions. Ezekyle Abaddon of the traitorous Sons was one; Jubal Khan of the Scars another; and Templar Sigismund of the Fists definitely another.

As was Sevatar. His name joined the others, coursing through both sides of the Imperial Civil War, cheered by some, cursed by others.

Shang was Nostraman gutter trash – he offered almost no threat at all despite being his primarch’s huscarl. When Alajos assured Corswain he would kill the Night Lord, it hadn’t been false bravado. He could, and would, do just that. The first clashes of blade on blade told Alajos all he needed to know about the other warrior’s form: Shang was an aggressive killer, seeking to stab rather than chop, dodging rather than blocking. But the tells betrayed him, as they always did to those who knew what to seek. Shang was slower than Alajos. Weaker. Less experienced. He overbalanced when he dodged. He missed the perfect angle of his blade each time he parried.

Appallingly inelegant swordwork. He’d be dead in minutes. Alajos engaged him and held nothing back, utterly convinced of victory.

When Sevatar finally broke cover behind Corswain, Alajos had whispered his warning. Corswain chose to run on. Sevatar, curse his eyes, chose not to pursue. Alajos had watched Corswain’s pounding boots breed more distance between them, while Sevatar stalked back to aid his foul brother, Shang.

Alajos backed away from them both now, his blade up to guard against Shang’s stabbing sword and Sevatar’s grinding halberd. The Night Lords stalked closer, stolen skulls and Dark Angel helms clacking against their ceramite war plate as they dangled on chains.

On a whim, Alajos tore the helm from his head. If this was the end, then by the Emperor’s blood, it would be done properly. He raised his blade in salute to them both, ceremonially kissing the hilt as he watched them come closer.

The blade lowered, at the ready.

‘I am Alajos,’ he told them. ‘Captain of the Ninth Order of the First Legion. Brother to all knights, son to one world, sworn to one lord.’

Sevatar lowered his halberd with a lance’s intent. The whirring teeth chewed air with a petulant whine. ‘I am Sevatar the Condemned,’ he growled, ‘and I will wear your skin as a cloak before dawn ruins the sky.’

‘Come then,’ Alajos chuckled, though never in life had he felt less like laughing. They charged as one, a short blade and cutting spear descending in the same moment. The Angel parried, barely, his long sword catching both strikes with awkward grace. All the while he surrendered ground, backing away, drawing the Night Lords with him.

In his own Legion, only two knights had managed to beat him in the sparring circles. One was Astelan, absent these past years from the Great Crusade. The other was Corswain, Paladin of the Ninth Order, bearer of the Mantle of the Champion.

With Alajos’s death, he would buy his brother’s life.

‘Brother,’ he voxed, ‘keep running.’

XIV

Corswain’s retinal display blurred as it refocused. The autosenses obeyed his impulse, tracking the distant movement and zooming to capture Alajos backing away from his attackers. It ended with humiliating speed, despite the captain parrying several strikes in a matter of heartbeats. Even at this distance, Sevatar was a blur of movement in grainy night-vision, his long halberd cutting and chopping, coming closer to digging into the Angel’s armour with each strike.

The end came when Shang’s blade plunged into Alajos’s thigh, driving the knight down to one knee. The Angel’s return cut cleaved through the Night Lord’s forearm, chopping the hand – and the sword it held – free. Even as Shang was staggering back, Sevatar let his blade fall.

Corswain saw his brother’s head roll clear of the armoured shoulders, the murder that failed all those months ago finally finished.

He turned and ran again, rounding the final pillar. Alajos’s sacrifice bought him precious seconds. He used them to hurl himself onto the primarch’s back, driving his sword through the spine of one of the Emperor’s sons.

XV

Curze screamed, his ghastly face raised to the sky. More blood drizzled from his pale lips as the insane pressure in his back and chest increased, until his breastplate gave way with a brittle crack that split the night. The wounded demigod clutched at the sword tip poking from below his collarbone, screaming like a man doused in chemical fire. More than a shriek of pain, it was an aural assault in itself, sending Corswain staggering back. The knight’s grip slipped from his blade – in desperation he clutched at whatever he could reach. One hand fisted in the primarch’s lank black hair, the other snagged a thick chain hanging from Curze’s pauldron.

The Night Lord primarch staggered to his feet, hauling the struggling warrior up with him. Corswain yanked the primarch’s head back, pulling out a fistful of tangled hair, while ripping the bronze chain from the shoulder guard gave him a weapon. Instead of lashing it against the primarch’s skull as a whip, he slapped it around Curze’s throat, holding tight to both ends. The cold metal garrotte tightened as the Night Lord stumbled and thrashed. Corswain tugged harder, hearing the soft, wet clicks of vertebrae giving way beneath Curze’s ragged gasps.

Corswain had broken horses as part of his squire training back on Caliban. Instinct made him tense the first time a horse bucked beneath him, and his rigid muscles had seen him easily thrown from the beast’s back. To break a horse, especially the proud and muscled chargers so prized by the home world’s knights, required as much grace and care as it did raw strength. The key was to move with the horse, to stay balanced, for the rider to keep his muscles loose and flexible in order to adapt to whatever tricks the creature might try. Corswain hadn’t thought of those days in a long time, but the bucking, thrashing ride he endured now brought it all rushing back. He knew he couldn’t have been on the primarch’s back for more than a handful of seconds, but it already felt like an age.

Curze twisted again, with enough force this time that the Angel lost his grip on the heavy chain. Corswain ended his tumbling fall by crashing against a stone pillar, the impact of his armour plating taking a huge chunk from the dense stone. He’d been shrugged off like a bothersome insect. Even strangled, beaten, bleeding, cut and stabbed, Curze had hurled him aside with almost no effort at all.

He hurt. Blood of the Emperor, he hurt. But he scrambled back to his feet, reaching for his sword in the dirt. If he could–

The shadow fell over him. Something hit – a mountain avalanche against his left side – throwing him back into the air. The ground spun, became the heavens, became both earth and sky at once. Corswain felt himself thudding along the rocky earth until he crashed to a rest against a stone wall.

For a moment, all he could taste and see was dust and blood, blessedly knocked insensitive to the protests of his tormented body.

The dull-witted invulnerability passed all too quickly, leaving him at the mercy of his injuries. His head was a swollen globe of blunt pain, contained by the helm that prevented his skull from coming to pieces. Agony replaced strength in his body; his entire left side felt shattered, literally broken into fragments. When he rose, it was with a scream of spasming effort. Only one leg and one arm obeyed his needs. One shattered eye lens showed a flawed, lagging view of the foundation site. The other showed nothing at all. He was blind in that eye, feeling something hot, wet and useless now occupying the broken socket. Three teeth fell from his lips as he voiced a second scream. They rattled at the base of his helmet.

Through what remained of his vision, he saw his liege lord standing once more. The Lion, a bleeding statue, advanced on Curze with sword in hand. In turn, Curze readied his claws. Several of the talon-blades were broken, scattered over the ground. They came together yet again, weapons sparking and flaring.

Corswain’s muscles ached with the sudden influx of chemical stimulants as his armour’s internal systems sought to keep him alive. He doubted it would work for long. Something dense and heavy hung in his chest, turning each breath into breathing fire. Something had burst within him, he was certain of it. Acidic spittle ran from his lips, pooling at his sealed collar. He’d drown in his own blood and spit if he didn’t get his helm off soon, or at least unseal the mouth-grille.

A figure obstructed his view of the primarchs. A figure with a spear in its hands.

‘Not much left of you, is there?’ Sevatar chuckled in a low, crackling vox-voice.

‘The moons are crying,’ Corswain breathed, and crashed down to his knees. His fading eye stared skywards, watching as the moons wept fire.

XVI

The first drop-pod hammered home into a gravel slope, sending ashy stones spraying out in a burst of debris. Heat-shielding on its black hull glowed from the atmospheric descent, while the whining turbines hissed with vented steam. Sealant bolts popped with gunshot cracks, and the pod’s sides opened with all the crude grace of a mechanical flower. The Dark Angels emerged with their bolters up and firing.

The second landed cleaner, followed by the third and fourth. All three struck home across the crater, spilling their knights onto the construction site.

‘How quickly the tide turns.’ Corswain was grinning bloodily behind his helm now. The shadows vanished. Sevatar and Shang fled as abruptly as they’d descended.

Rattling like hailstones, more drop-pods fell from above. Some were blackened by allegiance, others by the atmospheric fire. Both fleets in orbit disgorged warriors onto the surface, even as they were surely battling in the void. Here on the ground, Corswain could barely see anything at all. He heard the Legions meeting in the skidding clashes of chainblades on ceramite, and the insistent crash of bolters, but saw precious little. With the hand that still obeyed him, he dragged his helmet off, wincing as the cold night air hit his savaged face.

The Lion was in similar ruin, surrounded by his black-clad warriors. Blood sheeted down the back of his head, a liquid cloak down his shoulders. Corswain had no idea how he still lived with so little of his skull intact.

Curze laughed – at least, he began to – before his own warriors began to drag him back just as the Angels dragged the Lion. The two primarchs staggered back from one another, cursing each other above their sons’ heads, both hindered by weakened limbs and grievous wounds that made the air stink with their genetically divine blood.

The great sword impaled the ground as it fell from the Angel Lord’s grip, while Curze could no longer lift his claws.

Corswain felt himself sliding back down to the ground despite his attempt at moving to the primarch’s side. Strong hands pulled at him, hauling him up, forcing him to do what his muscles wouldn’t allow. He turned his head, seeing with his good eye.

‘Alajos,’ he said.

‘The captain is dead, Your Grace. It is I, Sergeant Tragan.’

‘Sevatar is here. Watch for him. He is here, I swear it. He killed Alajos. I saw it happen.’

‘Yes, Your Grace. Come... this way. Thunderhawks are inbound.’ Across the vox, he yelled to every surviving soul, ‘First Legion, fall back!’

Corswain limped in his brother’s arms, vaguely wondering if he was dying. It felt like it, though never having died before, it was a guess.

‘You’re not dying, Your Grace,’ Sergeant Tragan laughed now. Corswain hadn’t realised he was murmuring out loud.

His last vision was of the primarchs, both near driven to their knees, surrounded by growing phalanxes of their armoured sons. Curze reached his claws for the Lion, snarling and cursing, too weak to resist his Legion dragging him from the field. The Lion’s reaction was a foul mirror, made all the more hideous because of the warlord’s majesty. He screamed oaths from his bleeding, angelic face, pulled back from the battle by his own sons.

Above the battle, he heard Sevatar’s cry. ‘Death to the False Emperor! Death to his Angels in Black!’ His skin crawled in the wake of those words. Such conviction. Such hate.

‘The Thramas Crusade,’ Corswain sighed. ‘They are right, all of them. This war is just beginning.’

‘Your Grace?’

‘My sword,’ Corswain reached a hand out, as if he could touch the opposing groups of warriors.

‘Where is it, Your Grace?’

‘Gone,’ Corswain closed his remaining eye. ‘I left it in a primarch’s spine.’

XVII

The beast never dies in his dreams.

He watches it slink through the trees, keeping its sinuous body low to the ground, its movements fluid enough to be sickening and boneless. Its ears rake back flat against its head, while its clawed paws are silent on the deep snow. The creature hunts, eager but passionless, its dead cat’s eyes glinting with emotionless hunger.

The boy takes the shot, and the shell goes wide.

With the cold air split by the crack of gunfire, the beast twists in the snow, ghost-light on the ground as it snarls at its attacker. Quivering black spines rise from the denser white fur at its back and neck, an instinctive defensive response. A tail lashes behind the beast in threatening rhythm, coiling and thrashing in time with the boy’s own heartbeat.

For a moment he sees what the elder knights all claimed to see – a sight he’d always believed to be the lies of ageing warriors girding their fading legends with false poetry.

Yet there it is in the beast’s black eyes, something beneath the raw desire to survive. Recognition stares back at him: a crude intelligence, malicious despite its feral simplicity. The moment shatters as the creature vents its anger. Something between a lion’s burbling snarl and a bear’s hoarse roar rings out in the cold air between them.

The boy fires again. Three more shots echo through the forest, disturbing the snow bundled on branches above. Shivering fingers seek to reload the primitive pistol, but his aim was true and his father’s pistol sang its killing song. The beast limps now, dragging itself closer in a grotesque, mangled run.

He feels the chunky shells scatter from his grip, spilling out onto the snow. It’s too cold to reload with his fingers numbed to raw senselessness. He drops the pistol, too. Not from fear or pain, but because he needs two hands for what will come next.

Steel whispers as it slides from his sheath, a sword almost as long as the boy is tall, clutched in two shivering hands. As the beast stalks closer, he sees the malign hunger in its eyes cool to a feral wariness. It’s dying, but that only makes it bolder. Its foul sentience knows it no longer has anything to lose. It hunts now out of malice alone.

Flakes of snow drift onto the blade, freezing into diamonds wedded to the steel.

‘Come on,’ the boy breathes the whispered words. ‘Come on...’

The beast leaps, striking his chest with the force of a stallion’s kick, and he’s down on his back. The beast weighs as much as a warhorse, its twitching bulk pressing down on the boy’s slender body. The ache in his chest is a dull, creaking crackle, as if his lungs are filled with dry leaves. He knows his ribs are shattered, but there’s almost no pain at all. Steaming blood courses down the blade and onto his hands.

Finally, the beast ceases its shaking. The boy gathers his strength and counts to three, rolling the stinking creature onto its side. The spines still quiver and leak clear fluid. He’s careful not to touch those.

The sword in his hands is bonded to his fingers by a coating of the beast’s cooling blood. He lets the blade fall into the snow, and draws the serrated skinning knife from his boot. Birds sing in the branches above, though birdsong on Caliban is never beautiful. Raptors cry challenges at one another, while carrion birds caw for corpse-meat.

Slowly, everything starts to whiten, to fade away as other, truer sounds begin infiltrating his thoughts: the sound of a ticking fan blade in a labouring air filtrator; boot-steps on the deck above; the omnipresent rumble of live engines.

At last, he opens his eyes.

Both of them. Both work. He looks at the harsh illumination globes above, smelling the sharp disinfectant smell of the medicae chambers.

With a pained grunt, Corswain rises and says, ‘Water.’

XVIII

His mind wandered during the morning vigil. As Corswain knelt with his brothers, his muscles still stiff with aches and discoloured by bruises, he found the serenity of purposes ever more difficult to attain. His head remained bowed against the hilt of his sword, and he gave all the appearance of another knight in dutiful reflection of the coming crusade. In truth, he dwelled in memories. His thoughts flew back to a world that hated him.

Tsagualsa.

The name brought a sneer to his lips, hidden by the hood that cast his features into shadow. Tsagualsa, a dead world the Night Lords claimed as their own; a world where primarchs had been reduced to screaming brothers, and the foundations of a fortress would one day rise to become an enemy stronghold.

Tragan called to him once the reverence ended. The other knights filed from the chamber of reflection, their white surplice robes not enough the cover the battle scarring that ravaged every suit of black armour.

‘Your Grace,’ Tragan greeted him as he limped closer.

Corswain smiled in reply. ‘You do not need to call me that any more, captain. Is something amiss?’

Tragan, like his brothers, wore his full armour beneath a clean surplice. The hood was down, revealing his strong, aquiline features for all to see.

‘The Lion summons us,’ he said.

Corswain would‘ve checked his weapons, had they still been at his side. Instead, he nodded. ‘Very well.’

XIX

The lord of the First Legion sat as he so often sat these nights, leaning back in his ornate throne of ivory and obsidian. His elbows rested upon the throne’s sculpted arms, while his fingers were steepled before his face, just barely touching his lips. Unblinking eyes, the brutal green of Caliban’s forests, stared dead ahead, watching the flickering hololith of embattled stars.

Tragan and Corswain approached the throne as one. In a display far from perfect unity, the captain drew his blade and knelt before his liege, while Corswain went down slower – his body still sore, muscles still at odds with his desires. The Lion watched their obeisance with impassive eyes. When he spoke, his voice was the grind of thunder at the horizon – it could never be mistaken for human, and the pale scar across his tanned throat didn’t help humanise his tone.

‘Rise.’

They rose as commanded. Corswain stood with muscles taut, arms crossed over his breastplate, his armour enlivened by the thick, white fur pelt draping down his back. The skinned beast’s fanged head draped over his shoulder guard, forming the cloak’s binding.

‘You summoned us, my liege?’

‘I did.’ The Lion remained seated with his fingers steepled before his lips. ‘We have made contact with Imperial forces.’

‘Orders?’ Corswain asked, feeling his heart beat faster. ‘A summons?’

‘Neither. We will not abandon the Thramas Crusade until these systems are ours. The Imperium lives and dies by what we do here in the deepest reaches. Defending Terra means nothing if the rest of the empire is ash.’

‘I do not understand, sire. What force has made contact with us?’

The Lion shook his crowned head again, watching the hololith. His eyes reflected bright clusters of stars and worlds, while his voice was uncharacteristically soft.

‘We have made contact with several of my brothers and their Legions,’ he said, ‘for the first time since we parted company with the Wolves.’

‘Is it the Wolf King, sire?’ Corswain made no effort to disguise his reluctance. The Angels and the Wolves had hardly parted on brotherly terms.

‘No, Cor. The hail comes from Guilliman and our cousins within the Thirteenth Legion. Knowing we have been unable to reach Terra, it seems the Lord of Ultramar wishes us at his side instead.’

Before the warriors could reply, the Lion narrowed his Calibanite eyes. ‘Unending Imperial ambition has not bred warriors with the warm hearts of men, but angels with the cold hearts of weapons.’ He rose from his throne, circling the hololithic table, watching the worlds turn about their suns.

‘My sons,’ he smiled, though it was utterly without warmth. ‘It seems Horus is not the only soul to believe he is heir to the empire.’

About The Author

Aaron Dembski-Bowden wrote the Horus Heresy novels Betrayer and The First Heretic, as well as the novella Aurelian and the audio drama Butcher's Nails, for the same series. He is also responsible for the popular Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Helsreach, the Grey Knights novel The Emperor's Gift and numerous short stories. He lives and works in Northern Ireland.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in 2011 in the Age of Darkness anthology by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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