Betrayer Read online

‘And Ahriman, he is… similar?’

  Magnus rested a hand on his brother’s shoulder, causing no tangible sensation as he did so. The ethereal hand hovered against the parchment bound to Lorgar’s armour.

  ‘He is. A sickening thing for us to share in common, isn’t it?’

  Lorgar nodded and released a soft breath, not quite a sigh. ‘I know I’ve been a coward, at times. For all my passion, my zeal, I faltered at the final hurdle. I should never have sent Argel Tal into the Eye before I entered myself. Of all things, I regret that the most. He has become a haunted creature, plagued by the ghost of a single life he failed to save. Worse, he’s caught between what he was and what he is destined to become.’

  The ghostly hand lifted. ‘No fate is sealed, Lorgar. Change it while you still can.’

  ‘I mean to do just that. He is the best and worst of my sons. The strongest and yet the most broken. I’ve learned a great deal from what the Pantheon has done to him.’

  Magnus turned his face to the Great Ocean’s tides breaking over the ship’s Geller field. ‘I dislike you referring to those sentient storms as a pantheon.’

  Lorgar’s sideward glance made his armour joints whirr. ‘One word is as good as any, Magnus. And I cannot change the truth of what they are.’

  ‘Words have power, Lorgar. I scarcely need to remind you of that.’ The sorcerer grinned suddenly. ‘And stop gawping at me, brother! Especially at my eye.’

  His smile didn’t quite rob his words of their hardness.

  But Lorgar didn’t obey. He stared openly at the constant metamorphosis of Magnus’s visage: a warlord with a missing left eye, the wound sewn closed; a cyclops with one great orb in place of human eyes; a sorcerer with smooth flesh where a right eye had never existed.

  When the Word Bearer finally spoke, his tone was completely devoid of the halting doubt that had marked his life for so many years before Isstvan V.

  ‘It has always unnerved me how you look the most like Father.’

  Magnus raised a scarred eyebrow. ‘I? You were made to mirror him, Lorgar. Not I.’

  ‘I did not mean physically.’ Lorgar brushed a scriptured hand across his equally tattooed face. ‘I’m speaking of your… facelessness. You are as powerful as him, and your face dances in the same way.’

  It was Magnus’s turn to chuckle. ‘I am not as strong as our father. Would that I was.’

  Lorgar waved it aside. ‘Have any of us even seen your real face? Did you ever have two eyes?’

  Magnus tilted his crowned head. ‘Didn’t you hear the story of how I tore the right eye from its socket in sacrifice for knowledge?’ Magnus smiled. ‘I like that one. It might be my favourite.’

  ‘I’ve heard them all,’ Lorgar replied, eager to learn more but letting the matter drop. He knew too well that his copper-skinned brother could not be tempted into spilling revelations when he didn’t wish to. ‘I need your counsel, Magnus.’

  ‘It’s yours, as always. Though I’ll remind you what happened the last time you asked my advice, only to ignore it.’

  The Word Bearer didn’t laugh at the bitter jest; he didn’t even smirk. ‘You mean when I found that Father was lying to the entire Imperium and that the universe is not the godless place he insists it is? Yes, I have a vague recollection of those events.’

  ‘That is one way of looking at it. Not the right way, of course.’

  Lorgar shook his head. ‘I have no wish, and no need, to debate such matters. What troubles me is something far closer to home. Watch, brother. This was last month, when we assaulted some meaningless Throne-loyal world that Angron couldn’t just leave in peace. His World Eaters couldn’t be recalled. They massacred the populace.’

  He gestured with his empty hand, and a misty image formed before both brothers. Magnus recognised it at once: a figure, armed with two heavy, brutal axes, and armoured in the stylised bronze finery of a gladiator-king. The figure threw back its scarred head, roaring in silence to the sky. Cables thrashed from his skull as a mane of cybernetic dreadlocks. Most were plugged into the power feeds of his armour. As usual, several had torn free in the heat of battle.

  ‘He’s dying,’ said Lorgar.

  Magnus looked at the silent image of Angron facing down a charging Chimera transport. It struck him and ground to a halt. The primarch lifted it by the front ramming bars, flipping it onto its back. Its treads raced in futility the entire time.

  ‘He looks in fine health to me.’

  ‘No. He’s dying. The implants are killing him.’

  Magnus turned to Lorgar. ‘So?’

  ‘So.’ The Word Bearer stared at the image. ‘I’m going to save him.’

  Magnus didn’t ask how. He was silent a long moment, before cutting to the core. ‘You have always been a fey creature, Lorgar. Sentiment guides you. You know the value of loyalty to those few who have been loyal to you. I admire that. Truly. But would the galaxy really miss Angron’s tortured soul? Would his Legion even mourn his loss? Is his life really worth saving?’ As his questions trailed away, Magnus turned his attention to the warp once more. He smiled.

  ‘Something amuses you, brother?’ asked Lorgar, his golden eyes glinting in the warp’s hateful light.

  The sorcerer nodded. ‘I have just sensed where we are.’

  The Fidelitas Lex burst into existence, ripping its way back to reality on shrieking engines. The wound that gave birth to it was a tear in space and time, pulsing in the darkness, bringing the impossibility of sound to the vacuum of space. A terrible screaming heralded the warship’s arrival, and erratic, maddened laughter followed it through.

  Kinetic generators along the warship’s belly and backbone groaned as they woke, charging the nothingness around the Lex, bringing its void shields into being. Along its flanks and battlements, domes opened in a rattling ballet and blast shields lifted from gun ports as cannons juddered out into the void.

  The arcane drives gifting the vessel with warp flight cycled down, relinquishing control of the ship to its physical engines. Deep in the vessel’s armoured prow, a man with three eyes and a bloody cough surrendered control of the Lex back to the strategium, where hundreds of crew members were securing themselves into their thrones, bathed in the flashing lights of a battle stations alert.

  Smaller ships ripped into reality behind the Lex, filling its wake with hungry iron children – all bladed, all battlemented. The escorts and destroyers burned their engines harder and hotter than the battleships, powering ahead to establish the first semblance of attack formation.

  A shadow filled the wound, a reflection of the Word Bearers flagship. It shivered through into the material realm – a thing of crude, martial beauty, scorched and scarred from fighting at the heart of every battle it had ever seen. Just as the Lex had immediately readied for war, the Conqueror lit its shields and ran out its countless guns. Unlike the Lex, it didn’t slow to allow its armada to take shape in formation. The flagship of the World Eaters pushed ahead, forcing lesser ships to drift aside from its gathering momentum.

  ‘An ugly ship,’ Magnus said, ‘to match Angron’s ugly soul.’

  ‘You underestimate him,’ Lorgar said again.

  From the warded safety of the basilica, the Thousand Sons primarch watched the fleet manifesting above, below and in every direction besides. Ahead of them lay a world of pleasant skies, rocky grey continents and sparse, deep oceans turning in the life-giving radiance of an ideal sun. A handful of small cities shone in the night, their cobweb of linked light forming the unmistakable image of civilisation: an image graven on the human mind ever since mankind’s first voidnauts saw Old Earth from the cold comfort of low orbit.

  ‘Armatura,’ Magnus whispered. ‘You cannot mean to do this.’

  His brother continued to watch his fleet translating from the warp, and the utopian world hanging in space beyond them.

  ‘The year’s
journey from Isstvan was more eventful than I’d anticipated. Angron and his Legion delayed us, pausing to murder world after world on their wrathful whims. Our brother’s mutilated psyche makes planning anything something of a chore, but at last, here we are. The beginning of the end.’

  ‘Where’s the rest of your fleet?’ Magnus asked, caution threading his tone.

  Lorgar could now smell the salt of his brother’s sweat and hear the muffled thunder of the sorcerer’s heartbeat. Truly, the incarnated image of his brother was a masterpiece of psychic projection, becoming ever more real by the moment.

  ‘Ulixis. Espandor. Latona. Elsewhere. They’re killing their way across Ultramar, now Guilliman’s sons are crippled at Calth. The Five Hundred Worlds have suddenly found themselves rather starved of protection. A shame, I’m sure you’ll agree.’

  Magnus didn’t match his brother’s smile. ‘You can’t attack Armatura with a fraction of your fleet.’ The sorcerer narrowed his lone eye. ‘There’s some ploy you’re holding back, some nasty little surprise hiding behind your words.’

  ‘Yes,’ Lorgar said. ‘There is indeed.’

  ‘You’ve foreseen all this,’ Magnus accused him.

  ‘A great deal of it. The gods whisper of what will come. They speak, and I hear them.’

  Magnus’s shadow stole over him in a slow spread. ‘I told you, you shouldn’t trust their whisperings.’

  ‘I never said I trusted them, I said I could hear them. There’s a subtle difference.’ He laughed again, a sound ripe with honest amusement. ‘Is there anyone you don’t underestimate, Magnus? You’ve been here no more than a few minutes and already you’ve insulted both Angron and me several times.’

  ‘Do you hate Guilliman this much?’ Magnus asked suddenly. ‘Do you despise him so much that crippling his Legion at Calth isn’t enough? You’ve already won. Why must you reach out to annihilate his peaceful and prosperous empire?’

  Lorgar’s smile faded, but didn’t die. The scripture inked across his face smoothed into neat rows once more. ‘I don’t hate him, brother. At one point, I was jealous of him. But that was fifty years ago, and I was a different man. I have since learned that the warp is a song, Magnus, a symphony, and I am the only one willing to play it. That’s why we’re here.’

  Ahead of them, the World Eaters elements within the fleet began to diverge, to lose all sense of cohesion. Lorgar’s irises were a soothing gold-brown, somewhere between the shades of amber and earth. He watched impassively, neither surprised nor annoyed. If anything, he seemed rather charmed by the disunity on display. By contrast, the Word Bearers ships sailed in smooth, effortless formation.

  ‘The warp is not a song. I fear for your sanity, Lorgar.’

  The entire basilica fell dark as they sailed beneath the curve of Pila, Armatura’s lone moon. Spotted by the million lights of forge-fires and foundries, its smoggy bulk blocked the idyllic sun; a monument to human industry, eclipsing the light. Lorgar’s divine features darkened in the spreading shadow.

  ‘I imagine you do, Magnus, but you’ve always been gifted at criticising others for the sins you share with them so blithely.’

  Magnus’s smile was a snide, superior curl across his face. ‘There’s your overactive imagination at work once more.’

  Lorgar stepped closer to the sorcerer, his once-warm eyes now colder than fool’s gold. ‘Tell me, brother, whose Legion is trapped in the Great Eye, devolving into maggots while the god of Change laughs into infinity? Tell me whose physical form was broken over Leman Russ’s knee because he decided at the last moment that he wouldn’t accept his punishment like an obedient son after all? You didn’t commit to the fight, nor did you surrender and come to heel. Instead, you wasted your Legion and your life’s work in half-hearted capitulation. You think I act in madness? Look to your own sins, hypocrite. And look to your sons, while there is still something left of them.’

  He shook his head, taking joy in what he was saying. ‘Mark my words, Magnus, if you do not act soon, your Legion and all that you worked so hard to create will be dust.’

  ‘My Legion–’ Magnus’s face creased with rising anger ‘–was backed into a corner. My Thousand Sons died because of your treachery, because of the venom you whispered in Horus’s ears to start this insanity. He calls it his rebellion, but we both know the first heart to turn traitor was the one beating in your chest.’

  Lorgar laughed again, the sound one of unfeigned delight. ‘See? The blame always lies with one of us unworthy souls. Never with you for making the wrong compacts with the gods that you deny are even real!’

  The parchments on Lorgar’s armour flapped in the sudden wind of Magnus’s ire. The Word Bearer stood unfazed, his serene smile boiling his brother’s blood. The sorcerer’s skin quivered, beetles writhing beneath it as witch-lightning danced across his coppery flesh. Magnus moved, his body forming from the air itself, shaped out of the poison behind reality’s veil. Anger drove him into true incarnation.

  ‘That is enough, Lorgar.’

  Lorgar nodded. ‘It is. I’ve no desire to trade insults. We’ve all made mistakes, it’s how we deal with the aftermath that matters.’ He gestured to the fleet around the flagship. The World Eaters vessels, as always, abandoned the armada’s formation in favour of a more aggressive vanguard assault. In the year since Isstvan, Lorgar had slowly come to abandon any attempt at reining in the XII Legion’s independent streak. They couldn’t be collared, even for their own good.

  ‘Watch,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure I want to watch two Legions die in the skies above Armatura.’

  Lorgar didn’t make eye contact. ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘For once, Magnus. Trust me. Both Legions will make planetfall in a matter of minutes.’

  The Word Bearer closed his eyes and lifted his hands – a conductor before an orchestra in those tense, edged moments before the first note is struck.

  ‘The warp is a song, brother. Let me play a verse for you.’

  The word ‘fleet’ didn’t quite do it justice. In truth, an armada thundered across the silent sky towards Armatura: dozens and dozens of vessels, yet a mere fraction of two Legions’ strength.

  Armatura turned in the heart of Guilliman’s perfect empire. Neither the crown jewel that Macragge claimed to be, nor the future capital Calth had threatened to become, Armatura matched both in importance, and vastly eclipsed them in population. If Ultramar was reduced to crude metaphor, Macragge beat as the heart of the astral kingdom, while Calth served as its soul – a sign of a bright future, now consigned to fire. Armatura was a war-world, feeding the other planets the way bone marrow feeds blood into the body. It fed the Legion with recruits; it fed the void with damaged warships reborn from its docks; it fed the Imperium with hope that the largest Legion would forever be the largest, and even if the XIII was reduced to a single warrior, as long as Armatura turned in the night, the Legion would live on.

  Its close-orbit played home to immense shipyards, populated by thousands upon thousands of workers, servitors, archimechs, enginseers, serfs, thralls and technographers. It took an army of souls to breathe life back into the great warships of the Imperium, and here several million of them did their finest work. Orbital bastions of linked gantries and docking maws drifted above the placid world, crawling with insectile shuttles, lifters, loaders and tugs. Imperial warships limped here, scarred from the Great Crusade, and left months later in resurrected perfection.

  Above and beyond the shipyard was the first concentric ring of void defences. Here, weaponised satellites and fire platforms bristled with turrets, alongside independent landing decks for fighter craft in lockdown.

  Beyond those, the true defences began. Castles in the sky: great fortress-stations with their own racks of fighters and entire battlements given over to plasma batteries, laser broadsides and ship-killing lance arrays.

  In highest orbit, the outer sphere of sa
tellites was a three-dimensional spread of solar panels, clockwork engines and slaved servitor brains all connected to vast long-range weapons arrays.

  Amidst that outermost sphere waited the Evocati fleet. While the Legion mustered at Calth, the XIII Legion’s war-world could never be left undefended. The Evocati was comprised of several thousand Ultramarines drawn from a dozen Chapters, awarded the highest honour of all: overseeing the operations of Armatura and the training of new recruits, commanding an Imperial fleet to rival any other.

  The vessels moved in a perfection of militaristic motion that even their enemies found beautiful to behold. As the Evocati rose into a defensive formation, the combined Word Bearers and World Eaters armada altered to compensate; a shifting dance across a battlefield no different from the rearrangement of regiments marching in ancient eras.

  Battleships and cruisers, frigates and destroyers, all resplendent in XIII Legion blue, silver and gold, rising to defend the perfect empire.

  ‘Do you hear it?’ Lorgar asked, rapt in distraction. ‘Do you?’

  Magnus watched the first killing beams illuminating the Conqueror’s void shields, the impacts spreading with the greasy luminescence of oil on water. He sensed… something, as the fleet powered to its inevitable demise. A sensation not unlike the world itself holding its breath, the way Tizca’s air was charged before a storm.

  The Word Bearer tilted his head back, eyes closed as he let the flashing colours of the Conqueror’s shields dapple his face.

  ‘Calth is the syncopated back-beat to the song. The rhythm beneath the rhyme. That much fire, that much misery, that much pain.’ He smiled, his eyes still closed. ‘Suffering has always fuelled the warp in random stains and stigmata. Now we learn the virtue of control. Can you hear it? Can you hear the pain stirring the tides? Can you hear the crash of those waves, Magnus? Can you hear how those black tides beat, a million hearts bursting out loud, as rhythmic as drums in the deep cold?’

  He lifted his hands higher, gesturing with subtle relish, directing his invisible choir. ‘The tides of the Sea of Souls can be altered by mortal hands, brother. Listen. Listen. We’re reordering the warp itself, Magnus, changing it through pain. We’re rewriting the song.’