Treacheries of the Space Marines Read online

  ‘We found Khorne’s sigil hacked into the rockcrete walls with chainblades, or scrawled in the blood slicks that ran in the roadways. We heard the guttural prayers they had set the hive’s address systems to repeating, beneath squeals and crackles as the power of the name surpassed the fragile vox-circuits’ tolerances. We heard them screaming the name of their god over the scream of chain-teeth biting bone.

  ‘Now their brass-shod master’s gaze fell on them, counting the skulls they littered in their wake for him, and as Attegal Hive became a slaughtering-pen he made his favour known. Some berserkers seemed to be running through water, leaving ripples and wakes behind them. Others cast too many shadows, which reared and thrashed with a life of their own. The smoky breeze carried howls and snatches of shrieking laughter that came from no human throat. Gash-marks and bloodstains began to scar the walls where there were none to make them. The daemons of Khorne were making themselves manifest.

  ‘In silence my brothers and I left the charnel-floor to the berserkers and climbed through the hive. We witnessed screeds etching themselves into its walls, blasphemies bursting from the vox-horns, faces forming in the clouds beyond the window-walls. The trees in the arboreta had turned blood-red and sprouted thorns like fangs, and their boughs thrashed in time with the heart-drums of the daemons below them.

  ‘Standing at the pinnacle of Attegal Hive I proclaimed our task complete. We cast down the golden aquila that had spread its wings atop the final tine of Heggoru’s coronet, and in its place raised our own marker, a single upright girder decked in adamantium and yellow and black as our own armour was, splashed with blood from Khorne’s killing-house below us.

  ‘The hives of Heggoru burned! The legacy of Dorn was trampled and cast down!

  ‘The verminous Imperials of Heggoru perished! The labours of the children of Guilliman were in vain!

  ‘And so I show to you the trophies of my victory!’

  Into the amphitheatre clattered a procession of Defilers, each bearing the wrecked remains of a golden Imperial aquila high on its hull like a diadem.

  ‘The eagles from each spire-tip that fell into Heggoru’s stinking clouds! The prize from my finest conquest! Iron within! Iron without!’ The two Terminators guarding the bag of stones took up the Iron Warriors’ mantra at Chengrel’s shout, and a moment later it began to issue from the speech-horns of the Defilers themselves in counterpoint to their tread. The whole meeting-square filled and rang with the noise.

  When the monstrous parade had passed, Chengrel declared the first day of the gathering to be over, and bade all his guests depart to muse upon his tale and decide for themselves if they had any to match it. Then, satisfied that he had the measure of this meagre assembly, Chengrel returned to his citadel where he withdrew his bloated head deep into his tank and had his chamber shrouded in darkness.

  Emmesh-Aiye hurried away to his barbed and scarred cutter-craft – he craved raw sensation after so long with little but words for his senses to batten on. Khrove was behind him on the trail to the landing-camps, but made no effort to enter the shining, pyramidal lander that hung over his ziggurat. Instead he drew his feet up under him, hanging unsupported in the air, and a moment later the ground beneath him creaked and erupted into a great thicket of thorned tendrils formed of strange stuff that seemed at once metallic and gem-like. They enclosed him and hid him from view.

  Drachmus the Word Bearer and Hodir the Night Lord went walking more slowly back through the ruins, their cadres filing behind them and studiously ignoring one another.

  ‘How do you consider our host, then?’, asked Drachmus after an interval long enough for his little homunculus to have recited the Four Thousand and Eighty-Second Epistle of Lorgar in its entirety.

  ‘Old,’ Hodir replied thoughtfully, ‘Clever. Fortunate.’ He looked behind him. ‘Well-guarded.’

  ‘Fortunate,’ Drachmus replied with equal care. ‘Fortunate, indeed. And one whose fortunes will bear watching. Perhaps we are of one mind here?’ Hodir was generous enough to concede this with an inclining of his dark-helmed head. ‘Well then,’ Drachmus went on, ‘we shall hear more of this convocation soon.’ He did not bow or salute, but made a deliberate step away to show the conversation was at an end. Hodir did likewise, weaving his feet so as not to crush his ropes of scalps, and the two parted to return to their camps.

  Seventeen hours passed before a klaxon sounded from Chengrel’s fortress, the blaring followed by a quartet of household serfs, who scattered out through the ruins and to the landing-pads with the message that the master would soon be ready for the new day’s audience.

  Khrove was the first to return, appearing from his nest of vines as it unravelled and striding alone to the meeting-square to take his seat. After a few moments footsteps sounded behind him, and over them came the voice of Drachmus’s daemon-homunculus droning through the opening stanzas of Meditations on Two Transcendences. It was one of Lorgar’s more pedestrian works, and the papery little monotone did nothing to capture what nuances it did have. Hodir took his seat, settling silently into the same posture he had had for the previous audience. The addition of two silver armatures mounted on his armour’s backpack, which now kept his scalp-ropes suspended in a cat’s cradle above his head, was the only sign he had moved at all.

  Emmesh-Aiye was the last to join them. He still wore his silver breastplate, although his tongue had been unpinned from it and rearranged on a different sequence of hooks. Across his shoulders was a mantle of glass links, deliberately crude in make so that they grated against one another with a sound to put the teeth on edge. Maddening as the sound was to those around him, it clearly soothed Emmesh-Aiye, whose amplified hearing craved input in this relative quiet.

  Chengrel broke that quiet for them, his tank-hulk walking into the enclosure with a heavy tread and taking up position on his stone platform.

  ‘I have granted you ample time to prepare yourselves,’ he boomed. ‘Now we shall see what you bring me in return. Look to your own accounts. Hodir! Night Lord! Master Hodir, son of the fallen Curze! You shall speak first. Begin.’

  If Hodir took offence at the curt instruction, he gave no sign of it. Instead, he stood and walked towards Chengrel with something in his hand.

  Instantly, one of the Iron Warrior’s bodyguards came forth, something in a shape that might once have been an armoured Space Marine but which was now a hunched and creaking thing. Its legs were fused together and it moved on a rolling tank-track that had replaced its feet, although this track was made of thick muscle and its treads were bone claws. Its arms ended in bundles of gun-barrels and its face, sprouting directly from its neck between clusters of thick steel horns, was a leering mask made of tarnished ceramite. A meaty tongue flopped through the mask’s mouth-slit and tasted the air.

  ‘I intend no violence to your master, and none to you,’ Hodir told it, ‘but since you are studying me for him, then examine this.’ He held out the thing he was carrying: a triangle of white and yellow cloth, obviously cut from a larger piece, embroidered with a complex design. As the green-black tongue lapped the air near it, Hodir turned it over to show that it had been sewn, back-to-back, with a triangle of human skin.

  ‘Skin only recently stripped,’ Hodir declared. ‘Can you sense that?’ The bodyguard, uncertain of its reply, swivelled on its squelching, clicking tread-foot and looked up at Chengrel. ‘Fresh to confirm that we do have him, and that he’s still alive and healthy. He was when I set out to visit you, anyhow. From there on you must take us on faith.’

  ‘You give me riddles,’ replied Chengrel amid the thrum of his speakers. ‘Give me an offering and an accounting, or be sent back to tell your Legion of my disappointment with their envoy.’

  Hodir did bristle at that, drawing himself up and letting the others see that his free hand had made a fist. But he kept his temper and turned so he addressed both Chengrel and the other Traitor Marines.

&nb
sp; ‘If I am to recount something for my bid,’ he said, pointedly not using Chengrel’s word offering, ‘then my account and my bid go together. Here.’ He held up the sewn flap of skin and cloth again. ‘I will explain what it is, how we came by it, and what it is worth. To all of you.’

  Hodir of the Night Lords began his tale.

  ‘The tattoo on this skin,’ declared Hodir, ‘is a Navigator crest, the sign of the House of Drunnai. A House of no particular glory. I had not heard of them before the man who yielded us his skin told us his name. Vivyre Drunnai. A young one, but a skilled one. How skilled, you shall see.

  ‘Vivyre Drunnai is not the bid, but he is part of it.

  ‘Now. There is a warp-vortex northward of the Tembine Drifts in the galactic north-west that pierces down through the galactic plane. It boiled there when the Crusade first mapped the borders of what they now call Obscuras, and it boils there still. The violence of the funnel-current is fed by the storms radiating out from the Eye below and north-east of it. Shipmasters driven by haste or hubris sometimes catch the edge of the tide and let it fling them towards Cypra Mundi, but it is a turbulent, dangerous passage. Its lower reaches, I am told, have never been charted, and who is to say if there is any end to it? Perhaps it plummets out of our galaxy and continues forever down into the gulfs. Drift too close into the funnel of the storm and you will be dragged in and dragged apart. There is no surviving it.

  ‘The vortex is not the prize, but it is part of it.

  ‘There is a place where the vortex bends through an angle from the push of a counter-tide, and there the storm’s cohesion breaks. That is the Jaw, where a storm-whirl juts out like a greenskin’s chin. It throws out blast-fronts that are felt sectors away, vortices that spin for a hundred light years before they exhaust themselves. It makes storm-stitched patterns that wriggle and swim and fight to come to life. And it disgorges ships. The Molianis Reach in real space out beyond the Jaw is a hulks’ graveyard like few others. The storm drags ships from their courses and plunges them through who knows what depths, and the gravity well of Molianis’s great blue star is where so many of them are dragged back again. A trail of wrecks, parsecs long, strung out and drifting.

  ‘The ships’ graveyard is not the prize, but it is part of it.

  ‘The Imperium sits with their back to it! They are so sure that this great ships’ graveyard is a graveyard indeed, and no threat to them. They have built a fortress at the far end of the stream of wreckage. A magnificent thing, truth be told, tier on tier of gun decks, lance mounts, deep-gauge auspex arrays. It trails free-floating fortifications behind it, communications boosters, munitions depots, shipyards and repair docks. Squadrons of warships fuss around it. The scale of the place has grown. They are colonising other moonlets nearby so the fortress crews can expand. Who knows? Perhaps Molianis might one day house a world’s worth of colonists.

  ‘The fortress is not the prize, but it is part of it.

  ‘The Imperials are sure that the stream of warp-wreck emerges from the storm broken beyond all chance of threat. Fitful patrols through the graveyard sweep the hulks with auspex, and they mutter on the vox about quarantine checks, wrecks to be sterilised of genestealers and ransacked. Beyond Molianis there are thickly-infested orkish enclaves, and so the Imperium’s attentions turn that way. The goal is to place an Imperial eye between the greenskins and the graveyard, to make sure that no salvage can fall into orkish hands and into their war machine.

  ‘The Imperium’s unguarded flank is not the prize, but a part of it.’

  While he spoke, Hodir had been walking slowly to and fro beneath the window in Chengrel’s tank-hulk, while the Iron Warrior looked down at him with an expression intended to show benevolent indulgence. Now he faced the other bidders, again holding up his token of stitched skin and cloth.

  ‘We went raiding, my Night Lords and I, in the Greater Tembine Drift, which stretches out across the north-eastern quadrant like a shoulder blade. Ships striking out from the rich worlds of the Lesser Tembine Drift and pushing up through the unsettled layer between them can expect a long and tranquil voyage, coasting on the gentle outward pressure of the drift-tide towards the far northern marches of the Ultima Segmentum. Such was the voyage our prey had in mind when they ignited their drives at Isith.

  ‘It was a supply convoy, heavy and slow like fattened cett-cows, plodding towards the reaches with materiel from the Mechanicus forges. Fusion-formed alloys, tailored reactant blocks for plasma furnaces, biological stock, weapons, machines. We heard tell that the cargo was on its way to a string of new colonial hives. We had other intentions for it.

  ‘You need not hear the details of how we struck and what we took. All of us know the ways of these things. You can imagine the ambush and the boarding. We had three of the four ships by the time they reached the Isith jump-zones, plucked them where the Imperial flotillas could not defend them. The convoy’s lead ship was the Hymn of Phelinde, and I marked her as my prey and my prize. We harried her with weapon-bursts and vox-taunts. We collected vox-signals from the taking of the other craft, boosted them and beamed them into the Hymn of Phelinde, to let them hear how they die, those who fight the Night Lords, and when they did not surrender we opened our own engines and bore down on them, skewering their hull with lance-cuts and flying assault boats into the wounds, driving the crew into their suits, ready for the fighting.

  ‘To a Night Lord, shipboard survival suits are a weapon in themselves. They blinker the sight, with their little goggle insets or their narrow visors, so the prey’s imagination fills their blocked peripheral vision with monsters almost the equal of the monsters we are. They blur the hearing and fill it with scratches and garbling echoes to taunt tight-strung nerves. In those lucky enough to have vox-circuits, they open themselves to our whispers and screams should we find and break their transmission band, and we always, always do. They surround the limbs with heavy wrappings, burdening movements, concentrating the sense in each prey’s mind that they are cut off, alone, their companions now unfamiliar shapes on the other side of a visor.

  ‘To a Night Lord, each of these things is like a slender stiletto, planted in the enemy before we even lay hand to them.

  ‘We breached some sections of the Hymn to space. In others we pumped dusts and toxins into the airflows, or bled superheated gas from the plasma pipes to send firestorms through whole decks, then walked through flames and chemical smoke to cut apart repair teams. We let word of us travel up the ship, always leaving one prey alive long enough to scream a warning into a speaking-horn or flee to spread panic in person. We cut the lighting to whole decks, then left those decks to panic while we showed ourselves in compartments that had thought themselves uninvaded. Then we made those levels erupt in cries or fall silent forever, so that as we worked our way towards the bridge we were fighting enemies tormented almost to madness by their own fear. This is our way, and if you, my fellows, have fought alongside us then you will know it for yourselves.

  ‘The only way this prey-boat could think to fight back was to spite us of our prize, and drag us into the immaterium to die with them. The ship began to shake around us, and we heard the alarms in the corridors and the prayers and weeping of those who knew what they meant. We had not wrecked the warp engines, not when there would be salvage to be had there, and the captain had given the order to breach.

  ‘We had little time. We had broken through in a calm current, but soon the fear and the violence would echo, cohere and turn in on us. Geller field systems are tenuous things even on an undamaged craft. We had to move swiftly.

  ‘Now we became true predators, dealing out quick butchery in place of slow terror. By the time we had scoured the crew-decks and mustered at the base of the bridge tower, hot shadows were moving in the Hymn of Phelinde’s warp-wake, and as we brushed aside the last surviving crew we could all feel the ship shudder and our thoughts twist as conscious force began to grip the Geller field
and crush.

  ‘There were none left living among the bridge crew. By the time we reached them some had turned on the others. Fear? An attempt to mutiny and make for real space again? Warp-phantoms colouring their thoughts? No matter. But then we found that the captain had ceded control of the helm directly to the Navigator roost. Our steersman now was Vivyre Drunnai. And Drunnai’s order was to plunge the ship into that vortex that leads to the Jaw, to be torn apart down to its adamantine bones and its plasma heart.

  ‘And now the battle for the Hymn of Phelinde, and for our own lives, began in earnest.

  ‘Engineering servitors had welded the shutter-doors to the final sanctum that held the captain’s and Navigator’s eyries, the welds new enough to still glow in our infrared as we broke through. All the while the vortex tides tore at the Geller field like a butcher trying to flay a carcass with too blunt a knife. We could feel the hottest humours of the immaterium trying to boil into our thoughts.

  ‘Three servitors were still there, sealed in with instructions to try and fight us. Two had had their welding torches broken so that we could not commandeer them, and those two assaulted us with rivet-drivers that scarred our armour with red-hot plugs of alloyed steel.’ Hodir turned now, dipping one shoulder to show chips and scoring along one rim of his pauldron. ‘The third rushed at us with its torch still ignited and Gyaz, who aspired to lead my Second Claw and is boastful and eager, stepped forwards to show how he could cut it down. Then we heard the ultrasonic whine of its power pack and understood its purpose; it was overcharged and about to explode, and so Gyaz shot it apart instead.