Treacheries of the Space Marines Read online

  ‘It was the last continent, and among its serried islands and basalt reefs, where madness had truly incarnated. Here was where the tau had laid down their quarantine camps for what they thought was madness and rebellion, exiling here the first psykers to arise among their subjects as they strove to stay ascendant. By the time we landed there, the black cliffs and lichen groves had become playgrounds to the warp-touched at their maddest and most free. When we stepped from our lander we were greeted by a flayed torso and head that walked towards us on spider-legs made of lightning, calling our names. Behind it crawled a thing made of four human bodies that wriggled along on a tangle of limbs and turned the ground it passed over to bleeding flesh.

  ‘But Lorgar tells us in the second book of the Tractatus Entropia that “to some Powers it is given to us to be pupils; to some we are destined to be soldiers, but to others we know ourselves to be their masters, and over some we must understand that we are stewards”. So I had sermonised to my brothers before we landed, to resolve them upon our mission. We were here as stewards, as builders and marshals and generals, and the folk of Aechol Tertia, awoken to the grandeur of Chaos, were to us as children now, as pupils given us to guide.

  ‘We sought them out, these wild ones who ran in packs or covens or roamed alone. They were feral, even the potent ones, wild and untrained, and we contained them and brought them to heel, showed them the meaning and the glory of their natures. Others were insane, or given over wholly to something that had entered them as their untrained gifts blazed into the immaterium. We found places where distance and dimension had been mauled and folded in the wake of some calamitous possession that had consumed its host utterly. We found stretches of land burned sterile by warp-fire, or torn up as though by monstrous hands or claws, although we never found any possessed whose forms matched those marks.

  ‘Some we broke to the lash, some we bound with wards and scriptures. Some could not be made subjects, and then with prayers and absolutions we broke the flesh vessel and let the pure essence dissipate back into the warp. Some we harnessed to occult engines or bound into metal beasts of war. And when that land was ours we moved north again.

  ‘On the continent of seas we came as both conquerors and liberators. We subjugated the tribes with might and with zeal and inspiration. Assembled in great throngs along the shores, they watched while we stormed the old tau rigs and slaughtered their enemies there. After that they did not trudge before us as serfs, but marched joyously in our train as acolytes, begging any Word Bearer they saw to teach them, or bless them, or pray over them, for as Lorgar tells us in the Four Entreaties to Kyush-Beghan, “it is the breaking of dead loyalties that leads to transfiguration and rapture”. We put them to work rebuilding the rig-cities as fortresses, temples and armouries. Then we moved on anew.

  ‘We voyaged to the shore of the great fractured continent and its cities. No great hives these, but sprawls full of violent slums, the compounds of vicious and arrogant nobles, and towers or pits where the raw psykers would congregate and fight or brood. To each city we announced our presence, declared that we were there to teach them a more potent faith than the leprous lies of the Imperium or the bloodless wittering of the tau’s “Greater Good”. Some cities embraced us and saw us in to preach and teach. Some did not recognise us for what we were and fought, and we sent the smoke of their burning into the sky as a beacon to the faithful.

  ‘We rode out into the volcanic plains at the end of the winter, and by the turning of the summer every scavenger clan was mustered behind a Word Bearers banner and their chieftains pledged to us. When the next winter in turn came we did not allow them to flee to the temperate coasts, no – now we made them prove themselves to us. They raised a chain of shrine-cities across the heart of the continent, then mustered for war and raiding across the sea to the north, doing battle in the bitter winds and bringing Tertia’s final continent into our grip.

  ‘We could make the people of Aechol march for twenty-four hours without rest, fight like daemons with autogun or blade or simply their fingers and teeth, and send up a shouted sacrament to the Four Powers in beautiful unison from an assembly that might number ten or ten thousand. Every chieftain could recite the titles of all the works of Lorgar and repeat scriptures on spiritual leadership, fealty, zeal and hatred of the Imperium. Every ordinary subject on Aechol could bow down and say the correct blessings and oaths when a Word Bearer passed them by, and by now every psyker had been bound over to service in the great congregation of Chaos, or had laid down their life in disobedience. We had found Aechol the home to a worthless rabble, and made of it a congregation befitting any temple from Milarro to the palace of the primarch himself.

  ‘Now we remade this world. Every city was rebuilt around its shrine, and we put the forges on our own war-hulk to work to turn out what was needed: weapons, wargear, everything from devotional icons to brands with which to etch the proverbs of Lorgar upon our new soldiers’ flesh.

  ‘For we knew what was coming. Our omen-setters had seen an eagle’s wings spread across the stars, and been haunted by visions of kneeling before a shrine to the Four Ruins that remade itself into a golden throne amid screams and the crashing of hammers. We knew that the Imperium was on its way.

  ‘And they broke! Broke, my brothers! The aquila’s claw broke upon the rock we had made! A flotilla of warships, two great transports of the Imperial Guard, a clarion-craft bonded to the Ecclesiarchal sisterhood, and they could not sway Aechol Tertia from our teaching! Their soldiers disgorged onto the surface in their millions, sure of easy conquest, but we harried them on the frost plains, we savaged them with ambushes and raids as they tried to overthrow the temple-forts beneath the volcanoes, we made them pay a hundred lives for every las-bolt and siege shell they fired at the rig-cities that yet stand in the inland seas!

  ‘The Sisterhood spread out with the Imperial vanguard, to make Aechol buckle once again to Throne and eagle, but now our congregation showed us what they had learned. They marched with their own banners held high, the Eightfold Arrow and the icons of the four greatest behemoths of the god-sea. The Imperials shed blood on the frost, burned our tanks beneath the ash clouds, even felled brother Bearers of the Word in our fortresses… But they could not make our congregants doubt their loyalty. They could not sow treachery among our flock.

  ‘The Guard fought until our counter-attacks rolled them back, exhausted them and crushed them. The Sisters preached and burned until the Aecholi turned on them in flames of rage and destroyed them. They even brought inquisitors, two learned old fools with great retinues whose boasts, we were told, were that they could loosen the hold of Chaos on the most dedicated minds. And both their heads swung by their hair from the front of my Land Raider as we paraded in triumph down the length of the volcanic plains! All their learning and all their violence. And not a single word of treachery could they sow. Aechol Tertia remains a bastion of the Eight Blessings of Chaos, loyal to the true faith to this very day.

  ‘This is what faith can achieve, Master Chengrel! This is the power that worship brings! Does Lorgar not pay tribute to it in the Pentadict, and the Book of Lorgar, and the Codex de Barathra? And so in celebration of what blessings we may earn through worship, here do I present my offer. But say the word, and from my craft up above us I shall bring you an endless scroll, warp-charged, that will hang in the air about you and present you with the words of any and every scripture of Lorgar, moulded to your thoughts and situation, for you to be enlightened and strengthened. With it I offer sixty-four Flesh Prayers, the eyeless and limbless bodies of the enemies of Chaos, now with their minds stripped and left only with the ability to howl out prayers and psalms to Chaos. They are all strong, all will cry out their prayers many times before they perish, and between them they recite every major supplication and blessing from our body of doctrines. Also do I pledge to you four orbital shrine-spires, to be wrought by the finest artisans of my congregation. Each shall be a personal
retreat for your worship and meditation, each dedicated to one of the four Powers who are the chief manifestations of that ultimate and divine Ruin to which we all owe fealty. They shall be consecrated in your presence and set in motion about this world, that you and your warband may always know that the gods of the warp watch over you.

  ‘How say you, Chengrel Iron Warrior? Do you accept our price?’

  Chengrel’s face had distorted in an expression that after a moment became recognisable as concentration. His eyes had drifted closed, and his toothless mouth worked. After a moment he opened his eyes and spoke.

  ‘You speak with great care of your… missionary efforts, and the state of the world before you arrived there. But when you come to the meat and bone of the matter, Drachmus, to the iron of the matter, you leap over it with little care. Is all your story about preaching? About listening to this rabble say their lessons? Have you no pride in how you met the Imperial assault?’

  ‘The war was magnificent,’ declared Drachmus in reply, as his little daemon scuttled up behind him, clambered up his back and resumed its perch on his shoulder, whispering all the while. ‘But the war was the proof of our work, not the work itself. I have spoken to you of the spreading and marshalling of faith, Master Chengrel. The true faith that our primarchs and ancestors battled the Emperor himself to uphold. Is this not the great work, as Lorgar tells us?’

  ‘It is not, Drachmus!’ snarled Chengrel, his tank creaking forwards as he spoke. ‘It is not! The great work is not to prate of this verse and that psalm, and these prayers and those books! Shake the dust of Colchis from your feet, Drachmus, and remember yourself! Remember your Legion and your legacy! Does the shaming of your primarch mean nothing to you? Are you so soft-hearted that you set aside your grudge so easily? I set nothing aside, Drachmus. I do not value the scriptures and scrolls you offer me. They will not win you my prize, and your account, which could have had me hail you a true brother, does not earn my respect. You may be seated.’

  Drachmus turned to look at each of the other guests in turn, but none would give any word or any sign of their thoughts. The Word Bearer walked to his seat, picked up his bowl of smouldering bone and stared into the smoke from it as he stood with his back to Chengrel’s tank.

  ‘I withdraw,’ declared Chengrel when it became apparent that Drachmus was not going to turn around. ‘Emmesh-Aiye of the blood of Fulgrim. Khrove, scion of Magnus. Consider what you have heard from your brothers and resolve, each of you, to tell a tale worthy of your Legions’ names.’

  Once again Chengrel’s tank backed away from the little assembly and stalked off, and after a few moments the other four Chaos Space Marines made their impassive way back to their landing-camps to let the night end and the next day of bidding begin.

  ‘So. Neither of us, it appears,’ observed Drachmus to Hodir. Once again, the two found themselves walking away from the meeting together, with Emmesh-Aiye loping rapidly ahead of them in his clinking glass cloak and Khrove, solitary and inscrutable, hanging behind.

  ‘None of us at all,’ growled Hodir in reply. ‘It seems to me that so-called Master Chengrel has made up his mind that his prize will not change hands at all, whether or not he has done so consciously.’

  ‘Chengrel’s strength must be formidable, to entitle him to such a prize, let alone to this demeanour,’ said Drachmus. Everything in his tone made the statement a question.

  ‘To parade such a prize in front of armed visitors would require great… confidence that one had such strength,’ Hodir replied.

  The two walked on a little further, each turning to look at the terrain about them and back at Chengrel’s palace. Each examined the other’s marching retinue. Each knew the other was doing the same. Each knew that the other was appraising their followers as potential opponents as well as potential allies. Neither bothered to comment on the fact.

  They came to a halt at the top of a little rise from which they could see their landing-ziggurats and pavilions. Emmesh-Aiye was a dot scrambling up his ziggurat’s steps to the open hatch of his cutter.

  ‘Do Lorgar’s scriptures have much to say on being ready for the necessity to strike?’ Hodir asked.

  ‘Indeed,’ Drachmus chuckled. ‘I can think of over a hundred passages.’

  ‘I thought so.’

  At that moment Khrove overtook them, moving up the road, in haughty strides but somehow seeming to glide along even faster than the movement of his legs warranted.

  ‘Have you a bid ready, then, Lord Khrove?’ asked Hodir as it became clear that the Thousand Son was about to simply pass them by.

  ‘A bid and an account, as have we all,’ Khrove answered him.

  ‘We were discussing our host’s humours,’ said Drachmus. ‘We have contingencies ready if matters go astray.’

  ‘As have we all,’ said Khrove again, and with a perfunctory salute with his staff was on his way. The other two Legion contingents parted a moment later and went their own ways.

  ‘These reports I hear do not move me to admiration,’ Chengrel declared to his sullen guests the following afternoon. ‘Under the Warmaster’s banner we lanced the hide of the false Imperium from Cadia to Calth and back again. How is it that the Legions send such little lost lambs to me now? Emmesh-Aiye of the Legion of Fulgrim, I know that you have special reason to desire what I offer. Come before me and prove it.’

  This day Emmesh-Aiye had not come alone. Pinned to his flesh were two long cords of woven skin, and tethered by collars to these cords were two crippled and naked followers, twin brother and sister, both Emmesh-Aiye’s slaves of many years.

  Emmesh-Aiye had blinded the boy and deafened the girl, and then had cut off their arms at the shoulders. In this way they were always aware of one another, but unable to converse or embrace. Sometimes their master allowed them to sit together, clumsily trying to comfort each other with their cut and scarred bodies unable to embrace, Emmesh-Aiye giggling and trilling with excitement over the misery he was inflicting.

  Unable to shape words with his mutilated tongue, Emmesh-Aiye would grunt and yelp and clash his distended fingers in a cacophony that he had carefully and brutally trained the boy to interpret. Now strutting in the centre of the meeting-square, Emmesh-Aiye began to warble and clap. At each pause in his antics the boy-twin spoke while the girl, unable to hear her brother’s words, looked up at Chengrel or around the chamber at the others.

  ‘Emmesh-Aiye, whose words I speak, speaks his gratitude,’ said the master through the voice of his slave. ‘Emmesh-Aiye, whose will and instrument I am so pleased to be, speaks welcome and companionship to his fellow devotees and servants of the Powers of the Wellspring.’ Hodir and Khrove exchanged a look at that, and Chengrel’s expression turned stony, but Drachmus nodded and stirred the smoking ashes in his bowl.

  ‘Emmesh-Aiye presents himself for your admiration as the brave, the elegant, the exquisite master in the train of Slaanesh. Emmesh-Aiye shall present his offering and his account, certain that both shall delight even as our service to the Great Ruin delights us all. Emmesh-Aiye now speaks to his fellow masters direct, and bids my voice to speak just as his own as he recounts a tale of his deeds.’

  In such a fashion, laced with both vanity and strangeness, did Emmesh-Aiye begin his tale.

  ‘It is evident that there is no higher calling than of delight,’ went the boy-twin’s words, ‘and there is no higher delight than subjugation at the feet of Slaanesh, who bestows riches of excess that this cold and rule-bound universe cannot match. What better account to present than that of a liberation from drudgery and the elevation into rapture? Is this not the most perfect refinement of the concept of victory?

  ‘We all know, we of the Nine Legions, of the one Legion among us who have turned their back on delight. Who have not only allowed the life of the senses to slip through their fingers but who have opened their hand and let it fall into the dust.’ Emmesh-Aiy
e’s gestures aped his words, slowly uncurling the six joints in each of his six fingers. ‘You, Khrove, subject of the Great Conspirator, may vouch for this! These are your enemies as they are mine. The devotees of Nurgle. And here is what I won from them.

  ‘My court and I were dancing our celebration of the ruin of the maiden world Ethuaraine when word came to me that Typhus, that bitter little soul, was mustering his plague fleet for some great work. The news pricked my wits, woke me to possibilities. What a conquest! What a victory to lay at the feet of the Ecstatic Prince! What new doors might be opened to my consciousness in reward!

  ‘My sweet daemon-consorts slid their barbs into my senses and cast visions into my eyes and words into my ears. They showed me Typhus’s contention with some mighty Imperial preacher, who had led a great host of his faithful to claim a world whose own faith was already claimed elsewhere. They showed me Typhus raising his tattered banner in the fray, the confrontation that drove the Imperial invaders back, and the tiny clutch of eggs under the preacher’s skin, undetected among the sting-welts from Typhus’s unhallowed Destroyer swarm, incubating in him even as their parent swarm lived in Typhus’s own flesh. Soon the upstart swarm had made a hollow wreck of the upstart missionary’s body but yet had not taken his life, and now Typhus was preparing to follow the failed crusade back home, wither the man’s hive down around him and take him away with them, reborn into an endless life of servitude to despair.

  ‘How repugnant a fate! How bountiful my Thirsting Mistress’s generosity that allowed me to make him mine instead! Truly I am the instrument of magnificence!

  ‘My visions showed me the Terminus Est leading Typhus’s fleet out of its anchorage, and we flew like darts to remain ahead of them. We found his doomed preacher before he did, and we went to work.