Treacheries of the Space Marines Read online

  Slow and quiet, Khrove walked into the middle of the circle and stood a few moments. Then he let out a cry and smote the flagstones with the heel of his staff, and instantly was wrapped in hissing flames of pink and blue, bright enough that Emmesh-Aiye’s girl-slave squeezed her eyes shut from the pain of it. Khrove struck again and flames fell from his body, flowing out to become a billowing ground-mist and lifting Khrove into the air on a pedestal of coloured fire. He pointed down with his staff, and wherever he pointed into the roiling colours underneath him they began to twist and churn.

  With no preamble other than this extravagant show of sorcery, Khrove of the Thousand Sons began his tale.

  ‘No,’ he said, with a nod to Chengrel. ‘No, I was not among the first of our Legions as you, venerable Master Chengrel, were. I never saw the face of the living Emperor. I have never set eyes upon Terra or foot upon Prospero. I was raised among the mendicant logicians of Prekae Magna, travelling the roads between the Universitariate city-hubs, working to find mathematical patterns in the phrasing of Imperial scriptures and offering these insights to young scholars and labourers in exchange for alms. When we crossed paths with travellers around the space ports we would exchange tracts and treatises with them, and that was how my family came into possession of more esoteric works, passed to us in secret with whispers of truths that the most eminent scholars knew but would not teach to any save their own favourites and sycophants. We applied our calculus to these new texts and were steeped in wondrous and terrible revelations, insights that came so easily that it was like picking up treasure from the ground after a lifetime of battling to pry open locked vaults.’

  As Khrove spoke, the mist and fire below him swam up into a little tableaux of light that acted out the scenes he was describing.

  ‘We counted ourselves students only, always seeking understanding, but while we pursued our studies we were being studied in turn. These disciplines were stoking the light of my own dormant gift, and when they perceived me the Thousand Sons acted.

  ‘This was not the true Legion of Magnus, ignorant as I was of that when they appeared among us. For all their dread bearing and proud demeanour, these were lackeys of Ahriman the Librarian, the meddling exile whom Magnus had barely spared from death. They took me away without a word. This was just after the breaking of the forty-first millennium.

  ‘My proper education began, built on the foundations the secret tracts had laid. I learned to master passion and delusion and dominate the Ocean with will and intellect alone. Thirsting for knowledge I began to elaborate upon my masters’ principles in my own ways, every waking moment ablaze with insights and possibilities.

  ‘Ahriman did not remain my master. One of the roving magisters of the core of the Thousand Sons intercepted us in the galactic north-east. I took no part in their battle, but sensed it waged with weapons and wills across the nameless world where Ahriman had landed in search of I still know not what. They were driven from that rock before their search was successful, and I was taken as a trophy into the court of Magnus the Red.

  ‘And now the doors of learning were truly thrown open to me. I laboured for the sorcerer Abhenac on deriving the seven syllables of the seven true names of the Nurgle prince Phoettre Rotchoke, and then he released me into the service of Sulabhey the Arch-Invoker, who set me to work refining the principles by which his warding and summoning sigils were formed. My labours added such puissance to his own that he named me first among his adepts, and taught me the Third and Fifth Concatenations by which we could counter direct the eight fundamental immaterial temperaments. In contest with Xerdion of Nine Towers he had me create and enact a ritual by which the warp-radiance from a human psyker, as defined in the works of Carrackon the Elder, was matched in three secondary nuances of character to the tempest-flashes observed in the epistles of Ghell. Xerdion acknowledged the adepts of Sulabhey to be the better after my success, and when I used elements of this ritual to bind and discognate the daemon Herakdol, I was once again brought before Magnus and dressed in the livery of an aspirant mage.’

  In the glowing mist beneath him, Khrove’s fire-puppets made gestures and wrote signs that caused the air to groan and spark.

  ‘Now I was taught warfare. My gifts and spells were honed to a martial edge, and I mastered the baser, more physical weapons of the Legiones Astartes. I could loose an unerring fusillade from a bolter, fence with a chainsword, command one of the Legion’s ancient vehicles, march to battle with one of my battle-brothers or one hundred of them and know what was expected of me with never a question or order needed. I rewrote my soldiers’ doctrines with the incandescent skills of the mage.

  ‘At every step, I was tested. I remember a battle of one hundred and sixty-two hours, beneath a sky crowded with silver towers, against two hetmen of Magnus. One plucked up stones and bones from the plain and hurled them at us upon tendrils of thought laced with scarlet sparks. The other unlaced the safe fabric of space and distance and sent crawling, crackling runes to uncouple our minds from our senses. I alone remained master of thought and limb, commanding the others in the fray. When the test was done and the towers spoke to one another in the voices of their masters, they acclaimed me, declared me no longer aspirant but adept, and gave me those others who had survived as the core of my first coven.

  ‘I was brought wargear, the hollow armour of a Legion brother long dead. I reshaped it alongside the Legion’s finest forge-magi, engraving it with warp work so that it blazed with living etheric fire where once had been the simple energies of its reactor pack. When I donned the armour I was plucked from the foundry floor, to hang in a cell of folded space while the armourers assaulted the defences I had made. They tested my forge-work, my spell-carvings, the connections from my spirit into the armour’s anima, the predatory instinctual spirit-weaves, just short of minds, that I had patterned into each tooth of my chainsword and each round loaded into the magazine of my pistol. Such was their power that the simple attention of their minds scorched my body and soul, but though they picked apart my designs from every angle in four dimensions they could find nothing that displeased them, and I walked from the Seeing Mount to begin my studies with…’

  But here Khrove, like Emmesh-Aiye before him, was cut off by his host’s fury.

  ‘Be silent, Khrove! Be silent! Be silent, Thousand Son!’ for Khrove was still attempting to speak. When the sorcerer realised that Chengrel would brook no further speech, he shrugged and allowed himself to sink back to the ground. His ghostly pantomime collapsed back into glowing fog, which whipped around Khrove’s ankles, stirred the writhing hem of his surcoat, and was gone.

  This time Chengrel’s tank made no movement, but behind it in the shadows came the tread of metal on stone.

  ‘No more, Khrove,’ he repeated. ‘No more from any of you. Go from here. Be among your fellows. You shall hear from me in the daylight.’ Chengrel wheeled his tank about, moving it deceptively fast on its stubby legs. The two Terminators carrying the bag of stones were already departing.

  Emmesh-Aiye sat with his head down and made no move to leave. Drachmus had leaned towards Hodir as if to speak, but the latter turned his back on the rest of the assembly and got to his feet. Khrove, however, kept his position in the centre of the stone circle. He said, quietly:

  ‘I have not finished speaking, sir.’

  The other three turned and looked at him, but Khrove continued to stare after Chengrel and his retinue. Out in the dark, the sound of armoured tread stopped. Emmesh-Aiye closed his lips around his stretched tongue to slick them; Hodir and Drachmus exchanged a look and then moved quickly and purposefully out to Khrove’s flanks.

  There was silence for a moment.

  ‘My account is not done,’ Khrove said. ‘I understood that we would treat with one another here as equals, in comradeship and respect. I trusted that we would each present our bid to you, and even these accounts you saw fit to demand of us, and be heard. I
came here ready to graciously acclaim any of these others whose bids I believed to surpass mine, and to leave with no other prize than their fellowship, and yours. But I am denied. You have not heard my account or what I offer as my bid. Master Emmesh-Aiye has likewise been refused full hearing. You are a poor host, Master Chengrel. My fellows and I deserve more respect than you show us.’

  Away in the shadows a moving light appeared. It was the window on the front of Chengrel’s tank, coming into view as he wheeled around, the green-white glow from inside the tank brightening as he stampeded back towards them.

  ‘Respect?’ he roared. ‘Respect for you, you worthless, bloodless little inbreed? You disgrace to the gene of Magnus? Had you any understanding of respect you would be prostrate on the flagstones now, begging my forgiveness!’

  A bank of bolters cresting Chengrel’s tank-hulk rattled through sixty degrees of elevation and barked a salvo into the interlaced boughs overhead.

  ‘This is base betrayal!’ he shouted over the crashing of burning debris around them. ‘I sent out more than a hundred heralds, and this is the respect shown me? Four such weaklings? We are Legiones Astartes! We strode out in fire and blood to be humanity’s living gods of war! And we wage the Long War to split the galaxy asunder and remake it, to make the Imperium weep for the day they failed us!’

  A Defiler had stamped into view on each side of Chengrel’s tank, and shapes moved on all sides of the lamp-lit circle of paving.

  ‘But now I see treachery indeed!’ Chengrel went on. ‘A pack of scatterbrained infants who do not understand the task their gene-seed brings with it! I expected accounts of blows struck against the Imperials, worlds burned, lords and generals cast down, revenge on the Legions who would not march with us into righteous rebellion. Accounts of you fulfilling the purpose for which your primarchs’ genes were placed into your misbegotten and ungrateful bodies. And what did I hear?

  ‘From you, Hodir, I hear that the children of Curze are so dissipated that you brag of being able to pluck some fat supply convoy and must beg for my help assaulting an Imperial fortress. Drachmus, you tell me how your Word Bearers barely managed to hold the line against Imperial invasion. Khrove, your Legion of all of them must have a grudge burning white-hot against the Emperor, but instead, as if the burning of Prospero meant nothing to you, you yap about tempest-flashes and concatenations and fundamental temperaments. Tell me of the tempest-flashes you inflicted on our erstwhile brothers in war! Tell me of how these “concatenations” helped you to bring even a single Imperial life to an end! You cannot! You betray your heritage and waste yourself!

  ‘And from you, Emmesh-Aiye.’ Chengrel was no longer shouting, but his voice was blistered with contempt. ‘What possessed you to be anything other than ashamed? Crushing an Imperial city for no other reason than to thwart another Legion? Thwart a brother as great as Typhus? Where is your pride? Have the shallow glamours of your patron blinded you to the fact that if we all turn on one another so, there will be none left to strike at the Golden Throne? How may we weld ourselves together again into a force to raze Terra with such as you in our ranks?

  ‘And you demand to know why I will not hear your bids, Khrove? Do you understand now? Do you understand why I will allow none of you this prize, until your Legions can send me champions who prove that the fires that Horus kindled in us all still burn hot? Tell those Thousand Sons you claim to speak for that their ambassador is a poor specimen indeed.’

  If he had intended to say more then it was lost. For a moment it seemed as if some terrible weapon had detonated in front of Chengrel’s tank, for the space on the flagstones was filled with blue-white blaze. When the light passed Khrove once again hung in the air, suspended off the ground in sizzling cobwebs of lightning. His staff pointed straight between Chengrel’s eyes.

  ‘And what of you, then?’ he demanded. ‘Mighty Chengrel, revered Iron Warrior? Great Chengrel, acclaimed by his warsmith? Chengrel, who once managed to sack some Imperial hives at the head of an army and fleet, and whose greatest accomplishment since then has been to build a hideaway in a sector so gutted by war that he would be safely beyond challenge in a sackcloth tent?’

  At this Chengrel let out a bellow and his bolters coughed out a bright cluster of shots. An arm’s length from Khrove the shells tumbled in the air and scattered away from a sparkling rune that had not been there a split second before.

  ‘What are you, Chengrel?’ Khrove went on, as though nothing had happened. The lightning had spread to form an arch that framed him. ‘You set yourself up over us, sneer at our histories. You brag that you had fought in Horus’s lunge for power, as if that were some badge of greatness. You who marched in the rank and file ten thousand years ago! Praised for your prowess by your warsmith on Medrengard itself, you say? Were you one half, were you one third of what you boast of being, your praises would have been born in the throat of Perturabo himself, not some vassal outside his gates. And if you are such a magnificent beast of war, Chengrel, why must you style yourself with titles like “Master”? After a hundred centuries to prove your worth, why are you not a warsmith yourself?’

  ‘Bring him to me!’ roared Chengrel in reply, as weapon armatures unfolded from the sides of his tank and two rotary cannons began scouring the ground and throwing up dust and rock chips. A Defiler scrambled past him on its cluster of metal legs and sent a belch of yellow flame towards where Khrove hung, and without looking down the Thousand Son caught the blast and stilled it in mid-air as though he had imprisoned it in a picture of itself. A moment later the flame, now a glowing cobalt blue shot through with scarlet and emerald, reversed its motion, reversing back into the Defiler’s flame-tank, which exploded in a ruinous fireball.

  ‘Traitors, all of you!’ screamed Chengrel through the din. ‘The Long War is not done while the Emperor sits on that throne on Terra! And all we have left is fops and cowards who will not do what it takes to settle the account!’ Even as he crashed forwards, bolters and cannons tracking, the left cannon mount fell silent. Hodir had glided forwards with perfect calm, slipped between two hulking thralls whose senses were full of flame and gunshots, and gutted the cannon’s mechanism with a single precise jab of his power knife. Now he spun to defend himself as the grunting thralls closed in.

  ‘Us?’ cried Khrove as a burst from Chengrel’s other cannon drove Drachmus back from his other flank, the little daemon scrambling for a grip but continuing its monologues with not a syllable out of place. ‘Are you so stunted, Chengrel? So trapped? Leave your so-called Long War to the elders, all eaten up with spite, who cannot drag themselves out of a rut of ten thousand years! Think of all that Chaos offers you. Think of the power and grandeur. Think of what you have built already, and what you could achieve if you let the Great Ocean pour through you and push wide your understanding. Think of what awaits you if you would just shrug off your dreary little feud and strike out to explore! You are the traitor, Chengrel! Traitor to the potential our forefathers saw in us when they turned their backs on the Emperor and led us out into the void! Think on that, Chengrel, and learn shame!’

  A shocking storm of gunfire erupted on the left flank. Drachmus’s Word Bearers, waiting in the dusk, were hammering Chengrel’s followers with bolts and cannonades. On the right, a pack of household thralls hacked at Hodir with power rams and combat blades, to find a moment later that they had shredded an empty cloak. Next instant the creature holding the cloak pitched over dead, a smoking hole in its forehead from where Hodir’s power knife had punched through its skull. As the corpse fell, Hodir lifted a pistol in his other hand and shot the thrall overseer through the throat.

  Chengrel’s dorsal bolters blazed again, and once more Khrove undid the salvo with a gesture. This time the shells began to dance in front of him, leaving trails of sky-blue light that formed strange letters in the air. Chengrel snarled in anger, and the snarl emerged from his speakers as a squeal of static that detonated the bolt shells
. The concussions did not harm Khrove, but sent him skittering back through the air. Fire and lightning spread like a second cloak about his shoulders.

  ‘The Long War gives us meaning!’ Chengrel shouted as he stormed forwards. ‘The War is our purpose! Our primarchs swore it so! How dare you turn away from the pacts that they made before Horus and each other! Traitor! I name you traitor!’ He would have said more, but now the chassis of his tank crashed through the sigils that Khrove had left hanging in the air and shivered them apart. As they cracked, the space around them seemed to crack too, and suddenly Chengrel was surrounded by dazzling spectres of light that cohered into harder, physical forms. Squat blocks of pink-glowing flesh split by chanting mouths swarmed about the tank’s legs, cackling and clawing at the joints. Beaked and toothed things with skirted mushroom-stems for bodies bounded in circles around Chengrel and his Defilers like children about a bonfire, breathing streams of coruscating light that crawled across their enemies’ metal skins. Darker shapes screamed about the Defiler’s turret, leaving furrows in its armour.

  ‘Soulless, substanceless little remnant of a man,’ sneered Khrove, with blue and silver light now blazing from every seam of his armour. A rippling disc of silver-white metal manifested beneath his feet and he stepped down from mid-air to stand on it. ‘The war is as good as won, and we are the victors! We who understand! The Imperium means as little to us as the tawdry ambitions of those who cannot bear to stop making war on it. The only losers in your precious Long War are those who are unable to let it go. You and your Imperium deserve one another.’

  Next to Chengrel the Defiler’s cannon boomed, but there was no seeing where the machine-beast’s shot had gone. A second later one of the capering pink daemons vaulted up its side and rammed a grotesque arm straight through its turret-plates and into its innards.