Champions All - Marc Collins Read online

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  Champions, All – Marc Collins

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘The Talon of Horus’

  A Black Library Publication

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  Champions, All

  Marc Collins

  Cenric knelt, and prayed.

  There was nothing else. Only the movement of his lips and the beating of his hearts. The scent of incense drifted from the burning braziers across the plains before the fortress. He had kept his vigil through the chill night, till the crimson sun rose above Daronch and bathed the plains in bloody dawn. Like the spreading of great wings…

  A crimson angel, bearing the Emperor’s light in one hand, and death in the other. Her wings, burning sanguine glory, casting long dark shadows. Destiny turns about her.

  The Emperor spoke to him in visions such as these. On the eve of battle, at the moment of truth, He spoke. It had been so for the past five years of the Edioch Crusade. Cenric had fought for its forty-seven years, from neophyte to initiate… before he had been chosen, raised up as the Emperor’s Champion. Battle-brothers who had once stood shoulder to shoulder with him now looked to him in awe. Chaplains and Marshals clamoured for his guidance.

  Cenric ceased his prayer and rose to his feet. He checked the chains about his wrist, ensuring that they held tight to the shackled glory of the Black Sword, tracing his fingers along their links to the words etched onto the obsidian hilt. His name was engraved there, a binding the strongest chain could not match. He had not yet raised the blade in martial struggle, but soon. Soon it would taste blood and know battle. He would wield it as Sigismund had once wielded it, when he’d faced down the traitors before the Palace walls, when he had stood his long vigil before the gates of hell. Theirs was the legacy of heroes, the blood of crusaders.

  This is eternal, this duty. We cannot, will not, shirk from it. The mantra was like iron, a core of determination grounding his thoughts. He passed through the ranks of his brothers, where they knelt in obeisance before the Chaplains. Skull-faced warriors smeared ashen crosses upon the brows of the Templars, or flicked oil from sacred aspergills. Servitors stalked the ranks, their arms replaced by swaying auto-censers. This was war at its most sacred, its most perfect.

  ‘Brother!’ The voice rang out across the plain, like the hammer of inevitable artillery. Marshal Adelbert looked at him with muted concern. The warrior was unhelmed, his dark skin like carved wood beneath the beating sun. He was crowned with a simple circlet of bronze, the smooth metal riveted into his skull as a symbol of office. His armour was battered, lacking the true grandeur owed to him. At his side stood a neophyte, Baldwin, if Cenric was not mistaken, bearing the crusade banner. It fluttered in the wind, bathing the Marshal in its tattered shadow. ‘Does He speak, Brother Cenric? Does the God-Emperor bless this holy undertaking?’

  Cenric nodded. ‘The Emperor speaks in His tongue of fire, scouring the unworthy and girding the faithful.’

  ‘Glorious,’ Adelbert rumbled. He did not pry; he did not have to. Faith was its own reward. ‘He has spoken, and all that remains is for you to be the edge of His blade, His Champion.’ He placed his hand upon Cenric’s shoulder and leant in. ‘I know your pain, brother. The galaxy burns, and we fight alone. Unsupported. Ailing. Some would have me send word to the Helicos Crusade, to meld our strength.’ He shook his head, and Cenric could see the weight of his centuries of service press upon him. ‘While there is yet might in my body, we shall continue to do the Emperor’s work. The sons of Dorn do not turn from sacrifice. That is how the eternal crusade has endured, these millennia. That is how we have survived our own half a century of battle.’

  Cenric bowed his head and kept his counsel. Once we were over a thousand strong; now we are a mere handful. Wounded by the Archenemy, scarred by the wiles of the xenos, wearied by the attempts to cross the Rift. How much more can we endure?

  ‘As you will, brother.’ He spoke the words as though the desert grit clogged his throat. ‘Our allies are prepared?’

  Adelbert chuckled dryly and swept his arm round across the plain. ‘Come, Champion. Come survey the glorious faithful.’

  They passed through the serried ranks of their brotherhood and the sacred scents of their devotion. Warriors brought their fists to their breastplates with the clatter of ceramite, or formed the sign of the holy aquila as the Marshal and the Champion passed. They seemed ramshackle, their armour dented and the paint scraped. They offered their obeisance like the ragged hedge knights of old, a shadow of their crusade’s proud beginnings.

  Beyond them lay the muster fields of the Adepta Sororitas. Cenric and Adelbert passed beneath black banners, bearing the heart and cross of the Order of the Valorous Heart. The cloths rippled in the breeze, disturbed by the hymnal booming of laud hailers as though they were human adherents, stoked to zealotry.

  Canoness Aurea greeted them at the edge of the muster, a stern-faced woman holding an ornately sculpted power sword. She examined the blade with casual indifference, her blue eyes drifting along graven scrollwork that she had doubtless read a thousand times. She was armoured in black, as he was, though it felt moribund next to the vital shade of Cenric’s own plate.

  ‘Canoness,’ Adelbert said, bowing his head respectfully.

  ‘Marshal,’ she returned and then bowed before Cenric. ‘And you, the instrument of His will. Praise be.’ Voices chorused behind her, the laud hailers hitched an octave into a higher key of hosanna. Cenric nodded, though the adoration of mortals grated upon him. It was to the Emperor alone that they owed thanks.

  ‘Our warriors stand ready, our weapons prepared.’ Her lips tightened, barely contained anger thrumming within her. ‘We shall reclaim what has been sullied. We shall drive back the alien.’ She glared past them, and Cenric followed her gaze to the source of their shared ire.

  The fortress loomed.

  Once it had been a cathedral, hewn from the desert rock like ancient mega-scale scrimshaw. The winds had sung through it for generations, and a million artisans had carved and shaped and fluted its structure. Multitudes of scriveners had recorded the song, sifting it for the Emperor’s holy word. As Cenric understood it, they had still been recording when the ork scrap-ship had speared into them.

  Now the cathedral was a ruin, its walls broken and marred with alien graffiti, patched with great plates of salvaged metal. Defiled. Occupied.

  Cenric assessed the looming horror of the fastness, its rough angles crowded with guns, the air thick with smog and woodsmoke. The first shots were already echoing out, finding their range. A sudden detonation showered them in rock and shrapnel, but none of them moved. Aurea did not even flinch when a whipping spur of stone cut a thin line across her pale cheek. If anything, her determination appeared to grow.

  Behind her Cenric could see the kneeling ranks of the penitent. The women had cast aside their battleplate, in some cases so violently that their interface ports still bled. They were silent, eyes fixed. Their robes were torn, bound by declarations of penance and contrition. Flakboard had been carved with further condemnations, and hammered against their exposed skin as makeshift armour. Some were gagged or hooded with rough hessian, others had their mouths sewn shut or sealed with wax and stamped with the fleur-de-lys. Great Eviscerator chainswords lay before them, unprofaned by their touch. Cenric drew his eyes away, as the Marshal made his judgement.

  ‘We advance,’ Adelbert stated simply, as he drew his own blade. ‘We end this.’

  The sky was burning as they charged beneath the greenskin artillery. It tore lines of fire across the heavens, h
urling a rain of infernal spite against the pure. Prayers boomed across the plain, the divine cadence of the faithful in their rage. Cenric shared in it, gloried in it. He cast forth his voice in condemnation of the alien, the mutant, the heretic.

  ‘I am His rage and His sword! Judgement and justice!’ Everywhere he looked there was the enemy. They spilled from ramshackle gates or hurled themselves from the walls, bellowing their swine-cries. They were vermin. They would die for their transgressions, for their fundamental inhumanity.

  Cenric hurled himself into the midst of the foe, cleaving through the first of the greenskin warriors without stopping. The energised blade blazed white hot, obliterating the roaring warrior in a magnesium-bright burst of superheated blood and powdered flesh. He slammed it into the armour of another ork, splitting its plate and taking its arm off at the shoulder. The beast roared and grabbed at him with its free hand, letting an oversized cleaver fall from its fingers as it tried to strangle him. Lumpen digits scraped at his immaculate battleplate, but he cast it aside with the back of his gauntlet. Slamming the sword clean through its midriff, he wrenched it to one side and bisected it.

  ‘Face me, xenos dogs!’ The cry rippled from him, vox-amplified by his armour and echoing across the tumult. ‘Face the Emperor’s will made manifest!’ Lesser beasts scattered from his path, whether in fear or in the attempt to reach his brothers, Cenric did not care. They were nothing before him, not compared to the greater examples of their filth-breed. Where those things walked he could see the Emperor’s golden light, singling them out for His divine judgement. Cenric would tear apart their champions, cast down their tyrants. Only humanity would reign over this burning world.

  Cenric hewed the head from another greenskin and the corpse reared back, still firing its crude gun. He moved in a storm of sword thrusts and parries, watching alien blades break on his weapon’s edge or careen off his armour. The Emperor was with him, in every movement. Every breath. Whether he swung his sword in great two-handed arcs, or brandished it in one hand while he fired his bolt pistol, every strike was sacred.

  He could see others of his brotherhood slam into the ork horde. Adelbert brought his sword through an alien’s chest with an artful thrust, rending armour and flesh, showering himself in inhuman gore. Sword Brethren and Chaplains flanked him, lashing out with mace or sword and shield. They sang their war cries as they slew, chants of devotion to Him on Earth. Aurea fought her way forward, as though to prove her faith the equal of the Templars’. She need not have; all present knew the hearts of the Sororitas beat true and faithful. She fought in determined silence, lips tight when not moving to the echoing laud-hailed hymnals.

  The Sisters Repentia were an undulating, febrile knot of motion near her. They were a blur, almost frantic, moving with such rapidity that they seemed out of phase with the battle around them. The great chainblades swung and cleaved into the foe, drawing great gouts of blood and viscera. They forced their entire weight behind each thrust, driving the enormous weapons down with nothing more than human zeal, and the determination to atone. Together they were pushing forward, holding against the tide of roaring alien filth. The xenos’ animal stink was like a bow wave before their fury.

  He looked around. The larger orks seemed to be pulling back, rallying their forces with snarls and violent gesturing. If he moved up to support the Marshal, they could push through to the enemy’s leaders. Then there would be the reckoning Cenric craved. Turning the sword in one hand, he advanced, cleaving through the dregs with disdainful ease.

  Ahead of him, a clutch of orks suddenly burst up from the ground, trailing dust and garish purple paint. They glared at him with bestial malice, yet he could see the flicker of amusement in their eyes. Each of them held a clunky device, prodding and shaking it experimentally. Lights flickered on their surfaces, antennae sprouting madly in every direction. They quivered with ruinous potential.

  Detonators. By the Thro–

  Cenric had no time to finish his thought before the world erupted in fire.

  When he awoke, it was without a sense of time.

  The world was changed, warped like a pict twisted by heat. There was a greater darkness, beyond the smoke-streaked sky. Death, fire, the stench of burning meat.

  He forced himself up, feeling at his armour. The master-crafted plate held firm, though he could feel the weakness of his own flesh. Blood ran within his armour, from largely minor cuts. As he moved, he could feel that his fused ribs had split or cracked in places. He would live. The Imperial Fists, his Chapter’s gene-source, believed that suffering bound them to the heroes of the past.

  But here, all Cenric felt was alone.

  He had fallen. That much was clear. He was in a pit hewn into the earth by massed explosives. Ancient passageways had collapsed, spilling the broken bas-reliefs of their walls into the depths. The faces of saints and heroes stared up, impotently, their shattered visages judging him. Pipes that had once carried sacred oils had ruptured, burning with lurid multicoloured flame. The light rippled along the ragged walls, picking out details and horrors.

  Bodies surrounded him, giving the place a charnel air. Masses of the enemy lay dead, alongside multitudes of the Sisterhood and his own brothers. His grip tightened about the Black Sword. This was not the victory he had been promised. He pressed the blade tip into the cracked stone and bowed his head.

  Do not forsake us in our hour of glory or time of suffering. We venerate you, we trust in your guidance. This cannot be the end. This cannot be all that you have wrought me for.

  He nearly choked on the pride in his thoughts. His was not to question; merely to serve. To fight and to die at the Emperor’s will. Then his body and blade would be carried back to the Eternal Crusader, to lie alongside the other vanished heroes of the Chapter. An honour that would be denied to the brothers here, unless the Apothecaries were to find them when, if, the battle was won.

  ‘I will not let you moulder here, brothers,’ he swore. ‘When the enemy lies dead before me, you shall be honoured as you deserve. Your legacy shall return to the Chapter, that future generations might serve our cause in the Emperor’s name.’

  His words were drowned out by a tortured mechanical scream. The earth shook and trembled, dislodging debris from the sides of the pit. It pinged uselessly against his armour, not even scoring the pure blackness of the ceramite. He looked up. Great mechanical plates slid across the gap above, obliterating the sky with their grinding passage. Greenskin chants echoed, and he could hear their stamping and pounding upon the makeshift bridges.

  Sunlight died beneath their advance, and he was left alone in the flickering shadow.

  His armour’s auto-senses compensated quickly. Where his eye had first been drawn skywards, now he looked to the ruined mess of shattered tunnels and ancient cracked-open vaults. Powdered masonry and old bone coated everything, spilling from violated reliquaries and shrineholds. Worlds such as Daronch were threaded with them, like capillaries through flesh. All inevitably snaked back to the great organs of the cathedrals. He looked to the north, where the perverted fastness of their enemy waited. The tunnels were unreliable, likely still teeming with greenskin stragglers, but they were all that remained to him.

  He has set a path before me, and I will follow it even if it leads to death.

  To others it might have seemed a haunting thought, but it bore a reassurance within it. This was ordained; it had to be. Did the galaxy not turn by His will?

  Cenric pushed on, his pain forgotten, his kindled blade held before him.

  The light of the power weapon split the darkness, resolving the intricately carved walls of the passageways. Even here they had been worked and graven, the better to channel the desert winds into sacred song. Now they echoed with the distant sound of bestial roars and grunts, of metal on metal, and the clamour of battle. It had become a debased alien hymnal of desecration.

  And of struggle.


  He could hear human exertion echoing amidst the fray, the muted sound of battle. Orkish cries and jeers sought to drown it with their savagery. The whirring of an engine rose and fell, the juddering of teeth against metal. Someone was fighting, struggling to survive. Cenric barged his way past piles of debris and crude barricades, crushing rocks to powder beneath his tread. He rounded another corner and emerged into a domed circular chamber. There he found his quarry.

  The woman fought like a cornered animal, slashing at the air with the massive chainblade. Three of the greenskins had closed in around her, laughing with piggish amusement. They were toying with her, seemingly unconcerned by the rents in their armour and the wounds carved into their skin by her defiance. Her eyes were ablaze, piercing in their unbridled hatred. She swung recklessly, not caring if she exhausted herself, only that she struck, that she endured. She would fight, to the bitter end.

  Any brother of the Chapter would be proud to fight like this – to die like this. The thought gave Cenric pause, resolving his duty like a sharply honed blade.

  He hurled himself forward, bellowing his wrath. ‘For Dorn! For Sigismund! For the Emperor!’ The beasts turned, their red glare suddenly focusing upon him. The warrior took her chance and rallied. The great blade came up, teeth screaming as she raked it across the back of the nearest ork. It roared in pain and rage, spinning back towards her and catching her return sweep in the face. Its head vanished in a burst of gory slurry, its body shuddered and dropped. She was already moving past it, into the fray, initiative regained.

  Cenric swung the Black Sword double-handed and the nearest ork flinched back from it, too slow. The crackling tip of the blade opened a gouge in its oversized plate armour. Rivulets of molten pig iron spilled across exposed skin with an acrid crackle, and it swung its own axe in a desperate arc. The flat of the blade caught him in the side of the helm, knocking him backwards. The visual display jolted, damage runes staining everything with winking crimson.