Sons of Wrath - Andy Smillie Page 13

  The sorcerer’s eyes widened questioningly.

  ‘Chaplain…’ Seraph’s face was riddled with concern as he approached. ‘We cannot let this traitor go free.’ Beside him, Menadel raised his sword.

  Zophal shook his head. ‘I am not setting him free, and I am not going to kill him.’ He looked to Menadel. ‘And neither are you.’ Zophal’s tone did nothing to hide the threat in his words.

  ‘You would stand in his defence?’ asked Menadel.

  ‘I stand in our defence. In Amit’s. He has started down a dark path.’ Zophal’s tone softened. ‘One I alone am not strong enough to pull him back from. I need your help, brothers. And yours, Omari.’

  ‘I am listening,’ said Omari.

  ‘Allow me to return you to your cell,’ said Zophal.

  Anger twisted Omari’s face into a scowl. ‘I had come to think more of you, Chaplain. I had not expected you to break your word so completely. I would have accepted death, but imprisonment, a slow wait for your master to come butcher me, that will not be my fate.’

  ‘Wait.’ Zophal held up his hand as Omari reached for his weapon. ‘Do not make a liar of yourself now. Not after you have endured so much.’

  Omari stopped.

  ‘Amit sates his blood-lust with the lives of traitors,’ said Zophal. ‘It is a savage practice but justifiable. Yet, if he takes you, a loyalist by word and deed, then he is lost. It is a line he must never cross, a temptation he must resist.’ Zophal sighed, suddenly tired. ‘It is my hope that one day Amit will free you of his own accord.’

  ‘Your hope?’

  ‘Hope is all any of us have left. I hope for salvation as you hope for redemption. Let this be the beginning of hope for both of us. Help me, Omari. Help me save Amit and this Chapter. The Emperor and His sons still need you.’

  Omari nodded and released his grip on his blade. ‘Very well.’

  Amit was losing. His armour was rent and scarred, wounded by a dozen cuts and thrusts of the daemon’s sword. His own blade had been denied its every endeavour. The daemon had parried and weaved its way around every attack as they circled each other. He shared his weapon’s hunger, its thirst for the daemon’s flesh.

  ‘I was always stronger than you.’ The daemon’s voice was Nuriel’s again, its face returned to that of the Librarian. ‘You are weak,’ Nuriel snarled, gripping his sword two-handed and slashing it down towards Amit’s head.

  Amit brought his blade up in defence, struggling as Nuriel’s unnatural might drove him down onto one knee.

  ‘Weak,’ Nuriel sneered, and kicked him backwards.

  Amit rolled with the blow, shaking the fog from his senses as he rose to his feet. He threw himself into an attack, sending his blade cutting towards Nuriel’s abdomen. The Librarian parried the blow, stepping into the space on Amit’s flank. The Chapter Master let go of his blade, pivoting in a tight circle to smash his elbow into Nuriel’s face. The Librarian’s jaw broke with a wet snap. Amit struck again, connecting with a right cross that crushed his nose and cracked his cheek. Snarling, he grabbed Nuriel’s head, pulling him in for a third blow…

  A wave of psychic energy threw Amit backwards. He grimaced as his head slammed into the ground.

  ‘I see now that I was aiming low, aspiring to the rank of Chief Librarian,’ Nuriel said, pushing his words into Amit’s mind. ‘I should have been Chapter Mas–’ Nuriel rasped in pain, clutching his head as his face twitched and convulsed. ‘No! This is my victory. You swor–’ He stopped short again, his eyes smouldering as they flashed crimson. The daemon returned.

  ‘He is pathetic, is he not?’ The daemon’s face twisted with contempt as it tossed away Nuriel’s weapon. ‘Small of mind. Driven by selfish ego.’ It paused a moment, its eyes finding Amit’s. ‘But not you. Something far greater drives you, Flesh Tearer.’

  Amit pushed himself onto all fours. His head hurt, and one of his eyes refused to open.

  ‘We have seen your future. We have watched you from the immaterium. Shared in your rapture as you’ve killed.’ The daemon cast its arms around the chamber, sweeping them wide to encompass the broken corpses of the Zurconian council. ‘Yours is a glorious tapestry of murder and death.’

  Bile rose in Amit’s stomach as the thing continued its sermon. His skin was slick with sweat. His skull burned with pain. A piercing ache. It was as though a nail were being hammered through it by the daemon’s words.

  ‘Look how easily you bled this world. You would have killed the Eagle Warriors too, given a push. You cannot deny your true nature, Flesh Tearer. You and the rest of your Legion have belonged to us since before Horus struck down your father.’

  The mention of Sanguinius sent anger pulsing through Amit’s limbs. Even against the impossible pain, he got to his feet. ‘I will kill you.’

  ‘Such anger.’ The daemon nodded in approval. ‘You think many died that day on Terra? You mortals do not know the meaning of many. Sanguinius’s cry for vengeance cut across the fabric of this realm and ours.’ The daemon bunched an outstretched fist in emphasis. ‘His roar of anguish gathered to a great wind of slaughter, a bladed fury that scythed over the blood plains.’

  Amit cast his gaze around for his weapon. The eviscerator lay at the daemon’s feet.

  The daemon grinned, picking up the weapon. ‘Sanguinius’s cry killed thousands. Hundreds of thousands. And my father… my father was joyous.’ It tossed the blade to Amit. ‘In the angel’s death, Khorne had found himself ten thousand new disciples.’

  Amit roared as he snatched the eviscerator from the air. Blood and saliva dripped from his mouth as he attacked, chopping his blade down to bisect the daemon from brow to coccyx. The daemon was immobile till the last instant, its hands flashing up to catch the eviscerator. The weapon’s teeth whined as they tried to chew through the daemon’s gauntlets. Amit threw all of his strength behind the blade, willing it to rip the daemon to tattered gobbets. A curse died in his throat, and he felt the strength bleed from his arms as his eyes met the daemon’s. In the depths of their malicious darkness, he saw only his own.

  The daemon smiled and snapped the blade in two. Wielding a piece in its grasp like a club, it smashed it across Amit’s face. The ragged shard tore at the Chapter Master’s flesh. Amit staggered. The daemon struck him again, relishing the backwash of blood as Amit’s face broke and tore. ‘Your blood is thick with the rage. Your blood lust will never be sated.’ The daemon picked Amit up and threw him across the chamber.

  Amit spun wild, gasping in pain as he struck one of the pillars, and landed hard.

  ‘Where your brothers walk the Road of Skulls, you roar along its length. You are at its vanguard, laying its foundations with the skulls you pile around you,’ said the daemon.

  The ground shuddered violently, throwing Amit back to the floor as he tried to rise. A second shockwave rumbled through the chamber, dislodging brickwork and cracking the balcony.

  The daemon flashed him a wide smile. ‘Nuriel was not the only weakling among your flock.’

  ‘Ronja,’ Amit snarled.

  ‘A prideful, ambitious human. I saw in her all that you did and more. She will wipe your pitiful Chapter from the face of this rock.’ The daemon’s eyes narrowed, its voice dropping to a low growl. ‘Join me or I will finish what my brother Kabanda started. I will end the line of Sanguinius.’

  Amit lolled onto his back, barely conscious as the shockwave from another orbital assault buffeted him. His armour was as a sheet of fractured ice, flawed by deep cracks. His organs were failing. He could feel his body pulling him into a sus-an coma. ‘No. I am not done yet.’ Amit pulled a fist-sized sphere from his belt, armed it and threw it at the daemon’s feet.

  ‘Foolish creature. I have already told you,’ the daemon barked, its patience gone, ‘guns and bombs cannot kill me.’

  ‘It is not a bomb.’

  The sphere shivered.
Sparks of energy arced from its surface. No. Amit read the thought in the daemon’s eyes as the device burst in a flash of white light. The shockwave threw the daemon to the floor. A web of energy formed in the air where the daemon had stood, arcing tendrils that spun out to rend reality asunder. The web crackled as it cut into the fabric of space. It spread, thickening, growing, until with a sudden jolt, it shattered. The energy web vanished in the same burst of light with which it had formed. In its place stood Grigori. Steam rose from the shoulders of the Dreadnought’s armoured sarcophagus in the same instant that the layer of hoarfrost around his legs cracked. Amit stared at Grigori. In that moment, bristling with the touch of teleportation, his old friend was a nightmare incarnate, a wrathful monster of adamantium and rage.

  The daemon got to its feet in time for one of Grigori’s fists to connect with its head. The strike hammered the daemon back onto the floor. Grigori allowed it no respite, battering the daemon with blow after blow, the Dreadnought’s power fists sparking as they clashed against the daemon’s armour.

  Amit dragged himself up against the nearest pillar as the pair fought. He heard them as though through a memory. The trading of blows. The daemon’s snarl. Grigori’s metallic roar. Distant sounds filtered by time. His mind was elsewhere.

  Amit stood with Sanguinius and Azkaellon. Beneath his feet was a duelling stone. Above him, the sky of holy Baal. He remembered the day as though it were a moment ago. He remembered what Sanguinius had said to him during the Tempest of Angels.

  You fight because it brings you peace. But there will come a time when the cries of those you have led to death will drown out the roar in your veins. There will come a time when you must lay down your sword to defend what little we have left.

  Amit got to his feet. His eyes found Nuriel’s blade in the rubble. ‘By his Blood am I made.’ Forcing his limbs forwards step by agonising step, he moved towards the discarded sword.

  A heavy crash resounded from his right. He turned to see Grigori on his back. The daemon stood over him, its hands incandescent with heat.

  ‘By his Blood am I armoured.’ Amit kept going, stumbling towards the sword. The daemon ignored him, its attentions fixed on Grigori as it ripped open the Dreadnought’s sarcophagus. ‘By his Blood shall I triumph.’ Amit finished the catechism, stooping to retrieve the blade.

  Only then did the daemon turn to regard him.

  ‘If we are to die cursed, then so be it,’ said Amit. ‘We will not die damned.’

  ‘You cannot kill me–’

  ‘Your boast,’ Amit snarled. ‘Not a blade. This blade.’ Amit clasped Nuriel’s sword by hilt and point.

  The daemon’s eyes widened in anger. ‘I will see you again, Flesh Tearer. We will bleed together before the end.’ It grinned, a dark smile that never left its face even as Amit snapped the sword across his knee.

  ‘How many of the wrong lives can you take before you are damned?’ Zophal whispered. ‘How many sins can one bear and still claim to be righteous?’

  The Chaplain knelt in the wreckage of the Reclusiam. He had barred the servitors and menial serfs from reconstructing it until his vigil was complete. Still, the irony of the Chapter’s spiritual home lying in waste and ruin was not lost on him. Zurcon had scarred them all.

  How many?

  He looked to the painting of the Emperor adorning the chamber’s ceiling in search of an answer. If there was one hidden in the eyes of mankind’s saviour, he failed to find it. Zophal sighed, and closed his eyes, hoping for solace in the darkness. It only made the truth clearer, his memory sharper. He saw himself stood on the bridge of the Victus. The tactical hololith bathing his armour in light.

  Zophal laughed without humour and opened his eyes to gather up a handful of rock dust from the Reclusiam floor. He was surrounded by cruel satire.

  What of the Eagle Warriors? Amit had asked him.

  Zophal shook his head. The Chapter Master was a warrior born and so his was not a question. It was a command. Zophal gripped his rosarius and coiled it slowly around his fist. Questions were not a warrior’s burden. They were his. Questions and their answers. His true curse.

  The Eagle Warriors Thunderhawks were blinking ident-codes on the tactical hololith. Their strike cruiser destroyed, they had swarmed up from Zurcon to dock with the Victus, and receive the passage Zophal had promised them.

  How many survived?

  Zophal coiled the rosarius tighter, grimacing as the barbed beads cut into the bare flesh of his hand. Blood dripped from his palm to strike the floor in steady rhythm, the crimson droplets staining the ground like targets painted on a hololith.

  Captain Nikon had been right. The Flesh Tearers had attacked first. The curse had overtaken brothers Daael and Aciel. Dozens more had succumbed once the fighting intensified, and they were gauntlet-deep in the entrails of the Eagle Warriors. The rich taste of Space Marine blood was a trial too far.

  How many survived? Amit had asked him again.

  In the wake of Horus’s treachery, the galaxy was unstable. The realm of man was as a pane of glass cast among rocks. It was a time when the line between brother and enemy had been lost among the darkness of the void. Were the Eagle Warriors allowed to return home and report all that had transpired…

  Zophal saw himself again on the Victus’s bridge, a single word on his lips. Fire.

  If word of their actions reached Guilliman, the Flesh Tearers would be cast out. Hunted. Killed. There was no longer any room for doubt. No path to redemption. Zophal bowed his head, stopping short of asking the Emperor for forgiveness. He deserved none.

  How many survived? Amit had asked.

  None, he had answered.

  ‘Enter,’ Amit said in reply to the third knock on his cell door.

  Techmarine Naamah entered, carrying a ridged blade.

  ‘Have you come to kill me, brother?’ Amit joked, though the sentiment did nothing to unfurl the crease in his brow or lighten the darkness of his eyes.

  Naamah looked guiltily at the blade. ‘No, lord. Your armour. It is beyond even my skill to repair.’ Naamah spoke with the slow solemnity of a priest confirming a death. ‘I forged this knife from its remains.’

  Amit took the blade and tested its weight. ‘A worthy relic blade. I am honoured to receive it.’ The weapon brought Amit a measure of comfort, staying his anger at his armour’s destruction. ‘It is a blessing that even beyond destruction we will find ways to inflict harm on our enemies. We…’ Amit paused a moment. ‘Grigori.’ His face hardened. ‘Does he live?’

  ‘He lives.’ Naamah nodded. ‘Apothecary Pursun and I are beginning to doubt there is a monster capable of killing our colossal brother.’

  Amit grinned. ‘Let us hope so. And Barakiel?’

  ‘Alive. He is still in a coma and will need several weeks in the sarcophagus, but he will live.’

  Amit nodded. The sarcophagus was a healing tank, a bath of bio-fluids and nutrients. He had spent a week there himself after his fight with the daemon.

  The Techmarine dipped his head in salute and made to leave the cell. ‘Master Amit.’ He stopped in the doorway. ‘I can refinish the armour.’ Naamah gestured behind Amit, indicating the suit of Terminator plate that hung in stasis against the rear wall. ‘Embellish it with salvaged pieces from your pauldron so that it may still stand with you in battle.’

  Amit turned back to face the rear of the cell and regarded the ancient war-plate. ‘No, we have enough of the past haunting us, brother.’

  Naamah went to speak but found himself lost for words and left the cell with a courteous nod.

  Alone again, Amit stepped close to the stasis field. The suit of Terminator armour glared back at him in challenge, its rugged design every bit the equal of his own rough-hewn features. He had studied every rivet and groove of its surface and yet it was as unfamiliar to him as the rank he now held.

  Guill
iman. For the first time, the name did not come with a jolt of anger. How long, I wonder, did you stare at your own future before taking the knife to the Legions? Was it easier for you? Amit let out the breath he had been holding. We have killed your sons as you have cut away our past. Does the same coldness now sit in your breast as it sits in mine? I no longer believe us to be angels. Yet we are more than butchers – we must be.

  ‘Let us find out who we are,’ said Amit.

  With angry purpose fuelling every beat of his twin hearts, the Master of the Flesh Tearers deactivated the stasis field.

  Acknowledgments

  Without my friends, this book would have undoubtedly been written faster. They’ve done nothing but distract me with conversation and fun. Having said that, some of them at least had the good decency to keep me in beverages. Thanks to: George ‘Assam’ Mann, Eddie ‘extra-shot’ Eccles, Pete ‘Mojito’ Foley and John ‘Tea-time’ French.

  Others had me make my own drinks but kindly read all the drafts. Thanks to: Stuart Black, Nikki Loftus, Greg Smith and Aaron Dembski-Bowden, for reading my random scrawling without ever once requesting I stop sending them stuff in crayon.

  About the Author

  Andy Smillie is best known for his visceral Flesh Tearers novellas, Sons of Wrath and Flesh of Cretacia, and the novel Trial by Blood. He has also written a host of short stories starring this brutal Chapter of Space Marines and a number of audio dramas including The Kauyon, Blood in the Machine, Deathwolf and From the Blood.

  An extract from Flesh of Cretacia.

  Tamir let Kesef fall. Pressing himself into the rockface as the youth tumbled past, he didn’t spare the other warrior another glance. The weak had no place on Cretacia. It was better for Kesef to die than live to infect the tribe with his wretched blood. Tamir reached for the next handhold and paused. Kesef wasn’t screaming. The warrior had not allowed his death to expose Tamir and the rest of the war party. There was honour in that, at least. When the hunt was over, Tamir would have Harut find Kesef’s body and burn it. He would not leave the youth’s spirit to be consumed by the earth.