On Wings of Blood Read online

  The pilots began to recite the canticle, and the atmosphere buzzed. Wards on the inside of the Stormraven glowed a dull blue against the brushed steel of the Chapter’s livery. Aegir could feel the power coursing through his system. His hearts responded by beating faster and harder.

  Brothers,+ he communed. +Let us find their master, and ease the burden for the brother-captain.+

  He felt the assent of the others as they gathered on his left wing. They flew over the battle lines, firing into the daemons with sanctified ammunition. With every daemon or traitor that died, another rose to take its place. The Grey Knights’ advance was faltering.

  Does this feel right to you?+ Aegir spoke just to Thebe.

  None of this feels right,+ Thebe replied. +But I do not ask why. That is not my purpose.+

  You have permission to speak freely.+

  I have never seen these foetid creatures employ this tactic. They were never ones for this kind of sapping warfare.+

  Aegir’s mouth twisted slightly. +So what are they doing?+

  Thebe paused for a moment. +If I was to guess, I would say they are trying to draw something out into the open. They are hunting.+

  Using themselves as the bait?+

  Precisely.+

  ‘He has still not shown himself,’ Anahk’hir mused.

  ‘Lord?’ The transfixed herald looked away from the battle lines.

  ‘He has grown cunning these last years.’

  The herald returned to watching the bloodshed with a wry grin, realising Anahk’hir was talking to himself.

  ‘Perhaps the stakes must be higher for him to wield his own weapons. Very well. I shall be first onto the field of battle. Though I shall not be going alone. He may watch his pretty silver birds burn!’

  The daemon hoisted himself to his tree-trunk-like feet. He flexed and incanted words that sounded like a thousand bones snapping in sequence. His arms began to flicker as they transformed into brutal weapons – a rusted blade in his right, and a tri-barrelled cannon grafted on the left. On his back, a tank of bilious fluid containing unspeakable corruption slopped as he clambered from the crease in the cave floor.

  ‘Herald,’ he hissed. ‘Unleash the Heldrakes!’

  Aegir pressed the button, shredding the line of plaguebearers in his targeting reticle. He felt something familiar. A tickle on his palette, and the taste of salt against his tongue.

  Aegir.+ Metis was alive, and communicating.

  Metis–+

  There is no time,+ Metis interrupted. +I have found the locus of the interdiction. The brother-captain was correct. It looks as if it is taking to the field. On your–+

  A yawping screech broke Aegir’s concentration. It was the sound of a diving hawk, or hunting eagle – though it was made by a machine a hundred times the size of either of those birds. Great clouds of flame to rival the refineries of the Scouring of Genye pillared through the haze towards the ground. Aegir thought he saw, just for a second, a glint of metal. Orbs glowed red then orange – twinned like a binary star.

  The Heldrakes hiding in the gloom dropped from the cavern roof and screamed their battle cries.

  Kalyke was the first to die, his Stormraven snatched by the lead Heldrake as it dropped. The mechanical daemon-beast clamped its jaws around the flyer. A tooth the size of a forearm pierced the gunnery blister. With the wards broken, and the psychic protection dissipated, the Stormraven began to corrode. Within seconds, the entire hull was rusted beyond reckoning, and when the beast released its quarry, Longsword flaked to the ground.

  Eight more creatures joined the lead, unfurling their wings like bats emerging from their roost. Where the lead belched fire and flame, the others breathed smoke, insects or pestilence. They were big, their manoeuvrability hampered by their size, but they were fast – easily able to outpace the Stormravens.

  Thebe was next to die. Caught by the tail and spun into the cavern wall, he was obliterated in a pyroclastic sphere as the ordnance ignited. Chunks of red-hot ceramite rained from the sky.

  Losing one voice from his squad was painful, but to lose two was traumatic. Aegir felt like he’d been hammer-struck.

  All across the cavern sky, Stormravens dipped and ducked between the breath weapons and autocannons of the Heldrakes. Some were fortunate, evading the incoming fire, or able to weather the storm of corruption loosed upon them. Others were not so lucky. They fell to the ground as balls of fire, or broken husks of the illustrious war machines they had been. Each Grey Knight taken was a glorious light lost to the void.

  Justicars and battle-brothers across the brotherhood felt the losses, but none more keenly than Aegir. He tried to move his arms, but they would not comply. He felt like two-thirds of his brain had simply vanished without trace, or by some occult surgeries. His consciousness rose from his physical form, leaving his brain to swim freely in his skull, feeling like it was no longer attached to his brainstem. He was lost without his brothers and their stabilising influence.

  Skeins of psychic energy emanated from Aegir, leaving Kodachi drifting in the sky, as the battle raged on around them.

  On the ground, the loss was also taking its toll. For the first time since making planetfall, the Grey Knights began to pull back. Just a step at first, which became a second, then a third.

  The air grew thicker as the haze returned. It seeped between the Grey Knights, thickening as it rose. Weapons boomed a fraction of a second slower. Storm bolters fired with an almost imperceptible delay. Pelenas felt that he was fighting through a viscous liquid, forcing his muscles to move faster than they ever were capable.

  He had begun the Third Canticle of Banishment as the Heldrakes dived, the loss of his airborne brothers striking him like acid-tipped arrows. Yet one could not rise to the rank of brother-captain without accepting the inevitability of loss or sorrow. His chant rose clear from his vox-grille, echoed by those Grey Knights closest to him. But even their canticles could not shift the dense miasma that closed in around them.

  As the miasma thickened, so the forces of the Lords of Decay became resurgent. The plaguebearers struck with their rusted knives, the blows turning away from the heavily warded armour of the Grey Knights. Breaths of acrid fumes and vinegar-soaked ashes cut through filtration systems, causing those affected to choke, or their eyes to stream.

  The Traitor Space Marines attacked in force. Bolters thundered out in the murk, their ammunition exploding against the aegis armour of the brotherhood, sending deadly white-hot shrapnel flying out in all directions. A number of the brothers died. Shell fragments cut through armour joints, dispelling the sacred wards beneath, allowing the daemons’ weapons to bite down hard.

  Each death only spurred the brother-captain to greater and greater action. His voice grew louder until the canticle occupied every known vox frequency. His blade whirled as fast as the fog would allow, severing limbs and banishing daemons to the warp. Burning blue with witch-fire, his hatred, and the hatred within all who stood with him, was channelled into it. The brotherhood dug in, repelling the daemonic advance.

  The stench of decomposing bodies overtook the brother-captain. The screams of anguished souls echoed in his mind. He staggered. The ground shook as the waves of assaulting daemons and traitors parted to allow the daemon prince’s advance.

  The Neverborn levelled his mighty weapon at the brother-captain. His face looked like it had been moulded from clay using a template from a child’s nightmare.

  ‘You will summon your master to face me, and I will grant you mercy,’ he yelled, spitting acrid liquids to the ground where they ate into the rock and gave off wisps of steam. He stood as tall and wide as a Dreadnought, his torso a bulbous mass of blubber. Great pectoral flabs hung low over his corpulent belly. His skin was a rancid green colour, and pale to the point of translucency. Scars, scabs and boils covered almost every inch of the daemon prince’s hideous flesh. Sores wept
fluids that seemed like sustenance for the myriad parasites that crawled over it.

  The enmity of the Grey Knights burned brighter. Sparks of power licked along their blades. Pelenas felt like he would be sick, his fury magnifying.

  Anahk’hir’s mouth split his face in half as he spoke, revealing rotten teeth and a putrid black tongue. ‘Or you shall all fall beneath my weapons, and your corpses become playgrounds for my children.’

  Pelenas drew breath behind his helm. A radiant energy uncurled itself from the gestalt. The brotherhood released the concealment, and the warrior standing at Pelenas’ side became Grand Master Vardan Kai. Pelenas looked into the bare face of the ancient warrior – his sapphire eye-lenses meeting the pale grey gaze of the Grand Master as they began the Fourth Canticle.

  The daemon stilled. ‘No! You are not him. You are not who I wait for.’

  Pelenas poured his hate into the gestalt. His brothers did likewise. Grand Master Kai drew on this well of emotion, crafting it. He spread his arms wide, forming a transparent bubble in the miasma. It surrounded the Grey Knights. Weapons swung more freely, bolters were brought to bear as before. The sanctuary in the miasma forced back the lines of the daemon.

  ‘My plans, my bargains, will not be for nothing. He is here, I know it.’ The daemon’s face leered in fury.

  Now, brothers,+ Grand Master Kai pulsed. +We make them pay for their very existence.+

  ‘Your lives are forfeit,’ Anahk’hir growled. The daemon lowered his cannon into the advancing line of Grey Knights, and destroyed them.

  Iocaste ducked under the incoming Heldrake’s neck. His servitor fired the assault cannon into its metallic underbelly, as the craft looped over the creature’s thrashing tail.

  Iocaste reached out with his mind, searching for Aegir, but he could not be found. Aegir had become isolated only once before. He had retreated from the group mind for a long time. Iocaste knew his brother did not have that luxury on this mission. If he didn’t awaken soon, he would perish.

  Thuds of flesh against ceramite brought him back to the present, as scraping claws squealed against sacred metals.

  ‘Ugh!’ Iocaste spat. ‘Furies!’

  Targeting the largest concentration, he pulled the nose cannons to bear, commanding the servitor to open fire. Pounding reports issued through the hull as the heavy bolter filled the sky with shells, blasting apart the daemonic carrion feeders. Those he missed with the guns he burned with superheated air as he angled the jet exhausts in his wake. Thumps and bumps through the bulkheads told him they still had company.

  Iocaste suddenly felt Aegir’s presence in his mind. Slowing the throttle, he angled the Stormraven to starboard-down.

  Two Heldrakes fought over the quarry they had snared in their mouths. Each was curled like an ancient eagle from an arcane heraldic device. They pulled against each other, wrestling over a silver gunship. Iocaste drifted his gunship alongside, scrutinising the markings, and felt a stab of relief to see it wasn’t Aegir.

  Something sharp was tapping against Talwar’s skin, looking for a weak spot. Seeing the split-second window of opportunity open, Iocaste gunned the engine. He pitched the nose up and flew straight towards the captured flyer. The machine-spirit pulled back, baulking at the request. Iocaste fought the controls, winging the craft over in a loop as the two creatures yanked. The snared craft was growing ever closer in the window. The taps were getting louder, closer to the side hatch.

  The creatures tore once more, ripping the captured Stormraven in half. Its promethium fuel ignited on contact with the red-hot engine cowls, and erupted into a fireball. The Heldrakes tumbled backwards. Iocaste, unsighted, entered the fireball at maximum velocity. The intense heat searing the furies from the hull, and setting off warning sigils on the console.

  They emerged charred, but mobile, with a few minor scratches in the hull from the attention of the flighted daemons and wreckage. Iocaste pulled around in a tight pass as his servitor launched a brace of Stormstrike missiles – each targeted at the duelling Heldrakes, annihilating them in a conflagration of incendiary warheads and shrapnel from the thrice-blessed munitions.

  ‘Find me Kodachi!’ he said.

  Anahk’hir unleashed all he possessed at the Grey Knights. Plaguebearers fell faster than they could be summoned. His nurgling pets could not penetrate the protective shell that had been cast, and his own attempts to counter the shield had failed. Even his beloved slug-beasts could not make a dent in the wall of silver. Two of his Heldrakes had fallen, their hearts ripped out by the irritating silver ships. Not even Roga’s troops could break through the line.

  The Grey Knights’ canticles had worked their way under his skin, gnawing at his bones. They burrowed their way into his skull, distracting him, and ruining the summoning. His skin itched and burned like it had been doused in acid, but his rage was driving him to greater and greater risk.

  The balance needed tipping. The more silver-clad warriors that were lost, the closer it brought his tormentor to the field. And then, Anahk’hir’s vengeance could be exacted.Anahk’hir closed his eyes. Summoning his will, fear and hatred, he merged them into a single invocation. He exhaled, manifesting a swarm of flies that covered the sky. The Land Raider-sized flesh sacs around the cavern writhed. Ripping open, they disgorged packs of rotflies, each one bearing one of the Grandfather’s chosen on its back.

  The daemon raised his cannon and fired an ugly ochre viscera at the sanctuary. Around him, the summoned creatures lifted into the air on wings that hummed louder than a Chapter’s collected power armour.

  The swarm spread through the cavern like oil across water, enveloping a lone Stormraven, choking its fan blades and air intakes. Smoke bellowed from the exhausts. The gunship’s nose pitched down. Kodachi began to fall from the sky.

  Aegir floated on a kaleidoscope of stimuli. A riot of sound collided with every colour and shade known to the realm of men. Every nerve was supercharged with electricity. It coursed through his skin like a violent storm.

  He drifted in the immaterium, past bloated things with distorted faces and distended limbs, past avian-faced scholars and writhing tentacled manifestations, and beyond countless unspeakable horrors of excess and blood. Finally, he saw emaciated bipeds wearing a mockery of his brother’s armour. As he looked closer, he saw their faces – the blistered, hollow-cheeked imitations of Kalyke and Thebe.

  The corners of his vision began to fold in on themselves, and with that sensation came pain. With each fold came an increase in temperature; pain gave way to anger, anger gave way to hatred.

  Aegir looked at his gauntlets and saw white light emanating from his armour’s joints. Rage burned through his veins, magnifying with each heartbeat. His face twisted, becoming a rictus mask of loathing. He balled his fists as his vision collapsed in on him.

  For a fraction of a second, he hung inside the vision in a foetal position, his blood white-hot, his rage distilling into pure wrath. Aegir’s form exploded outwards with a primal scream.

  He opened his eyes.

  Iocaste felt the acrid tang on his palette before he saw the plummeting Kodachi’s fly shroud glow, red at first, then orange. The faster it fell, the brighter it got. The tang flushed over his tongue and dripped acid down his throat. A scream built in microseconds in his mind – from a distant shout to a deafening cry.

  The flies detonated in a white ball of fire, carbonising the creatures, and turning them into pellets that rained harmlessly off Talwar’s armour. He could sense Aegir battling the controls as blue flames licked at the hull, searing anything that dared to get too close. The engines screeched as the last of the choking insects burned off, igniting from a growl of mechanical vexation.

  Faster the Stormraven dived, and faster the ground came to meet it. Iocaste was willing the flyer to right itself. He could feel Aegir’s struggles against inertia, desperate to save the craft he loved.

 
Suddenly, the flames guttered and died at once. The suicidal dive of the gunship slowed, and it was pulled into a hover.

  Iocaste.+ The squadron leader sounded different. His timbre was still that of Aegir but deeper, more resolute.

  Your orders, squadron leader?+

  Stormraven wing,+ he broadcast, opening his consciousness to the pilots and gunners of the First Brotherhood. +We are outnumbered. We are outgunned. But we shall never be outmanoeuvred. Rendezvous point alpha-five, then take flight, brothers. Back to the tunnels at full speed. You have your instructions. Enact them,+ Aegir pulsed, closing down his communion.

  A wide grin spread itself across Iocaste’s face.

  Kodachi flew languid patterns while the remaining Storm­ravens disengaged to gather at the muster point. As the last Stormraven raced in ahead of its draconic pursuer, the wing split, scattering towards the tunnels through which they entered.

  The Heldrakes turned their heads in confusion, unsure of which to pursue. The subsumed pilots tried to exert some control, but the daemons in the machines simply spat angry sheets of flame as the gunships scattered. Aegir took aim at the fire-breather, striking its maw with a few rounds from the assault cannon. It howled its displeasure and gave chase, accelerating at a rate far beyond that expected from a beast its size.

  It was on Kodachi fast. Aegir dipped and snatched the craft out of the beast’s line of fire. Autocannon shells swept by, exploding in mid-air and scattering shot off the fuselage.

  Aegir,+ Iocaste pulsed

  Aegir dismissed it with a shrug, shooting a few more shells at the creature’s face, shattering one of the carmine eyes. The Heldrake flinched against the attack. Shaking its head, it screamed again and increased its speed.

  Get out of there,+ Iocaste warned.

  Keep going.+ Aegir’s rage still burned beneath his skin. It was evident from his tone.