Endurance - Chris Wraight Read online

  ‘You’re killing yourself,’ the man says. ‘That seems wasteful.’

  Sarrien pushes himself up from the floor. Blood splatters against the inner curve of his helm as he exhales. He thrusts his blade against the man’s neck and drives the metal into the flesh.

  ‘Silence!’ Sarrien hisses.

  The man bleeds freely. ‘Yes, that’s the thing.’ He licks his scabby lips, and the sinews of his neck slip over the crackling sword-edge. ‘He’s very close now. He’s coming. The Gallowsman.’

  Sarrien wants to push the blade in further, to finish the task, but he can’t. He looks into the man’s eyes, and suddenly feels tired. So, so tired.

  ‘It’s over, lad,’ the man says, and a black line of blood bubbles down over a blotchy chin. ‘He’s almost here now.’

  At that, Sarrien feels fire kindle again. He cries out – a wrenched sound of mingled anguish and defiance. Strength returns and he hauls his sword clean across, severing the neck. Flesh parts, bone cleaves, and the huge man subsides into a leaking heap.

  Sarrien swings around, breathing heavily, looking for more of them.

  He is ankle-deep in corpses, but none of them are moving. His boots slip on the gore, making him stagger. He feels suddenly cold, chilled to his core, and starts shivering. Despite that, he is still sweating too much.

  He starts to walk. He needs to get out of this place, to get away from the stench, to draw purer air into his lungs.

  All he can see is the man’s sympathetic expectancy.

  He’s coming.

  Sarrien keeps walking, not hearing the crack of bone under his boots, struggling to keep the blackness from narrowing his vision into nothingness.

  ‘Endure,’ he whispers, little more than a croak from blood-raw lips. Then he says it again. And again.

  Dragan looks down at the world he will kill. He and Glask stand on the observation deck and take in the flickering scan-feeds. From far below, he can feel the heavy clunk of lander-pods being lifted into position.

  ‘A hive world, Gallowsman,’ Glask says.

  Dragan snarls at him – he hates the title, a typical piece of Barbaran whimsy, and he is no Barbaran. He can’t even remember where he heard it first, or how it got attached to him, but he’s never been able to shake it off.

  ‘There,’ he says, gesturing to the greatest area of conurbations, a huge tangle of interlinked hive-spires high up on the northern continent.

  ‘Already under attack,’ says Glask doubtfully. ‘Invested, cut off. Can we add much to this?’

  Dragan finds he has a certainty about this place, more than is generated or explained by his usual excessive confidence. He stares into the scanner.

  ‘Not just filth down there,’ he says, blink-summoning his honour guard and issuing follow-up orders to the rest of the Plague Marines in his war band. ‘Adversaries worth our blades.’

  The two of them head to the pod-bays, where they rendezvous with the rest. The Incaligant has a single Dreadclaw lander, salvaged somehow from the ancient wars and still in working order, plus a brace of more cumbersome ways of getting down. Centuries of contiguous service with Death Guard war bands have seen the Dreadclaw’s sides break out into pulsing sacs and its metallic spines erupt with bony outgrowths. When they get into it, gripping on to glistening tendrils strung from the spiny roof, the floor flexes under them.

  ‘Are you… all right, Gallowsman?’ asks Glask uncharacteristically, and bravely.

  ‘Do not call me that,’ Dragan says.

  Then the Dreadclaw unlocks, and the dizzying descent begins. They are thrown about, slammed into the pod’s yielding innards. For a few moments there is nothing but the internal roar of the engines, but then the greater boom of atmospheric burning surrounds them. The speed builds and builds, reaching a crescendo just before the retros fire and the plummet ends in the familiar bone-jarring crash of planetfall.

  Dragan is first out. He lumbers into a cityscape ravaged by the close attentions of his Legion’s god – spires hollowed out into rusted lattices, great black vines strung between rotting nutrient processors. The air is humid and rot-sweet, the ground crawling with blowflies. It is raining in a steady torrent, the drops as viscous as mucus. The Dreadclaw has driven a crack into the rockcrete, and it is already filling up with a sticky swell.

  ‘Good place,’ Glask says, lurching into shattered streets.

  Dragan hesitates. He lets his warriors go ahead of him. He looks up at the distant pinnacles, mobbed by specks that look like crows but are in likelihood something altogether stranger. He breathes in the torpid atmosphere, detecting the familiar strains of sickness and flesh-decay. Rain runs down his armour, streaming in rivulets over his many corruptions.

  He starts moving, stirred by the sound of distant munitions. Fighting is taking place here, despite all the signs of deep and ingrained corruption. His war band heads towards the heart of the mouldering city, passing under the thin shadows of skeletal hab-structures, and sees the first poxwalkers lurch out from under cover. Those wretches are, as ever, happy to see Plague Marines, and begin to gibber. One comes close to Dragan, simpering, and has its spine snapped.

  ‘They have been here a long time,’ Dragan remarks, casting a troubled gaze across signs of deep-set corrosion. ‘What still fights them?’

  The Plague Marines stalk through the steady downpour, gathering a train of limping poxwalkers behind them, who paw and gurgle like domesticated cattle. Some carry shocking wounds, barely caked over by the regenerative powers of their many diseases. Glask remains at the forefront, and the others begin to fan out. Their helm-lenses shimmer with pale green light in the murk. Dragan has a sensation that he cannot name and cannot shake, humming behind his eyes, nagging like an insect he cannot swat.

  Then he smells it. Even under the fug of festering organics, ceramite armour has a certain odour, carried by lubricants and ritual oils.

  ‘Be wary,’ he voxes, extending rust-flecked talons from his gauntlets. ‘A serious enemy is here.’

  They do not hurry. They never hurry. They stalk their way deeper into the rain-soaked plague-city, cloven boots splashing into the claggy mire, neither hiding their approach nor advertising it. As they have done on a thousand battlefields, they gauge the threat, they measure their strength against it, they close in on it. Soon they are pushing their way under the looming shoulders of streaming spires, burned black and dripping with stringy lines of pus. Their tactical displays, smeared and thick with condensation, pick up heat-markers, and they head towards them. The poxwalkers come with them, more every moment, flocking around the lords they revere and wish – futilely – to one day become.

  Glask is first into battle. As he limps down a snaking transitway clogged with the carcasses of charred transports, the first bolt-round cracks out, punching a hole in his right pauldron. He reels, keeping his feet, then returns fire.

  Dragan, a few paces back, scans for the source. He sees it – a hundred metres further up, under the cover of a tangled mass of steel wire and crumbled concrete, a lone warrior in unsullied battleplate clambering into view, firing as he emerges.

  Then there are more of them, all in gunmetal-grey armour, emblazoned with yellow-and-black chevrons. A dozen, smelling strongly of engine oil and promethium. Behind them, something boxy, huge and wreathed in smoke is ploughing its way through rafts of detritus.

  Dragan smiles. Sons of Perturabo. A serious enemy indeed.

  ‘Engage freely, my brothers,’ he commands, slowly lumbering into a ground-cracking charge, his talons crackling with strings of disruptor-charge. ‘Let’s see what they’ve got.’

  The last lines are broken. Cleon is out of contact. As far as Sarrien knows, the sergeant and all the others are dead now. He gave the order himself for Votive IX to evacuate with the last of the sacred weapons and scarce vials of recovered gene-seed, but has no idea if the command made it t
hrough in time.

  He has been fighting without any kind of pause for longer than he can remember. One leg is broken, and splinters of bone graze up against his armour cabling. He is nearly blind from the blood pouring down his forehead. His powerblade has finally extinguished, its energy unit smashed, and now he wields it like the mute blades of antiquity.

  He is backing away from the hordes, slashing in weary, two-handed curves. All he can see is the ocean of corrupted humanity sweeping towards him, every one with that damnable grin on their stretched faces. The air is hot, dry and caustic.

  ‘For the Emperor!’ he cries out for the thousandth time that day, in defiance, his voice weak and liquid through a blood-filled throat.

  Flies have got in through the rents in his armour, and they burrow into his flesh, snapping and sucking. Foul gases burst up from the ground beneath him, lurid greens and yellows, old toxins now released into an already putrid atmosphere.

  He is the last. He has watched all the others die, one by one, selling themselves for a world the Imperium has clearly forgotten. He has no idea if their sacrifice bought time for victories elsewhere, and no longer cares. He cannot remember his own name, nor the chants given him by the Chaplains. He can only remember how to fight, and those three words – For the Emperor – that have burst from his lips since before his ascension to the Chapter itself.

  A flayed canine horror bounds towards him, its mouth open to expose concentric rings of curved teeth, and he wearily hacks it down. He is aware that stumblers are clambering in the scaffold above him, coiled ready to pounce, and can do nothing about it.

  For the first time, despair rises to choke him. There is nothing noble to fight here, nothing to test himself against, just this hateful, hateful swell of twisted and destroyed flesh.

  ‘For the Emperor,’ he gasps, his body flaring with agony.

  He staggers into a cavernous interior of a roofless cathedral, pursued all the way. A great stone aquila hangs from a broken archway, still suspended by corrosion-eaten chains. He fights his way towards it, panting, limping, feeling the insects burrow deeper into his skin. They get into his helm, suffocating him.

  ‘For. The. Emperor.’

  Just as he draws closer, a blunt blade chops out his good leg from under him, and he stumbles. He hacks the blade’s bearer apart, but has to crawl now. The aquila is swaying, rocked by hot plague-winds gusting along the nave. Even as he watches, the chains break, and the mighty stone sigil crashes to earth. It breaks into three pieces, rocking amid the detritus of the altar beneath.

  ‘For. The…’

  No breaths will come now. Every time he tries, more blowflies clog his throat.

  ‘For…’

  He looks up. High above him, hidden behind a haze of dust and insects, the heavyset tattooed man is there again. A livid weal runs along his flabby neck.

  ‘That’s enough now, lad,’ the man says, ‘don’t you think?’

  ‘For…’

  Sarrien is trembling all over. He can feel his body giving up. His organs are full, pulsing as if worms might burst from them. His sword drops from his trembling fingers.

  ‘You want to keep fighting, do you not?’ the man asks.

  He struggles. All is going black.

  ‘There’s a better death for you. If you want it. You won’t even remember you were here.’

  His head cracks to the ground, and he feels the weight of the stumblers as they land on him. Lice swarm up into his carapace, lodging deep within the interface nodes. His secondary heart bursts, and he feels the hot, wet pain within him.

  He manages to look up, one last time. The tattooed man has come closer, and is squatting over him. There’s a strange breaking of the light over his green-eyed, bloodshot face.

  ‘So what do you want now, lad?’ the man asks.

  Just as before, it seems as if it is just the two of them. He can still see the man’s features, but the rest is a blur. He can still feel the pain of his body’s disintegration, but the shrieks of the stumblers are muffled. The world shrinks around him like gauze over a wound.

  ‘Resist,’ Sarrien croaks, though his voice is coming from a long way off.

  ‘You could do.’ The face looms. It has an unhealthy pallor up close, grey-green like moss on stone. ‘You have done for months. You never broke. But then, you can resist anything, can’t you? Except, perhaps, pointlessness. This has all been pointless. That is the real torture.’

  Sarrien feels the words penetrate like fingernails. Something within him uncurls, a tumour or a blight, flexing into birth. He sees the iron ingots on the man’s shaven head, and they look like elongated service studs. He sees the lumps under the man’s skin, and they look like the ancient, decayed remnants of a black carapace.

  ‘I killed you,’ Sarrien says.

  ‘You may do so again. And that, too, you will never remember.’

  He has been fighting for so long. He has forgotten so much. The pain is unbearable. He knows nothing. He has been destroyed. All around him, the city is becoming a shrine. All it lacks is an offering.

  ‘What do you want?’ the tattooed man asks again.

  Sarrien looks up at him.

  ‘To keep going,’ he says.

  ‘There’s only one way to do that.’

  For a long time Sarrien makes no reply. It feels like he’s falling, tumbling into a cold well. He can hear someone screaming.

  To ask the question is the beginning. He knows this. But that is the easiest way to set off, to soften the hard path ahead.

  The green eyes never let him go.

  ‘What do you want?’

  The pain.

  ‘More,’ Sarrien says.

  Dragan takes joy in the fighting. The enemy is pushed back. They resist, and do well, for they are as stubborn and strong as the Death Guard, but this world belongs to the god and they are on foreign ground, and so they will lose in the end.

  In truth, he does not know why there are poxwalkers in this city. They must have been here for years, corroding and infesting the entire planet in a slow vice of decay. He assumes they were spawned in some ancient war, and have since changed it from its cold Imperial template and transformed it, as they are wont to do, into a little mirror of the Plague Planet.

  Dragan launches into the next adversary, plunging his talons into thick ceramite, relishing the Iron Warrior’s grinding death. A final death blow rattles his helmet, grating up against the swollen iron studs in his skull. Dragan seizes the dying Iron Warrior and hurls him aside. As he does so, his chest spasms with pain – the old flesh-cut tattoo over his ribcage is suppurating again.

  He presses on, flanked by his brothers. They drive the enemy into the rotting shell of what might have been a cathedral, its walls heavily green with glowing vegetation and its floors spongy with saturated spores.

  He sees the ruins of an old stone Imperial aquila, half-buried in the mats of rain-spattered fungus. It is in pieces, as if it fell from the open roof a long time ago.

  That makes him pause. He freezes, and for a moment feels an old memory tug at him. When he blinks, for a split second he is looking down at a crippled, bedraggled fighter half-buried in the debris, as if they had been speaking, the two of them. A dim memory swims close to the surface, and he reaches out to it and almost gets hold of it.

  But then there is a heavy crash, and Glask is forging ahead. The others are going with him. Dragan pulls back. He blinks again, and there is only rubble.

  He shakes his head. He barks out a caustic laugh and starts walking again. He finds new targets and selects which ones he will end.

  ‘Gallowsman!’ Glask calls out merrily. ‘We have them on the run!’

  Dragan glowers at him and takes up the slaying afresh.

  ‘Do not call me that,’ he mutters and strides across the broken aquila, grinding what remains of its outli
ne into the rotting dust.

  About the Author

  Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Scars and The Path of Heaven, the Primarchs novel Leman Russ: The Great Wolf, the novellas Brotherhood of the Storm and Wolf King, and the audio drama The Sigillite. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written the Inquisition novel The Carrion Throne and the Space Wolves novels Blood of Asaheim and Stormcaller, as well as the short story collection Wolves of Fenris. For Space Marine Battles, he has written the novels Wrath of Iron and War of the Fang. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, including the Time of Legends novel Master of Dragons, which forms part of the War of Vengeance series. Chris lives and works near Bristol, in south-west England.

  The Grey Knights are humbled on the plains of Kornovin by the daemon prince Mortarion, and reluctant Grand Master Kaldor Draigo is hurled towards a most unlikely destiny…

  A Black Library Publication

  Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

  Cover illustration by Mark Holmes.

  Endurance © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Endurance, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.

  All Rights Reserved.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-78572-843-3

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.