Massacre - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Read online

  Xarl turned his bat-winged helm towards Talos, red eye lenses gleaming in the transport bay’s gloom. ‘Legion pride,’ came the reply in his husky, deep voice. ‘It feels right, given what we’re about to do.’

  Cyrion, standing behind Xarl, had affixed his bolter’s chain-bayonet, and was testing it by live-cycling it with droning whines.

  ‘That crest is almost as high as Sevatar’s,’ he pointed out. ‘The enemy will mistake you for a hero.’

  Xarl grunted. In dismissal or disgust, it added up to the same result. He turned back to face the front.

  In the hull-shaking, iron-rattling unquiet that followed, Cyrion looked over his shoulder, where Ruven was distractedly watching lightning ripple across the naked blade of his force sword. It cast watery light across the gunship’s interior, ugly and fluid – it would have been just bright enough to hurt the warriors’ sensitive Nostraman eyes, had any of them stood unhelmed.

  ‘Will you be keeping to the precepts of the Nikaean Edict down there, brother?’

  Ruven, Tenth Company’s attached Librarian, gave a charmless sneer. He sheathed the sword, plunging them into true darkness again, and said nothing.

  Deprived of his favoured targets for baiting, Cyrion looked across the bay to Talos. Lightning bolts ran down the warrior’s faceplate, painted as elemental tear-trails. They glowed scarlet with the light from his eye lenses.

  ‘So,’ Cyrion said. ‘How are you?’

  *

  True to the Night Lords’ nature, the fight was anything but fair. They’d left the main battle in the Urgall Depression to the forward elements of Warmaster Horus’ forces. Malcharion had other plans, which First Captain Sevatar was only too pleased to grant his blessing.

  Malcharion had led Tenth Company at the head of its battalion along the southeast ridge, holding back in favour of bringing their Thunderhawks down among the columns of fleeing, wounded Iron Hands struggling on the way to their own evacuating gunships.

  Fresh from orbit, unscathed from the day’s exhausting fighting that continued to leech the strength of the massacred Legions, the Night Lords had torn into their foes with relentless, joyous abandon.

  Half a long and bloody day later, the unending demands of butchery were taking their toll even on the sons of Curze. Their gunships still roamed overhead on strafing runs, gutting the loyalists with relentless volleys of heavy bolter fire and driving them forwards onto the waiting blades of the VIII Legion. But those blades moved slower in arms that were growing weary. Though wounded and scattered, the Iron Hands resisted their slaughter with the tenacity that their Nostraman cousins were learning to lament.

  Talos wrenched his chainsword clear of another fallen warrior, ignoring the blood spray that flecked his eye lenses from the blade’s revving teeth. His hand was cramp-locked to the grip, his forefinger curled against the trigger and unable to bend away. His muscles were aflame with lactic burns just from the gruelling repetition of raising and swinging his blade, again and again and again.

  The Iron Hand on the gore-soaked ground clawed up at the Night Lord, too brutally stubborn even to realise that he was dead. Another swing of the chainblade took off the warrior’s reaching bionic arm at the wrist in a spray of sparks, and on the backswing Talos rammed the whining, protesting weapon down into the Iron Hand’s throat. The chainsword threw several more of its remaining teeth on the way through the fibre bundle musculature of the warrior’s gorget collar. When the Apothecary pulled the blade clear for the final time, he looked with momentary irritation at the paltry few still attached, rotating loosely on the moving saw-blade.

  He tried to hurl the weapon aside. It took two attempts to get his hand to unlock, such was the force of his cramp after six hours of face-to-face fighting.

  Just as the sword left his straining grip, something crashed into the side of his helmet with a hammerblow of force, snapping his head back and de-tuning his eye lenses to a mess of red static for the duration of two heartbeats. Talos was hauling himself back up from the mud when another blow pounded him beneath the right arm, knifing through his ribs with a spread of sharp, thick, throbbing pressure. He tasted fyceline gunsmoke on his tongue and blood far back in his throat.

  Retinal alarms flashed and flickered, demanding his attention, cataloguing his exact wounds, even charting the angles of the incoming enemy fire. Up ahead, a trackless, wrecked Rhino transport grew a flickering outline on his retinal imaging: the source angle of the bolt shells that had knocked him from his feet. For a rare moment his own lifesigns took precedence over those of his brothers. Stings lanced through his bloodstream as his armour dispensed pain nullifiers and battle stimulants.

  He blind-fired back through the press of warring bodies, holding his bolter one-handed, heartened by the heavy kick of the gun in his fist. There was no cover to take out here in the naked melee. The closest shell of a tank wreck was thirty metres away.

  Two of his brothers were nearby, almost close enough to touch. To his left, Xarl was reaving left and right with his immense chainsword, all sense of skill abandoned as unnecessary, carving through exposed joints in black, war-scarred Mark II plate. Cyrion was down in the mud, kneeling atop a convulsing Iron Hand, sawing his bayonet through the dying warrior’s neck.

  Over the vox, Xarl – who usually waged war in cold silence – was emitting a primal grunting, doubtless feeling his own muscles burning after so many hours of battle. Cyrion was alternating between cursing in reptilian Nostraman syllables and occasionally breaking into laughter. He had a way of laughing without any cruelty, sounding somehow good-natured and generous even as he was tearing out a rival’s trachea.

  Talos moved ahead, needing to fight his way forward. The ground beneath his boots was a tormented scree of broken ceramite and blood-choked mud; when he wasn’t clambering over the fallen corpses he was sloshing in the gore ejected from their bodies. He paused only to loot the slain for ammunition, firing mercy bolts down at the dying.

  +Cease.+

  The word flared in his mind, more visual than audible, written in flame upon the backs of his eyes. The Apothecary staggered, risking a glance to his side, seeking signs of the Librarian, Ruven. It took several seconds for his vision to clear from the mist of migraine fire.

  +Cease executing the fallen. Mercy has no place here.+

  Talos gave a bestial grunt at the pressure in his head, a compression at his temples hard enough to make the bones of his skull squeal under the strain. The sourceless pain of the last few weeks sang harsher and harder in the wake of Ruven’s telepathy.

  The Librarian stood with Malcharion – As he always does, Talos thought with a sneer, guarded by the company’s best blade – adding his sorcerous lightning to the Tenth Captain’s relentless advance.

  ‘I see all pretence of the Edict has been cast aside,’ Cyrion murmured across the squad’s internal link.

  The Apothecary ignored Cyrion’s baited observation. ‘It is not mercy,’ he voxed to the figure fighting in Malcharion’s shadow. ‘It is prudence. Should we advance too far, and the wounded reform in enough numbers...’

  Ahead, Ruven didn’t spare Talos a backward glance. The skin-cloaked Librarian swung his heavy blade, rippling with psychic energy, breeding thunderclaps each time the sword fell upon scarred black ceramite.

  +You have your orders, Apothecary.+

  Talos was drawing breath to reply when another bolt caught him behind the knee, shattering the machine-muscles of his greave. Two more took him low in the breastplate a half-second apart, breaking the silver Aquila on his chest and sending him to the ground. He crashed into the blood-churned muck, only for one of the downed Iron Hands to ram a broken gladius blade into his wounded side, triggering a fresh panic of irritating retinal alarms.

  ‘Traitor,’ the wounded Medusan breathed, the word a wet crackle through his shattered vox-grille. Talos stared into the warrior’s scorched, empty eye socket through the Iron Hand’s cleaved faceplate. There was a moment of grotesque fraternal camaraderie, joined as they were by wounds and hatred and the blade gouging through the Night Lord’s fused ribs.

  Talos levelled his bolter, pressing it to the warrior’s flame-ruined face.

  ‘Jasca,’ he replied in a hiss of Nostraman. Yes.

  He never pulled the trigger. The Iron Hand’s head rolled clear, raked away by a downswing of Xarl’s immense, howling chainsword.

  ‘Get up, damn you,’ came his brother’s distracted command.

  With a snarl against the adrenal sting of pain nullifiers, Talos offered up his hand. Taking Xarl’s place, Cyrion gripped the Apothecary’s wrist and hauled him to his feet.

  The pulsing in Talos’ head was a ragged, merciless crush now. He could barely see past the blurring runes spilling down his data feeds. The surreptitious neural scans he’d performed aboard the Covenant weeks ago had revealed no brain injury, yet the pain came ever more fiercely, day after day.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said to his brother.

  ‘How apt,’ said Cyrion.

  ‘What?’

  Talos was still struggling to clear his retinal alarms. First Claw had sustained no fatalities, but the other squads were beginning to register an infrequent stream of fallen kin. There was gene-harvesting to be done.

  Cyrion banged a gauntleted fist against Talos’ smoking breastplate, where the silver-forged Aquila was reduced to cracked, blackened devastation.

  ‘That,’ he said. ‘How apt.’

  *

  Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

  The warrior crouched in the comforting dark, needing no light by which to carve. Scratching into ceramite wasn’t an easy task, but the edge of a Legiones Astartes combat blade did the trick sure enough.

  Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

  Each rake of the blade’s edge
lanced the throbbing boil of pain in his mind. Each long scrape was a relief, though not a release. He could fight the pain, diminish it, but not banish it.

  Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

  The sound of carving was a whetstone rasp that echoed from the bare walls. The sound of crude art being born in absolute black. Human eyes couldn’t pierce the gloom, but the warrior hadn’t been human in many years. He could see, just as he could see on the sunless world, born and raised in a city where light was a sin only the wealthy could afford to indulge.

  Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

  It was a scratching percussion to the omnipresent growl of the warship’s distant engines. Other sounds intruded upon the warrior’s work, but these were easily – unconsciously – ignored. Far from his sanctum were the muted moans of men and women toiling on the black decks, and the rattling thuds of bulkheads opening and closing elsewhere on the Covenant of Blood. Here in the room with him were the rhythms of a slow-beating human heart and the wet sighing of mortal respiration. He heard these things without truly knowing them. They were sensory nothingness, input without context, not piercing the veil of his ruthless focus.

  ‘Master?’ came a voice.

  Scrape. Scrape. Scrape.

  ‘Master?’

  The warrior didn’t look up from his work, even as he lost the instinctive rhythm of his etching.

  ‘Master? I don’t understand.’

  The warrior breathed in slowly, only then realising he’d been starved of breath, murmuring to himself in a low drone that blended with the ship’s rumbling engines. That, at last, was enough to make him raise his head from his carving.

  A human stood there in the dark, clad in a filthy Legion uniform, with a Nostraman coin threaded upon on a leather thong around his neck. The warrior looked at the grime-marked man for some time, feeling his parched throat constrict in an attempt to speak the slave’s name.

  ‘Primus,’ he said at last. The sound of his own voice horrified him. He sounded as though he’d died weeks ago, and a desiccated revenant was speaking in his place.

  Stark relief passed over the slave’s bearded features. ‘I brought water.’

  The warrior blinked to clear his vision, reaching for the tin canteen in Primus’ hands. He saw the dirt beneath his slave’s fingernails. He smelled the stale brackishness of the life-giving fluid in the metal container.

  He drank. The pain in his head, already exorcised by his carving, faded further with each swallow.

  ‘How long?’ he asked. ‘How long have I been here?’

  ‘Twelve days, master.’

  Twelve days. When had the massacre ended? How had the massacre ended?

  He remembered little past Cyrion’s lightning-etched faceplate, as his brother hauled him to his feet...

  Talos turned to the nearest wall, where a crooked scrawl of Nostraman runes ran along in ugly lines across the dark iron. The lettering crossed itself, seemingly without order. It trailed across the chamber, even onto the deck floor in places, carved by the now dulled gladius blade in the warrior’s hand.

  ‘Twelve days,’ he said aloud. He was genetically reforged beyond the capacity to feel fear, yet a cold, cold unease trickled through his blood at the sight of all these words he couldn’t recall writing.

  ‘There are things in my head,’ he said at last. ‘Memories that never happened.’

  Primus had no answer. Talos expected none. He was already distracted – the runes marked his own armour as well. Much of it made no sense, though his brothers’ names were mixed in amidst the nonsense. Sergeant Anrathi’s name was brutally scratched over with the rune symbolising ‘exalted’.

  One phrase rang through his senses as his black eyes passed across it. A sentence he would never forget.

  Written there, in a jagged and child-like incarnation of Nostraman script, were nine words.

  It is a curse, the runes read, to be a god’s son.

 

 

  Warhammer 40K, Massacre - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

 

 

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