The Burden of Loyalty Read online

  ‘Like a tower,’ Ranulf agreed, moving beside him. ‘Lots of towers.’

  Jurgen pointed with his bolter. ‘Up there, too.’

  Bulveye looked up and saw that the ceiling was much clearer. But instead of a sky, he saw what looked to be a landscape of walls and keeps, half-seen jagged towers linked by arching bridges in a maddening labyrinth of walkways and alleys, all made of silver, crystal and shadow.

  ‘It’s like a castle or something, at the centre...’ Ranulf murmured. He was looking in the opposite direction to Bulveye, but seemed to be describing the same scene. ‘I see towers with thousands of windows.’

  Whichever way he looked, the Old Wolf saw the same view, or near enough. Then he took a few steps and the angle changed dramatically, so that only metres further on it seemed that he stood almost directly over the huge maze, looking down into innumerable mirrored courtyards and cloisters.

  ‘It’s almost like–’

  Halvdan interrupted him with a curse. ‘By the Allfather, look!’

  He was pointing to where a transparent tunnel bridged a wide gap not far away. A squad of Space Wolves, their markings unidentifiable, walked overhead – but they seemed to be advancing along the ceiling, and not the floor. Other packs could be glimpsed making their way through the maddening passages, some of them impossibly distant already, or appearing only in fractured inversions.

  The small chamber beyond was one of many, all hexagonal and linked by square arches. As the Old Guard moved onwards the honey­comb continued, the rooms varying in size but not shape; the walls, floor and ceilings mirrored so that reflections of the Space Wolves accompanied them to each side, and above and below.

  Ranulf stopped to look at himself.

  ‘Wait. That isn’t right.’

  Bulveye looked at his own image and saw that it was not quite perfect, like a skewed projection from the wrong side of where he was looking. He glimpsed movement behind him and turned sharply, Eldingverfall at the ready.

  There was nothing in the room, but on the edge of his vision he caught other shapes and figures, barely visible in the reflective glass. The wary snarls and growls of the other legionaries indicated that they had noticed it too.

  Even as he watched, Bulveye saw the reflection to his right change. The image distorted, the limbs lengthening while plasma pistol and axe became serrated claws jutting from the beast’s fingers. Pale yellow eyes with slit pupils glared back at the Old Wolf, the entire illusion moving to match him as he stepped back and raised his hand.

  ‘Do not be deceived, brothers. These are merely–’

  The mirrors exploded, showering Bulveye and his companions with slashing shards of blood-red crystal. In seconds the chamber was filled with snarling, clawing, howling monstrosities.

  Bulveye’s wulf-self bore him down with the surprise and weight of its charge, claws raking and scrabbling at his chest, saliva-flecked fangs snapping just inches from his faceplate. Falling onto his back, the Old Wolf had his arms pinned, Eldingverfall and pistol useless. A long claw punched through his gorget seal and grazed the clavicle, its edge keen enough to saw through bone.

  With a roar, he kicked himself free of the monster’s grip. All around him the Old Guard battered and wrestled with the wulf-kin, their armour broken, flesh slashed by monstrous facsimiles of themselves. ‘Hold fast, warriors of Fenris!’ he called out. ‘We will not be–’

  The Bulveye-wulf leapt to the attack again, an impossibly strong arm wrapped around the Wolf Lord’s throat as it slipped behind him.

  The retort of a bolter right next to his head startled Bulveye. He felt the weight slip from his back, and staggered around just in time to see Ranulf, his weapon still smoking.

  An instant later another fanged monster leapt on the warrior, a pair of sword-like claws erupting from Ranulf’s chest as he fell, ­spattering Bulveye with blood. ‘No!’ the Old Wolf cried in anguish, his plasma pistol vaporising the creature’s head and chest, the blast at such close range that heat warnings flashed across his war-plate’s systems.

  Bolters roaring, the Old Guard fought back, but with every stray round, more mirrored walls shattered, and through the breaches clambered fresh waves of wulfen-beasts.

  All sense of command was lost. The vox was a mess of conflicting reports and disjointed shouts from the other squads. Bulveye almost tripped over Ranulf’s corpse as he batted away a clawed hand with the haft of his axe. He reversed his swing and hacked the creature’s head from its body, to reveal another pulling itself through from beyond a splintered wall. Darkness and vague lights swirled beyond the creature.

  ‘And so our path is revealed...’ Bulveye murmured.

  He leapt towards the incoming beast, his axe meeting its throat as it jumped into the chamber. Not stopping to check whether it was dead, Bulveye crashed shoulder-first through the remaining crystal, hurling himself out into the half-seen void beyond.

  He fell.

  Above he saw sprinkles of light receding and, silhouetted against the gleam, the figures of his Old Guard following their commander.

  Everything froze.

  For an instant or an eternity, Bulveye looked at the stark plateau of his warriors spilling from the broken citadel of glass, some still entangled with the wulf-kin, falling with him into endless night.

  Light engulfed them, burning brighter and brighter from within the maze-like structure. It became so fierce that Bulveye’s auto-senses had to shut down, plunging him from whiteness to darkness.

  He was completely aware of everything that transpired, and felt the moment exactly when there was solid footing beneath him.

  The darkness slowly lifted to reveal a domed hall, impossibly vast. Around him a battle raged, though silent and motionless for the moment, as though bound in amber: Thousand Sons and Space Wolves were locked in a frozen tableau, with no sign of the wulf-kin or the crystal labyrinth in sight.

  Bulveye could see two portals. They were both active, each a circle of iridescent energy. He recognised smoke-shrouded Tizca beyond the one on the right. Through the other was a long corridor, much like the crystal passage they had just left, though intact.

  ‘You are destroying us all,’ came an unwelcome voice.

  He turned and saw Izzakar Orr striding towards him.

  ‘Your blundering weakens the fabric of the portalways,’ the sorcerer continued. ‘These are delicately contrived creations. Stop, for all our sakes!’

  Bulveye took a step towards the son of Magnus, his pistol rising a fraction. The sorcerer lifted up empty hands as he walked.

  ‘I am unarmed, as you can see.’ Orr walked past Bulveye and several legionaries locked in hand-to-hand combat, until he stood between the two portals. He gestured to the one to Tizca, the image wavering like a visual-feed losing its clarity. ‘Attack me and you’ll never see the real universe again.’

  ‘The wolf and the dog do not play together. I do not bargain with the Emperor’s enemies. You–’

  Orr raised a dismissive hand. ‘Silence, you oaf. These portals are exceptionally fine-tuned. Each time you barge through one, you are upsetting a harmonious matrix of forces that took centuries to put into place. Each gateway needs to be calibrated, orientated and verified before and after each translation. It is mostly luck that I was able to get us here, to the stasis heart.’

  Bulveye glowered. ‘What have you done with my warriors?’

  ‘These Wolves?’ the sorcerer replied, gesturing towards the frozen scene of battle. ‘They are in temporal paralysis. Momentarily, I will release them, along with my own brothers. We will call a ceasefire, you and I. I will surrender to your custody, and then we will all return to Tizca and escape this awful mess that you have created.’

  ‘What of the others? The ones lost in the maze?’

  Letting his gaze fall, Orr hesitated. ‘I... I cannot vouch for their continued survival. What they
have done threatens the fabric of Prospero itself, and other worlds besides. The labyrinth will purge them eventually, when we have restored some semblance of control.’

  ‘Purge them?’

  Orr nodded. ‘Like an organism expunging a foreign body,’ he said, trying to remove any trace of emotion from the words.

  Still wary, the Old Wolf grunted. He considered that prospect for a moment, then straightened. ‘You willingly surrender?’

  ‘It seems to be the only way that any of us will get back to Prospero alive.’

  Bulveye grunted again, then cocked his plasma pistol.

  ‘No. The Wolf King was very clear. I cannot accept your surrender.’

  He fired. The plasma blast ripped open Orr’s chest, flinging broken war-plate and charred flesh.

  Like a pressure seal bursting, time reasserted itself – with a thunder­clap shock, the turmoil and clamour of battle engulfed Bulveye. Bolts and missiles screamed past, the snarls of the Space Wolves and battle cries of the Thousand Sons filling the immense chamber.

  The Old Wolf spun towards the Tizca portal. Silvered spires were still plainly visible through the arch. With a Wolf Lord suddenly in their midst, the Thousand Sons were thrown into disarray, and Bulveye hewed the legs from under a retreating traitor.

  A ragged whisper drew his attention to where Izzakar Orr crawled closer.

  ‘Fool... You have... doomed... us... all...’

  ‘My brothers are still lost, and yours at large. We will not rest until all have been found.’

  Orr summoned enough strength to spit blood at Bulveye’s feet. ‘Error... carries away... the unteachable...’

  The Old Wolf smiled cruelly, readying his axe. ‘A gift should be repaid in kind,’ he growled.

  He split the sorcerer’s skull, and the Tizca portal flickered and died with him. Bulveye saw that the other was still open, heading back into the cosmic labyrinth.

  Several of the Thousand Sons withdrew through the shimmering veil, disappearing from view. He charged, plasma pistol spitting ruin, Eldingverfall making a bloody cleft of another foe’s head. Bulveye’s war-cry echoed as he leapt towards the open portal.

  ‘Did you destroy our way home, Old Wolf?’ Jurgen called out, stepping over the body of a fallen son of Magnus, his blade wet and red. ‘Are we to head further into the nightmare labyrinth of the half-warp forever?’

  Bulveye roared with laughter.

  ‘We were not born for easy deaths, my wolf-brothers!’ he replied. ‘Into the maze, wherever it leads, and spare none the blade of retribution!’

  Bulveye of the Thirteenth Great Company locks blades…

  Into Exile

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  10

  Gritty ochre dust clings to the dead warrior’s open eyes. A shadow retreats from his stilled form, something immense yet hunched, something with rattling joints and grinding metal claws. It strides away, limping badly, its orders unfulfilled, its masters informed.

  The legionary lies in the dirt, his duty done.

  9

  The scholar sits hunched in the chamber of stinking steel and bleeding bodies, breathing in the scorched scents of mangled automata and riven human flesh. The creature on his shoulder bears no small resemblance to a species of simian detailed in the archives of Ancient Terra. Its name is Sapien. The scholar named it himself when he constructed the creature from vat-cloned fur and consecrated metals.

  The psyber-monkey gives a worried chitter at their surroundings. The scholar feels no such unease, only disgusted irritation. He sneers at these charnel house surroundings, this place of the ruined and the wounded that is supposedly his salvation.

  The arched walls shake around him. Outside the ascending ship, the sky of Sacred Mars is on fire. Far below, Nicanor will be dead by now. Butchered, no less. The fool.

  Arkhan Land huddles like some filthy refugee amidst the other survivors, praying to the Omnissiah that the reek of their cowardice and failure won’t infect him.

  Sapien scampers to Land’s other shoulder. He chitters again, the tone wordless yet curiously inquisitive.

  ‘He was a fool,’ the scholar murmurs, idly stroking the cog-like vertebrae plates that made up the little creature’s spine. ‘Space Marines,’ he snorts the words. ‘They are all fools.’

  But even to himself, those words ring a little hollow this time.

  8

  Nicanor stares into his slayer’s eyes. His own blood marks the bulbous golden domes of the war machine’s visual actuators, blood that he coughed into the thing’s face right after it drove the crackling, motorised spear through his breastplate. It keeps him aloft, impaled, his boots scarcely scraping the dust that makes up the useless yet priceless Martian soil. Each scuff smears away the red-brown regolith to reveal greyer earth beneath – a secret of the Red Planet concealed mere inches beneath the surface, yet unknown to most capable of conjuring the world’s image in their imaginations.

  The machine leans in closer, the domes of its insect eyes inspecting the prey, recording Nicanor’s face and the markings upon his armour. The dying warrior hears the clicking whirr of an open transmission sluice as his killer exloads its findings to its distant masters.

  This is prey. It knows that in the processes of its murderously simple consciousness.

  But this is the wrong prey.

  Nicanor swallows the pain. He doesn’t cower from it and he refuses to let it consume him. Pain is felt only by the living, and thus it is nothing to regret. Pain is life. Pain can be overcome as long as breath resides in the human, and transhuman, body. He will die, he knows this, but he will not die ashamed. Honour is everything.

  Blood falls from Nicanor’s clenched teeth as the war machine shakes him, seeking to dislodge him from the toothed length of its spear-limb. The lance is buried too deeply in his innards, clutched by reinforced bone and armour plate, and refusing to easily come free. He feels his left boot connect with his fallen boltgun, the ceramite clanking against the gun’s kill-marked metal body. Even if he could twist to reach for it without tearing himself in two, the weapon is empty. Through his reddened gaze he still sees the scorched pockmarks cratering the robot’s head, where every bolt he fired found its target.

  The war machine lowers its spear, slamming the impaled warrior hard against the dusty ground, and its taloned foot crunches down on Nicanor’s limp form for leverage. With a brace and a wrench of machinery joints, the lance tears free in a fresh scattershot of bloody ceramite and cooling gore.

  The disembowelling also pulls the last breath from what remains of Nicanor’s body. He stares up, strengthless and silent, and he sees nothing in the robot’s implacable eye domes. There is no hint of intelligence or sign of who might be watching through the automaton’s retinal feed.

  His greying gaze slides skyward, slipping from the hunched and bolt-blasted carapace of his mechanical slayer. There, rising into the embattled sky, is the silhouette of the scholar’s transport vessel.

  It would be poetic to say that this is Nicanor’s final thought, and victory is his final sight. Neither is true. His final thought is of the ruination of his breastplate, where the symbol of the Raptor Imperialis had shown so proud in ivory upon the golden-yellow plate. His last sight is of Mondus Occulum, where subterranean foundries and bolt shell manufactories burn beneath the Martian rock, and where the last of his brothers’ gunships stream into the sky.

  The dust in the air begins to settle over his armour, upon his torn body, even on his eyes as they twitch one last time, yet fail to close.

  The war machine casts a shadow across his corpse as it records his demise.

  7

  Land runs, breath sawing from his mouth, spit spraying with each heave. His boots clang up the gang-ramp, which rises already beneath his panicked tread. He doesn’t look back, not to bid the Space Marine farewell, not to bear witnes
s to the warrior’s final moments. The hammer-crash of Nicanor’s discharging boltgun is the last thing that Land hears before the hatch grinds inexorably closed.

  There, in the fresh dark, he collapses to his hands and knees, all dignity abandoned. Shaking hands drag the multilens focusing goggles from his face.

  Safe, he thinks. Safe.

  And for some reason the thought feels almost treasonous. Perhaps a lesser man might consider it guilt. The niggle of a weak soul’s conscience, knowing that Nicanor is still out there, selling his life to buy Land’s survival.

  But pragmatism drowns any pathetic stirring of morality. Conscience and guilt are concepts brought into being by those too meek to face up to their failures, seeking to mark their hesitations as virtues.

  He has to survive. That’s the beginning and end of it. He matters infinitely more than a single legionary. Nicanor’s own actions prove the truth of it.

  ‘Ascension,’ comes a servitor’s bland tones over the chamber-wide vox. The transport begins its rise in shaking inelegance.

  Arkhan Land weaves through a compressed sea of moaning, wounded forms, and sits with his back to the chamber wall. Sapien squawks an entirely unsimian sound as he takes his place upon his master’s shoulder.

  6

  ‘Run!’ Nicanor’s voice, even weakened, is a roar above the wind. ‘Run, damn you!’

  He turns with his boltgun braced against his shoulder, trusting that the technoarchaeologist’s arrogance and fear will serve even if Nicanor’s command fails. The war machine lopes and lurches closer, leaping over the wind-smoothed grey rocks that lie across the Martian surface like the tumbledown shamanic stone circles of Old Earth.

  And it is the same machine. It bears the scars that Nicanor already inflicted upon its armour plating with bolter and bomb back in the Mesatan Complex. It sprints forwards on backward-jointed legs, its chain-toothed limbs revving in the silence of its empty rotor cannons.

  Nicanor’s boltgun barks in futility. Explosive shells strike true, detonating against the stalker-killer’s insectoid cranial housing, doing little more than jerking the head with its bulbous golden eyes to the side.