Battle for The Abyss (29 page)

Though supposedly newly fashioned, the vessel felt very old.

Its concomitant parts had spent so many decades being built and rendered in the forges of Mars that they had acquired a history of their own before the battleship was ever finished, let alone launched. It had a presence, too, a kind of impalpable sentience that exuded from its steel walls and clung to its corridors and conduits like gossamer threads of being.

Skraal passed under a support beam, his chainaxe held out warily in front of him, and saw the signature of a Mechanicum shipwright inscribed in binary. The passageway of steel looked like an avenue in a wealthy spire-top, the low ceiling supported by caryatids and columns; a nest of shanties, perhaps the lodg-ings of the menials, who had once laboured to build the ship, their ramshackle homes abandoned between two generatorium housings: the vessel was intricate and immense. The World Eater saw chambers he could only assume were for worship, with altars and rows of prayer books etched in the Word of Lorgar. A temple, half wrought in stone and symbiotically merged with deep red steel, was housed in a massive false amphitheatre, its columned front and carved pediment providing a medieval mi-205

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

lieu. The wide threshold was lit by braziers of violet fire. Skraal thought he had seen something moving inside and took care to avoid it.

The World Eater had no time for distractions. The denizens of the
Furious Abyss
hunted him, and even in a ship as vast as it, the chase would not last indefinitely. Melta bombs and belts of krak grenades clanked against his armour as he moved, reminding him of their presence and the urgency with which he needed to put them to some use.

In a fleeting moment, when Skraal had paused to try and get some kind of bearing, he thought of Antiges.

The Ultramarines believed themselves to be philosophers, or kings, or members of the galaxy’s rightful ruling class. They did not appreciate the purity of purpose that could only be found in the crucible of war as did Skraal’s Legion. They were most concerned with forging their own empire around Macragge. Antiges had demonstrated his warrior spirit, though, fighting and dying in the cauldron of war, driven by simple duty.

Skraal mourned his passing with a moment of silence, honour-ing his valorous deeds, and, in that moment, he made a promise of revenge.

A great set of double doors carved from lacquered black wood blocked the World Eater’s path. Skraal could not turn back from the barrier, incongruous like so much of what he had witnessed on the
Furious Abyss
. Instead, he pushed the door open. There was light inside, but still the silence persisted, so, he entered into what was a long, low chamber. Beyond it was a gallery full of artefacts. Tapestries lined the walls, displaying the victories and history of the Word Bearers. He saw a comet crashing down to their native earth of Colchis and a golden child emerging from the conflagration left from its impact. He saw temples, their spires lost in a swathe of red cloud, and lines of pilgrims trailing off into infinity. It was a world stained with tragedy, the gilded palaces and cathedrals tarnished, and every statue of past religious dynasts missing an arm or an eye. In the middle of this fal-206

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

len world, like a single point of hope, was the smouldering crater of their saviour’s arrival.

The ceiling was a single endless fresco depicting Lorgar’s con-quest of Colchis. Here it was a corrupt place cleansed by the primarch, whose image shone with the light of reason and command as robed prophets and priests prostrated themselves before him. Armies laid down their arms and crowds cheered in adulation. At the far end of the museum the story ended with Colchis restored and Lorgar a scholar-hero writing down his history and philosophy. This epilogue ended with a truth that Skraal knew, the Emperor coming to the world to find Lorgar, just as he had come to the World Eaters’ forgotten home world to install Angron as the Legion’s primarch.

The paintings, frescoes and tapestries gave way to trophies displayed on plinths and suspended from the vaulted ceiling. Skraal ignored them and pressed on.

‘You look upon the soul of our Legion, brother,’ boomed a voice suddenly through the vox-casters in the gallery.

Skraal backed up against the wall, which was painted with an image of Lorgar debating with a host of wizened old men in a Colchian amphitheatre.

‘I am Admiral Zadkiel of the Word Bearers,’ said the voice, when the World Eater answered with silence. ‘You are aboard my ship.’

‘Traitor whoreson, does your entire Legion cower behind words?’ Skraal snapped, unable to contain his anger.

‘Such a curious term, World Eater,’ the voice of Zadkiel replied, ignoring the slight. ‘You dub us traitors, and yet we have never been anything but loyal to our primarch.’

‘Then your lord is also a traitor,’ Skraal growled in return, hunting the shadows for any sign of movement, any hint that he was being stalked.

‘Your own lord, Angron, calls him brother. How then can Lorgar be regarded as a traitor?’

207

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

Skraal cast his gaze around, trying to locate the picter observing him or the vox-caster broadcasting Zadkiel’s voice. ‘Then he has betrayed my primarch and in turn his Legion.’

‘Angron was a slave,’ said Zadkiel. ‘The very fact shames him.

He despises what he was, and what other men made of him. It is from this that his anger, that the anger of all the World Eaters stems.’

Certain that there was no one else in there with him, Skraal started moving cautiously through the gallery, looking for some way out other than the double doors at either end. He would not be swayed by Zadkiel’s words, and focused instead on the hot line of rage building inside him, using it to galvanise himself.

‘I saw the echo of that anger at Bakka Triumveron,’ said Zadkiel. ‘It was enacted against the menials that drowned in their own blood at the hands of you and your brothers.’

Skraal paused. He had thought no one knew of the slaughter he had perpetrated at the dock.

‘Angron sought to bring his brothers closer to him in that aspect, did he not?’ Zadkiel was relentless, his words like silken blades penetrating the World Eater’s defences. ‘It was the Emperor’s censure that forbade it, the very being that holds you and your slave primarch in his thrall. For what is Angron if not a slave? What accolades has he won that the Angel or Guilliman have not? What reward has Angron been given that can equal the empire of Ultramar or the stewardship of the Imperial Palace granted to Dorn? Nothing. He fights for nothing save by the command of another. What can such a man claim to be, other than a slave?’

‘We are not slaves! We will never be slaves!’ Skraal cried in anger and carved his chainaxe through one of the museum’s stone pillars.

‘It is the truth,’ Zadkiel persisted, ‘but you are not alone, brother; yours is not the only Legion to have been thus forsaken,’ he continued. ‘The Word Bearers worshipped him, worshipped the Emperor as... a... god! But he mocked our divinity with reproach and reprimand, just as he mocks you.’

208

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

Skraal ignored him. His faith in his Legion and his primarch would not easily be undone. This Word Bearer’s rhetoric meant nothing. Duty and rage: these were the things he focused on as he sought to escape from the chamber.

‘Look before you, World Eater,’ Zadkiel began again. ‘There you will find what you seek.’

Despite himself, Skraal looked.

There, within an ornate glass cabinet, forged of obsidian and brass and once wielded by Angron’s hand, was a chainaxe.

Decked with teeth of glinting black stone, its haft wrapped in the skin of some monstrous lizard, he knew it instinctively to be Brazentooth, the former blade of his primarch.

The weapon, magnificent in its simple brutality, had taken the head of the queen of the Scandrane xenos, and cleaved through a horde of greenskins following the Arch-Vandal of Pasiphae. A feral world teeming with tribal psychopaths had rebelled against the Imperial Truth, and at the mere sight of Brazentooth in Angron’s hand they had given up their revolt and kneeled to the World Eaters. With the forging of Gorefather and Gorechild, the twin axes Angron now wielded, Brazentooth had been as much a symbol of Angron’s relentlessness and independence as it was a mere weapon.

‘Gifted unto Lorgar, it symbolises our alliance,’ Zadkiel told him. ‘Angron pledged himself to our cause, and with him all the World Eaters.’

Skraal regarded the chainaxe. Thick veins stuck out on his forehead, beneath his skull-helmet, exacerbated by the heat of his impotent wrath.

‘It is written, World Eater, that you and all your brothers will join with us when the fate of the galaxy is decided. The Emperor is lost. He is ignorant of the
true
power of the universe. We will embrace it.’

‘Word Bearer,’ Skraal said, his lip curled derisively, ‘you talk too much.’

The World Eater shattered the cabinet with a blow from his fist and seized Brazentooth. Without pause, he squeezed the tongue
209

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

of brass in the chainaxe’s haft, and the teeth whirred hungrily.

The weapon was far too heavy and unbalanced for Skraal to wield; it would have taken Angron’s own magnificent strength to use it. It was all he could do to keep the bucking chainblade level as he put his body weight behind it and hurled it into the nearest wall.

Brazentooth ripped into a fresco depicting Lorgar as an educa-tor of the benighted, thousands of ignorant souls bathing in the halo of enlightenment that surrounded him. The image was shredded and the weapon, free of Skraal’s hands, bored its way through, casting sparks as it chewed up the metal beneath.

‘You’re doomed, Zadkiel!’ bellowed Skraal over the screech of the chainblade. ‘The Emperor will learn of your treachery! He’ll send your brothers to bring you back in chains! He’ll send the Warmaster!’

The World Eater hurled himself through the ragged tear in the museum wall and fell through into a tangled dark mess of cabling and metal beyond.

Zadkiel’s laughter tumbled after him from the vox-caster.

ZADKIEL SWITCHED OFF the pict screens adorning the small security console at the rear of the temple. ‘Tell me, chaplain, is everything prepared?’

Ikthalon, decked in his full regalia including vestments of deep crimson, nodded and gestured towards a circle, drawn from a paste mixed from Colchian soil and the blood that had been drained from the body of the Ultramarine, Antiges.

The Astartes inert body lay at its nexus, his cuirass removed and his chest levered open to reveal the congealed vermillion mass of his organs. Symbols had been scratched on the floor around him, using his blood. His helmet had been removed, too, and his head lolled back, glassy-eyed, its mouth open as if in awe of the ritual he would facilitate in death.

‘It is ready, as you ordered,’ uttered Ikthalon, the chaplain’s tone approaching relish.

210

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

Zadkiel smiled thinly and then looked up at the sound of shuffling feet. An old, bent figure ascended the steps at the temple entrance and the candles on the floor flickered against its cowl and robe as it entered between the pillars.

‘Astropath Kyrszan,’ said Zadkiel.

The astropath pulled back his hood, revealing hollow sockets in place of his eyes as inflicted by the soul-binding.

‘I am at your service,’ he hissed through cracked lips.

‘You know your role in this?’

‘I have studied it well, my lord,’ Kyrszan replied, leaning heavily on a gnarled cane of dark wood as he shuffled towards Antiges’s corpse.

Kyrszan knelt down and held his hands over the body. The astropath smirked as he felt the last wreaths of heat bleeding from it. ‘An Astartes,’ he muttered.

‘Indeed,’ added Ikthalon. ‘You’ll find his scalp has been removed.’

‘Then we can begin.’

‘I will require what is left after this is done,’ added Ikthalon.

‘Don’t worry, chaplain,’ said Zadkiel. ‘You’ll have his body for your surgery. Kyrszan,’ he added, switching his gaze to the astropath, ‘you may proceed.’

Zadkiel threw a book in front of him. Kyrszan felt its edges, ran his fingers over its binding, the ancient vellum of its pages and breathed deep of its musk, redolent with power. His spidery di-gits, so sensitive from a lifetime of blindness, scurried across the ink and read with ease. The script was distinctive and known to him.

‘What... what secrets,’ he whispered in awe. ‘This is written by your hand, admiral. What was it that dictated this to you?’

‘His name,’ said Zadkiel, ‘is Wsoric and we are about to honour the pact he has made with us.’

IN THE HOURS that followed, the warp was angry. It was wounded. It bled half-formed emotions, like something undi-gested: hatred that was too unfocused to be pure, love without
211

Ben Counter – Battle for the Abyss

an object, obsession over nothing and gouts of oblivion without form.

It quaked. It thrashed as if being forced into something unwilling, or trying to hold on to something dear to it. The
Wrathful
was thrown around on the towering waves that billowed up through the layers of reality and threatened to snap the spindly anchor-line of reason that kept the ship intact.

The quake subsided. The predators that had homed in on the disturbance scented the corpses of their fellow warp-sharks in the
Wrathful
, and hastily slunk back into the abyss. The
Wrathful
continued on its way, following eddies left by the wake of the
Furious Abyss
.

‘HAS THERE BEEN any change?’ asked Cestus as he approached Saphrax.

The banner bearer stood outside the medical bay, looking in at the prone form of Mhotep, laid as if slumbering, on a slab of metal.

‘None, sire. He has not stirred since he fell after the battle.’

The Ultramarine captain had recently been tended to by the
Wrathful
’s medical staff, an injury sustained to his arm that he had not realised he had suffered making its presence felt as he’d gone to Mhotep’s aid. In the absence of the dead Laeradis, the treatment was rudimentary but satisfactory. The bodies, what was left of them, of the Astartes, two of the Blood Claws included, had been taken to the ship’s morgue.