Battle for The Abyss (30 page)

Cestus’s mind still reeled at what he’d witnessed on the lance decks and the powers that the Thousand Son had unleashed.

Truly, there was no doubt as to his practising psychics. That in itself left an altogether different and yet more pressing question: Brynngar.

The Wolf Guard had also been down in the lance decks, though Cestus was not aware of it until the battle was over, and had banished three of the warp spawn with his Blood Claws. The artifice of the Fenrisian rune priests, in their fashioning of Felltooth, was to thank for it. For once, reunited at the centre of the deck,
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Brynngar had curtly disclosed how the creatures parted easily before the blade and fled from the Space Wolves’ fury. The Ultramarine believed that some of the account was embellished, so that it might become worthy of a saga, but he did not doubt the veracity at the heart of Brynngar’s words.

It mattered not. Whatever the Wolf Guard intended to do about Mhotep and, indeed, Cestus, he would do regardless. Right now, the Ultramarine captain had greater concerns, namely, that the traitor had been broken, for Saphrax had discovered his shattered body in the isolation chamber, but that whatever secrets he had divulged were denied to them while Mhotep was incapacitated. It felt like a cruel irony.

‘Do you know what we do with witches on Fenris, Ultramarine?’

Cestus turned at the voice and saw Brynngar standing behind him, glowering through the glass at Mhotep.

‘We cut the tendons in their arms and legs. Then we throw them in the sea to the mercy of Mother Fenris.’

Cestus moved into the Space Wolf’s path.

‘This is not Fenris, brother.’

Brynngar smiled, mirthlessly, as if at some faded remembrance.

‘No, it is not,’ he said, locking his gaze with Cestus. ‘You give your sanction to this warp-dabbler, and in so doing have twice besmirched my honour. I will not let his presence stand on this ship, nor will I let these deeds go unreckoned.’

The Space Wolf tore a charm hanging from his cuirass and tossed it at the Ultramarine’s feet.

Cestus looked up and matched the Wolf Guard’s gaze.

‘Challenge accepted,’ he said.

BRYNNGAR WAITED IN the duelling pit in the lower decks of the
Wrathful
. The old wolf was stripped down to the waist, wearing grey training breeches and charcoal-coloured boots, and flexed his muscles and rotated his shoulders as he prepared for his opponent.

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Arrayed around the training arena, commonly used for the armsmen to practise unarmed combat routines, were what was left of the Astartes: the Ultramarine honour guard, barring Amryx, who was still recovering from his injuries, and a handful of Blood Claws. Admiral Kaminska, as the captain of the ship, was the only non-Astartes allowed to attend. She had forbidden any other of the crew from watching the duel. The realisation that the Astartes in the fleet were turning on one another was a sign of the worst kind, and she had no desire to discover its effects upon morale if witnessed by them first hand.

She watched as Cestus stepped into the arena, descending a set of metal steps that retracted into the wall once he was within the duelling pit. The Ultramarine was similarly attired to Brynngar, though his training breeches were blue to match the colour of his Legion.

At the appearance of his opponent, Brynngar swung the chainsword in his grasp eagerly.

The assembled Astartes were eerily silent; even the normally pugnacious Blood Claws held their tongues and merely watched.

‘This is madness,’ Kaminska hissed, biting back her anger.

‘No, admiral,’ said Saphrax, who towered alongside her, ‘it is resolution.’

The Ultramarine banner bearer stepped forward. As the next highest ranking Astartes, it was his duty to announce the duel and state the rules.

‘This honour-duel is between Lysimachus Cestus of the Ultramarines Legion and Brynngar Sturmdreng of the Space Wolves Legion,’ Saphrax bellowed clearly like a clarion call. ‘The weapon is chainswords and the duel is to blood from the torso or incapacitation. Limb or eye loss counts as thus, as does a cut to the front of the throat. No armour; no fire arms.’

Saphrax took a brief hiatus to ensure that both Astartes were ready. He saw his brother-captain testing the weight of his chainsword and adjusting his grip. Brynngar made no further preparation and was straining at the leash.

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‘The stakes are the fate of Captain Mhotep of the Thousand Sons Legion. To arms!’

The Astartes saluted each other and levelled their chainswords in their respective fighting stances: Brynngar two-handed and slightly off-centre, Cestus low and pointed towards the ground.

‘Begin!’

BRYNNGAR LAUNCHED HIMSELF at Cestus with a roar, channelling his anger into a shoulder barge. Cestus twisted on his heel to avoid the charge, but was still a little sluggish from the earlier battle and caught the blow down his side. A mass of pain numbed his body, resonating through his bones and skull, but the Ultramarine kept his feet.

Blows fell like hammers against Cestus’s defensive stance, his chainblade screeching as it bit against Brynngar’s weapon. Teeth were stripped away and sparks flew violently from the impact.

Two-handed, the Ultramarine held him, but was forced down to one knee as the Space Wolf used his superior bulk against him.

‘We are not in the muster hall, now,’ he snarled. ‘I shall give no quarter.’

‘I will ask for none,’ Cestus bit back and twisted out of the blade lock, using Brynngar’s momentum to overbalance the Space Wolf.

The Ultramarine moved in quickly to exploit the advantage with a low thrust, intending to graze Brynngar’s torso, draw blood and end the duel. The old wolf was canny, though, and parried the blow with a flick of his sword, before leaning in with another shoulder charge. It lacked the sudden impetus and fury of the first, but jolted Cestus’s body all the same. The Ultramarine staggered and Brynngar swept his weapon downward in a brutal arc that would have removed Cestus’s head from his shoulders. Instead he rolled and the blade teeth carved into the metal floor of the duelling pit, disturbing the streaks of old blood left by the World Eater’s earlier contest.

Cestus came out of the roll and was on his feet. There was a little distance between the two Astartes gladiators, and they circled
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each other warily, assessing strength and searching for an opening.

Brynngar didn’t wait long and, howling, hurled his body at the Ultramarine, chainsword swinging.

Cestus met it with his blade and the two weapons came apart with the force of the blow, chain teeth spitting from their respective housings.

Brynngar cast the ruined chainsword haft aside and powered a savage uppercut into Cestus’s chin that nearly shattered the Ultramarine’s jaw. A second punch fell like a piston and smashed into his ear. A third lifted him off his feet, hammering into the Ultramarine’s gut. The sound of Brynngar’s grunting aggression became dull and distant as if Cestus was submerged below water, as he fought to get his bearings.

He was dimly aware of falling and had the vague sense of grasping something in his hand as he hit the hard metal floor of the duelling pit.

Abruptly, Cestus found it hard to breath and realised suddenly that Brynngar was choking him. Strangely, the Ultramarine thought he heard weeping. With a blink, he snapped back into lucidity and smashed his fists down hard against Brynngar’s forearms, whilst landing a kick into his sternum. It was enough for the Space Wolf to loosen his grip. Cestus head-butted him in the nose and a stream of blood and mucus flowed freely after the impact.

Feeling the ground beneath him again, Cestus ducked a wild swing and lashed out beneath Brynngar’s reach. The Ultramarine wasn’t quick enough to avoid a backhand swipe and took it in the side of the face. He was reeling again, dark spots forming before his eyes, hinting that he was about to black out.

‘Yield,’ he breathed, sinking to his knees, his voice groggy as he pointed to the Space Wolf’s torso with the chainsword tooth clutched in his outstretched hand.

Brynngar paused, fists clenched, his breathing ragged and looked down to where Cestus was pointing.

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A line of crimson was drawn across the Space Wolf’s stomach from the tiny diagonal blade in his opponent’s grip.

‘Blood from the torso,’ Saphrax announced with thinly veiled relief. ‘Cestus wins.’

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FOURTEEN

Hunted

A single blow

We are all alone

TIME HAS LITTLE meaning in the warp. Weeks become days, days become hours and hours become minutes. Time is fluid. It can expand and contract, invert and even cease in those fathomless depths of infinite nothing; endless everything.

Leaving the gallery and Zadkiel’s echoing laughter behind him, Skraal had fled into the pitch dark.

Crouching in the blackness with naught but the groans of the
Furious Abyss
for company it felt like the passage of years, and yet it could have been no more than weeks or as little as an hour.

Heaving, shifting, baying, venting, the vessel was like some primordial beast as it ploughed the empyrean tides. Sentience exuded from every surface: the moisture of the metal, the blood, oil and soot in the air. Heat from generatoria became breath, fire from blast furnaces anger and hate, the creak of the hull, dull moans of pleasure and annoyance. Perhaps this awareness had always existed and lacked only form to give it tangibility. Perhaps the skeleton the adepts of Mars had forged provided merely a shell for an already sentient host.

The World Eater decided that his thoughts heralded the onset of madness at being hunted for so long, the thin talons of paranoia pricking his skull and infecting his mind with visions.

After his discovery in the gallery, he had gone to ground, quest-ing downwards through the inner circuitry and workings of the
Furious Abyss
in some kind of attempt at preservation. It was not
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cowardice that drove him, such a thing was anathema to the Astartes: a World Eater was incapable of the emotion. Fear simply did not have meaning for them. No, it was out of a desire to regroup, to plan, to achieve some petty measure of destruction that might not at least escape notice, that meant something. Into the heat and fire he’d passed arches of steel, vast throbbing engines and forests of cables so thick that he’d needed to cut them down with his chainaxe. It was in this manufactured hell that he’d found refuge.

Bones lay on the lower decks, pounded to dust by pistons, though some were intact. They were the forgotten dead of the
Furious
’s birth, sucked into machinery or simply lost and left to starve or die of thirst in the ship’s labyrinthine depths.

During his flight into this cauldron, Skraal had seen things. The dark had played with him, the heat, too, and the endless industrial din. Glowing eyes would watch the World Eater, only to then melt away into the walls. A landscape had opened up before him, its edges picked out in darkness: a vast land of bloody ribs and palaces of bone, with mountains of gristle and labyrinths carved down into plains of rippling muscle. Humanoid shapes danced in rivers of blood as the whole world swelled and fell with an ancient breath.

Then it was gone, replaced by the darkness, and so he had driven on.

Here in the searing depths, he’d found some respite.

It could have been days that he’d lingered in meditative solitude, listening to the pitch and pull of the vessel, marshalling his thoughts and his resolve so as not to give in to insanity. Way down in the stygian gloom, Skraal couldn’t hear the vox traffic, didn’t sense the patrols at his heels and so didn’t know if he was still hunted.

Sheltering in a crawl space large enough to accommodate his power-armoured frame, within a cluster of pipes and cables, the World Eater snapped abruptly to his senses. Disengaging the cataleptic node that allowed him to maintain a form of active
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sleep, Skraal became aware of a shadow looming in the conduit ahead. He was not alone.

The passing of menials was not uncommon, but infrequent.

Skraal had listened to their pathetic mewlings as they serviced and maintained the ship, with disgust. Such wretches! It had taken all of his resolve not to spring out of his hiding place and butcher them all like the cattle they were, but then the alarm would have been raised and the hunt begun anew. He needed to think, to devise his next move. Not gifted with the tactical acumen of the sons of Guilliman or Dorn, Skraal was a pure instrument of war, brutal and effective. Yet now he needed a stratagem and for that he required time. Survival first, then sabotage; it was his mantra.

That doctrine dissolved into the ether with the shadow. No menial this, it did not mewl or bay or weep, it was silent. It was something else, massive footfalls resonating against metal with every step, and it was seeking him. Skraal extracted himself from the crawl space and bled away into the darkness, eyes on the growing gloom he left behind him, and went onwards into the
Furious Abyss
.

‘THEY TAIL US ever doggedly, my lord,’ uttered Reskiel as he considered the reports of Navigator Esthemya clutched in his gauntlet.

Zadkiel appeared sanguine to the fact that the
Wrathful
continued to follow them into the warp as he regarded the scrawlings on the cell wall of one of the ship’s astropathic choir.

It was a spartan chamber with little to distinguish it. A narrow cot served as a bed, a simple lectern as a place to scribe. Function was paramount here.

‘Wsoric is with us,’ he said, emboldened enough in the surety that they had sealed their pact with the ancient creature to speak his name, ‘and once he reveals his presence, the pawns of the False Emperor will learn the folly of their pursuit. The horrors endured thus far will be as nothing compared to the torture he will visit upon them.’