The iron within. The iron without. Iron everywhere. Empires rise and they fall. I have fought the ancient species of the galaxy and my Legiones Astartes brothers will fight on, meeting new threats in dangers as yet unrealised. We are an Imperium of iron and iron is forever. When our flesh is long forgotten, whether victim to the enemy within or the enemy without, iron will live on. Our hives will tumble and our mighty fleets decay. Long after our polished bones have faded to dust on a gentle breeze, our weapons and armour will remain. Remnants of a warlike race: the iron of loyalist and traitor both. In them our story will be told – a cautionary tale to those that follow. Iron cares not for faith or heresy. Iron is forever.
And as our battle-plate, our blades and bolters rot in the sand of some distant world, they will pit and tarnish. Their dull sheen will corrode and crumble. Grey will turn to brown and brown to red. In the quietly rusting scrap of our fallen empire, iron will return to its primordial state, perhaps to be used again by some other foolish race. And though the weakness of my flesh fails me, as the weakness of my brothers’ flesh will ultimately fail them, our iron shall live on. For iron is eternal.
From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron. This is the Unbreakable Litany. And may it forever be so.
SAVAGE WEAPONS
Aaron Dembski-Bowden
‘In raising these men to watch over mankind, we have bred a legion of inhumans whose sole purpose is to defend that which they no longer understand. Their duty, borne with pride; their curse, carried with grace – but let it never be forgotten what we have done to Caliban’s finest sons. Unending Imperial ambition has not bred warriors with the warm hearts of men, but angels with the cold hearts of weapons.’
No soul so changed will recover what was lost. No weapon so savage can be wielded without cost.’
– The Verbatim, Lutherian Amendments,
Chapter I: These Savage Weapons
I
THE BEAST NEVER dies in his dreams.
He watches it slink through the trees, keeping its sinuous body low to the ground, its movements fluid enough to be sickening and boneless. Its ears rake back flat against its head, while its clawed paws are silent on the deep snow. The creature hunts, eager but passionless, its dead cat’s eyes glinting with emotionless hunger.
The boy takes the shot, and the shell goes wide.
With the cold air split by the crack of gunfire, the beast twists in the snow, ghost-light on the ground as it snarls at its attacker. Quivering black spines rise from the denser white fur at its back and neck, an instinctive defensive response. A tail lashes behind the beast in threatening rhythm, coiling and thrashing in time with the boy’s own heartbeat.
For a moment he sees what the elder knights all claimed to see – a sight he’d always believed to be the lies of ageing warriors girding their fading legends with false poetry.
Yet there it is in the beast’s black eyes, something beneath the raw desire to survive. Recognition stares back at him: a crude intelligence, malicious despite its feral simplicity. The moment shatters as the creature vents its anger. Something between a lion’s burbling snarl and a bear’s hoarse roar rings out in the cold air between them.
The boy fires again. Three more shots echo through the forest, disturbing the snow bundled on branches above. Shivering fingers seek to reload the primitive pistol, but the beast’s sinewy weight pounds into his chest, hurling him away, throwing him down onto the frost. In the same moment the boy hits the ground, he feels the chunky shells scatter from his grip, spilling out onto the snow. The beast’s bulk on his back saps his strength as well as his breath. What little air he drags into his abused lungs reeks of the creature’s foetid exhalation, and a hot, wet mist of stinking tumour-breath washes over the back of his head. Whatever the beast is, it’s rotting from within. Saliva runs in a slick string from the beast’s jaws, spattering onto his bare neck.
Corswain swings over his shoulder, hammering the body of his pistol against the beast’s skull. Bone gives with a muffled crack, eliciting a whine that’s almost feline. As the creature rears in response, the boy scrabbles across the snow, regaining his feet in a staggering run. Steel whispers as it slides from his sheath, a sword almost as long as the boy is tall, clutched in two shivering hands. As the beast stalks closer, he sees the malign hunger in its eyes cool to a feral wariness. It’s afraid now, or at least cautious. Flakes of snow drift onto the blade, freezing into diamonds wedded to the steel.
‘Come on,’ the boy breathes the whispered words. ‘Come on…’
The beast leaps, striking his chest with the force of a stallion’s kick, and he’s down again. This time his sword spins from his grip, stabbing into the snow like a grave marker. The ache in his chest is a dull, creaking crackle, as if his lungs are filled with dry leaves. He knows his ribs are shattered, but there’s almost no pain at all.
The boy strains under the creature’s weight, his young muscles bunched taut as he struggles to strangle through the thick fur. The spined quills pierce his fingers and the backs of his hands, each one tipped by beads of clear, stinging venom. His hands tremble as the toxins attack his blood.
When he coughs, steaming bile gurgles from his mouth in a bitter rush. The puke hisses onto the snow, eating holes in the frost with acidic eagerness. The boy barely notices his useless hands falling away from the beast’s neck, nor how they curl into arthritic claws.
Convulsions wrack his whole body no more than three heartbeats later. The venom has him now. A scream leaves his lips as nothing more than a silent mime.
Slowly, everything starts to whiten, to fade away. He feels himself dragged, body scraping over the snow, but other, truer sounds begin infiltrating his thoughts: the sound of a ticking fan blade in a labouring air filtrator; boot-steps on the deck above; the omnipresent rumble of live engines.
At last, he opens his eyes.
It plays out like this each time he sleeps. The beast never dies in his dreams.
II
HIS MIND WANDERED during the morning vigil. As Corswain knelt with his brothers, his head bowed against the hilt of his sword, he gave all the appearance of another knight in dutiful reflection of the coming crusade. In truth, he dwelled in memories. His thoughts flew home to a world that hated him.
Caliban.
The name brought a smile to his lips, hidden by the hood that cast his features into shadow. Caliban, that lethal haven of burning summers and vicious winters; where the unending forests permitted no sunlight to fall beneath their boughs, and every ancient tree defended itself with poisonous sap for blood; where every beast hunted with killing talons, mythic agility, or acidic venom. Biting insects spread plagues that left entire settlements silent and lifeless within days. Chittering clouds of locusts descended over the land year after year, annihilating villages and towns in their wake.
Orders of knights shared the grim duty of burning devastated settlements with each yearly cycle around the sun. On Caliban, the number of names inscribed upon the rolls of the dead matched the lists of the newborn. Imperial ledgers coded the world In Articulo Mortis,‘at the moment of demise’, with the slang tag of ‘Death world’. Corswain had laughed when he first saw those words written in an archive.
The scribes’ notations damned the world as a worthless globe deserving no further colonisation. It was rendered exempt from paying Imperial tithe even when all other worlds began to suffer such demands from the fledgling usurers of Terra, and pledged itself only to sell its sons into willing slavery in the Emperor’s First Legion.