‘This still reeks of an ambush,’ Alajos warned.
The Lion didn’t reply. Instead, he answered the vox-voice. ‘What is to stop me firing on those coordinates from orbit?’
‘By all means, do just that. Commit to whatever course of action it takes to ease your suspicions. When you have ceased panicking and firing into the shadows, please inform me. I will ask my lord to wait until then.’
‘Sevatar.’Corswain had never heard the Lion pour so much threat into a single name.
‘Yes, uncle?’ the soft voice chuckled again.
‘Tell your master that I will meet him where he wishes. Inform him to limit his honour guard to two warriors, for I will be doing the same.’
The Lion drew a thumb across his throat, signalling the vox-channel’s termination. Those cold eyes turned upon his closest two sons, and he reached for his helm. ‘Alajos. Corswain. Come with me.’
V
HE HATED DOING this.
‘Permission to speak freely, my liege.’
The Lion stood in full armour now, his features masked by the snarling helm with its angular crest of splayed angel wings. The helm’s slanted red eyes emanated disapproval even before the Lion’s rumbling baritone left the speaker-grille.
‘Not this time, Cor. Focus yourself.’ The sword at the Lion’s hip was as tall as a Legiones Astartes warrior in full war plate. The primarch’s left hand rested on its hilt, his posture somewhere between the piratical grace of a gunslinger and the cautious reverence of a knight preparing to pull steel.
Corswain kept his silence, bolter loosely clutched in his hands. The chamber around them was almost devoid of Gothic ornamentation, its ceiling and walls instead given over to the cabled, thudding engineering of Mechanicum teleportation generators. Several of the rattling engine pods vented near-continuous gushes of steam for no reason Corswain could comprehend.
‘Begin,’ the Lion ordered. At the chamber’s edges, cowled tech-menials cranked levers and manned great bronze wheels, turning them on squealing mechanisms. As they worked, each one chanted a different numerical line of a binary cant, like some bizarre mathematical sea shanty.
The engines started to judder, whining as they cycled up to engage. On a raised platform above the flat chamber deck, a choir of nine robed astropaths sang with closed eyes. Their Gregorian chants were at eerie odds with the blurted coding issued forth from the menials.
Corswain truly loathed travelling like this. Seat him down in the deployment bay of a Stormbird gunship screaming through low atmosphere and into the face of enemy fire rising up from the ground, and he wouldn’t think twice. Buckle him into a drop-pod and spit him from the bowels of an orbiting ship to plough into the soil several kilometres below, and he’d do his duty without a whisper of complaint.
But telepor–
VI
–TATION WAS something else.
Even before the flash of white-gold faded, he felt the world’s wind pushing against his armour with weak breaths, strong enough to do no more than tear at his surplice and the oath scroll bound to his shoulder guard. His bolter was up and ready in the seconds it took for his vision to clear of the chemical-scented mist from their teleportation. Artificial thunder from displaced air echoed in his ears, filtered to tolerable levels by his helm’s autosenses.
The aura of coiling mist would’ve lingered longer but for the breeze. Corswain took a moment to feel the hard earth beneath his boots, to assure himself that he was whole and complete. With teeth gritted and skin crawling, he panned his bolter across the vista before him.
Dusty wind gritted against his visor as his gunsight followed the horizon. They’d materialised in the heart of a crater, spanning at least a kilometre across in all directions. Black stone foundations jutted from the ground – too new to be ruins, they were low walls and pillars that would form the basis of a huge building above. The Night Lords were building something here. A fortress… but the work crews had evidently been withdrawn to make way for this meeting.
Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.
‘Clear,’ he called, in the same moment Alajos called the same.
The Lion moved to one of the black rock pillars, stroking a gauntleted hand down its sculpted side. Corswain doubted it escaped the primarch’s notice that the stone was clearly quarried off-world and brought here for use.
‘Do you hear something?’ he asked.
Alajos turned to the primarch. ‘The wind, my liege.’
Corswain didn’t answer at first. Could he hear something beneath the wind clawing at his helm’s receptors? Something beyond his own slow breathing and the machine-beat of his pulse tracker at the left edge of his retinal display? With a blink-click, he disabled his active retinal screen.
The world’s breath howled on.
‘Just the wind, sire.’
‘Very well,’ the Lion replied. ‘Now we wait.’
VII
ON THE STRIKE of the third minute, a second sonic boom of displaced air heralded the enemy’s arrival. Corswain looked into the nexus of spreading mist as the ship’s atmosphere teleported down with the enemy dissipated into the wind. His lenses didn’t filter out the light fast enough, and in the wake of the transition flare, Corswain had to blink to clear his aching eyes. Tears came unbidden, not from pain or torment, but as the biological response to soothe the irritation.
The Lion anticipated his movements, for he said ‘Weapons down, little brothers,’ as soon as the knight felt his muscles bunch.
‘Yes, my liege,’ Alajos murmured, displeasure raw in his tone.
Corswain swallowed his awe at what stood before him. A cadaverous god, in midnight clad, each armoured finger ending in a charged blade the length of a scythe. Black hair at the mercy of the world’s winds streamed back from a corpse’s face. Chained skulls rattled against war plate etched with runic writing rejoicing in past massacres and celebrating atrocity against the empire of humanity. This husk of nobility, this emaciated wraith now no more than the shadow of a prince, bared teeth filed to fangs as he opened his arms to the Lion, offering a welcoming embrace.
‘My brother,’ hissed Konrad Curze, Lord of the VIII Legion. His was a viper’s smile, just as predatory, just as brazen in its hunger. ‘I have missed you.’
The Lion hesitated. He raised his hands to his collar, unlocking the helm’s seals hidden there, and pulled the helmet free. An expression of naked surprise marked his features, yet his face was still an angel’s countenance – not the beatific, handsome lies of ancient religious myth, but rather the truth of Terran artistry: a face that could’ve been shaped from tanned marble, emerald eyes with soulful depths, contrasted by a mouth that would forever struggle to show emotion.
To Corswain’s eyes, Curze was pathetic, ghoulish, in comparison. A wretched husk facing a knight-lord, claws against a prince’s sword.
‘Curze?’ The Lion asked, his resonant voice softened by disbelief. ‘What has happened to you?’
The Night Lord ignored the question, speaking with insincerity rich enough to make Corswain’s teeth ache. ‘Thank you for coming. How it warms my heart to see you.’
The Lion drew his blade in a slow, clean movement. He neither brought it en garde, nor threatened the other primarch. Instead, he clutched it in both black gauntlets, the crosspiece hilt before his face as he stared at Curze above the quillions.