Corax signalled to Agapito, one of his commanders. ‘Marshal the embarkation. Get everybody onboard and break for orbit.’
The commander nodded and turned, growling orders over the vox-net to organise the Raven Guard’s retreat. With practised speed, the Raven Guard dispersed, the drop-ships launching in clouds of smoke and dust as soon as they were full, heading for the ship or ships that had despatched them. Corax watched them streaking back into the skies as shells and missiles fell once again on the Raven Guard’s position. An explosion just to his left rocked him with its shockwave.
Ignoring the blast, Corax glared down the slope at the approaching World Eaters and their leader. The Raven Guard primarch had resigned himself to death here at the hands of his insane brother. It would be a fitting end to fall to Angron’s blades, and there was always a slim – very slim – chance that Corax might instead cut down the World Eater and rid the galaxy of his perfidious existence.
A moment later, Commander Aloni was at his side. Like the rest of the Raven Guard, his armour was battered and cracked, a mishmash of plates and parts scavenged from fallen enemies. He had lost his helmet at some point and not found a replacement. The commander’s tanned, wrinkled face betrayed a mix of astonishment and concern.
‘Last transport, lord!’
Tearing his gaze away from Angron, Corax saw a Stormbird with its assault bay open, just a few metres away. Taking a deep breath, the Raven Guard primarch reminded himself of the teachings he had drilled into his warriors; teachings he had lived by for the whole of his life.
Attack, fall back, attack again.
This was more than a tactical withdrawal. This was surrender. It ate at Corax’s gut to depart Isstvan in such shame. Corax glanced again at the drop-ship and back at the World Eaters. They were only a couple of hundred metres away. More than seventy-five thousand of his Legion had been killed by the traitors, many of them by the berserk legionaries rushing towards him. It was a dishonour to the fallen to abandon them, but it was pointless pride to believe that he could right the wrongs done here by himself.
Attack, fall back, attack again.
Biting back his anger, Corax followed Aloni up the ramp, his boots ringing on the metal. As the ramp began to close, he looked out across the World Eaters army, baying like frustrated hounds as their prey slipped from their grasp.
‘We survived, lord.’ Aloni’s tone conveyed his utter disbelief at the truth of this. ‘Ninety-eight days!’
Corax felt no urge to celebrate. He looked at Aloni and the other legionaries sitting down on the long benches inside the transport compartment.
‘I came to Isstvan with eighty thousand warriors,’ the primarch reminded them. ‘I leave with less than three thousand.’
His words hushed the jubilant mood and a sombre silence replaced it, the only sound that of the drop-ship’s roar. Corax stood beside a viewing port, the deck rumbling beneath his feet, and looked at the hills of Urgall dropping away, picturing the thousands of fallen followers that he was leaving behind.
‘What do we do now?’ asked Agapito.
‘We do what we have always done.’ Corax’s voice grew in strength as he spoke, his words as much a reassurance to himself as his warriors. ‘We fall back, rebuild our strength and attack again. This is not the last the traitors will know of the Raven Guard. This is defeat but it is not the end. We will return.’
The cloud obscured his view, blanking it with whiteness, and he thought no more about the dead.
CORAX COULD NOT bear the bleak expressions of his warriors and left to find himself a brief moment of sanctuary in the linking corridor that sloped gently up towards the cockpit. He was alone and had time to consider what had happened.
Twice in the last one hundred days he had stared death in the face and twice he had survived. He had not just been in battle; such hazard was the life of any legionary or primarch. He had been poised moments from death in a way he had never experienced before.
Stooping to prevent his head from banging the passageway ceiling, Corax turned his back to the wall and leaned back, legs braced against the opposite side of the corridor. He took off his helmet and gazed numbly at the battered grille of its faceplate before dropping the helm to the floor from weary fingers. He saw the dents and cracks in his armour, its ornate engravings pitted with bolter-round impacts, the delicate designs smeared into ruin by las-blasts and missile explosions. Beneath the plasteel and ceramite, his wounds ached. He could smell his own blood, clotted across a dozen grievous injuries.
The primarch’s keen ears could pick up the background chatter of the communications net receiver in his discarded helmet, his subconscious mind absorbing the flow of information even as his conscious thoughts drifted elsewhere. The danger was not yet over. He knew he should contact Branne and establish the facts of the situation, but could not bring himself to do so just yet. From the vox traffic, he surmised that there was a World Eaters battle-barge nearby. Listening for a few more seconds, as the vox-unit continued to relay the Traitors’ position and course, Corax discovered that the World Eaters ship had earlier been on an attack heading but was now slowly withdrawing from the Raven Guard flotilla. The primarch dismissed the threat as minimal as recent events crowded his thoughts.
Danger had been his companion since his first memories, and war had been his calling. Not once had he ever felt afraid to die, and even against the toughest enemies of the Emperor he had approached every confrontation with a certainty of survival and victory. Ninety-eight days had washed away his confidence. Nearly a hundred days of staying one step ahead of his pursuers. Nearly a hundred days of being hunted by his fellow primarchs. Ninety-eight days of constant movement, of attack and retreat, of counter-assault and withdrawal.
He shuddered as he remembered the start of that testing time, when the traitors had revealed their intent and Corax had come so close to death at the hands of Konrad Curze, his brother who took such delight from being called the Night Haunter. Corax knew himself to be numbered amongst the best fighters in the service of the Emperor, and he had never considered Curze his equal. Curze was ill-disciplined, capable of sporadic genius but equally prone to moments of emotional blindness, moments a warrior like Corax could exploit with deadly effect. Yet there had been something about the Night Haunter that had unnerved the Raven Guard’s primarch, an aura that had reached into Corax’s spirit and found weakness. The hatred of Curze had shocked him, adding to the devastation he had felt at the treachery of Horus and many of his fellow primarchs; yet it was no excuse for fleeing from Curze.
Fear. He had felt a moment of fear when confronted by his demented brother, and in the peace of the passageway he understood what it was that had caused him a moment of dread, looking into the dead eyes of the Night Haunter.
They were moulded of the same stuff, Corax and Curze, creatures born and raised in shadow and fear.
Curze had lived in the night-shrouded streets and alleys of Nostramo Quintus; Corax’s infancy had been amongst the tunnels and dungeons of the prison-moon of Lycaeus. Curze and Corax alike had seen worlds enslaved to the will of evil men, where the weak and destitute had toiled until death for the power and pleasure of others.
In that moment, subjected to the full brunt of the Night Haunter’s scorn, Corax had realised how close he might have been to becoming the creature that was trying to kill him. Their lives were the toss of a coin apart. Corax had been taken in by men learned in politics and the human heart, and they had shown him compassion and support; Curze had received no such upbringing and had become a figure of vengeance and terror.
To look at Curze had forced Corax to see himself as he might have been, shorn of the civilising influence of others and the code and principles his mentors had instilled in him. In that moment it had not been fear of Curze that had unmanned Corax but a dread of himself and, to his shame, he had fled rather than destroy the object of his dread.