His captor took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of recent battle and burned books.
‘You are one of the Argentum.’ She licked a slow circuit of her black lips, as if tasting the word. Even her smile was tainted. Her face was a canvas of meticulous scars, inflicted by a madman’s hand.
He laughed again, though thirst made the sound ragged and raw.
‘What is amusing?’ she asked, closer to sneering than speaking. ‘You think we cannot recognise the difference between Imperial regiments?’
‘What gave it away?’ He inclined his head to his silver shoulder guard, where the Warmaster’s laurel-wreathed skull was displayed in detailed engraving, and banged his silver vambraces against the back of the chair he was tied to. The same sigil was repeated on each of them, in echo of the Warmaster’s own armour.
Had he been able, he’d have shot her through the eye with his hellgun, which was – assuming it was still in one piece – embossed with silver aquilas on both sides of the stock.
‘Perhaps I dress like this because it’s cold outside,’ he said. ‘All the silver keeps me warm.’
She smiled, as if indulging a spoiled child.
‘You are one of the Argentum.’ He didn’t like how she mouthed the word, like she hungered for it. ‘The Silver Kindred.’ She swallowed, and something wet clicked in her throat. ‘The Warmaster’s Own. How proud you must be.’
He didn’t dignify that with a response.
‘You will tell me what I wish to know,’ she insisted with stately politeness.
‘Never in life.’
Fine words, but they came out badly, slowed by blood-thickened saliva. Throne, he wished she’d put the sword down. The hurt of seeing it in her hands went beyond a matter of personal pride – beyond even regimental honour.
‘We know the customs of the Silver Kindred,’ she said, and her voice was rendered gentler still by the whispering hiss of profane fingertips on sacred steel. ‘To lose your weapon is to betray the Warmaster, isn’t it? It carries the harshest penalty.’
She didn’t wait for an answer, instead drawing the blade from its scabbard. Steel sang in the air as the blade scraped free. He winced, and hated himself for it.
‘This pains you,’ she told him, not quite asking because the answer was so clear. ‘It hurts you to see your blade in enemy hands, doesn’t it?’
Once more, his words were thickened by exhaustion and a bleeding mouth. ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about.’
As he spoke, she turned the sword over in her hands, seeking something. There, etched onto the grip: an Imperial eagle of white gold. She smiled at her captive, and spat on the God-Emperor’s sacred symbol. Her saliva hung down in a string, dripping from the sword onto the filthy floor.
His eyes closed, and he imagined his hands slipping through her dark hair, fingers curling to cradle her skull while his thumbs plunged into her slitted eyes. Her screams would be music.
‘Look at me,’ she commanded. ‘There. That’s better.’
She stepped closer. He had one shot at this. One shot.
‘I’m going to kill you,’ he promised through the threat of tears. ‘In my Warmaster’s name, I am going to kill you, witch.’
‘Your Warmaster.’ She cast the sword aside without a care. It tumbled across the floor with a clash of abused metal. ‘Your Warmaster is nothing more than crow shit by now. He is as dead as your Emperor, a feast for the carrion-eaters. Now tell me what happened.’
This again.
‘You know what happened,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows.’
‘Tell me what you saw.’ She stepped even closer, the knife in her hand again. He hadn’t seen her draw it. ‘You are one of the Argentum. You were there, so tell me what you saw.’
One shot. Just one. She was close enough now.
The knife’s tip kissed his jawline, stroking along, scratching patterns too soft to break the mud-marked skin. As the blade caressed his lips, she smiled again.
‘Tell me what happened, or you die a piece at a time.’
‘You don’t want to know what happened. You just want to know how he died.’
She trembled. There was no disguising it. The knife pricked his cheek at her lapse of control, and tears drip-dropped – one from the left, one from the right – almost in unison from her fluttering eyelashes. She had to moisten her lips to speak, which she did with a black tongue.
‘How did he die?’
In a traitorous moment, he realised that she was beautiful. Pale, poisonous and corrupt. But beautiful. The corpse of a goddess.
His breath misted on the polished knife blade. ‘He died first. And we killed everyone who came for his body.’ No need to lie when the truth was enough to hurt her. ‘I saw your king die, and we shot every weeping bastard that came to claim his body.’
‘He was not my king. My lord is Gaur, for I am Blood Pact. But Nadzybar was the best of us, nevertheless.’
‘Now,’ the captured Imperial grinned, ‘he’s crow shit.’
The knife lowered in a slackened grip. She didn’t try to hide the spilling tears. ‘Tell me what happened,’ she said again. ‘Tell me how the Archon died.’
Their eyes met. His were human, with irises of rich hazel. Hers hadn’t been human in years: mutated, slitted the same way a snake’s eyes are split by black pupil slices – just as disgusting, and just as captivating.
Just one shot at this. One chance.
With his shins leashed together, there was a chance he could hammer a two-booted kick up into her throat, crushing her trachea and damaging her larynx. At the very least, she’d be stunned and muted, preventing an immediate call for aid. At best, she’d die from the trauma of impact, asphyxiating soon after.
One shot. One chance.
He could see it, hear it, feel it. Perhaps he’d miss. Perhaps his boots would smack into her chin, meeting her jawbone with a sick, sharp crack. Her lovely face would snap back on a bent neck, and instead of rising to flee, she’d fall like a puppet with cut strings.
One chance.
Her guard was down, but... not enough. It wasn’t worth the risk.
Not yet.
Bide your time.
His rank was senior sergeant. His regiment was the Argentum: also known as the Silver Kindred, the Warmaster’s Own, and – on the Munitorum rosters – the Khulan 2nd Huscarls, assigned as bodyguards to Slaydo himself.
He wore the same silver shoulder guards and ornate vambraces that the Warmaster wore, for his uniform was a lesser reflection of Slaydo’s own finery. Carried in a scroll case strapped to his thigh was a parchment copy of the 755 Crusade Charter, issued by the High Lords of Terra, granting permission for Imperial forces to declare a crusade into retaking the Sabbat Worlds.
In his webbing, he carried a printed, leather-bound copy of A Treatise on the Nature of Warfare – required reading for command candidates, and the seminal work from the pen of Lord Militant Slaydo, written in the decades before his ascension to Warmaster.
Slaydo knew his first name, and addressed him by it. Familiarity had long begun to erode the boundary between the officer and the soldiers that served him.
‘Commodus,’ the Warmaster would always say in his gruff tones. ‘Still dogging my footsteps, boy? Still keeping up with this old war hound?’
Commodus Ryland, senior sergeant, was not with the Warmaster now, but he was still breathing. He intended to keep it that way.
Bide your time, he thought.
So he said: ‘I’ll tell you.’
And did just that.