His task was to skirt the battle’s edges, cutting down any stragglers that sought to escape from the main melee. Although only five of his outriders had survived the transition into the Gal Vorbak so many years before, they sat at his side now, gunning their engines in readiness for what they were committed to do.
He blinked burning sweat from his eyes, breathing in laboured rasps, trying to ignore the voice howling in his mind. The pain in his throat had been building in intensity for hours to the point where swallowing caused excruciating pain. Now, even breathing was a trial. Venom dripped down his chin, bubbling hot, from his overworking saliva glands. The acidic poison dripped over his lower teeth every few seconds, and he could no longer bear to swallow and neutralise it.
‘Thirty seconds,’ came Argel Tal’s order.
Dagotal murmured meaningless syllables with a wet voice, as acid hissed from his helm’s mouth grille.
Torgal thumbed a gear-rune on his chainaxe’s control, shifting settings from soft tissue to armour plating. A thicker second layer of jagged teeth slid forward alongside the first. In truth, a chainbladed weapon would always struggle to do more than strip the paint from layered ceramite, but it would chew through fibre-bundle armour joints or exposed power cables with ease.
He had been weeping blood, without feeling sorrow or any emotion at all, for an hour. Had he been able to remove his helm, Torgal was certain the scarlet tracks would be stained across his cheeks by now, darkening the skin with a tattoo’s permanence. Each time he blinked, his tear ducts flushed more of the watery blood-fluid down his face. When his tongue moved in his mouth, it slid along a maw of jagged teeth that cut his tongue open, and he tasted coppery pain for the few seconds it took the little slice wounds to seal.
Blood, thick and dark, was leaking from the knuckle-joints of his gauntlets, cementing his fingers to the haft of his axe. He couldn’t open his hand. He couldn’t release the weapon, no matter how he tried.
‘Twenty seconds,’ said Argel Tal.
Torgal closed his eyes to blink them clear, but they wouldn’t open again.
Malnor’s breath sawed in an out of his vocaliser grille. A chorus of voices assailed him, and for the briefest moment, he believed he was listening to the sounds of everyone he had ever met in his life. There was a tremor in his bones that he couldn’t suppress.
‘Ten seconds,’ came Argel Tal’s voice. ‘Stand ready.’
Malnor’s twitched head turned to the advancing ranks of the Raven Guard. Distance markers flashed across his retinal display, flickering as it recognised individual squad sigils on their shoulder guards.
Malnor grinned, and clutched his bolter tighter.
‘Brothers,’ the voice crackled. ‘This is Captain Torisian, 29th Company, Raven Guard.’
At the vanguard of the marching Astartes, a cloaked captain raised his hand in greeting. A spent bolter was mag-locked to his thigh, and a gladius glinted in his left hand. The captain’s cloak, once a regal blue, was a ragged ruin. Argel Tal raised his own hand in response, and replied over the vox.
‘This is Argel Tal, Lord of the Gal Vorbak, Word Bearers Legion. How goes the battle, brother?’
The Raven Guard leader laughed as he came closer. ‘The traitorous dogs already flee the field, but they fight like bastards, each and every one. In Terra’s name, it is a blessing to see you. Our primarch has ordered us back for resupply – but Lord Corax is an unselfish man. He would not wish us to steal all the glory on this day of days.’
Argel Tal could hear the smile in the other warrior’s voice as he continued. ‘Good hunting down there, all of you. Glory to the Word Bearers. Glory to the Emperor!’
The commander of the Gal Vorbak didn’t reply. The advancing Raven Guard were almost at the barricades. He felt his muscles bunching and twitching with sick need.
‘Brother?’ asked Torisian. The captain’s armour was an older Mark III Iron-class suit, blocky and heavy, almost primitive compared to the Maximus-class armour worn by the XVII Legion. ‘What are your plans for assault?’
Argel Tal took a breath, and prepared to speak damnation.
Without knowing why, he couldn’t keep from thinking of Lorgar’s words to him, spoken so long ago. ‘You are Argel Tal. You were born on Colchis, in the village of Singh-Rukh, to a carpenter and a seamstress. Your name means ‘the last angel’ in the dialect of the southern steppes tribes.’
He thought, briefly, of his parents – two hundred years dead now. He had never visited their graves. He wasn’t even sure where they might be.
His father had been a quiet man with kind eyes, who had round shoulders from a lifetime of devotion to his craft. His mother was a mouse of a woman, with dark eyes and black hair in the ringlets preferred by the southern tribes. She had smiled a great deal. It was his abiding memory of her.
How far he’d come, in distance and time, from their riverside hut of packed mud and straw. He could almost feel the river water on his hands now, cooling to the touch even as it sparkled in the oppressive Colchisian sun.
He had four older sisters, each as distant and dead as his parents. They had wept when the Legion came for him, though at the time he couldn’t understand why. All he could see was the adventure, the joy, in being chosen by the holy warriors. The youngest – Lakisha, only a year older than he was – had given him a necklace of desert-dog teeth that she’d made herself. He felt it now, tied around his wrist, bound there each dawn upon rising and completing his meditations. The original string had long since rotted away, but he threaded the jackal teeth onto a new cord with the passing of every few years.
His oldest sister, Dumara, had spent every day telling him that he was good for nothing but getting underfoot. But she had no unkind words that day, and instead brought him a blanket of goat’s wool to take with him.
‘He will not require that,’ the massive grey warrior had declared in a machine-voice.
Dumara flinched back, clutching the blanket to her chest. Instead of offering it to the boy, she kissed his cheek instead. She was crying, too. He remembered how her tears made his face wet, and he hoped the warrior didn’t think it was he who’d been crying. He had to look brave, else the warrior might not choose him after all.
‘What is the boy’s name?’ the warrior demanded.
His mother had surprised him with a question of her own. ‘What is your name, warrior?’
‘Erebus. My name is Erebus.’
‘Thank you, Lord Erebus, this is my son, Argel Tal.’
Argel Tal. The Last Angel. He’d been born as a sickly little thing, during a year of blight and drought, and was given a name to mark him as the last child his mother would ever bring into their dry, thirsty world.
‘Forgive me,’ he whispered now. He hadn’t meant to speak the words aloud, but didn’t regret doing so.
‘Brother?’ Torisian’s voice crackled. ‘Repeat, please.’
Argel Tal’s grey eyes hardened to flint. ‘All Word Bearers,’ he said. ‘Open fire.’
TWENTY-SIX
Dropsite Massacre
Hull Breach
In the Shadow of Great Wings
Torisian shoved the body of his sergeant aside and scrambled forward. His ammunition counter flashed up the moment he touched a hand to his bolter, and it told a stark tale indeed. Among the clattering, crashing carnage, he drew his combat blade and charged.
‘Victory or death!’ he cried the call of his Legion. ‘We are betrayed! Attack!’
Bolt shells hammered into his chest and pauldrons as he ran, throwing him off-balance and breaking his armour apart. He sustained damage faster than his retinal display could track it. Torisian staggered, feeling fluid in his throat. A dense wetness was drowning him behind his ribcage.