Raeven shucked his gun arm forward and a hurricane of stubber fire strobed the canyon with muzzle flare. Tracer rounds stabbed into the mallaghra’s shoulder, setting light to its fur and driving it back. He followed up with a crack from the energy lash that ploughed a bloody trough in its chest.
The mallahgra roared in pain, and Raeven didn’t give it a chance to recover. He stepped in close and slammed the hard edge of his ion shield into its face. Fangs snapped and oily blood poured from its ruined maw. The lash cracked again and peeled the muscle from the monster’s thigh.
A clawed hand tore at his chest armour, but Raeven batted it away with the barrels of his stubber cannon. He brought the arm back and pumped half a dozen shots into its face, shattering the bone and exploding the eye sited in the side of its skull.
The mallahgra surged towards him, and not even Raeven’s genhanced reflexes could match its speed. Its corded arms encircled Banelash, and began crushing the life out of him.
Hot animal breath doused him in rank saliva and the reek of rotten meat. Raeven gagged at the stench and fought to escape the monster’s grip. They stamped back and forth through the cavern like drunken dancers at a Serpent Revel, slamming into walls and dislodging debris from high above. A chunk of rock smashed onto Raeven’s shoulder, buckling his pauldrons and shattering his carapace lights. Broken glass rained into the shattered canopy and Raeven flinched as razored fragments sliced his cheeks.
Warning lights flashed on the damaged sensorium. Armour squealed as it reached its maximum-rated tolerances. Raeven brought his knee up into the mallahgra’s side, where his whip had previously wounded it. The beast roared, almost deafening Raeven, and its pain gave him the opening he needed.
He slammed his ion shield against the bloodied, heat-fused side of the mallahgra’s skull. The monster’s grip loosened and Raeven pulled free of its crushing embrace, unleashing a blitzing stream of fire into its chest and head.
Repeated lashes from his energy whip followed each salvo and the mewling beast stumbled away, its lifeblood flashing to red mist in the cauterising heat of gunfire.
Raeven laughed as he drove it back.
He didn’t see Hellblade surge up on its one good leg behind the mallahgra. All he saw was the fountain of viscous blood as the revving blade of his father’s chainsabre exploded from the mallahgra’s ribcage.
The life fled from its eyes and Raeven felt something caged within his chest for four decades stir at the monster’s death, something barbed and hateful and full of spite. The juddering chainsabre caught on the mallahgra’s ribs. It spasmed with false life before Cyprian wrenched the blade out through its side in a flood of reeking viscera. The gutted beast toppled into the chasm, and anger filled Raeven as it fell.
He turned Banelash to face his father’s wounded Knight.
Hellblade crouched at the edge of the chasm, one leg buckled beyond its ability to bear any weight. The Knight had suffered a grievous hurt, but with the ministrations of the Mechanicum and the Sacristans, it would walk again.
‘It died a good death,’ said Cyprian, between heaving breaths and using the end of his stilled blade to remain upright. ‘Damn shame the head is gone though. No one’s going to believe the size of that thing.’
‘The kill was mine,’ said Raeven with cold fury.
‘Now you’re being ridiculous,’ returned Cyprian. ‘I’m the Knight Seneschal, the right of First Kill was always mine. Don’t piss your britches, boy, I’ll credit you with aiding me. You’ll win a share of the glory.’
‘Aiding? You’d be dead if it wasn’t for me.’
‘But who ended its life? Me or you?’
The cage in Raeven’s chest unlocked and the barbed thing of hate and ambition that imprinting with the Throne Mechanicum had sought to imprison was freed to stab his soul once more.
‘And who will they say ended yours?’ hissed Raeven. ‘Me or the mallahgra?’
Too late, Cyprian Devine saw the depthless well of venom in his son’s heart, but there was nothing he could do to stop what happened next.
Stepping back to plant Banelash’s clawed foot in the centre of Hellblade’s chest, Raeven kicked the Knight into the chasm. His father yelled in outrage, and Raeven watched the ancient machine fall end over end. It slammed into a sharp outcropping of rock and broke apart like a confiscated automaton from the Clockwork City beneath a Sacristan’s forge hammer.
The remains of Hellblade vanished into the sulphurous mist, and Raeven turned away. With every purposeful stride he took from the chasm, the poisonous ambition within him took an ever more defined shape.
Raeven was now Imperial commander of Molech. What would Lyx make of this new development?
Raeven grinned, knowing exactly what she would say.
‘The Serpent Gods provide,’ he said.
FOUR
Reforged / Filum Secundo / The Seven Neverborn
When the Warmaster needed to dominate or awe petitioners he received them in Lupercal’s Court, with its towering, vaulted ceiling of muttering shadows, black battle standards, glimmering lancets and basalt throne. But when simply desiring company, the summons was to his private staterooms.
Aximand had come here many times over the years, but usually in the company of Mournival brothers. In his staterooms, the Warmaster could put aside that heavy title for a few precious moments and simply be Horus.
Like most places aboard the Vengeful Spirit, it had changed markedly over the last few years. Trinkets taken in the early years of the Great Crusade had vanished, and many of the paintings were now hidden by sackcloth. A vast star map with the Emperor at its heart, and which had covered one entire wall, was long gone. In its stead were innumerable pages of densely wound script, together with fanciful imagery depicting cosmological conjunctions, omega-point diagrams, alchemical symbols, trefoil knots and a central image of an armoured warrior bearing a golden sword and glittering silver chalice.
Those pages had presumably been ripped from the hundreds of astrological primers, Crusade logs, histories of Unity and mythological texts that lay scattered like autumn leaves.
Aximand tilted his head to catch a few of the titles, He who saw the Deep; The Nephite Triptych; Monarchia Alighieri; Libri Carolini. There were others, with titles both mundane and esoteric. Some, Aximand noticed, were lettered in gold-leaf Colchisian cuneiform. Before he could read any further, a booming voice called his name.
‘Aximand,’ called Horus. ‘You know better than to stand there like some poxy ambassador, get in here.’
Aximand obeyed, limping past haphazardly stacked piles of books and data-slates towards the primarch’s inner sanctum. As always, it gave him a thrill of pride to be here, to know that his gene-father esteemed him worthy of this honour. Of course, Horus always dismissed such lofty nonsense, but that only made these moments more precious.
Even seated and without the encasement of armour, Horus was enormous, a heroic Akillius or Hektor, a cursed Gylgamesh or Shalbatana the Scarlet Handed. His skin was pink and raw with grafts and regeneration, especially around his right eye where the charred ruin of his skull had been exposed. His hair was still bristly with regrowth, but the attack on the Dome of Revivification appeared to have left no permanent scars. At least none that Aximand could see.