The Last Son of Dorn Read online

  Laurentis halted the trolleycart’s sideways trundle with one of his three limbs.

  Mesring extricated himself from the trolleycart, brandishing an empty vial as though announcing a toast to a vanquished foe’s honour. If Koorland could profess amazement at how some Lords retained all evidence of good living while the billions beneath them starved, it was almost as remarkable how quickly decades of indulgence could be expunged from a man’s body. Gone were the pouches under the Ecclesiarch’s eyes, the blubber that had padded his expansive white robes, the self-reverential glow of overstated piety. In its place were glazed eyes, black teeth made prominent by receding gums, sunken cheeks whose pallor he had for some reason decided to mask with dark green kohl. His beard came out in clumps, stained with blood, wine, and vomit. He tottered on the spot and would have fallen in a second if not for the efforts of an elderly but well-built man in the robes of a senior confessor and a gaggle of sextons and fraters. They looked nervous, embarrassed. Some of them looked afraid.

  Why would they be afraid?

  ‘You look unwell, Mesring,’ said Vangorich, his tone one that Koorland had heard used by medical orderlies in battle­field hospices. ‘Why, you look fit to drop.’

  ‘Suffer in hell, Vangorich. So slick. So clever.’ The Ecclesiarch paused only to hawk up a gob of blood. ‘I want the cure. I want it. I want it now.’

  Koorland looked from one to the other. ‘Vangorich?’

  The Assassin shrugged. ‘The pressures of his office are great, lord, the pastoral care of so many billions. The tragedy of the ork moon’s destruction still affects him, I fear.’

  ‘Lies!’ Mesring staggered through the clutching hands to face Wienand. ‘Tell him! Tell him how you bought me with the cure to his poison, for as long as my life had worth to you.’

  Vangorich and Wienand shared a look that gave away nothing and everything.

  With a frown that the genetic bequest of Rogal Dorn made furrowing and deep, Koorland turned from them and extended a hand towards the Ecclesiarch. He was a metre taller than Mesring and, in armour, four or five times as broad. He could have enclosed the man’s head in one hand.

  ‘If you have accusations to make, then I will hear them.’

  Mesring shook his head so vigorously against his frail neck that Koorland feared he might snap it, arms aflap, striking Koorland’s gauntlet like an inebriate attacking a wall and waving the diamond vial above his head as though it meant something.

  ‘Mutants. Poisoners. Heretics.’ Mesring shot them all a glare, his painted face puce with consumption as he pointed finally at Kavalanera. ‘Consorts of witches.’

  The knight abyssal appeared to smile but gave no other reaction.

  ‘Your order is barely a millennium old,’ interrupted Wienand, firmly. ‘Hers is ancient, older by far even than Lord Koorland’s, and has fought alongside the very person of the Emperor. Are the orks not enough? Must we scour the human diaspora for more enemies?’

  ‘Apostates. Traitors. By the Throne of Ullanor, I am surrounded!’ With a flap of his arms, Mesring parted his attendants and stumbled through them. No sooner had he done so than he spun around again and waggled a shrivelled finger. ‘There will be no corner of Terra that does not feel my fall, you mark me. I know things. The hypocrisy. The lies. The masquerade of the Fists. The death of Vulkan. The empty deviants that call themselves their leaders.’ He signed the aquila and spat blood on the floor. ‘The Emperor abandons us and with just cause.’

  He turned away, looked up, and spread his arms wide as though sermonising to a planetary congregation.

  ‘The people will hear it all! Only by throwing down the heretic and the disbeliever and welcoming the armies of the Beast can they be saved. Praise the Beast!’ he screamed, spittle spraying from his lips, eyes rolling up into his head. ‘All praise the Beast!’

  The thunderous boom of bolter discharge startled the servo-seraphs to flight. The contents of Mesring’s head and shoulders sprayed over the suddenly screaming arch-confessor holding on to the arm of a now headless torso.

  Wienand opened her mouth to say something. Her gaze slid from the dead Ecclesiarch on the floor to the pistol in Koorland’s hand and she shut it again. Wise. Vangorich leaned across the table to look at the body, a strange smile on his face. Everyone else looked too stunned to react. Except for Kubik, of course. Kavalanera turned to Koorland with an arch expression, as though to question whether summary execution was now commonplace on Terra.

  Koorland’s bolt pistol slid back into its mag-holster with the faintest of sighs.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Brother,’ said Thane, still positioned by the doorway, blood on the grey hem of his habit. ‘What have you done?’

  Four

  Plaeos – Hive Mundus

  Check 2, 00:41:11

  Black water boiled across Kjarvik’s faceplate, the thunder it made no longer separable from that of the explosion. His body banged against light alloy walls and any fixed machinery bulky enough to have stood up to the flood. His pack lights slashed the walls. White metal. Dark corridors. The beams speckled dirty water. Reflective strips shone back. Section markings. Hazard stripes. Kjarvik saw it fleetingly, the way a pebble might see the villages it was carried through when spring thaw burst the great rivers’ banks. The water turned him, spun him like thread on the wyrd-spinners’ wheel, so far beyond his superhuman ability to resist that his vaunted genetic lineage seemed like a joke of wyrd.

  Punch a hole in the skin of a voidship, and every man knew that what was inside was going to come out. Inflict the same on the outer shell of an island hive under a thousand atmospheres of pressure, and the luckless enemies of man might see the first bitemark of the Wolves.

  A length of metal cracked him on the back of the head. A ladder. He felt the aluminium alloy bend, and on preternatural reflex snapped out an arm. He missed. The torrent had already swept him past. His wolf-clawed gauntlet dug instead into the wall and screeched through until it struck a horizontal rebar and he stopped.

  He began to draw himself up.

  Water hammered against his huge, barrage-like pauldrons. The current dragged on his feet with a grip of void-cold iron, the wight-fingers of so many wolf-brothers lying on Ullanor’s red snow.

  Not him. He was the unlucky one.

  With a howl of defiance, he broke the surface. The wall he had latched on to was part of the bulk housing of an effluxer, one enormous pump slaved to a greater assembly installed millennia ago to keep the submerged levels of the underhive dry. They had been designed to mop up pressure leaks. This was a flood fit to drown a city.

  The section was a vertical maze of catwalks and gangways, vast power coils towering up through the levels. Horizontally, there was little to see before hitting a wall or an effluxer station. At its best, it would have been dank and claustrophobic, but now, floodwaters rising, it was a thousand ways in which to suffocate and die in the dark.

  His arm shook, armour servos whining, and with fangs biting into his bottom lip he managed to haul his trailing arm out of the water, the Sister of Silence still held firmly in his deactivated power fist. That was the hard part.

  A flick of his shoulder sent the Sister arcing over the effluxer. The warrioress flipped mid-flight to guide herself feet-first onto the catwalk. It rattled on loose fixings. The woman immediately began shedding the layers of her pressure suit to reveal ornate crimson and gold armour with a high gorget that concealed her face up to the eyes. She activated her power blade and moved off. Torquing his body against the wall, Kjarvik vaulted after her, coming down in a feral hunch where the Sister had just been.

  An ork came pounding down the gantry. It looked like a worker, but was still as big as an armoured Space Marine with biceps the size of demolisher shells straining at its short leather sleeves. A toolbelt clanked at its thighs like an armour skirt as it ran, a thick-toothed metal wrench held
high above its head. It blinked, dazzled by Kjarvik’s pack lights as he turned towards it. The Space Wolf shot it once through the head. The mass-reactive detonation blew out the back of its skull and flung the wretched body forward as though some part of its corpse remained desperate to bury its wrench in an Adeptus Astartes helmet.

  The walkway was clear.

  Reaching up to his gorget ring, Kjarvik disengaged the seals and removed his helmet with a depressurising hiss. He tossed out his hair and took a deep breath of rust, gunpowder, alien sweat, and salt corrosion. Better. His Imbiber organ could usefully extract oxygen from seawater, but the pressure of the ocean trench would have crushed his head like an eggshell. That was not to say that he would rather have his helm on.

  A burst of bolter fire drew his attention away and up. All he could see of it was muzzle flare, greasily reflected by a section of wall about ten metres above. The howls of dying orks rang out from a few metres further along from that.

  ‘Follow,’ the Sister signed. She broke into a run, angling against the wall and then, remarkably, shifting her feet across so that for the next few strides she ran along it. Using her momentum she leapt across, grabbed hold of a hanging rung on the opposite side, twisted her body around, kicked out, and swung into a kind of backwards roll that took her up onto the next level. Her power blade whickered out, silver-blue; there was a guttural roar, and an ork’s arm bounced down between the walls.

  With a snarl, Kjarvik hauled himself up the wall. At about his own height, he pivoted at the waist and leapt, free arm out wide, legs tucked in, and slammed two-footed onto the previously hidden companionway.

  A solid slug winged his elbow joint and deflected into a slag chute. He turned. A flex of his hand activated his power fist. A thrumming blue disruptor field surrounded the gauntlet, and with a roar he punched it through the shooter’s belly and wrist-deep into the backing wall. The ork looked at the arm buried in its gut with brute surprise, and died.

  A short way ahead, Phareous backhanded his shield across an ork’s mouth and forced it back into another. The rapid-fire flash of his shield’s storm bolter mount lit the dingy walkspace and pulped the ork with the bloody mouth. The second bellowed, covered by its kin-thing, and shoved the corpse off. The second Sister of Silence tucked in lightly behind.

  Kjarvik did not know their names. Names were powerful and the Vow of Tranquility made before the Golden Throne of the Emperor protected them. But names were also useful, and Kjarvik called this one Sommer, for her warmth, and to distinguish her from Rós and her open heart. That he could make light of their presence made it no less unnerving.

  A dozen deftly guided slashes from Sommer’s power blade left a half-dozen orks in ruins.

  More ran around the opposite corner, war-axes flashing, barking their guttural cries. A blizzard of bolter and plasma fire cut them down. Iron Father Bohr stomped through the red mist, boltgun steaming hot. A gout of flame from his servo-harness drove the following wave back out of sight.

  It was hard-fought, vicious, but that was why Thane had summoned Kjarvik Stormcrow to get it done, and why he in turn had assembled Kill-Team Umbra.

  An ork with a bare chest strapped with ammo belts and an autocannon-style weapon mounted on a line of toolbins held the end of the next corridor. Spent casings clattered across the metal floor as it pumped rounds into Phareous’ shield. The mob of orks in garish red wargear that had been lying in wait just around the corner took advantage of the big gun’s suppression fire to pile in, and then the fighting really became ugly.

  Phareous’ knife flashed from behind his shield. A dead ork draped over it and blocked his storm bolter. Sommer skipped back. An ork lunged for her with an axe and fell on its face. Kjarvik stamped on its head. Tusks snapped against metal. His power fist ripped the arm off another and blood sprayed the walkspace. Rós danced across him, spun, blade a blur, and opened an ork from throat to middle with a sizzling back-slash. Bohr stamped into view like walker support. A scream of his servo-arm and an ork was rammed head-first into the bulkhead. Blood erupted from its back and splattered across the opposite wall.

  And always, high-calibre auto-fire banged the walls.

  Kjarvik marked the set of overflow pipes stood behind heavy metal jackets along the wall leading up to the machine-gunner’s nest. He raked his claws down the face of an ork, and pounced for it. Auto-fire chased him as he leapt, one to the next, slugs spanking off the thick metal. A lucky shot – or an unlucky one, Kjarvik was unsure of the difference – penetrated, and a jet of hyper-pressurised water punched an ork into the far wall, hard enough to sever threads. Phareous, Sommer and Bohr drove the orks left on their side of the torrent mercilessly into the water, like routed enemies into the sea.

  From the last jacket in line, Kjarvik tossed a grenade into the nest and leapt.

  The fragmentation blast ripped the crude barricade open. Bits of smoking metal rattled back up the walkspace like the cast of a rune-priest’s mystic bones. Kjarvik flung his gauntlet clawtips over the lip of the companionway above. With a snarled breath, he pulled himself up and rolled onto one knee.

  Baldarich and Zarrael were already there, having risen by another route. The state of their armour and of the floor around them was testament to their bloody progress. The two Space Marines battled back-to-back within a maelstrom of massively muscular ork fighters. The Black Templar’s greatsword moved with the lightness of a knife. Severed hands and bits of tusk flew from its edge, as if to kiss his power armour in a final show of respect. Zarrael meanwhile had his boot on the chest of a brutally sized ork whose crooked moon tattoos and rumbling megaplate marked it as a boss. It was on its knees, hollering, the Flesh Tearer’s eviscerator ripping out its neck and painting it unevenly across the companionway. Another ork barrelled towards the Space Marine’s right, looking to blindside him on the side opposite his buried weapon. Zarrael turned, face unhelmed, the sneering red gaze of an angel, and launched a hissing gob of Betchers’ acid that dropped the brute at a full twenty strides.

  If the fight had been related to Kjarvik with the skilled words of another, then the tale would have been one to inspire. Two warriors, champions of distant Chapters, side-by-side and slaying the Emperor’s foes by the legion. But he was witnessing it for himself, and had not the skjald’s skill to overlook the clear disdain in which each warrior held the other.

  They did not have their backs turned out of necessity. It was preference.

  ‘I think you have their attention!’ The bark of Kjarvik’s bolt pistol announced his arrival to the fray. The orks did not last long after that.

  They ran towards another big mob that was already retreating, hemmed into a deep column by the narrow walkspace, blockish stubbers up, moving towards a set of heavy-duty plasteel floodgates. Baldarich and Zarrael shrugged off the fire, hacking into the rearguard with a psychotic zeal, each more alike the other than not.

  And men called the Vlka Fenryka wild.

  ‘More are coming.’ Kjarvik broke off the pursuit and took cover behind a dented piston block that seemed to be part of the floodgate mechanism. Baldarich and Zarrael just kept on killing. ‘We wait for the others. We attack as one!’

  Orks in clanking war-plate piled through the floodgates to shore up the retreating mob, which in turn spread out into the cover of rusty toolbins and the thick buttress struts that leaned diagonally up into the section wall. Kjarvik shifted his aim upwards as a score of greenskins, their thickly muscled torsos wrapped in ammo belts, clattered across the upper walkways.

  For some reason they did not fire.

  They chanted – ‘Gork! Mork! Gork! Mork!’ – and mashed the barrels of their guns on the handrail in time to the foot-pound of ork warriors below. They got louder. The stamping grew faster. ‘Gorkamorkagorkamorka!’ Kjarvik could no longer tell individual orks apart. A weight dragged on his skull, as if the ork knucklebones braided through his hair felt the same prim
al call. His gums ached as though some reality-bending force drew on his teeth.

  With a thump of metal, the roadway bridge trembled.

  An oil-skinned, web-clawed monster of horrific size slither-crawled through the floodgates. Its passage bent them outward so completely that Kjarvik doubted they would ever shut again. It was the size of a Baneblade, mocking its rattling escort of garishly painted armoured walkers with their ill-made irrelevance. Serried rows of teeth gleamed a smudgy, reflected green from within a huge, half-moon slash of mouth. Rubbery gills fluttered behind armoured flaps. Two rows of uneven spines ran down its dark, blubbery back. With a bone-capped boot planted against a spike from either row, an ork clad in a studded leather harness of monstrous size and wielding a trident-stave coiled with spitting copper wires waved about in a trance.

  Its harness was painted with weird, swirled lines, and its face and hands were tattooed with branching continuations of the uncanny design. At a growled utterance, a wind blew, causing its dangling piercings to twist like wraiths on a pyre. The gantry between Kjarvik and his two brothers buckled, bent, boiling seawater spraying through the fissure. The amphibious beast dug its claws into the tortured metal and gave a wet, cavernous roar. Green energies lanced through the spiked collar bolted over its neck and spat back out like living spikes.

  Kjarvik bared his fangs.

  Maleficar.

  He was the Stormcrow, all right. The unlucky one. He could always rely on it.

  Five

  Eidolica – Alcazar Astra

  Check 7, 00:55:37

  Tyris emerged from the loading breach of the voidstorm cannon and dropped into a soundless crouch. His landing trembled out through the metal gangway. The Sister of Silence – she had not yielded her name, and Tyris had not asked for it – squatted with her back to an equipment drum. Her blade was unpowered. She raised a finger to the concealing gorget above her mouth.