‘Iktinos is not with us,’ said Sarpedon. ‘His flock must have joined
him.’
‘Not with us? What do you mean?’
‘Iktinos brought us here. He has been doing it for years now,
manipulating us towards this place and time. Why, I do not know.
Probably it is at the behest of Daenyathos. Whatever the reason, he
has his goals and we have ours, and they do not coincide.’
‘The Chaplain has betrayed us.’
‘Yes,’ said Sarpedon. ‘He has.’
Luko’s customary joviality was gone. ‘I will kill him.’
‘There will be a queue,’ said Sarpedon. ‘Focus for now on your
survival. You have picked a good place to make our stand, brother. I
would think twice before attacking such a place.’
‘We have your armour, and your axe,’ said Luko. ‘They are stored
behind that bookcase. We could not find the Soulspear among the
evidence, though.’
‘Then I shall do without. The Axe of Mercaeno is weapon enough for
me.’
‘You know, the Howling Griffons would want that back.’
‘Then Borganor can take it from my dead hand,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘I
have no doubt he will be seeking just that chance. Many stories will
end here, captain. Borganor and I is just one of them. If we can give
those stories endings worthy of these histories, then we will have won
our victory.’
Scamander’s voice reached them over Luko’s vox. ‘Captain! The
Howling Griffons are advancing! I’m falling back towards Graevus’s
position!’ The deep spatter of gunfire sounded over his words, and
Sarpedon could hear the thuds of bolter impacts through the walls of
the library.
‘Then it is done,’ said Sarpedon. ‘I shall arm. To the end, Captain
Luko.’
‘To the end, Chapter Master,’ replied Luko. ‘Cold and fast.’
Sarpedon saluted. ‘Cold and fast, Soul Drinker.’
Chapter 9
The days following the Horus Heresy formed the forgotten apocalypse
of the Imperium. The Heresy itself was the subject of legends known
throughout the realm of mankind – the traitor Horus, waxing great in
his jealousy of the Emperor, his treason against the human race and
his death at the hand of the Emperor himself. The Scouring, the period
of reformation that followed Horus’s death and the Emperor’s
ascension to the Golden Throne, was an afterthought, a footnote in the
approved histories preached by the Imperial Church. But the truth,
appreciated only by a few historians who skirted with heresy in their
studies, was that the Imperium was born in the Scouring, and it was
born in a terrible tide of blood.
It was a time of vengeance. All those tainted by the deeds of Horus
and the many who had sided with them, even worlds who had bowed
to Horus under threat of destruction, were destined to suffer. The
remaining loyal Primarchs led a campaign of bloody reconquest in
which collaborators were hung in their billions. Planets full of refugees
were purged lest their number contain the wrong type of war criminals.
A thousand civil wars sprang up in the Heresy’s wake, the combatants
left by the Imperial Army to fight among themselves until the survivors
were weak enough to be conquered, subjugated and re-educated.
It was a time of reform. The Space Marine Legions were split up into
Chapters, a process which sparked its own share of shadow wars and
near-catastrophes as Space Marines fought in all but open warfare for
the right to the heraldries of their parent Legions. The Imperial Army
broke up into millions of fragments, miniature fiefdoms with no central
command. The Imperial Creed was born among the religious
catastrophes that tore at humanity in the wake of the Emperor’s
ascension and the Adepta of the Imperium were formed to hold the
shattered mass of humanity together. Born in desperation, the
Priesthood of Terra and its component Adepta founded the principles
of fear and suspicion that would determine their every action in the ten
millennia that followed. Whatever image the Emperor had cherished for
Scouring into something flawed, something half-born, something fearful
when the Emperor had sought to form it from hope.
It was a time of Chaos. The powers of the warp had made their play
for power over the human race and though the Emperor’s sacrifice had
thwarted them, they had sunk a thousand tendrils of influence into
realspace and clung on jealously. The daemonic legions unleashed in
the Battle of Terra took decades to hunt down and exterminate, the
Blood Angels and their newly-formed successor Chapters seeking
them out to exact vengeance for Sanguinius’s death. Horus’s acolytes
had opened portals to the warp in the Heresy’s dying days, seeking to
seed the fledgling Imperium with secrets waiting to be uncovered and
suffered by generations to come.
No one knew how many such portals had been built by the
sorcerers and madmen under Horus’s command. Some were vast
gateways on forgotten worlds, ready for explorers or refugees to speak
the wrong words or cross the wrong threshold. Some were built into
the foundations of cities rebuilt in the Heresy’s wake, runes worked
into the streets or dread temples far beneath the sewers and
catacombs. Others took stranger forms – prophecies woven into a
tainted bloodline, the words of a story that opened the way a little
more with every telling, a song sung by desert spirits which would
become a gateway to the warp as soon as it was written down.
One gateway was an eye, ripped from some titanic predator that
glided through the warp. Acolytes of the Dark Powers, gathered on a
spacecraft in orbit around a star, brought the eye into realspace. Like
another, living, planet, it settled into its own orbit. It looked out upon
the void and wherever its gaze fell, daemons danced. The acolytes
who had summoned it were shredded by the daemons that sprung up
around them, their last thoughts of thanks towards the gods who had
permitted them to be a part of such a glorious endeavour.
The Predator’s Eye was seen in divinations and séances across the
Imperium. It was Rogal Dorn who stood up and swore to close it. The
Chapters which venerated him all sent their own champions to assist,
and in orbit around the blighted star were fought many of the most
terrible and costly battles of the Scouring. Rogal Dorn himself set foot
on the Predator’s Eye, evading the biological horrors that budded out
of its gelatinous surface as well as the daemons that scrabbled to
intercept him. But even as battle-brothers fell around him, Rogal Dorn
did not falter. He was a Primarch, and in him flowed the blood of the
Emperor. He plunged a fist into the pupil of the Predator’s Eye, and
the eye, blinded, closed in agony.
Rogal Dorn’s surviving battle-brothers included a number of Space
Marine Librarians, and for three days without rest they enacted a ritual
to seal the eye shut. Dorn led their chanting and fi
nally a sigil of
power, born of his own valorous spirit, was branded against the shut
eye to keep it closed.
Dorn did not possess enough battle-brothers to destroy the
Predator’s Eye permanently. His Librarians were exhausted and many
had not survived the ritual. He knew that one day he would have to
return to finish the job. The Predator’s Eye would have to be opened
before it was destroyed, and so Dorn placed a condition on the ward
that sealed it so that only his own blood could open it. He buried the
Eye’s location in myths and legends, such that no one Chapter would
know the full story of its location and purpose, and swore that one day,
when the countless other threats had subsided and he had found
another corps of Librarians and champions to face down the terrible
gaze of the Predator’s Eye, the warp portal would finally be destroyed.
But the Imperium was beset on all sides by threats that did not let
up. For every daemonic foe that was despatched, rebellion or the
predations of the xenos would spring up, every new danger threatening
a new form of oblivion for the Imperium. For centuries the Predator’s
Eye lay hidden just below the level of mortal sight, blinded yet
possessing a bestial sense of anger and frustration born of the warp’s
own hatred. And eventually, Rogal Dorn died, to join the Emperor at
the battle at the end of time.
The Predator’s Eye remained orbiting its star, forgotten.
The name of that star was Kravamesh.
Scamander braved the first volley of bolter fire that streaked across the
archive. The walls exploded in torrents of burned and shredded
parchment around him as bolter rounds from the Howling Griffons flew
wide. One caught Scamander in the chest and blew him back a pace.
Another tore through the reading table in front of him and exploded
against his thigh. A storm of shrapnel crackled against him.
‘You will never see us kneel!’ yelled Scamander and he looked up to
the ceiling, his bared throat glowing scarlet. Flames licked up from his
hands, over his shoulder guards and face. Ice crusted around the table
and the floor around him as the heat energy bled into him to be
concentrated and forced out by the psychic reactor that churned in his
mind.
Scamander looked down at the Howling Griffons, face wreathed in
flame. They were charging heedless towards him, competing for the
honour of first blood. Captain Borganor was among them, ripping out
volleys of bolter fire.
Scamander breathed out a tremendous gout of flame that washed
over and through the first Howling Griffons. Some were thrown off their
feet by the wall of superheated air that slammed into them. Others
were caught full in the blast, ceramite melting in the supernaturally
intense heat, armour plates exploding. Three or four fell as the nervefibre
bundles in their armour were incinerated, robbing them of
movement as the joints melted and fused.
Borganor leapt through the fire, crashing through a reading table
already collapsing to ash under the force of Scamander’s assault. He
took aim without breaking stride and put a bolter round square into
Scamander’s abdomen, throwing the Soul Drinker back onto one knee.
Other Soul Drinkers returned fire in the wake of Scamander’s attack,
and the Howling Griffons struggled through the flame to get into cover
and drive them out. Borganor ignored the rest of the fight and dived
under the table Scamander was using for cover, his bionic leg
powering him forward.
Borganor came up face to face with Scamander. Scamander’s bolt
pistol was in his hand and the two wrestled over their guns.
Scamander was half-glowing with heat, half-slippery with ice, but
Borganor kept the muzzle of Scamander’s pistol away from him. His
own bolter was too unwieldy for this close-quarters murder – he let it
drop from his hand and took his combat knife from its sheath.
Scamander immolated himself in a cocoon of fire. Borganor yelled
and fell away. Scamander got to his feet and blasted at Borganor as
he stumbled away, holding the wound in his abdomen with his free
hand.
Borganor rolled through the flames, bolter fire impacting on his
shoulder guards and backpack. Chains of bolter fire hammered across
the archive room and shredded parchment fell in a burning rain,
filaments of ash rising on the hot air and flames licking up the walls.
The huge rolls of parchment were ablaze, falling in spooling masses
like waterfalls of fire and silhouetting the shapes of the Howling
Griffons as they ran from cover to cover, firing all the time.
Scamander raised his free hand, black with charred blood from his
wound. Flame sprayed from his fingers and Borganor grabbed hold of a
table leg to keep the burst of fire from carrying him off his feet. He
trusted in his ceramite, in the rites with which he had blessed his
wargear and the spirit of Roboute Guilliman he had beseeched to enter
his heart and make him more than a man, more than a Space Marine.
He trusted in the force of his vengeance, the shield of contempt which
could spread out from his iron soul and keep him alive long enough to
execute the traitor he faced.
Borganor forced himself forward a pace, knife held out in front.
Scamander raised his pistol again but Borganor swatted it away.
‘Traitor,’ hissed Borganor. ‘Witch.’
Scamander replied with a breath of fire, a narrow tongue of flame as
concentrated as a las-cutter’s beam. Borganor ducked it and rammed
the knife up into Scamander’s face. The blade passed up into
Scamander’s jaw, ripping through teeth and tongue. The flame
sputtered as clot of blood sprayed from Scamander’s mouth.
Borganor leapt forward, a knee on Scamander’s wounded stomach.
Scamander fell against the back wall of the archive room, where he
was bathed in the burning remnants of centuries of parchment records.
Borganor grabbed the back of Scamander’s head and wrenched it up,
exposing the Soul Drinker’s throat.
Scamander’s eyes were full of hate. Borganor grinned as he saw the
tiniest glimmer of fear there, a twitch at the corner of the eye.
‘Everything you die for is a lie,’ said Borganor, and slit Scamander’s
throat.
The Howling Griffon had to push the Soul Drinker’s body up against
the wall so the gout of fire that ripped from his torn throat shot upwards
instead of into his face. The fountain hit the ceiling and spread, flame
like liquid pooling outwards. Then it sputtered as if whatever fuelled it
was running out and Scamander fell limp. Fire licked from the corners
of his eyes, his mouth, his ears, and smoke coiled from the joints in
his armour.
Borganor threw the body aside. He looked around him. The burning
room was in chaos, half held by the Howling Griffons, half by the Soul
Drinkers. Many Howling Griffons had died to the Soul Drinkers
Librarian, but now Soul Drinkers were dying to the numbers and
firepower of the Howling Griffons.
Borganor’s
fight with Scamander had brought him out of cover. Only
smoke and flames concealed him from Soul Drinkers guns.
‘Brothers! The trickster is dead! Let bolter fire be your truth!’
Borganor yelled over the gunfire, standing proud of the fight even as
bolter shots fell around him. He snatched his bolter up off the floor and
got into the battle proper, hammering volley after volley into the hazy
purple-armoured shaped that loomed through the smoke.
‘Onward! Onward! This is but a welcome, my brothers! The
celebration is yet to come!’
Sarpedon heard the gunfire, and smelled the smoke rolling in from
the reading room. In the heart of the library labyrinth, alongside
Captain Luko, he waited for the wave to break against the Soul
Drinkers defences.
‘Scamander is lost,’ said Luko.
‘Then we have something to avenge,’ replied Sarpedon calmly.
‘I promised myself that no more Space Marines would die by my
hand,’ said Luko. ‘I have made many such promises to myself, but I
have a problem keeping them.’
‘You promised yourself peace, Captain,’ said Sarpedon. ‘You will
have it. But not just yet. Hold on for a few more moments, for your
battle-brothers.’
The first volleys of bolter fire, sharp and crisp, cackled from the
interior of the library. The Howling Griffons were in, past Scamander’s
forlorn hope and into the death-trap the Soul Drinkers had created for
them.
‘At last it will end,’ said Luko. ‘I don’t have to lie any more. Thank
the Emperor it ends here.’
‘And we decide how it ends,’ added Sarpedon. ‘How many men can
ever say that?’
Luko did not reply. The power field around his lightning claws flared
into life, and loose papers on the shelves scattered in the electric
charge.
The gunfire rose towards a crescendo as the vox channels filled with
bedlam.
‘Side by side with me, brothers!’ yelled Graevus, charging shoulderfirst
down the narrow corridors of the library. Burning books rained
down around him, thousands of words flitting by as pages turned to
ash.
Graevus crashed around a corner straight into a Howling Griffon
wielding a two-handed chainsword like an executioner’s axe. The blade
screeched down and Graevus turned it aside with his power axe, his