Lotara looked pointedly at the two Titan crew members.
‘I want complete copies of your reports. If I don’t get them, I’ll know why.’
Toth nodded, and Keeda smiled. ‘Aye, ma’am.’
‘Good. Now go to the apothecarion and get Toth patched up.’
She stepped back, making way for them. Just as she turned to begin the long journey back to the bridge, she noticed just who was leaving the Stormcrow. The warrior’s crested helm marked him out above his brethren, but she’d have known him purely from the bronze versions of the XII Legion symbol on both of his shoulder guards. She watched him as he descended the gang-ramp into the hangar, his walk assured, his grace undeniable, his arrogance unbounded. He spoke to his companions, ignoring the human serfs and hangar crew going about their business around him.
Very calmly, Lotara Sarrin drew her laspistol, took aim, and shot a World Eaters captain in the face.
His head snapped back from the las-beam’s impact, and she had a momentary flush of pleasure at scoring a truly wicked shot, before the World Eaters circled their captain and raised their bolters, aiming across the crowded hangar deck. There was, very distinctly, just long enough for Lotara to think they won’t shoot, before they shot.
She saw the flare of muzzle flashes as their guns kicked in their fists. Time didn’t slow down as she’d been led to believe by the war-sagas. She barely had time to blink before the bolts detonated in the air not six metres from her face, spraying her with burning, stinging shrapnel. Serfs and thralls were scattering with the same haste as cockroaches fleeing a sudden light. She stood dumbstruck for one of the first times in her life, unsure why she was still alive, yet more annoyed they’d dared to shoot her aboard her own ship.
Another World Eater moved to stand by her side, his hand raised to ward off further attack from the captain’s bodyguards. He spoke a single word, soft and low.
‘Enough.’ The others weren’t listening, and the captain wasn’t dead. He came to his feet, storming towards her at the head of nine of his brothers. A meteor hammer rattled loose on its chain, hanging from his right fist.
‘You puling little whore,’ he snarled down at her. ‘How dare you?’
He pulled the weapon back, activating its spiked head, meaning to wipe her from the face of the deck. Lotara spat at his boots, but the World Eater at her side took another step forwards, preventing the two of them from coming to blows.
‘I said enough.’ He kept his hand raised, warning them back. ‘Stand down, Delvarus.’
The Triarii captain turned his grim-faced helm towards the Codicier, eye lenses gleaming.
'You have no authority over me, Esca. The bitch shot me. Get out of my way.’
‘That,’ Esca replied patiently, ‘will not be happening. Move away.’
The other Triarii pulled steel, as another three World Eaters came to stand by Lotara. She looked up at them, each of them a full head and a half taller than her. All three wore Destroyers’ black.
‘Problem, captain?’ said the sergeant, in a voice laced by vox-corruption.
Delvarus pointed at the mortal woman in the middle of the towering pack of legionaries.
‘She–’
‘I wasn’t asking you, Captain Delvarus. I was asking Captain Sarrin.’
He looked down at her, his empty grenade bandolier clanking against his chestplate.
‘Nothing I can’t handle, Skane. But you’re welcome to stay anyway.’
More Triarii were arriving to swell the ranks of those around Delvarus. The captain’s cloak was ruined from the surface war, but he imperiously cast its ragged remnants over one shoulder.
‘This doesn’t concern either of you,’ he said. ‘Sergeant, Codicier, you’re dismissed.’
They ignored him. Lotara spat on his boots again. ‘You abandoned the ship, Delvarus. That’s dereliction of duty. Every life we lost in that boarding action is blood on your hands.’
He laughed down at her. ‘You were boarded? When I left the ship, the fight was a foregone conclusion. How did you manage to get boarded, Lotara?’ She smiled, the sweetest knife of a smile.
‘Would you prefer I took this to the primarch?’
'Aye, perhaps I would. You think he’ll even care? He barely knows who he is, any more. Dereliction of duty may be a grave threat to an Ultramarine, but we’re a little more grounded in the realities of war. Now get out of my face, girl. I’ll let this insult pass once. Try it again, and I’ll give your skull to my artificers as a pot for night soil.’
More legionaries gathered on both sides.
‘This looks entertaining,’ said Kargos, moving next to Skane. ‘Have we missed something?’
‘She shot me,’ Delvarus said.
Kargos snorted, sounding suspiciously like a snigger. There was a similar bark of vox-chuckling from Skane’s augmetic throat.
‘Well, I’m sure you deserved it,’ the Apothecary said.
‘You aren’t funny, Kargos.’
Kargos was still grinning, iron teeth on show.
‘Maybe not, but you are. Getting shot on your own hangar deck? I only wish we still had remembrancers around to record that in your archives of personal heroism.’
Delvarus gave a snort of derision and turned away.
‘I’m done with this idiocy.’
‘Stand your ground, soldier.’
The Triarii captain halted, and turned with a feline and somehow amused slowness, to regard the woman who’d addressed him.
‘What is it, Lotara?’
‘You will address me as Captain Sarrin. And you are confined to your arming chamber until I say otherwise. Discipline exists even if you consider yourself above it, Delvarus.’
‘Enough, girl. You’re still alive. The ship’s still in one piece.’
She stepped from the protection of Skane, Esca and Kargos, until she was right before the Triarii, staring up at him with narrowed eyes. Her head reached his chestplate. Barely.
‘We lost over two thousand crew to the Thirteenth Legion’s bolters, you stupid whoreson. The Ultramarines knew where to board us, and where to strike. Two thousand men and women dead because you wanted to chase glory down there in the dust. Not slave-deck dregs and war fodder, Delvarus. Trained, vital crew from the command and primary enginarium decks. We sustained enough internal damage over several systems that the Conqueror won’t function fully until she’s been drydocked for a month or more. Am I making myself clear, you arrogant swine? You have your orders. Now get out of my sight.’
For a moment, it looked as though he’d refuse. In the end, Delvarus inclined his head in a nod, saluted her with a fist over his heart, and led his men away.
‘I’m going back to the bridge,’ she told Esca. ‘Thank you for doing… whatever it is you did. With the bolt shells, I mean.’
The Librarian bowed, his ravaged and restitched face in its usual hideous calm.
‘Hunt well, captain.’
She looked around the battle-damaged crowd of World Eaters around her, with their weapons in their hands. How many people had died with a scene just like this as the last thing they ever saw?
‘Thank you, all of you.’
They each nodded, only dispersing once she walked away. On one of the gantries overlooking the hangar deck, a figure three times the height of a legionary stood in contemplative silence, still the way only statues and corpses can be, for he was a little of both. He watched and learned, and in knowing, he began to plan.
[Later, in the fighting pits]
Esca nodded down to indicate the Triarii captain.
‘Evidently, Lotara freed him from his quarters.’
Vorias gave a thin-lipped smile. ‘The flag-captain knows her trade. She shamed him in the finest way: she showed him as a warrior that couldn’t be trusted by his brothers. Very artfully done. Now we get the dubious pleasure of watching him seek to prove himself again, the only way he knows how.’
Below them, Delvarus was roaring into the crowd, baying at them, building their cheers for the fight to come. Like many World Eaters, Delvarus was inducted from a planet conquered in the Legion’s earliest decades rather than from a specific homeworld. No Legion except the Ultramarines was as diverse, coloured by so many shades of skin from so many different worlds. Where the Word Bearers were uniformly dusky-skinned from the desert world Colchis, and the Night Lords were pale from their years on sunless Nostramo, the World Eaters reflected a diversity of flesh overruled by the bonds of brotherhood.
Delvarus was unhelmed and unarmoured for the pit-fight. His dark skin marked his genesis in the jungles of whatever planet he’d once called home, and he bared iron teeth at his kindred, demanding one of them step forwards and face him.
‘His popularity seems unaffected,’
Esca pointed out.
‘You’ll see,’
Vorias replied. Skane was the first to step forwards. The Destroyer’s pale skin showed an unhealthy lightning-storm of veins and blood-bruises staining his flesh, from proximity to his own toxically lethal weaponry. His neck was collared in dark metal, forming armour around his augmetic throat. An aggressive cancer had stolen his vocal chords, but Kargos had given him new ones.
‘First blood?’ Delvarus growled at his brother.
For years, but for the rarest bouts, first blood was almost all they ever asked of him.
‘Third blood,’ Skane replied, and lifted an inactive chainsword.
The fight was painfully, though not shamefully, brief. Skane went down to third blood in two minutes, losing to Delvarus without the Triarii captain even breaking a sweat. Before Skane had even picked himself up, another World Eater stepped forwards to take his place. Delvarus was still laughing.
‘First blood?’ he asked again.
‘Third blood.’
The fight went the same way. As did the next, and the next, and the next. As did the one to follow that. By the seventh fight, Delvarus was breathing heavily, his skin beaded by effort.
‘Who’s next?’ he cried over the hamstrung brother at his feet. ‘Who’s next?’
'Third blood,’ said yet another World Eater, lifting a stilled chainaxe. This fight went to four minutes, ending with Delvarus smirking through the cheers. Tradition stated no warrior should fight more than eight bouts in a single night, else he attracted accusations of arrogance and vainglory, putting himself above his brothers. The Triarii cast his meteor hammer to the deck, raising his fists in triumph. The cheers, however, had stopped cold. Delvarus turned to leave the circle and rejoin the crowd, but the World Eaters didn’t part to make way for him. One of them, a warrior with a face almost as badly sutured as Esca’s, thudded chest to chest with the Triarii.
‘Third blood,’ he said to Delvarus. There was a chainsword in his hand.
‘I’ve done my eight,’ the warrior grinned.
‘Third blood,’ the World Eater repeated, and shoved Delvarus back into the circle.
The Triarii reclaimed his flail, hesitating a moment before setting it whirling again. His eyes were utterly untouched by the amusement plastered across his dark features. Above all of this, Esca started to smile. Three more fights ended just as the first eight had. Delvarus was no longer amused, and no longer trying to leave the circle. He knew where this was going. Another fight. And another. And another – on this, the fourteenth, Delvarus’s opponent raked the motionless teeth of his chainaxe across the Triarii’s bicep, drawing first blood. In a rage, Delvarus retaliated with first, second and third bloodings in as many swings.
‘Next,’ he breathed through clenched teeth, looking out at the ring of his brothers who stared at him in silence.
He was panting now, no different from the breathlessness of the front lines. Legionaries were gene-engineered to fight for days on end against human and inhuman enemies alike, but on even ground… When brother fought brother in a place as brutal as the XII Legion’s fighting pits, the rules changed with the game. He beat the next opponent, and the next, and the nine that followed those. With cramping muscles, he put his twenty-fifth opponent down on the deck and caught his heaving breath.
The twenty-sixth was tied at second blood for a dangerously long time. His opponent landed a lucky kick to his chest after almost half an hour of duelling, and Delvarus staggered back against the wall of World Eaters. Where duellists were usually pushed back into the fight with cheers and good-natured jeers, he was shoved unceremoniously forwards in vicious silence, almost stumbling over onto his hands and knees.
He recovered in time to block the descending blow, his flail’s chain wrapping the incoming sword and tearing it from his foe’s fingers. Delvarus cannoned a fist into the warrior’s face, breaking his nose and winning on third blood at last. He dragged in another breath.
‘Next.’
The challenge was almost a wheeze. Kargos stepped forwards.
‘Sanguis extremis,’ he said. ‘To the death.’
Delvarus narrowed his eyes, giving a snarl that wouldn’t have been out of place rolling from the throat of an Ancient Terran tyger, or Fenrisian wolf.
‘So eager,’ he breathed, ‘to die, Apothecary?’
Kargos gave a crooked, nasty smirk and held out his hand towards Skane. The sergeant handed him a power sword without a word. Their weapons came alive in the same moment: Kargos’s borrowed blade and the spiked flail-head crackling with opposing power fields. Neither warrior went to parry. Neither did anything beyond trying kill strike after kill strike, weaving aside when death came too close for comfort. Desperation gave strength to Delvarus’s sore muscles, but it couldn’t give him the agility he possessed while fresh.
Kargos’s first blow came after the first minute, cutting a shallow line of sizzling flesh down the Triarii’s cheek. Delvarus’s face twitched as his Nails pulsed and he launchedback at the Apothecary. He scored the next hit, his flail’s head catching Kargos on the jaw. The barest scratch, too weak to even flare the power field, but it painted blood over Kargos’s pale skin and left his gums bleeding.
That was enough to bring Delvarus’s smile back. He was wise to Kargos’s games. He flinched aside when the Apothecary spat bloody saliva in reply, ready for the oldest of tricks that earned Kargos his pit-fighting name.
‘A filthy habit,’ Delvarus grinned.
His return blow lashed through the air with a whine of energised metal, pulled back before it could crash into the deck and wedge in the iron. Kargos’s reply came with another smile, this one with blood-reddened teeth.
‘You look tired,’ he said.
Delvarus sprayed spit as he roared in reply. Above them, Vorias narrowed his eyes in thought.
‘Did you feel that?’ he asked softly.
Esca nodded. He’d felt something change in the air, a tightening of the atmosphere around the circle as Delvarus’s implants ramped up. The Triarii’s blows were wilder, heavier, accompanied by grunts and snarls.
‘Six seconds,’ Vorias said in the same quiet voice. ‘Maybe eight.’
It was six. Kargos parried for the first time, cleaving through the meteor hammer’s chain in one chop. The deactivated flail head crashed into the closest World Eaters observer, raking across his bare chest. At the mercy of his implants, Delvarus reached for Kargos with his bare hands, only to find the point of the Apothecary’s blade at his throat. Even with the Nails stealing the edge from his reason, the threat of imminent death penetrated to his hind-brain instincts, forcing him to hesitate.
The silence was louder than the cheering had ever been.
‘Finish it, Bloodspitter.’ Saliva trailed in a thick string down the Triarii’s chin.
‘You’ve proven your point. All of you have. So finish it.’
Kargos kept the blade against Delvarus’s throat. ‘The other Legions have primarchs that lead them to glory. They have homeworlds to honour and cultural legacies to live by. We have scraps of stolen tradition and the trust between brothers. That’s all. Brotherhood, captain. A brotherhood you broke when you abandoned your duty and lied to your sworn kindred.’
Delvarus was clearly fighting the Nails, forcing his twitching fingers into fists to maintain a semblance of control. The sword’s tip blackened his throat where it touched and scorched the flesh.
‘I recognise my failing–’ he growled the words ‘– and will be sure to correct it.’
Quoting the traditional apology of the VI Legion earned a guttural tide of chuckles. Even Kargos smiled, and this time without the shadow of malice that had backlit every one of his expressions thus far. The Apothecary stared hard into the Triarii’s eyes.
‘Are you my brother, Delvarus?’ The Triarii exhaled, tilting his head back to bare his throat for the final thrust.
‘I am. And I’ll die as your brother. Finish it.’
Kargos deactivated the blade. He lowered it, and tossed it back to Skane at the circle’s edge. Delvarus stared, wide-eyed, the Nails sparking in his brain.
‘Sanguis extremis,’ he said. ‘To the death. To the death.’
‘We’ve all broken traditions in our time,’ said Kargos. ‘You’re one of our best, Delvarus. Remember that. Remind us why we’ve spent so many years thinking it.’
The dark-skinned warrior met the eyes of his surrounding brothers.
‘You all stand by his words? Any who would make a liar of Kargos step forwards now.’ He spread his arms wide. ‘Plunge a blade through my breast. I will stand here and let you.’
No one came forwards. A few warriors smiled, others nodded in a respect that passed for forgiveness.
‘I sense Khârn’s hand in this,’ Delvarus said to Kargos. ‘It smells like his wisdom, carried out by other hands.’
That earned more quiet laughter; no longer was it the sound of mockery.
‘I couldn’t possibly comment,’ the Apothecary replied.
Above the dispersing confrontation, Esca finally turned to Vorias.
‘They still have nobility in them. The Nails haven’t bled them dry.’
The Lectio Primus nodded.
‘Yet.’
Submitted October 23, 2019 at 02:12PM by Something_Syck https://ift.tt/2PatdcQ
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