Iron Warrior Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  About the Author

  Legal

  eBook license

  Warhammer 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  Chapter One

  The planet had no name. Not because it had been forgotten over the countless millennia since it had first been discovered, and not because it had passed into history as a dusty footnote at the end of some ancient chronicler’s archive. It had no name because it had never been given one, its discoverers knowing on some subconscious level that to name this world would bring others to it.

  In the wake of the Great Betrayal, explorators seeking out new worlds for the resurgent Imperium of Man had found the world inimical to human life on almost every level. Howling winds swept over a bleak landscape of siliceous dunes, ashen basins of crushed quartz and towering cliffs of basalt and knife-edged obsidian. Nothing lived on this world, and the first men to set foot on its glassy deserts, the shimmering sand crunching beneath their cumbersome exo-armour, felt the planet’s hostility leeching through the heavy gauge plasteel of their environment suits.

  Thirteen hours later, six men committed suicide by opening their suits to the atmosphere, and another turned a plasma torch on his fellows. Within the next six hours, another ten men were dead, driven into paroxysms of madness and homicidal rages.

  The survivors fled, leaving the planet unnamed and unmarked in the records of the Imperial Cartographae, hoping to spare others the fate that had overtaken them.

  The forsaken planet spun in the void, unknown and unvisited.

  But such ill-fated places are a beacon to those in the service of discord.

  Mountains like a row of black fangs reared from the rocky hinterlands at the edge of the continental dustbowl. Slicing gales of powdered glass billowed from the quartz deserts, and a sky of cracked slate pressed down upon the world like a great hammer about to fall.

  Honsou climbed over the edge of the vast depression, his growling transport perched on a rocky ledge a hundred metres below. Screaming winds tore at him with spiteful claws, but power wrought into his bones by ancient craft, and the mechanical strength of his burnished iron armour allowed him to remain upright in the face of their fury.

  ‘We’re close,’ he said to the four warriors who followed him. ‘She’s here, I can feel it.’

  ‘No one lives here,’ spat Cadaras Grendel, sealed within battered and scored battle plate the colour of bare iron. Grendel shielded his visor from the swirling particles and said, ‘This is a waste of time, Honsou, there’s nothing to find here.’

  ‘Frightened are you, Grendel?’ said Honsou, unable to resist baiting the warrior. ‘Never thought I’d see the day.’

  ‘This is a cursed world,’ said Grendel, keeping a tight grip on his weapon, a blackened melta gun that had sent a thousand souls to their doom. ‘We should leave.’

  Towering and powerful, Grendel’s violence was a stark promise, and Honsou was surprised he hadn’t risen to the bait.

  Beside Grendel, the Newborn watched their conversation with the keen attention of a student. Beneath the expressionless mask of its helmet, its face was a melange of skin sliced from the dead, its body created in a fusion of stolen genetics and warp science. Its power was greater than any of them fully understood, but its mind was new and easily moulded.

  The fine-grained glass had scoured the plates of their armour bare of all colour, insignia and markings of rank. Their shoulder guards had, only hours ago, borne the heraldry of the Iron Warriors, but the lashing tongues of the wind rendered Honsou, Grendel and the Newborn nearly identical.

  Nearly, but not quite.

  The surfaces of the Iron Warriors’ armour were flensed and dulled by the flying glass dust, but Honsou’s silver arm gleamed like liquid mercury. No sooner was its surface abraded than it was renewed, as though possessed of some dreadful regenerative power.

  Nor was it just their armour that differed. Honsou carried himself with an insouciant swagger of brash self-confidence, while Grendel was tensed like a bar brawler on the verge of terrifying bloodshed. In contrast, the Newborn stood unbending in the wind, proud and with an innocence that flew in the face of the brutal angles of its armour.

  ‘Honsou is right,’ said the Newborn. ‘This world is home to great power. Psychic venom has poisoned it beyond redemption.’

  ‘Perceptive, isn’t it?’ said Ardaric Vaanes, alone of the warriors not clad in bare iron armour. ‘But you don’t need any warp-sense to know this is a forsaken place.’

  Vaanes’s armour was the colour of the blackest night, though it too had been scored bare of insignia and markings by the scouring winds. Once, it had borne the winged emblem of the Raven Guard overlaid with the jagged cross of the Red Corsairs. The wind had obliterated both symbols of allegiance, as though he were a warrior without a master or a past.

  ‘Indeed he is,’ purred Notha Etassay, the last member of Honsou’s group, a warrior clad in buckled straps that held strategically situated elements of flexible plate close to his body, leaving much of his tanned, spare frame exposed. By rights, the flesh should have been scraped from his bones by the powdered glass wind. A rippling energy sheathed his body, though its protection was far from total. Shallow cuts were carved in Etassay’s skin with every gust of wind, but the lithe warrior seemed to enjoy the sensation. ‘He is a unique creature, one I would sorely love to test my talents against.’

  Honsou frowned, unsure of Etassay’s meaning, and unable to read the expression beneath the blademaster’s mask of silver and leather. Etassay was an androgynous beauty of uncertain sex, a hedonist who indulged his every whim of sadism, butchery and masochism. He was also a killer who honoured the art of blades and to whom no secret of swordsmanship was unknown. Honsou had won Etassay’s army at the Skull Harvest on New Badab, along with nearly seventeen thousand warriors of all stripes.

  ‘You can feel it?’ Honsou asked the Newborn.

  ‘I can.’

  ‘Tell me,’ commanded
Honsou.

  The Newborn cocked its head to one side, as though listening to something hidden within the howling cry of the wind.

  ‘Rage,’ said the creature. ‘A rage born of betrayal. It withers everything it touches.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Honsou. ‘That’s it exactly, hateful bitterness that sours the very heart of this place. This world is the one, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Then let’s get on and find it then,’ snapped Cadaras Grendel. ‘I don’t fancy being withered by whatever it is we’re here for.’

  ‘Not what,’ said Etassay. ‘Weren’t you listening? It’s a person we’re looking for. A woman.’

  Grendel bristled at Etassay’s words, his fingers flexing on the grip of his gun. Etassay and Grendel had taken an instant dislike to one another, and Honsou, remembering the Tyrant of Badab’s last words to him, did nothing to dispel it.

  ‘It’s a woman, right enough,’ said Honsou, setting off into the teeth of the wind, ‘but no ordinary woman.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Vaanes.

  ‘I’m looking for Moriana,’ said Honsou. ‘The seer who guided the Warmaster.’

  They marched through blinding sheets of wind-blown glass, trudging through rolling dunes of the stuff, over craggy ridges of black rock like the spines of buried dragons. Honsou could feel the malice carved into the flesh of this world, and it gave him strength. He knew in his bones that this was the place, but looked for any sign that would confirm it.

  The swirling air before him dropped and he saw a low haunch of smooth boulders gathered together in the far distance… like a cairn or burial mound primitive savages built for their dead. He laughed and looked to the sky, silently thanking the dark gods of the warp for leading him to this place.

  ‘The Hag that dwells in the Bone House,’ he said, feeling his heart beat faster at the sight of a darkened cave mouth amid the boulders. It had been a long road from the Iron Warriors home world of Medrengard, a grim procession of murder and mayhem that had seen a world of the Emperor destroyed and an army gathered to his banner.

  All in service of Honsou’s vengeance upon Uriel Ventris of the Ultramarines, the only warrior ever to walk away from him. And if Honsou had interpreted the hidden clues in the ancient books correctly, then the end of that road was almost in sight.

  Grendel came alongside him, peering through the mist and ashen wind at the mound of boulders. Vaanes and the Newborn stood apart from the warrior, while Notha Etassay sashayed through the scoring wind with his arms upraised to better enjoy the sensation of glass abrading his skin.

  Honsou sensed their confusion and waited to see who would speak first.

  ‘Horus Lupercal?’ spat Grendel. ‘That Warmaster?’

  Honsou shook his head. ‘No, the Despoiler.’

  Grendel gave a harsh bark of laugher. ‘Then you’d best not heed her words, for they did Abaddon no good. That fool has been sent packing with his tail between his legs more times than I’ve killed the dogs of the Emperor.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that, Grendel,’ said Honsou, ‘but the Despoiler’s failings are his own. It was Moriana who guided him to the Blackstone Fortresses.’

  ‘The Gothic War?’ asked Vaanes.

  ‘So the Imperials call it, aye,’ agreed Honsou.

  ‘That was over eight hundred years ago, surely she must be dead.’

  ‘You think seers have no power to step outside the passage of time?’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to find out,’ said Vaanes. ‘Anyone who has cheated death for so long gathers ill-fate to them like crows to a battlefield.’

  ‘And how much longer than a mortal man have you lived, Ardaric Vaanes?’ asked Notha Etassay with a silky chuckle. ‘We are all harbingers of death here. You, me, Honsou. Grendel especially. And even this grotesquely ugly by-blow has existed far beyond its span.’

  ‘You’re a great comfort, you know that, Etassay?’ snapped Vaanes.

  ‘Enough,’ said Honsou. ‘We’re here.’

  The mouth of the cave was hung with talismans and fetishes that sang in the wind, tinkling musically as bone and glass swayed back and forth. Tendrils of aromatic smoke issued from the darkness, as though something vast and ancient dwelled within. The rocky mound stood inside a stunted grove of trees amid a withered glade, and to see such an approximation of living things was strange and unsettling.

  ‘Now what?’ asked Vaanes. ‘Do we go in?’

  ‘No,’ said Honsou. ‘I go in, you wait here.’

  ‘Suits me,’ said Grendel, staring in apprehension at the black maw of the cave.

  Honsou took a moment to gather his courage. He had faced the mightiest of champions of Chaos during the Skull Harvest, yet the prospect of marching into this cave to face this seer sent tremors of unease along his spine.

  ‘I will fear nothing,’ he whispered. ‘I am what others should fear.’

  Without a word to his subordinates, Honsou left them behind.

  The darkness of the cave swallowed him.

  Honsou’s eyes adjusted to the darkness slowly, the mechanics of his armour and the augmetic eye whirring as they sought to penetrate the unnatural gloom. He felt a moment’s dislocation, a sharp spike of dizziness, as he crossed the threshold of the cave, as though he had stepped from one realm and into another. He looked back over his shoulder, but instead of the reassuring silhouettes of his warriors against the bleak light of the nameless world, he saw only a deeper blackness.

  ‘Come farther, Honsou of the Iron Warriors,’ said a voice from the darkness.

  Honsou obeyed without hesitation, knowing on a deep, instinctual level that to disobey would be a terrible mistake. With each step he took into the cave, the more he saw of his surroundings, as though its occupant was choosing to only gradually reveal it to him.

  The walls were smooth stone, machine finished, and every inch was covered with tightly wound lettering, an entire library copied onto the rock. Yet more charms and fetishes hung from the ceiling, grotesque trophies torn from living bodies or crafted from their remains. Noxious candles flickered in bowls fashioned from the lids of skulls, and scrolls crafted from human skin were spread across tables of bone.

  Honsou had seen far worse in his time, and such petty cruelties were little more than shabby window dressing to frighten those who had not stared into the warp and seen true horror. A low fire burned in the centre of the cave with an amethyst light, and a hunchbacked creature squatted behind it. Honsou saw the figure was clad in what might once have been a hooded dress of vivid green, but which was now little more than a tattered, filthy shift.

  ‘You are Moriana?’ asked Honsou, removing his helmet and taking a breath of the foetid, herbal stench of the cave. The molten glass smell of the world beyond was gone, and beneath the fragrant poultices, Honsou could smell the reek of something long dead.

  The hunched figure rose from behind the fire and drew back her hood, revealing the crumpled face of an ancient crone with leprous flesh, cratered and pitted like the surface of a dead moon. Grey and pallid, her features were gnarled and ancient, her eyes gouged out long ago by some long-dead torturer, yet still weeping tears of blood.

  ‘Of course I am,’ wheezed the crone. ‘Who else would dwell in such a place?’

  ‘Then you know why I am here?’

  ‘I do,’ confirmed Moriana, spitting a black wad of phlegm as a hacking coughing fit bent her double. ‘You seek the Thrice Born.’

  ‘It’s real then?’ said Honsou, coming forward, his eagerness overcoming his natural caution. ‘Tell me where I can find it!’

  ‘Patience,’ wheezed Moriana. ‘All in good time.’

  ‘No,’ demanded Honsou. ‘Now.’

  Moriana laughed at his impatience and said, ‘The mightiest champions of the warp have sought my counsel, by what right do you dare come before me?’

  ‘By right of battle and by right of knowledge,’ said Honsou. ‘I know who you are and what you have done. I know you once stood in the presence of the cor
pse-emperor and I know why you fell from grace.’

  ‘You know nothing!’ said Moriana, spitting the words at him. ‘You read a few ancient tomes and you think that makes you wise? Yes, I stood before the golden throne, but a half-breed like you will never understand the truth of those times.’

  ‘Don’t call me that,’ snarled Honsou. ‘People who call me that end up dead.’

  ‘You think you can threaten me?’

  ‘Why not? I could kill you where you stand.’

  ‘Always with your kind it is threats,’ said Moriana, as though saddened by his predictability. ‘Mighty Abaddon thought to open my throat with the claw he took from Horus Lupercal’s corpse, but even he knew better. Others have come since then, and all have barked their empty threats. Listen well, half-breed, I have stared into the abyss and treated with the foulest monsters of the deepest dark, so I do not fear your petty torments.’

  Honsou swallowed his anger with difficulty. It sat ill with him to allow an insult to go unpunished, but without Moriana, his schemes of vengeance would come to nothing.

  ‘Very well,’ said Honsou. ‘Speak and I will listen.’

  ‘It is not enough simply to listen, Honsou. What will you offer in return for my help?’

  ‘Name your price,’ said Honsou. ‘Whatever you ask I will grant you.’

  ‘You are impetuous, Honsou, but I am never one to forego such an offer. I require only your word that you will see this through to the end, no matter what. When all others falter, you must not. When all hope is gone, you must remain true, for great deeds require great sacrifice.’

  ‘You have my word on it,’ promised Honsou.

  ‘The word of men is valueless,’ croaked Moriana. ‘Blood is the only thing that speaks true. Come closer.’

  Reluctantly, Honsou took a step towards the blinded seer, his lip curling in distaste as she lifted a hand to his face. The withered claw caressed his skin, long curling nails like talons encrusted with centuries of filth tracing a path over his features: his strong jaw line, his aquiline nose and the crude augmetic grafted to his skull where a bolter round had pulped the side of his face.