He felt like a fool. When the operation was over, he would meditate. He would clean his mind of the fears and dreams that had accumulated. He would purify his thoughts and expel his weaknesses. To serve the Warmaster, he needed to be an even-tempered weapon.
He had let himself slacken. It was time he recommitted his mind and made himself truer to the image of Lupercal.
Aximand opened the vox, and took stock. Large portions of the Precinct were in Sixteenth Legion hands. Grael Noctua reported the West Hall and the approaches secure. Aximand ordered squads forward into the East Hall, to his position. He ordered all access ways closed.
He looked at the cybernation array around them. A little damage had been done, but not too much. The facility was essentially intact, and a little pressure applied to Dweller technadepts would soon have repairs completed.
The huge white statues of shrouded demi-gods, bright as snow, that had been kneeling in obeisance around the central great bio-stasis generator stack were gone.
‘Wait–’ Aximand began.
The White Scars killteam rushed them. The five killers of the Fifth Legion had thrown off the white cloaks they had used for concealment. They had used chalk dust or some funereal powder to mask the crimson edges of their armour. Their helms were crowskull, the Corvus pattern. It seemed Lev Goshen had been badly mistaken. The White Scars didhave the patience to wait. What on the open field was fast hit and run became, in city fighting, stealth and swift ambush.
Grael Noctua’s warning had been shrewd.
The first one was on him. It was Hibou Khan. Aximand identified him from his rank and company pins. This was the practice of burkutchi, to ‘cut the head’. The term came from the Chogorisian art of hunting with eagles, the great akwilluh, using the birds to draw out and isolate the bull leader of a herd. Once the bull was dead, the herd was broken.
It had been their intention to decapitate the Sixteenth. Thwarted, they were going to make do with other prey: other bulls, junior bulls, company captains.
Aximand smashed Hibou away, and broke the White Scar’s blade on Mourn-it-all’sedge. Another Scar lunged in. Aximand parried and heard Geraddon cry out as two blades punched through him. Aximand drove his sword down through the cap of the next snow-white crowskull helm that came at him. Suddenly, not all the red decorating the White Scar wargear was scarlet lacquer. He reached for his bolter.
Gunfire ripped through the Mausolytic Precinct. More White Scars and renegade Iron Hands had sprung their trap. Squads of Aximand’s company were meeting both, bolter to bolter. Fighting on, out-numbered, Aximand slew another White Scar, blasting his bolter point-blank through an eyeslit. He yelled over the link to Noctua and his lieutenant captains to close the fight down.
To be on alert that their enemy was hunting captains as trophies.
To be aware that they weren’t facing Tyjunate Compulsories or Chainveil anymore.
They were facing Adeptus Astartes transhumans.
Hibou Khan had got back on his feet. To replace his own, broken sword, the White Scar had snatched up the long blade of Medusan steel that Henricos had wielded. His first blow notched Mourn-it-all, his second beat Aximand’s guard.
His third blow caught Little Horus vertically at the cheek, in a line that began just over the right eye-piece where his Mournival mark was displayed. The bonded ceramite of his helm didn’t even seem to stop the Medusan weapon.
Aximand fell. There was a great deal of blood suddenly, and he couldn’t properly account for its source. He saw something on the etched steel floor in front of him.
It was the visor and snout section of his own helmet, the entire faceplate. It had been sheared off, peeled cleanly away, as though shaved by an industrial slicer.
And it was not empty.
THE REATTACHMENT LEFT a scar. It set the character of the face differently, altered the seating of the muscles. Somehow, the wrongness, the imperfection, made him more like Horus, not less.
Noctua brought his squads into the East Hall in a rapid counterstrike, and broke the burkutchi.Hibou Khan was denied the opportunity to finish the job. Most of the loyalist Space Marines were driven back out into the lap of Lev Goshen and his Terminator squads.
Hibou Khan fled, leaving twelve men of Aximand’s company dead by his own hand, and earning himself a place on Aximand’s death list.
A new helm was forged for him, with the half-moon above the right eye. The armourers were already busy graving Mournival marks to the helms of Grael Noctua and Falkus Kibre. When Aximand was shown the pieces of his old headgear, he saw that the blade had sliced his half-moon mark in half.
Had he been a man prone to superstition and belief in omens, he might have read bad things into this. But he was not afraid of change. He was not really even a man.
Under the surgeon’s knife, in stasis sleep, he had dreamt one final dream. The identity of the faceless intruder had ultimately been revealed. Aximand had been slightly apprehensive that the intruder’s face would turn out to be his own, or one just like it, and that lengthy psychological work would be required as a consequence.
It was not. As they restored his face, he dreamt the face of the other.
It was the face of Garviel Loken.
When Aximand woke, he felt a measure of happiness and relief. A man could not be afraid of the dead, and Loken was dead, and that fact would not change.
Not that he was afraid of change. Change was, he always insisted, part of his ruling character.
‘The melancholic humour is protean,’ he said. ‘It possesses the quality of autumn. It is transformative. It makes me the accelerator of death, the enabler of ends and beginnings. I was made to clear away this world ready for renewal. To change the order of things. To cast out the false and enthrone the true. This is my purpose. I am not afraid.’
Then again, once they reattached his face, all he ever really looked was invincible.
THE IRON WITHIN
Rob Sanders
THE IRON WITHIN. The iron without. Iron everywhere. The galaxy laced with its cold promise. Did you know that Holy Terra is mostly iron? Our Olympian home world, also. Most habitable planets and moons are. The truth is we are an Imperium of iron. Dying stars burn hearts of iron; while the heavy metal cores of burgeoning worlds generate fields that shelter life – sometimes human life – from the razing glare of such stellar ancients.
Empires are measured in more than just conquered dirt. Every Iron Warrior knows this. They’re measured in hearts that beat in common purpose, thundering in unison across the void: measured in the blood that spills from our Legiones Astartes bodies, red with iron and defiance. This is the iron within and we can taste its metallic tang when an enemy blade or bullet finds us wanting. Then the iron within becomes the iron without, as it did on what we only now understand to be the first day of the Great Siege of Lesser Damantyne…
THE WARSMITH STEPPED out onto the observation platform, each of his power-armoured footfalls an assault on the heavy grille. The Iron Warrior’s ceramite shoulders were hunched with responsibility, as though the Space Marine carried much more than the deadweight of his Mark-III plate. He crossed the platform with the determination of a demigod, but the fashion in which his studded gauntlets seized the exterior rail betrayed a belief that he might not make the expanse at all. The juggernaut ground to an irresistible halt.
A rasping cough wracked the depths of his armoured chest, his form rising and falling with the exertion of each tortured, uncertain breath. Imperial Army sentries from the Ninth-Ward Angeloi Adamantiphracts watched the Warsmith suffer, uncertain how to act. One even broke ranks and approached, the flared muzzle of his heavy carbine lowered and scalemail glove outstretched.