Stabbing his blade into the ice, Thane knelt down and scooped up a handful of snow. Rubbing it between his palms, he washed the blood of previous opponents from his hands. Something felt broken in his left forearm, his right eye was swollen and bloodshot, while the ragged slice across his chest was knitted together with ice. All over, his flesh burned with the deep cold of the planet. Thane felt the eyes of the gathered Space Marines on him. Chapter Masters like Cuarrion and Verpall, looking on with grim approval. Fists Exemplar, a cold pride thumping in their chests. Champions broken and bested by the Chapter Master, like Stormon Valdred of the Black Templars and Morion Abermort from the ranks of the Iron Knights. Gasparian Riguez, representing the Crimson Fists, was still unconscious.
Thane pulled his gladius from the chill embrace of the arena floor. It had come to this. The Excoriator, Dathan Tychor, and himself, ready to smash each other into the frozen surface of Dorn-blessed Inwit, in honour of a fallen Chapter. He felt the surrounding Space Marines feeding off the torment and expectation. They had to do something with their bottomless grief. Their superhuman rage. Their brotherly love.
Opposite, Chapter Master Issachar was conferring with his champion. With his words stolen by the wind, Thane nonetheless saw him nod his respect through the darkness and snow. Thane nodded back, as Sergeant Tychor jumped down from the ice blocks delineating the arena. As the Excoriator trudged through the snow towards him, Thane could see that the Space Marine was taller than he, and broad. His face and chest were a branching and bifurcating pattern of stapled scars, funnelling in towards the ragged tissue of his right arm. The limb was missing. Instead, the flesh was fused to a heavy-duty shoulder socket and a bionic replacement for an arm. It was an old cybernetic, dented and scuffed, but the sergeant looked like he had been attached to it a long time and knew how to use it.
An Excoriator called out from the surrounding crowd before throwing a blood-stained gladius through the gelid air. It flew blade over pommel across the arena. Tychor had broken his gladius in his previous battle against the Crimson Fist, Riguez. For a moment it looked like Tychor was going to let the gladius fly by, until, with a sudden movement, the champion snatched it out of the air with his bionic hand. To make matters worse, as he stood before Thane, he passed the blade from his right hand to his left and then back again. Clearly ambidextrous, the sergeant finally settled on his left hand for the gladius, leaving the bludgeoning metal of his bionic fist free. He gave the Chapter Master a grim and disarming smile of confidence.
‘Dorn demands your best,’ Thane told the Excoriator. It was almost an order. ‘I demand it too, brother.’
‘You will get it,’ Tychor assured him. ‘Every swing of my blade shall honour Koorland and his Imperial Fists. I won’t disappoint you.’
The mangled Excoriator lifted his blade and with a grim nod Thane tapped the end of his gladius against it. Taking several steps back through the snow the two Space Marines began to circle one another. Tychor gave the Chapter Master the confidence of a good-natured smile, frozen to his face like a mask. In return Thane had for the Excoriator the grim rawness of a bloodshot eye. He blinked as the pair of them circled, the snow swirling into his face.
Within the space of that blink, Tychor had passed his blade back to the metal digits of his right hand. With the speed of his bionics, he swung for Thane. The Chapter Master was faster, however and slipped straight into a powered turn. He had expected his opponent to make the most of the blinding snow and had heard the whine of the bionic’s servos milliseconds before the Excoriator had unleashed its hydraulic fury.
As he turned, Thane brought his own blade around in a clean and savage riposte. He intended to slash the edge of his weapon across the flesh of Tychor’s exposed back, leaving him with another precious scar. The bionic arm came around again, however, batting Thane’s blade aside with enhanced power and speed. Thane felt the force ring through the metal of his gladius, and then the gut-wrenching thud of Tychor’s boot in his midriff.
The Chapter Master grunted and stumbled back. The Excoriator wasn’t done with him, however. He came at Thane again and his gladius flashed in the guttering brazier light, coming down with pneumatic certainty. Thane smashed the blade aside again and again, the broken bone in his arm throbbing with every impact.
Abruptly their swords locked, the frozen metal of the weapons sliding down each other. The blades stuck in the deep cold of Inwit’s night. Thane capitalised, grabbing Tychor’s hilt-clutching hands in his own. Turning, he hauled the hulking Excoriator over his shoulder. The brutal throw sent the sergeant crashing into the ice. Tychor recovered quickly, rolling off his augmented shoulder and back onto his feet.
Thane ran at him, jumping to one side and jabbing in with his weapon. With a shower of sparks, Tychor smashed it aside with the back of his bionic hand. The duel devolved into a sequence of merciless manoeuvres: muscular bodies arching, arms reaching, blades clashing. With the sword in his left hand, the sergeant weaved, stabbed and slashed at Thane. The Chapter Master moved his own blade through a sequence of desperate deflections, turning and bringing the gladius over his head and behind him to protect his back. As the battle intensified, Space Marines on the surrounding ice blocks leaned in. The tip of Thane’s blade nicked the Excoriator above the eye, while the sergeant’s own opened up the muscle on Thane’s shoulder.
With blood in Tychor’s eyes, Thane pressed his advantage. Holding the gladius with both hands he brought down the blade with a cleaving motion. Tychor stumbled back, holding his bionic arm up to absorb the blow. Denting the forearm’s metal with the force, the Chapter Master aimed to repeat the manoeuvre — to cut through the armour and workings of the augmented limb, if he had to. The sergeant absorbed the power of the blow and with clenched teeth pushed against the blade, knocking Thane back.
The Fist Exemplar’s back hit an ice block situated in the middle of the arena, hard enough to leave cracks in the surface. Suddenly, Tychor was everywhere. Pinning Thane to the block with his sweeps and stabbing motions, the Excoriator crowded his opponent. Thane ducked and leaned out of the path of the blade as it carved up the ice at his back. The tip of the gladius hissed into the surface of the block as a manoeuvre designed to skewer him through the midriff went wide. The bionic fist came in like a hammer, narrowly missing Thane’s head and smashing free fragments of ice.
With the pair of Space Marines enveloped in a cloud of ice crystals, Thane passed his gladius between his hands and turned it about. Clutching the hilt, he braced his forearm behind the blade. As the pneumatic swing of the Excoriator’s bionic arm came in again, Thane was ready for it. While the power behind the blow almost knocked him into the ice, the squealing, sparking edge of the blade took the impact. Coming back up off his bending knees, Thane hammered his right fist home in Tychor’s stomach. It was like hitting stone, but after a second and third gut-pounding slug to the midriff, Thane forced his opponent back.