Wait twenty seconds.
The wind roared against him, and the ground swelled below. Was he going to be sick? He hoped not. The queasiness in his stomach flipped and bubbled. Ugh.
Wait twenty seconds.
No sign of anti-air fire, at least. He could make out a spot among one of the inner courtyards – a blackened stain where a red drop-pod had beached itself. That was a good place to start.
Wait twenty seconds.
How... How long had he been falling?
Oh, shit.
Ishaq looked up, through bleary goggles he could see his two minders above. Both were far, far higher than him, shrinking all the while. Even smaller, above them both, were the others who’d caught onto his plan and given it enough credence to come with him.
He flicked the switches, first the blue, then the red. For several moments, absolutely nothing happened. Ishaq continued his plummeting death-dive, too surprised to even swear. He started flicking the switches in random panic, little realising that by doing so he wasn’t giving it time to warm up and engage.
The grav-chute finally kicked in hard enough to wrench the muscles in his neck, its gravity suspensors humming as they came alive. The late activation saved Ishaq from becoming a red smear along the wall of a palace tower, but he paid the price for distraction. Laughing with terror, he careened off the stone parapet, bouncing, giggling and trying not to soil himself as he tumbled through the air.
Forty-eight seconds later, the first of his minders touched down in the courtyard. He found Ishaq Kadeen a bloody mess, cradling his picter in bruised hands as he sat on the grass, rocking back and forth.
‘Did you see that?’ he grinned at the soldier.
Three remembrancers, six Euchar soldiers – a strike force of nine souls, moving through the corridors of the palace. It was a scantly-decorated affair with little in the way of art or ornamentation. The architecture was all pillars and arched roofs, while uncarpeted stone floors led them deeper into the structure, which had all the charm and warmth of a mountaintop monastery.
When they’d first entered the palace, leaving the fire-blackened Astartes drop-pod behind, Ishaq had wondered how they’d know which way to go. It turned out to be a needless worry. They just followed the bodies.
Evidence of the Astartes’ passing was everywhere. This wing of the palace was swept clean of life, with ruptured corpses left in place of traditional decoration. One of the other remembrancers, a whippet-lean imagist by the name of Kaliha, would pause every few minutes and compose a pict around the dead bodies. It was clear from the angle of her picter that she sought to avoid any real focus on the slain, perhaps leaving them as blurred images in the foreground.
Ishaq had no interest in chronicling this butchery – artfully, tastefully or otherwise. The ambitious, mercenary part of his brain knew there’d be no point: such work would never enter the most treasured archives. Truly morbid pieces rarely did. People on Terra wanted to see what was humanity was capable of creating, not the aftermath of what it destroyed. They wanted to witness their champions in moments of glory or struggling in righteous strife, not slaughtering helpless humans that resembled Terrans far more than the Astartes themselves did.
It was all about presentation, about presenting what people wanted to see, whether they knew it or not. So he left the bodies unrecorded.
He tried not to look at the corpses they passed. Their ruination was so brutally complete it was difficult to imagine that these gobbets of meat had ever been people. They hadn’t just been killed, they’d been destroyed.
One of the soldiers, Zamikov, caught Ishaq’s eye. ‘Chainblades,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘The look on your face. You’re wondering what does this to a body. Well, it’s chainswords.’
‘I wasn’t wondering that,’ Ishaq lied.
‘No shame in honest horror,’ Zamikov shrugged. ‘I’ve been with the Serrated Sun twelve years now, and I puked my way through the first two. The Crimson Lord’s lot do messy work.’
They took a left, stepping through another broken barricade that had failed to do its job. Gunfire in the distance hastened their strides.
‘I’d heard the Word Bearers always incinerated their enemies.’
‘They do.’ Zamikov hiked a thumb over his shoulder, at the corpses arrayed in various pieces around the furniture barricade. ‘That’ll come afterwards. First they kill, then they purify.’
‘They come back to burn the dead after a battle? They actually do it themselves?’
Zamikov nodded, no longer looking over at the imagist. Ishaq noticed the shift in the soldier’s stride – as soon as they’d heard the gunshots, each of the Euchars moved lower, faster, their lasrifles clutched tighter. It was like watching hive-street cats on the hunt for rats.
‘They do it themselves. No funerary serfs or corpse-servitors for the Word Bearers. They’re a thorough lot, you’ll see.’
‘I can already see.’
‘That a fact?’ Zamikov spared him a quick glance. ‘What do you see here?’
‘Bodies.’ Ishaq raised an eyebrow. What kind of question was that?
‘It’s more than that.’ The soldier looked ahead again. ‘This entire wing of the palace is cleaned out, but we’ve doubled back on ourselves more than once following the trail of dead. The Word Bearers aren’t racing to the throne room. That’s not how they do things. They’re killing everyone in the palace first, room by room, chamber by chamber. That’s punishment. That’s being thorough. You understand now?’
Ishaq nodded, not sure what else to say.
The sound of gunfire was joined by the guttural whine of motorised blades. He felt his heart quicken. This was it: battle, seeing the Astartes fight. And hopefully, not getting shot at himself.
‘Look alive,’ the sergeant grunted. ‘Rifles up.’
Ishaq didn’t have a rifle, but with his face set just as stern as Zamikov’s, he raised his picter.
When they caught up to the Word Bearers, the scene was nothing like he’d expected. Firstly, it wasn’t a squad of Word Bearers, it was just one. And secondly, he wasn’t alone.
The picter clicked and clicked and clicked.
They were twins in movement, a single weapon with a single intent. Neither led the other, neither moved any more or less than his twin. It was not competition. It was the perfection of unity.
They stopped as one, ending their advance to take stock of their surroundings. The city was in the throes of evacuation, for whatever good it would do the populace, and the air was a wailing morass of conflicting sirens audible even here within the palace. Platoons of defenders stood at every corridor corner and junction, armed with solid shot rifles that cracked and pinged harmlessly off Astartes armour.
The vox-network was calm. No cries for reinforcement. No demands for orders. The monotonous chanting so typical of Word Bearer squads was absent from the Gal Vorbak. Forty warriors, drop-podded into four sections of the royal castle, immediately splitting up to slaughter with muted grunts and growls.
Another barricade stood before the two advancing warriors, manned by dozens of the rifle-armed defenders in their ostentatious white and gold garb. Puffs of smoke preceded the click-clack-click of their bullets sparking harmlessly aside.
Both warriors broke into a run, boots crunching into the stone floor. Both vaulted the barricade of smashed furniture in the same moment, both grunting in effort as they leapt. Both landed at the same time, and both let loose with abandon, their weapons lashing out to shed blood. The defenders fell in pieces around them, chopped and carved faster than the eye could follow.
Ruthless familiarity with each other was all that made this possible. When one would weave low to thrust, the other would aim high to slice. Their movements were a blurring dance around each other’s forms, forever watching and anticipating the other’s movements even as they focused on slaying their enemies.