Endeavour of Will Read online

  All of the Imperial Fists were consigned to the pits. One by one, they died. They held on for a long time, and the unique opportunities offered by a Space Marine’s physiology were not wasted by those daemons who fancied themselves surgeons. The Iron Warriors made a particular point of watching the captain, for they knew that he would last the longest. They were disappointed that he died so soon after his battle-brothers, and that the daemons, in their enthusiasm, had heaped upon him so many varying methods of death that it was impossible to tell what had killed him.

  The Iron Warriors argued with the daemon torturers. The Dancers at the Precipice were among them, newly-born and already resenting the bonds that compelled them to obey the Iron Warriors or fade from real space. They denied that they had thrown away the Imperial Fist’s life, for his soul was now being rent by their fellow daemons of the warp, and indeed the Iron Warriors were the wasteful ones for they denied the warp their kill for too long.

  Guns were drawn. Daemons’ teeth were bared. The Iron warriors and the daemons were ready to offer each other’s deaths up to the warp; then one of them noticed the Imperial Fists captain’s corpse was missing.

  What followed was remembered only in scraps of memory. A few details were scraped onto the walls of a fortress in the warp, where details of a billion battles were kept inscribed on the massive lead blocks of its battlements. Others turned up in séances and daemon-haunted nightmares for years afterwards. The Imperial Fist became the Gilded Wrath of Malodrax, and daemons spoke of him as men spoke of daemons. He tore his way through the death pits, and by the time he reached the surface of Malodrax he was accompanied by everyone who could walk and fight that had broken from their chains as he slaughtered every daemon in his way.

  Somehow, a message reached the Imperial Fists. A force sent to Malodrax found their battle-brother fending off a tide of horrors at the edge of a chemical ocean. The dancers at the Precipice fought him there, and from their number he tore the one who had been their primary personality, the thing closest to a leader.

  The Imperial Fist tore the daemon’s head off and threw it into the sea. Malodrax’s sun turned black, the eclipse like an eye closing in response to the challenge. The Space marine cried out that he was Darnath Lysander, and that no daemon could kill him. And the Iron Warriors who had overseen his captivity, if they had a spine between them, would face him there and fight to the death, for no one locked up an Imperial Fist and lived.

  The Imperial Fists landed and took their brother back to his Chapter before daemon reinforcements could arrive. Lysander spat on the ground and cursed the Iron Warriors. A daemon was hatred and evil incarnate, but an Iron Warrior had once been a man who had chosen to become what he was. Lysander would never forgive them, not for what they had done to him, but for what they had done to themselves. And he would see them all dead in his lifetime, or he would have failed in his duty to mankind.

  The Dancers hovered around Lysander. They crouched against the ceiling and on the floor, the knotted muscle of their bodies masked in shifting veils of shadow that fluttered like banners in the wind.

  ‘I took one of you,’ said Lysander. ‘I laid him low. The inquisitors of the Holy Ordos sought out the works of madmen and prophets, and found there the binding laws of the Dancers at the Precipice. I know that when I shed your blood, you are bound to me. You must obey, only once, but absolutely. Is this not so? Is this not written?’

  ‘It is so,’ came the hissing reply. ‘Upon the hides of the Gravendran Hydra, in the ink from the Tears of Morgedren, it was written. This was the contract that wove us into being from the raw stuff of the warp. This was the form taken by the will of Tzeentch.’

  ‘Then I may command you once.’

  ‘Not to destruction!’ came the reply. It seemed all the Dancers spoke at once, but as if through the same throat, so many voices tangled into one torrent of noise. ‘Not unto the end of existence! It is written!’

  Lysander turned and looked down at Hestion. The Techmarine was breathing heavily, his fused ribs obvious as they moved beneath gelatinous, half-made muscle. He did not look back, his eyes instead fixed on the daemons that formed a wall before him. Lysander looked away from the Techmarine and spoke.

  ‘Take the body of Techmarine Hestion of the Imperial Fists,’ he said. ‘Into his body I bind you. Let his form be your prison. This is the will of the Gilded Wrath of Malodrax, and you are compelled to obey. So it is written.’

  The daemons screamed. They fought. They howled and scratched at reality. But they were bound by fate, a force as certain and relentless in the warp as gravity was in real space. Their forms stretched and deformed as they were drawn by the grasp of fate towards Hestion.

  It was impossible to tell if Hestion understood what was happening as he was caught in a cage of painful light, his form merging with that of the Dancers. Their tangled limbs rippled through his skin and muscle, their glowing eyes bulged from his body and his features distorted with theirs.

  Hestion’s body contracted again, forcing the Dancers into his own form. He writhed on the apothecarion floor, and joints cracked and popped as his body was forced out of its proper shape. The faces of the Dancers, red eyes and indistinct folds of features, shifted under his skin. Hestion’s face was as distorted as the rest of him, jaw locked open, eyes screwed shut, blood trickling from his nose and eyes.

  ‘Now you have a body, an honest human body,’ said Lysander, bringing the Fist of Dorn over his head. ‘And now you can die.’

  The Dancers screamed in denial, but as was written, the Gilded Wrath who had defeated them had bound them to his will and they could not escape the bonds of fate that held them in Hestion’s body. Hestion was in there with them too, and perhaps some of the screams that issued from his raw throat were his. But they were lost among the inhuman sound that issued from Hestion, a howl like a gale roaring straight from the warp.

  Lysander yelled and brought the Fist of Dorn down. Hestion, his body commanded by the Dancers at the Precipice, tried to rise to face him, but Hestion’s body was broken and Lysander was too quick. The head of the hammer slammed into Hestion’s chest and drove him against the wall of the apothecarion. Ribs crunched and splayed, painting the wall with the Techmarine’s blood. From his ruptured body the broken limbs of the Dancers reached, waving feebly at Lysander as if trying to fend him off.

  Lysander’s second strike knocked Hestion’s head from his shoulders. His body toppled to the side, and the cries of the daemons were replaced with the awful high-pitched squealing and gibbering that was their death rattle. As Hestion’s blood pooled on the floor, the Dancers at the Precipice discorporated and became once again the formless stuff of the warp.

  The silence seemed to take a long time to return. The air rang with the din that had died down, as if the apothecarion was reluctant to let go of the battle it had seen. Moment by moment the echoes faded, until the only sound was the dripping of Hestion’s blood from the ceiling and the autosurgeon bed.

  Lysander knelt beside the body of the Techmarine. Hestion’s body was a wreck, intact only below the waist, the torso broken open and the head gone.

  ‘I am…’ said Lysander. The rest of the sentence caught in his throat.

  I am sorry, brother. There was no one to hear it.

  He switched on his vox-link. ‘Rigalto, Menander. Lysander here. The daemons have been cast out, but Techmarine Hestion is dead. Attend upon the apothecarion for his honour guard. Though we are at war, we will give him the rites that are his due.’

  Acknowledgement runes flickered. Lysander stood back up, and looked down at himself. Hestion’s blood was spattered over him, already congealing into rust-red crystals, for a Space Marine’s blood did so almost instantly to seal the wounds of battle.

  Lysander leaned the Fist of Dorn against the wall and, pulling the sheets from a nearby bed, began to wipe Hestion’s blood from his armour.

  The muster deck of the Ferrous Malice was hung with captive banners, from the delicate si
lks of an eldar pirate lord to the bullet-shredded standards of Imperial Guard regiments. The siege masters of the Iron Warriors had taken them from the most secure fortresses in the galaxy, or from the corpses of the enemies who had dared to besiege their own strongholds.

  Shon’tu looked up at them, and knew that added to them would be a standard torn from the hallways of the Endeavour of Will. It was not a vow, it was not an ambition. It was a simple fact. The gods of the warp had decided it would be so. Fate would take care of the rest. Fate, and the guns of the Iron Warriors.

  Shon’tu turned to the Iron Warriors gathered on the muster deck. Beneath the blood-coloured light from above, the steel of their armour shone grimly, punctuated by the glow of the eye lenses beneath the visors of their helmets. Well over fifty Iron Warriors stood ranked up, the entire warband sworn to Warsmith Shon’tu. Four squads of Space Marines, along with the surviving Obliterators of the Coven and the possessed of the Choir. Forge-Chaplain Koultus, priest of the dark gods who brought the favour of the warp with him. Steelwatcher Mhul, Shon’tu’s weaponsmith. Shon’tu’s own veterans. Even with the losses at the Tomb of Ionis, the Iron Warriors outnumbered the Imperial Fists by three to one at least.

  And every one of them wore iron within just as he wore the iron of his armour without. Every one had taken the steps on the path that Shon’tu himself had almost finished – the conversion from man into machine, from a weak thing of fallible flesh to a weapon in the image of the primarch Perturabo. The forges of the Iron Warriors created bionics with technology long forgotten by the Adeptus Mechanicus of the Imperium, and every one of Shon’tu’s warband carried within him a relentless steel heart or a bionic limb, cranial implants loaded with battle-routines or inhuman artificial senses.

  ‘Fate has seen fit,’ said Shon’tu, ‘to place before us a test. A puzzle box hangs in the void before us to be unlocked. The prize inside is the head of Captain Lysander of the Imperial Fists. The daemon could not tear its machine-spirit from its shell. We have sought to pick its lock with a surgical assault. We have sought to bypass its defences and strike at the prize directly.’ Shon’tu drove a fist into the palm of his gauntlet. ‘The only tactic that remains is to smash it!’

  The Iron Warriors raised their left fists. ‘Iron within!’ they yelled. ‘Iron without!’

  ‘Brother Malikos!’ ordered Shon’tu. ‘To your squad falls the task of securing the western lance battery. The assault on the machine-spirit left it dormant, and it has no defences against our Dreadclaws. Brother Veyrin, you will accompany Steelwatcher Mhul to the spur. Brother Tektos, Brother Skast, with me you will secure the rest of the western defence spur.’

  The hullward edge of the muster deck was dominated by enormous cradles holding a dozen Dreadclaw assault-pods. Vapour hissed as pneumatic arms lowered the pods into boarding positions, warning lanterns flashing. Mutant crewmen scrambled across the machinery, tightening valves and operating controls, as the Iron Warriors lined up with parade ground efficiency to board.

  Shon’tu’s mind had long been given over to the seething stuff of a devotee of Chaos, but fragments of human emotions could still surface, an echo of the man he had presumably been several lifetimes ago. He was angry. He was humiliated. The Imperial Fists had him – Lysander had bested him, with a cunning that should have been the province of an Iron Warrior. Lysander’s death would burn that away. The human side of Shon’tu would be forced down again, buried under the steel of an Iron Warrior, not to emerge again for another ten thousand years.

  He would have to send his whole warband onto the Endeavour of Will. It was the only way he could be sure that no trickery of Lysander’s could withstand an attack. He had held back his force to test the Imperial Fists’ defences, and to claim the prize of the star fort and Lysander’s head without risking his entire strength. But risking it now was worth it. To silence that weak human, the final part of him not yet replaced with iron, it was worth it.

  The Iron Warriors embarked into their assault-pods. The sergeants spoke words of prayer to the Iron Warriors they led. The crew hauled the Dreadclaws closed after them, sealing the embarkation doors with sigils of warding that called on the powers of the warp to deliver them to their enemies.

  Shon’tu’s own veterans lined up with him at the final Dreadclaw. ‘I shall cast the head of Lysander into the warp,’ he told them. ‘It matters not who kills him. To us all the glory will belong. But I shall stand upon the threshold and give his head to the gods. That is all that matters.’

  ‘For such an offering,’ said Brother Ku’Van, ‘daemonhood will surely be granted.’

  ‘Then if it is so,’ said Shon’tu, ‘I shall take the wings of the daemon and let their shadow fall across the Imperium. No Imperial Fist will be spared my wrath. And then, no Space Marine. And then, no man. It is here that it will begin; with the death of Lysander, and with the boon of daemonhood, it will never end.’

  Shon’tu’s squad climbed into the Dreadclaw. Grav-restraints locked around them as the door was hauled closed, and the only light was the winking of the status display that told Shon’tu the Dreadclaw was ready to launch.

  ‘Iron within!’ ordered Shon’tu. ‘Iron without! To the fray, my brothers! Launch!’

  ‘He was a Space Marine,’ said Lysander, his head bowed. ‘He was a son of Dorn. A defender of the Imperium. A golden light in the darkness. But above all things, he was a brother.’

  Lined up in the airlock corridor stood the seven surviving members of Squad Rigalto, Scout-Sergeant Menander and his two remaining Scouts, and Lysander’s First Company command squad. In front of them, held above the ground by a suspensor unit, was Techmarine Hestion’s coffin. It was a functional box for transporting bodies from the apothecarion – a Space Marine required better, according to the law of the Chapter, but on a war footing there had not been the time to organise full funeral rites for Hestion. As commanding officer it was Lysander’s duty to say the eulogy, a duty he had fulfilled many dozens of times. The circular airlock portal was ready to receive the coffin and send it on its way into the void, as was traditional for those who died on a spacecraft or space station. Hestion’s gene-seed had been extracted by the star fort’s apothecary staff as best it could from what remained of his head and neck, and all that remained for the Techmarine was this final journey.

  ‘Victory,’ said Lysander, ‘is sacrifice. Rogal Dorn teaches us this. He learned it in turn from the Emperor Most High, who willingly sacrificed everything he was to defeat the arch-traitor, Horus. One day the sacrifice will be ours to make, just as it was our battle-brother Hestion’s, and it is the greatest honour we can bestow upon him to make that sacrifice as he did before us. Go to Dorn, brother, stand beside the Emperor, and at His side may you fight on.’

  ‘May you fight on,’ echoed the assembled Imperial Fists. Their heads were bowed in prayer, too. They had performed this scene already for the Space Marines lost at the Tomb of Ionis, and sent five such coffins into space with the same sentiments. It never became routine, this farewell to a brother, because every Imperial Fist knew that one day it would be him in the coffin, be it a wooden box cast from an airlock or a gilded sarcophagus interred in a memorial on the Phalanx.

  But this time was different. Hestion had died from a head wound that every Imperial Fist who saw the corpse knew was from a thunder hammer strike. The only such weapon on the Endeavour of Will now hung across the back of Captain Lysander. Even if Hestion’s body had been a host to daemons, Hestion himself dead, it had still been the hand of a fellow Imperial Fist that struck the final blow. It was not the first time a brother had killed a brother, nor would it be the last, but such an event was always toxic. It could only happen through treachery, as one brother turned on another, or the collapse of an Imperial Fist’s vaunted mental defences, as when a mind was driven from its body and replaced with the daemon. For Lysander to have killed Hestion, no matter how justified in the moment, must have been the result of some appalling violation of everything a Spac
e Marine should be.

  Two of Squad Rigalto pushed the coffin towards the airlock. One of the star fort’s crew operated the controls that slid open the portal, and the coffin passed through the first airlock door. The inner door closed again, the airlock depressurised, and the outer door opened.

  The coffin slid out into the void, accompanied only by silence and a shoal of icy slivers that flaked off in the sudden cold of space. Hestion’s coffin got smaller and smaller, lit into a hard-edged lozenge of red light from the star Kholestus, until it became impossible to distinguish from the scattering of stars and the billows of the nebulae marking the edge of the Eye of Terror.

  Lysander’s vox chirped. ‘Sensorium helm here,’ came the voice of one of the star fort’s bridge crew. ‘Multiple contacts coming in, looks like boarding craft. They’re moving in on the western spur.’

  ‘What defences are active there?’ said Lysander.

  ‘None,’ came the reply. ‘All were lost to the machine-spirit.’

  Lysander looked up at the Imperial Fists who were now waiting for his orders. They knew from the tone of his voice that the time for reflection was gone, and that they were back at war.

  ‘Shon’tu has launched his final attack,’ said Lysander. ‘We have humiliated him and he is sending everything he has to destroy us. But that also means he is risking everything he has. Take comfort from the examples of the brothers we have lost. Through sacrifice, they have defied Shon’tu this far. Through sacrifice, if needs be, we shall defy him again. You have your orders. You know what is expected of you. To your stations, sons of Dorn.’

  As the Imperial Fists split up to man the positions Lysander had dictated, Lysander took a final look through the airlock porthole. Hestion’s coffin was invisible against the backdrop of stars. The Techmarine had gone to join Dorn and the Emperor at the end of time, to fight the final battle for mankind’s soul. Lysander had at least one more battle to fight before he could take his place there too.