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Honourbound – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

Fire and thunder

Commissar Severina Raine slides a fresh magazine into her bolt pistol with a hard click. She has replaced the eight-round magazine four times. Thirty-two shots fired.

Six of them to execute her own troops.

Raine has fought many wars on many fronts across the Bale Stars, and almost all of them have been against the Sighted, or their splinter cults. She has seen the way they turn worlds with whispers and false promises. The way they set workers against their masters, and guards against those that they are meant to protect. It’s what makes them dangerous. When you battle the Sighted, you battle the people of the Bale Stars too. Scribes and soldiers. Priests and peacekeepers. The poor, the downtrodden, the ambitious and the reckless. For some of those that serve with her, that knowledge is too much. For some it is just fear that means they find the trigger impossible to pull. No matter the reason, they will find themselves looking down the barrel of her pistol, Penance, in turn. Just like Penance, Raine is made for the act of judgement. For the instant before the strike of the hammer and the burst of flame. She understands what it means to pull the trigger, and what it makes her. She is not driven by anger, or malice. That would undermine her purpose, which is the same no matter the crime.

To eliminate weakness.

Raine crouches down and takes Jona Veer’s ident-tags from around his neck. They will not be sent back to Antar as with the honoured dead. They will be disposed of at the end of the fight on Laxus Secundus. His name will go with them, to be forgotten in time by everyone but her, because Raine never forgets the dead, honoured or not.

‘Commissar.’

The voice belongs to Captain Yuri Hale. It’s rough-edged, like he is. The captain of Grey Company is tall, like most Antari. Three deep, severe scars run down the left side of his face from hairline to chin. The Antari call him lucky because he managed to keep his eye. They say he must have been graced with that luck by a white witch, or by fate itself. Raine doesn’t believe in luck. She believes that Yuri Hale survives the same way the rest of them do.

By fighting for every breath.

‘More power spikes from the inner forge,’ he says.

Raine puts Veer’s tags in her pocket, where they clatter against the others, then she gets to her feet and looks to the dust-caked screen on the auspex kit Hale is holding. When the regiment first entered the forges, more than six hours ago, it was registering soft spikes. Now the peaks are jagged, with the regularity of a great, slow heartbeat.

‘Whatever the Sighted are doing in there, it’s burning hot,’ Hale says, and he frowns. ‘Kayd’s been picking up enemy vox too.’

‘On an open channel?’

‘Aye, it’s as if they don’t care if we hear it.’

‘Anything of use?’ Raine asks.

Hale’s frown deepens, and it pulls at the scars on his face. ‘The words were Laxian. Kayd reckons they said something like “it draws near”.’

Despite the arid heat of the forge, Raine feels a distinct chill at those words. The tactical briefing two days prior had been clear. The primary forge on Laxus Secundus is an invaluable asset, both tactically and logistically, and not just because of the super-heavy tanks built there, but because of what waits in the inner forges. High Command did not disclose the purpose of the machines that Raine and the Antari would find there, only that they must not fall into Sighted hands. That for the enemy to use them successfully would be catastrophic, not just for the battle inside the forges, but for the war effort across Laxus Secundus and the crusade front.

‘We are running out of time,’ Raine says.

Hale nods. ‘And support too. Blue Company are pinned down on approach to the Beta Gate, and Gold have yet to reach the inner forges. I’m calling the push now, before the Sighted can send whatever draws near against us, or we lose everything we’ve bled for.’

‘Understood, captain,’ Raine says. ‘We will not fail.’

Hale glances to where Jona Veer lies dead. Raine knows him well enough to see what he is feeling by the set of his shoulders, and the way his eyes narrow. Hale is disappointed. Ashamed, on the boy’s behalf. Raine also knows that, despite all of Veer’s failings, it is hard for Hale to accept judgement against one of his own.

‘Is there anything else?’ Raine says.

Hale looks back to her. ‘No, commissar,’ he says. ‘Not a thing.’

Then Hale gets to rounding up the Antari, voxing orders to the rest of his company pushing up through the machine halls. They have orders to fulfil, traitors to silence, and those machines to retake.

And her judgements are something that Yuri Hale knows better than to question.

Lydia Zane can feel the touch of death on every inch of her body. It makes her ache, skin to bones. The Sighted are doing something in the forges that casts a long shadow. Something that echoes in the immaterium like a scream. It has been the same for Zane since the moment she set foot on Laxus Secundus, death’s long shadow clinging to her.

Like that damned hateful bird.

It is sitting there now, talons crooked around the rim of a girder. It is so very still, that bird. She has not yet seen it blink. It never cries, or ruffles its feathers. It just sits still and stares.

On the pillar below the bird’s perch is a symbol, daubed in blood. The smell carries to Zane even over the heavy stink of smoke. The symbol is a spiral surrounding a slit-pupilled eye. The mark of the Sighted. The rings of the spiral are just a hair off perfectly spaced, and it makes the breath in Zane’s lungs thinner, looking at it. The Sighted who painted the symbol lies broken at the foot of the pillar. So very broken. He is clad in fatigues and feathers, his skin inked with iridescent, metallic tattoos. The Sighted was one of the flock hunting Jona Veer through the machine halls. Zane caught sight of him slipping into the shadows between the half-built tanks during the gunfight. He thought himself hidden, but he was wrong. There is no hiding from Zane, because she does not need footprints or line of sight or even sound in order to hunt. She followed him into the darkness by the stink of his traitor-thoughts and came upon him painting the spiral and the slitted eye.

And then she broke him.

Zane winds her fingers tighter around her darkwood staff. The psionic crystal atop it hums. One at a time, bolts pop out of the pillar and join the objects floating in the air around Zane. Tools. Rivets and screws. Empty shell casings. Splinters of bone. They drift around her absently. The floor tremors under her feet as the panels start to bend upwards. Zane tastes blood, running thick over her lips. Blood on the pillar. Blood that makes up the painted eye at the centre of the spiral, unblinking.

Just like the bird.

‘Zane.’

She turns away from the bird and its black eyes and the way it never blinks them. Commissar Raine is standing there with her pistol drawn, but not raised. A threat in waiting. Zane finds she cannot speak. It is as if her lips have been sealed by all of that blood. The objects circle her like a storm, with lightning arcing between them. Raine does not flinch.

‘Control,’ Raine says, the word carrying clear.

The pistol does not move. The barrel is round and dark, like the eye painted in blood. Like the eyes of the bird. Like Raine’s eyes, unblinking.

‘Control,’ Zane slurs.

More blood finds its way into her mouth.

‘Tell me about the tree,’ Raine says.

‘About the tree,’ Zane says, her voice a rasp. ‘The singing tree.’

‘And why is it called the singing tree?’ Raine asks.

Zane blinks. Against the back of her eyelids she sees it. The singing tree standing on the cliff’s edge, the roots curling over it like the bird’s talons around the girder. The bone-white branches reaching up to meet Antar’s thunderhead sky.

‘Because that is where we would go to sing to Him on Earth,’ she says. ‘Because it was as close as you could get to the heavens.’

‘And He spoke to you there,’ Raine says.

‘In the rustle of the leaves,’ Zane says.

‘What did He say?’ Raine asks.

Zane feels the ache in her bones lessen. The objects orbiting her begin their fall to earth.

‘That I will be tested,’ she says. ‘And that I must never break.’

Metal objects clatter off the metal floor, and it sounds like a storm.

‘Lydia Zane,’ Zane says, finishing the ritual words. ‘Primaris psyker. Graded Epsilon. Eleventh Antari Rifles.’

The cables connecting to her scalp click as they cool. Zane wipes her hand through the blood on her face, painting a red streak up the back of it.

‘Apologies, commissar,’ she says, bowing low. ‘It is this place. The darkness in it.’

‘The Sighted?’ Raine asks.

‘I know the shape of their darkness,’ Zane says. ‘This is different. Things are changing.’

‘If you see anything, tell me,’ Raine says.

Zane knows that she means foresee, not just see, but it still feels like a cruel joke given the bird. The bird that she has been seeing for months now, since she walked the crystal tunnels on Gholl. The bird that she will speak of to no one, especially not to Raine, because to do so would be to invite death.

Because Zane knows that, like every instant of her life so far, the bird is just another test, and that she will not break.

Sergeant Daven Wyck waits until the commissar has gone after the witch before he fetches Jona Veer’s rifle. He knows better than to do something like that in front of her. That it’s better not to draw her eyes at all if he can help it. Around him, the rest of his Wyldfolk are securing the area at the end of the assembly line, watching for Sighted movement in the smoke. They tend their rifles and replace spent powercells and share out grenades and charges. Clean their bloodied combat blades on their fatigues. Wyck slings Veer’s rifle over his shoulder by the strap, then takes his knife and his grenades too. Veer hadn’t used even one of them. So stupid, not to shoot, or act at all.

Even more so to get found out.

‘Really, Dav?’ Awd says.

Wyck gives his second a look. The sort that says shut up.

‘He isn’t going to use them, is he?’ he says.

Awd looks as though he’s smiling, but it’s just the way the burn scars tug at the skin of his face. His eyes aren’t smiling at all.

‘You’d truly leave him with nothing for where he’s going?’ Awd asks.

Wyck looks down at Veer’s body and remembers the way he spoke, with that lilt of the Vales. It’s the same place that Wyck grew up before he was tithed to the Rifles, all deep black lakes and tangled forests. It’s a big place, with the people spread thin. Wyck didn’t know Veer then. He didn’t know him now either, not really, but he was kin all the same. Even if he was a coward, and a stupid one at that. Wyck stoops and puts back the knife. Awd’s right. He can’t leave Veer with nothing for when judgement comes.

‘There,’ he says. ‘Now it’s up to him to answer for his deeds.’

Awd nods. ‘As we all will, in death.’

Wyck shakes his head. ‘Death will have to catch me first,’ he says.

That makes Awd laugh so hard he starts to cough, a wet hacking sound from deep in his chest. It’s the flamer he carries that makes his lungs rattle that way. All the ashes from the fuel and the things he burns.

‘Death will have to be lucky,’ Awd says. ‘Sharp soul like you.’

Wyck smiles, but it doesn’t go deeper than his teeth. He curls his hands into fists. They ache from fighting. From every trigger pull, every swipe of the knife. From throwing punches and breaking bones. That ache doesn’t stop him wanting to fight, though. To cut and shoot and kill. If anything, it makes him want it more.

‘Wyck.’

He turns to see Hale standing there. The captain definitely notices the extra lasrifle and the grenades, but he says nothing about either. Wyck has known Hale a long time. Longer than he’s had to call him captain.

‘We are pushing the Gate,’ Hale says. ‘I need your Wyldfolk up front.’

The order is no surprise. Wyck runs his twelve-strong infantry squad fast and sharp, so Hale always puts them in the teeth of it.

‘Aye, sir,’ Wyck says. ‘I wouldn’t be anywhere else.’

Hale claps him on the shoulder and for the sparest instant Wyck’s instinct is to react as if he’s been hit. He has to consciously stop himself from throwing a punch at his captain and force himself into stillness. It’s the adrenaline, mostly.

‘Fire and thunder,’ Hale says.

Wyck thinks about the way his blood burns and his heartbeat rolls like a drum and the old words seem almost funny. He has to stop himself laughing, just like he had to stop himself throwing that punch.

‘Fire and thunder,’ he says, instead.

It takes Raine and the Antari another hour to fight their way from the assembly lines into the casting halls. The colossal, vaulted chambers are the midpoint of the forge complex, and the most direct path to the forge halls and the Delta Gate beyond. Like the rest of the Forge Primary, the casting halls are still working unabated despite the conflict taking place across the complex. All around Raine, vast machines judder and roar. Overhead, great buckets of molten steel are raised by lifters and poured, spitting, into the moulds beneath. Censers swing over the moulds, and slaved cherubim drop ritual ashes, still running on subroutines that were set long before the war began. The panels move down the line to be beaten, quenched and cooled by blasts of dirty water, filling the halls with smoke, steam and the smell of industry.

To Raine, it feels like running through hell. It makes her long for the icy, ocean-spray winters of Gloam, where she was trained. For clothes stiff with frost, and for the misting of breath in the air.

The casting halls are occupied by dug-in squads of Sighted infantry. Most of them are sworn rebels and traitors that wear blue and grey flak plate and the trappings of heretics. Mirrored glass on bits of cord. Feathers that pierce their skin. The spiral-eye symbol, daubed in red. The rest are faith-breakers, a mixture of manufactorum workers, tech-savants and defected Laxian soldiery that have torn away their icons and excised their loyalty tattoos. Raine cannot say which disgusts her more, but no matter the nature of their betrayal, they will all be granted the same fate.

Death.

‘Leave none standing!’ she cries, as she charges into combat alongside the Antari.

One of the Sighted looms from the steam and smoke. His eyes are solid black, and his teeth are filed to sharp points. Heretic sigils run and bleed on the Sighted’s flak armour, and the heavy, two-handed sword he carries seems to swallow what little light there is. Raine dodges him as he swings for her with that heavy blade. It could take her head clean off if it were to hit her, but the Sighted plants it in the riveted metal of the floor instead, where it sticks for an instant.

An instant is all Raine needs.

She opens the Sighted up from belt to throat with an upward swing of her own powered blade. As he falls, she fires her pistol past him, knocking another of the heretics to the ground in a burst of blood. Behind him, there are more. Dozens more. Hale is right beside her, his laspistol drawn. It’s a heavy variant with warding words carved into the grip in Antari script. One sleeve of his fatigues is torn and smoking where las-fire has caught him, and his flak armour has been scored by a dozen blades.

‘They are different,’ Hale says, between breaths. ‘They have always had numbers, and ferocity, but this is more than that. They are well-armed. Organised.’

Raine fires her pistol as the Sighted fall back towards their own lines and the cover of the forge machinery. They are doing it in good order, under smoke. Some carry slab shields, protecting those beside and behind them, making a mobile defensive line. On Drast, they fought her as if their minds were lost, until they had no limbs left to do it with. They dropped their rifles in favour of knives, because they placed more value on blood than survival. They were dangerous, but they were feral, and fractious. Zane’s words echo in Raine’s ears.

Things are changing.

‘You are right,’ she says to Hale. ‘But we will kill them all the same.’

Hale nods, and speaks his next words into the company vox-channel.

‘All squads advance,’ he says. ‘We break them as they run!’

Raine raises her sword. Misted water from the machinery hisses on Evenfall’s powered blade. ‘Give them death,’ she shouts. ‘In the Emperor’s name!’

The Antari of Grey Company cheer. The Hartkin. The Mistvypers. The Pyrehawks. The ones to cheer the loudest are those right beside her in the teeth of it. Wyck’s Wyldfolk. They are leading the push, like always. Hale uses Wyck as a blade’s edge, because it is what he is good for.

‘Yulia!’ Wyck shouts. ‘Deal with those shields!’

Yulia Crys grins and unslings her grenade launcher. Raine takes cover in the shadow of a casting machine for the moment it fires. The noise of it is like thunder, a series of rapid, automatic thumps that puts half a dozen grenades in the Sighted’s lines, in and around those slab shields. They detonate almost immediately. Raine can’t see the damage for all the smoke and the fire, but she hears it. The crack of armour and bone. Screams. The scattering of debris landing around her.

‘What shields, sarge?’ Crys shouts.

Wyck laughs. It is an unpleasant sound.

‘Keep pushing forward!’ Raine shouts.

The breath she takes tastes of ash and smoke, and blood too. The Sighted that Crys’ grenades didn’t kill are running now, much less ordered. Raine fires Penance twice, putting two of them down with quick kill shots. The Wyldfolk light the casting halls with bright flashes of las-fire all around her. The tide has turned. The Sighted are faltering. Dying. But then Raine is hit by a heavy calibre round that impacts against her silver chest-plate and puts a fist-sized dent in it. It knocks the air from her lungs and cracks something in her chest, knocking her aim out. Raine’s vision swims, but she catches sight of the Sighted who shot her. He is a tall, whipcord-thin man wearing blue-grey carapace with a cut stone replacing one of his eyes. It is a mark of rank on them, a stone like that. He raises his snub-nosed shotgun to fire again and smiles. Raine raises her pistol, but before she can pull the trigger Wyck slams into the Sighted and knocks him onto his back. Raine hears the shotgun go off. Hears Wyck laugh. She makes an effort to breathe until it isn’t agony to do it. The Wyldfolk have the other Sighted dead or running. She makes her way to where Wyck is kneeling. The Sighted underneath him is a mess. His throat is open and pumping blood all over the floor.

‘Too slow,’ Wyck says, softly. ‘Much too slow.’

‘Enough,’ Raine says to him. ‘On your feet.’

He looks up at her. For an instant, there’s no recognition in those grey eyes of his. Barely any grey either. It’s all swallowed up by the black of his pupils. But then he blinks and takes a ragged breath.

‘Enough,’ he says, getting to his feet. ‘Yes, commissar.’

His voice is deliberate and careful. His use of her rank even more so. Wyck often cloaks himself in obedience and piety when he is being watched.

‘He said something,’ Wyck says. ‘That we can’t kill the life they will make here.’

The words, and the implication of them, turn Raine’s stomach. She knows what the Sighted are capable of. She has seen it first hand, on Gholl and Drast, and all of the worlds before them. Devastation, and desecration. Whole populations sacrificed in rites and rituals. Blood spilt on a massive scale, all in the name of their false prophets.

And now the Sighted intend to make life.

Whether it is soldiers or slaves, or something worse, Raine cannot allow it.

‘Whatever it is that they intend, we will stop them,’ she says. ‘At any cost.’

Raine thinks then of the machines that the Antari have been charged with capturing. Those that would cause catastrophe if the enemy were to use them.

Here, and across the crusade front.

Wyck flinches and turns to look up the avenue, towards the Sighted’s lines, where the traitor infantry disappear into the smoke and steam.

‘There’s something coming,’ he says. ‘Something heavy.’

Raine strains her ears over the sounds of the casting machines and then she hears it too. Heavy, clanking footsteps.

‘Make ready!’ she shouts.

The rest of Grey Company have caught up to them now. They take what cover they can behind the casting machines and reload their rifles and pistols. Water spray from the machines runs off the brim of Raine’s hat, mingling with the sweat in her eyes. Steam rolls across the avenue like ocean fog.

Through it stride three armoured shapes, half as tall again as the tallest of the Antari. They have domed heads and heavy fists that end in blaster weapons. Carapace-mounted flamethrowers track back and forth on their shoulders. The kastelan automata are stripped back to bare steel, save for the great red spirals painted on their domed heads. At the centre of each is a slit-pupiled eye. With them moves a figure that is human only in shape, dribbling oil onto the forge floor from beneath its black robes. Mechadendrites thrash at its back. The tech-priest turns its face to the Antari, to Raine, and it blares machine noise from the grille of its mouth.

‘Pyrehawks!’ Captain Hale shouts.

All of the Rifles’ infantry squads are named for Antari folk stories, and Raine has come to know most of them since joining the regiment. Andren Fel told Raine that the pyrehawk was said to be the one to light Antar’s night sky with stars, setting hundreds of fires in the void with every beat of its wings.

Raine cannot think of a more appropriate name for Kasia Elys and her five-strong special weapons team. They are heavily armoured, with extra plates strapped around their arms and legs, and glare visors in their helmets. The Pyrehawks move up into position and brace their plasma guns, ready to light new stars.

‘Set them afire,’ Elys snarls.

The Pyrehawks fire their plasma guns in the same instant as the kastelans do their phosphor blasters. Bright white light blooms in the casting halls, printing on Raine’s eyes. She is half-blind as she fires her pistol at the kastelan automata and the tech-priest controlling them.

One of Odi’s Hartkin is hit by phosphor. Raine can’t say who, because there is not enough left to know. The figure is silently running towards the rest of its squad in its blind death throes. Raine puts a bolt in the figure to stop it from passing the phosphor along to the rest of them. It falls, still burning.

In return, one of the kastelans goes to a knee, juddering and smoking from plasma fire. The tech-priest is blaring more machine noise that sounds like a scream. The other two kastelans twist and train their phosphor cannons at Elys and her Pyrehawks as they go for cover. The Pyrehawks fire again as they fall back, trading plasma for phosphor. Their shots land true, staggering the kastelans, but not felling them. Most of the Pyrehawks end up burning like stars themselves and Raine doesn’t have enough rounds for all of them.

Not if she wants to kill the tech-priest.

‘Zane!’ she shouts.

There is no way the psyker hears her over all of the noise, not really. But Zane does not need to truly hear.

‘The kastelans!’ Raine shouts. ‘Break them!’

Lydia Zane walks through the storm as dozens of her kin fall back, firing at the kastelans. One of the automata moves to meet her and the flamethrower on its shoulder angles downwards. Zane raises her hand as the kastelan fires a gout of promethium that would melt her like the steel in the forge if it were to touch her skin. Instead, Zane deflects the liquid flame back over the kastelan in an arc. She feels the heat of it against her kine-shield as a fire in her mind. The cables at her skull creak and the floor under her feet trembles and twists. The kastelan, burning now, reaches for her with a huge, powered fist. For an instant, Zane almost pities the machine. This thing that is made to take commands, and never to question. Only to kill. She sees herself reflected in the mirror of its faceplate. Her nose is bleeding thickly, and her skin is as pale as a lakebottom fish. The crown of cables that thread under her scalp are arcing with lightning.

‘Die,’ Zane says, and throws up her hand.

The kastelan robot explodes into pieces, disassembled in an instant, all bolts sheared, all seals broken. The floor panels around Zane splinter. Dozens of metres away, overhead cables flex and snap. The shockwave knocks some of her kin to the ground, breaking bones. She hears them scream. The world wavers, and time seems to slow. Zane’s heart goes arrhythmic and she distinctly hears the snap of folding wings. She wishes that closing her eyes would stop it, but it never does. Especially not since she lost her real eyes, and had them replaced with false silver discs. Now she sees fire and death in every blink.

It is a test, she thinks. And I will not break.

With a scream of effort, Zane refocuses, and turns to the last remaining kastelan and its tech-priest overseer. The tech-priest is slowly raising its arm. Its gamma pistol is pointed at Raine. The commissar’s own pistol is raised in answer, but even one as quick as Raine will be ashes if fire from the tech-priest’s weapon so much as grazes her. Lydia Zane does not care for the commissar. The psyker is not a hound, loyal and loving to her master. She is caged and tethered, watched and judged, all by Raine. But if Lydia Zane is truly honest, she is sometimes thankful for the strength of this particular tether.

So Zane lifts her hand and curls it into a fist as the tech-priest’s fingers ratchet around the gamma pistol’s trigger. She turns the gun to scrap, along with most of the priest’s arm. It shrieks and rears back. The last kastelan stumbles forwards on jarred, broken legs, still slaved to protect its master. Zane squeezes it with invisible force until the joints burst and it collapses, crushed. Exhausted, Zane falls to her knees, with electricity dancing from the cables of her crown and running along her teeth.

On Gloam, where she was trained, they would make Raine run the upper gantries over the ocean. They were narrow spans of riveted metal, either slick with sea-spray or with ice when it turned to deepwinter. The trick was to run quickly and surely. Second guess yourself, and the ocean would gladly take you. Raine places her feet just as surely, just as swiftly, as she leaps up on the fallen kastelan’s shell and snaps off the last three rounds of her bolt pistol’s magazine. They all hit the tech-priest. Chest, throat. Head. It falls backwards, thrashing, the bladed mechadendrites seeking her. Her pistol empty, Raine draws her sabre. Evenfall’s power field snarls. One of the tech-priest’s mechadendrites cuts Raine’s face as another tears a great rip in her greatcoat and her arm. Raine feels blood run hot and fast as she swings her sabre, severing the mechanical arms as they reach for her, until she is close enough to plant the powered blade in the tech-priest’s chest. Even then, it takes a moment to stop twitching.

Raine draws a breath, all ashes and the smell of spilled oil. The Sighted have all but disappeared into the smoke, taking cover in amongst the vast casting machines standing between the Antari and the forge halls beyond. Raine pushes another magazine into her pistol. She is down to her last two.

‘No respite!’ she cries. ‘No mercy!’

And around her, the Antari roar and push onwards.

Wyck falls back against one of the casting machines. At his feet, the Sighted takes his time to die, bleeding out slowly across the corrugated floor. The smell of it dizzies Wyck as he cleans the blade of his knife on the leg of his fatigues. Everything seems muffled as if by distance. The thrum of the machine at his back. The las-fire echoing up to the roof.

The Sighted at his feet, choking to death.

Wyck blinks his stinging eyes. He looks back down the aisle to make sure he is still alone before putting his hand in the pouch at his belt and taking out a short, stubby vial with an auto-injector mounted on the cap. Wyck breaks the seal with his thumb, and then punches the needle into his arm, straight through his fatigues. The rush comes quickly, like it always does. Setting him alight from the inside out. Sounds go from murmurs to bellows and everything pulls pin sharp.

Wyck drops the auto-injector on the floor and crushes it with his boot.

‘The way is clear,’ he says, into the vox. ‘Move up.’

His Wyldfolk approach up the aisle, resolving as if from the smoke and the darkness, their green and grey flak plate fouled with ashes and blood.

‘I don’t like this, sarge,’ Crys says. ‘We’re way out in it.’

The combat engineer is twitching her head from side to side, trying to compensate for the fact she’s part-deaf in her left ear. Crys is taller than he is, and so broad across the shoulders that standard template flak plate doesn’t fit her all that well. She has her grenade launcher slung across her back and her pistol drawn in its place. Crys has modified the grenade launcher, like she does all of her kit. It’s something that she should be sanctioned for, but Wyck has seen how that gun works since. What it can do. The box and cabling mounted on the stock of it increase the speed of the rotary magazine, so that it fires on full auto.

By all rights, Yulia Crys should be deaf in both of her ears.

‘We’re always way out in it,’ Wyck says. ‘It’s what we’re good at.’

Crys shrugs her broad shoulders, but she’s still frowning. In some ways, she’s right. They are deep into the labyrinth of casting machines, probably cut off from the rest of Grey, but Wyck has the Sighted running and he won’t stop chasing until he’s bled the lot of them.

Wyck takes point, following after a sound he picks up even over the machines and the gunfire. The ring of boots on metal. He rounds a corner and follows a set of bare plated stairs upwards. It brings him out on top of a rig mounted with plasma torches that are cutting shapes from huge sheets of steel. He moves up the central gantry with his squad behind him. It is noisy, with equally spaced alcoves like confessionals arranged on either side for the machine’s slaved servitors. A lot of cover, for those who might hide. Sparks rain from the machines, and smoke blows across the gantry like fog.

No good, Wyck thinks. This is no good.

The servitors loll at their stations, operating the torches with convulsive movements of their withered limbs. They don’t look up as Wyck passes because their routines don’t allow it. Because they are made for the moment of the cut and nothing more. Wyck’s fingers twitch by the trigger. The stimms are pressing at him and are making him shake, just minutely.

There’s a noise. The barest sound that he wouldn’t be able to pick up if his brain weren’t so electric.

One of the Sighted lurches out of the next alcove on his left. No carapace on this one. No flak armour. The man is clad in coveralls and he has a heavy, long-handled hammer in his hand. He swings for Wyck, but he is much too slow. Wyck ducks the swing and puts his boot in the man’s gut, sending him reeling. He snaps three las-rounds into him before he can get back up again.

More of them come, out of the alcoves, or dropping from ledges above. A dozen or so. They are shouting something over the noise in Laxian. Two of them are down and twitching from chest shots before they can pull their weapons. The sound of them gasping for air they can’t get carries to him even as Wyck puts his knife in the chest of a third. He pulls it free again, but the Sighted doesn’t go down. Instead he coughs blood onto Wyck’s face and swings for him, raking a blunt-edged knife across the front of Wyck’s flak armour. It digs a gouge, but doesn’t go through. Wyck blinks the blood from his eyes. He can’t help but laugh.

‘You think you can cut me?’ he says.

Wyck cuts the Sighted back, across his arms as he tries to block, then across his throat when his arms finally drop. Wyck gets more blood on his face. His heart is so loud now. Louder than the las-fire and the roaring of Awd’s flamer as they finish the rest of them.

‘I’m Wyldfolk,’ Wyck says. ‘And cuts from us always kill.’

‘Dav.’

For a moment, Wyck could swear it’s Raf’s voice he hears, after all this time. There’s the same kind of dread in it.

‘Dav.’

Wyck blinks and shakes his head. Of course it’s not Raf. Raf has been dead for more than ten years. Long since taken. Long since judged. He turns to see Awd looking at him. The others are moving swiftly up the gantry, checking for runners or trip mines.

‘What?’ Wyck asks.

‘These folk,’ Awd says, slow and careful. Quiet. ‘I don’t think they’re Sighted.’

Wyck snorts. ‘What are you talking about?’ he says.

He looks at the body at his feet. The pool of blood that has spread around his boots like a black lake. Wyck realises that the man hasn’t cut up his face or torn away his icons. He wears no mirrors or feathers, and his coveralls are Munitorum-issue. The only mark on the man is the worker number branded on his neck. It occurs to Wyck that the blunt-bladed knife is the sort you’d use to pry panels off machines.

‘They were behind the lines,’ Wyck says, absently. ‘They jumped us.’

‘I found this on one of them,’ Awd says.

He throws something that Wyck catches. Something shiny and silver. No, not silver. Tin. Cheaply pressed.

It’s a pendant in the shape of the aquila.

The thunder of Wyck’s heart skips a beat. In his head, he hears what Raf said to him, all those years ago, his grey eyes wide with horror.

What have you done, Dav?

The answer is the same now as it was then.

Too much to forgive.

Wyck blinks and clears his throat. ‘You know how they are,’ he says to Awd. ‘The Sighted make soldiers of everyone, even if they don’t look like it. They did it on Gholl. On Hyxx too. Even the priests, there. You remember?’

‘I remember,’ Awd says. ‘I won’t forget that. Not even when I’m dead.’

‘Everywhere they go, people turn their coats for them. This is just that.’

Wyck puts the pendant in one of the pouches at his belt. The one next to where he keeps the auto-injectors.

‘I know,’ Awd says. ‘But–’

Wyck gives him that look again, and just like before, Awd falls silent.

‘This is just that,’ he says again. ‘Now forget it and move.’

Awd nods his head. ‘Yes, sergeant. As you say.’

Wyck glances down at the body one more time before following Awd. At the blunt-bladed knife and the wide pool of blood. At the aquila pendant glinting around that man’s neck too.

And he knows that when death finally catches him, he’ll have so very much to be judged for.

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To Mum and Dad, for every museum trip, every library visit and all of those plastic dinosaurs.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Marc Lee.

Honourbound © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Honourbound, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78030-869-2

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