The Last Hunt Read online

  After a moment, Feng ducked into the arena and slipped his guan dao over his head. Like Joghaten’s enhanced weapons, the wicked blade of the power glaive remained inactive. Its long haft felt curiously unfamiliar in Feng’s grasp as he took up his combat stance. The realisation shamed him.

  Joghaten gave a terse bow, the motion mimicked by Feng. For once, the ger was silent. Everyone had stopped to stare at the two new combatants. It was not often that the Master of Blades trained before the eyes of his brotherhood.

  Joghaten struck. Even for a Space Marine, the speed with which he went from statuesque stillness to serpent-like blows was astounding. Feng was immediately forced back onto the defensive, heel brushing the mat edge as his secondary heart kicked in with an uncomfortable jolt. Joghaten’s tulwars came at him, one stabbing up towards his eyes, another slashing low, at his thighs. He managed to parry both with his guan dao’s haft, the force of the blows ringing up the blade. The third strike would have opened Feng’s gut had Joghaten not pulled it at the last moment.

  ‘Again,’ the Master of Blades said, his eyes hard. Feng reassumed his stance, legs planted wide, glaive held horizontal and low.

  This time when Joghaten came at him he countered. It made little difference. The Master of Blades let Feng’s lunge slide past and was inside his guard in a heartbeat, a tulwar slicing for his throat. Feng, with the reflexes enjoyed only by the Emperor’s ­finest, managed to twist backwards far enough to avoid the strike, but it left him off balance. A clumsy swing of the glaive just about succeeded in keeping Joghaten at bay long enough for him to regain a defensive stance. The khan-commander didn’t pause to reassess, however, but kept coming, still twinning his strikes, high and low, high and low. After four narrow parries Feng felt as though he’d found his combat rhythm, only for Joghaten to change the order and pace of his strikes. A deft flick of his wrist and Feng’s guard was open once again. He was toying with the steedmaster.

  ‘Use your weapon’s length to your advantage,’ Joghaten snapped, speaking as though to an unscarred Tenth Brotherhood initiate. ‘Your reach is your best hope.’

  Feng gritted his teeth and resumed his stance. This time he stayed on his toes, moving around the edge of the mat, guan dao extended protectively. Joghaten made two gauging attacks, ending both as Feng gave ground and used his power lance’s length to keep him at bay.

  Feng’s defence faltered when he sensed Tenjin behind him. For a split second he thought he could feel icy breath on the nape of his neck, and in his mind’s eye he saw the long-dead White Scar’s innards oozing from the hideous splinter wounds blown in his torso.

  He misstepped. It was enough. The khan-commander was on him again, a flash of wicked steel. One blade knocked Feng’s glaive from his hands while the other nicked at his throat, drawing forth the tiniest bead of blood. It fell, perfectly formed, to stain the türüch’s white silk shirt.

  ‘That’s enough,’ Joghaten said, lowering his blades and kicking the guan dao to the edge of the mat. Feng made no move to try and retrieve it.

  ‘We are hours from deployment, and still you do not fight,’ Joghaten said.

  ‘When the time comes I will be ready, khan-commander.’

  ‘You are slow and distracted. It is turning your hunt-brothers into lesser warriors. Find your centre, Lau Feng, before we make planetfall, or Darkand will extract the same price from you that it took last time.’

  Feng could only nod, bitterness choking his throat. Joghaten bent and retrieved the glaive, as oblivious as everyone else to the four bloody revenants passing their eternal, silent judgement on Feng. The khan-commander spun the long weapon deftly and slammed it into the deck, the wicked head slicing through the training mat and the plates beneath to leave the weapon quivering and impaled before Feng.

  ‘Prepare for deployment,’ Joghaten said, addressing the entire sparring ger. ‘We make planetfall within the hour.’

  Timchet flexed his fingers around the twin grips of his Godwyn-pattern heavy bolter and checked his visor’s chrono display. Thirty seconds. He knew that his Land Speeder co-pilot and wind-brother, Hagai, would be doing the same at the other end of the tulan, the long, narrow service corridor running between the Pride’s level 13 aft and foredecks. The entire length had been converted by Techmarine Khödö upon departing Chogoris, weaponised into a training sector – a tulan – that would better prepare the White Scars for what they would face on Darkand.

  ‘Perhaps I won’t have time to polish my kindjal before you reach me, brother,’ the voice of Hagai crackled over the vox.

  ‘Perhaps I won’t have to save you from the servitors this time,’ Timchet replied, suppressing a smile. An alarm chimed and the ship’s corridor was bathed in red light. The blast door before the White Scar rolled open.

  He advanced at a slow jog, his heavy weapon up and ready, servos whirring as they took the worst of the bolter’s weight. The corridor beyond the blast doors had been transformed by sheets of mould-blotched plastek and ugly low-level lighting, its pipe-and-cable-clad walls made irregular and claustrophobic. The intention was to give the space a degree of alien otherness, and change the dynamics of what would usually have been a simple building clearance run.

  Timchet made it fifteen paces before the first trap was sprung. A concealed orifice in the sheet coverings spat a gout of low-burn proto-plasma. The mechanical whirr of the ejection motor gave the White Scar just enough warning to drop one shoulder, taking the spray of what was supposed to pass for bio-acid on his left pauldron.

  ‘Non-fatal,’ crackled an automated voice in his ear. ‘Proceed.’

  He carried on, twin hearts pounding as he sought the balance so often espoused in White Scars combat philosophies – speed without undue recklessness. He detected another faux-orifice just before it spat a flurry of plastek spines across the corridor, then flung himself forward as a cloud of noxious vapour burst from a mesh decking grille underfoot.

  The chrono display in his visor was still ticking over.

  There was a ripping sound to his right and the wall covering gave way to reveal a combat servitor set to assault mode. The fusion of plasteel and pale synth-skin had been modified to better represent their new enemy – hunched over, with grafted-on mechanical scythe-limbs, reprogrammed for speed. Timchet caught it in a burst of heavy bolter electro-blanks as it lunged at him, blades clacking. The modified rounds struck the servitor and immediately deactivated it with a burst of charge, its weapon limbs freezing inches from Timchet’s armour. Another came at him just a few paces down the corridor, too close for him to bring his heavy weapon to bear. The White Scar smashed it back against the wall with the bolter’s stock, letting it waste its blows against his armour, before smashing its head against a metal coolant valve. It went limp and crumpled.

  ‘Proceed,’ instructed the servitor-overseer’s voice in his ear. He was almost out of time. He sprinted for the finish, another shower of barbs clattering off his armour. The doors ahead slid open at his approach, and he came to a sharp halt in the space beyond the training corridor.

  What had once been a turning bay for the haulers used to transport sheets of adamantium to the Pride’s outer corridors had been transformed by the drill türüch into an extra fighting arena. It was now filled with broken scrap, scrap that had once taken the form of over a dozen modified combat servitors. They’d been smashed into deactivation by the tulwar and bolt pistol of Hagai who now sat atop a heap of the pretend-xenos. His helmet was off and he was grinning as he wiped oil and synthetic fluids from his blade’s wicked edge.

  ‘Too slow by well over five seconds,’ the White Scar taunted. ‘I could have gone a whole other bout before you broke through to me.’

  ‘One caught me at close range,’ Timchet complained, mastering the urge to kick out at the closest servitor remains.

  ‘They’re meant to be tyranids, that’s what they do,’ Hagai responded, rising and mag-l
ocking his weapons.

  ‘It won’t be so easy when we face the real thing,’ Timchet responded.

  ‘I pray to the Khagan that you are right,’ Hagai replied, still grinning. ‘After such a wait, I would fight every xenos in the galaxy.’

  The vellum scroll lay on an angled wooden board before Joghaten. The Master of Blades lit the last lumen stick and settled himself on his rug, legs crossed, stretching his back and arm muscles as the shuddering ache of combat adrenals left him. It seemed to take longer now than when he was a youth. When he had first joined the Fourth Brotherhood his ability to go from a state of calm to darting, razor-tipped blows, and back again, had immediately drawn the attention of the then khan-commander. Now it was a struggle to unclench his fist from the hafts of his tulwars, to let his pulse decelerate until his secondary heart ceased, to quell the feral instinct to slash and cut and gouge after the moment of danger had passed.

  He had fought too long and too hard to let go of such urges easily anymore. It was part of who he was. But, as Qui’sin often reminded him, it was not all he was.

  He focused on the vellum parchment. There was less than an hour left before the fleet reached stasis-anchorage in high orbit above Darkand. Not long, but long enough. His tulwars had been returned to their slots at the heart of the wooden trophy rack that dominated one wall of his personal busad. He had wiped the sliver of Lau Feng’s blood from the edges – he had not meant to cut the steedmaster. For the briefest second when he had done so the urge to follow through – to saw and cut his way through flesh and tendon, to open the warrior’s throat to the sparring ger’s humid air – had been almost overwhelming. The realisation had shamed him. It was a savagery he could never admit, not to young Qui’sin, not even to the brotherhood’s Chaplain, the venerable and much-scarred Changadai.

  He shook the memory off and reached for the brush and pot of soot-bound ink set beside his rug. There were few other Chapters in the galaxy that would devote time to brushwork, even fewer with a combat insertion imminent. Most would have busied themselves with weapons rituals and armour rites, strategic overview briefings and councils of war. But there were few Chapters like the White Scars. Joghaten had spent the past month, voyaging through the empyrean’s haunted depths, venerating his arms and armour. He had consulted and briefed his tulwar brothers extensively. He had conferred with Qui’sin, Changadai and ­Voyagemaster Shen when they had first broken in-system, back into real space. The khan of the Fourth Brotherhood did not need another strategic algorithm analysis or xenos threat profiling. He needed his brush and ink and vellum.

  He picked up the former and dipped it in the pewter ink pot beside him, careful to drain the excess before easing it to the bare white of the scroll. The thick aduu-hair brush did not fit particularly well in his large, transhuman grasp, but he had long ago mastered the technique of grasping it. Without hesitation, he applied it to the vellum with one long, smooth stroke.

  Poetry, painting, calligraphy, all were common forms of expression for the sons of Chogoris, whether they were the Sky Warriors that dwelled amidst the tallest peaks of the Khum Karta, or ­humble herders travelling the steppes below. Joghaten began to paint the Khorchin symbol for prescience and understanding. That was what he sought now. More so than ever before, he felt as though the path before him was shrouded and uncertain. Returning to Darkand, a place that haunted his memories, was not making that path any brighter. Shadows lurked amidst the darkness encroaching either side, full of the wicked gleam of murderous eyes and sharp claws. Once that same path had been open and untangled. He fought for the Great Khan and the Emperor. He brought heads back to the White Road and filled the Ayanga with tales of victory and heroism. In a little less than two hundred years he had not suffered a single scar that was not an honour marking or victory notch. In battle, an opponent’s blade had never marked him deeper than his transhuman physiology’s ability to heal.

  That had all changed with the coming of the Dark Imperium. The Cicatrix Maledictorum, the vast warp storm that had torn mankind’s domain in half and plunged countless systems and sectors into madness and war. Even before his ascendance to the ranks of the White Scars, Joghaten had been born to fight. All Chogorians steppe tribes were. If the horrors that had beset the Imperium of late – the failing of the Astronomican, the fall of Cadia, the near-annihilation of Baal – had merely meant that the White Scars were required to fight harder, that would not trouble the Master of Blades. He would fight every day, every moment, to his last drop of blood and his final breath, in defence of humanity, Chogoris and the Imperium.

  But the Cicatrix Maledictorum had heralded not just more slaughter. It had brought questions too, and rumours. Tales abounded of the return of the primarchs, of the gods of old bestriding new battlefields. Such uncertainties, wrapped up in falsehood, exaggeration and embellishment, were impossible for any White Scar to ignore. All knew the tale of their own ­pri­march, the Khagan, Jaghatai, who had stood against traitors and daemons ten thousand years before and saved humankind from certain annihilation on distant, holy Terra. All knew also of his disappearance, of how he had quested into the mysterious, alien realm of the eldar, the webway, and never returned. The legend of his eternal hunt resonated with the Chapter, was built into the very fabric of its being.

  The knowledge that the Khagan may have returned haunted all White Scars. It challenged their very perception of themselves. Though they desired nothing more than to be reunited with him, the idea that their hunt might have come to an end – or been in vain – was one few could entertain. Surely the rumours were just that? Rumours. Such uncertainties created unrest, and that unrest was, in the case of Joghaten’s brotherhood, being amplified by the confinement of warp travel. Being trapped on board the Pride of Chogoris was creating discipline problems, and worse. The khan-commander had never enjoyed voyaging through the empyrean but, since the coming of the Cicatrix Maledictorum, time spent in the Sea of Souls had become ever more harrowing. He was haunted by nightmares, his sus-an meditation plagued by visions and memories that were not his own.

  He could see them now, in his mind’s eye. A palace of insurmountable splendour and glory, ravaged by darkling hordes of daemonkind. An open steppe, shrouded in pulsating, hideous flesh. A mountain on fire. Legions of silver warriors collapsing in on themselves. A dark cavern, full of horrors, and the gaping maw of a great, serpent-like beast. Worst and greatest of all, a voice issuing from a corona of blinding light. It spoke in ancient, broken Chogorian riddles. Was it his own voice, or another’s? Somehow, it was impossible to say.

  He had spoken of the visions only to Qui’sin. He knew the young Stormseer passed word of them to his more venerable brethren on Chogoris. He knew they believed him touched by destiny. That did not worry Joghaten. Every warrior had his own path, no matter how dark it became, and he would not have risen to command of the Tulwar Brotherhood if fate’s will did not sit easily enough on his shoulders. What plagued Joghaten, what ate away at his thoughts and turned his moods sour, was the fear that he would never realise the destiny expected of him. He would not find the purpose to walk the path to completion.

  Joghaten blinked. His right hand ached. Slowly he raised it, seeing how his fingers gripped the brush shaft, the knuckles white with strain. The black-stained aduu-hair bristles were bent and abused, and ink had splattered up his arm. After a moment’s effort he let go, the brush falling to the rug, staining the intricately woven Chogorian patterns. He looked down and noticed the vellum sheet for the first time.

  If there had been any Khorchin script on the page at any point during Joghaten’s fugue state, it was now gone, swallowed up by the harsh, broad strokes he had dealt while consumed with thought. Now, instead of the symbol for understanding, he was looking at a brutally rendered image of a Space Marine. The painting was too crude to decipher the Chapter or allegiances, but the armour seemed archaic, of no discernible mark or pattern. ­Strangest of all was the fact that the
figure had no head. In its place was a jagged black smudge.

  Joghaten started at the unsettling image for a moment. Then, features twisting into a snarl, he snatched the still-wet vellum, crumpled it in both fists, and flung it away. The screwed-up ball struck the far wall of the busad and fell, in amongst a pile of twenty or thirty similarly crushed scrolls and splattered ink.

  Each ruined sheet bore on it the vision-scrawl of the Space Marine with no face.

  ‘Khan-commander, we are thirty minutes from anchorage.’

  The voice of Tzu Shen tore Joghaten from his thoughts. He pressed the rune panel inset next to the chamber’s door, then scrubbed the ink from his thick, dark-haired forearms in the ambulatory basin. The door slid open and his two zarts entered with their shaved heads bowed.

  ‘Prepare me,’ Joghaten commanded.

  In the corner, beside the trophy rack, the khan-commander’s armour waited. The great plates of plasteel and ceramite gleamed as white as the snows that capped the Khum Karta, except where they were slashed across by jagged dags of brightest red – the honour markings that echoed the ritual scars all members of the Chapter marked their bodies with. Joghaten bore his on his armour’s right greave, along with his brotherhood marking, and on his left vambrace and gauntlet – blood-red to donate his status as Master of Blades. His left knee plate also bore the vertical red jags of the Fourth Brotherhood, while his helm’s right side was slashed with more vicious crimson, in memory of his time among Khan Arro’shan’s personal bondsmen. The armour’s ­pauldrons were draped with the thick mottled black-and-white fur of a Chogorian lar’ix, while the lush hairs of a torandor pelt were tied up in a topknot atop his helmet. Mounting the armour’s backpack were three spikes upon which were impaled six skulls – xenos and ­heretic alike, the only ones to have come close to scarring him with a blade that was not his own. The golden glory of the twin-headed Imperial aquila gleamed across the armour’s breastplate.