*So, the Wolves of the Rout are cowards, I take it?"
*No," snarled Faffnr.
*Then take your strike, Wolf," said the Lion, *and make it count."
Faffnr sighed and swung his axe at the Lion. Guilliman flinched as the blade cut the air beside him. It was a sensationally good strike. Faffnr had betrayed no cues, no hint of muscle tension, no focus of powered plate. The blow had just come. Guilliman wondered if it would have taken him by surprise. He was forced to admit that it might have.
The Lion caught Faffnr"s swing with one hand, blocking the haft with the blade edge millimetres from his face. Faffnr grunted involuntarily as his strength was met and fundamentally matched by superior power.
Then the Lion delivered his return blow. It came with his left hand, not enough to maim or kill, almost pulled, but fast, faster than Faffnr"s superb swing.
It knocked the pack-leader onto his knees and left the Lion holding Faffnr"s axe.
Faffnr Bludbroder rose to his feet again.
*Satisfied?" asked the Lion, tossing the axe back to him.
*Honour is satisfied, lord," Faffnr a.s.sented, catching it. He nodded and backed off, waving to his pack to do the same. Holguin and Redloss both grinned with unbearable insouciance.
*Then tell Bo Soren to guard his manners, Faffnr," Guilliman said over his shoulder without looking back.
*I will, Jarl," Faffnr returned. Guilliman heard a hard slap and a m.u.f.fled curse.
He looked at the Lion. He"d never realised before that the Lion was very slightly taller than him.
*Shall we, brother?" he asked.
*The famous Fortress of Hera?" asked the Lion. *I would be disappointed not to see it."
It was late afternoon.
At the Occident Gate in the mighty Servian Wall, at the very western edge of Magna Macragge Civitas, the gate-guards were processing incomers. There was a steady tide, tricksters and black-marts flowing in to the evening markets of Laponis Deme from the slums of the Illyrian Enclave behind the high wall, or agrics flocking to the city granaries with sweating payloads of grain from the chora on bulk-servitor wagons.
*Name?" asked the gate officer, a senior ranked man in the praecental division. The man looked important and he b.l.o.o.d.y knew it too.
*Damon," replied Damon Prytanis, huddled on the back gate of a servitor freight car in his smelly black fur coat. *What"s going on?"
*What do you mean what"s going on?"
*In the city? All that airshow? The d.a.m.ned horns?"
*The First Legion has come to us," the officer replied proudly.
*The First Legion, eh? The Lion"s mob? Big news."
*It is," the officer agreed.
*Big news," Damon repeated, nodding. His heart sank. Too many serious players for comfort.
*Ident," the officer reminded him.
Damon shrugged and nodded and held out his open, empty hand. It generally worked. The gesture was so automatic, guards usually saw what they wanted to see.
*Good, all right," the officer said, waving him on.
Damon pa.s.sed through the deep, cold shade of the Occident Gate on the back of the jolting servitor car and entered the western edge of the city. This was his target city, his b.l.o.o.d.y destiny, probably. It was not promising. Down at this skunk-end of the low-qual deme it was still gross, cheap-built habitas, tinker-marts and slum runs, and would be for many kilometres before a traveller could reach the handsome domi and wide estates of Xanthi Deme in the low, rolling country west of the river.
Damon dropped off the back of the trundling bulk-car and started walking down the busy highway, skirting Illyrian caravans and grain cargoes.
He suddenly had a bad feeling. He liked to call it his first sense because, according to his blessed mother, he had not been born with any.
*Hey!" a voice called out from behind him. *Hey, you! Fur coat man!"
Damon cursed. The gate officer had only been temporarily convinced. Damon took a look back, and saw a squad of praecentals moving from the gatehouse in his direction. They were picking up pace and shoving slower-moving pedestrians out of their path. Most of the locals shrank back. The praecentals looked like over-groomed show-guards, but they were tough, well-trained, and they carried serious authority.
They were also well-armed. Damon saw plasma weapons and intimidating blades.
*Halt!" one of them shouted. When Damon didn"t, the officer started barking at the pedestrian traffic.
*Out of the way! Give us a clear shot!"
A clear shot? Encouraging. Welcoming. Rea.s.suring. Times were worse, and tensions far hotter, than he had antic.i.p.ated, and he had antic.i.p.ated a fair bit.
It was a moment to switch out, to revert to the skills he"d honed hunting and being hunted over an unimaginably long period. The hindbrain temptation was huge. There were only a handful of humans in the galaxy possessed of equal to or greater experiential skill than Damon Prytanis. He"d met two of them, and one of those was his current target. The other was a surly, uncooperative rogue.
Yet another of his kind was the Emperor of Man. Damon had never met the fellow, and didn"t much want to. He sounded like a total dunkhole.
Smiling, he reverted.
Damon ducked to his left very sharply, racing down an alley into the warren of stenopoi, the maze of narrow streets in this most densely packed quarter of Laponis Deme. He collided with no one and knocked over nothing. People just got out of his way or, if they froze, he went around them. He made two more turns, another left and then a hard right, following a dank, high-walled lane under the arches of a major aqueduct. Washing had been strung out to dry on lines below the arch and between the walls, and he could smell cook-pots and pipe smoke.
The guards were fit, and close behind him, moving fast and with determination, despite the enc.u.mbrance of their armour and wargear.
He saw the hazy grey shapes of the giant granaries ahead of him, and thought for a moment that he might reach them and hide. But the praecentals were efficient. A second squad had appeared, crossing a chain-dropped ca.n.a.l bridge ahead of him to work back through the stenopoi and pin him between them and his pursuers.
He realised he was going to have to get wet. It disappointed him to have to contemplate blood-business so early on, but it also partly pleased him. He"d been in the mountains for too long, and he was cold and hungry and fit to hurt someone. He"d been sent to Macragge to perform a mission he didn"t want to perform, and challenge a man he didn"t think needed to be challenged.
Damon Prytanis was in an ugly mood, and by cornering him, the praecentals had offered him a chance to vent that frustration.
He carried four weapons. They had come with him in a sack of living flesh in order to survive, as metallic items, the extremity of the fast-jack teleport. The sack had been bred for purpose in a Khu"Nib replicator vat. Once he had cut it open and killed it to get at his weapons and kit, after his painful arrival, its meat had fed him for six days.
Four weapons: a matched brace of Zhul"kund murehk a elegant, long-snouted, k.n.o.b-gripped sling pistols, the best kind. Eldar shuriken weapons were Damon"s favoured firearms, for what they lacked in range and accuracy they more than made up for in rate of fire and penetrative effect. This pair had come from Slau Dha"s personal battle-casket, an uncharacteristic gesture of generosity that had been made, Damon was sure, to emphasise the importance of the mission. One was called (in High Idharaen) Guh"hru, which meant *Bleed-to-death", and the other was called (in the demotic and corrupted slang of the Crone Worlds) Meh"menitay, which meant *Death Looks in Your Eyes and Finds You Entirely Wanting". He kept them holstered under his fur jacket, in a makeshift double-shoulder rig he"d made from the indigestible skin of the flesh-sack.
The third weapon was a short-pattern chainsword, not much longer than a gladius, which dated from the interminable wars of the pre-Unification Era of Terra, and which had been designed as a secondary, close-protection weapon for the retinues of a Panpacific n.o.bleman called Kendra Huul. The sword came from Damon"s private collection, and he knew its provenance well, because he"d been the retinue member it had been carried by, and he had given it its name: Huul"s Doom. He wore it across his spine, once again under his heavy fur jacket.
The fourth weapon was a small red-gla.s.s bottle that lay in the right-hand pocket of his fur coat, jumbled in among the other odds and ends of his trade.
Damon side-stepped into a range of shadows, darted under the eaves of an old stable block, and pulled himself back against a stone part.i.tion wall to wait.
Six men coming from behind, six more from up ahead, Praecentals all. All of them were packing plasma weapons, and wielding quality blades if it got nasty-close, blades they knew how to handle. They were armoured in the head, torso, shoulders, groin and legs. Guilliman did not stint on the materiel budget for his householders, so that armour was plasteel at the very least, probably with a ceramite underveil.
Nothing a murehk couldn"t puncture, but he"d need to let them get very close to ensure hard, wet kills.
He reached under his coat and drew his pistols, Guh"hru in his right hand and Meh"menitay in his left. He held them up, muzzles aimed at the storm-streaked sky. With his thumbs, he stroked the studs that activated the almost silent gravitic accelerators and brought them cycling up to power. The wraithbone grips began to feel warm.
The sound of racing footfalls had ceased. Damon listened and heard, over the gurgle of the nearby ca.n.a.l and the distant street sounds, a terse, hushed back and forth: vox chirps, a search pattern inter-signalling as it spread out.
Come for me then, he willed them.
The first two appeared to his left very suddenly, turning around the end of the stable block with their plasma weapons aimed.
Snap. He was already moving. They had the drop, but he beat them to it. His guns came down, side-by-side, as he moved and fired.
He squeezed each trigger with the lightest of touches, a pulse technique that the eldar called the Ilyad"than, or *feather-finger". Shuriken technology was amazing. The gravitic accelerators shoved shots out of the weapons at abnormal velocities, and ammunition was a solid core block of plasti-crystal that the gun sliced off and hurled one monomolecular disc at a time. It was so efficient a system that a single over-generous squeeze of the trigger could unleash hundreds of razor-rounds in a second or two.
The Ilyad"than technique allowed the shooter to fire off crisp bursts of five or six discs at a time, preserving the solid ammunition core and avoiding messy overkill.
Damon was well-practised. Guh"hru spat four monomolecular discs through the armoured chest of one guard, and Meh"menitay did the same to the other. Dark slits, suddenly welling blood in extravagant quant.i.ty, appeared in their chest plating as they fell backwards. One dropped onto the path, the other toppled over a rail into the dirty ca.n.a.l.
Damon swung around as a third praecental appeared around the opposite end of the stable block behind him. Turning, he fired Guh"hru straight-armed, and put two discs into the man"s face, which ruptured messily inside the frame of his helmet. The man dropped to his knees, then flopped onto his front, kicking a squish of blood up out of his head on impact.
No pausing now. Voices were raised. The men had heard the distinctive shriek of sling guns, a sound no being who had faced the eldar ever forgot. Damon ran towards his first kills. The corpse in the water was face down and slowly sinking into the green, algae-thickened murk, supported by the air caught in his cape. The man on the path was on his back, his eyes as wide as full moons, blood leaking out of him in astonishing quant.i.ties, turning the earth pathway into terracotta putty.
Damon knelt and made an adjustment to the man"s weapon. Then he started to run back the way he had come.
*Here he is! Help me!" he yelled over his shoulder as he ran.
Damon threw himself sideways into the far end of the stable block, putting a heavy wall between him and the ca.n.a.l.
He heard other praecentals approaching, heard their outraged curses as they saw the kills.
Then one of them said, *Wait, wait! What"s that sound?"
A plasma weapon"s powercell on overload, you numbwit, Damon thought.
It went off like a bomb, blowing out the far end of the stable block where it overhung the ca.n.a.l. Damon emerged into the smoke, finished off the one man that the blast hadn"t killed with a swift headshot, and counted the other bodies. It was a jigsaw. He had to make sense of the b.l.o.o.d.y, half-cooked chunks. Four. Two more still close, then. And more squads would be on their way.
How many more would he risk? How many more would it take to slake his frustration?
He looked down at the ca.n.a.l. The water was very still, suddenly.
*Oh, come on..." he began.
Gahet looked up at him, an impossible reflection. The telepathic consult was like a hot wire through his brain.
You waste time and expose your presence unnecessarily, Damon.+
*I"m blowing off steam," Damon growled back, hurting.
Fulfill the duty you must perform for us.+
*All right, just stopa"
Find him and secure the prize. Make him perform his a.s.signed task, or, if he will not do it, perform it for him.+
*All right, d.a.m.n you!" Damon winced.
He turned away from the ca.n.a.l. The two praecentals were rushing him along the towpath. One fired, scorching the air beside Damon with plasma heat, a very near miss.
Damon pulled up his guns, firing both.
What are you doing?+
*Finishing things," Damon replied.
He could hear the other squads moving in. Wet. It was going to get b.l.o.o.d.y wet.