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Arnogaur – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Arnogaur

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Urdesh, Southern Continent, the Serechan Expanse,
the Foundry City ‘Xavec’, 782.M41
(the 27th Year of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade)

I

The crew of the Strygora came for Erec while he was taking a piss. Tomorrow would be too late, for tomorrow was the battle – they needed him dead before dawn. It had to be tonight and it had to be unseen.

Reaching him in the heart of the encampment wasn’t easy. Murder between crews was an act punishable by crucifixion, and they could hardly cut his throat and hope his body would go unfound. If killing him in the field had been an option, he’d have been dead for a year. Similarly, it would have aroused suspicion if they’d simply followed him through the camp of barbed wire and flakboard, only for him to show up dead mere hours later. They had to walk away from the deed as innocently as they’d walked into it.

Guards were everywhere. Guards with scruffy lasguns clutched to their chests, their eyes keen and untrusting. Guards who were only your brothers on the battlefield, and who were all too eager to string you up and let you hang if you violated the laws of the Pact.

To get to Erec, the crew of the Strygora had to wade their slow and sloshing way through the latrine trenches at the encampment’s western edge, their boots and trousers soaked in the knee-deep filth. They carried ritual knives in hands marked with sacred scars, and hid their faces beneath grotesques of twisted brass. Thus prepared, they went hunting through the sluggish, semi-liquid waste of several thousand men, women and monsters.

They melted out of the darkness when they were sure Erec was most distracted, garrotting him with a wet bootstrap to keep him from crying out. The leather cord slid taut against his throat beneath the snarling bronze visage of his own grotesque, denying him any last words. His eyes widened, piggish and panicked, as slaughter came from the shadows.

The first knife slid home into his back, immediately severing his spine with a sensation of sick, icy pressure rather than the sharp kiss of pain. The second knife stuck in his belly at an awkward angle, a killing blow missed, before it began sawing its crooked way across his stomach. The first blade crippled him, the second disembowelled him. His attackers were carving him open even as they strangled him.

He sagged back into the clutches of his killers as the slick ropes of his innards tumbled out in a wet spill onto the boots of the men that had come to murder him.

Neither of the knives killed him. The crew of the Strygora held him in that murderous embrace, hissing with bent-toothed laughter in the dark, cooing softly into his masked face, letting him die a strangling death in their arms.

Once their prey ceased his futile struggling, they made ready to ruin his flesh forever. Their urgency was such that they couldn’t just wait for decay – the meat had to be spoiled at once. Dead men did indeed tell tales, and the poetic verse that claimed otherwise was one of the galaxy’s great lies.

They used their knives on Erec’s lifeless eyes before casting his defiled corpse into the waste trench.

Satisfied that at least one dead man would tell no tales, the Strygora’s crew waded into the filth and slunk back the way they had come.

II

Erec’s last journey was a slow and sedate one. He drifted along the vile, shallow river for almost half an hour, face down in the filth, until he was finally dragged from the waste trench by the fumbling hands and crunching industrial claws of two desecrated servitors. The cyborged slaves hauled the carcass onto dry ground and pulsed a summons as soon as their rudimentary visual acuity made note of the scars on the body’s hands. Their dull and scarcely sentient brains had been triggered by one of the only sins they were capable of recognising: Blood Pact had killed Blood Pact.

Nautakah Arnogaur was summoned.

III

Nautakah Arnogaur had sworn the Blood Pact four years before setting foot on this blighted, lost world. Like all of Urlock Gaur’s warrior elite, he’d made the Pact by dragging his palm across the Archon’s jagged armour plating, splitting his skin and leaving a smear of blood as both a promise and an offering.

Unlike most, however, he’d looked Gaur in the eyes while doing it. More than that, he’d looked down at the Archon. Despite his many gifts and blessings, Urlock Gaur, Overlord of the Blood Pact, was still human. Nautakah was not.

When he closed his eyes now he could see the treacly smear of his own blood across the Archon’s breastplate. He would never forget the way his blood had glittered against the beaten bronze symbol cast upon the Overlord’s armoured chest. Nor would he forget the chanting of the nearby Red Priests in their surplices like gore-splattered aprons, moaning in divine tongues that held no meaning to mortal minds. Some of the words sounded like Nagrakali, the tongue of his former brethren, but he found sense in only one word among every ten. If the language was related to Nagrakali, it had rotted on the vine and fallen far from its roots.

He could even summon the smell of that night to memory – the vascular, syrupy sweetness of fresh death and sacrificed life. It was the smell of a god’s smile.

Nautakah was to be Arnogaur. One who swore the Pact, yet stood apart from its disciplined human legions. This fate had pleased him then, and it pleased him still.

‘Blood,’ Nautakah had promised the Archon, ‘for the Blood God.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Sabbat Crusade in Great Britain in 2014.
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 Raymond Swanland.

Arnogaur © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2019. Arnogaur, 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: 978-1-78030-755-8

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