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Cthonia's Reckoning – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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He woke to darkness and the sound of his old name inside his skull already fading. He could taste the blood in his mouth and throat, clotting to a red slime. The instinct to panic rose for just long enough for him to notice it. Then the psycho-conditioning cut it away and he was calm. His name, his real name, sounded clear in his thoughts. He was Diosus, a warrior-son of Rogal Dorn, brother of the Imperial Fists. He had been in battle. He had been injured. Instinctively he tried to move his hand, but could not. A flash of panic again, but far away, strangled before it could cry out.

There had been sixteen of his brothers: two units, under-strength, force command designated to Sergeant Astoga. The mission parameters and objectives flashed clear in Diosus’ mind: push down and south through the supply tunnel network and into the mined tunnel warrens; identify ambush site, engage XVI Legion force elements, inflict damage then withdraw to prepared emplacements; allow enemy force to increase and then demolish the tunnels to both block advance and inflict maximum casualties. Once complete, withdraw back to Traitor’s Gate. It had not progressed as intended.

The enemy had advanced further forwards and with greater force than expected: mutant-slaves, half-machines, things that wore armour but bounded across the ground like canids. No ambush, no preparation of kill-zones or battle progression, just sudden running warfare. Bolt-rounds smacking into chiselled stone. Grunts and cries and the thunder of explosions rolling through from the throat of the tunnels, deafening, shaking Diosus’ skull inside his helmet. No possibility of holding, just the chance of slowing them for long enough to set the charges.

‘To the glory of Dorn and the Emperor!’ The cry had echoed over the vox in his ears and then from his throat as he fired into the oncoming tide. Then the rolling thunder of demolition charges, then white fire and a deluge of darkness.

He flinched at the recall. It was so bright and vivid that he felt the instinct to blink. The display lit in his helm. Information winked back at him: red icons, numbers, data. For a moment it did not mean anything to him. Then it snapped into focus. His armour was intact but damaged. Atmosphere was breathable. His weapon was no longer in his hand, no longer linked to his armour by gauntlet contact. Debris covered him. He was buried…

Buried. Down in the worm burrows… down in the dark with the breath-thieves and the coin-takers… down where you die if you are not quick enough, if you are weak.

Blink, the display came back into focus. His armour was still powered. It would move. Other fragments of red data pulsed in his eyes. Damage markers. Damage to him. There was no pain. Just the red pulses and indicators on the display.

He had to move. He was alive. That meant that he could fight, could stand with his brothers, could die facing the enemy.

Facing the enemy… not down in the dark where the lost and the eyeless walk, not dying in slowly, slowly fading breaths, no one to put the coins on your eyes after the silence came…

The thoughts were slower to fade that time. He waited. Noticing now the metal taste on his breath. He began to move, testing the weight of the debris, levering, finding give in the blanket of dust and rock and starting to move. It was careful work, an inch-by-inch process, taken one movement at a time until his hands were free, then his head, and then he was kneeling on a tunnel floor at the base of a tumble of broken rock.

His helm gathered what scraps of light there were, but the darkness was almost total and so the world was sketched in grainy green. He looked down at himself. Blood covered his lower torso and left thigh. Dust had mixed with it as it clotted, but it still stuck to his fingers, still wet. There was a split in the armour running across his gut plate, grating as he moved. There was still no pain, just numbness. That would not last. There were corpses on the floor. Pieces of armour. He saw a bolter lying half-buried in debris. Pulled it free, checked it: functioning, magazine half full. He swapped it for a full one from his ammo pouch, made the gun ready, then knelt by the corpse that had been near it. It was face down, the vents of its backpack twisted and half torn off. Carefully, he rolled the heap of broken plates. It sagged as it moved, a collection of crushed flesh and shattered ceramite. The yellow looked black in his green-tinted sight. He saw the dagger-and-shield mark incised on a shard. It was a mark he had seen every time he looked beside him in the battle line: Thasius, raised to the Legion with him, a brother in war and in blood. He bowed his head.

‘Your sacrifice will be remembered,’ he said aloud.

‘None of us will be remembered, son of Cthonia…’ The voice came out of the dark, echoing off the stone walls. Diosus was on his feet, bolter in his hand, head and eyes tracking for a target.

Geldron held still as his own words fled into the dark. He heard the scrape of a heavy boot on rock, the low clatter of shifting stone shards. The son of Dorn was close… perhaps. It was difficult to tell precise direction and distance in these tunnels. You could hear the dead breathing down here, they said, could feel their chuckles on the hot air, but the warrens played their tricks. The Writhing Gods had made the tunnels as a place to flee, that was the story he had learned when he had been a boy running through them with a knife in his hand. The Writhing Gods had made them and turned them into a web to catch their prey: no way to escape sounds stolen from one place and sent to echo in another, holes opening in the floor that plunged down into the mouths waiting far below. All sounds were ghosts in the dark. You could feel the inferno heat rising up from the depths, smell the rank breath of the things that hungered and waited for you. Old stories, long left behind. He had never thought he would come back, never thought he would be waiting for a shift of air or a sound to tell him which way an enemy was. He had never thought he would come home.

He had lowered the power going to his armour systems, nudged down the heat exchanger so that its buzzing was just a low purr. Sweat was starting to prickle his skin, beads running down his forehead. There was a light ahead, red and orange, a fire glow from where some slumbering tectonic force had heaved itself through the rock floor. It ran right across the tunnel path. Beyond it the darkness shifted, mottled and deepened by contrast with the low light. There could be a figure there, crouched at the edge of sight. He ran his tongue across his teeth, thinking. He needed to get closer. That was the way to kill in these tunnels. Get close, rip an enemy’s limbs from under them, then go into them, fast, remorseless, all aggression until you could take their last breath: that was the Cthonian way.

‘You were born here, weren’t you?’ he asked, speaking the words aloud so that they bounced and sheared from the stone. No reply, no sound, not even the chink of stone. He began to move towards the shadow figure. ‘I was, too, a long time ago. Most of the newborn of my Legion have never seen Cthonia or been here. Not like you and your brothers…’

A little closer, and he was almost sure that it was a figure in the dark. He had to be sure, had to be closer. That was a rule to stay alive by: never move to kill until you are certain you have your mark cold.

‘You have never left this world, have you?’ he called, letting the noise roll and shift as he moved, swallowing the sound of his armour. ‘Taken, selected, then made into a Legion warrior and sent to fight over the ground that gave birth to you. Cthonia is all you have known. The universe likes to jest. The new breed of my Legion daub themselves in names and trinkets, and chew out bits of gang tongue that they don’t understand, all to be true Sons of Horus, all to ape the ways that we both were born to…’ He laughed. The dark folded the noise back to him, breaking it so that it sounded like a chorus laughing from somewhere he could not see. ‘And then there is you. You have been made a warrior, but you have shed all that my newly bred brothers would want. No mirror coins for you when you die, no topknot to show you are a bond warrior, no kill tally on your armour and skin. Yellow armour, honour and strength, cast in stone like Rogal Dorn himself…’

Geldron stopped. He could see a warrior in battleplate in the tunnel ahead, the yellow of the Imperial Fists dusted dull and draped in the tunnel dark, shaded by the orange seeping from cracks in the floor. The warrior was injured, Geldron could tell, a wound to the left thigh and gut. That would be slowing him, making his reactions slower. That was good. He had him cold and clear. He just needed to set the shot – he would do it the old way: rip the legs apart, then the upper limbs, then execute.

‘What is your name?’ he called.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2022.
This eBook edition published in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.

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ISBN: 978-1-80026-604-9

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