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Siegemaster

Chris Wraight

I see the marks of his work from orbit, long before Tacitus reaches drop-range. I have time to study them, shifting blurred images across the lenses, and what I see inflames the anger that has been intermittently dormant for the long month I have spent in the void getting from Scraw’s Reach to Harrowar.

It makes me angry for the waste of resource. I find I care about this even more than I did before the Legion broke itself apart and every usable rivet became as precious to us as diamonds.

The last time we had spoken, he and I, we had lamented this. We had remembered how it had been in the Stor-Bezashk, when we had commanded access to our unmatched leviathans, those machines of glorious, terrible power. We had both been in that brotherhood. We had both been there when our instruments of reduction had vomited their innards out against those damned, Dorn-crafted gates.

But now we scratch around for blunted blades and pretend the rust was always there. So it stirs my anger that he has diminished himself further. As I see what he has done on Harrowar, my eyes are dark with fury.

My crew evade my gaze. They clank and shuffle in the darkness of the bridge-wells, preparing the lander.

I look down at the world my brother travelled to, eighty Terran years before this day, and whisper the curse that he will find most hurtful.

‘You have wasted yourself.’

‘Warsmith Bakulos,’ the slave-drone vocalises.

I do not look at it, that creature of iron and pulled sinew, but its intervention tells me descent is prepared. I rise from my throne, armour hissing, and draw my helm to me. The patina of old wars is on it, thick like oxidation.

My retinue falls in behind me as I walk – three battle-brothers of my warband, clad in dark, chevroned iron, the icon of the Corpse Grinders on their blunted shoulder-guards. I have not seen their true faces in a hundred years, nor they mine, for our mortal skins are now bound up with our armour, the union of body and ceramite our Father himself had flirted with, on occasion, back when he still possessed the inclination for invention.

My quarry has hidden his location well, but not the effects of his presence. As the lander burns down through Harrowar’s choked atmosphere, I see the webs of scarring stretch out, gradually sharpening into networks, and networks inside networks. The earth is beaten down by the tread of a billion boots, made slick and black, then burned again, until it all glints like coal.

We come down fifty kilometres southwest of the main battlefront on what my tactical feed tells me is Kurr’s nineteenth offensive complex on the primary continental mass. Constructions loom up around us, half-lost in the dirty film of Harrowar’s poisoned air. I see refineries meshed in pipe-clusters, glowing sickly with chem-discharge from ranks of terraced chimneys. I see munitions works, armour manufactories, cavernous hab-blocs. He has built all these things himself, for the mark of ancient Olympia is on them – no Imperial would have used such obsessive layers of redundancy.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Siegemaster © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. Siegemaster, 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: 978-1-78572-021-5

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