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KORYN

They moved silently, as if they had surrendered their corporeal forms to become spirits or wraiths, as if the very shadows themselves were living things that shifted and breathed – shadows that wore black ceramite armour and harboured vicious adamantium claws. Shadows that were trained to kill.

Ravens.

Shadow Captain Koryn of the Raven Guard flexed his neck and shoulders to dispel the tension. He sensed more than saw his brothers – Argis, Grayvus, Syrus and Coraan – as the five of them crept through the narrow tunnels of the maze-like mortuary complex, surrounded by the remnants of the dead. Dour faces hewn from soapstone and marble loomed out at him from all sides in the gloaming, their blank eyes watching impassively from across the centuries. Ornate tombs, stone coffins and the skeletal remains of old politicians and administrators – some of them still wearing their now-faded finery – lined the walls, embedded in roughly chiselled niches like insects in a hive.

It had once been a sacred place, a place to honour the dead in the name of the Emperor. Now, though, the blight of Chaos had infected the planet, and even here, in the bowels of this ancient mortuary complex, the evidence of corruption was all around them.

Foul mist clung to the air, turning everything a pale, putrid green. The walls were slick with ochre slime that seemed to quiver and move with the perturbations caused by their passing. Worse of all was the stench, the rotten reek of death and decay that pervaded everything, threatening to overwhelm even Koryn’s hardened senses.

He didn’t know what had brought the Death Guard to Kasharat, a mortuary world on the outer rim of the Imperium. Their reasons were opaque. It may simply have been a symptom of their inexorable drive to spread their foul plague – that burning, zealous desire to infect world after world with their sickening rot – but their actions hinted at some greater purpose. Koryn knew that his bull-headed brothers, the Brazen Minotaurs, would be concerned only with smiting the enemy and not with understanding their motives. To them, Koryn knew, the enemy were the enemy; faceless traitors who needed only to be vanquished. Their strategies were not subtle. They did not need to understand their enemy in order to strike them with a wall of sheer force, to overwhelm them with firepower. There was a certain honesty in that sort of combat, and Koryn respected the Brazen Minotaurs for their unwavering, unquestioning approach. He had seen them storm their way to victory on more than one occasion, a fist of iron driven into the very heart of the enemy.

The sons of Corax, however, excelled at a different kind of combat. Koryn knew how to hit an enemy where it hurt, to search out their weak points, to foil their plans. The Raven Guard struck from the shadows and were gone before their foe was even aware of what had happened. That, he knew, was what was needed here on Kasharat. That would ensure the success of their mission. The mortuary complex would be easily defended and a full assault would result only in a stand-off. That stand-off, in turn, would result in a siege that would take days, if not longer, to break. And days were a luxury the Brazen Minotaurs didn’t have. Not if they wanted to retrieve their target in one piece.

Koryn hoped that their brothers might have had a chance by now to pick up the signal from the beacon he had planted earlier, amongst the corpses of the corrupted humans who had guarded the entrance to the mortuary complex.

He slowed as the passageway opened into a large, cavernous space. They were now far below ground, and looking up, Koryn could see that the space had originally been a natural formation, remodelled some time in the distant past for the mortuary builders’ macabre purposes. Huge stalactites dripped from the roof like fangs encircling an enormous maw. Two colossal statues towered over the Space Marines, the figures’ heads bowed in quiet repose. Each of them clutched a sword and shield and wore an unfamiliar pattern of armour. Effigies, Koryn assumed, of ancient heroes, long since forgotten.

At the feet of these towering figures stood a small group of grotesque creatures, formerly human, but now mutated and corrupted by the Sickening. One bore a writhing, wriggling proboscis where its arm had once been, erupting from just beneath the shoulder joint to curl, snake-like, in the air. The man’s face was deformed with pustulent growths, and his belly was distended and marred with puckered sores. Beside him, another appeared to have lost his lower jaw, and his tongue, now oversized and sickly yellow, lolled across his naked chest, where his skin erupted in innumerable boils. He clutched a lasrifle in his disgusting, weeping fingers. There were five others, each of them bearing the diabolical mark of Nurgle.

Koryn glanced from side to side, noting how his brothers had fanned out in the shadows, drawing a wide semicircle around the group of cultists. This was how the Raven Guard worked. So attuned were they to each other, so practised were they in the art of subtle warfare that he need not even issue his command. Intuitively, his veterans knew what he expected, what was necessary.

Koryn readied himself. He would enjoy this, would enjoy despatching these foul bearers of the taint.

Silently he raised his twin lightning claws, the flashing blades glinting in the half-light. He drew his breath and then swooped forward, barely making a sound as he erupted from the shadows like a whirlwind of slashing blades, spinning about so that his talons traced wide circles through the miasmic air. The lightning claws parted the flesh of the nearest cultist like warm butter, slicing him open from shoulder to belly so that his body collapsed silently in a bloody heap in the dirt.

Koryn’s blood sang as he twisted, knocking aside the raised barrel of a lasrifle and skewering a second cultist through the belly. The man opened his mouth as if to howl in agony, but was silenced a second later as Koryn’s other set of talons flashed, removing the cultist’s head from his shoulders and spattering hot, festering blood over the Space Marine’s ebony chest-plate.

Around him, Koryn’s brothers moved silently in the dance of death, ducking and weaving and swiping as their blades and talons despatched the remaining five cultists in moments. The disciples of the Death Guard barely had time to register what was happening before it was all over. None of them had the opportunity to even squeeze off a shot or so much as raise an arm in defence. Within seconds the Raven Guard had melted away into the shadows, their work done, the only trace of their passing the quivering heap of corpulent flesh and severed limbs on the ground, writhing with the swarms of maggots that the cultists had harboured within their obscene bodies.

Talons dripping with gore, Koryn moved silently to join his brothers.

‘Captain?’ The voice that came over the vox was barely a whisper.

‘Yes, Argis?’

‘I understand, captain, that we owe the Brazen Minotaurs a grave debt, but should we not honour them on the field of battle as they honoured us, and not silently, from the shadows?’

‘Argis, the Brazen Minotaurs honoured us in the only way they know how, in open combat, using their brute strength to aid us in our hour of need. Their sacrifice was great. But honour is not simply a matter of trading one life for another, of standing side by side on the field of battle. We honour our brothers the way we know how. The situation on Kasharat demands more subtlety than our bull-headed brothers could muster. We repay our debt the Raven’s way.’

‘Yes, captain,’ said Argis, his tone circumspect. One of the shadows up ahead inclined its head, and Koryn smiled. Yes. The Raven’s way.

Koryn watched as Argis slipped away into the darkness, and then followed silently behind.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Prey first published in 2012.
Helion Rain first published as an audio drama in 2011.
With Baited Breath first published as an audio drama in 2012.
Old Scars first published in 2012.
Labyrinth of Sorrows first published as an audio drama in 2012.
The Unkindness of Ravens first published in 2012.
By Artifice, Alone first published in 2013.
This eBook edition published in Great Britain in 2015, Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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UK ISBN 978-1-78251-317-9

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