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Scions of the Emperor – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Canticle

David Guymer

The boy had no name.

The capsule that had first brought him to this world had labelled him X, but he had earned a great many names since that day of his awakening. The storm giants of the Karaashi Pinnacle, elementals of dark rock fused into cognitive sheaths of mineral armour, artificer-sages and warrior-mystics, had called him Cataclysm. It had been his planetfall that had sundered their mountain monastery, and his explorations that had unwittingly released the great wyrm from its captivity there. The boy had not been able to stop it. He had not been strong enough. From that day, the boy had called himself Hunter. Following its path of destruction brought him to the black ice of the surface world. The undying phantasmagoria that haunted the foothills of Karaashi – shades of code-personality mis-phased from time and dimension, and from sanity itself – had called him The Finality. Further south, where black ice gave way to gritty tundra, the pyramid complexes of aeons-lost civilisations broke through the layers of dust, their perfect geometries unscarred by the howling storms, their seals unbroken until the coming of the boy. The mecharachnids and phasewraiths that guarded the labyrinths of those tombs had not sought to name him, only to kill him. But the eidolic algorithms that had, as a last resort, sought to communicate had called him Rehew Netjer. It had meant Son of Man.

The fragment warlords of the Subliminat had called him Flesh.

The name had, at first, been extemporised as an expression of desire, for a resource too priceless to leave unnamed. Then with contempt, as their efforts to assimilate the boy into their worker collectives proved fruitless. Then with fear-code, as the boy dismantled their harvester cohorts one by one and came for them.

Of all the names he had worn or been given, it was the one that had resonated with him the most.

He was flesh.

But it had not stuck. What need did he have for a name?

He had walked from the wreckage of the Black Pinnacle and the ruins of the once-mighty civilisation therein for a time he could not track and a distance he could not measure, ever south, following the trail of the biomechanical beast he had set loose.

If there was a sun around which this black world turned then it was alien to the boy. If there was a season then it was winter. Its changelessness was a black cloak over a landscape where each blast of wind was an apocalypse. There was no day. There was no night. Light emerged spontaneously. Frenetic windspeeds and an abundance of electro-dense particulates in the air generated frequent, albeit erratic, electromagnetic bursts. The boy had been taught none of this, but he knew it, intuited it, pursued such understanding with the same voracious appetite with which he submitted his changing physiology to each new trial of its limits.

And if it had any then the boy had not reached them yet.

He had gauged the erosion of time by the new challenges that he faced, and by the steady lengthening of his limbs as he walked, the thickening of muscle, the slow change of his body from that of a boy into something else that he could not yet define.

For not once in all that time had he encountered a being that came anywhere close to resembling himself.

The boy reached out towards the dead thing.

It was marginally smaller than he was, encased in a bronzed ceramic shell that had, before grit and dust and age had scoured the curved plates to senility, borne some kind of pictorial script. It had two arms, two legs, a single head. Though similar to many of the robotic, semi-robotic and infernal creatures that he had encountered, vertical symmetry was an uncommon template in the boy’s experience. There was something intuitively familiar about this body’s design however, something that appealed to his sense of logic.

He brushed dust from the corpse’s face. The wind broke against the back of his hand, black sand quickly piling up past the line of his middle finger, briefly shielding a visor screen. A network of shatter lines tunnelled through the tempered glass, opaque rings where windblown particulates had impacted but without force enough to break the material entirely. Some of the damage looked significantly older than others, the stress halos wider. The boy did not think the body had lain here long enough to account for the damage. Raw material, flesh or otherwise, did not stay unpicked for long. What the wind did not bury or destroy, every techscavenger with even a partial auspex in range would soon be flocking towards.

He looked through the cracked visor.

Inside, a face.

It was hard and pale, a face painted on bone, its own internal symmetry framed by a mess of long, ash-black hair. The forehead lay against the inside of the helmet, as if glancing away, hair covering the mottling bruises. The eyes were wide and dark. The lips were blue. The boy stared, fascinated. He had always understood that he did not belong to this world. He knew, in his bones, that he had a purpose that went beyond the bruising challenges of his immediate environment. He did not know what it was, only that it was out there, somewhere, and that he needed to be strong enough to face it. This frail corpse was not it, but it felt like another step on the path he would take towards finding it.

He looked up.

The mountains of the northlands lay behind him. Ahead, a lowland of fierce winds and biting, almost predatory squalls of dust. A trail of metal fragments littered the desert. The wind animated them. Twists of metal walked end-over-end, misshapen legionaries of dark iron that for all their apparent vigour went nowhere, the wind pushing them two steps backwards for every two steps forwards, burying them piecemeal under black sand.

Soon, they would all be gone.

Then they too would be sand.

Beyond their trooping ranks, a great trapezoidal hulk of weather-beaten steel lay on its side. The scaffolding of its undercarriage lay exposed. Like an armoured creature tipped onto its flank to bare the soft parts beneath. Solid rubber tyres taller than the boy, with treads as thick as the length of his hand, jutted into the wind. Bits of track lay strewn amongst the wind-tossed debris, along with other, larger, fragments of sponson, hull armour, and coils of sense array. The boy mentally reassembled the super-heavy vehicle. It was long, low-slung over a bed of enormous tyres and nail-studded tracks, with a low centre of gravity that nothing short of a once-in-a-millennium storm would put onto its side. To the boy’s intuitive understanding it was obvious that the monster had been attacked. The warping of the armour shell was consistent with that of a plasma blast. The body he had discovered had probably been crewing one of the sense nests before being thrown clear by the explosion. They would have been killed in the blast or expired shortly after when their exo-armour’s umbilicals had been torn, severing them from their vehicle’s environment.

The boy withdrew his hand.

The dust buried the face anew.

He looked again over the wreckage, largely succeeding in ignoring the growls of complaint from his belly.

He subsisted on a diet of sand, supplemented by whatever minerals and metals he could scavenge. His physiology was able to metabolise whatever inorganic material he could ingest, but even scraping the organic tissues from the cyborgnetic ghouls and skin-wearing demimachinic reavers he could run down and kill did little to soften the pangs. The last time he had been truly sated was when he had slain the last fragment lord of the Subliminat. He had broken into their amnioesis vats, feasted on amino acid slurries and lipid pastes until he had been too full to move so much as an eyelid, but even that banquet had not satisfied his metabolism for long. In a way, the boy almost liked the feeling of hunger. It was like a spirit familiar, keeping him focused, keeping him sharp.

If not for its growls, he might have ignored the vehicle wreck and carried on south.

He considered breaking open the corpse’s exo-armour and devouring the meat inside, but he did not. The boy was not entirely sure why, except for that haunting familiarity of face and form. He hoped he would not regret it. He knew he could not guarantee that the body would still be there when he returned.

With a creak of metal, he rose.

Even by the definitions of later years his armour would be considered a masterpiece, limited only by the materials available to him and the tools he could obtain to work them, but not by the visionary genius that underpinned the whole. Adamantium plates were bolted together with bronze rings, ribbons of kineto-mimetic crystal chemically welded to sheets of ultra-hard glasteel. The tapestry of colours and materials unavoidably left parts of his body bare. His left forearm, both legs, his hands, his head. His eyes shone like silver coins. His hair was rugged and black.

The wind broke against him with storm force and the boy set his jaw, enjoying the sensation of its pushing, clawing, his muscles bunching and resisting.

Winning.

He drove the haft of his weapon into the sand.

It was best described as a bardiche. The long pole had originated within the spinal cabling of the seer-king of the storm giants. The curved blade had been the claw of a phasewraith. It seemed to have retained some of its transdimensional properties even after the boy had torn it from the ghost machine and it had blended itself to the weapon shaft as if moulding itself to the boy’s vision. He had discovered any number of ranged firearms in the desert, powerful solid projectile weapons, devices that harnessed exotic forms of matter and every type of energy his innate genius could conceive, and had assembled several of his own design from found parts. He had built conversion blasters powered by electromagnetism and autocannons to fire bullets of compacted sand. But however much ingenuity he bent to the task he had not been able to craft a weapon that could kill as reliably or well as a blade wielded with his own two hands.

The boy crunched over the first rank of wind-tossed debris as he walked, the tear in the super-heavy crawler’s side gaping dark and savage, and curiously enticing.

No corpse stayed unpicked for long.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Adrian Smith.

Scions of the Emperor © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2020. Scions of the Emperor, 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: 978-1-78999-374-5

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