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Severed – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

‘Remember Yama, old friend?’ said the nemesor, with a wistful sigh. ‘Those blasted swamps… eating bugs… wading through filth… but we made what we could of things, eh? Messy as it was, I sometimes think we were our best selves back then.’

Vargard Obyron grunted: the barest reply, like the grating of shifted stone. Stars had lived and died in the time since he had bothered to verbally acknowledge his master’s reminiscing.

‘Too many think war to be a matter of will,’ Zahndrekh continued, gesturing at the fire-streaked sky beyond the capital barge, as if addressing a crowd only he could see. He might have been, for all Obyron knew.

‘And indeed, Yama was a battle of wills, was it not? Ours, and that of the separatists… a great contest to see who could stick it out for longest.’ The nemesor sighed again, although no breath moved from his body. ‘But will alone does not make a warrior, Obyron! We could have seized Yama in days, had we fought dirty – and the enemy could have held it for years, had they not conceded when honour demanded. But then, who would any of us have been afterwards, eh? Will without honour is nothing, I’m afraid. And I’m beginning to wonder if our current foe, clinging senselessly to the threshold of defeat as they are, has forgotten that spirit of honour.’

It went on and on. Obyron’s eyes could not close, but he dulled his oculars and his auditory transducers for a moment, in what passed for brief respite. With the nemesor just an indistinct blur, and his voice reduced to a muted drone, it was almost as if they were back on Yama, when these same interminable sermons had seemed fresh and inspiring. For that short moment, Obyron felt a glimmer of what might have been longing, but was probably just sadness. No matter. To feel anything, these days, was bliss.

But then a bloom of fire in the middle distance snapped his senses back to perfection, and the feeling was snatched away. They were, after all, a long way from Yama now.

An enemy bulk lifter, lumbering to reinforce the front line, was dying. Hammered by the Sautekh guns, its primitive shields had collapsed all along one side, exposing its fragile hull for a fraction of a second. That was all it took. Turning at speeds that would have collapsed the innards of a mortal pilot, a trio of Night Scythes broke off from their attack run on the enemy guns, locked into a new formation, and screamed towards the stricken lifter. The crescent-shaped fighter craft fell into a tight spiral as their guns charged, leaving a triple helix of superheated exhaust in their wake, then spat their lightning at point-blank range. The shots set off a chain of explosions down the giant vessel’s flank, and it listed to one side with a thunderous groan.

‘Ha!’ cried Zahndrekh, rising from his command throne. ‘A fine blow struck! A cheer for our pilots!’ There was no answer. The retinue of lychguard on the capital barge just stared ahead, death’s-head faceplates flickering with reflected fire, as their nemesor rambled on. And below them, labouring across the plain in a tide one million strong, the soldiery marched. Skeletal figures plated in lustreless silver, their oculars aglow with dull green fire, they did not so much as raise their heads as the leviathan ruptured.

This was, Obyron supposed, what passed for glory now. After three years of campaigning, they were on the brink of seizing this system from its usurpers, and adding another star to the domain of the Stormlord. The enemy – the deranged human machine cult calling themselves the Adeptus Mechanicus – had put up a ferocious defence, but had finally been beaten to their knees. The nemesor’s legions were now just fifteen leagues from their primary forge, and while the advance had stalled on this plain for days, victory was inevitable. Under Zahndrekh’s orders – regardless of the depth of the madness from which they rose – it always was.

Obyron surveyed the sprawling plain below them, making a mental inventory of what they had left to destroy. There wasn’t much. He might not have had Zahndrekh’s eye for the flow of a battlefield, but he certainly knew the edge of defeat when he saw it.

Most of the machine cult’s credible assets were gone by now. On the horizon behind them stood a line of wrecks: a trio of the superheavy walkers the humans called Knights, which had strode proudly from the forge gates to meet the invaders, only to have their engines cooked off at range by the nemesor’s artillery. They hadn’t even got close enough to fire a shot of their own, and now their ruins were surrounded by the oncoming Sautekh reinforcements, like islands in a river of molten lead.

What war engines the enemy still possessed were clustered together on a distant ridge, a desperate rabble of ancient guns, coughing out the last of their shells under columns of smoke. Under constant assault from Night Scythes, their crackling shields were shrinking by the minute, popping one by one as their generators gave up. It was only a matter of time before they failed entirely, leaving the lumbering cannons next to helpless.

But still, the Mechanicus had not given up. Indeed, they were still forging weapons for the fight. Behind the teeming trenches of the enemy infantry, a steel river of their own stretched all the way to the forge-city’s ferrocrete walls: four-legged walkers, hulls still steaming from the assembly line, marching straight from the foundry into carnage. The doomed endeavour was admirable in its way – almost a crude imitation of their own ability to recall troops for redeployment. But doomed it was, as it would never be enough to replace losses.

With so little left in the field, the last dregs of the humans’ armoury – all the exotic relics – were now being ferried to the front by transports like the one now slowly collapsing from the sky. A huge tracked thing, almost as large as the lifter that had carried it, had been flown in the previous day – but it had immediately broken down, and been pounded into slag by a bombing run, even as its crew had swarmed over its flanks waving censers.

Since then, not a single lifter had made it within a league of the front without being downed, as the enemy no longer had any combat aircraft with which to contest Sautekh air superiority. The craft now foundering – presumably their last, as it was their largest – had only got as far as it had by virtue of its sheer size.

In the end, for all their pathetic toys, and their obsession with machines, the humans were forced to rely on flesh. Virtually all that stood between them and the capital now were the toiling legions of the Mechanicus’ skitarii, their red robes blackened to the colour of bruises under this world’s fierce blue sunlight. Their weapons sparked and burned their bearers, and their bodies were riddled with radiation damage, either from the miserable world itself, or from their own cantankerous technology. Why, Obyron wondered, would they seek to become one with machinery, when this is what it did to them? Catching the irony of his own thoughts, Obyron grunted in an approximation of a grim laugh. Yes: the humans ought to be careful what they wished for.

Despite all the warped symmetries between the cultists and their conquerors, however, the humans were worse than Zahndrekh’s forces at absolutely everything – except perishing. They were, at least, quite good at that.

There was always room for surprises, however. A shift in the tone of the dying lifter’s engines triggered the vargard’s circumspection protocols, and he found his hand moving to his warscythe as he realised what the humans were doing. Zahndrekh was already ahead of him.

‘Blood and starfire!’ bellowed the nemesor, thrusting his staff towards the vessel. ‘The dogs are steaming ahead!’ And sure enough, they were. Rather than attempting a controlled landing as it fell from the sky, the bulk lifter was picking up speed, plunging forwards with all power driven to its crude engines. On its current heading, it would strike the heart of the Sautekh lines right beneath the nemesor’s barge. It was a very… human stratagem.

Obyron ran a rapid divination on likely debris trajectories, but found no threat the barge’s shields could not handle. Still, the impact would likely wipe out most of the thirteenth decurion, and necessitate hours of close-quarters fighting with whatever troops survived the crash. As the lifter’s prow dipped towards the trudging horde – who still did not even raise their heads – Obyron readied his blade.

For long minutes after the impact, all was dust and smoke and thunder. Zahndrekh was an indistinct figure in the cloud, raging at the foe’s impropriety in between bouts of coughing and spluttering. Obyron’s curiosity had long since died on the matter of his lord’s respiratory affectations, but he still found them tremendously irritating.

Right now, though, his mind was on other things. Down below, in the ruined ground surrounding the lifter’s carcass, there were new shapes moving in the smoke. Huge, bulbous constructs, they waded from a ragged hole in the transport’s side, bleating out the weird, strident code-songs of their masters. Although armed crudely with solid munitions, they were making quick work of the first phalanxes to move into the impact zone. Zahndrekh barked in frustration, wafting dust from his oculars despite their capacity to see in a thousand arcane spectra.

‘Obyron, old fellow, your eyes are sharper than mine – tell me, what’s that blasted racket? What do you see down there?’

‘The engines they call robots, my nemesor,’ replied Obyron. ‘We faced them before, on the fifth world of the system.’

‘Robots? Pah!’ spat Nemesor Zahndrekh in disgust. ‘How unsporting, to field soulless machines against necrontyr!’

Of course, Zahndrekh himself – as well as Obyron, and every one of the soldiers below – was a soulless machine. They had been so long enough to see mountains worn to sand. But the nemesor either could not – or would not – see it. Once again, the vargard weighed the urge to correct his master against the certain knowledge he would be ignored, and decided against it. And once again, he looked for the opportunity to channel his frustration through his blade.

‘Shall I translate down and see to them, lord?’ asked Obyron, using the tone he reserved for those moments when he wished to gently prompt an order from his master. But Zahndrekh gave a dry, grating chuckle, and held out a palm to stay him.

‘Not so fast – there’ll be no need for my noble vargard to dull his blade on these unworthy hulks. Your place is not always in the fray, oh eager servant! And besides,’ he added, encompassing the silent lychguard with a sweep of his staff, ‘without your company, I’ll have only these taciturn dullards to watch the sport with. No, Obyron, stay with me.’

And so Obyron stayed, and watched the fight play out, as his nemesor held forth on the poor manners of fielding machines in place of living troops. It was maddening – but it got worse. As the enemy’s shock troops rushed forwards to the wreck, consolidating the toehold the robots had won them, Zahndrekh began talking about how pleasant the weather was. The radiation from the world’s swollen blue star was so fierce as to make even the ancient home world seem benign, and would have curdled an unarmoured body in hours, yet Zahndrekh registered it as balmy sunshine.

By the time his master finally began to ruminate on the issue of driving back the enemy, Obyron had resorted to inspecting the capital barge via its maintenance scarabs, hoping to find some minor imperfection to put right. In truth, he was bored. One by one, he projected into the beetling constructs via ocular scry, peering through their optics in search of some error in calibration, but found nothing. Every soldier was in perfect condition, every surface spotless. The whole length of the barge was still, like a garden of dead statuary.

Then something moved.

It was only a flicker, and only for a few thousandths of a second, but to his vargard’s instinct it may as well have been a solar flare. There, against the mass of glyph-carved stonework at the barge’s stern – a shape. A human form: an assassin.

While Obyron had not yet encountered a baseline human capable of seriously challenging him in single combat, specimens such as this were at least good sport. If he had possessed a heart, it would have raced in readiness – this might not turn out to be such a tedious day after all. But while his reflexes screamed for him to turn and activate his blade, he remained still, and kept watch via the scarab’s oculars. Excitement was no excuse for poor form – it would be best to let the mortal get closer, within range for a quick kill.

As the vargard waited, the truth of the situation became irritatingly clear. In the context of this surprise incursion, the enemy’s wild manoeuvre with the bulk lifter made sense. Its primary purpose had not been to carve a hole in the Sautekh lines at all. It had been a feint, designed to tempt Obyron away from Zahndrekh and into a close-quarters fray, leaving his master vulnerable. And he had been ready to play right into it. Until Zahndrekh had commanded him to stay, that is. Another happy accident of nemesorial whimsy, Obyron thought to himself, suspecting the exact opposite.

Switching his scry to one of the warriors wired into the barge, he watched the assassin creep forwards across the deck, thinking itself undetected. And indeed, to the muted consciousness of the barge’s retinue of troops, it was. But Obyron, peering through their oculars, could see it well enough. The human was slight, moving with an odd, liquid gait. And there, affixed to its arm, was the unmistakable glint of a C’tan phase blade. Ah, thought Obyron, retrieving a name from the suite of low-grade engrams he reserved for alien concepts, a Callidus. This would be good sport indeed: the Callidus creatures were fast even by his reckoning, and – alone among humans – were arrogant enough to make use of the blades forged by the necrontyr’s ancient former masters.

In the old days, such a blasphemous intrusion on royal ground would have made Obyron bristle, but he had seen too many such transgressions over the years to really care any more. Indeed, this would be his sixth Callidus, if his engrams were to be trusted.

‘What should we do about this damnable robot business, then?’ queried Zahndrekh, tapping metal fingertips on the prow rail as he observed the fight below. The question was directed at Obyron, but he knew he was not expected to answer – he had ever been the silent partner in the nemesor’s thought process.

Zahndrekh continued.

‘See, their troops are concentrated in the shadow of the wreck. We could always pull back, let them overextend themselves. Or perhaps we should keep their backs to the steel, and see how much they’ll commit to the foothold. What do you think, old friend?’ As Zahndrekh spoke, the assassin stalked forwards, tight as a coiled spring, just paces away from pouncing range.

For a brief, wild moment, Obyron entertained madness. What if he were to let the human stalk three more steps, and leap? He would never have to hear the anecdote about Uttu Prime ever again, or have to sit through another joyless banquet, pretending to enjoy wine from a chalice that had been dry half of eternity. He might even, at long last, see realisation dawn in the nemesor’s eyes, as the assassin’s blade sunk in. Would it be worth it all, just to see the old general wake up to reality at last?

But even as he thought this, his warscythe was in his hand, and aglow. Without Zahndrekh to endure, he was not Obyron. And so, for once, he answered his master.

‘Let them commit, my lord,’ he said, in his doleful husk of a voice. ‘Let them feel victory is within reach… then take everything from them.’

The assassin’s head snapped round at the sound of Obyron’s voice, and he exploded forwards, warscythe sweeping in a wide arc. The human dived into his strike, shunting his weapon aside with its own, and the impact of the phase blades rattled the cracks between dimensions.

As the vargard spun round from the impact, the assassin kicked out at his forearm with a force that would have shattered ceramite, but barely challenged Obyron’s balance. If anything, it was remarkable the mortal’s leg stayed in one piece. Still, the slight offset in his equilibrium was enough to buy the creature time for another attack, and in came the phase blade.

Obyron let the strike connect, shaving a strip from his thorax as he swivelled to face the assassin once more. And then he paced backwards, inviting another lunge. He even drew back his scythe, holding it overhead in the ancient form known as the spearfisher’s poise. Sure enough, the human came forwards, swiping at him piecemeal as it weaved around the shadow of his blade. Each cut carved a new silver gash in his necrodermis, but it mattered little. His body would repair itself in seconds; the assassin’s would not. He would only need to connect once.

Zahndrekh, being Zahndrekh, had not even looked around, so engrossed was he in his pondering of antiquated tactics. From the sounds of it, he was trying to recall an amusing mnemonic from his youth.

‘Ah yes!’ said the nemesor, with a satisfied sigh. ‘That was it – Take a drubbing, let them advance… wait for the moment… seize your chance! And I do believe this is our moment, dear vargard. Signal the Doomsday batteries to fire on the wreck, and let’s be done with this.’

‘As you wish,’ answered Obyron, wishing he had teeth to grit, as the assassin made a feint and dived sideways, hoping to get between him and his master. It was tempting to channel his frustration into a flurry of blows there and then, but he hadn’t kept Zahndrekh alive this long by acting rashly. So he cast an interstitial command to the batteries as ordered, and circled round to face off against the interloper once again.

As the human ducked in and out of his range, slicing shards from his body, Obyron found – to his profound irritation – that he had the nemesor’s accursed rhyme in his head. Take a drubbing… he thought, as he felt the distant rumble of the guns charging. Let them advance… wait for your moment…

And there it was. The human’s ankle wobbled on a chunk of loose stone – an imbalance so small mortal eyes would have missed it. But living death had its advantages, Obyron supposed. Quick as a striking snake, his scythe came down, driving straight through the assassin’s leg and pinning it to the floor. In the same instant, the Doomsday cannons fired, drenching the sky with actinic light as the wreck below was obliterated.

Releasing his grip on the scythe, Obyron switched his oculars to wavelengths far beneath the visible, and surged forwards onto the assassin. Blinded by the artillery’s fury, the creature was helpless to avoid his backhand swipe, and fell to the deck with its chest half-flattened. Obyron slowed his chronosense, allowing himself the briefest instant to savour his victory, before bringing his heel down onto the assassin’s head. A second stamp saw the skull crack, and a third smashed it flat in a gush of blood. It was the death it deserved.

‘A brilliant stratagem as ever, my liege,’ rumbled Obyron, once the echoes of the explosion had begun to fade.

‘Well, quite,’ answered the nemesor, pleased with himself, as he peered over the prow rail at the inferno below. ‘Now come, and let’s watch the fire together.’

With a rare sigh of his own, Obyron picked up the carcass of the interloper – he couldn’t allow it to stain the royal barge any longer than necessary, after all – and trudged over to his master. As he dumped the body over the rail into the conflagration far below, Zahndrekh gave him a queer, sidelong look, and chuckled to himself.

‘Glad you stayed?’

Obyron did not need to reply.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2019.
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 Rhys Pugh.

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