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The Vorago Fastness — Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The Vorago Fastness

David Annadale

‘To be seconded to the Deathwatch is a great honour,’ Captain Vritras had said. ‘For the warrior, and for the entire Chapter.’

There had been just enough irony in the captain’s tone for Teiras to feel he could respond freely. So he had. ‘For an Ultramarine, certainly.’

‘And for a Black Dragon?’

‘This must be a joke.’ He had never heard of any brother from a Chapter of the Twenty-first Founding serving in the Ordo Xenos’s force of Adeptus Astartes.

Vritras’s smile had been tight-lipped, grim and bitter. ‘Of course it is a joke,’ he had said. ‘The Inquisition is famous for its sense of humour.’

Sense of humour? Perhaps not, Teiras thought now as he approached a massive set of doors aboard the Inquisition battle cruiser Iudex Ferox. But a sense of the perverse? Ah, that’s a different story. And still he looked for the joke.

Beyond the doors was a small theatre. The curving rows of seats descended to a proscenium stage, where a marble lectern was flanked by rows of pict screens and, to the left, a hololith table. There were four other warriors present. They turned to look at him as he worked his way down to take a seat. He ran his eyes over the insignia on their right shoulders, and it seemed to him that here, perhaps, was the punch line. He started to grin.

‘Do we amuse you?’ growled the Flesh Tearer sitting in the front row.

Teiras shook his head. ‘Your pardon, brother. I meant no offence. It is the situation that makes me smile.’

‘What do you see that we don’t?’ the Relictor demanded. He sounded no more friendly than the Flesh Tearer, but had none of the other’s defensiveness. There was a haughtiness to his tone.

‘He sees a pattern, as now do I.’ The speaker sat on the far right and at the rear of the chamber, as far as possible from the dim light of the single lume-strip that ran down the centre of the ceiling. He was the only Space Marine present who wore his helmet, and his right pauldron had no insignia. His livery was of the Deathwatch alone. He was anonymous.

‘So do I,’ said a soft voice. The Son of Antaeus sat a few rows back from the front, and he was a head taller than any of the others. He was one of the biggest Space Marines that Teiras had ever seen. Only Volos, a fellow Dragon Claw of the Second Company, was larger. Teiras nodded to the Son of Antaeus and took a seat beside him. ‘Teiras,’ he said. ‘Well met.’

‘Jern,’ said the other, nodding back. He pointed to the others. ‘The Flesh Tearer is Utor, and the Relictor is Kyral.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘And our shadowy friend tells us his name is Gherak.’ His gaze focused on Teiras’s forehead. ‘You’ll want to be careful. Our sponsor might decide a head like yours should have a place of honour atop a column.’

‘Beauty like mine is a rare thing,’ Teiras agreed, and showed his fangs. From the centre of his head grew a single horn, the gift of an overproducing ossmodula zygote. Like the other mutated battle-brothers of his Chapter, Teiras had moulded the bone protuberance, teasing out the shape it suggested and sheathing it in adamantium. It was conical, and curved to a lethal point. ‘I plan to keep my head where it is,’ he said, and as he held up an arm and flexed his fist down, a bone-blade suddenly jutted out from his wrist. The flash of pain as it emerged was so familiar, he didn’t even wince.

‘I shouldn’t worry,’ said a new voice. ‘Your head is of far more use to me attached to your shoulders.’

Teiras faced forwards as Lord Otto Dagover stalked towards the lectern. The Black Dragon had known the name of the inquisitor whose orders he would be following, but little else. As monstrous as Teiras knew he looked to most mortals, and to more than a few Space Marines with his horn and stone-grey flesh, he was a physical ideal next to the creature that now stood before them. Dagover had so many bionic modifications, he might have passed for a member of the Adeptus Mechanicus were it not for the ostentatious morbidity of his remaining flesh. His ornate power armour was night-black, with silver spines rising along the shoulders and back. He was accompanied by a constant hum of servo-motors, and Teiras wondered how much of Dagover’s original being was encased in ceramite, and how much of the ceramite encased anything at all.

Both of his arms, certainly, were artificial. They were longer than a human’s, had several joints and ended in iron-clawed fingers that twitched at the air as if searching for prey. Above his shoulders, Dagover’s head emerged from his gorget like a malignant tumour. There had been no juvenat treatments for the inquisitor. He wore his centuries and his battle scars like badges of honour and masks of horror. A few strands of grey hair hung like coarse spider’s webs from a scalp that flowed like molten wax off his skull. Oversized lenses replaced eyes in something that was not so much a face as it was a hanging curtain of wrinkled, savaged flesh. Hooks pulled back the cheeks to reveal an almost lipless mouth. Teeth poked through, but they weren’t genuine fangs like those of Teiras and Utor; they had simply been filed to cruel points.

Draped over the inquisitor’s armour, pierced by its spines, was a cloak. It was a meticulously crafted leather patchwork, the different shades of hide suggesting the colours of a noble house. It took a moment for Teiras to realise the cloak was composed of flayed xenos skin.

Dagover’s arms reached out and tapped at the screens and table. Picts of a planet appeared on the former, while the table generated a hololith of an immense fortification with a towering spire at its centre. ‘Your mission,’ he began without preamble, ‘concerns the planet Discidia.’ His words were amplified by a speaker in his gorget, but his natural voice was still audible, its cancerous rasp overlaid by the electronic scrape. There was just enough delay to create a sepulchral reverberation; the sound was redolent of all the nuances of pain both given and received. ‘Your target,’ Dagover went on, ‘is the Vorago Fastness.’ He gestured at the hololith.

Teiras took in just how many structures were contained within the walls displayed before them. There was a sprawling, disorganised quality to the layout, as if the buildings had sprung up over time and been built without regard for anything except the convenience of the moment. There was nothing liveable about the fortification, and it was far too large to be barracks. Judging from the scale of the buildings, the Fastness covered thousands of square kilometres. The meaning of the tower and the height of the walls registered. ‘A prison,’ he said.

Dagover nodded. ‘A most profitable one, thanks in part to its quarries. One in particular also has a certain xeno-archaeological interest. My colleague,’ he said with weary loathing, ‘Inquisitor Salmenau has been overseeing a dig site at this location,’ a light began to blink near the north-east wall, ‘and his team has found a xenos relic of considerable importance.’

Kyral sat forwards. ‘What kind of relic?’

To Teiras’s surprise, Dagover answered. ‘Early reports point to a cyranax weapon.’

There was a pause. The cyranax watchers were a xenos race that existed somewhere between myth and rumour. Teiras had heard whispers that the creatures possessed world-destroying technology, but he didn’t know anything verifiable about them, not even whether or not they still existed. Teiras wasn’t sure what was more startling: the nature of the information, or the fact that Dagover had revealed it so readily. The inquisitor smiled, and seemed to chill the air by several degrees. A sense of humour, by the Throne, Teiras thought.

Utor broke the silence. ‘And the problem is?’

‘Other than the fact that Inquisitor Salmenau’s judgement makes him an unfit guardian of that weapon? An enemy force has arrived before us to claim the prize.’

‘What enemy?’ Teiras heard Utor’s temper flare at Dagover’s tease.

‘The ruling council of Discidia has no idea. But their fragmentary intelligence strongly suggests the necrons.’

Teiras fought back a snort of disbelief. A single kill-team against an enemy about which so little was known beyond its utter implacability? Was there more information available than he suspected? ‘What connection do the necrons have to the cyranax watchers?’ he asked.

‘Unknown, if indeed there is one.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Deathwatch: Xenos Hunters in 2012
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Pavel ‘Cynic’ Romonov.

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