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Warhawk – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The blade
Handing over
New blood

It begins under stone.

Hidden, folded up in darkness, cold as the breath of winter dawn. The people of Ong-Hashin come for it, as they have done for as long as songs have been sung in their high valley, lodged between the Takal Shoulder and the eastern fringe of the Great Borai Plain. They climb the narrow ways, leather-bound feet slipping against the rock, hauling their own picks and baskets.

The ways down are hand-cut, supported with timber frames. The lintels of those frames are scraped with angular glyphs, made with the same blunt knives they use for prising stones from their mounts’ hooves. These are not high calligraphic marks, but the marks of a hard people, used to rockfalls and landslips. They wish to delve for it, to find it, then return. They do not love the deep places, the cool sweat of the narrow tunnels, for they are Chogorian after all, and like the open wind on their faces.

When they hack it out, it is brittle. Blacksand, they call it. It crumbles in your hand, if you treat it roughly, once out of the earth. A few moments later, though, and it is hard, so much so that you can toss it into a basket and start to work at the lode again. If you hold it up – a chunk the size of a man’s fist – you can see the sparkling fragments within, catching the light of subterranean candles.

Once done, they take it all back down the track, picking their way carefully. It rains often, as the Takal Peaks capture the moisture rolling across the open lands, and the rocks are greasy with moss. This party returns to a settlement deep in Hashin country, perched between pine stands, frigid and mist-clouded. They take the blacksand pieces and haggle with the blademakers. This takes a long time, and is a bad-tempered affair. Those who have laboured to obtain it are weary and need to sleep. Those who wish to take it are anxious to get to work. And the sun is low, by then. No bargains are well made at dusk, the sages say.

The following dawn, and the labour begins. In Hashin, blademakers always come in pairs – a man, a woman. They need to know one another very well. Sometimes they are siblings; more often, bonded couples. The charcoal furnaces are stoked until the flames spit. The blacksand chunks are turned and assessed again, then placed in long-handled pliers. At this stage, the man works the fire, the woman handles the pliers. Both wear thin cotton shirts, despite the chill of the air outside. Inside the forge, it is already punishingly hot, and their exposed flesh glistens.

Once hot enough, the chunks are withdrawn from the fires and beaten. The man takes up a hammer, striking hard. The woman directs him, shifting the red metal over the anvil’s blunt surface. Impurities are beaten out. It is gruelling work, a process that jars bones. The process is repeated, over and over, until the steel starts to purify. The beaten flakes are broken up, doused in cold water, then re-melted and re-struck. Plates are created, stacked on top of one another, then gently placed back into the flames, melted, compacted, re-melted. Both parties scrutinise, checking for flaws.

Neither speaks. If they need to make their feelings known to one another, they tap with a hammer in a certain way, but this is rarely necessary – they are masters of the craft, working by intuition and observation. The steel is folded, again and again, each time refining the metal, hardening it, purifying it. Soon it begins to lengthen, to thin, to extend out into the long curve of a true blade. The hammering is remorseless, clanging out of the forge’s open doorway, keeping the rest of the village awake.

Finishing the blade’s face is done by the woman. She mixes a clay jacket for the cutting edge, using her thinner fingers to press the spatula into the slurry. By then, both workers are weary, having been at the forge for days. When the clay is broken off after more time in the coals, the pattern on the steel is visible. Every blademaker has a different mark – for some, solak blossom; for others, tiger’s claws. The most prestigious, and hardest to achieve, is the lightning spread, forking from tip to scabbard-edge. This one bears such a mark.

Then it is filed, marked, polished, washed. If all is perfect, the blade is wrapped in straw and fabric, and placed in a heavy cart drawn by aduun. A red pennant is tied to a long pole, marking the cart as sacred cargo – it will not be attacked on its journey, even if it passes through tribal lands at war. The blademakers rest at last, their hands calloused, their skin blistered. They will never see their creation again, and receive no payment for their work. The entire village supports them, and they occupy positions of reverence. All know where the swords are destined to find service.

The cart then travels west, descending rapidly before reaching the open country. After many months of trekking across the grassland, eventually the drivers spy the Khum Kharta on the horizon, pale against the whisper of the long grass. They pull up, and prepare the cairn. Stones are piled up, draped with prayer-fragments and incense bowls, crowned with the pennant. The blade, still wrapped, is placed at the top. Then the drivers withdraw, beginning the long journey home.

The following night, it is taken up into the fortress by Legion menials. Once inside the shadowy halls of Quan Zhou, each prayer-fragment is studied, interpreted, then placed in the librarium. From these scraps, the masters of Chogoris learn much of the shifting patterns of the endless grass, and where to draw aspirants from, and how the health of the thousand realms ebbs and flows. The blade – still without its hilt, scabbard or guard – is unwrapped and carried into the forges. None of the painstaking marks made by the Hashin blademakers are removed. None of the tiny flaws – few as they ever are – are removed. This is a product of the people of Jaghatai, not of a machine intelligence. When polished to a mirror sheen, it reflects the authors’ faces in every flash of light from its surface.

A powered grip is added, meticulously crafted onto the steel, bound into it, worked at by hand until the gold chasing cuts smartly into the metal’s surface. The disruptor field is blended, harmonising with the structure of the underlying blade. It will be tested, over and again, returned to the forges many times by the sparring-tutors until the balance cannot be improved upon. The flare of the energy field is bonded to the marks made in its first forging, augmenting them, giving the sword its signature. Thus the labour of Hashin will be witnessed across the known galaxy, as vivid as the lightning it mimics.

Only when all is done can it be passed up to the blademasters of the ordu for final scrutiny. They keep the weapon in their temple vaults, surrounded by ritual guardians, unused, unlit, until an aspirant is inducted into the Legion with a suitable character for the blade.

This one is given to the warrior named Morbun Xa. Morbun Xa is famed, not just for his prowess, but also for his restraint. He is a model of the Path of Heaven, they say. The blade suits him. He takes it with him on the void-ship Korghaz with the Brotherhood of the Night’s Star. It is first drawn against an enemy on the world of Egetha IX, where the ordu is victorious.

During the long years of the Crusade, it changes hands twice, as its bearers meet their end in battle. The great treachery nears its endgame, and now it is borne by Ajak Khan, of the Brotherhood of the Amber Eagle. He stands on the walls of the Palace as they crumble beneath his boots, and calls out curses on those who assail him. He grips the hilt loosely, making the steel dance around him. The skies are black, like calligrapher’s ink. The air is ringing with noise – from the infantry yelling, from the god-machines that have all but penetrated the last solid line of defence, from the thunder of the fixed guns.

Ajak Khan spies his enemy, a captain of Angron’s tragic berserkers, debased fighters he pities as much as he hates, clambering through ruins towards him, followed by a dozen more. In their wake come the hordes, still languishing in no-man’s-land, exposed to the pounding of the guns. Ajak Khan runs, accompanied by his battle-brothers, racing into the close combat he loves. The blade whirls, trailing forks of lightning. It bites, it cleaves, and Ajak Khan cries aloud in pleasure.

Under the stone, on another world, by candlelight, the rock-cutters of Ong-Hashin pause. The flames have shuddered briefly, though there is no wisp of a breeze in the deep places.

It happens, sometimes. They know what it means.

Diligently, they take up their picks, and return to work.

‘Why tell me this?’ asked Jangsai Khan, though he felt that, in truth, he already knew.

Naranbaatar’s face was in shadow, half-lit from below by a cracked sodium tube. The rest of the bunker was dark, hot from confinement, stinking of sweat and mould. The Stormseer’s skin was dark too, scarred from ritual marks and newer wounds, creased with age. The crystals of his armour’s hood glinted, and animal skull totems twisted gently from their fixings on lengths of twine. ‘You should know its history,’ he said.

Jangsai took up the sword. It was a fine piece – a mid-length blade, slightly curved, though less so than the tulwars used by the mounted units. He switched it to the horizontal, looking down it, feeling for balance. Faint lightning patterns were visible on the steel, part of the structure of the cutting-face. He slipped his thumb over the disruptor trigger, already speculating on how the blaze of energy would take its key from those marks.

‘Its bearer–’

‘Died well,’ said Naranbaatar. ‘Much was recovered, including this. Now it is yours.’

Jangsai nodded. No use in wasting it. Powerful, fully functional powerblades were valuable now. Everything was running out, on its last legs. ‘I knew him,’ he said. ‘Ajak.’

That was less of a claim than it would once have been. Almost the entire Legion was clustered together now, their numbers winnowed cruelly, hemmed in behind walls and pressed up against the faces of the enemy. Once-sundered brotherhoods fought next to one another, mingling as their casualties mounted up. At times it felt that there was not a warrior of the ordu still alive that Jangsai didn’t know the name of, or hadn’t witnessed fighting, or whose unit’s history he wasn’t acquainted with.

‘His brotherhood no longer fights,’ said Naranbaatar. ‘The survivors have been distributed. But the deeds have been recorded, and will be taken to the halls of Quan Zhou when all this is over.’

That was one of the hallmarks of Naranbaatar. Jangsai had never heard him boast, but time and again the Stormseer had spoken of plans for the future, nonchalantly, with the certainty of success underpinning it all, and hence the need to move on to the next task. It was all so matter-of-fact – this thing here must be done, and then we must return to what we were doing before. Everything shall be put in order again, everything recorded. It was amusing, sometimes, to listen to it all, as the world around them sunk further into desecration.

‘Then they are inside the inner wall,’ Jangsai said.

‘Within the hour, we think.’

‘You wish me to take over Ajak’s position?’

‘No, that has been assigned to another. I wish you to leave your station – you have new orders.’

‘From you?’

‘From the Khagan himself.’

Jangsai hesitated. ‘We are hard-pressed here, zadyin arga.’ That was as close as he would ever come to pushing back. He had to register something, though – his warriors were dying, and would continue to die, and his place was with them. The unspoken undertone was understood by them both. Why now?

‘We need you to speak to someone,’ Naranbaatar told him. ‘He is not a native of Terra. As we learned recently, he comes from the same world that you did. So that is the reason. I know you wish to fight on here, but, believe me, you will not be deprived of chances to do so again soon.’

Once again, a fractional pause before replying. ‘This is the end, then,’ he said.

‘The beginning of it.’

‘What can you tell me?’

‘Enough for you to perform this task. After that, it depends. We do not know what will be possible yet. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.’

It could still take you aback, that essential calmness. Jangsai knew that Chogorians got angry. He’d seen it many times in combat, and they were terrifying when they really, truly lost their composure, but for the most part they maintained an equanimity that could be as infuriating as it was impressive.

Jangsai looked down at the blade again. Ajak would have been holding it, just a matter of hours ago, maybe. They would have been a seamless pairing, both products of the same background, parts of a harmonious whole.

‘Tell me where I need to go,’ he said.

The world was called Ar Rija.

It had suffered greatly during the terrors of Old Night, and so when the Emperor’s armies arrived during the first few decades of the Crusade, they had been welcomed enthusiastically. Its old industrial base was rebuilt quickly, and within a generation it was contributing handsomely to the war effort. Many regiments were raised for the Imperial Army, a number of which went on to earn widespread fame. By the time of the Triumph at Ullanor, Ar Rija was considered a linchpin planet – one upon which the security of an entire subsector depended, sited at the strategic junction of many established warp lanes, a settled, substantial place.

The Legiones Astartes, the Imperial Fists in particular, had begun to take aspirants from Ar Rija from the second century of the Crusade Age onwards. It had never been a major recruiting world, being generally considered too civilised to produce the optimally brutal Space Marine candidate, but the demands of the all-encompassing conquest meant that every avenue was explored. Only when the civil war broke out in earnest did that situation change. As the scale of Horus’ treachery became apparent, Imperial strategos began a frantic programme of asset-withdrawal, pulling everything they could out of the reach of the oncoming enemy. Ar Rija, for a time, was considered a safe haven. Its Naval yards were reinforced, its regiments boosted, its defences resupplied. Recruiters for a number of Legions turned their eyes towards it, already seeing how desperate things were likely to become, and suddenly needing to make use of every possible means of increasing the supply of aspirants.

It was always a tenuous hope. The process of turning a mortal child into a Legion warrior was a delicate art, honed over many years and conducted in secure surroundings. It could be speeded up, if necessary, and its programmes moved to different locations, but both actions brought risks with them. Even once a number of scattered Legion facilities had been evacuated to Ar Rija, increased aspirant deaths meant that recruitment rates failed to rise as swiftly as hoped. More subjects were sought from the native population, fast-tracked through the usual screening and placed onto accelerated ascension protocols.

Tuyo had known nothing of this at the time, of course. He had been too young. His ambitions, such as he had had any back then, had been to serve in the Army one day – to take ship as part of one of the prestigious regiments and sail into the void in pursuit of the Emperor’s designs. When the officials had come to his parents’ cramped hab-unit, with their strange expressions and odd uniforms, he had thought little of it. Only later, when his mother had burst into tears and his father’s face had lost all its colour, had he begun to realise that something was very wrong.

Those were his last memories of them. It was hard even to remember their faces, now. So much had changed – in himself, in the Imperium. For a while, he’d been determined to hang on to those final childhood images, thinking it important that he had some kind of tether to his old life. As the training programme had commenced, however, and he had undergone the first rounds of mental conditioning, that had become hard. After a few months, he had stopped trying. Everything had been consumed by the changes raging through his prepubescent body – the agonising hormone treatments, the psycho-honing, the relentless physical improvements.

He had had four years of that. Far too short a time, he learned later, to be sure of success. More than half of those he started the programme with died early on. Others fell by the wayside after the first wave of implants. His memories of that phase of his life were hazy now, filled with the impressions of faces he had no names for and places that he could no longer locate. He had been angry, so angry, all the time. They had made him that way, he assumed – pumping him with chems that fuelled his rage. Those had got him through the pain, made him work harder – just for the sake of spite, it felt like sometimes.

But he had learned a great deal. He had learned that the Imperium he had assumed was ever-expanding and secure was in fact on the brink of destruction. He had learned of the Enemy and its ruthlessness. He had learned of the history of the Eighteen Legions and the role each one had played in the entire affair, including the traitors, because you had to know an enemy before you could be sure of killing him.

In other circumstances, he would have completed his training on Ar Rija. Near the end, though, everything had changed again. The war reached his home world, just as it had always been destined to. He was not permitted to fight for it. None of the aspirants were. They were herded into transports and sent hurtling away from the wave of destruction. Now Ar Rija was far behind enemy lines, presumably destroyed or occupied. He hoped the former, with what lingering human attachment he had for the place – you did not want to live under the rule of Horus, not if you had been a loyal world.

So it was that he had seen Terra at last, the centre of all things, heart of the Imperium, and yet already threatened with attack, already vulnerable. The entire place was filled with soldiers, teeming with them, spilling out of every lander and onto every viaduct and marshalling yard, all tense, all terrified.

This was where he would fight. It was where he had been made to fight. He would know no other battlefield, not unless they were victorious here. Those final few months had been the hardest of all – the last implants had had to take, his accelerated training had had to be completed. He had needed to prove himself to the instructors, and then to his Legion, neither of whom could afford, even now, to let a substandard product enter the ranks of the Emperor’s Finest.

He was a newblood. A hurriedly created product of a desperate empire on its uppers. A warrior rushed through both creation and training, given none of the immersion and cultivation that the Imperium had once lavished on its paramount living weapons. If things had not been so desperate, he would never have been changed on Ar Rija. He would never have been transported from station to station, his development interrupted, overseen by instructors drawn from a dozen worlds. Everyone knew it was suboptimal. A few even counselled against the process entirely, acutely aware of the consequences when a Space Marine entered service with a flawed background.

For all that, he had still been proud. He had burned to fight, to demonstrate what he could do, both to himself and to the established members of his Legion. He was neither Terran nor Chogorian, but he was still a warrior, a battle-brother of one of the three Blessed Legions, the honoured trinity tasked with the last defence of Terra. The soul of the primarch smouldered within his own blood. The sacred scar ran down his cheek, zigzagged like lightning.

They had left it a long time to perform the final rite of ascension. When the moment had come at last, he had stood in long lines with many others, all of them mongrels like him, plucked from obscure backwaters and outposts, painfully undertrained, painfully eager. Their armour was bone-white, immaculate, fresh from the forge. The lord commander had arrived by shuttle, making the dust on the open parade ground billow and skitter. He had clanged down the ramp, flanked by ivory-armoured giants in battle-tarnished plate. The skies were blustery and rain-blown above them, yet to be darkened by the downdraught of a million landers.

Tuyo had waited patiently, arms by his sides, tensing his muscles one by one. Spires and defence towers rose up around them, casting deep, cold shadows over the gravel. You could hear the noise of military preparations in all directions – the grind of machine-tools, the grumble of engines, the tramp of marching boots. Everything was on the edge, there. Everything had been poised, ready to explode into violence.

Eventually, the lord commander had reached Tuyo’s place in the line. His name was Ganzorig, a noyan-khan in the Legion’s own reckoning. He was a Chogorian, one who had been fighting against the traitors for seven terrible, arduous years. He had been a seasoned warrior for decades before that. That left its mark on him, like a scent. He looked unbreakable.

Tuyo had looked him in the eye. Ganzorig had looked back, coolly, lingering, as if appraising a steed for purchase.

‘Tuyo,’ the noyan-khan had said eventually. ‘You are of the ordu of Jaghatai now. Your old life is no more. What name do you take to mark your ascension?’

‘Jangsai,’ he had said, without hesitation.

Ganzorig had nodded, satisfied. It didn’t matter to them, where you came from – only what name you took, and whether you gave honour to it. ‘You are one with the ordu, Jangsai.’

Jangsai had waited. One final thing remained to be done – to assign him to his minghan, his brotherhood. So straitened were the times, and so mauled had the Legion been on its return to the Throneworld, that reconstruction was still ongoing, and recruitment was a matter of considerable fluidity.

Ganzorig had given it much thought, as he had with every newblood warrior he’d inducted that day. Hundreds of warriors had been standing there, but the noyan-khan had known everything about all of them – their training records, their confidential instructors’ reports. Jangsai waited in silence.

‘You are of the Brotherhood of the Iron Axe,’ Ganzorig had said, at last. ‘You will not leave it except in death – may it be long in coming, and may glory accompany your deeds until that day.’

Jangsai had bowed. Now he was complete. Now, at last, he was a White Scar.

‘Hai Chogoris!’ he had said. ‘Glory to the Khagan.’ Then, with even more feeling, ‘And a thousand deaths to his enemies.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited - Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.
Internal artwork by Mikhail Savier.

Warhawk © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. Warhawk, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Siege of Terra, 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: 978-1-80026-605-6

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