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‘Since Molech, brother, you have lost your good humours.’ ‘Since Molech, there are no good humours. I am become vengeance, the destroyer of creation. So, no, I do not laugh as I once did.’
If it had been a mistake to pretend the warp never existed, it was an even greater one to believe the words of those who dwelled within it.
The Implacable likely contained twice that number of XIV Legion warriors, and there were few better exponents of close-confines fire-fights: other Legions might have a more developed tactical sense, but it took a lot to put down every single Death Guard warrior, and in a tight space with few options for flanking moves, that mattered.
Then he smiled to himself. Even he was capable of weakness, of the human vice of just a little further. That was the root of it all, all this damnation – the satiation of curiosity, the pushing into the darkness. There was no unlearning it. It was written into the genetics of every one of them, the seeds of species destruction, as permanent and furtive as a virus.
‘Know this, son of Magnus,’ said the Khan. ‘There is more under the arch of heaven than victory and defeat. We may fall back, but not forever. We may feint and we may weave, but not forever. We may yet be doomed to lose all we cherish, but we shall do so in the knowledge that we could have turned away, and did not.’
‘We remained true,’ the Khan said. ‘They can never have this, not if they burn all we ever built and scorn us through the dancing flames. You hear me? We remained true.’
‘But you need not these names, oathbreaker,’ he rasped, bloodily, hungrily. ‘For you, I am only retribution.’
‘Why, my lord?’ the khan laughed, poised for the coming strike. ‘Atonement. At last.’ Mortarion readied his scythe. ‘No such thing exists.’
