For a time, following Valeran Mortoc was a mostly silent affair. The hiss and stomp of his footfalls, while of high volume, were the only real sound to be heard. This mechanical march of the Iron Warriors Captain was oddly calming to me. Perhaps it, for its periodic nature, made me recall my time in the Militarum, where the sounds of men marching a thousandfold were commonplace to me. Or perhaps it reminded me of the sound of His Angels, fallen though this one was. Whatever the case may be, I should note I found Mortoc’s footsteps calming, not comforting. I found no comfort for myself in this deranged, defiled citadel which had been so corrupted by the traitor-kin of Man.
I found less comfort still when Mortoc’s tour led me from one great hall into another, and in this one waited many of the Lost and the Damned, as well as a few other Iron Warriors. Upon our entry, my mortal opponents made their hatred of me known at once, spitting out their revilement in heretical slurs I would neither commit to memory nor commit to this scripture of my recount of the scene. “Pay them no mind,” Mortoc said over his shoulder to me. “They are not for you.”
“I think they very much are for me,” I replied in jest. The hatred, yes, was for me. But Mortoc had meant that these human traitors were not something he intended for me to worry about. No, I was confident, even then, that he was saving me for himself. This was a point furthered, perhaps by design, by what came next—something that I could not see coming, for lack of my psykana, but that a being of heightened reactions, like Mortoc, could easily perceive at a glance.
The shot was blocked against the side of a great axe before I even heard the sound of the autogun having been fired. I flinched at the pop of the firearm’s muzzle and also at the ping of the bullet against Mortoc’s power weapon. For Mortoc, however, there was no flinching. Instead, he moved himself between me and my unseen assailant while reaching over me with his axe-wielding arm, for it was that arm that also held the Combi-Bolter on its wrist. With a single roar, the Combi-weapon vaporized a would-be assassin that had not yet tried to kill me, and then Mortoc turned around to kill the one that had. His Iron Warrior brothers, meanwhile, pointed their own Bolters into the crowds on either side of me, quelling the rambunctious jeering to quietude instead.
“Any who mean harm to a guest in our house mean harm to me,” Mortoc proclaimed, voice loud and pronounced, but it was clear he was not shouting or yelling. As he made his declaration, he circled around me, his cloak of braided chains sliding along my waist as he did so and, as a result, nearly toppling me over from its own heft. [Post script addendum: It is here I must confess to a degree of awe for Mortoc, and the Astartes project in general. Their great size betrays their grace—not unlike in regards to Lucene, albeit to an even greater discrepancy. In a way, I deeply envy Mortoc; I see him as having squandered such bountiful gifts, to be what he is but having chosen to become who he is. I do not admire the traitor, but I do acknowledge what he could have been, and in that, I am in awe.] “While he is here you will treat Inquisitor Blackgar with the same reverence that his own citizenry would. You will not obey his demands, no, but you will nevertheless treat him with the utmost respect or otherwise meet as grisly an end as I can muster. Come then, Blackgar,” he said more quietly, turning to me after he had demonstrated his defense of my person. “I have much to show you.”
“And I assume this scene was staged among the rest of your tour,” I suggested, but nevertheless followed him still.
“Why would it be?” he mused, leading me on through the now-silent hall.
“You intend to corrupt me,” I observed. “It is the only fathomable reason I yet live.”
“It is far from the only one, Inquisitor,” he answered. He then glanced over his shoulder to me and added, “But you are keen indeed. Still, I suspect you will not be too difficult.”
“I may surprise you,” I grunted.
“As may I,” he warned me. “Not far now. Just through here,” he told me, leading me from the great hall into a narrower corridor that he, in his power armor, could only barely fit into comfortably. This corridor led around a bend before exiting into a large, rounded room. A semicircle arc of this room was of glass, or some other reinforced transparency, revealing the orange/red hues of the outside warzone. Meanwhile, cages hung from the ceiling of the room or otherwise simply rested upon its floors, among a greasy sop of blood, bile, and oils. This was a prison, though why he had led me to such a place, and why a prison had such a view of the outside world, were both unclear to me in the immediate. There were a few prison guards, all Astartes, that meandered about between cages. Mortoc motioned one over. “Which one is he?”
The guard gestured across the room, and I followed still in Mortoc’s footsteps as he stomped onward in that direction. He led me to a cage covered with an olive-colored tarp, upon which rested a familiar Boltpistol. Mortoc planted his great axe in the ground upon its hilt, where it rested upright without his grip on it. I assume the hilt magnetized to the metal floor at our feet. With his hand now freed, he plucked my Boltpistol from the top of the cage and tossed it back to me. The weapon may have been small for his hands, but for mine—of which I only had the non-augmetic birth one—it was quite large, and I again nearly fell over in trying to catch it. Once I had caught it, however, I made note of its weight—there was a single Bolt in it. Any Commissar worth their salt knew when they were on their last round by weight alone.
Despite such intrinsic knowledge, Mortoc saw it fit to declare such information to me. “Just one Bolt. Make it count,” he told me, and then tugged on the tarp of the cage to pull it off, revealing the prisoner within as Mortoc stepped aside. In a heartbeat, my arm snapped to aiming at the prisoner, though my aim was shaking. Mortoc, laughing, pulled his helmet off and sat it upon the top of the cage where my Boltpistol had been. “Picked him up as he chased in vain. He was not too fond of you, it seemed,” Mortoc explained, gesturing to Lord Inquisitor Kanin, bound and gagged within the cage. Patches of Kanin’s flesh had been torn or seared off, and his head hung low, even as blood-filled eyes locked with mine. He seemed as an animal, beaten within an inch of his life, but alive all the same.
But to me he was the one that had gotten Xavier Gradshi killed. Or Lord Caliman. Or thousands of others. The forces of ours that he ran off with were demonstrably wasted, and I hated him to my core for it. A summary execution would have been fit for him on the field of battle, were I a Commissar and he anything less than an Inquisitor. Mortoc knew this, and grinned. “What has he cost you, I wonder? He, this pathetic excuse of a man, who outranks you? Who held such sway over you and your environment? A rival who loathed you more so than the dregs we just waded through?”
I had no response but to shakily maintain my aim. Kanin, likewise, had no response but to stare at me in silence. How it stung me to know that he had lived where others had not. How it must have stung him to see me relatively unharmed, and with the freedom to act as I pleased, unbound and untortured. I had promised myself, and Lucene, that I would skin him alive, and not long ago, I would have enjoyed doing so. Even then, it was likely I would have gotten some small pleasure from such an ordeal, at a minimum. And in his eyes, those weak, hyphema-enduring eyes, I still saw the hatred of me, the disdain. I did not see Kanin wanting me to shoot him, but rather the expectation that I would. He undoubtedly saw how very much I wanted to. Who would know? sung temptation. It would be free. Another casualty of war, slain by the Bolts of the enemy. And he deserves it all the same.
I pulled the trigger, having spun on my heels, aim now between Mortoc’s recently-exposed eyes. And with a click, nothing happened, and my own gaze fell to the barrel of my Boltpistol in confusion. “Hm. Disappointing,” Mortoc shrugged, then reddened the cage’s insides further with a single shot from his Combi-Bolter. Some of Kanin, now splattered across the scene, splashed upon my boots in turn. As I recoiled in beholding the sudden killing of a Lord Inquisitor, Mortoc picked his great axe up again and, with the side of its blade, swatted my Boltpistol from my grasp, which did a good job of getting my attention back to him. “Why?”
“You misunderstand my hatred,” I seethed. “I hated him, yes, with everything I had. But that doesn’t change the fact that you’re my enemy, and he wasn’t.”
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“Your hatred does not guide your aim?”
“I hate you all the same,” I noted. “It is a matter of the kind of hatred, not the intensity.”
Mortoc looked around the room, gesturing to the other Iron Warriors present. “You would make such a distinction, with a single Bolt to your name, and choose to spare a weak runt such as he in the presence of such might as would end you in turn?”
“In a heartbeat. That is the war beyond these walls, traitor. Not merely on Jaegetri, but through all the cosmos. I am no ally to the likes of Lord Inquisitor Kanin, but I am most certainly, and always, your enemy. You would be unwise to make that mistake again,” I assured him.
“Hm. We shall see. Quite literally so; there is more yet to show you. Come along then,” Mortoc declared, and donned his helmet once again. It then occurred to me that he had only taken it off to pose the option of shooting him in Kanin’s place to me. An opportunity provided by design, just as he had staged the attempted shooting in the great hall prior. I was far from as free as I thought—and Kanin loathed—I was. I was a step behind him still, very literally following the murky paths he had laid out before me. I may not have been chained up and dragged along behind him, but there was no choice but to follow him for now; any alternative was something already calculated for.
A point furthered still by the Iron Warrior that approached him as he made to leave the scene. “Captain Mortoc, sir, we have intercepted vox communication from the enemy. They know he is here.” For the briefest moment, that inspired me with some small hope. But then I realized, in the fractional seconds before Mortoc’s hope-killing response, that this, too, was pre-ordained. I had no business hearing the communique of Astartes, not while they had their helmets on. This conversation was for me, and were it not for Mortoc’s reply, may not have even been true. But as his response was worse than the alternative, I assumed their interception was indeed true.
“Good,” he answered, and in that crushed the glimmer of optimism I had found. “They will be inclined to come here, then, where they will die upon our walls. Raise the Skybreaker.”
“Right away, sir,” the traitor-Astartes nodded, and left to fulfill whatever order Mortoc had just given him.
“You have this all planned out, don’t you?” I seethed from behind Mortoc.
“Of course,” he confirmed with a chuckle. “You are not the only soldier in the war beyond these walls. We all fight and die to kill all the others. Now then, shall we?”
***
Through countless iron halls, Valeran Mortoc led me further into his citadel. Up, down, within, throughout. I could not have retraced my steps if I tried, and the nagging curiosity of where he intended to bring me, coupled with the puppeteer’s strings I knew to be on my hand and feet, kept me behind him still. Eventually, he led me to a great balcony of sorts, an opening in his citadel half-exposed to the outside world. Half the circular room was without a roof, but erected under the half that was covered from the skies was a great pillar of iron. A man—no, another Astartes—was chained to this pillar, the iconography of the Iron Warriors at his back. But the armor at his feet was not of the IVth Legion. It was, instead, red and brass. Two great, flat-plated horns erupted from his helmet on the floor. I knew this chained prisoner, then, to be another enemy of mine—a World Eater of the XIIth Legion. But, also, apparently an enemy of Mortoc’s.
“A small squadron of them attempted to raid this world not long before you arrived,” Mortoc explained to my side, noting my temporary interest in the captive, who seemed not to pay me any mind. The World Eater instead continuously wrestled against his bindings, and devolved into screaming—not out of physical agony—and incoherent shouting as the chains around his body failed to break. I looked back to Mortoc, who I found to be leaning on a reinforced railing of the balcony. “Killed most of them. Some survived, and of those survivors, I have given them what they most desire,” Mortoc explained, and gestured out to the warzone beyond. “A great spilling of blood. The torture, then, is that they are but witnesses to the bloodshed hence, that it is not their hands that maim and kill.”
“Is this where you hand me another Bolter? Because I would kill this one,” I offered.
“Ha. No. I think it more likely you would aim to free him, in the futile hope that he might kill me instead, even if he would also slay you.”
“Not a bad trade,” I acknowledged.
“I did not bring you here to see him. In fact, we are not here for long. Our destination lies a few rooms that way,” Mortoc admitted, gesturing to an archway on a far wall of the balcony, under the roofed half. “I brought you here to witness what he does. The war we wage, you and I. Yours are fierce, I will give them that. I suspect there is Iron in the veins of many that oppose us, Iron which will sadly be spilled out. You could end that, you know.”
“I have never surrendered, and you most of all will not be the one to change that trend,” I spat back, disgusted with the ‘s’ word as it left my tongue.
“I do not ask for your surrender, Blackgar. I ask instead for your alliance,” Mortoc answered, and the thought was more disgusting for me still. “Oh how it would torture him so,” Mortoc laughed, looking back to the World Eater. “Peace. Peace might just be too much for him to handle. What greater victory is there than the kind that ends all battles beyond?”
“Peace is what you want?” I asked in disbelief, scoffing and shaking my head. “Peace? That’s why I’m alive, is it?”
Mortoc turned back to me, and for a long while, he said nothing, leaving me instead with the sounds of cataclysmic warfare and the barbarous screaming of a World Eater. At last, Mortoc simply stated, “Yes.”
“Well you won’t have it, not while I’m alive,” I assured him.
“I think you do not know the whole picture,” he offered.
“I think I don’t need to.”
“Hm.” Mortoc then reached onto his hip and produced a voxcaster, which he rested upon the railing of the balcony. He then lifted a hand to his helmet, but after a moment returned it to the voxcaster before turning the device on.
%All vessels, commit forward batteries to strike targets around the Citadel of Rust, as provided in Briefing 44.J.CB. All strike teams, converge on the Citadel itself. Command operative is withheld and requires immediate assistance,% Zha Trantos said through the voxcaster, though it was surely not meant for my ears or Mortoc’s.
%We’d be exposing ourselves to the Wolves if we commit to such a strike,% Alejandro Batos replied.
%I don’t give a shit about the Wolves! We have credible intel on the location of our target and the location of a captive Inquisitor! Turn everything else on the planet to a smoldering crater or a sheet of glass, because nothing else matters! You can tell the Wolves to besiege the Citadel too if they want, or otherwise get off the planet. But I’m not shedding a tear if they stand between us and the enemy and are reduced to molten slag for it. You have your orders, Batos.%
Mortoc then put the voxcaster away and turned to me. “Who is she?”
“Never heard her before in my life,” I shook my head.
“Like hell. The vox comes from the bridge of your ship. What is her name?”
“You’re not having her,” I promised him.
“I want her because she’s worth saving from the Skybreaker,” Mortoc sighed.
“I don’t know what that is, but that you want her is why you’re not going to get her,” I replied.
“So be it. It should be ready soon,” Mortoc shrugged. “Or, now, apparently—so I’m told,” he corrected himself, then raised a hand to his helmet again. “Echoshroud. Confirm.”
“What did you just do?”
“I told you, Blackgar. You and yours will die upon these walls, even if from the void above. This all ends when you give the order for it to stop,” Mortoc explained. “You have one hand. Cover that side’s ear.”
“Why?”
“Because my power fist would otherwise disintegrate your head,” Mortoc explained, then wrapped himself around me while covering my left ear with his non-power fist hand. Then with my skull within his grasp, it was abundantly clear both that he could have killed me in an instant if he wanted, and that he did not want to. I did as he instructed, and covered my other ear. In silence, at last deafened to the World Eater’s screams, I stood impatient, though Mortoc stood far more stoically still than I managed. He was as unto a statue within his armor. After perhaps two minutes of this, an incomprehensibly titanic shockwave rushed over the Citadel, lifting my feet off the ground and thrusting me back. Surely, were either of my ears exposed to it, my head would have popped. And whatever made this shockwave also made a concentrated beam of light that sailed into the skies above Jaegetri, ripping apart and incinerating the orange clouds of the world.
Skybreaker.
When the world stopped shaking, Mortoc released me to my own devices, where I immediately fell forward and puked over the balcony’s railing from the vertigo I had suffered. Standing behind me, Mortoc declared, “Twenty-seven minutes between shots. How many hours has this battle been fought across, hm? How many could I have killed with Skybreaker? I will spare her for last, Blackgar, but if the time comes and your vessel, with her on it, is all that’s left, I will kill her too. I would rather not, but we are at war.” I then managed to look up, over the horizon, where I witnessed the flaming carcass of the Echoshroud fall upon a faraway land. “Until we are allies, Blackgar, I am Devastation. I am Ruin. I am where good intentions, be they those for your Corpse-God or for the daemon upon a Throne of Skulls, go to die. There is only one outcome for my enemies, Blackgar, and I think you’ll come to agree that it is not productive. Be my ally, then. There is someone we both want to kill.”
“Who?” I grunted out, short of breath and still spitting out mucus and phlegm.
“The man—if he can be called that—with whom we are about to speak. Now come along, and remember: every second that goes by, I am killing everyone you know.”