Ghosts Speak Not and Patience - James Swallow by Warhammer 40K

Author:Warhammer 40K [40K, Warhammer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785724299
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2016-01-11T15:52:59+00:00

It is not a lie to say that I expect to find my former commander dead amidst the wasteland we have made of Nolec Trinus.

The bombardment of the northern continent by twenty thousand Imperial artillery batteries has turned every inch of it into murdered grey earth and heaps of rubble, tilled by a week-long rain of ordnance. How must the Noleci have felt to see their sky blacken as a wall of shells descended? I wonder, in those brief seconds before the first of them landed, did the Noleci realise the depth of their betrayal? Did they understand that this was the consequence of their choice?

They all died, of course, as was fitting. The last of them – those few that managed to survive – emerged from deep-earth bunkers set many kilometres beneath the surface, and attacked us with all their might. We gave them the end they craved. We silenced their cries of hate with our guns.

This is not the first world I have stood upon where a populace has sided with the Arch-traitor Horus. I regret that it will not be the last.

We are walking now, up the hill of rubble that is all that remains of Nolec’s First City. It weathered the attack best, having been protected by a massive void shield – but even that eventually failed under the iron rain. It is just as dead as everywhere else, but here you can actually make out the stubs of shattered buildings, where elsewhere the heaps of cracked stone hint at nothing.

I lead. Following me is the lieutenant and his platoon. They are as drab in their armour as I am in mine. It’s the dust, you see. It coats everything.

I glance at him, the ruby eye-slits of my beaked helm scanning the hard planes of his face. The dust makes him a ghost. It flattens his features, rendering him nondescript. The dried blood from his wounds is caked with it too, as are the blood-smeared faces and breastplates of all his troopers. The Noleci tried very hard to take us with them to their graves.

Only the winged skull across the brow of the lieutenant’s headgear seems to stand out. Before landing here with me, he looked like a man. And before that, before he accepted the same bargain that I did, he looked like any other soldier of the Imperial Army.

But now he and I are different. Our colours have been bled from us. We are grey. The Regent of Terra plucked us from the continua of our lives; he made these men into his elect, dubbing them as his Chosen.

And I? There is no name for what I am. Fallen son? Dusk Raider? Loyalist? Death Guard? I am all and none of those things. I am only Helig Gallor.

The lieutenant and his soldiers call me a ‘Knight Errant’. It suffices.

‘Look there,’ says one of the troopers. She’s pointing through the wreathes of smoke that wash over the land. ‘A ruin.’

I am almost amused by her words.

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