[Iron Warriors 02] - Iron Warrior by Graham McNeill

Author:Graham McNeill [McNeill, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2012-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

High in the shadowed roof beams of a metal fabrik in the eastern reaches of the Via Rex, Ardaric Vaanes leaned against a heavy iron stanchion. His helmet sat before him on the wide girder, and he took a deep breath of air. It tasted of metal shavings and the warm, animal reek of the loxatl, but the chance to remove his helmet was too good to pass up. This deep in the star fort, atmospheric integrity had not been compromised and even the stale taste of recycled air was like a refreshing mountain breeze in his lungs.

Far below, huge piles of refined metal covered vast areas of the floor between the dormant forges and idle milling machines. Further along the girder, the Newborn watched the surviving loxatl with rapt attention. The lizard-like beasts clung to the iron girders, as dormant as the machinery below, and their chameleon-like skin rippled through shades of darkness as the light changed.

While Honsou and his Iron Warriors laid siege to the Gauntlet Bastions, Vaanes, the Newborn and the loxatl had taken the fight to the Imperials in a shadow war behind the front lines. Day and night, they sabotaged communication nodes, blew power relays, generators and void arrays. With looted weapons and explosives they set improvised traps that claimed the lives of hundreds of enemy soldiers.

Supply trains, repair crews and isolated patrols were ambushed and killed, and now the Imperials never travelled without an escort of heavily armoured vehicles. Hundreds of men had been drawn from the front lines to guard vital locations, and Vaanes could almost taste their fear in the air. Something in the dark was hunting them, and the terror of that unseen foe was scraping at their nerves like a rusty blade.

Realising the enemy had infiltrated their rear echelons, the Imperials sent scout patrols to seek them out, tough soldiers schooled in working behind the lines. They were good, the best of their regiment no doubt, but their prey was a hunter trained since birth to be like a shadow himself. Ardaric Vaanes had been Raven Guard, a warrior first and foremost, but haunting the shadows, striking from ambush and killing in the darkness, he was in his element, and there were no finer hunters of men than the scions of Corax.

He glanced at the bare plates of his shoulder guards. Once they had proudly borne the heraldry of the Raven Guard, a winged white hunting bird. A moment of madness had seen that symbol’s meaning and identity stripped from him, and strange circumstance had forced him to adopt a new symbol, that of the renegade; the jagged red cross of the Red Corsairs.

Now, even that was gone and the stained, featureless metal was a perfect reflection of his soul. He was a warrior without a Chapter, a killer without a code and a man who saw a great abyss before him.

A great abyss into which he wasn’t sure he hadn’t already fallen.

Looking at the shoulder guard, he wondered if, one day, there might be a symbol of which he could be proud emblazoned upon it.

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