A More Perfect Union by Rich McCormick

Author:Rich McCormick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2022-05-11T14:20:34+00:00

About the Author

Rich McCormick is a writer and videogame producer whose love affair with the worlds of Warhammer began when he was handed a small plastic ork at a very tender age. He used to live in Japan, but now he lives in Yorkshire, with his wife and son. ‘Knife Flight’ is his first story for Black Library.

An extract from Fabius Bile: Primogenitor.

Oleander Koh strode across the dead city, humming softly to himself.

The dry wind scraped across his garishly painted power armour, and he hunched forward, leaning into the teeth of the gale. He relished the way it flayed his exposed skin. He licked at the blood that dripped down his face, savouring the spice of it.

Oleander’s demeanour was at once baroque and barbaric. It was fitting, given that he had left a trail of fire and corpses stretching across centuries. His power armour was the colour of a newly made bruise, and decorated with both obscene imagery and archaic medicae equipment. Animal skins flapped from the rims of his shoulder-plates, and a helmet crested with a ragged mane of silk strips dangled from his equipment belt, amongst the stasis-vials and extra clips of ammunition for the bolt pistol holstered opposite the helmet. Besides the pistol, his only weapon was a long, curved sword. The sword was Tuonela-made, forged in the secret smithy of the mortuary cults, and its golden pommel was wrought in the shape of a death’s head. Oleander was not its first owner, nor, he suspected, would he be its last.

Unlike the weapon, he had been forged on Terra. As Apothecary Oleander, he had marched beneath the banners of the Phoenician, fighting first in the Emperor’s name and then in the Warmaster’s. He had tasted the fruits of war, and found his purpose in the field-laboratories of the being he’d come to call master. The being he had returned to this world to see, though he risked death, or worse, for daring to do so.

He had been forced to land the gunship he’d borrowed some distance away, on the outskirts of the city. It sat hidden now among the shattered husks of hundreds of other craft, its servitor crew waiting for his signal. There was no telling what sort of defences had been erected in his absence. And while he’d sent a coded vox transmission ahead, asking for permission to land, he didn’t feel like taking the risk of being blown out of the sky by someone with an itchy trigger-finger. The few occupants of this place valued their privacy to an almost lunatic degree. But perhaps that was only natural, given their proclivities.

His ceramite-encased fingers tapped out a tuneless rhythm on the sword’s pommel as he walked and hummed. The wind screamed as it washed over him. And not just the wind. The whole planet reverberated with the death-scream of its once-proud population. Their delicate bones carpeted the ground, fused and melted together, though not from a natural heat. If he listened, he could pick out individual strands from the cacophony, like notes from a song.

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