Champions, All (Warhammer 40,000) by Marc Collins

Author:Marc Collins [Collins, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2019-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

About the Author

Marc Collins is a speculative fiction author living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. ‘Ghosts of Iron’ is his first published work for Black Library. When not dreaming of the far future he works in Pathology with the NHS.

An extract from The Talon of Horus.

In the long years before the Battle of Canticle City, I knew no fear because I had nothing to lose. Everything I’d treasured was dust at the mercy of history’s winds. Every truth I’d fought for was now nothing more than idle philosophy – spoken by exiles, whispered to ghosts.

None of this angered me, nor was I victim to any special melancholy. I’d learned over the centuries that only a fool tried to fight fate.

All that remained were the nightmares. My somnolent mind took a dark joy in casting back to Judgement Day, when wolves howled and ran through the burning city streets. I dreamed the same dream each time I allowed myself to sleep. Wolves, always the wolves.

Adrenaline pulled me from slumber on a lactic leash, leaving my hands trembling and my skin dusted in cold crystals of sweat. Dream-howls followed me back to the waking world, fading into the metal walls of my meditation cell. Some nights, I felt those howls in my blood, riding through my veins, imprinted in my genetic coding. The wolves, even though they were nothing more than memory, hunted with an eagerness fiercer than fury.

I waited for them to melt away into the thrumming sounds of the ship all around. Only then did I rise. The chronometer cited that I’d slept for almost three hours. After remaining awake for thirteen days, even a clutch of stolen hours’ rest was a welcome respite.

On the deck floor of my modest bedchamber, a wolf that wasn’t a wolf lay in watchful repose. Her white eyes, as featureless as perfect pearls, tracked me as I stood. When the beast rose a moment later, her movements were unnaturally fluid, not bound to the motions of natural muscle. She didn’t move the way real wolves moved, nor even as the wolves that haunted my dreams. She moved like a ghost wearing a wolf’s skin.

The nearer one came to the creature, the less she resembled a natural beast at all. Her claws and teeth were glassy and black. Her mouth was dry of any saliva, and she never blinked. She smelt not of flesh and fur but of the smoke that follows fire – the undeniable scent of a murdered home world.

Master, came the wolf’s thought. It wasn’t really a word; it was a concept, an acknowledgement of submission and affection. However, a human – and post-human – mind instinctively processes such things as language.

Gyre, I sent back in telepathic greeting.

You dream too loud, she told me. I fed well that day. The last breaths of the Fenris-born. The crack of white bones for the tangy marrow within. The salty tongue-sting of the proudest blood.

Her amusement inspired my own. Her confidence was always infectious.

‘Khayon,’ came a dull, inhuman voice from all around the chamber.

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