Corax by Gav Thorpe

Author:Gav Thorpe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2016-08-15T08:53:51+00:00

Fifteen

Carandiru

[DV +2.5 hours]

The last two survivors fled down the corridor, not looking back. Corax dashed after them, long strides assisted by half-opened wings so that he seemed to glide between every step. Reaching his prey, he drove his armoured hands through their backpacks, shattering vertebrae, and lifted them both from the ground. Their panicked flailing caused him no difficulty.

Another door opened to his left as he tossed their twitching bodies aside. He turned to see several Raven Guard, weapons at the ready, with Arendi at their head.

‘Follow me,’ said the primarch. He turned his back on the new arrivals to head down the corridor towards the main chamber of the keep.

A cold rage burned through the primarch at the thought of Nathian’s betrayal. It was not the notion that a Raven Guard might side with Horus that drew his ire; intellectually Corax understood there would be warriors from his Legion who had fallen to the temptations of rebellion. With Nathian the treachery seemed personal. Corax had favoured Nathian over doubts keenly expressed by others, taking him in to the inner circle of the rebellion on Lycaeus and, later, bringing him into the Raven Guard against the objections of others.

Perhaps that was what angered Corax: that he should have known better. Nathian’s betrayal was the primarch’s pride staring back at him, an embodiment of Corax’s refusal to back down, so often a boon but on occasion a terrible vice.

With these thoughts burning through him the leader of the Raven Guard cut and smashed his way through the scarlet-uniformed soldiers he found in his path, barely giving them a second thought. He gave more mind to the cracks and holes and burns of his armour and the soreness of the wounds within; reminders of how close Nathian had come to killing his former master.

The inner sanctum was located underground, reached by several sloping corridors. Corax stopped to despatch Arendi and the remaining bodyguards to cut off escape, but the primarch knew that Nathian would be waiting for retribution. There had always been a nihilistic streak in the traitor, which Corax had hoped loyalty and dedication to new duty would erase.

Now that he was unfettered by oath or fraternity, Nathian’s less favourable tendencies had come to the fore.

Corax descended to the next level and then paused. Nathian had boasted that Corax had been easy to predict. Did the renegade have some other welcome planned for the primarch in his headquarters? It seemed very likely, but unless Nathian had created a whole brigade of New Men to wait in ambush with a forge world’s worth of experimental weapons – and evidence suggested that was not the case – Corax could not foresee what threat the former legionary posed.

The hydraulics of the door rumbled open at Corax’s approach. Through the doorway the primarch could see Nathian, his back turned, hunched in front of a bank of screens. Lights glimmered from his black armour and his face was lit by the images on the displays. Corax

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