Huron Blackheart: Master of the Maelstrom by Mike Brooks

Author:Mike Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2022-03-28T13:38:45+00:00

ELEVEN

Kastelan combat automata were never designed to fit into a Stormbird gunship, but Huron insisted, and Griza Dallax has clearly already learned her place sufficiently not to argue. So it is that the datasmith’s maniple of cybernetic war machines has taken up uneasy station in the passenger hold, opposite Huron and his five huscarls, and the nine members of the squad who call themselves The Scourging. Their leader is the former Black Legionnaire Huron saw earlier, who salutes him with a fist thumped into his breastplate. Despite abandoning his old allegiance, he sports a high topknot not dissimilar to that worn by the Warmaster. Huron eyes him.

‘You’re not an original Cthonian, are you?’ he observes.

‘No, Lord Huron,’ the Space Marine replies thickly. His tongue is too large for his mouth, his flesh is slightly scaled, and the tips of two tusks are just beginning to protrude from the end of his jaw. ‘I was forged for the first assault on Terra.’

Ten thousand years old, Huron muses with grim humour, and this warrior’s command consists solely of another eight of his own kind. Huron has lived for over four hundred years, but even his enhanced mind can barely comprehend the thought of a hundred centuries. Still, he is reasonably certain that had he lived for so long and achieved so little, he would have surrendered to despair.

Then again, for all the fact that the First Legions are so proud about turning on the stifling mindsets of the early Imperium, many of the individuals still think in no more complicated terms than battle and killing. For those who have given themselves over to Khorne, that is practically all they can ever think of.

‘What is your name?’ Huron asks. A warrior who believes his commander takes an interest in him will fight harder, in order to impress.

‘Yariel, lord.’

‘Heed me well, Yariel,’ Huron says. He does not need to raise his voice to ensure his words reach the rest of the squad; their enhanced hearing will suffice. ‘The Apostate must not reach what we seek before me.’

‘Will you be leaving your guards behind then, lord?’ one of Yariel’s squad asks, with a rough laugh. Tagron growls in response, and the tension in the Stormbird rises a little, but the warrior is not without a point: the ancient Terminator suits of Huron’s huscarls are marvels of ancient engineering that can withstand all but the heaviest gunfire and turn even the keenest blade, but they are ponderous and slow.

However, Huron is not much quicker himself, these days.

‘I will not, because I have no need to make compromises,’ he says calmly. ‘I have stated my expectations – see that you live up to them.’ The warrior who spoke is helmed, so Huron cannot see his face, but his body language subsides a little. Insubordination might be a more frequent occurrence within the renegade legions than it is in their Imperial counterparts, but the punishments for it can be considerably more capricious and severe.

‘Ready to launch, master,’ Carazzalan says into his ear.

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