Chapter 385: Old Scores Settled
A mountainous stretch of terrain twenty kilometers north of Throne Mountain.
Dense forest, broken ground, an ecosystem that had been kept pristine for centuries. It had once been royal hunting grounds, where nobles came to stalk game whenever the mood struck. Now it was where the last of the Chaos forces played at guerrilla war.
The canopy grew thick and tall enough that low-orbit surveillance from the warships overhead couldn't spot anyone moving beneath it, which ruled out orbital bombardment. The roads were bad, too rough for tanks or armoured transports to push through.
Loyalist forces generally left holdouts like this alone at first, focusing instead on the tens and hundreds of thousands of enemy troops massed in the open. Small bands hiding in the trees could wait. Their turn would come.
And it came today.
The Chaos remnants skulking in the forest had grown anxious. They could feel the world changing around them. The loyalists were back, the god's power was draining out of the sector, and they themselves were growing weaker by the day. Armour that used to feel weightless now hung heavy on their shoulders. Weapons that had once swung like extensions of their own arms now dragged. Their whole bodies felt sapped of strength.
They knew their reckoning was coming. It arrived that morning.
Kian Voss led a column of power-armoured guards into the hills, encircling the area and advancing at a slow, deliberate crawl, killing everyone they found. Three thousand troops in powered armour, every one of them carrying a lasrifle, made short work of an enemy armed with nothing but melee weapons.
Some tried to hide, in caves, in the underbrush, in whatever strange corner they could find. It didn't matter. Kian's private troops carried individual-pattern auspex scanners, gadgets that looked like comms backpacks but functioned as wallhacks. No matter where the enemy hid, they were found and killed. The braver ones who tried to charge got cut down by las-fire in bursts.
The forest rang with the bip-bip-bip of lasrifles as the circle tightened, smaller and smaller.
In the end, more than three thousand power-armoured soldiers ringed a single cave mouth. A few dozen stormed inside, and after a short burst of las-fire, dragged out a Chaos warlord missing his nose.
Two soldiers forced him to his knees in front of Kian. He looked wrecked. When he lifted his head and saw the familiar face staring back at him, his pupils went wide.
"You. You're not dead."
Kian let out a short laugh.
"Told you I'd come find you. Where's my stuff?"
"Commander, your gear's right here!"
Little Joel and a handful of soldiers hauled Kian's belongings out of the cave. The Demon-Cleaver, the power armour, the bolt carbine, the shield. Everything, all accounted for.
When Kian had died before, he'd vanished into thin air and left behind an empty suit of armour. Gear like that was worth a fortune, so the warlord had kept it close even while running for his life. Every piece was gene-locked to Kian alone. No one else could use any of it. As for the Demon-Cleaver, even without its disintegration field active, it was still a formidable adamantium-alloyed blade in its own right.
The problem was the weight. Over eight kilograms. Not many men could swing something that heavy. At first the warlord had managed, more or less, treating it like an oversized mundane sword. But once the Inquisitor's fleet arrived at Glory, turned Throne Mountain into a crater full of standing water, and destroyed the planet's chaos anchor point, the god's power had waned, and the blessing on him had waned right along with it.
Standing face to face with him now, Kian could see it plainly: the man's muscles had visibly shrunk. He was still stronger than an ordinary human, but nowhere near as vicious as he'd once been. It wasn't just him, either. Every last one of the Chaos troops had withered the same way.
That was the thing about the Chaos gods. Followers could turn their backs whenever they liked, but throwing in with Chaos in the first place was a one-way road. No god of the Warp ever promised anyone security. A man could betray the Imperium and, more often than not, be forgiven and welcomed back into the fold. The Imperium did plenty of monstrous things itself, after all. But Chaos was different. Touch it, and you were as good as dead.
Kian noticed something clenched in the gauntlet of his empty suit of power armour: a brass tube. Luca's flute.
He drew it free and turned it over in his hands, studying it. As he looked it over, he raised his other hand and gave a small wave.
The power-armoured soldiers around him raised their rifles. A short burst of las-fire later, and the noseless warlord, gone.
Over the following days, Kian boarded a shuttle and flew up to the Inquisitor's flagship for deployment, bringing along the three thousand "graduate students" who'd sworn themselves to him and the Knight suits salvaged from the battlefield.
He went to the Sanctum alone, and walked to the Emperor's Shrine. He took out Luca's flute, wiped it clean, and set it down on the offering table.
With that, every debt and every grudge Kian had on this planet was settled. He was ready to move on to the next campaign.
Over the following month, the Inquisitor's troops swept back and forth across Glory's surface, killing more than eight million Chaos loyalists. Whole armies of them, warlords included, were hunted down and executed. The fleet's advanced corruption-detection instruments showed the planet's readings had dropped into the double digits: safe levels. The long cleanup work that remained could be handed off to the local nobility from here.
One day, while Kian was in the cargo hold of the Inquisitor's flagship inspecting his salvaged Knight suits, several Devourer-class transports touched down on the deck. Ten Knight suits and more than thirty squire-suits filed into the ship.
Kian's first thought was: what did the Inquisitor promise to get an entire Knight House, or houses, to fall in line?
He watched Magos Robert personally escort the Knights to a designated bay deep in the ship, walked over, and pulled the Magos aside.
"Hey. Glory's been smashed to pieces. Shouldn't the Knight lords be busy rebuilding at home? How are they still sparing this many Knight suits to go fight at the Forge World with us?"
Magos Robert said:
"What do you think? The Inquisitor promised them something worth their while.
The High King is dead, and this world fell to Chaos. That's a sacrilege of the highest order. If word of it ever got out, the fallout would be severe. The Inquisitor promised the local nobility he'd keep it quiet, and that he'd back their choice of a new High King as the planet's ruler.
You have to understand, this world's High King rode with the Emperor Himself on the Great Crusade. The Emperor personally granted this world a tax-exempt decree. If it ever came out that the High King fell to Chaos, Terra might well rescind that decree, maybe even send troops to garrison and monitor the place.
But as the saying goes: you don't say anything, I don't say anything, and everyone agrees it never happened."
Kian understood immediately. The Inquisitor was pretending he'd seen nothing. The planet's corruption was already dealt with, so the priority now was reinforcing the Forge World next door.
You give me a few Knight suits, and I'll forget all about the Chaos business.
And so the local nobility handed over ten Knight suits and thirty squire-suits, and sent them up to the flagship to go fight greenskin Orks at the neighboring world.
The moment he heard that, Kian's mind started turning. As luck would have it, he spotted the cockpit hatch of the largest Knight suit there swing open, and an old noble climbed out.
Kian hurried over, threw an arm around the old aristocrat's shoulders, and murmured:
"Gramps. You don't want anyone finding out the High King fell to Chaos either, do you?"
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