The Shadowmasters Read online

  THE SHADOWMASTERS

  Gav Thorpe

  THE DARKNESS WAS comforting.

  Flames raging across the various districts of Atlas illuminated the heavens, but the streets between her towering tenements and looming manufactories were more shadow than firelight. Chamell had been born in the twilight of Lycaeus's prison-mines; grown to adolescence in the fitful dimness of lumen strips, he had spent his childhood in the darkened cells and corridors. As one of Corax's tunnel-runners, he had learned to navigate the narrow access shafts and maintenance ducts by sound and smell alone.

  The darkness was home.

  When Deliverance had been created, he had thought that the darkness had been dispelled forever. With the coming of the Emperor, with the arrival of Enlightenment, Chamell had been proud to stand alongside his fellow freedom fighters in that glorious radiance.

  Now he fought in the darkness again, so that the traitors would not extinguish the light he had never seen as a child. Horus's treachery threatened to bring tyranny and devastation back to those that had been saved from the terrors of Old Night.

  With Chamell were three others - Fasur, Senderwat and Korin. All were Lycaeus-born, and all were peculiarly gifted. Chamell was nominally ranked as sergeant and the others as battle-brothers, but there was another name for the four Raven Guard warriors flitting from one pool of gloom to another.

  Mor Deythan. The Shadowmasters.

  Be where the enemy desires you not to be. So proclaimed the First Axiom of Victory. The Mor Deythan excelled at this.

  Chamell and his fighters used their abilities to remain unseen. They drifted past the outlying pickets of the skitarii, passing so close at times that they could, if needed, strike down their foes in an instant. Such action was unnecessary; the sentries and patrols detected nothing. Their attention was focused elsewhere. Other Raven Guard and the Mechanicum forces allied to Lord Corax made their presence well known to the renegade tech-priests, drawing attention away from the danger that lurked close at hand.

  The Shadowmasters passed through the enemy lines. They moved from one patch of darkness to another, almost to within firing distance of the great Mechanicum temple at the heart of the floating city. Already they had infiltrated the refinery pipeline feeding the edifice and placed their timed charges. Now they waited in the darkness for the detonations that would herald the next phase of the attack.

  Chamell had been so proud to be chosen as a warrior of the Legiones Astartes. Hand-picked by the primarch himself, from amongst the thousands that had aided in the overthrow of the despots of Kiavhar, he had trained with the others, his body changed beyond recognition by the implants and therapies bestowed by the Apothecaries of the Raven Guard.

  And then, upon the eve of his ascension to full battle-brother, they had come for him. Just as the Librarians had occasionally taken away one of the initiates who had developed latent psychic ability, so the Mor Deythan had claimed Chamell. They saw in him what others could not; they saw the secret gift of the primarch. The shadow-walk.

  The charges blew, sending a fireball high into the skies above Atlas, and Chamell and his brothers moved again, their black armour blending perfectly with the umbra. They were nothing more than shadows themselves.

  A directed electromagnetic pulse from Korin's modified gauntlet overloaded the arc-light pylon at the end of the street, plunging the road into blackness. Moving quickly, the four of them planted handfuls of small but potent plasma mines, like farmers sowing a deadly crop - there was detritus and rubble aplenty to conceal the charges.

  In the distance, blaring klaxons shattered the silence. They were followed by the growl of engines and the thud of heavy armoured feet on rockcrete. A few hundred metres away, more enemy warriors swarmed from the temple to seek out the perpetrators of the pipeline attack.

  It was not long before the column approached Chamell's position. He glanced up and saw familiar, dark shapes moving across the roofs of the buildings, bounding from one to the next in near-silence.

  He whispered a few syllables in stalk-argot, readying the squad for combat. Fasur and Korin prepared their stripped-down plasma rifles. They packed the full punch of an unmodified weapon, but sacrificed charge time for lightweight design; enough to deter an armoured foe but not designed for prolonged combat. Chamell's and Senderwat's missile launchers were of equally slimline construction. Lack of ammunition was no great disadvantage - it was not in the minds of the Mor Deythan to engage at length.

  Half-tracked transports and armoured walkers growled and stomped past the Shadowmasters' position. Chamell drew upon the specialised training he had received all those years ago; he remained motionless, becoming one with the shadows. Gunners in cupolas looked straight through him as they passed, seeing nothing, swinging their weapons to cover other directions.

  It was quirk of the gene-seed, the Apothecaries had explained. In every generation of Lycaeus-born Raven Guard, there were a handful that carried more than just the standard genetic code of the XIX Legion. This explanation had never quite sat right with Chamell or the other Shadowmasters - surely a mind as brilliant as Corax's would be able to find the tiny mutation, the quirk that set the gifted apart, and isolate it for future exploitation?

  Between themselves, they had their own whispered theories. A splinter of Corax's soul within them, perhaps? Even though no one tended to speak in terms of 'souls' anymore, the fact that the primarch was capable of removing himself entirely from the perception of others was an open secret amongst the Raven Guard. So too was the existence of the Mor Deythan. No one spoke of either to outsiders.

  Special reflex technology, they told everybody else. Miniaturised. Highly temperamental.

  The truth was much simpler: darkness was their home, and in darkness the Shadowmasters could not be seen.

  The great irony of their kind - an irony taught to them by Corax himself - was that in order to bring illumination to others, one needed to embrace the darkness. Not the darkness of the spirit; in his heart Chamell held true to the light, to the sun's warmth that he had never known as an infant.

  No, this was a darkness made by others. To break the darkness, one had to engage it, become easy with it, and destroy it from within. This the Raven Guard knew well, and the Mor Deythan better than most. While the plaudits and glory went to those that marched to war surrounded by the pageantry of the Legion, the Shadowmasters sneaked and slinked. In victory they made the light a little brighter, and that was reward enough.

  Much like today. While Atlas burned, in the smoke and grime the Shadowmasters patiently waited for the right moment to strike.

  When several of the half-tracks and walkers had passed, Chamell sent the trigger signal. Plasma erupted along the street, engulfing the lead elements of the column, cracking open ceramic plates and searing through metal and flesh. Half a kilometre away, Agapito launched his attack, his warriors descending upon the enemy with furious bolter fire and a storm of grenades.

  Still the Shadowmasters waited while the traitor skitarii tried to reorganise, utterly unaware of the unseen foe in their midst. Chamell watched as Agapito's warriors moved along the column from the rear. They took out each of the walkers in turn, methodically butchering and smashing everything in their way.

  The enemy responded, sending out reinforcements from the temple to aid their stricken comrades. Agapito and his warriors began to withdraw, and the time to act had come.

  Opening fire with plasma and missiles, the Mor Deythan struck from behind, tearing through the newly arrived skitarii. Caught between the escaping Raven Guard and the new enemy in their midst, the tech-priests' warriors were cut down by the dozen. Multi-turreted walkers and transports exploded, and rockets sent bursts of shrapnel through the ranks of infantry.
r />   As suddenly as they had attacked, the Shadowmasters ceased.

  Burning wreckage and bodies littered the street. The fires were spreading, chasing away the darkness, and the enemy were gathering their numbers. It was time to enact the First Axiom of Stealth: Be other than where the enemy believes you to be.

  Falling back, Chamell and his companions sought out the shadows, slipping away into their dark embrace once more.

 

 

  Gav Thorpe, The Shadowmasters

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