I am the Flail of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would have not sent a punishment like me upon you.
— Gengizkan, M2
Taln Zarilah strode silently through the high, yellowing crops towards the thin line of black smoke rising above the treeline.
Neither he nor his companion spoke. The only noise was the rushing sound of the tall plants swaying in the breeze and the soft whine of their ancient, Mark-III Heresy-era armour with every measured step forward.
The dark plume above the trees marked the point where the Imperials had triggered the explosive surprise he'd left for them. It was a position about a kilometre distant, by Zarilah's reckoning. His helm's targeting auspex didn't work. In marked contrast to his body armour, his headgear was a battered Corvus-pattern Mark V with its distinctive beak. It had been a prize, taken by Zarilah from a Dark Angel he'd bested sometime during that slow, interminable defeat that had led inevitably to the Eye of Terror. He still wore it now, despite the fact that the range-finder was just one of several functions that no longer worked. Like all the Tristissera warriors' plate, his was a patchwork collection, the detritus of a thousand wars welded together and many times repaired. Nothing ever worked reliably.
Zarilah didn't care about the auspex at least. He didn't need it. His natural, predator's senses were not as preternaturally sharp as they had been once, but at times such as these — when the hunt was on — they were as keen as ever.
His companion trod heavily on a fallen branch, making an audible crack. The sound caused a panicked bird to take flight, disturbing the stillness with its squawks and the frantic beat of its wings. Both marines froze, becoming statues while they scanned the treeline for any sign of movement.
"Why don't you fire a few shots off while you're at it, Florea?" Zarilah growled through his helm's vox — that much still worked, at least. "I'm not sure the enemy heard you that time, and we wouldn't want to be so unsporting as to surprise them, would we?"
Florea said nothing. He rarely spoke anyway, and never to answer his brother's jibes.
That, Zarilah reflected, was a form of wisdom. Calin Florea occupied a rung far below Zarilah in the unspoken hierarchy of the Tristissera. It had been barely sixty Terran years since he'd been locked in the lower decks of the battle barge, Requiem for Sanity, with two hundred other youths snatched from some benighted hive world. Calin Florea had emerged from the darkness six months later as the only survivor. He never spoke about what he'd been forced to do there, down in the lightless bilges, but the Sanity's crew hadn't bothered to feed their captives. He'd subsequently undergone Sinilus Rand's crude surgery to become a transhuman warrior of the warband, but somehow Florea had never taken to his new, elevated state of existence. Transhumanity had preserved him in a state of perfect misery, unable even to find the joy in killing as Zarilah and the others did. It was almost as if he had abandoned something of his soul in the charnel house of the Sanity's lower decks.
Yet, like all of his battle brothers, Calin Florea was a murderer. He slaughtered mindlessly, like an automaton. Some of his brothers had wondered whether Florea's brutal violence on the battlefield was driven by his wretchedness, as if his inner torment was only ever silenced in those moments when he waded knee deep through the bodies of his enemies. In all honesty, Zarilah didn't really care.
He lifted a hand and motioned Florea forward. His companion straightened and took two steps towards the treeline some five hundred yards away.
A burst of light appeared amongst the trees.
The rear of Florea's helmet exploded in a mist of blood. His power armoured figure remained upright for a moment longer, a smoking hole in his helm where the left eye lens should have been. He swayed, then dropped to his knees and toppled forward.
Zarilah was already moving before his brother hit the ground. Sprinting forward, stims rushing through his system, he felt a joyous near sense of nirvana as he fell into the hyper-calmness of combat awareness.
The shot had been good — outstanding, even. To have successfully picked out Florea's eyepiece at almost a thousand yards meant his adversary was a marksman of rare ability. That also, was good.
Taln Zarilah felt a second thrill spike that had nothing to do with the drugs coursing through his system. Here was a worthy opponent, or at least, one rather more worthy than the ragged conscripts the Tristissera had been butchering for the last two months.
Bursting from the field of high stalks, Zarilah covered the open space before the trees in swift strides. As he ran, his mind performed thousands of rapid calculations. The marksman had fired a hotshot. It had to have been — to have punctured Florea's lens at that range. That meant the rifle's charge was empty. It had been no more than three seconds since Florea's body had hit the dirt, less than four since the shot that killed him. The shooter could only now be clipping a fresh charge into their weapon, and it was already too late.
Zarilah reached the foot of the treeline. Auspex or no, the shooter's line of fire and elevation already told him precisely which tree they perched in and their exact position. He could easily have exposed them and blown them apart with a barrage of mass reactives by now, but that would have been a waste.
Taln Zarilah sunk his gauntleted fingers into the tree's body. The trunk was ancient, broad and easily supported his weight. He began to scale it, each effortless pull of his arms thrusting his bulk upward like an oarsman propelling a boat forward on a calm river. Above him, amidst the foliage, he caught briefly sight of a figure in dark fatigues. He heard the mortal's quickening heartbeat and grinned.
He was going to have fun with this one.