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More Blood Angels from Black Library

• MEPHISTON •
by Darius Hinks
BOOK 1: BLOOD OF SANGUINIUS
BOOK 2: REVENANT CRUSADE

THE DEVASTATION OF BAAL
A novel by Guy Haley

DANTE
A novel by Guy Haley

SHIELD OF BAAL
A Space Marine Battles novel by Josh Reynolds, Joe Parrino and Braden Campbell

MEPHISTON: LORD OF DEATH
A novella by David Annandale

SIN OF DAMNATION
A novella by Gav Thorpe

LEMARTES: GUARDIAN OF THE LOST
A novel by David Annandale

HEART OF RAGE
An audio drama by James Swallow

VIRTUES OF THE SONS / SINS OF THE FATHER
A Horus Heresy audio drama by Andy Smillie

• THE BEAST ARISES •

THE BEAST ARISES: VOLUME 1
Various authors
Includes the novels I am Slaughter, Predator, Prey,
The Emperor Expects and The Last Wall

THE BEAST ARISES: VOLUME 2
Various authors
Includes the novels Throneworld, Echoes of the Long War,
The Hunt for Vulkan and The Beast Must Die

THE BEAST ARISES: VOLUME 3
Various authors
Includes the novels Watchers in Death, The Last Son of Dorn,
Shadow of Ullanor and The Beheading

• SPACE MARINE BATTLES •

WAR OF THE FANG
A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang

THE WORLD ENGINE
An Astral Knights novel

DAMNOS
An Ultramarines collection

DAMOCLES
Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare

OVERFIEND
Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

ARMAGEDDON
Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire

• LEGENDS OF THE DARK MILLENNIUM •

ASTRA MILITARUM
An Astra Militarum collection

ULTRAMARINES
An Ultramarines collection

FARSIGHT
A Tau Empire novella

SONS OF CORAX
A Raven Guard collection

SPACE WOLVES
A Space Wolves collection

To see the full Black Library range, visit the Kobo Store.

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

THE FURY

DEUS ENCARMINE

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Epilogue

BLOOD DEBT

DEUS SANGUINIUS

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Epilogue

REDEEMED

RED FURY

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Epilogue

BLACK TIDE

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Epilogue

BLOODLINE

REFLECTION IN BLOOD

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Mephiston: Revenant Crusade’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that He may never truly die.

Yet even in His deathless state, the Emperor continues His eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

THE FURY

The power sword falls in a screaming arc, more a thing alive with its own anger than a weapon controlled by his hands. He sees it descend, the fractions of seconds extended by the chem-stimulated processing of his genhanced brain. He sees it at point of impact, the molecule-fine edge slicing though the armour plate of the traitor cultist’s wargear. The momentary flash of sparks as metal is torn apart. The blade sinks into flesh, easy and quick, cutting and burning. Meat-smell. Seared flesh, heavy in his nostrils, triggering scent-memory of a grox butchered for sustenance months ago. The enemy makes a sound that is not a scream, not truly. It is more a moan, a cry of futility. There is understanding in it, now at the end. The cultist knows he is finished.

The blood gushes like wine from a cracked urn, a stream becoming a spray, a jetting, throbbing pulse that pools at the murdered man’s feet. He comes apart, shoulder and arm and half his chest cleaved away, the bone-crack sound as it breaks off.

The traitor dies and the warrior moves on, crushing his opponent’s skull with one great boot of crimson ceramite as he passes. The act is not deliberate, not planned. It is simply that the Blood Angel has finished his task with this particular foe, and there are so many more yet to be killed. A numberless horde, foul of tongue and screaming their black hymns to Chaos. The Blood Angel and his kinsmen will murder them all before the day is done, and soak the earth of this inconsequential world with the spoil.

He is firing the bolt pistol. It bucks in his armoured gauntlet like a living thing, eager as if it could leap from his fingers if so allowed. Echoing crashes of shot blast thunder-calls cross the reeking battleground, and with each expended round a death follows closely. Skulls explode into pink haze. Limbs are turned to red slurry. No moment of kill-power is wasted. It is how he was trained; it is how his primogenitor fought. Fury, marshalled and controlled like lightning in a bottle. The power of rage, harnessed. A darkest of potentials hidden beneath a mask

And yet, the mask may slip. At his side, a brother fights with greater and greater abandon. His knows this man: Celcinan, of the Third. He is far from his unit, perhaps propelled by the fog of war and the crush of battle. But Brother Celcinan does not seem to pay it any mind. He watches Celcinan fighting as he reloads the pistol.

Celcinan has removed his helmet, but not for any good reason that can be intuited. The warrior’s face is drenched in crimson, the back-spray of hearts burst open to the air. His armoured fists end in steel claws, barbed talons that can tear the hulls of tanks. They are smoking with newly spilled blood, hot vapour steaming off them into the cold air. Celcinan is in a fury, and it comes from the Blood Angel like radiation.

He feels it like the aura of an inferno, lapping against him. Rage, black as space. Thirst, red as blood. Celcinan is deep, swimming in it, awash in it. His battle-brother’s anger is something quite magnificent to behold.

Until Celcinan is killed. A brilliant rod of purple light bursts from within the cultist lines as a heavy lascannon discharges at near range. He flinches away, nictating membranes flicking closed over his eyes to protect him from the dazzle-flash. When he blinks back to full sight a tenth of a second later, Celcinan is quite dead.

A charred hole large enough to fit a fist through has cored Brother Celcinan’s torso, penetrating armour, flesh and bone. He topples like a felled tree and sinks into the squelching, blood-thick mud. Celcinan’s last act is to look at him, and something unseen crosses the gap between the two Blood Angels.

That ghostly thing is anger.

The moderated wrath of the warrior suddenly ebbs away and he feels himself fill with a kind of rage that only titans can know. His battle-brother is lost, and now all he wants is to take back the blood cost of Celcinan’s murder. It is a death undeserved, for every warrior of the Adeptus Astartes is worth a thousand of these screaming, mewling whorechild zealots. He wants to take the payment now.

The Blood Angel forgets his bolter; this is a deed to be done close at hand, eye to eye. Those who perish must go to their warped gods knowing who killed them and why.

Bellowing his primarch’s name, the son of Sanguinius hurls himself into the enemy line, his sword becoming a bright and shining blur. Death follows close. The killer with the lascannon is unmanned by the thunder of the Blood Angel’s battle-roar, and not even the hypno-imprints of the dark acolytes that turned him can blot out the sound of such anger and such revenge.

The warrior’s sword goes through the cultist’s sternum and explodes from his spine in a welter of crimson fluid. They draw closer, into a murderous embrace, and by freak chance the traitor still lives. The warrior acts without thought, and with his free hand he rips open the cultist’s throat.

Blood.

Blood erupts in a steaming fountain from his enemy’s ruined flesh, spattering across his faceplate and staining his vision red. It clogs the breather grille, the hot coppery perfume saturates the inside of his helm. His mouth instantly floods with saliva, and he wants nothing more than to tear off his armoured helmet and drink deep of the spill. He savours the desire for that rich taste, and the wine-dark flow of the vitae across his tongue and down his throat.

He feels the mask slipping off his face. The perfect, patrician mask of nobility and humble heroism, the outward eternal character of the Blood Angels cast in the likeness of Great Sanguinius. He feels it crumbling, becoming dust. Beneath, the curse-power of his primarch’s burning blood rises to the surface. The gift of strength and courage that makes him a superlative warrior now turns dark.

Rage, black as space. Thirst, red as blood.

In this moment, he balances on the edge of the abyss. An Angel of Death, cursed and blessed in equal measure, doused in the vitae of those deserving his fury.

The battle without will be won this day; victory was never in doubt. The battle within…

It lingers still, hidden beneath the mask.

DEUS ENCARMINE

CHAPTER ONE

Amid the graves, it was difficult for Rafen to tell exactly where the sky ended and the land began. He became still for a moment, halting in the shadow of a large tombstone in the shape of a chalice, the muzzle of his bolter calm and silent at his side. The wind never ceased on Cybele; on it came over the low hills and shallow mountains that characterised the planet, moaning mournfully through the thin stands of trees, rippling the grey-blue grass into waves. The gently rolling landscape flowed away from him toward an endless, unreachable vanishing point, an invisible horizon where grey land met grey sky. The distance was lost in the low clouds of stone dust that hovered overhead, stained like a great shroud of oil-soaked wool. The haze was made up of tiny particles of rock, churned into the sky by the torrent of artillery fire that had etched itself across the planet hours earlier.

Cybele wailed quietly around Rafen. The wind sang through the uncountable numbers of headstones that ranged away in every direction as far as his visor’s optics could see. He stood atop the graves of a billion-fold war dead and listened to the breeze as it wept for them, the familiar hot battle-urge of caged frenzy boiling away beneath the veneer of his iron self-control.

Steady and unmoving, an observer might have mistaken Rafen for a tomb marker. Indeed there were places on Cybele where stone-carved likenesses of Space Marines topped great towers of granite. In those hallowed grounds, men bred from Brother Rafen’s own bloodline were buried as a measure of respect for the planet and the great memorial that it represented to the Imperium. The moon of a vast gas giant, Cybele was a war-grave world, one of hundreds of planets declared Mausoleum Valorum throughout the Ultima Segmentum. Rafen kept his statue-like aspect as a flicker of movement danced on the edge of his auspex’s sensors.

Presently, a figure emerged from behind an oval sepulchre carved in pink vestan stone, and it nodded toward Rafen before making a series of sign-gestures with a gauntleted hand. The two of them were almost identical: their man-shapes broad and hulking in red ceramite sheaths, the colour glistening from the soft, reverent rain.

Rafen returned the nod and emerged from his cover, low to the ground and swift. He did not pause to check if Brother Alactus was following him; there was no need. As Alactus followed Rafen, so Brother Turcio followed Alactus, and Brother Bennek followed him. The team of Space Marines had drilled and fought alongside each other for so many decades that they functioned as pieces of the same machine, each a finely-tooled cog linked to the other, operating in perfect unison. To move now in silence, without a single spoken word between them, was child’s play for soldiers who had trained to fight under the most testing conditions. He could sense their eagerness to meet the foe; it was like a palpable scent in the air, thick and coppery on his tongue.

Rafen slipped around a smashed obelisk that rose like a broken bone from the cemetery grass, an accusing finger pointing upward and decrying the foul clouds. He dropped down into a shallow valley. A day earlier, this sheltered place had been a devotional garden dedicated to naval pilots lost in the war for Rocene, but now it was a ruined bowl of broken earth. A stray round from the enemy’s opening sub-orbital bombardment had landed here and carved out a hemisphere of ground, fusing the dirt into patches of glassy fulgurites. Brown puddles gathered where ornate caskets were torn open and their contents scattered around Rafen’s metal-shod feet: bones and decayed, aged medals crunched into the dirt where he walked. The Space Marine picked his way through the skeletons and traversed the opposite lip of the crater, pausing to check his bearings.

He glanced up to see the shape of an angelic statue curving away above him, arms and wings spread as if about to take flight. The statue’s face was unblemished and perfect; its eyes were raised to stare at some exquisite heaven that was an infinity away from the crude reality of this earthly realm. For one serene moment, Rafen was convinced that the stone seraph was about to turn its countenance to him, to display the face of Lord Sanguinius, the hallowed founder and primogenitor of his Chapter. But the instant fled, and Rafen was alone with the dead once more, stone angel and Blood Angel alike both wreathed in the mist and rain. He looked away and allowed himself to listen to the wind once more.

Rafen felt a churn of revulsion in the pit of his gut. A fresh sound was being carried to his helmet’s auto-sense array, buoyed along with the ceaseless moans of the breeze: screaming, thin and horrific. It was a noise torn from the very darkest places in a man’s heart, an utterance that could only have issued from the lips of one truly damned. The Space Marine surmised the Traitors were preparing to make an augury from the entrails of one of their slaves before they began another sortie.

Rafen considered this for a moment. If the archenemy were getting ready for another attack, then it made his mission all the more urgent. He moved off, a frown forming behind the formidable mask of his breather grille. A troop of lightly armoured, fast-moving scouts would have been able to accomplish the same task in half the time. But every single one of the pathfinder squad in Rafen’s detachment had been killed in the first assault, when a fusillade of krak shells had torn through their ranks. He had been standing in the lee of a Rhino’s hull when the shriek of superheated air signalled the incoming salvo, and in his mind’s eye Rafen recalled the moment when a scout bike had spun up and over his head, as if it were nothing but a plaything discarded by a bored, petulant child. All that remained of the young Space Marines were some torn rags and flecks of burnt ceramite.

He buried the dark ember of his anger deep and pressed on, shuttering away his recriminations. It mattered little now what they had been told before arriving on Cybele, that the posting here was purely a ceremonial one, that it was a matter of honour rather than a battle to be fought. Perhaps he and his battle-brothers had been lax to believe that the corrupted would have no interest in a cemetery world; now they would repay that mistake with the blood of their foes.

Rafen slowed to a steady walk as they closed in on the grove the enemy had chosen for their staging area. The pristine, manicured lawns of the graveyards elsewhere were no longer evident here – around the perimeter of the Traitor camp, great dark tendrils of decay were trailing out through the grasses, emerging through an expanding ring of soiled plants and toxic slurry. In some places, the ground had broken open like an old wound and disgorged the dead from beneath it. Grave markers lay slumped and disfigured next to black twists of bone vomited from the newly putrid earth. Rafen’s finger twitched near the trigger of his bolter, his knuckles whitening inside his gauntlet. The rush of righteous fury was tingling at bay within him, the longing for combat singing in his veins. He gestured for the other Blood Angels to stand back and hold their positions. He found a vantage point at the corner of a ruined vault and for the first time that day Rafen laid eyes on the enemy. It was all he could do to resist the urge to riddle them with gunfire.

Word Bearers. Once they had been an Adeptus Astartes Chapter of the most pious nature, but those days had long since turned to dust. Rafen’s lips drew back from his teeth in a sneer of disgust as he watched the Traitor Marines move to and fro, marching arrogantly between tents of flayed ork-hide and the still steaming orbs of grounded dreadclaw landers. He closed his ears to the pestilent shouts of the enemy demagogues as they wandered about the edges of the encampment, spitting their vile prayers and chants over the cries of the slave-servitors, and the incessant cracks of neuro-whips against the backs of the helots.

The Word Bearers were a dark mirror of Rafen and his brethren. Their battle gear was doused in a livid scar-red the shade of fresh gore, their armour dominated by a single sigil – the face of a screaming horned demon against an eight-pointed star. Many of the Chaos Space Marines sported horned helms with filigree and fine workings cored from children’s bones, or pages of blasphemous text drawn on skin-parchment and fastened into the ceramite with obsidian screws. Others went about bareheaded, and these ones displayed faces rippled with ritual wheals, tusks or hooks of warped cartilage.

It was one such Traitor Marine who was carefully ministering to the torture of the slave whose screams had carried so far on the wind. One of his arms ended in a writhing cluster of metallic tentacles that flicked and whipped at the air as if they had a mind of their own. In his other hand, the torturer held a vibra-stave that he used like a sculptor, lopping off slips of flesh with infinite care. The victim’s cries wavered up and down the octaves and Rafen abruptly realised that the enemy soldier was playing the man like an instrument, amusing himself by composing a symphony of pain. Rafen looked away, concentrating on the mission at hand. His squad leader, Brother-Sergeant Koris, had made the orders quite clear – Rafen and his team were to merely locate the enemy camp and determine the strength and disposition of the foe. They were not to engage.

Training his auspex on the assembled force, he picked out assault units and the massive bulks of Terminators, but only a handful of vehicles. He considered the options: this might be a testing force, perhaps, maybe a blunt brigade of heavily armed troops sent in to probe the defences of the planet before a larger attack could begin. For a moment, Rafen wondered about the fate of the ship his company had left in orbit; it was a forgone conclusion that if so large a Traitor force had made planetfall, the skies already belonged to the enemy. He did not dwell on the prospects of what that would mean for them. With a full half of their force dead or crippled in the initial surprise bombardment, the Space Marines were reeling and on the defensive; the momentum of battle was on the side of the foe.

But in the next instant, Rafen’s grim train of thought was abruptly stalled. From out of the open hatch of a deformed Razorback transport strode a figure that came a full two heads higher than every other man in the Traitor camp. His armour was chased around its edges with sullen gold plating and traceries of infernal runes that smudged and merged as Rafen’s auspex struggled to read them. Wrappings of steel chain ending in flaming, skull-shaped braziers dangled from his arms and waist, while his shoulder plates mounted a fan of necrotic spines that appeared to be venting thin streams of venom into the air. Rafen had seen the champions of the archenemy before and so he was in no doubt that the being he looked upon was the master of the war force at Cybele.

A fragment of memory drifted to the front of Rafen’s mind as he watched the tall Word Bearer approach and converse with the torturer. He recalled a snatch of description from the indoctrination lectures of his training, the words of old Koris back when the grizzled veteran was serving as a mentor. The Word Bearers, who forever bore the aberrant mark of Chaos Undivided, practised their foul religions under the stewardship of the highest ranked Traitors among their number – and Rafen was sure that the tall one was just such a being. A Dark Apostle, and here, in his sights! The hand around the bolter twitched again and he allowed himself to entertain the idea of killing this bestial adversary, despite the sergeant’s orders ringing in his head. Bloodlust rumbled distantly in his ears, the familiar tension of pre-battle humming in his very marrow. With a single shot, he might be able to send the enemy into instant disarray; but were he to fail, their survey would be compromised and his brethren back at the Necropolita would be lost. Reluctantly, he relaxed his grip a little.

In that moment of choice, Rafen’s life was almost forfeit. A fierce rune blinked into being on the Space Marine’s visor, warning him too late of movement to his flank. With speed that belied the huge weight of his battle armour, Rafen spun on his heel, reversing his grip on the bolter as he did. He came face to face with a Word Bearer, the Chaos Space Marine’s hideous countenance a series of ruined holes and jagged teeth.

‘Blood Angel!’ it spat, declaring the name like a venomous malediction.

Rafen answered by slamming the butt of his bolter into the Word Bearer’s face with savage ferocity, forcing the enemy warrior to stagger back on his heels and into the cover of the vault. He dare not fire the weapon, for the report of a bolt shell would surely bring every Traitor in the camp running, and he knew that none of his other battle-brothers could come to his aid lest they expose themselves. It was of little import, however, Rafen had killed enough warp-spawned filth to be sure that he could murder this heretic with tooth and nail alone if need be. Caught by surprise, he had only heartbeats in which to press his advantage and terminate this abomination – this thing that had polluted the universe since before he was born.

The Word Bearer’s hand snapped toward the gun on its waist. Fingers with far too many joints skittered across the scarlet armour. Rafen brought the bolter down again and smashed the hand flat like a pinned spider. The Traitor recovered and swung a mailed, spike-laden fist at Rafen’s head; the blow connected with a hollow ring and Rafen heard his ceramite helm crack as fractures appeared on his visor. Letting the gun drop into the oily mud at his feet, the Blood Angel surged forward and locked his gloved hands around the Word Bearer’s throat. Had his enemy been helmeted too, Rafen would never have been able to strike back at him this way, but the corrupted fool had thought this place secure enough to show his face to the air. Rafen pressed his fingers into the tough, leathery hide of the Word Bearer’s neck, intent on showing him the cost of his folly. Gouts of thick, greasy fluid began to stream from the Traitor’s wounds, and it tried in vain to suck air through its windpipe, desperate to scream for help from its brethren.

The spiked glove returned, crashing into his head again and again. Warm blood filled Rafen’s mouth as his teeth rattled in his jaw. The Traitor butted him, but the Blood Angel stood firm, the joyous lust of his hate-rage flattening the pain. Rafen’s vision fogged with the sweet anticipatory surge of a hand-to-hand kill, as the Traitor’s black snake-tongue twitched madly, lapping at breaths it could not draw in. He was dimly aware of the Word Bearer punching and striking at his torso, flailing to inflict some sort of damage on him before he ended its repellent life.

Rafen registered a flashing bone dagger at the edges of his vision, then the sudden bloom of pain on his left thigh; he ignored it and squeezed tighter, compacting the Word Bearer’s throat into a ruined tube of bloody meat and broken cartilage. Voiceless and empty, the Traitor Marine died and slipped from his ichor-stained fingers to the ground. Rafen staggered back a step, the thunder of adrenaline making him giddy. As his foot came down, fresh streams of agony surged out of his leg and he saw where the Traitor’s tusk blade had cleanly pierced his armour. Shock gel and coagulants bubbled up around the wound, and turned dark as they struggled to combat the after-effects of the cut. Rafen grimaced; the daemon knives of the adversary always carried venom and he did not wish to be cut down by the dying blow of such an unworthy foe.

The Blood Angel gripped the haft of the Chaos blade and he felt it writhe and flex in his grip, quivering like a creature seeking escape. He could feel the movement of bladders inside it, fleshy organs pulsing as they sucked in his blood like a parasite. With a snarl, Rafen tore the serrated weapon from his thigh and held it up before his eyes. The blade was a living thing, each ridge of its saw-tooth edge a yellowed chevron of enamel crested by a tiny black eye spot. It hissed and chattered at Rafen with impotent hate, contorting in on itself. Before the Space Marine could react, the blade puffed up its air sacs and spat out a cloud of his siphoned blood, scattering it in a fine pink vapour.

Rafen broken the thing in two but it was too late: in the enemy encampment, the Word Bearers had stopped what they were doing and were glancing upward, nostrils and tongues taking in the thin stream of scent-taste.

He swore a blistering curse and tossed the dead creature aside, breaking vox silence for the first time in hours. ‘Fall back!’

The four Blood Angels erupted from cover, moving as fast as their augmented limbs and power armour would let them; ten times that number of Word Bearers crested the lip of the grove and gave chase, bolters crashing wildly and voices raised in debased exaltation.

In the encampment below, Tancred hesitated, the vibra-stave wavering in his hand as he shifted forward to join the pursuit; but then he realised that his master had not moved an inch, and with careful deliberation he relaxed and cocked his head.

Iskavan the Hated, Dark Apostle of the Ninth Host of Garand, let his bloodless lips split in a smile wider than any human orifice was capable of. One of his tube-tongues flickered in and out, sampling the damp air. ‘A mewling whelp,’ he pronounced at last, rolling the faint flavour of Rafen’s spilt blood around his mouth. ‘A little over a hundred years, by the taste of him.’ He eyed Tancred. ‘Perhaps I should be insulted that these mongrels saw fit to send children to spy on us.’

The torturer glanced back at the twisted ruin of flesh that was his handiwork. ‘A handful of scouts are hardly worth the effort, magnificence.’

Tancred saw Iskavan nod in agreement from the corner of his eye, and he suppressed a smile. The Word Bearer had risen to the rank of second to the Dark Apostle through a mixture of guile and outright ruthlessness, but much of his skill stemmed from his ability to predict Iskavan’s moods and to know exactly what his commander wanted to hear. In four and a half centuries of service, Tancred had only earned his master’s displeasure on three occasions, and the most severe of those was marked forever on him where his organic arm had been severed by Iskavan’s dagger-toothed bite. The torturer gave his tentacle replacement an absent flex.

‘Let the hungry ones hound them back to their verminous hiding place,’ said Iskavan, as much to Tancred as it was to the rest of the Word Bearer camp. ‘We will join them momentarily.’ The Dark Apostle turned the full force of his baleful gaze on the torturer and toyed casually with a barbed horn on his chin. ‘I shall not be interrupted before I have completed my sacrament.’

Tancred took this as a cue to continue and beckoned a pair of machine-bound helots forward. Each of the once-men picked up an end of the rack on which Tancred’s victim lay. The homunculae moved into the centre of the camp on legs of burping gas pistons, their arms raw iron girders ending in rusty blocks and tackle, rather than flesh and bone. Their burden was moaning weakly but still clinging to the ragged edge of life, thanks to the consummate skill of Tancred’s art.

The Word Bearer bent close to the dying slave’s head and whispered to him. ‘Give,’ he husked. ‘Give up your love.’

‘I do,’ the helot managed, between blood-laden gurgles, ‘I give my heart and flesh and soul to you, great one.’ His teeth appeared in a broken grin, the beatific glaze in his eyes locked on the heavy, dolorous clouds overhead. ‘Please, I crave the agony of the boon. Please!’ The slave began to weep, and Tancred ran his clawed hand over the man’s scarred forehead. The poor wretch was afraid that he would be allowed to die without the exquisite pain of Iskavan’s blessing.

‘Do not fear,’ Tancred cooed. ‘You will know torment such as that which Lorgar himself endured.’

‘Thank you! Oh, thank you!’ The helot coughed and a fat globule of heavy, arterial crimson rolled from his mouth. Tancred resisted the urge to lick at it and turned to bow before his master.

‘With your permission, lord Apostle?’

Iskavan wet his lips. ‘Bring me my crozius.’

The Blood Angels had reinforced the edifice of the Necropolita even as the dust was still settling from the bombardment, toppling stone needles and broad obelisks to serve as makeshift cover. The building had been an ornate combination of Imperial chapel and outpost facility, but now it was in ruins. Its sole occupants, the priest-governor of the planet and his small cohort of caretakers, were among the first to perish when the building’s central minaret had been struck. Now for good or ill Cybele was under the complete command of Brother-Captain Simeon, the ranking Space Marine officer. Crouching atop the corner of the Necropolita that still stood, Simeon was the first to see the enemy approach through the tombstones, and he drew his chainsword with a flourish.

‘Sons of Sanguinius!’ His voice cut the air like the peal of a cloister bell. ‘To arms!’

Below him, where the marble plaza ended and the graveyards began, Brother-Sergeant Koris dug one armoured hand into the fallen stone pillar and pushed himself up to sight toward the foe. He saw Rafen’s unit charging and firing, sending controlled bursts of bolter-fire over their shoulders as they closed; behind them was a seething wall of Chaos Space Marines, a cackling, screaming horde that moved like a swarm of red locusts.

‘Brothers on the field! Pick your targets!’ he ordered, and to illustrate his point, the seasoned soldier shot the head from a Word Bearer just hand-spans away from Turcio’s back.

Bennek was less fortunate, and Koris growled in anger as the Space Marine lost his leg from the near miss of a plasma gun. Bennek’s armoured form tumbled and dropped, and the Word Bearers rolled over him without stopping.

With a yell of effort, the crimson flash of a Space Marine leapt over Koris’s head and twisted in mid-air, landing perfectly behind the stone barricade. The sergeant turned as Rafen, panting hard, brought up his bolter and laced the air above him with shot; a Traitor who had been snapping at his heels made it halfway over the obelisk before Rafen’s shells sent him screaming backward. The air sang with energy and explosion around them as the two sides clashed.

‘Damn them, these fiends are on us like desert ticks!’

Koris gave Rafen a brief, sharp grin. ‘You brought some company back with you then, eh lad?’

Rafen hesitated. ‘I…’ Salvos of Traitor gunfire chopped at the dirt near their feet.

‘Brother Rafen!’ Simeon loped over the pockmarked ground toward them, weaving around the flashes of new impact craters and the keening of lethal ricochets. ‘When I told you we needed to study the enemy closely, I did not expect you to take me so literally.’ The captain let off a ripping discharge from his bolt pistol, right into the enemy line. ‘No matter.’

Koris drew back from the skirmish and let Turcio take his place. ‘Speak, lad. What do these warp-spawn have for us out there?’ His voice was urgent, carrying over the constant fire.

Rafen gestured to the south. ‘An assault group, most likely a reconnaissance in force,’ he replied, calmly relaying his report with the same dispassion he would have showed in a training exercise. ‘A squad of Terminators and armour, at least three Razorbacks.’

Simeon grimaced. His few Space Marines with little or no heavy weapons would be hard pressed to hold the line against such a detachment. ‘There’s more,’ he added – a statement, not a question.

Rafen ignored the low hum of a bolt that lanced past his head. ‘Indeed. Terra protect me, but I looked upon one of their foul ceremonies, a sacrificial augury. There was a Dark Apostle in the camp to observe it.’

‘You’re sure?’ Koris pressed, the crack of rounds flicking off the tiles around them.

‘As the God-Emperor is my witness,’ Rafen replied.

Simeon and Koris exchanged glances; this made matters more complicated. ‘If one of those arch-traitors has befouled the graves here, then his plans for Cybele are clear.’ Simeon loaded a fresh clip into his gun, eyeing the torrid battle line as blood-red and gore-red armour clashed and fought. ‘He will seek to erect one of their own blasphemous monuments here and salt the earth with their profane benedictions.’

‘It shall not be,’ Rafen grated. A heat of fury flooded into him.

‘No, it shall not,’ Simeon agreed, bearing his fangs. With a roar, he dived into the fray, his chainsword braying as it cored a Word Bearer sending it skittering over the marble. Rafen and Koris waded through the fight with him, weapons flaring.

‘Hear me, Blood Angels!’ Simeon’s voice called. ‘In the name of the red grail, turn back this tide–’

The captain’s words were cut short as a tiny supernova engulfed him, and wreaths of hot plasma turned the stone to slag around his feet. Rafen had a single, momentary vision of brilliant white, then Simeon’s ammunition packs detonated all at once and threw him aside in the shock wave.

Iskavan gathered up his most impious symbol of office and cradled it as a parent would a beloved child. The crozius in his hand gave off an actinic glow that surged as his fingers wrapped around it. The weapon sighed, pleased that its master was near, excited by the prospect of what was to come next. Murmuring a litany of un-blessing beneath his breath, the Dark Apostle dipped the disk of blades at the staff’s head into the catch-bucket beneath Tancred’s torture rack. He stirred the thick, fresh blood. The liquid flashed into steam, boiling around the accursed weapon.

‘From the fires of betrayal,’ Iskavan droned. ‘Unto the blood of revenge.’

Tancred raised the vibra-stave over the helot’s body, so he could see that death was upon him. ‘By the bearer of the word, the favoured son of Chaos.’ The torturer plunged the stave into the slave’s stomach and tore it open, savouring the screams.

The Word Bearers standing watch around them spoke as one voice. ‘All praise be given unto him.’

Iskavan held up his soaked crozius to the grey sky, the ritual of desecration repeated once again as it had been on countless worlds, before countless victories. He glanced at Tancred, who hunched over the spilt innards of the sacrifice. ‘What do you see?’

It took the most supreme effort of Tancred’s life to lie to his master. ‘Death comes. Lorgar’s sight is upon us.’ The words were almost choking him. ‘We shall feed the hunger of the gods.’

His black heart shrinking in his chest, Tancred stared at the entrails before him in fear and dismay. The loops of fallen intestine, the spatters of blood, the placing of the organs – the configuration was terrible and ominous. There, he saw the signs of something impossibly powerful rising into life, a coming force so strong that it dwarfed Tancred and his master. The play of light and shadow was confused, and so the torturer could not be sure from where this energy would emerge, but he could see clearly that it would bring ruin and destruction in its wake. At last, he managed to tear himself away from the sight, his final reading bringing a disturbing prediction to bear. Both he and Iskavan would not live to see the end of the events they would set in motion on this day.

The Dark Apostle met his gaze and something like suspicion danced there. ‘Is that all you see, Tancred?’

The words pushed at the torturer’s decaying lips, fighting to be heard, but he knew with blind certainty that such a fatalist divination would enrage Iskavan, to the degree that Tancred would be first to taste the freshly-blooded crozius’s power. He looked down in what he hoped would seem like reverence, praying to the gods that he be spared his master’s displeasure. ‘I see death, lord.’

‘Good.’ Iskavan chained his twitching, eager weapon to his wrist. ‘Let us take the word to our adversary, and see them heed it… Or perish.’

The Chaos Space Marines whooped and yelled black hymnals and mantras as the battle force rolled forward and amid them all, Tancred picked at his newborn fears like a scabbed wound.

Simeon’s violent end tolled around the perimeter like a death knell; it was felt almost as a physical shock by the Blood Angels ranged about the Necropolita’s edge. The hero of Virgon VII, victor at the Thaxted Insurrection and decorated warrior of the Alchonis Campaign, was gone, swept away. The brother-captain was honoured and respected by every Space Marine in the Chapter, and in the centuries they had fought alongside him, each one of them could trace a debt of life to the bold officer. Rafen himself had almost been killed on Ixion by a mole-mine that Simeon had spotted a moment before it emerged. And now, as the Blood Angel considered the patch of scorched ground that marked the spot where the captain had died, he found the memory of that moment slipping away from him, as if it too had been lost in the plasma burst.

Koris was the ranking officer now, and the craggy old warhound seemed determined to cut a blood cost for the captain’s death from each and every Word Bearer. But Rafen knew the veteran better than most of the Space Marines there, and he saw the signs of distress on his former teacher that others did not.

For all of Koris’s encouragement and rousing, Simeon’s sudden killing had dealt their morale a fatal blow, and the will of the remaining men lay wounded, bleeding out into the grass.

Rafen saw the surge in the enemy line as the rest of the Word Bearers’ force joined the fight, and in that moment, he was certain they would die here. Unhallowed lighting flashed in the distance from a blazing force weapon, and the Traitors roared with approval. They drew back, a ruby tide retreating from the land’s edge before returning as a flood. And then on they came, killing and ripping Rafen’s comrades into fleshy shreds. His gun clattered, the barrel spitting hot as rounds big as fists tore into the foe – but then a sound, a heart-stopping shriek of sundered air, fell across the battlefield.

Rafen instinctively looked up, and felt ice in the pit of his stomachs. Swooping in through the low cloud by the dozen were bright red Thunderhawk drop-ships, each one bristling with missile and cannon, each one heavy with more Space Marines to feed the fray. Half-glimpsed in the contrails and gunsmoke, the flyers looped over the enemy and turned.

‘We are lost,’ said Turcio, as if the words were his dying breath. ‘With such reinforcements, we will be drowned in a sea of corrupted ones.’

‘Then we’ll litter this place with their dead before we do…’ Rafen’s voice tailed off as the Thunderhawks opened fire as one, and bright spears of light lanced from their lascannon. But the shots never reached them. The beams fell short of the Space Marines and struck the middle of the Word Bearers’ force with devastating effect, killing a unit of Chaos Terminators in one blaze of fire. Now the other flyers released packs of hellstreak warheads, which tore into the Traitors with furious abandon.

Rafen’s eyes widened as the leading drop-ship cut the sky above him, and in a blink of crimson he saw the sigils painted on the aircraft: a pair of silver angel’s wings, adorned with a shimmering teardrop of blood. As the Emperor willed it, so the Blood Angels had been delivered from the jaws of oblivion by their battle-brothers.

CHAPTER TWO

In their unfettered arrogance, Iskavan’s Word Bearers had expected only token resistance at the Necropolita. With the unerring accuracy of their artillery strikes from the murder-class cruiser Dirge Eterna in low orbit and the lightning speed of their ground assault, not one of the Traitor Marines had doubted that the day would be theirs. The de-consecration of Cybele in the name of Chaos Undivided would come to pass, or so they had believed. Those certainties were now ashes in the mouth of Tancred, who watched as his soldiers became screaming torches of flame under the punishing beam salvoes from the Blood Angel’s Thunderhawks.

The torturer had paused as the entire forward phalanx of his most celebrated warriors vanished in a plume of blazing hellgun fire. The Space Marines on the ground, the tiny band of men who just seconds before had counted their lives on the ticks of a failing clock, surged forward with renewed vigour and scrambled over the dead Word Bearers to break the Chaos line. And with his enemy dropping from the grey sky on wings of fire and his soldiers falling about him, Iskavan turned a stony countenance on Tancred. Then he gave the order that disgusted the torturer to his very core. The Dark Apostle told his troops to fall back, and, cursing the corpse god of men with every step they took, the Word Bearers broke apart and drew away, fading into the endless graveyards.

Tancred studied the face of his commander and he saw the anger of his men reflected there; and yet still he had given the demand. It was almost as if – dare he even think such a thing? – Iskavan had been given orders to let the Blood Angels live. It was the sacred war doctrine of the Word Bearers to advance, advance and never give quarter, yet Iskavan called out for them to retreat and led them into the shadows without comment or explanation. Tancred considered this as they broke away by ranks, firing as they went. There would have to be some plan that his master had concealed from him, some greater scheme at work that would later redeem this indignity. The torturer prayed that this was the reason. The only other alternative was that Iskavan had realised that Tancred’s prognostication had been false. If that were true, Tancred would never see his death coming.

Rafen stayed close to Koris as they tore chunks out of the Word Bearers’ division. Eventually it fragmented, until at last there was no enemy to follow. The brother-sergeant halted his men at the ridge where Rafen had hidden in the shade of the angel statue. The young Blood Angel glanced up to see the graceful stone figure still there, untouched by the passing of the archenemy.

Koris approached him, the old warrior’s bearded face grim. ‘They’ve gone to ground. Without a force big enough to seek them out, we’ll not be able to destroy them all.’

‘We live still,’ said Rafen, hardly believing the turn of events himself.

Koris gave him a brusque nod. ‘Aye, but this matter is not concluded, lad. Not by a long way.’ A drop-ship turned overhead, the roar of its engines halting the conversation until it passed downwind. ‘Those horned bastards never break unless they have to. I’ll warrant they’ll be digging in to make ready for a counter-strike before sunset.’

Rafen watched the Thunderhawk drop into a hover to let a couple of men descend to the ground. ‘But with reinforcements, they’ll be no match for us.’

‘Do not be so sure,’ Koris spat. ‘They caught us unawares once, Rafen. By the Throne, they’ll have more surprises in store.’ He made a cutting gesture with the blade of his hand. ‘The Word Bearers are tenacious.’

One of the Blood Angels from the drop-ship approached at a run. ‘Hail!’ he called. ‘I am Corvus. Who commands here?’

‘Brother-Sergeant Koris of the Fifth Company,’ the veteran Space Marine replied, tapping his heart and his head in a gesture of gratitude. ‘You have our thanks.’

The warrior threw a glance over his shoulder, in the direction of the ruined Necropolita. ‘The governor is dead, then?’

Koris nodded. ‘Along with every member of his retinue, and our captain. I am what passes for authority on this planet now.’

‘No longer. You will find that burden has been lifted from you, brother-sergeant,’ the Blood Angel said smoothly. ‘By his decree, the Inquisitor Ramius Stele has declared the planet Cybele under his stewardship from this moment onward. He expects you at the star port immediately.’

‘Stele?’ Rafen repeated. ‘The leader of the Bellus Expedition?’

‘The very same. The ship stands at high anchor above as we speak,’ said Corvus, then added, ‘The inquisitor is not known for his patience, brother-sergeant.’

Koris made a sour face and headed for the Thunderhawk, the rest of the squad filing into the ship alongside him. ‘Rafen, you’ll accompany me.’

He nodded. ‘I confess I am curious to see the faces of our saviours.’

Koris said nothing as they scrambled after Corvus into the drop-ship’s cramped interior.

From the air, the true scale of the Word Bearers’ attack was made manifest. The Thunderhawk’s pilot kept the aircraft just below the lower edge of the cloud deck, rumbling over the thermals that coiled up from smoking bomb craters bored into the blue-green turf. Endless rows of identical grave markers stretched to the horizon from every direction. Blackened darts of poison were strewn where the warheads had fallen, and the toxins and manufactured taints had been worked into the metal of the shells so that they spread corruption on everything they touched. The landmarks of giant crypts dotted the landscape like bunkers in a war zone.

‘What is that?’ Turcio asked, pointing at a livid purple stain around the base of a memorial ziggurat.

‘Binder fungus,’ said one of the other Space Marines, without looking. ‘The enemy lace their engine fuel with it, so it is cast adrift in the air from their exhaust fumes.’

‘What does it do?’

‘Whatever they want it to,’ snapped Koris. ‘The Chaos biologians impose patterns on the spores with their rituals. When the fungus takes root and grows, it forms the shapes of their vile symbols.’

Turcio’s nose wrinkled, as if he smelled something foul. He could see where the mould was already taking on the shape of an eight-armed star.

The myriad rings of weapon strike points drew overlapping ovals around the landscape, many of which were centred on the site of the Necropolita. Rafen’s only memory of the ornate marble keep was when they had first approached it, as they drove in from the east on the Great Penitent Bridge that spanned the Ghona Canyon. The Blood Angel had chanced to look through the firing slot of his Rhino’s door and saw the magnificent white shape thrusting into the air, circled by thin towers in organ-pipe clusters. Gone now, all rubble and shattered ivory splinters. The flyer banked as they passed the ruins; the direct hit that had killed the priest-governor had blown the building down like a house of tarot cards. Rafen noticed a pair of grounded drop-ships nearby, survivors loading themselves aboard in skirmish lines. His augmented vision counted few men on the ground, however; it seemed that a retreat was in progress, not a reinforcement.

‘We have been ordered to draw all forces back to the star port,’ Corvus spoke, as if he saw the question forming in Rafen’s mind. ‘We noted from orbit that the Necropolita was lost. The port makes a better location for a strongpoint.’

Rafen agreed; it was a tactically sound choice. After the Word Bearers’ bombardment, Captain Simeon had said the very same thing, but the enemy strikes had been carefully targeted to down the bridge behind the keep, and with only one or two remaining ground vehicles in their possession there had been no way for Rafen’s detachment to cross back over. The handful of Chapter serfs and men they had left behind at the port had no doubt been killed in the same shell deluge that struck the outpost.

The canyon flashed past beneath them, the torn edges of the suspension bridge blunted and bent. The great statues of Cybele’s first pilgrims that held up the trestles were gone, dashed to pieces on the ravine’s floor kilometres below.

Rafen glanced at his battle-brother. ‘There was a naval warship that brought us here, the Celaeno. What was its fate?’

Corvus shook his head. ‘I do not know the specifics, but it is my understanding that the frigate’s remains were detected when we emerged from the warp. The Word Bearers’ vessel we engaged in orbit must have caught them unawares.’

‘Unfortunate,’ Rafen said. Koris stood nearby, silent, his face steady and unreadable. The younger Blood Angel considered the men aboard the Celaeno, imagining them unprepared and alone before the ferocity of a Chaos strike vessel more than twice their tonnage. He hoped for their sake that the Emperor had taken their souls quickly.

The flat ferrocrete expanse of the star port appeared beyond a strip of woodland, clusters of hangars and fuel tanks visible in the distance. The landing field was practically unmarked by enemy fire, which instantly made the plans of the Word Bearers clear: they intended to keep the port intact so that they might use it themselves. Without ceremony the Thunderhawk’s nose dipped sharply into a landing pattern.

The battalion laid out at the port seemed a world away from the tattered remains of the late Captain Simeon’s company, who trickled out from the returning drop-ships with their armour scorched and pitted by near-misses and shrapnel. The wounded Space Marines were guided by Apothecaries to a makeshift staging area, while the others stood warily in a loose group as the Blood Angels from the Bellus ranged around them, their battle gear parade-ground pristine and untouched.

The survivors of the Word Bearers’ attack were stern-faced and muted; each of them had been convinced, as Rafen was, that they were due to meet their end this day. Simeon’s death and the sudden reversal of their fortunes had left them in sombre mood. Brother Alactus was leading them in a prayer of thanks to Terra, but none of them could shake the pervasive sense of doom they felt in the endless field of tombstones. Nearby, servitors were assembling the remains of the Guardsmen that had been garrisoned at the port’s orbital defence guns; each of the men had died in horrific pain from the nerve toxins dropped by the Word Bearers. Their bodies were twisted and gnarled by the muscle spasms that killed them. The faint bouquet of the poison, far too weak to give a Space Marine anything more than a mild headache, still lingered in the air.

Koris and Rafen left Turcio to assemble the troops into some semblance of order and moved deeper into the port, past pairs of Baal-pattern Predator tanks and land speeders. Some of the vehicles showed battle honours on their sponsons that Rafen did not recognise.

‘You have seen many engagements, Brother Corvus?’ he asked the Space Marine who walked with them.

‘The greenskins may be dull-witted beasts, but they fight hard,’ he replied. ‘You know the mission of the Bellus?’

‘Who could not?’ Koris was blunt and clipped. ‘A most sacred endeavour indeed.’

Rafen answered with a nod. To great fanfare and good omens among the Chapter faithful, the battle barge Bellus had been sent on its way a decade earlier by Commander Dante himself, high lord of the Blood Angels. Crewed with a hand-picked force of men on an assignment to trace an artefact that dated back to the Horus Heresy, the Bellus’s quest was to recover the archeotech device known as the Spear of Telesto, an object thought lost in the confusion of those dark times. It was only the chance discovery of a storehouse of documents on Evangelion that had led to the founding of the ship’s mission, and under the command of Ramius Stele – an inquisitor of most rigid nature trusted by both the Chapter and the highest levels of the ecclesiarchy – Dante had sent the Bellus to the ork-held worlds on the borders of the Segmentum Obscurus. Word of the expedition’s imminent return had been spoken of among the Blood Angels for many months now.

Corvus was speaking. ‘It has been a challenging campaign, but we were blessed. Sanguinius was watching over us.’

‘And the spear?’

Pride swelled the Space Marine’s words. ‘Secure in the deep holds aboard Bellus.’ He glanced at Rafen. ‘Truly, brother, it is a sight to behold.’

‘You laid eyes upon it?’ said Koris, in a low voice.

‘We all did,’ Corvus noted. ‘Stele himself brought it out of the ork warren on the morning we killed the last of them. He held it up for every man to see.’ His eyes glazed over for a brief instant, as the moment replayed in his mind. ‘I felt the radiance of the Lord Primogenitor upon my face that day.’

‘Hard to imagine a servant of the Ordo Hereticus would be allowed to place his hands on something so sacred,’ Koris said, his voice carefully colourless. ‘Some Blood Angels would decry such a thing.’

Corvus gave the veteran a hard glance. ‘Only those who do not know Stele would say the like. He is a true comrade to our Chapter.’

‘Of course,’ Koris allowed. ‘I do not mean to infer otherwise. The honour debt between the Blood Angels and Inquisitor Stele is well documented.’

Rafen watched the interplay between the two men and said nothing. Throughout all his years of service, Koris had never been one to take anything at face value, and he would often probe and press at the thoughts of the men he served with. Sometimes he challenged them to the point of near-heresy. It was, he had often said, the only way to see the truth behind the prayers and catechism that formed so much of their daily lives. To believe, one must first be the greatest sceptic.

Rafen had seen the tapestries of Riga that hung in the silent cloister of the fortress-monastery on Baal, they depicted the ancient depictions of Sanguinius and the Spear of Telesto in action against the Slaughter-Lord Morroga. The great battle was rendered in threads dyed a million shades of red, every strand coloured in the blood of a fallen brother. And across the vast, heavy landscapes of dull ruby, the golden archangel who was their Chapter’s founder was shown – his beautiful face in its most terrible aspect, driving back the tide of Chaos. In every panel, the holy spear blazed like a shard of the sun, and Rafen found himself wondering what it would be like to hold the haft of a weapon that once belonged to his eternal liege.

The trio came to a halt outside an ornate pavilion of dark material that sported arcane wards and had silvery threads that chased through it. Dangling across the threshold was a pair of braziers forged from steel-plated skulls. Each grinning visage was crested with a stylised letter ‘I’: the unmistakable mark of the Inquisition. The tent was protected by a pair of Blood Angels honour guards, their golden helmets glinting in the watery sunlight.

‘Brother-Sergeant Koris, if you will attend? Lord Stele awaits your report.’ Corvus gestured for the veteran to follow him inside.

Rafen made to accompany them, but the closest honour guard came off his mark and blocked his path. ‘Just Brother Koris,’ said Corvus.

Koris threw Rafen a look. ‘Stand to, lad. I’ll not be long.’

Reluctantly, Rafen did as he was ordered. The Inquisition’s penchant for secrecy and obfuscation grated on the Blood Angel, as it did on most members of the Adeptus Astartes. Space Marines believed in the strength of direct action, of decisive deeds set forth without the petty minutiae of politics and endless discussion. Although he would never give it voice, Rafen disliked the fact that someone like Stele could sit here in the midst of a Chapter encampment as if he were the Chapter’s master in all things. Rafen turned away, dismissing the thought – and found himself staring at a familiar face.

White flashes from the winged crests on the armour of a tall Blood Angel drew his gaze. The figure strode purposefully across the star port runway from the mouth of a freshly landed Thunderhawk, with a pair of Space Marines trailing at his flanks as a personal guard.

‘Sachiel?’ he called. ‘Brother Sachiel?’ Although it was a breach of protocol to address a priest in such an informal manner, Rafen spoke without thought and approached him.

The man gave Rafen a quizzical look. Then abruptly, a thin smile of recognition emerged on his face. Sachiel threw a glance at one of his guards, then back to Rafen. ‘Can it be?’ he asked. ‘Rafen the Ready, as I live and breathe?’

Despite himself, Rafen frowned at the nickname from his days as a novice on Baal Secundus. ‘You are well, Apothecary?’

Sachiel tapped an armoured finger on his shoulder pauldron. ‘Time has passed, Brother Rafen. For the glory of Sanguinius and by the grace of our comrade inquisitor, my rank is now that of high priest.’

Rafen gave him a reverent nod. ‘Forgive me, lord. It pleases me to see you alive after all these years.’

‘Indeed,’ Sachiel replied, with the very smallest hint of pride. Like his brethren, Sachiel’s powered armour was blood red, but as an honoured Sanguinary High Priest, his battle gear was trimmed with lines of white detailing. A number of purity seals were fixed about his waist, beneath a bone-coloured crest of two spread angel wings. Rafen noted the shape of a velvet drawstring bag on his hip; inside, Sachiel would be carrying the traditional symbol of his rank among the Blood Angels, a sacred chalice modelled on the great red grail of Sanguinius.

Rafen did not dwell on the question of how Sachiel had advanced in rank so quickly during the Bellus’s mission; he was certain that if the verbose priest’s personality had not changed in ten years, he would soon be regaled with the whole tale.

Sachiel’s smile grew. ‘This is certainly an omen of good fortune. It is not enough that we paused in our journey through the Empyrean at just the right moment to hear the cries from the Celaeno, but to arrive here and discover our own battle-brothers in need of deliverance…’ His hand strayed to the bag on his belt. ‘The God-Emperor guides us in all things.’

‘As he wills,’ Rafen agreed.

‘And yet…’ Sachiel seemed not to notice that he had spoken. He studied him carefully. ‘I sense that your faith has been sorely tested this day, Rafen. I see it in the poise of your stride, the lilt in your voice.’

Unbidden, a flare of irritation sparked inside the Blood Angel. What could he know of Rafen’s thoughts? ‘I faced the archenemy, as is my eternal duty, and you say I was tested? You know this within moments of meeting me, despite the fact that we have not laid eyes on one another for a decade?’ Rafen found himself falling back into the same patterns of rivalry he and Sachiel had shared as trainees; the two men had never overcome their mutual dislike.

Sachiel gave a languid nod, his expression laced with a faint air of superiority. Rafen remembered why it was he had never enjoyed the priest’s company. ‘I do. But I could not expect you to understand the things I have seen during the voyages of the Bellus, Rafen. While you have served Sanguinius in your own way, I have ventured into the very heart of the xenos and faced the absolute inhuman. Such things change a man, Rafen. They grant you insight.’

You have not changed at all, Rafen thought, except you may have grown more vainglorious. But instead of voicing these thoughts, he nodded to the priest. ‘I imagine it must be so.’

Sachiel’s smile remained fixed, and Rafen was certain that the Sanguinary Priest knew exactly what question was pressing at the Space Marine’s mind; the thought that had been clamouring to be voiced from the very moment he had heard the name of the Bellus. After a long silence, he spoke again. ‘I must ask, Sachiel. Rumours have spread throughout the Chapter since the astropaths received word that the Bellus was to return. There is the talk of deaths among the brethren sent to recover the spear.’ He paused, the next words heavy and sharp in his chest like rough-hewn lumps of lead. ‘What became of my brother? Does he still live?’

Sachiel cocked his head. ‘Your brother? But are we not all brothers under the wings of Sanguinius, Rafen?’

‘If it pleases you, high priest,’ Rafen’s temper flared again, ‘I would have you tell me what happened to my sibling Arkio.’

The Apothecary gestured to one of his guards, and the Space Marine holstered his weapon, reaching up to remove his combat helmet. ‘The bonds of blood transcend all others,’ Sachiel said, quoting a line of scripture from the book of Lemartes, ‘but no blood runs stronger than that of Sanguinius.’

Rafen said nothing. Even when they had fought alongside each other as novice brothers, Sachiel had always tried to turn each conversation into a lesson, as if he felt the need to constantly prove his knowledge of Imperial dogma at every opportunity. Rafen preferred to keep his faith a personal issue and illustrate it with deeds, rather than trumpet the words incessantly. At that moment the Space Marine guard at Sachiel’s side revealed his face.

His younger brother’s youthful and yet serious countenance stared back at him, and Rafen broke into a broad grin. ‘Arkio! By the Throne, you’re alive! I had feared the worst.’

Arkio gave a rueful smile. ‘Well met, my brother. I–’

Rafen didn’t let his sibling get any further, crushing him into a bear hug with a bark of laughter. Their armour clanked together; and for the first time since he had set foot on Cybele, Rafen’s black mood was forgotten.

Corvus stepped to one side and came to attention as Koris halted. With his helmet cradled under one arm, the veteran Blood Angel’s vision was only as good as the augmented occulobe grafted to the back of his retinas. Under normal circumstances he would have been able to penetrate the darkness, but here inside the inquisitor’s tent the shadows that fell around him were as deep as the void of space itself. The sergeant wondered if some sort of witchery was at work; he did not know enough of Ramius Stele to glean what powers the inquisitor had at his command. He knew only of the tale of Stele’s honour debt, and the unbreakable ties that made the man a trusted comrade of the Blood Angels – but as with anything that was declared a matter of faith, it was in Koris’s troublesome nature to question it.

The true story of the debt was known to a select few, and even a seasoned warrior like the sergeant understood it only in the broadest strokes; there had been an incident when the inquisitor was travelling aboard a navy ship with the great Brother-Captain Erasmus Tycho of the Third Company. Allegedly, a daemon had manifested inside the ship’s engine core and Stele had killed it single-handedly when the beast had battered Tycho into unconsciousness. The hereticus agent’s actions had earned him a personal commendation from Commander Dante and the respect of the Legion Astartes.

Part of the darkness before him shifted – a cloth drew open from another chamber inside the tent’s voluminous folds – and he caught the scent of parchment and oil before a figure stepped into the light. Koris had seen the inquisitor only once before, at a conclave of Blood Angels following the great victory at Thaxted Duchy; then, the sergeant had been one of hundreds of men who heard him speak from a podium. Here and now, he had the immediate sense that Stele remembered him, even though his had been a single face among many.

‘Honoured sergeant,’ Stele’s voice was rich and resonant. His bald scalp glittered in the thin yellow light of the glow-globes, making the aquila electoo on his forehead seem bright in comparison. ‘I am distressed to hear we arrived too late to preserve Captain Simeon and the Governor Virolu.’

‘As am I, honoured inquisitor. The Word Bearers’ attack came without warning. Several brothers lost their lives under their guns, and others now flounder with severe wounds.’

Stele approached an ornate chair but did not sit. ‘I have learned that the Celaeno was obliterated by a warship called the Dirge Eterna. I led the Bellus against the foul vessel, but it retreated behind the gas giant and may hide there still.’ He absently touched his ear, where a silver purity stud glinted. ‘I chose to save your lives rather than pursue it.’

‘My men thank you.’

The inquisitor made a dismissive gesture. ‘As the Emperor wills. It was a calculated risk, sending empty Thunderhawks from the port to harry the enemy line from the air. Had the Word Bearers not broken, it would have been for nought.’

Koris’s expression hardened. ‘They have not broken. They will regroup and attack again.’

Stele looked directly at him for the first time. ‘You are correct, sergeant. The sons of Lorgar do not retreat without good cause, and even now my auxiliaries in orbit are reporting signs of their formations.’ He paused, considering something. ‘I am about to take my leave and return to Bellus, so that I may direct the search for the Dirge Eterna. But I wanted to look into the eyes of the man who held the line at the keep before I departed.’ Stele gave a thin, humourless smile. ‘I see I have little cause for concern.’

The veteran flashed a glance at Corvus, who stood silently by. ‘What will be the disposition of my men?’

Stele turned and walked back toward the other part of the tent, pausing only to recover a pict-plate. He gave Koris a sideways look. ‘I am placing the Sanguinary Priest Sachiel in command on the surface. You will obey his orders as you would mine.’

‘And those orders are?’

‘Hold,’ Stele said as he walked away, his back to the Blood Angel.

The shuttle cut the air with a crackling roar as it blazed into the clouds on a white spear of flame. Arkio watched it go with a reverent cast on his face. ‘Lord Stele returns to our barge,’ he noted. ‘I think the enemy counter-attack shall not be long in coming.’

The pair of them stood alone on the ferrocrete apron. Rafen studied his younger brother without answering. His mind picked over the memories of the last time they had spoken; it had not gone well on that day. Arkio had told him of his acceptance into the Bellus expeditionary force and Rafen had disagreed with his choice. Such a mission was for seasoned Space Marines, he argued, and Arkio was anything but that. Although Arkio was Rafen’s junior by a few years, they had become Blood Angels at the same time. Nevertheless the elder brother Rafen could not shake the duty that he had sworn to his father as a child: that he would protect Arkio for as long as he lived. They parted with cross words between them, but on the morning of the Bellus’s launch, Rafen had swallowed his pride and made peace with Arkio’s choice. If they served in the same company, Arkio would forever be seen as a youth in comparison with Rafen, so until he stepped from his elder’s shadow, Arkio felt he would never achieve the fullness of his potential. And so they parted with a salute, each man proud of the other, but secretly afraid that they would never meet again.

‘You’ve changed,’ Rafen said at length, ‘and yet, you have not.’ He chuckled. ‘My brother has matured while he was away from my stewardship.’

‘True enough,’ Arkio noted, not without a touch of challenge in his voice. ‘I’ve shed blood on countless worlds and faced more foes than I thought possible. This and more, brother.’

Rafen accepted that. ‘You make me proud, Arkio. Proud that we share a bloodline as much as we are warriors in the name of the Golden Throne.’ He hesitated, his voice thickening. ‘I hoped… I hoped that I would not see my end until I learned of yours, brother. This very day I feared that I was moments away from the Emperor’s peace, and nothing vexed me more than the thought I would not know the fate of my kinsman.’

‘You know it now, brother,’ Arkio said carefully. ‘So does this mean you will seek out death?’

Rafen gave him a sharp look. Arkio’s words were curiously barbed, his manner outwardly calm, but with a cold glitter dancing in his eyes. He truly has changed, Rafen thought, and perhaps in ways that hide themselves from a first glance.

The Blood Angel pushed his musings away. How could he have expected the callow youth of ten years gone by not to mature and grow hardened by the ordeal? He had no doubt that Arkio was probably looking at him in the same fashion, wary of a man who at once was his blood relative and a stranger.

‘My fate will come to me without me having to look for it,’ Rafen said with mock lightness. ‘Perhaps it already has.’

‘Perhaps–’ Arkio began, but then his words died in his throat. Both he and his brother froze as the wind brought a faint clatter to their ears.

‘Bolter fire,’ Rafen snapped, and grabbed his weapon. Arkio mirrored his actions, and the two brothers broke into a run, toward the port proper.

Brass leaves forming the bridge’s iris hatch sighed open to admit the inquisitor and his retinue. The two honour guards immediately stepped into alcoves either side of the door, and Stele’s lexmechanic and trio of servo-skulls hovered close by.

‘Captain Ideon,’ the inquisitor addressed the Blood Angel’s officer wired into Bellus’s command throne. ‘Status?’

‘Under way, lord.’ The Space Marine’s voice was a guttural snarl that issued not from his lips, but from a bulbous voxcoder implanted in his neck. ‘We will reach the orbit of the gas giant in moments.’

Stele examined the view ahead in the vast holosphere that dominated the wide control deck. The Cybele moon was depicted as a small, featureless ball to one side, dwarfed by the mass of the supergiant planet that forever held it locked in a tidal embrace.

‘Contact,’ said a servitor to his right. ‘Capital ship, deceleration curve evident.’

Inside the sphere, the image remained static. ‘Where?’ Stele demanded, gesturing at the space ahead. ‘Where is it?’

‘Astern.’ The display flickered before resolving into a larger-scale view, which showed the planet far behind them. A blinking glyph formed in close orbit.

‘It’s the Ogre Lord,’ Ideon noted. ‘A grand cruiser, repulsive-class. They must have been hiding out above the pole, waiting for us to break orbit.’

‘Then where is the Dirge Eterna?’ Stele snapped, even as new detections bloomed into life on the holosphere. The cruiser they had been pursuing was now emerging from behind the gas giant with two more ships in line formation.

‘Confirm, Dirge Eterna and unidentified idolator-class raiders on intercept course,’ droned the sense-servitor. ‘Advise condition on battle stations.’

‘Rot them, they planned this!’ Ideon spat static. ‘Shall we engage, my lord?’

Stele gave a brisk nod. ‘Weapons free, captain. They’ll burn for their temerity.’ About the bridge, gun-helots began a litany of prayers as they sought firing solutions for the battle barge’s missile batteries.

The finger-thick cables feeding into Ideon’s skull brought with them vox traffic from the surface of Cybele and sensor readings of innumerable landers falling from the central hull of the Ogre Lord. ‘Sir, I read a massive drop assault in progress on planet… Without orbital cover, the men on the ground–’

‘They will fight and they will die,’ Stele said. ‘For the glory of the God-Emperor and Sanguinius.’

On Cybele the Word Bearers boiled out from behind the marble tombstones and low sepulchres in a tide of screaming, chanting ruby. Man-forms in pitted, ancient armour turned the manicured lawns black in every place where their clawed boots fell. The toothed tracks of their Rhinos ground the grave markers of brave men into powder behind them.

Rafen found Koris at the spearhead. The veteran’s gun was hot with constant fire; his crimson greaves were dashed with licks of polluted blood. From the corner of his eye, Rafen watched Arkio move and shoot, pause and reload, without a single gesture or movement wasted. He grinned; he would look forward to hearing his sibling’s tales of battle when this was over.

‘How did they cross the bridge?’ he said aloud, discharging a burst into a pack of turbulent enemy hymnal-servitors.

‘The point is moot,’ Koris retorted. ‘It matters little where we kill them–’

‘Just as long as we kill them,’ said Rafen, switching his bolter over to single-shot mode. He paced rounds into the face and chest of a Chaos Space Marine emerging from a sluggish Chimera transport.

‘Listen!’ Nearby, Brother Alactus was calling out. ‘Do you hear it?’

Rafen strained his senses to pick out the noise from amongst the crash of bolters and the foul cacophony of the Word Bearer’s exaltations. ‘Thrusters!’ Alactus shouted. ‘Listen! Our deliverance falls from the skies for the second time today!’

Arkio paused, replacing a spent sickle magazine. ‘I think not,’ he said grimly.

Something in the tone of Arkio’s voice made Rafen pause and look skyward. From the thin grey morass of Cybele’s clouds came a myriad of iron teardrops, each one glowing cherry-red with the displaced heat of re-entry. Rafen heard Koris curse under his breath, as the skies above turned black with enemy landers.

CHAPTER THREE

The Ogre Lord spat murder and flame across the surface of Cybele, raining destruction over the grasslands and shallow mountain ranges. To the far north-west, where the great Valkyrie towers climbed skyward, it sent atomic warheads and fuel-air explosives laced with poison. The minarets were the glory of generations of memorial artisans, commissioned by the Adepta Sororitas to venerate those lost in the savage Phaedra Campaign; each one was hollow, their innards a network of acoustic channels cut from raw marble. In the high season, the wind would sing through them in perfect tones of mourning. But no pilgrims stood before the towers as the archenemy’s nuclear retribution bloomed overhead, and no human ears heard the final, awful screams that were forced from within them, in the seconds before the shock wave of super-heated air scoured them from the face of the planetoid.

Closer to the starport, low-yield munitions and finely targeted lance strikes fell on the Imperium forces. Rafen was dazzled as a discharge ate into the ferrocrete apron. In an instant, the rock flashed to toxic vapour and air molecules crashed as heat split them into atoms. A skirmish line of Blood Angels’ tanks caught in the weapon’s footprint became blackened humps of slag, featureless and smouldering. Overhead, precise discs of sky shone through the wide holes the beam weapons punched in the clouds.

As fallout ash began to settle, all about him the air was cut and slashed by the profane hoots of the enemy. Garbled litanies and exhortations of violence assailed his ears, blasphemous descants warring with repellent pulpit speeches broadcast from speaker horns. Without conscious thought, Rafen’s lips began to move, forming the words of the Barbarossa Hymnal, and as he gave it voice, he heard the song spread to his battle-brothers on the firing line. He drew strength from the sacred lyrics, and advanced.

Turcio was at his right hand now, a heavy bolter in his grip. Rafen did not ask where he had acquired the weapon, rather he marvelled at his brother’s use of it, as shells cascaded from the muzzle and shredded the enemy advance. The hymn’s words became a dull rumble in Rafen’s ears, as a hot flood of adrenaline charged through his muscles. The eager twitching of his gun-hand’s fingers returned, so he gave it freedom, his bolter joining the chorus of chain-fed death laid down upon the Word Bearers. At the edges of his vision, crimson spectres danced just out of sight – the ever-present ghost of the rage. Rafen kept the dark impulses firmly in check – control was the key to staying alive in a battle like this one.

Waves of spiny dreadclaw drop capsules landed around them, the earth shaking with each hammer-blow impact. Like vile seedpods, they broke open to spit out fresh Chaos Space Marines or the warped forms of dreadnoughts. Every one of them added to the bloody discord of the battle, tearing Cybele’s quiet landscape of pious contemplation into shreds. Rafen removed his combat blade from the eye socket of a Word Bearer who had strayed too close, and wiped gore from the serrated edge. Turcio’s gun bawled and cut another Traitor down, splitting him asunder as surely as if he had been gutted by a chainsword.

‘Still they come,’ the Space Marine said through gritted teeth, ‘How many more?’

‘Too many,’ Rafen retorted. ‘Blood for blood’s sake!’ He bellowed, firing to underline his words with lead. More landers came to rest in the distance, the closest collapsing a crypt with a gust of decayed air. Rafen paused, readying a brace of krak grenades to feed its passengers the moment one of them dared to emerge. He waited until the broken slabs of the tomb roof began to move and lobbed them in. He dropped to one knee as the explosion coughed, the muffled report lost in the clamour of the Word Bearers’ advance. Rafen sighted at the ruined crypt, taking a moment to kill any stragglers that might have survived. But instead of a seeing a stunned Traitor emerging from the rock, a thick pincer-like limb extended itself from the stones. The heavy iron armature wavered and then came down hard, biting into the turf. Rafen and Turcio stumbled backward as more legs grew out of the rubble, pushing up a box-shaped body with a toothy fan of blades.

‘Defiler!’ Turcio cried out the machine’s name, and rang bolt shells heedlessly against its gore-streaked hull. Rafen was more careful. He placed single rounds into the clusters of weapons along the war engine’s flanks, hopeful that a lucky hit might crack a flamer line or sever power cabling. The red metal of the walker rippled under the strain of sudden movement, as the skin of a vast beast would show the flexion of its muscles. It let out an ear-splitting honk from a war trumpet as it pulled itself up on six fat legs. It was met by an atonal choir of replies. Rafen’s gaze flicked to the other landers that had come down with this one and saw that each had the same cargo: a dozen more Word Bearer defilers were stepping from their pods, swivelling their guns to bear. As the first jets of burning liquid promethium gushed across the Blood Angels’ forces, Rafen yanked on Turcio’s arm to pull him out of the firing zone.

Somewhere in the melee, he had lost sight of Arkio. He had been distracted by the crack-snap of lasgun shots. Rafen returned fire and ejected a spent magazine, while Turcio covered him.

‘Those grotesques will overrun us!’ Turcio snapped angrily, ‘Where is our armour?’

Rafen remembered the boiled pools of metal that had once been tanks and said nothing. He ignored Turcio’s words and watched the defilers shifting into position: the walkers were preparing to break the Blood Angels’ line. If they had still had armour, the Space Marines might have stood a chance at blunting it, but with these light arms… The endless rain of Word Bearer troops was tipping the odds ever further against the Blood Angels, even with the men left behind by the Bellus.

Wherever he was, Brother-Sergeant Koris had come to the same conclusion. The veteran’s gruff voice issued out of the Space Marine’s ear-bead. ‘Fall back to the inner fence by squads!’ came the order. ‘Let these warp-spawn come at your heels, but don’t get caught up!’

‘Let’s move,’ Rafen shot a glance at Turcio. ‘Come now, we’ll give them their push and then shove it back down their throats.’

Turcio glanced over his shoulder as they ran, fighting down his disquiet.

A chain-reaction of short-circuits sent sparks ripping across the portside gun console, and frying the synapses of the cannon-servitor connected there. Stele wafted a hand in front of his face to dispel the burnt meat stink that assailed his nostrils. The other gripped the brass rail that bordered the warship’s giant glasteel porthole. They were close enough to one of the idolator raiders to actually see it with the naked eye, the tumbling dart of metal stark against the emerald hue of the gas giant. The quick application of a tactic refined by Ideon’s anti-ork sorties had granted Bellus first blood against the Chaos flotilla. A high-gravity turn, more akin to the manoeuvres of Thunderbolt fighters than capital ships, had allowed the battle barge to rake Dirge Eterna with her bow guns, although the nearest of the small raiders had surged forward to protect the large ship, as if its crew would receive some cryptic honour for accepting the hell storm intended for the cruiser.

The wounded raider was bleeding gases into the void and Stele’s servo-skulls relayed scans of a cracked fusion bottle. He pressed one finger on the glass, blotting out the shape of the vessel. The ship was a cripple, and so the inquisitor had already dismissed it from the complex game board arrayed in his mind.

Captain Ideon was conversing with one of his subordinates. ‘Set to work on repairing the torpedo tubes first,’ he ordered. ‘The warp drives can wait.’

Stele took a quick step forward. ‘So our damage is worse than you first stated, captain?’

Ideon’s face remained fixed but his voxcoder’s tones were terse. ‘I have revised estimates.’

As they pulled away from their first strike, the second raider had come about to flank the Bellus, taking advantage of her weakened void shields to the aft. Hard impacts on the stern quarter had sent tocsins wailing on every deck, and although Ideon had said nothing, Stele knew that they had been disabled – at least, temporarily.

Time was short, there were only moments now until the Dirge Eterna’s commander moved into formation with the undamaged raider and advanced on Bellus. The odds were poor with the ship in this sluggish condition. Stele studied the Blood Angels’ officer, aware that Ideon was courting the same thoughts. ‘We must not allow the enemy to place us on the defensive. Bellus must maintain the initiative, or we are lost.’

‘I concur, my lord, but if we move on our previous heading, we will be caught between the Dirge and the Ogre Lord.’

‘Correct,’ Stele noted, dipping his hand into the holosphere. ‘Instead, we will draw away, toward the gas giant.’ He indicated the huge green orb streaked with white cloud. ‘Take us into the upper atmosphere. The vapour will conceal us long enough to return the ship to full readiness.’

Ideon considered this. ‘To do that would mean that my brothers on Cybele would have no hope of rescue. We would be leaving them to an uncertain fate.’

‘On the contrary,’ said the inquisitor. ‘Their fate is all too certain, but if we do not wish to share it, this is the course we must pursue.’ He nodded at the captain, and allowed himself an expression of rueful sadness. ‘Execute my orders without delay, and by Terra, let His light protect those who stand and fight on Cybele.’

The starport’s ornamental gates had been wilted by a plasma blast, and the cannon turret that once defended it was now a black stump. Sachiel had ordered a pair of Trojan tenders parked across the road as a makeshift barricade, but none among the defenders fooled themselves into thinking it would do more than slow the Word Bearers’ advance.

Rafen ran toward the stone revetments that edged the fence. Crossfire from his brothers and traitors alike cut past with high-pitched screams. One instant they were in open ground; the next they were inside the port. Rafen blinked away the moment. In the thick of the fight, there were often flashes of time that seemed stretched thin or compacted without rhyme or reason. The Space Marine had learned to take them as they came and trust in his training.

‘Assault troops inbound!’ a voice called. ‘Look sharp!’

Rafen reloaded for what seemed like the thousandth time that day. His hands worked the bolter by touch alone as the grim visage of his helmet scanned the low cloud. He saw them instantly: the bulky shapes of Traitor Marines bobbing up in jet-fuelled skips, every one of them rising and falling on dirty orange plumes of flame that spat from their mammoth thruster backpacks. Streams of energy hotter than a sun’s core issued from the pistols in their mailed fists. The plasma guns carved blackened streaks across dirt, stone and flesh alike. Other men close to him were already opening fire, stitching tracer into the sky in lazy red threads. The Word Bearers’ assault cadre wove in and out of the lines of shot, with grace that belied their obdurate mass. Rafen held back. It was better to wait until the jump-packs slowed the Traitors for a landing, he reasoned; it was better to hesitate and pick that instant when the enemy hovered like a hawk about to swoop.

As that thought formed in his mind, Rafen saw his opportunity and trimmed a falling flyer as a gardener would prune thorns from a plant. He took off the Word Bearer’s left leg below the knee, then his arm at the shoulder. Suddenly unstable, the Space Marine tumbled out of the air and landed in a mud slick at the base of a bomb crater. Puffs of heat overhead marked the deaths of a handful more. But a few of the Chaos Space Marines had made it over the fence and had dropped into firing crouches, guns ripping with mad abandon.

Turcio’s vision filled with the foetid shape of a Word Bearer as an enemy soldier bore down. He jerked the trigger of his heavy bolter, but something gave a hollow click inside the breech and the fat-barrelled gun stayed silent. Turcio swore a curse that would have earned him fifty lashes if a senior brother had heard it. He brandished the inert weapon like a club as the Word Bearer felled him in a bone-shaking tackle. The enemy warrior had a deformed power claw where his right arm should have been, and he used it to cleave the jammed bolter in two. Locked together, Turcio punched the Word Bearer, but the clawed Chaos Space Marine took the blows without pause. Lukewarm spittle bubbled out from the attacker’s faceplate, and seething emerald eyes peered at Turcio from behind dirt-flecked lenses.

The young Space Marine’s gorge rose; the stench of the beast made his gut rebel. He drew back and head-butted the Word Bearer, getting a string of unholy invective in return. The claw-hand raked down the breast of Turcio’s armour, ripping through the ceramite and cutting vital connections. The Blood Angel felt cold air touch his bare skin.

Then the Word Bearer said the first words that Turcio could actually understand. ‘Give your flesh,’ it burbled.

‘Not today.’ Rafen’s voice was right in Turcio’s ear, and he jerked away as a red flash blurred into his line of sight.

The Chaos Space Marine barely had time to recognise the shape of a godwyn-pattern bolter pressed to its head, before Rafen fired point-blank and turned its skull into a grimy mist of filthy blood and brain matter. Some nerve connection still firing in the Word Bearer’s glove control jerked. Abruptly the headless soldier flew back up into the sky, and spiralled wildly; he had become an unguided missile. Rafen saw it spin and fall like a mortar shell – back into the advancing enemy line.

Black with exhaust soot, Turcio struggled to get up; the myomer muscles in his broken armour whined. ‘Brother, are you able?’ Rafen asked, helping him to his feet.

Turcio coughed. ‘Give me a weapon that works and I’ll show you just how able!’ He failed to keep a waver from his voice.

Rafen smiled grimly. ‘Good man. Here.’ He handed him a laser pistol, an Imperial Guard-issue weapon he’d found discarded by the gates. ‘Make do.’

Undisturbed by the ceaseless thunder of weapons’ fire, wisps of haze drifted across the open landing field of the port from discharged smoke grenades and the wreckage of burning Thunderhawks, obscuring the far edge of the broad ferrocrete oval. Rafen could see shapes moving out there, but even the enhanced sensory capacities of his auspex could not give him anything more than the most basic information. Metallic fumes thrown into the atmosphere by the fighting baffled the scanner and roughened every breath the Space Marines took. It would have cut an ordinary man’s lungs like broken glass, but there were no ordinary men left alive on Cybele.

Patchwork blobs of sunlight crossed the tarmac now and then. They caught the haze and conjured ghost images in plays of light and shadow. Rafen found himself glancing over his shoulder, to make sure that the enemy was not coming up behind them. There could easily be hundreds of them out there, concealed in the fog of battle and waiting for the right moment to strike.

Shot after shot from the Chaos host pitted and nicked the sparse stone fortifications. Lasers carved down great curls of razor-chain fence where they melted through the links. Ahead, the leading elements of the Word Bearers’ force were pressing into the Blood Angels’ barricade, and one of the defilers gave the parked Trojans a desultory kick. The red war engine crouched down and threw itself at the tracked vehicles, ramming them away in a gout of orange sparks.

In reply, a blue-helmed Devastator Space Marine sent a pair of missiles into the defiler’s prow. The rockets leapt eagerly to meet their target, and a dozen troopers poured fire into the same place, forcing the machine to stagger backward.

‘Rafen!’ The Blood Angel turned to see Koris, his gun smoking. ‘Report!’ The veteran absently brushed rock chips off his armour as a stray round shattered a decapitated statue close by.

He jerked a thumb at the sky to indicate the Chaos command ship. ‘They must be spawning up there like maggots, brother-sergeant. There are four of them to every one of us…’ His words trailed off. ‘Tycho’s blood, this isn’t the kind of hit-and-fade we’ve handled before. They mean to raze the planet and make trophies of us!’

‘Aye,’ Koris said with a dour nod. ‘This world has no tactical value, but they choose it because their very presence here is an affront to the Emperor.’ He shook his head. ‘A world full of graves and just a handful of men to guard it? Bah! We’re standing on the lip of a corpse-grinder!’

Shapes moved in the smoke, white and red flickering amid the grey. ‘Take care, Koris,’ Sachiel’s voice was clear and hard. ‘Defeatist talk belittles us all.’ The Sanguinary High Priest approached with a unit of men at his heels. Rafen noted with slight concern that none of them was Arkio.

Koris stepped closer to Sachiel, his voice low. ‘Pragmatism is the watchword of any Blood Angel, priest. I taught you that lesson when you were still a whelp.’

Sachiel’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’ve had other teachers since you, old man,’ he said, ‘other lessons learned.’ He gestured with his chainsword. ‘I gathered the men who survived the bombardment intact. I’ve ordered them to come forward and reinforce the line.’ Sachiel threw a nod to the Space Marines with him and they rushed forward to take up firing positions at the barricade.

‘To what end?’ Koris demanded. ‘We are assailed on all sides – those blighted scum are tightening the noose around us as we speak! Surely you see that?’

‘Lord Stele’s orders were to hold,’ the priest shot back, ‘and hold we will.’

The sergeant showed his teeth at Sachiel’s tone. ‘Hold what, priest? Tell me that. What patch of ground? A metre? A kilometre?’ He shook his head. ‘We stand and we die, and Stele – if he is even still alive – returns to find the Word Bearers chewing on the bones of my men.’ He flashed a glance at Rafen. ‘I will not allow it.’

‘The port must not fall–’

‘It has already fallen!’ The words bubbled up out of Rafen before he was even aware of it. Sachiel gave him a barbed look. ‘We’re just slowing them, not halting them.’ As if to lend its agreement to the words, one of the defilers spat out a deafening hoot of sound as it speared the husk of a smouldering speeder. ‘We need to regroup, before it’s too late.’

Despite himself, Sachiel hesitated. The priest’s many battles over the decades had been in conflict with xenos scum of every stripe, but this was the first time many of the warriors of the Bellus had met their traitorous brethren at close hand. As much as he loathed admitting inferiority in anything, he had to admit that Rafen and Koris had the greater benefit of experience against this foe. Sachiel’s fingers strayed to the bone wings on his breastplate and the ruby blood droplet depicted there. There would be no glory in dying in a graveyard after surviving so much to recover the spear.

‘Give the order,’ he told Koris, after a long pause. ‘But watch your tone in future.’

The sergeant turned away and relayed the command, leaving Sachiel and Rafen together. ‘You dislike me, don’t you?’ The priest said suddenly. ‘You have never given me any more than what is expected of you.’

Rafen covered his surprise at Sachiel’s words. ‘It is my duty to respect the holders of the grail–’

Sachiel waved him into silence. ‘You respect the office, but not the man, brother. Even after all these years, you slight me.’ The priest turned as the rest of the Blood Angels began to draw back. ‘But I will have your respect, Rafen,’ he said gently. ‘You will give it to me.’

Rafen tried to form an answer, but none came to him. Koris’s voice in his ear-bead pulled his attention away.

‘There is a gap in the Word Bearer line to the north. Take the lead and secure a regroup point at the reservoir dome’

‘Acknowledged,’ he said. ‘I’ll need some men.’

‘You can have one. Go with your brother.’

The Blood Angel came about as a throaty roar signalled the arrival of a fast attack bike from across the landing field. The low-slung motorcycle growled to a halt and idled. Arkio beckoned to his elder brother. Rafen gave him a nod and bounded up to the rear spoiler, gripping the back of the seat with one hand. Arkio gunned the engine, and the bike threw itself into the wavering lines of mist. Behind it, a crimson stream of Space Marines disengaged from the fierce fighting, and with weapons running dry, they reluctantly gave their backs to the enemy.

Arkio tore across the flat apron, veering the bike around the remains of drop-ships, skirting the places where beam fire had cut the ground. With his bolter clasped in his free hand, Rafen picked targets as they moved and strafed them. Arkio arrowed the vehicle toward a pack of Word Bearers pushing forward from the western side of the port and triggered the twin guns atop the front wheel. Orange tracer lanced through their warp-changed bodies even as the sound of the bike’s approach reached their ears.

‘There!’ Arkio shouted over the engine’s roar. ‘I see the breach!’

Rafen followed his brother’s outstretched arm. Ahead of them, the Word Bearer line had become strung out where the Traitors had allowed their fire discipline to become lax. To Rafen’s trained eye, the weak point stood out like obsidian against ivory. ‘Sergeant Koris,’ he spoke into his helmet communicator pickup, ‘rally to us. We’re breaking through.’

‘Firing!’ called Arkio, as he unleashed the twin bolters again. Rafen hesitated as something caught his eye back in the smoke haze.

‘What is it?’ asked his brother.

‘I thought I saw…’ Rafen replied, dispatching a Chaos Space Marine fumbling with a tube-launcher. ‘People.’

Then they were off the level ground of the ferrocrete and into the mud and grass of the graveyards, and all of Rafen’s attention was spent on the enemy troopers, who popped up from behind the headstones like targets in some carnival shooting gallery.

While Sachiel led Koris and the troops from the barricade in an orderly retreat, there were other Blood Angels’ units following the same orders. From the hangars came the few walking wounded that had not been killed when the makeshift hospital had been bombed, and with them the support units whose Predators had been razed in a single shot from the Ogre Lord’s cannons. Injured and bleeding, they fought hard all the same, daring the Word Bearers to try and stop them.

These were the Space Marines who came across the eight skinny men standing in a ragged group in the middle of the landing field. A novice scout found them first, all of them stumbling around in little circles, humming and mumbling to themselves. Their mouths and eyelids were sewn shut, and some sort of blade-edged chain tied them together in a loose knot.

‘What are these?’ The scout asked his commander, a craggy-faced sergeant. The humming voices were rising in volume.

The sergeant glanced over his shoulder at the wave of approaching Blood Angels and the fire they laid down behind them. He had no time to halt the retreat because of some addled civilians. He stepped closer and studied them. When he was at arm’s length, he realised that their skins – which he had thought were dark in tone – were actually covered in tiny writing. The sergeant saw the representations of a many-angled star drawn there in millions of configurations, and he spat in disgust.

‘Heretics,’ he growled, and every gun around him came up to firing position. ‘Execution detail! Kill–’

His Space Marines didn’t hear the command. The humming chants of the eight men was so loud now, it blotted out his voice.

The scout, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the figures since he first saw them, watched it happen: a sparkle of unleashed psychic energy licking between the men, fanning out into a coruscating globe of sickening light. Linked together since birth and imprinted by Iskavan’s psyche-mages, the eight channelled all their mental energy into the one unstoppable release that was the sole purpose of their lives. They were a psionic munition with a war-shot of pure, violent intensity. Their power arced through every one of the injured Space Marines, and then they died, turning to ash; but none of this mattered to the men their discharge had touched.

The minds of the surrounding Blood Angels – more than three-quarters of the survivors of the two Word Bearer attacks – were shredded instantly; their higher reasoning and intelligence wiped clean. All that remained was naked, primal aggression, and the very darkest core of unchained bloodlust. Brothers who had known each other for centuries, allies and comrades, fell upon one another with monstrous abandon. Sachiel and Koris watched helplessly from outside the radius of the psi-weapon, as Blood Angel killed Blood Angel amid the lusty cheers of their enemies.

Out in the Word Bearer lines, Iskavan the Hated bellowed with laughter and shouted his delight to the sky. ‘Forward!’ He called to his host. ‘Take the port!’

‘There are more out there, my lord. You’re letting them go?’ said Tancred, realising too late that his words might be interpreted as disrespectful.

‘I intend no such thing.’ The Dark Apostle gestured with his crozius. ‘No victory is so complete as the one that comes over an enemy that is broken. We winnow these wretches until only the very strongest of them remain.’ In anticipation, Iskavan’s tongues emerged from the forest of teeth behind his lips. ‘And they will be the ones we will leave begging for the beautiful tortures that please the gods.’

Tancred pushed all thoughts of his dark prediction away and presented his master with an agreeable aspect. ‘By your command.’

The Traitors moved forward over the bodies of the dead.

By nightfall, the last of the Space Marines that had escaped the psi-blast had stumbled back to the rally point. Rafen’s heart turned cold and heavy in his chest as the weak warmth of the day faded. As light drew out of the landscape around him, so hope seemed to follow it. In the dank shadows cast by the reservoir’s dome, injured men and battle-weary survivors sat in sombre silence. Rafen walked among them, sparing a nod or a gesture of solidarity to those he knew personally. Outwardly his manner was neutral, but within it was burdened with grim malaise. There were hardly a handful of them now, not a single man above sergeant’s rank or armed with more than a bolter. He passed Koris as the veteran spoke in low, angry tones to Sachiel; his first order had been to tally up the ammunition and weapons held by the survivors and Rafen could tell just by his expression that the numbers were poor.

Rafen sat by Turcio as he worked to patch his armour with glutinous sealant. Nearby, a watchful Arkio cleaned his bolter. Rafen’s brother had returned from a patrol with Alactus to report the terrible sights of the Traitors’ victory revels only an hour earlier. The wind brought the sounds of distant shrieks for all of them to hear. Some of them belonged to voices that Rafen recognised.

‘Once again we wait for death,’ Turcio’s voice was a hollow echo.

‘Not for the first time,’ Rafen agreed, forcing the doubts from his words, ‘but we will prevail. We are Blood Angels.’

Perhaps on another occasion, the sentiment might have been enough, but here and now Turcio met Rafen’s gaze and he saw the spectre of dread there. ‘I pray that is enough, brother, or else we will join the men on whose graves we trampled today.’

‘We will not die here,’ Rafen said without heat.

Turcio saw the lie and looked away. ‘You know that we will. And it shames us all that these animals will dance upon the bones blessed by the Throne.’

Arkio came to his feet in a rush, startling Rafen. ‘No,’ he said, exasperated. His voice carried iron with it. ‘What shames us is that any Blood Angel would countenance defeat at the hands of the corrupted!’ He advanced on Turcio and pressed a fist into the other Space Marine’s chest. ‘The blood of Sanguinius courses through us all. It is the very stuff of defiance and honour, but you speak as if your heart pumps water in its place!’

The low murmur of speech in the camp was suddenly gone; every man was listening to Arkio’s words. They were caught by the abrupt passion that surged from them.

‘I face my fate with clear eyes,’ Turcio managed. ‘That makes me no less a battle-brother!’

Arkio’s expression was a mix of concern and sadness. ‘My poor friend, you have lost your faith and yet you do not see it. Here,’ he handed Turcio his knife. ‘If you are so sure of death, take this now and slit your throat.’

‘Arkio–’ Rafen began, but his sibling held him at bay with a hand. Something in the younger Space Marine’s manner made him stop and fall silent.

‘Take it,’ he repeated.

‘You mock me!’ Turcio snapped, his colour rising. Without warning, the Space Marine’s dispirited mien broke and in its place was a hot rage. ‘I will take a thousand Word Bearers with me before I go to the Emperor’s side! I will not end my own life like some mewling, broken imbecile!’ The words flowed out of him in an angry rush.

‘There!’ Arkio’s face split in a savage grin. Inexplicably Turcio did the same, baring his fangs. ‘You see, my brother? There is the fire of our Lord Primogenitor! Look within, see it! It still burns in your breast! I merely had to remind you of it…’ The younger Space Marine turned to face the rest of them, the knife glistening in his hand. ‘Look at us, brothers! Have we escaped the enemy only to let them win without a shot? Did our comrades die today just so we might wallow in despair?’

‘No!’ A dozen men shouted out in answer, and Rafen was one of them, speaking without thinking. Something bright and powerful flashed in his brother’s eyes, and he was roused by it. Arkio’s every word was crystal clear, each sentence resonating with righteous energy.

‘The Traitors think we are broken, beaten, defeated!’ he growled. ‘By Lemartes, I say this is not so! I say we will yet bleed them white and send them running!’

Rafen’s gaze locked with his younger brother’s for a second. Arkio looked about him, taking in the faces of all the assembled Blood Angels. In the dimness, the Space Marine’s sharp-angled face and his cut of golden hair made him seem like one of the renditions of the honoured warriors of antiquity, in portraits at the fortress-monastery. In a moment of strange disconnection, Rafen saw Arkio as if he were a Blood Angel from the time of the Heresy, an ancient face of the Chapter’s most glorious past; then the image passed, and Arkio was speaking again. ‘The Traitors do not have the honour to meet us in open battle. They nip and strike at our numbers, wear us down. The Word Bearers do not just wish us dead… They desire the destruction of our souls as much as our flesh! But to the last man we can defy them!’

A chorus of assent greeted his words; but then one voice sounded above them all. ‘Your ardour does you credit, lad,’ said Koris carefully. ‘But rhetoric is never a substitute for gun and blade.’

Sachiel’s face set in pious indignation, but before he could censure Koris for his interruption, Arkio nodded respectfully to the veteran. ‘The honoured brother-sergeant is right, of course – but I have more than just words to offer.’

‘Explain yourself.’ Rafen demanded. He fixed his eyes on his sibling, part of him marvelling at a facet of his brother he had never seen before.

The young Space Marine stooped and pulled at something concealed in the long grass. With a grinding of hinges, a hidden maintenance hatch came open in his hands. ‘If it pleases my brothers to hear it, I dare to have a strategy. A way we can take the fight to the foe, even with numbers as small as this, and still cut their hearts from them.’

CHAPTER FOUR

Alactus shook his head and smiled coldly. ‘Have you been so long from true battle that your brain has softened, whelp?’ He stood up and approached Arkio, the rhythm of his gait suggesting he might strike the Space Marine. ‘While you were playing games with greenskins, the rest of us have been fighting the real foes of the Imperium! You presume much to speak so boldly of an untried plan in such a facile tone!’

Arkio stood his ground and let the insult roll off him. ‘I would respectfully hear your thoughts, brother.’ Alactus was barely a few decades older than Arkio and he had little cause to cast the other Space Marine as his junior. Arkio ignored this fact and let him speak.

‘You spout a few words of holy writ and think that you can turn the tide of battle? You have much to learn.’ Now the tension in the camp came to a knife-edge, every strain and unease among the survivors rushing to the surface.

‘Then teach me, Alactus,’ Arkio said mildly. ‘You say you doubt my prowess and that of my comrades from the Bellus, but I know you do not. I see a different reason behind your outburst. You are afraid, and you turn it on me instead of the enemy.’

The other Space Marine’s face flushed crimson with barely restrained anger. ‘You ask me if I know fear? You dare?’ he roared. Alactus stabbed a finger in the direction of the starport. ‘You were not there to see the weapon those unholy fiends unleashed upon our brethren! I was in the last of the ranks to retreat, I stood with Koris and watched the witch-fire engulf every Blood Angel who followed behind us!’

‘I, too,’ said Corvus, from the shadows. ‘I saw it. Men with their dignity stripped away by the touch of Chaos, rendered into blood-hungry beasts. They conjured the red thirst from every one of them.’

The phantom of their Chapter’s gene-curse forced a sullen silence over the assembled men. The anger fell from Alactus’s face and he became ashen. ‘I am afraid, Arkio. Though we face the darkness without until we die, there is no Blood Angel who does not fear the beast within. Any man who says he does not lies to himself. It is what makes us sons of Sanguinius. Our strength… Our bane.’ He shook his head. ‘That these Traitors might seek to use it against us chills me to my marrow.’

Corvus nodded his agreement. ‘By the Emperor’s grace, we few have survived this day, but to have seen such a sight and still live…’ He shuddered.

Sachiel’s voice was a low growl. ‘This morbid prattle spreads like a virus! Your brothers died for the Throne! You should be honoured to join them!’

‘No, priest,’ Arkio broke in, his subdued words reinforced with quiet humility. He hung his head. There was pain in his eyes. ‘Forgive my disagreement, but there is no shame in what has been said here. What kind of men would we be if we could watch our kinsmen die and feel nothing? Are we more than mindless killing machines in the garb of flesh?’ He looked up again, and Rafen felt a physical shock as their eyes locked. Tears coursed down Arkio’s face. ‘I weep for my brothers.’

Arkio took Alactus’s hand and grasped it firmly. ‘I weep for them and I know your fear, brother – but if this is true, you too must know my fury as well, my wish to punish those who transgress against us!’

A change passed over the face of Alactus. ‘I do,’ he agreed. ‘I know it in my heart and my blood.’

Arkio looked to the Sanguinary Priest, and to Rafen’s surprise Sachiel too nodded his agreement. ‘We are Blood Angels,’ said Arkio, his voice thick with emotion, ‘and we carry the flaw, but as Argastes said in the litany vermilion, we are not weak because of it!’

‘The black rage makes us strong,’ said Sachiel, quoting the passage from memory, ‘because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives–’

‘Or be forever lost.’ Koris finished. ‘Arkio is right. We have no choice but to fight.’

Rafen felt the words resonate in his chest. A renewed sense of purpose bloomed among the men, and suddenly the wounds and privations of the battle seemed cursory things. The will had been in them all along, he realised, and it merely took the spark of his brother’s words to rekindle it. Rafen spoke quietly to his brother. ‘You are full of surprises, kindred.’

Arkio gave him a brittle smile. ‘No, Rafen. I am as you are, a Space Marine and servant of the Emperor and Lord Sanguinius. No more.’

‘And how will we serve them now? You spoke of a strategy…’

The young Blood Angel stooped. ‘Look here, brothers.’ He gestured towards the hatch he had opened in the ground. ‘During the battle I became separated by the shelling. A mortar round took me from my feet and I found myself thrown against a grille on the surface of the landing field…’

‘A drainage channel,’ said Turcio. ‘There are many of them throughout the starport.’

‘Indeed. The rainy season on Cybele is fierce, is it not? And the waters are diverted here, to the catchment reservoirs.’

Koris gave a quiet grunt of laughter. ‘By the oath, this bold young pup has found us a route back to the port. The flood channels can take us right under the Word Bearers.’

Sachiel studied the open hatchway. ‘A clever tactic, Arkio. But what are we to do with this course? If we emerge in the midst of the Traitor scum, we will be no better off than if we had stayed at the barricade.’ He gave Koris a hard stare. ‘And as I was told, that would be certain death.’

‘It would,’ Arkio noted, ‘which is why we would send only a few men. Brother-Sergeant Koris will correct me if I err, but I believe that only one is required to operate the port’s defence batteries, yes?’

‘The anti-ship guns?’ Koris nodded, and looked to a surviving Techmarine from his company. ‘If you took Lucion here, it could be accomplished.’

The Techmarine tapped the cog-and-skull symbol on his chest-plate in a gesture of agreement. ‘I can turn my hand to that. It would be simple.’

‘But once you have the guns, what then?’ asked Sachiel. ‘They cannot depress low enough to strike at the Word Bearers.’

Rafen felt a rush of excitement as he saw the plan unfold in his mind. ‘We will not use the guns on the ground troops. We target the Ogre Lord overhead.’

‘The command ship?’ said Lucion. ‘It orbits directly above us… If it fell from the skies, it would be like a storm of meteors…’

‘Aye, this borders on madness,’ said Koris. ‘But for Sanguinius, it will be done!’

Sachiel reached for the velvet bag on his belt. ‘So ordered. I will take command of the strike team personally. Arkio, for your eloquence you will join me with Corvus and Lucion.’ He turned to Koris. ‘Brother-sergeant, choose a squad of men to accompany us. You will lead the remaining troops to stage a diversionary raid on the perimeter once we are within the port’s confines.’

Koris masked his ill humour at the orders with a salute; the veteran had clearly hoped to lead the team himself. ‘As you command.’

As Sachiel stepped away, Rafen laid a hand on his commander’s shoulder. ‘Sergeant, I would have you choose me to go too.’

Koris raised an eyebrow. ‘You want to keep a watch on the lad, eh? In case he has any other flashes of tactical brilliance or sudden urges for oratory?’ The elder warrior gave a terse nod. ‘Very well. Take Alactus too, and draw full stocks of ammunition from what assets we have.’

‘Lord, that will leave the rest of you with next to nothing–’

‘Bah,’ Koris waved him away. ‘We’ll beat them with stones and harsh language if need be. You take your brother’s plan and make it work, Rafen.’

Rafen said no more, as a silence fell across the survivors. Sachiel held up a brass chalice and murmured a benediction. Each of the Blood Angels was drawn to the glittering replica of the red grail. The priest drew his combat blade across his bared forearm and let a thin stream of blood trickle into the cup. Then he handed it to Koris, who did the same. The chalice went from man to man until each of them had added a run of their own vital fluid to the mixture. The container had the same shape and form as the most sacred and ancient of the Chapter’s artefacts, the red grail that contained the blood of every Sanguinary High Priest. So the Chapter’s scripture said, these men – of which Sachiel was one – shared an iota of the primarch’s blood; it was injected into their veins in a sacred ritual. Now the priest took a draught from the cup. ‘By blood we are bonded,’ he intoned, ‘and by blood we serve.’

He passed the chalice back along the line of men, and each of them sipped from the dark, coppery liquid. ‘We drink deep of victory, and remember the fallen.’ The cup, empty now, returned to Sachiel’s grasp. ‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’

With one voice, the last warriors of the Imperium on Cybele took up the cry. ‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’

The flood channel was a tight fit for the Space Marines, and it was a credit to their battle discipline that they moved quietly through the waist-deep water, never once brushing against the worn brickwork that closed in around them. The water-course was not the product of a single construction: over the centuries, the pipes had been extended and built over one another as more and more of Cybele’s surface had become a resting place for war dead. In some parts, the Space Marines were able to stand line abreast instead of single file, passing through the stone foundations of huge crypts and mausoleums. Alactus led the way with a faint biolume in his hand. The dull green glow from the lamp shifted and danced off the walls and the sluggish water.

Rafen picked out the shapes of small vermin and carrion insects as they scattered from the light. Now and then, Alactus would pause and study the path ahead, the faint glow illuminating aged text in High Gothic on the subsided memorial stones. The Space Marine studied one such monument, canted at a wild angle, half buried in the earth. The names of hundreds of men were carved there in an endless train of letters; victims of some long-forgotten atrocity on a world that likely no longer existed. Since he was a child, there had always been something about tombstones that at once attracted and repelled Rafen; it was as if he sensed that one day he would discover a stone that bore his name. The moment of reverie broke as he became aware of Lucion behind him. Alactus had started forward again, and Rafen followed on.

As they moved closer to the starport, the occasional breaths of night air along the tunnels became more frequent, and with them they brought disturbing sounds that were ghostly and incoherent. Rafen noticed that the water had changed consistency; it ran more sluggishly now, and it had a dark, oily sheen. Alactus paused again and made a quick set of gestures with his hand. Rafen showed him a slow nod to indicate he understood and relayed the signs to Lucion behind him. The Space Marine on point had found a place where the walls had partly fallen in, and they would need to drop to a crawl to pass it. Alactus slid into the thick waters and the light from the biolume vanished with him.

Rafen let his helmet visor adjust to the darkness, rendering the channel in a monochrome grey. He felt a pat on his back and he went down to his knees, then his chest, and into the liquid embrace. Submerged, the Space Marine moved forward by touch, letting his fingers lead him through the heaps of rubble and thick slides of disturbed earth. Once, his hand traced over the shape of something that felt suspiciously like a human femur, but then he was past it and rising up from the viscous grip of the run-off. Alactus pulled him to his feet and Rafen reflexively drew his hand across his faceplate to wipe off the oily matter. The red ceramite glove came away with purple-black clots of coagulated fluid glistening on it. Rafen realised that he had been holding his breath, even though the sealed Adeptus Astartes power armour had its own internal oxygen supply. Toggling a vent in his gear, he allowed himself to sip at the air in the flood channel, and a million scent-tones raced through his sense memory.

The channel was knee-deep in blood, and he did not need to look at the other Space Marine to see that he knew it too. As the other members of the squad emerged, Rafen looked up to take in the place where they had risen.

They were inside the perimeter of the starport now. By Rafen’s reckoning they were quite close to the place where the first Thunderhawks from the Bellus had touched down. The narrow pipe had given way to a tall, vaulted run-off chamber where other, smaller effluent channels converged. Some six metres above his head, set in the landing field’s surface, was a long slot that showed dark sky beyond, barred by thick rods of steel grille.

In the rainy season, water would sluice off the ferrocrete pads and through those grids, but what fell from them now was something quite different. Irregular shapes were heaped over the drains above, piled in discarded heaps. They were bodies and there were countless dozens of them, some still clad in broken pieces of Blood Angel armour. A continuous rain of blood was falling, the vital fluid of their dead brethren greeting them like some arcane shower of anointment.

Beyond the mournful patter of the dead men’s blessing, there were other noises that merged into one rolling thunder of sound. Demagogues and mechanised loquitur-drones led the massed ranks of Word Bearers above them in thanksgiving for their victory. Rafen resisted the urge to spit and turned away. Arkio stood close by, his helmet turned to the sky, his expression hidden behind the fearsome mask.

‘Brother?’ Rafen’s voice was a whisper. ‘Do you see something?’

With a near-physical effort, Arkio broke away from the sight. ‘Only the dead.’

The Word Bearers had made camp amid the port’s broken structures. Tancred found his liege-lord picking at a heap of soft, fish-belly white meat. He appeared deceptively languid in his auto-throne with one hand cupped under a Space Marine helmet. Iskavan eyed the torturer as he approached and held the helm to his lips, licking cold blood from it.

‘Speak.’ Iskavan grunted. Tancred knew instantly from the tone in his voice that the Dark Apostle was annoyed, even though they had won the day against the Blood Angels.

‘News from orbit, master. The Dirge Eterna has located the human ship in the atmosphere of the gas giant world and commenced bombardment from low orbit. Guided by the ruinous powers, we will force them from their hiding place or destroy them.’

Iskavan spat harshly. ‘A fine victory indeed,’ he said with leaden sarcasm. ‘But no amount of holy murder will lessen my disgust!’

Tancred’s tentacle-hand shivered, as it always did when he was concerned. ‘Lord, what ails you? You have taken this world in the name of the blight but yet you stand aside from our victory revels. I would know why.’

In answer, Iskavan drained the last draught of blood from the Astartes helmet, then pitched it away into the chanting crowds of his own soldiers. ‘You were there, Tancred. You saw it as well as I did.’ He shook his head. ‘By the order of our warmaster, we fell back. We retreated.’ Saying the word made the Apostle twitch with anger. ‘What orders are these that a Word Bearer must step back from an enemy?’ With that he was on his feet, kicking over the food tray. ‘Ever forward, never back! That is our creed, by Lorgar’s eyes!’

Tancred stood his ground. ‘Above all others, we are bound to serve the word of Lord Garand…’

Invoking Garand’s name had the desired effect: the Apostle’s mood softened – but only a little. ‘There is more at work here than we know, Tancred,’ he hissed. ‘Garand moves us about like regicide pieces on a hooded board and grants us the merest slips of information, but Iskavan the Hated is the pawn of no one!’

‘But what choice do we have, dark one?’

‘What choice?’ Iskavan snorted. ‘What–’ Without warning, the Chaos warlord’s voice choked off in mid-sentence and he licked at the air. When he spoke again, all trace of his previous mood was gone. ‘Do you taste that, Tancred?’

‘My lord?’

The Apostle jumped down from the makeshift dais where his throne sat and beckoned a warrior to him. ‘You! Give me your name.’

The Word Bearer bowed to his master. ‘I am Xanger FellEye, if it pleases great Iskavan.’

‘I scent men hereabouts. Gather your most zealous and search the perimeter.’

Without another word, the Chaos Space Marine turned and ran to his task. Tancred watched him go. ‘Lord, surely no more than an insignificant few of the man-beasts remain alive? Our puppeteers saw to that.’

Iskavan’s hideous mouth split in a too-wide smile as he recalled the injured Blood Angels murdering one another in frenzy. ‘Yes. If Garand had granted us more of those precious psyker-helots, then this world would have been subdued in an hour, not a day.’ He dismissed the thought with a blink of his yellow eyes. ‘How many are left does not matter. It only matters that they are left.’ Iskavan drew himself up to his full height. ‘Tancred, when the dawn rises on Cybele I will erect the first great obelisk to the glory of Chaos Undivided, and mark me, I shall have it made from the fresh-hewn bones of the Adeptus Astartes.’

The edge of the sprawling Chaos encampment seemed close enough to touch through the optics of the gun’s target scope. ‘I have a target, sergeant,’ Turcio sub-vocalised, the sensor pickups in his throat relaying the words as clearly as a shout. The Space Marine held his aim steady on the Word Bearer guard post; he was still carrying the laser that Rafen had pressed into his grip in what seemed like an age ago.

‘Hold your fire, lad,’ the veteran replied. ‘We’ll go just as soon as the priest says so.’ The remnants of his unit lay in wait, spread out behind him and hidden in the lee of a hill. All of them were burning for revenge.

Turcio watched the Traitor Marine pause at the door of the ruined hut. One squeeze of the trigger plate and its head would pop like an overripe fruit.

‘Wait for the word,’ Koris repeated, as if he read his mind. ‘It’ll come soon enough.’

FellEye found his thoughts wandering as he approached the edge of the landing fields. Under other circumstances, he might have called it a blessing that he had been selected for a mission by the Dark Apostle himself – but the events of the day on this blighted corpse-world had left him, like many of his comrades, disturbed. Of course they had routed the hated Blood Angels – and Xanger had never doubted that would take place – but Iskavan’s confused orders during the initial assault had left the Word Bearers under his command wary. And now there was this, the sudden demand to search for survivors. FellEye was torn between his desire for the raucous cacophony of the victory carousal and his duty to his lord. Hushed whispers that Iskavan’s mind was unsettled had long been spoken of in the Legions of the ninth host, and many of the men blamed the Apostle for their poor victories of late – but until today the veteran Word Bearer had never given them any credence.

He sniffed the air. The Dark Apostle said he smelled man-flesh out here, but then so could Xanger. The whole moon was a repository for rotting human carcasses, after all, and the earth was churned to mud where bright rivers of enemy blood had pooled. FellEye shook off the thought. It was not his place to question the orders of an exalted one. Not yet, anyway.

One of his men grunted through his tusks. ‘I saw movement.’ The other Word Bearer pointed at a metal grate in the ferrocrete.

‘Open it,’ Xanger commanded, gesturing to the rest of his patrol with the flat of his hand.

The tusked Chaos Space Marine bobbed his head in a bow and tugged the covering off with a squeak of complaining hinges. He dropped into a crouch so he could see clearly into the flood channel.

Sachiel’s chainsword entered the Word Bearer’s flesh just above his sternum and sank into the meat of him, before ripping back out in a wound that opened his skull from the inside. The Traitor fell away as the Blood Angels erupted from their concealment, boiling out of the vent in a burst of red.

Xanger fired wildly. Bolter rounds from his skull-mouthed weapon skipped across the runway as he walked his fire into the mass of emerging enemy bodies. The other Word Bearers in the patrol reacted a spilt-second slower than he; they were surprised by the sudden appearance of the foe in their midst. These men paid for their laxity with their lives. FellEye’s shots clipped a figure and one of the Blood Angels tumbled back the way he had come. Just as suddenly the guns of every Space Marine converged on him and Xanger’s millennia of service to Chaos ended in a screeching whirlwind of agony. The warrior’s corrupted form came apart in chunks of decayed flesh and ceramite.

‘The word is given,’ Sachiel hissed into his throat mike as the other men dispatched the rest of the patrol. ‘Commence attack!’

‘Lord, please,’ Tancred said, a lilt of concern in his voice, ‘I fear you may be allowing your mind to play tricks–’

‘Silence!’ Iskavan cuffed him to the ground with a cursory flick of his wrist. ‘Rally the men! Don’t you hear it? Gunfire!’

Tancred struggled to recover his dignity, fuming inwardly. ‘Perhaps you are mistaken, dark one. All I hear is the popping of human bones on our pyres, the spree of our warriors.’ But just as he spoke, the torturer caught the distinctive snap-crack of a laser discharge on the wind. Rising to his feet, he looked to the western edge of the starport and saw beams flaring there and the hot globes of grenade detonations. ‘Forgive me, lord! You are correct!’ He bellowed commands to the soldiers around him and wrapped his tentacles around his plasma pistol. He was not aware that Iskavan was looking in the opposite direction.

‘Where are they?’ the Dark Apostle asked, turning to study the distant flares of Sergeant Koris’s attack. Iskavan’s eyes narrowed. ‘An echo, then,’ he told himself, dismissing his suspicions.

Cowering in case he might be struck again, Tancred held up his master’s crozius. ‘Your weapon, lord…’

Without another word, Iskavan took up the device and strode westward, eager for battle.

‘They’re taking heavy fire,’ Lucion said, his face implacable as he listened to the signals from Koris and the Space Marines at the diversionary front.

‘Then let us make use of every second they give us,’ Sachiel snapped. The priest looked up. Just as they had planned, Alactus had led them to the shadow of the four great defence cannons that loomed over the starport in stubby, sharp-edged ziggurats. Thick tubes emerged from the capstones of each construction, tilted at steep angles toward the sky. Inside those imposing structures were mechanisms and conveyers that fed shells as big as Thunderhawks into gaping, hungry breeches.

‘We’ll need to pass the gate…’ said Rafen, considering the doors that blocked the firing bunker from the outside world.

Arkio smiled. ‘I have an idea.’ A vehicle, far enough away to miss them as it raced toward the attack on the perimeter, rumbled by in the mists. Arkio filled his lungs and shouted, his voice carrying. ‘Hail!’

Alactus grabbed his arm, a second too late. ‘You fool, what are you doing?’

The running lights on the vehicle twitched and grew as it turned and approached them. The shape of a Word Bearer tactical Space Marine was visible, half out of the roof hatch. He threw a chest-beating salute at them as the tracked machine slowed in jerks and fits.

‘A Rhino,’ whispered Rafen. ‘One of ours…’

The transport was indeed of Blood Angels’ issue, but as it came closer it was clear that a glancing melta-blast had ripped most of the port armour away. The old Imperial or Blood Angel sigils had been painted over with crude Chaos symbols. Rafen could see three more Word Bearers through the hole in the hull.

‘Hail!’ the Traitor called, as the Rhino skidded to a halt. ‘Host-brothers! Will you come join our hunt for the men-prey?’ In the darkness, with their wargear coated by blood and detritus, the armour of the Blood Angels appeared the same shade as the gore-red the Word Bearers wore themselves; it was enough for the enemy to lower their guard.

‘I think not,’ said Arkio, and opened fire. Rafen and the other Blood Angels did the same, killing everything inside the Rhino before they could even draw a weapon.

‘Good thinking,’ Sachiel commented, striding over to the idling vehicle. ‘Get these unblessed monstrosities out of this machine. Lucion!’ He addressed the Techmarine. ‘Take the wheel.’

‘Idiots!’ said Noro, his one organic eye squinting through the fire-slot. ‘The Rhino is returning.’ The Chaos Space Marine gave his comrade a quick look of confusion. ‘What now?’

The other Word Bearer shrugged, the gesture magnified tenfold by the bulk of his armour. ‘Be wary,’ he hissed through blunted snake’s teeth. ‘I will meet them at the gate.’

Noro watched him turn the crank that released the iron doors to the firing bunker. Typically, it was he who had been left behind when the humans started shooting and the other Word Bearers in his squad wanted to go and join the battle. Noro shook his head in disgust. Dropped from the Ogre Lord in the very last wave, Noro’s unit had missed every moment of the fury, and then they’d been ordered to guard the defence battery instead of taking part in the communion. He hadn’t even seen a single live Blood Angel all day. Noro cursed his luck and spat hissing acidic phlegm on the stone deck.

‘Something is amiss.’ said the other Word Bearer, studying the approaching Rhino. ‘The vehicle is gaining speed.’

And then, the bionic optic in his other eye socket provided him with a close-up image of the transport. Noro saw the distinctive winged blood drop on the armour of someone inside the vehicle, and he knew precisely what was going on. ‘Warp take them!’ he screamed. ‘Secure the gate!’

To his credit, his comrade didn’t ask for an explanation. Instead he turned the crank the other way and forced the iron doors to reverse back into the closed position, but the effort he’d used trying to open them made the task twice as hard and twice as long. So the gates to the bunker had three feet of clearance between each edge when the prow of the Rhino struck them at full throttle.

Lucion handled the tracked transport like a guided missile and rammed the gate at precisely the point where their resistance was least. The impact stunned the Techmarine into giddying moments of semi-consciousness, but the rest of the team had jumped free just seconds before the collision. Now they poured in behind the broken form of the Rhino, forced like a crimson wedge between the doors.

Noro’s comrade was gutted by a lucky collateral kill when splintering segments of the Rhino’s tracks took his head from his shoulders. There were other Word Bearers in the bunker, but they had not even understood that anything was amiss until the transport’s explosive arrival. Now all of them were taking up guns, shooting and dying as the Blood Angels brought them death.

Arkio was at the head of the pack, his bolter a murderous roar of devout vengeance. ‘Imperator excommunicatus!’ he cried, sending the Chaos Space Marines and their chattering servitors screaming into hell.

Noro thought about his warp-forsaken luck and crossed gazes with the young Blood Angel. The Word Bearer fired his bolt pistol, but the rounds never seemed to even get close, skipping away as if the human had some charm about him. Noro cried out in Lorgar’s name and rushed forward to bury his knife in the furious face of the whelp, if nothing else, but he was met by a horrific storm of metal-shattering bullets.

Noro was the last of the Word Bearers in the bunker to fall, and Arkio pitched back his head to cry out in anger. ‘More!’ he spat. ‘More to slake the thirst!’

‘Aye! More!’ Alactus was with him, eyes wide with need.

Rafen shot his brother a glance as he helped Lucion to extract himself from the crumpled Rhino. ‘Which way now?’

‘Down.’ Lucion indicated a wire-cage lift. ‘The firing control is below us.’

Sachiel ran his hand over the white and red of his armour. ‘By the grail, Sanguinius graces us this day! We turn the tide!’

As they rode down into the lower level, Rafen chanced another look at Arkio. For a moment, the orange hue of the emergency lamps made his armour seem bronze in colour, and Rafen was reminded of the Riga tapestry again; then the moment passed, and they had arrived.

A few single-shot kills made short work of the helots cowering amid the consoles, and while the Space Marines cleaned up, Lucion began the ritual of activation. Above, inside the stone ziggurats, the four gun tubes groaned and shifted, as if the weapons themselves sensed what was about to happen.

Bellus burst from the gas giant on the shock wave of a nuclear firestorm, volatile elements in the planet’s air combusting around her. Although he had no firing solutions, Captain Ideon ordered every gun to fire blindly, sending up a wall of destruction. The battle barge raced away, and the Cybele moon grew rapidly in its forward screens.

‘This was an error,’ Ideon grated, ‘We will be caught between the ships.’

Inquisitor Stele shook his head. ‘Study the aft monitors and tell me, captain, would we have not been destroyed if we had remained?’ View-plates aimed astern showed the flaming patch spreading to ignite pockets of gas all across the massive planet. ‘Those corrupted scum would see the entire world put to the torch just to end us.’

Ideon’s impassive face twitched slightly. ‘You may have only delayed our fate, my lord, and not for long.’

‘Contact,’ droned one of the servitors. ‘The Ogre Lord has seen us. She is bringing all weapons to bear. Dirge Eterna is also turning for broadside.’

‘Not for long,’ Ideon repeated.

Fines of rust flickered through the shafts of their biolumes as the massive gun carriages turned to track the Chaos cruiser in orbit. Nerves jerked in Lucion’s cheek as a trio of mechadendrites extended from his skull and into waiting slots in the targeting pulpit.

Three of the four loading glyphs had now turned green, and Sachiel was becoming impatient. ‘What is the delay?’

Arkio answered for Lucion. ‘We must fire the guns as one, high priest. We may not get a second chance, and the rounds will do the most damage if they strike together.’

Deep, bass thunder rolled around the chamber and the last glyph changed colour. ‘Ready.’ Lucion’s voice was breathy and distant. ‘The Emperor’s eye sees the enemy. His wrath is at your command.’

Sachiel nodded at the young Space Marine. ‘Let the honour be yours then, Arkio.’

‘Thank you, lord.’ A fierce smile danced over the lips of Rafen’s sibling, and he placed a hand on Lucion’s shoulder. ‘By the blood of every brother dead this day, let their vengeance be fulfilled!’

‘So shall it be,’ intoned the Techmarine.

The guns discharged so close together that the report from the muzzles came as a single thunderous howl of noise. The shockwave compacted rings of air into dense hoops of vapour around the barrels, and an earth tremor took ill-prepared Word Bearers and Blood Angels alike off their feet.

Four huge rocket-assisted proteus-class anti-starship munitions screamed skyward with a sound like tearing flesh. The Ogre Lord did not see them coming until it was too late. The enemy warship, still turning to face Bellus, had put all power to her lances and dorsal void shields, leaving the belly she bared to the moon below utterly unprotected.

Each of the shells found purchase in the hull metal of Ogre Lord, the staged fusing in their adamantium-sheathed warheads pushing them through the plates of ablative armour and into the soft meat of the ship’s interior. There, the main fusion cores that were the poison hearts of the proteus missiles went critical and detonated.

Ogre Lord rippled from within, and shattered.

CHAPTER FIVE

‘Vandire’s oath!’

The curse slipped from Brother-Captain Ideon’s voxcoder in a spit of static. Wired as he was into every sensor output from the detectors that lined the Bellus, the ship’s commander viewed the death of the Ogre Lord with a thousand eyes. He was witnessing the killing of the Chaos cruiser in ranges of vision beyond ordinary sight. In the higher frequencies of infra-red, Ideon saw plumes of hot atmosphere gush out into the black void; under warp-scan, he saw the twinkles of aberrant daemon-life as they tore asunder in explosive decompression and through the lenses of the rho-field trackers he watched the bright flood of liberated mesons and neutrinos as the enemy vessel’s fusion bottle cracked. Even at this distance, waves of hot energy from the blast licked at the Bellus’s void shields.

Ogre Lord came apart like rotten wormwood struck by a hammer. Great chunks of the craft span away propelled by the monstrous detonations of the proteus missiles. Chain-fire licked across the upper quarter of the ship as it distended and broke, and munitions blocks of shells all exploded at once.

‘Glorious,’ said Stele, the angles of his face lit by the backwash of light from the ruined craft. ‘Do you see, Ideon? The Emperor delivers us.’

Under his breath, the officer whispered a prayer of thanksgiving and continued to monitor the fragments of Ogre Lord’s hull, which were now flickering embers as they dropped into Cybele’s upper atmosphere. ‘I wonder who fired those shots from the surface?’

‘A bold soul, I would warrant,’ Stele fingered the purity stud in his ear. ‘Such a fearless gambit will turn the skies to fire down there, and set the archenemy on their heels.’

Ideon hoped he would live to meet the man who had pulled off so risky a gambit. But perhaps the poor fool would perish along with the Word Bearers on the ground when the Ogre Lord’s remains began to rain down. In the periphery of his normal vision, he noted the way that his astropaths were twitching and cowering as the enemy cruiser succumbed. The psychic death-screams of untold numbers of the corrupted in close proximity disturbed their mental equilibrium. Ideon idly wondered what consequences that effect would have on the enemy psi-sensitives on the planet.

Stele spoke as if he had read the captain’s mind. ‘There were a great many slave-psykers on board that ship. I imagine their deaths would have been a mercy for them.’

With effort, the captain pulled his attention away from the dying ship. ‘We must act swiftly to enjoy this bounty.’ He flicked a glance at his adjutant. ‘Where is the Dirge Eterna?’

‘Still turning,’ the Blood Angel snapped, without looking up from the pict-slate in his hand. ‘The loss of the other vessel has confused them – they are in danger of extending too far from their attack pattern.’

‘Perfect.’ Ideon’s eyes narrowed as he willed the hololithic screen before him to display a fresh series of firing solutions. ‘Bow guns to ready condition. Bring us to bear.’

‘Complying,’ answered the servant at the helm. ‘Number three gun does not answer.’

The inquisitor raised an eyebrow and made a tsk noise. Ideon ignored him, a feral heat building in his chest as the screen drew about to show the other Chaos vessel. ‘We’ll shoot with what we have. Fire at will.’

A sensor-servitor let out a chirp of warning. ‘New target entering the firing line!’ As the sightless bondsman bound into his scanner pulpit registered the incoming Idolator-class ship, Ideon saw it too in his mind’s eye. Raw jags of data streamed into him down the lines of his mechadendrites. The dagger-form of the raider copied the same manoeuvre that had crippled its twin in the earlier engagement, physically placing itself in front of the Bellus’s war shots to protect the Dirge Eterna. Some higher element of Captain Ideon’s tactical intellect turned this over, wondering just what it was about Dirge that made it so worthy of protection, but that was a matter for consideration after the second raider had been punished for its audacity.

His synthetic voice spat and hissed. ‘If they are so eager to court oblivion then they’ll find we have it to spare. The order is revised: strike that idolator from my sky.’

‘Your will,’ nodded his adjutant, and the junior officer repeated the command to the cannon-servitors.

The raider rotated to present its prow to the Bellus. The idolator ship was distinctive: the broken red tooth of the bowsprit was dominated by a huge brass-plated dome in the shape of a human skull. The eyeless shape was tipped backward, as if it was screaming, and from the open jaws a blunt gun muzzle emerged. Ideon had once been told that the figurehead skulls of these vessels were made from metals recovered from the bodies of the dead. They were forged with the iron recovered from the blood furnaces of slaughterhouse worlds in the Eye of Terror. He did not care if the rumour was true; the archenemy’s ships could be made from the bones of the Chaos gods themselves, for all that it mattered to him. They would die like all the other traitors that ever dared to cross the Blood Angels.

‘He means to ram us,’ said the adjutant, half-statement, half-questioning.

‘Then show him the error of his ways,’ rumbled Stele.

Bellus obeyed.

The battle barge’s hammer-shaped bow sported four massive gun tubes each the length of a Cobra-class Imperial destroyer, and in a glare of violent discharge, all but one of them spat their death-loads at the idolator. Each cannon was powerful enough to deal a shattering blow to void shields or hull armour, and to use them against a lighter capital ship like the Chaos raider was complete overkill. Shots from the first, second and fourth guns – the third was still inoperative – savaged the vessel and opened it to the vacuum. Unlike the Ogre Lord, whose crew had moments of screaming fear to understand what was happening to them, the raider simply ceased to exist.

In one murderous detonation of energy, steel and twisted bone-metals flashed to atoms and became gas; it was as if the ship had been flung into the heart of a star. Under Ideon’s command, Bellus pushed on through the expanding wave front of the ship’s vaporous remains and bore down on Dirge Eterna. With the balance of power tipped back towards the Blood Angels, the enemy ship fell away from the gas giant and made speed for Cybele’s orbit, raked by the barge’s sub-cannons as she passed. With her engines still below full capability, Bellus could only begin a slow turn to follow it.

The very air itself was aflame on Cybele as Rafen and the rest of the strike team stumbled from the defence battery bunker. The night sky was no longer dark: wide trails of hot orange fire criss-crossed it in a web of glittering colour. Wreckage screamed through the ragged remains of clouds overhead. Vast slabs of metal as big as islands threw themselves from horizon to horizon, scattering rains of dirty, molten droplets behind them.

Arkio’s face was lit with savage fury, and he stooped to drag a leg’s-length of iron bar from a shallow impact crater. It was a fragment from the Chaos cruiser after the fall. The rod went slack, the heat of re-entry making it distend. ‘What worthless things these creatures are,’ he grimaced, ‘Curse them for forcing us to sully our hands with their blood.’

Lucion held up his hand. ‘Listen… Do you hear that?’

Rafen’s brow furrowed. The ceaseless screeching of the Word Bearer demagogues and the noise of weapons fire had been such a constant companion over the past day that changes to the cacophony were not immediately apparent to him. But then he caught it too, and strained the sensitive lyman organs in his ears to separate the sound from the hypersonic shrieks of falling debris.

‘The Traitors… What are they doing?’ Gone now were the spitting blasphemes of the Word Bearer war-priests, and in their place were anguished yelps and utterances of wretchedness and woe.

Sachiel spared Rafen a grim smile. ‘We have dealt them a terrible blow, kinsmen. They feel keenly the deaths of their foul brethren and it vexes them. Listen to them, they nurse the pain like it is a physical wound!’

The priest was correct. The Word Bearers’ chants were no longer monotonous litanies and corrupt hymnals, but keening wails and funereal chants.

Alactus laughed. ‘Then we’ll give them something to weep for, eh?’ He hefted his bolter and made a show of cocking it.

To the west, the fighting between Koris’s unit and the main force of the Word Bearers was still going on, but now the exchanges of fire were desultory and sporadic, as both sides reeled from the eruption of death-flame from the heavens.

‘Your orders, then, high priest?’ Arkio asked. Strangely, it seemed that none of the Blood Angels had thought to move until the young firebrand had brought it up.

‘Yes, of course,’ Sachiel said, distracted from the burning sky. ‘We should regroup with Sergeant Koris before the enemy gather their wits.’

‘I’ll take the lead,’ Arkio snapped, and with that he was away, racing across the starport fields, dodging from cover to cover. Rafen kept pace with him, pausing to conceal himself in the lee of a wrecked Thunderhawk as once more the sky tore open with the passage of another piece of ship. The dense fragment of hull struck the hills a few kilometres distant with a white flash that underlit the smoke clouds. The shock of the impact reverberated through the ground as the sound of the landing snapped past them. Bits of the Ogre Lord would be raining down on Cybele for days to come.

Rafen considered the ashen landscape. ‘Blood and martyrs, brother. We may have done more damage to this world with one shot than the Traitors did all day…’

‘What does it matter as long as we kill them in kind?’ Arkio’s voice was cool and distant. ‘I am the Emperor’s servant, and by my hand his enemies perish.’ The younger Space Marine leapt from cover as a loose knot of firing Word Bearers approached. Rafen joined him.

Iskavan the Hated gave one of his flamer-troops a savage kick, pushing the wounded Chaos Space Marine face-first into a mouldering pile of dead men. The injured Word Bearer was one of the lucky ones; the Dark Apostle’s accursed crozius had already fed on the life of a dozen more Space Marines who had been too slow to follow their master’s commands.

The lord of the ninth host was literally incandescent with rage. Discs of turbulent electro-telepathic force encircled his head in coronets of lightning. They glowed about his bony horns like Saint Elmo’s Fire. In the near distance, cracks of bolter rounds signalled the places where Word Bearers and Blood Angels fought, but around the main mass of the Chaos Legions were disordered lines of hand-to-hand fighting. Every member of the host had felt the death-throes of the war-psykers on the Ogre Lord, the black shroud of their screaming minds reaching out to hammer all the warp-touched who walked on Cybele. The Word Bearers stood fast and weathered the shrieking. Their disciplined mentalities were rigid and resistant, but the cackling minor daemons and countless legions of helots they had brought with them went mad from the sound in their heads, and they turned on one another.

The unexpected side-effect from the Blood Angels’ sneak attack now changed the Word Bearers’ forces from precise, mechanical formations into a raging, uncontrollable rabble. Iskavan roared with inchoate anger as a dozen gun-servitors dared – they dared! – to attack him in their maddened fury. Slug-throwers burped fat discs of serrated metal at him and blunderbuss horns vomited rains of lead shot, every pitiful round rebounding off his ruby armour. He replied with the most terrible blades of his crozius, sweeping the slave creatures away in a screeching arc of gore and entrails. The Dark Apostle could not reach the enemy Space Marines for hundreds of his own helots were now attacking the Word Bearers and each other alike, tearing at the sallow skin of their faces in vain efforts to quell the insanity boiling through them. Iskavan’s crozius jumped and sang in his mailed fist, rattling the chains that bound it to him. The weapon was spooked by the thick taint of mind-death in the air, and it craved blood to drown out the sensation. The Word Bearers’ leader gave it what it desired by the gut-load: he buried the seething blade head into the bellies of the men-forms around him.

‘Rip them apart!’ he bellowed, as much to himself as an order to his warriors. ‘Kill for us or be killed by us, you maggot-blood wretches!’

Tancred was suddenly at his side. Perhaps the torturer has been there all along but it was only now that Iskavan noticed him. It mattered little, and it took a moment of effort to pull the crozius away from the neck of his second. The weapon moaned at the blood denied it. ‘Magnificence, the bound daemon-forms are tearing themselves apart!’

He gestured with his tentacle hand and the Dark Apostle saw the rank of wheeled black bone cages, marooned now in the midst of the infighting helots who were supposed to be dragging them toward the enemy. Inside each enclosure a minor daemon beast was held. They were throwing themselves against the bars in bloody madness, and beating their skulls and limbs against the confinement. These were not the towering princes of the warp that the followers of the eight-blade star lived in fear of; they were smaller, bestial life forms, the empyrean’s equivalent of animal predators. They possessed a savagery that nothing from the mortal realm could match, and in conflict they would sow fear and disruption in enemy ranks, provided they were directed properly. Now they were spoiled and crazed, worthless in battle for anything other than cannon fodder. Iskavan cast a disgusted look around and watched the keepers of the beasts fighting one another while others were being chewed apart by their very charges.

‘Wasted! Wasted!’ he spat, lamenting the finely wrought battle plans he had laboured on in the days prior to their arrival on Cybele. The Dark Apostle drew up his crozius with its red blades shining like a beacon, and bellowed out his commands. ‘Clear a path through these chattering dastards! Cut the daemons free!’

‘My lord, the creatures are broken minded – they will tear apart everything in their path!’

‘Of course, you fool!’ Iskavan spat, waving his weapon, ‘but all that will be there will be the corpse-god’s men and those fit for death! Now by my decree, release them!’

The Word Bearers parted like a falling wave and drew back from the skirmish lines. At Tancred’s direction, sharpshooters blasted the fat phase-iron padlocks off the bone cages from a safe distance. As one the inhuman ravagers threw themselves into the melee, fighting and eating and gorging on fresh meat.

Sergeant Koris and his men met the largest of the things as it stumbled toward them, licking gore from its mouthparts. For a moment, the veteran thought the daemon had two heads, as it appeared that one of them was attached to the end of its arm. But then it popped the skull into its mouth and crunched it down, flicking the blood of one of its unholy brethren aside in an almost human gesture. It threw back its head and hooted wetly.

The daemon had too many legs, some of them arched upward in spindly arcs of bone, others low to the ground with fat ropes of muscle. A nest of barbed forelimbs snapped at the air as it came toward them, on its sinuous neck bobbed a broad oval head that seemed to be a random collection of eyes and teeth. It spat out a thin line of black drool before surging forward, to come at the Blood Angels in a stumbling run.

Koris had no need to remind his men to maintain fire discipline. All of them knew just how low on ammunition they were, and not a single Space Marine would waste even one bolt round on a chanced miss. When the warp-beast was close enough that its fetor engulfed them, they shot it. Rounds clacked off the bony claws and egg sacs in its torso with hollow sounds, leaving no mark of their passing. Other more precise shots blinded eyes or gouged divots of hairy flesh from its hide. It was heedless, however, and the Blood Angels scattered as it dived into them. Koris saw Alactus sweep away under the thing, but by the luck of Sanguinius he dodged each crushing footfall as it passed over him. Corvus was not blessed by the same fortune: he spun out as the beast ripped at him with a sickle barb. Another Space Marine, one of the Bellus contingent whose name Koris had not learned, died as his bolter choked on an empty magazine. The daemon opened him up with mad fury, shaking its head so that the razor teeth in its mouth could crack his ceramite cladding. As it swallowed him, Koris gave the command to fix bayonets, snapping his combat knife into the magnetic mount on the bolter’s foregrip.

And then, through the mass of screaming, dying helots came a dozen more Blood Angels, their guns fat with ammunition and spitting fire.

‘Koris!’ Sachiel’s voice hummed over the communicator. ‘Cover fire!’

‘With what–?’ The sergeant demanded, but his words were ignored. He saw the Sanguinary High Priest come forward. He was brandishing his chainsword and pistol and laying rounds into the mottled hide of the warp-beast. The eager fool! He’ll be killed!

The creature sensed the white and red shape in its peripheral vision and spun in a tight circle. As it did so, it whipped out its barbed tail to knock down a dozen more Blood Angels with callous relish. The shock of the strike pushed Koris reeling against a tilted headstone, so that his fire was directed away from the creature’s head.

Rafen saw the beast’s move coming a split-second before Arkio and he dropped, snapping out a kick at his brother’s ankle. His sibling fell just as the spiny club of meat at the end of the creature’s tail thrummed over their heads. ‘Watch it!’ he added.

Arkio’s eyes were elsewhere. ‘Sachiel! Guard yourself!’

The priest went off-balance. The beast was far faster than he had thought; its huge legs belied the thing’s nimble movement. He slashed the chattering chainsword at one of the meaty limbs, but his cut was shallow and did nothing but anger the daemon-beast more. With its hindmost claw, it tore into the Space Marine who stood to Sachiel’s right, then threw his corpse into the priest. The impact tossed Sachiel into a shallow crater and the lanyard connecting his sword to his gauntlet snapped. The blade buried itself upright in the mud, teeth growling.

Dark malice glittered in the creature’s myriad eyes and it flicked at the dirt. It resembled a housecat with a rodent, unwilling to bring the kill too quickly for all the sport it would lose. It ignored the bolt rounds that bit into it from the other Space Marines. It wanted to play.

Rafen squinted into the target sight of his gun and saw Sachiel’s face behind his half-mask. The priest’s skin was pale and drawn with exertion. With unfocussed eyes he was winding up his flank where the beast had casually cut him. Rafen’s finger froze on the trigger. If he had to he would grant the priest the Emperor’s peace rather than let him be a meal for this monster.

Then, like a rising rocket, Arkio burst from his cover and crossed the distance to the beast in a dozen loping steps. The daemon gave him a desultory swipe, angry to be interrupted in its game, but the young Blood Angel dodged easily. He swooped to snare Sachiel’s fallen chainsword. He brought the buzzing blade around in a flickering arc and cut cleanly through a knee joint. A leg as thick as two men fell away in a gout of thick blood, and the creature let out a thunderous shriek. With one splayed claw it pinned Sachiel to the dirt, and snapped at Arkio with the others, probing and shifting in place.

‘He’s going to kill it,’ Rafen heard Turcio’s comment over his ear-bead. The Space Marine was unable to keep the awe at Arkio’s daring from his voice. Rafen fired into the beast, doing his best to cover his brother’s actions. Arkio darted back and forth beneath the animal, slashing at soft parts that lay between iron-hard pads of chitin. Gushes of black fluid spurted from the wounds with ropes of slick, slime-covered intestines drooping from their open mouths.

Sachiel made some sort of strangled yelp – possibly a call for aid, or a warning to Arkio – and his hand flapped feebly at the creature’s claw. The Sanguinary Priest attempted to stab the beast with the acus placidus on his wristguard, but the steel needle could not penetrate the hard bony spines. A shiver ran though the daemon, and for a second Rafen saw a shimmer of pain in its eyes. The agony of its wounds was at last making its way to the thing’s tiny feral brain, enraging it even further.

Before he could react, the monster coiled all its movement into one lightning-fast spin, lashing out at the irritant beneath it. Arkio did not cry out when one of the creature’s blade-quills rammed through his armour. The yellow cartilage emerged from his shoulder with a mist of bright blood about it.

Rafen felt his stomach fill with ice; such a wound would surely be mortal, and his sibling’s life was measured now only in seconds. Rafen’s vision blurred crimson with a haze of hate and he bounded from cover, heedlessly racing at the creature. From the edge of his rational mind, something hot and black began to uncoil. The dark shadow of the gene-curse boiled up inside him, desperate for release. He bellowed an incoherent war cry, his bolter running red-hot as he emptied it into the beast. Rafen saw Arkio dead, cast aside in the mud, with the whirring chainsword still ticking over in his mailed grip. As lucidity threatened to flee from him, Rafen had a mirror-bright flash of memory of his father, on the day that he and Arkio had set off for Angel’s Fall and the place of challenge. Watch over the boy, Rafen. I ask nothing else of you. His father’s face seemed to flow and merge like mercury, shifting into that of the primarch, and Arkio.

Then the impossible became real before his eyes. Arkio rose in one swift motion from a puddle of rainwater and his own blood, apparently ignorant of the vital fluids that streaked his wargear or the black tear in his chest. With a single stab, he drove the sputtering, buzzing teeth of Sachiel’s weapon into the throat of the daemon-predator, and buried the weapon to its hilt. The gnashing blade severed the thing’s vocal chords and cut off its cries in mid-scream. Arkio rolled the weapon back through the beast’s gut and it came apart with a noise like ripping cloth. Organs and undigested pieces of men emptied on to the grass in wet heaps. The beast wheezed and died.

As quickly as it had appeared, Rafen’s rage abated, and he was at his brother’s side, holding him up. Arkio gave him a wan smile and wiped black gore from his face.

‘How could you…?’ Rafen began, words failing him. ‘The wound…’

Arkio face was pale with blood loss but his eyes were as hard as diamond. ‘Faith is my armour, brother. Sanguinius protects.’

‘By the grail, he speaks the truth!’ Sachiel approached them, favouring his injured flank. ‘Did you see him, Rafen? The Lord Primogenitor himself would have been proud to witness such bravery!’

Rafen said nothing and nodded. He was unable to draw his eyes away from his brother’s injury; the cut was deep and bloody, but where it should have torn open arteries and exposed his gory bones, the gash was wet with life, almost as if it were knitting together as he watched.

‘Arkio, you are touched!’ Sachiel added with a gleeful spark in his voice. But a seed of uneasiness was being lodged in Rafen’s heart.

The artificial flatlands of the starport, once drab and featureless, were now stained with thousands of gallons of blood in all shades of crimson, from the rust-brown of humans to the bright scarlet that coursed through the veins of the Adeptus Astartes, and the night-black slicks of ichor from the corrupted ones and their minions. Cybele’s grasslands, which for so long had consumed the flesh and bone of the Imperium’s war dead, were now dyed with the gore of those who fought upon its soil.

Surrounded by the ragged remains of his warband, Iskavan the Hated turned his too-wide mouth to the sky and screamed his rage at the dirty clouds. The sound of his anger cowed his men. It drowned out the constant impact of wreckage plunging from orbit. They were on the verge of losing the engagement to the Imperials, and it drove the Apostle into apoplexy.

At last he recovered enough to speak coherently, instead of hissing and spitting. ‘What ill-starred fate is this?’ he demanded of the night. ‘By the eight, we were promised victory this day!’ Almost the instant the words left his corpse-like lips, the Dark Apostle was turning on Tancred, his crozius humming loudly. ‘You.’ The Word Bearer champion loaded the word with absolute loathing and ire.

The torturer willed himself into stillness, terrified that even the slightest gesture would reveal the duplicity of his earlier prognostication.

‘You told me you saw success, Tancred,’ Iskavan’s voice hovered dangerously low. ‘Where is it?’ he growled. ‘Where is my victory?’

‘Th-the manner of the Empyrean cannot always be–’ the torturer fumbled at an excuse, but the Apostle backhanded him across the face.

‘Silence, pestilent fool!’ He pushed Tancred away and advanced on his men. ‘The eye take these subhuman dregs! We are the sons of Lorgar, bearers of the word!’ Raw fury blurred his features with an unholy psychic light. ‘We have lost our ships, our beasts and helots, but yet we still have our hate!’ Iskavan pointed his crozius at them. ‘Hate enough to choke the bloody mongrels of the carrion god!’

Iskavan expected the Word Bearers to roar back at him with hungry approval, but only silence greeted him. The Apostle was about to strike the nearest Traitor Marine dead for their intransigence when he suddenly realised why. A hooded form was walking through the unkempt lines, glittering with dark witch-fire.

‘Iskavan, my servant. Hear me.’ The voice it spoke with was a breath from a rotted tomb.

‘Warmaster Garand…’ For the briefest of instants, the Chaos champion’s face twisted in a sneer, but then he dropped to one knee and made the sign of the eightfold star. Without hesitation, the remainder of the Word Bearers mimicked his actions. The only sound was the thin keening of the accursed crozius. The weapon was nervous and afraid at the outpouring of ebon psi-energy that lapped about the hooded one’s body.

‘I would know your mind. Your intentions.’ Breathy and disordered, the speech seemed to come from the hazed air itself.

Iskavan could barely keep from spitting as he grated out a reply. ‘I intend no less than to fall on the man-beasts with the curse of great Lorgar on our lips! Kill and kill and not yield!’

‘No.’ The shock of the denial was so great that Iskavan actually dared to look up and into the stygian depths of the hood. A null void stared back at him. ‘You will leave this place. I command it.’

A vein throbbed in the Dark Apostle’s face. ‘Lord, I… You cannot! We are Word Bearers! We do not retreat! Not again!’

Malice hung in the air between them. ‘I must be mistaken. For a moment, I thought you had dared to question me, Apostle.’

Iskavan forced himself to be calm. ‘No, warmaster. The error was mine.’

‘Just so.’ The hooded figure shimmered, and for a moment it became ghostly and insubstantial. ‘Even now, your personal cruiser evades the mongrels to reach transport range of this world.’ It pointed a crooked finger toward the horizon. ‘Recover your teleport beacon and prepare to evacuate.’

‘My lord–’ began the Apostle, in one final, imploring entreaty.

‘Go now,’ the voice added as an afterthought. Then as suddenly as it had appeared, the figure dissolved into the dark, leaving a psyker-helot quivering in its place. The twisted slave had briefly hosted a fragment of the warmaster’s essence. But that fleeting contact had been enough to warp it into a mess of singed flesh.

Iskavan exploded with anger and roared, smashing the helot into bloody chunks with the crozius’s blades. ‘Tancred!’ he shouted, eyes afire. ‘Gather the men! As the Warmaster commands–’ he paused, the emphasis on Garand’s rank dripping venom, ‘–we quit this blighted place!’

And so as dawn crept over the forest of broken monuments, Cybele once more was a domain of the Imperium of man; but the blight of the Word Bearers’ filthy touch was on everything, from the earth itself to the scars that criss-crossed the orange-purple sky. Rafen returned from a sweep of the port with Alactus to find Sachiel ministering to Arkio. He was blessing the works of Lucion as the Techmarine fixed a ceramite patching solution over the gouges in his armour.

The priest ended his litany with a whisper of the primarch’s name and turned, as if noticing Rafen for the first time. ‘Brother,’ he began. ‘What of the enemy?’

For a moment, Rafen was at a loss for words. He spread his hands to indicate the silent battlefield around them. ‘Gone,’ he managed, at length.

Arkio grinned, his perfect white teeth showing through his dirt-coated face. ‘I knew it would be so! In my bones, I felt it!’

‘There’s nothing left but the dead and the dying… and us.’ Alactus noted. ‘We found a few helots here about, and they were dispatched without incident. They appear to have done our job for us, killing one another.’

Sachiel nodded. ‘I have word from the Bellus. Inquisitor Stele will reach orbit in a matter of hours.’

‘They live? Emperor be praised.’

‘Indeed,’ Sachiel continued. ‘The comrade inquisitor informed me that their long-range scanners detected the Dirge Eterna on a departure course. It seems we gave the sons of Lorgar a bloody nose that sent them scurrying back to the maelstrom!’

Rafen shook his head. ‘That… cannot be. The Word Bearers do not retreat. It is not their way…’ His jaw tightened. ‘Perhaps this is a ploy, honoured priest. They may have salted Cybele with munitions or some sort of delayed-action weapon–’

Sachiel’s lips twisted. ‘Rafen the Ready, always ready to find fault, eh?’ He took a step closer. ‘Can you not accept that perhaps our strength of arms was enough to drive them back? Must you belittle our victory even as we hold it in our hands?’

‘Strength of arms?’ He couldn’t keep the incredulous tone from his voice. ‘Tell me, Sachiel, did you take part in some other battle last night, and not the one where we were outnumbered fourfold by the Traitors? They had us on the brink, and then they let us live! Do you not wonder why?’

The Sanguinary Priest shook his head. ‘No, I do not, because my faith answers that question for me. Why did we win?’ He placed a hand on Arkio’s shoulder plate. ‘Victory came to us through the spirit of the Lord Sanguinius himself.’ He turned away from Rafen, dismissing him without a word, and addressed the rest of the ragged group of men. ‘Hear me, warriors of Baal, sons of the blood! This day you may meet the rising sun with pride and honour, as we drink deep and remember the fallen! Know this,’ he paused, drawing his grail from the drawstring pouch on his belt, ‘By the credo vitae, Sanguinius is watching over us, guiding our hands…’

Arkio came to his feet as Sachiel spoke, sparing his sibling a brief, troubled glance before he joined the other men in genuflection.

‘The primarch walks among us,’ Sachiel intoned, studying Arkio’s face. ‘He moves through our actions.’

Rafen considered Arkio for a long, leaden moment; it was subtle and almost invisible, but the Space Marine could see something changed in his younger brother’s manner. It was not the confidence, or the strength that he had grown into in maturity, but an unknowable shift in his eyes. There was a distance, a preoccupation with some inner conflict that he could only guess at.

Overhead, more trails of vapour from debris inched across the heavens, their feathered edges blurred into blades of white.

CHAPTER SIX

The Dirge Eterna moaned. Throughout the cruiser’s decks, the bondsman crew and the Word Bearers aboard her felt the vessel’s lament. The ship’s mood was a reflection of the minds she carried. They had been buoyant and bristling with savagery as they had approached Cybele, but now they were mournful and dispirited as they left the world behind them. Their mission had been a failure, and there was not a single Traitor Marine on Dirge Eterna that did not burn with impotent anger and shame.

There had been a very real moment when rebellion flashed in the eyes of these once-men. Iskavan had reappeared on the transmat pad, and as he kicked away the twitching form of a Chaos Space Marine who had malformed in the teleporter, he gave out the order to retreat in a baleful voice that brooked no argument. The Word Bearers had been stunned to hear the words fall from his lips, and only the terrible aspect of his face had kept them from rash and hasty recriminations.

Retreat. It made the ship sick to have that order spoken aboad her.

In the lower decks, where the corrupted practised the unholy consecrations of their wargear or prayed for blasphemous guidance from their gods, word spread of events on Cybele. The Dirge’s crew had seen the death of the Ogre Lord first-hand, but none of them had expected it to cost them the fight. Some of the bolder dissenters wondered aloud if Iskavan had lied about the orders from Warmaster Garand; they gave voice to the opinion that the Dark Apostle had become craven and fled the field of battle in disgrace. Those Chaos Space Marines were all dead now; Tancred’s trusted agents had ensured that each one had been isolated and killed with the maximum of agony. To placate his master, the torturer had kept two alive and performed some intricate pain works upon them, as a diversion for Iskavan – but even this amusement did not cheer him and the Apostle had wanted nothing more than to remain in his chambers and nurse his anger.

Once or twice in the past few hours, Tancred’s thoughts had drifted towards plotting an escape or some other scheme to hold off the end he had glimpsed on the planet, but each feeble idea flickered out against the inexorable certainty of it all. He might delay or avoid his fate, but Tancred knew that spilled blood never lied to him. It was not that the torturer was a fatalist – he had simply come to realise that he had nowhere else to go.

The cruiser was beyond the gravity shadow of Cybele’s gas giant world now, in the free space between the inner orbit zone and the system’s asteroid belt. Like everyone on board, as well as the ship herself, Tancred felt directionless and empty. He wandered the decks. Now and then he would brush his tentacles over the breathing walls between the bone stanchions and coo softly to the Dirge. Like Iskavan, he too had a fondness for the vessel that extended back for decades. Both of the Word Bearers had been foot soldiers aboard it in earlier black crusades, and Iskavan had come to consider the cruiser charmed. When he had ascended to the command rank of Apostle under Garand, he demanded the Murder-class vessel be the one to bear his flag. Other host masters made their commands on bigger, heavier craft like the Executor-class hulks or even the huge Despoiler battleships, but Iskavan preferred the speedy, nimble cruiser. Both he and Tancred understood its moods; they could sense the ship’s will leaking out through the deck plates and the baffles. But on this day, even the sightless, deaf and psi-blind servitors labouring in the cesspools would know that Dirge Eterna was dispirited.

The torturer walked without a conscious route in mind, and so it was with mild surprise that he found himself in the gallery above the aft-deck arena. It was a diamond-shaped space, open to the stars above through a glassteel window that was etched with runes and long lines of text that moved like a maggot nest. Below him, a single figure was fighting a dozen scopus drones. Two plasma weapons screamed hot against the fleshy target-servitors. He recognised the Apostle’s fighting style in an instant: Iskavan liked to press in close to his foes, even when using a mid-range weapon, and his master’s feral anger brought his motions a frantic pace that even the most accomplished warrior could not hope to match. The energy coils atop the plasma pistols burned blue-white with radiation backwash, singing through the spaces between Iskavan’s blurry form and the hapless drones. When only two were left, the Apostle suddenly threw the guns away – even though they still glowed with charge – and rushed the servitors. Before the bulky men-forms could react, he was on them, one in each spike-fingered hand, grinding the meat of them together. He roared as he twisted their flesh, folding bone and skin and organ into an indistinguishable mass that oozed between his gauntlets.

Iskavan drew back and spat. The sparring match had fuelled his irritation, rather than cooling it. ‘Tancred,’ he growled. ‘I know you are up there. Come down.’

The torturer did as he was told, and with each step his fear increased. If the Apostle was to end his life for failing him on Cybele, it would be here and now.

As he approached, Iskavan was crouching next to one of the drone’s bodies, picking at it. The Word Bearers’ commander snagged something fat and grey from the body and ate it. He chewed with a faraway look in his dark eyes. The drone sobbed weakly, barely clinging to its pathetic semblance of life.

‘My victory is still on that planet,’ he said quietly. ‘I would have it now if only we had stayed.’ Iskavan threw Tancred a glance. ‘Is that not right?’

The torturer nodded. ‘As you decree it, magnificence.’

Iskavan stood up and indicated the scopus at his feet. ‘Indulge me, Tancred. Perform your augury again. Here, now. With this.’

The demand surprised him and put him off-balance for long moments. ‘My lord, that would be… inappropriate…’ Tancred fumbled for an excuse.

‘Inappropriate?’ The Apostle’s voice was loaded with menace. ‘Do not test what little patience I still have, old ally.’

Resigned, the torturer knelt by the servitor and began to make the sacred signs across the flesh, removing his vibra-stave from the scabbard on his hip. ‘My reading may not be accurate,’ he said through dry lips. ‘This body is not properly prepared.’

‘Do it,’ Iskavan snarled.

Tancred mouthed a word of power and cut the drone open, spilling its innards on the scratched metal floor of the arena. Almost instantly, he saw the same patterns emerging that had come to him in the camp on Cybele, but now they were more urgent. The light and shade were screaming a warning to him. Death was close at hand; it might even be in this very room.

‘What do you see?’ The Apostle’s mouth was at his ear, breath hot and foul with corpse meat.

‘I see death,’ Tancred blew the words out. ‘Death and death and death.’

‘The Blood Angels, yes?’ Iskavan demanded, pressing into him.

No. Yours and mine. ‘I cannot be sure–’

A swift kick took Tancred off his feet, landing him in the charred remnants of another corpse. ‘Be sure!’ Iskavan roared, eyes afire. ‘Or else you are useless to me!’

Above, on the fascia of the glass roof, a glittering shape unfolded from amid the snarls of text, and Tancred was momentarily distracted by it.

‘Answer me!’ said Iskavan.

‘Dark one, above you–’

The Apostle turned just as the sense of a heavy, frigid presence entered the arena space. On the glass, the words merged and shifted into a horned visage that was cut from nightmare cloth. ‘Iskavan, and your little lie-spinner. Heed me.’

Tancred’s master dropped to one knee. ‘Warmaster. I had expected you to contact me via my astropath–’

Garand’s sketch-face became a death mask with a crooked grin. ‘This manner of address amuses me. It has so much more bearing than a mere proxy manifestation, yes?’

‘By your will,’ Iskavan said. ‘My flesh and my soul for Chaos, liege. What would you have us do?’

There was laughter, hollowed by the distance it had travelled across the Immaterium. ‘Oh, I taste your anger from here, Iskavan. Your rage is barely contained at the indignity I have forced upon you.’

As if the Chaos lord’s words had given him permission, the Apostle’s self-control snapped. ‘Yes, rot and blood, yes! Every black soul aboard my ship seethes at this abuse of our war doctrine! I ask of you, warmaster, what possible cause could force us against Lorgar’s way?’

The sinister humour faded like vapour. ‘Insect! You seek to question me, to seek the meaning in my plans? Your mind is fit for direction and orders, not the match of wits with the Chaos-blessed!’ Garand’s face loomed down on them. The glassteel distended and warped with the force of each word. ‘Do not presume to comprehend the scope of my intentions, Iskavan. A larger plan is at work and you are merely a small part of it. You are a tool, Apostle, you and your host. Be thankful I grant you a mind at all, unless you desire to become a servitor-vessel for my will!’

For a moment, Tancred thought that Iskavan would explode with an angry tirade against his master; but instead, the leader of the ninth host closed his eyes. ‘As you say it is so, and I ask once more. What would you have us do?’

The warmaster’s voice began to dwindle, as if he was losing interest in the conversation. ‘Take your ship and return to our base on Shenlong. Reinforcements await you. Assume command at the Ikari Fortress in the capital city and hold there.’

‘And the humans we did not kill on Cybele, what of them?’

The ghost of a dark smile glittered on the glass, fading. ‘The Blood Angels will come to you, Iskavan. Of that, you can be certain.’

The lander settled on spears of white fire. Retro-rockets blew a thin nimbus of smoke away from the starport’s main landing pad. Sachiel brought the Space Marines to order as the drop ramp yawned open, allowing a trio of servo-skulls to escape into the air, with their null-gravity impellers humming.

The inquisitor was the first to disembark, advancing fearlessly ahead of the gold-helmeted honour guard that accompanied him. Stele was dressed in field battle dress now. He had discarded the formal cloak he had worn on his first landing and chosen something more practical. He made a show of surveying the ruined starport. One hand clasped the sacred symbol of his order where it dangled from a necklace, the other rested on the grip of an ornate, custom-made lasgun. He gave a grim, measuring nod. ‘You have done the Emperor’s work this day, Blood Angels.’

‘As is our duty,’ Sachiel added. ‘Comrade inquisitor, what state is the Bellus? We feared you might have fallen to the foe.’

Stele gestured to a gaggle of serfs aboard the shuttle and they clambered down in awkward steps with cargo pods in their hands. ‘Brother-Captain Ideon is a fine officer, but even his rare skills could not protect her from injury. It will be another day before the ship returns to full operational status.’ He allowed himself a thin smile. ‘We claimed two archenemy ships and drove one from our sight.’ Stele patted Sachiel on the shoulder. ‘But you, priest, your actions here were nothing short of Herculean. The killing of a grand cruiser from the ground… Magnificent.’

The Blood Angel bowed. ‘Your praise is wrongly directed, lord. It was one of my men who conceived of the plan to shoot down the Chaos hulk.’ He indicated Arkio. ‘Bloody, bold and resolute, as the best of us are.’

Stele accepted this. ‘Brother Arkio, isn’t it? Yes, I remember you. I have observed your actions for some time. I sense a bright future stretching out before you.’ He glanced at Rafen, standing close by. ‘Who is this?’

‘Brother Rafen, if it pleases the lord inquisitor,’ he replied. ‘Of the late Captain Simeon’s company.’

‘Ah, one of Sergeant Koris’s troops.’ He turned slate-grey eyes on Rafen, examining him as if he were looking for flaws in a gemstone. ‘I see something between you and brave Arkio here. You are brothers by birth, yes?’

‘We shared the same parents on Baal Secundus, lord.’

Stele nodded. ‘A rarity. It is most uncommon that two siblings from a single generation be found suitable for Astartes recruitment. I’ll warrant none here would know the bonds of bloodline as well as you two.’

The comment hung in the air for a moment, and Rafen’s eyes narrowed, unsure of the inquisitor’s meaning. ‘We are all brothers under the wings of Sanguinius,’ he said after a pause, repeating the words Sachiel had said a day earlier.

Stele seemed to be content with the answer, and returned his attention to the Sanguinary Priest as the serfs continued to unload the transport ship. ‘I have brought fresh supplies from Bellus and narthecium for your wounded, Sachiel. You have secured the port?’

‘If you wish to call it that,’ he said, weariness colouring his tone for the first time. ‘Our counter-strike sent confusion through their ranks, to such a pitch that they ran from the field of battle. Brother Lucion detected the energy patterns of multiple teleportation signatures just after dawn. If, as you said, the Word Bearers’ surviving starship left orbit, I would say that they were soundly defeated.’

A nerve jerked in Rafen’s jaw, but he kept his mouth closed. Stele eyed him. ‘You have something to add, Brother Rafen?’

Sachiel aimed a pointed glance at the Blood Angel as he answered. ‘Such behaviour is uncommon for the Word Bearers, inquisitor. We should be wary of any victory that comes so easily.’

Stele glanced around at the heaps of the dead. ‘One would hardly call this skirmish an easy one, Rafen… But yes, I see your point. It would be unwise to…’ The inquisitor’s words faded into silence. On the ramp, his lexmechanic froze in place.

Sachiel’s face creased in concern. ‘Comrade inquisitor? What is wrong?’

‘Heed Rafen’s words,’ Stele intoned. ‘I sense the archenemy’s taint nearby.’

The land raider had come apart in a storm of shrapnel in the first wave of bombardment from the Word Bearers. While Simeon and his men had been caught unawares at the distant Necropolita, other barrages of laser fire and crude warheads had lanced into the Blood Angels’ units left to defend the port. The raider crew had been one of them, and as they had churned up the broad treads of the tank to ride it out of harm’s way, the ionised air at the lip of the beam blast flattened it like a hammer. The forward half of the vehicle was torn off in a hurricane of volcano-hot gas, while the rest of it spun away to eventually come to rest, cherry-red and steaming, on the scorched ferrocrete. Throughout Cybele’s night cycle, the raider wreckage had contracted and cooled, the metal ticking and snapping. Word Bearers and Blood Angels alike had used the machine for cover in the thick of fighting, but now it stood ignored and forgotten in the lee of shadows cast by columns of smoke. It was less than six hundred metres from the spot where the lander had put down.

Inside the raider’s torn hull were many dead men, and the pieces of many more. It was a red profusion of warped ceramite and torn plasteel, the mass of corpses so badly disfigured that it would be difficult to distinguish enemy from ally at first glance. But amid this litter of cold flesh there was one single thing that still lived, although its life was ebbing from an orchard of livid wounds across its torso.

Noro’s breath rattled in his clotted throat. He tried very hard not to move each time he sucked in and pushed out a breath. Every last muscle flexion sent darts of pain from his bloated gut, where the cold, leaden weight of a dozen bolter rounds lay lodged in him. In the firefight that took place at the defence battery, Noro took a spread of bullets at close range, and by rights he should have died, but his sheer bad luck and the layers of fat on his corrupted hide had prevented death from taking him easily. And so, with sweet agony lighting him up inside, Noro had finally risen from unconsciousness to crawl on his hands and knees from the missile bunker.

No one had noticed him inching his way across the ground. Above him, cannon fire and hot flame gushed back and forth as he dragged his carcass from one piece of broken cover to the next. With slow and ponderous execution, Noro’s thoughts had gradually come around to the matter of what he was going to do. The Word Bearer had been unable to find a medicae or even a helot with rudimentary field surgery skills, and with each passing hour he had grown more and more angry, pressing himself back from the edge of coma through sheer force of hate. When his winding blood trail brought him to the debris of the land raider, he discovered a bolter, undamaged and fully loaded, still gripped in the severed hands of a Blood Angel. Noro took the gun and made himself a hide within the wreck. Quietly nursing his pain, he waited.

Stele closed his eyes, and the air seemed to turn greasy and cold. In the next second he looked up and the sensation vanished. ‘There!’ he snapped, dodging to the right.

Rafen saw the discharge of the bolter before he heard it. The shell cut through the air where Stele had been standing and into the chest of an unlucky servitor behind him. He was just about to turn when the crack of another shot reached his ears, bringing his bolter to bear. ‘The raider!’ The Blood Angel released a salvo of shots to ring against the wreck’s hull and received another blast in return. The rounds went high and wide of him.

Stele’s hand came out of nowhere and pressed Rafen’s gun downward. ‘No, no killing. I want this one alive.’

The inquisitor stood up, presenting himself as a target. His arms were outspread in offering.

‘Lord, seek cover!’ Sachiel cried. Arkio was already scrambling toward the raider with Alactus a step behind him, but Rafen could see the glitter of light on the weapon’s scope as the gun bore down.

Stele looked directly into the unblinking lens of the targeter and Rafen felt the peculiar thickness in the air once again. It was like being on the edge of a storm, concentrated along the channel of the inquisitor’s sight line. The Blood Angel’s gut knotted at the taint of psyker-scent about him.

Noro’s eye could not blink. The muscles on it were rigid as stone, the optic jelly of the orb twitching with impotence. And likewise, no matter how hard he tried, he could not will the finger about the gun’s trigger to contract. The Word Bearer was locked in place, unable to do anything but stare into the face of the bald human at the other end of his target sight. The man never moved, but he seemed to grow to fill every inch of the Traitor Marine’s perception. At no stage did he speak, but he imposed his will to suffocate any thoughts Noro might have had to run or fight. He wanted nothing more than to scream, to cry out and die and let the wounds have his life at long last.

Stele answered him as the thoughts formed in his mind. ‘Your prayers will go unanswered, corrupted one.’

Noro tried to curse him, but there were shapes in red armour clustering in all around him, ripping the gun from his grip and carrying him away.

Rafen watched Arkio and Alactus drag the wounded Word Bearer from the wreck, for a moment believing that the Traitor was dead, because he was rigid and unmoving. ‘A survivor. There may be others.’

‘Perhaps,’ Stele mused. ‘In any event, this one will serve us well enough.’ He nodded to his lexmechanic. ‘Locate somewhere secure and construct a makeshift crucifix. Inform Captain Ideon I am going to delay my return to Bellus.’ The inquisitor glanced at Rafen and Sachiel. ‘Your experience with the tactical situation here will prove useful to me. I will have you attend… I may need you to prompt my investigation.’

‘Investigation?’ Rafen repeated.

Stele nodded. ‘We have an unexpected bounty, Brother Rafen. Soon, we will return to Bellus and mark our success with ceremony, but for now, come watch me put this monstrosity to the question.’ Without another word, he took off after the lexmechanic, the servo-skulls darting to follow.

Sachiel gave Rafen a look. ‘Have a serf bring out a chirurgeon’s kit,’ he said. ‘The inquisitor will require tools.’

When it was done, Rafen felt soiled. He had no sympathy for the Word Bearer, not a single iota of sorrow for the perverse beast – after all, the thing had known the implications of its actions from the moment the Traitor Legion had embraced the Horus Heresy – but the overspill from Stele’s searing mind-witchery seemed to cling to everything around him. Ignorant of the Inquisition’s methods, Rafen had expected Stele to attack the Word Bearer with blades and barbs, but his technique had been more disturbing than direct. The lexmechanic directed a Techmarine to jury-rig a crude extricator from parts of a sentinel power-loader. With the X-shaped crucifix erected in one of the burnt-out hangars, Stele set to work.

Arkio and Alactus stripped the Traitor of his wargear and torched it with a plasma burst. Unlike the hard ceramite armour of the Blood Angels, the Word Bearer’s mail was a curious amalgam of metals and tough, rubbery flesh. It bled profusely when they cut it from him, trailing nerve fibres and veins across the stone floor. When they set it alight, it squealed as it crisped into ash.

The naked bulk of the corrupted was a ruin of scars and open wounds. Stele chose a few of them at random as places to stab fine trepanning needles or skin shears. This was only the opening move. The inquisitor made quite sure that the Traitor was not going to die. He began a whispering conversation with it. Once in a while, the enemy soldier would cry out or curse them all, shaking with horrific violence. Rafen listened hard, but he could not make clear the words the inquisitor spoke. He was only a few feet away, but Stele might well have been on the other side of the world.

There came a moment when he gestured to Arkio, pointing him out to the Word Bearer. The ghost of a smile danced on Stele’s lips and the Traitor began to weep. Inch by inch, moment by moment, the Chaos Space Marine broke a little more until finally, in the stifling air thick with ozone and organic waste, it sagged and became little more than a pale sack of meat. For long seconds no one spoke. The only sounds were the wounded, husky breaths that sighed from the Word Bearer.

The inquisitor drew away from it and Rafen saw him lick his lips like a man at the end of a particularly tasty meal. ‘Shenlong. This is the world from which they struck at us.’

Sachiel’s pale face turned to Rafen. ‘Your company is more familiar with this sector than the Bellus crew. What do you know of this planet?’ His voice could not mask the disquiet at what he had witnessed.

Rafen thought for a moment before answering. ‘A forge world, honoured priest. Until very recently, one of ours.’

Stele raised an eyebrow. ‘Explain.’

‘Shenlong is… was one of many munition manufactories for the Ultima Segmentum. The world became isolated by a warp-storm several months ago, and under cover of the turbulence the planet was invaded by the archenemy. Shenlong and every human on it have been declared lost to the Emperor’s light, lord.’

‘Indeed?’ Stele said, absently tapping a finger on his lips. ‘Where is this blighted place?’

‘Coreward, perhaps a week’s travel in the empyrean.’

The inquisitor digested this information with a slow nod, and then turned to Sachiel. ‘Priest, gather the men and prepare to lift for Bellus. I must review the information I have gleaned from our friend here.’

‘Lord,’ Rafen pressed, ‘if you are considering that we leave Cybele, you should know that our orders were from Commander Dante himself, to hold post here until relieved–’

Stele waved him into silence. ‘We shall see what orders are given, Rafen. We shall see.’

The lexmechanic spoke for the first time. His sibilants hissed and ground together like cogwheels. ‘Master Stele, your specimen still lives. If you wish, I will cull it.’

‘No,’ the inquisitor tossed the word over his shoulder as he walked away. ‘Sustain the Traitor for the moment; bring it up to the ship. Its dissection may yield more data of interest to us.’

By nightfall Cybele was home only to the dead. Thunderhawks and cargo lighters from Bellus ranged back and forth between the surface, and the battle barge brought up the remains of men and material that might later be salvaged. While Techmarines directed hordes of serfs to repair the warship’s warp motors, Apothecaries ministered to jars of amniotic fluid in the infirmary. Each canister contained progenoid glands harvested from the Blood Angels killed in the planetside fighting. Shoals of the spheroid organs floated there within the green, life-sustaining liquids, and inside each lay a precious storehouse of genetic material.

These simple egg-shaped sacs of flesh were the most priceless and delicate resource on the ship. They were even valued more than the holy artefact that had been the object of Bellus’s mission. Without the gene-seed that nestled within the progenoids, the future of the Chapter would be threatened. Each was thick with the raw matter of the Blood Angels, nascent zygotes that could be taken and implanted in a new generation of initiate recruits in the chamber vitae of the fortress-monastery on Baal. Through these elaborate knots of genetic complexity, the departed would give life to a new generation of Adeptus Astartes, so beginning the cycle of death and rebirth over again.

Rafen studied the work of his Apothecary brethren through the glass walls of the medicae sanctum. He became lost in the precise ballet of their actions. From the very start of his life in the Blood Angels, Rafen had always admired the work of the men who served the Chapter as field surgeons and biologians: such skills with the workings of the flesh were beyond him.

‘Rafen,’ the voice was roughened with fatigue.

He turned to face his trusted mentor. ‘Brother-sergeant.’

‘You left the meal early, Rafen. I was surprised,’ Koris said mildly. ‘Most of us had an appetite to choke a sand-ox.’

‘I had my fill,’ he said, a little too quickly. The kitchen vassals of the Bellus had provided a rich spread of protein-heavy meats and broth for the survivors of the battle for Cybele, but Rafen’s appetite had been lost to him. He ate cured steaks cut from dried fire scorpion, but the taste of home brought him no succour.

Koris watched him. ‘This has been a strenuous posting,’ he said, with characteristic understatement, ‘and tricky. I had not thought we would leave the war grave world again.’

‘Nor I,’ Rafen agreed. ‘But perhaps Sachiel was correct. The primarch watches over us.’

The sergeant spat out a chug of gruff, humourless laughter. ‘Our liege lord has better things to do than keep an eye on Space Marines, lad. We are the sharp edge of his blade, no more. We serve and we die, and that is our only glory.’

Rafen laid a gloved hand on the glass partition. ‘Glory enough for them, I would hope,’ he added, inclining his head toward the progenoid jars beyond.

‘Aye, if we ever return home…’ Koris looked away.

The Space Marine shot the elder soldier a loaded glance. ‘Old man, do not cast out cryptic comments to me like some addled seer. Speak plainly, teacher. We know each other well enough for that.’

Koris gave him a sharp nod. ‘Aye, that we do.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Bellus was on course for Baal to return the spear, as we all know – but now word has come to me that Stele intends to cut that journey short.’

‘We have been aboard this ship for less than a day and already you know this?’

‘The manner of how information comes to me is not your concern, lad. Live as long as I have and you’ll learn the knack of it too.’ Koris’s face was a grimace. ‘Mark me, the inquisitor intends to turn Bellus about and make a new heading.’

Rafen shook his head. ‘This will not happen. Captain Simeon’s orders were to maintain the garrison on Cybele, and if Stele makes any new dictate it will be to take up that posting.’ He pointed at the zygote jars. ‘The dead here with us proves that the planet has value to the Traitors… He could not simply abandon it.’

A thin sheen of anger coated Koris’s words. ‘Lad, how can you be blind to what takes place right in front of you? For all Stele’s honour debts with our Chapter, what is he? A servant of the Ordo Hereticus, not a Blood Angel! He will seek the path that brings him glory, as every blighted one of his kind will do!’

‘Sergeant, there are many who would see the taint of heresy in those words.’

‘Then the warp curse them,’ hissed the veteran. ‘I have no time for the petty edicts of such men. Do you not see, Rafen? This fray on Cybele turns the battle lust of our brothers, and Stele only needs to mould it if he wishes to use it for himself.’

‘How could he do such a thing?’ Rafen dismissed the older Space Marine and made to walk away, but Koris snared his arm in an iron grip. ‘Brother-sergeant…’

‘Some of the men have already begun to speak about Arkio,’ Koris whispered darkly. ‘His bravery on the surface with the daemon, the ploy that ended the Ogre Lord… They credit him with the victory.’

‘So they should,’ he replied hesitantly. ‘My brother showed uncommon daring.’

‘Uncommon, yes. Such that some think him blessed by Sanguinius.’

‘Maybe he is.’ The answer tasted flat and dry in Rafen’s mouth.

‘And who would gain by exploiting such a thing, lad? Consider that.’

Rafen shook off the veteran’s grip with an angry jerk. ‘You have always been my most resolute mentor, Koris, but you let your distrust of all things blind you.’

The sergeant accepted this with a slow nod. ‘Perhaps, but if you ever fail to question what lesser men take on faith, Rafen, then it is you that is truly blind.’ The elder Blood Angel stalked away, leaving his former student to weigh his words in silent consideration.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The grand chamber on the Bellus could dwarf the cathedrals of some colony worlds. It was a cloister for giants: huge column-towers rose up to an arched roof that webbed together with beams and vaults. At the far end, past the tight ranks of worshipful Space Marines, the wall that faced the bow of the battle barge was dominated by a circular lens of stained glass and worked metals: it was a rendition of the Lord Sanguinius in his most bloody aspect. The sun-bright gold of his sacred armour was streaked with the scarlet blood of his enemies, and his head was thrown back in a roar of victory. As he entered the chamber, Brother Rafen found his attention was instantly drawn to the shining white fangs bared in the primarch’s open mouth. He found himself suddenly aware of the same sharp teeth in his own jaw. Like the handsome, noble profile that he shared with his brethren, it was just one aspect of the genetic lineage that connected them to the godlike figure in the glass.

Rafen had never been aboard Bellus, and so the majesty of the hall was new to him. As he walked forward among the solemn lines of battle-brothers, he found it hard not to become drawn into the myriad devotional artworks and stone scrolls of script work fashioned overhead. There were whole Chapters from the Book of Lemartes, and pages from the testaments of the lords of Baal, all cut in obsidian that glittered like dark arterial blood.

And still, his eyes were constantly pulled back to the glass. The closer he got to the altar at the head of the chamber, the more detail seemed to rise from the image. Now he could see the shadowy shape of the Emperor above and to the right of Sanguinius. He was looking down on him with cool pride. Arrayed around the edges of the disc were versions of moments from the blessed angel’s life – as an infant, falling to the surface of Baal; a boy, killing a fire scorpion with his bare hands; airborne on his angelic wings, flame licking about his gaze; and in single combat with the arch-traitor Horus, just before his own death. For a moment, Rafen felt transported by the sight of it, as if he were home on Baal Secundus once more. All the confusion and emotion of the past few days was gone – but then he spied the shape of the gas giant planet looming beyond the pane and the instant was gone.

They reached the place of honour near the altar and as one, Rafen and the rest of the survivors from the battle on Cybele dropped to one knee. The sharp tang of the sacrament incense drifted down on them from the floating sensors above.

In the silence of the chamber, Sachiel’s voice was a breaking wave of noise as his armour’s audial pickups broadcast his words to speakers hidden in colonnades about the hall. ‘Yea, for the Emperor and Sanguinius, we stand and we serve.’

Every Space Marine in the room repeated the phrase; the walls rumbled with the chorus. From the corner of his eye, Rafen could see Arkio silently mouthing a litany and beyond him Lucion, Turcio and Corvus. The Techmarine held one hand to the Adeptus Mechanicus cogwheel-and-skull symbol on his chest, while Corvus clasped absently at the healing wound the daemon-beast had inflicted on him. Turcio was immobile, eyes tightly shut.

The Sanguinary High Priest climbed a coil of wooden steps to the broad pulpit, and bowed to a flickering hololith of Brother-Captain Ideon. In millennia past it had been tradition to have the ship’s commander present during a mass, but war had evolved to the point where captains were now permanent fixtures on the bridge, so this was no longer possible. Ideon was still present in spirit if not flesh. He was alone on the command deck with his senses hardwired into the machine-ghost of the Bellus. He would observe the ceremony through the eyes and ears of the innumerable monitors dotted about the grand chamber’s expanse.

Rafen raised his head slowly and for the first time noticed Inquisitor Stele in the shadows of the platform. He was watchful of Sachiel in the same manner that the Emperor of Mankind watched Sanguinius in the glass image above.

Sachiel stood behind the lectern and placed his hands on the winged blood droplet that crested it. ‘This day we give thanks to our lord and the master of mankind for the glorious bounty of war. We pledge our lives and our very blood to Sanguinius, our faith and our honour, until death.’

‘Until death,’ cried the chorus.

The priest gave a pious nod. ‘We venerate our brothers who fell on Cybele. Some of them were proud men who had given their oath to the mission of the Bellus. Sadly they will now never see it completed.’ He opened a large book bound in the dun-coloured hide of a Baalite sand shark and ran a finger along a line of names. Each one was freshly written in blood. ‘We speak of them now and charge their lives to the memory of the sepulchre of heroes. Know their sacrifice and honour it.’

From behind him, Rafen heard the faintest of sighs. Koris was kneeling there, and Rafen wondered how many of these ceremonies the veteran had witnessed. Too many, he would warrant.

Sachiel began the roll call of the dead. ‘Brother-Captain Simeon. Brother-Sergeant Israfel. Brother Bennek. Brother Hirundus. Apothecary Veho–’

With each name, the Blood Angels gave a gesture of salute, touching their balled fists to the places on their chests beneath which beat their primary and secondary hearts. There were thousands of fingers tapping in unison on their torso plates, signifying that the dead men would live on in the hearts of their brethren.

After the procession of names, deeds and honours, the priest’s litany came to a close and Sachiel shut the book with grim finality. As Rafen watched him, the Space Marine remembered his thoughts in the graveyard. He wondered when his name would be read aloud to such a gathering. With a blink, he brushed the distracting thought away, just as a new voice rose to fill the chamber’s stillness.

‘Comrade Brother Sachiel, I wish to address these brave warriors,’ Stele stepped forward from the back of the pulpit and surveyed the assembled men. The lamplight glittered off the intricate working of threads on his cloak. The complex letter-string design was similar to the tent-cloth Rafen had seen down on Cybele. No doubt they were psionic wards or some such arcane magick against the enemy’s mind-witches.

Sachiel gave a shallow bow to the inquisitor and allowed Stele to take the stage. ‘Blood Angels, hear me,’ he said, in rich stentorian tones. ‘Know that the Lord of Man has worked through us in this challenging engagement with the archenemy. It was by His will that those of us on board the Bellus intercepted the cry for help from the Celeano and came to Cybele. It was by His will that we were able to drive back the hordes of the hated Word Bearers, on the surface and here in the void. In His eyes and in those of His most trusted warrior Sanguinius, we are blessed.’ Stele grew rueful in his expression. ‘Here, so far from their birth world, the brothers who fought and died might have fallen unremembered by those who remained on Baal, but we will never forget them.’

Rafen’s eyes narrowed as a ripple of agreement slipped around the chamber. The inquisitor was being careless with his choice of words – such a statement might be thought by some to cast doubt on the Chapter’s dedication to distant, less important missions, such as the Cybele garrison.

Stele continued. ‘And now the choice faces us, warriors. Do we remain and bury the dead without taking vengeance? Or do we bring the wrath of the Imperium and the Blood Angels to the Chaos filth on Shenlong?’ Dark light glinted in his eyes. ‘You who have served and fought with me these ten long years will know my heart on this concern!’

Many of the assembled Space Marines growled and spat at the name of the enemy. For a moment the hall was a jumble of voices. Rafen heard Koris give a cynical grunt. The veteran’s earlier prediction was coming to pass.

‘Lord inquisitor,’ Sachiel said quietly, his voice barely audible beyond the confines of the pulpit. ‘I would of course endorse you in this action, but the matter is unresolved. If we were to leave Cybele without sanction from Lord Dante–’

Stele smiled thinly. ‘The commander will see the merit in my orders, Sachiel. You know that to be true.’ Before the priest could answer, the inquisitor raised his hands to call for silence. ‘Blood Angels! There is no doubt that your primarch turns his beneficent gaze toward us! We are the soldiers of the Bellus, and we bear the very weapon that Sanguinius was granted by the God-Emperor himself!’

There was movement behind the pulpit and a gaggle of shrouded servitors from Stele’s retinue came forward. They carried a lengthy case cast from solid titanium, the surface intricately worked with symbols of the Chapter, the Imperium and the Ordo Hereticus. Rafen felt a physical shock as he realised what the container was for. By the Throne! The spear!

‘Our victory on Cybele was our sacred duty,’ the inquisitor glanced down at the assembled Space Marines before him, ‘but there is one among you who excelled, who showed the true power of the birthright that sings in your blood, even when defeat was upon us!’ Stele’s eyes locked on Rafen’s sibling. ‘Brother Arkio! Come forward.’

Arkio did as he was ordered and stood up, climbing into the pulpit. Stele’s servitors halted before the young Blood Angel and presented him with the metal case.

‘Open it,’ Stele ordered him. ‘In recognition of your daring, yours shall be the honour of presenting the Spear of Telesto.’

Arkio reached out and with trembling hands turned the latches that sealed the container closed. Behind him, Sachiel gripped his grail and uttered the words of the litergus integritas.

A joyful warmth infused the metal as Arkio laid his hands upon it. When he slid the clamshell container open he saw inside an object as bright as a shard of the sun.

The radiance from the weapon swept across the length of the grand chamber in a wave of pale golden light. Below the pulpit Rafen stifled a gasp as the glow caressed the bare skin of his face. From the corner of his eye, he saw Turcio avert his gaze; he was overcome by emotion. But Rafen could not look away from it. There, before him was the Spear of Telesto in all its mellifluent glory. The Riga tapestries did not even come close to the majesty of the sacred lance.

The blade itself, an elongated tear cut with a hollow in the centre, represented the single drop of blood that Sanguinius shed when he swore fealty to the Emperor. Glittering with an inner light, it rested atop a sculpted haft that showed the angel of blood, clad in the monastic vestments of a Sanguinary High Priest. His perfect face was lost in a voluminous hood and his mighty angel wings spread against the air; and below that, a single purity seal that bore the personal mark of the Emperor himself. It was the most incredible sight Rafen had ever seen, and his heart ached with it.

Once more the words rang out across the hall, this time from Arkio’s lips. ‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’ Rafen’s brother felt the nerves in his arms tingling as his blood surged with adrenaline. The gene-template of the spear’s ancient technology could sense his closeness and the fragmentary elements of the Sanguinius’s stock that sang though his veins. Unbidden, Arkio broke protocol and touched the ageless lance.

‘No–!’ Sachiel blurted, starting forward to grab the Blood Angel’s hand. He advanced barely a half step before Stele snared him and held him back. The inquisitor shook his head once, eyes cold with menace, and the priest was suddenly cowed.

Arkio’s limbs seemed to work mechanically, and he removed the weapon from the case, raising it in his left hand in a mirror image of the Riga artwork’s last panel: Sanguinius victorious over the corpse of Morroga. The spear vibrated in his grip like a live thing, a streak of amber lightning frozen into physical form. Uncanny energy lit the teardrop blade from within and, like a supernova, a pulse of white light flared.

Rafen saw the colour wash across his brother’s body and Arkio’s flesh seemed to melt into the features of his liege lord. His crimson battle armour turned gold and white wings flared from his shoulders. Then, just as quickly the spear grew quiescent again and the vision was gone.

The silence that followed was so complete that for a brief instant Rafen feared he might have been struck deaf. But a moment later every Blood Angel in the chamber erupted in full voice, calling out the name of their primarch until the very walls seemed to shudder with the sound of it. Blood’s oath! Did I truly witness this? Could my brother be touched by the angelic sovereign himself? The questions hammered at the inside of Rafen’s mind, rocking him to his core.

In the pulpit, where Sachiel stood transported by the sight and Arkio’s face was wet with tears of joy, the Inquisitor Stele watched the young Blood Angel with satisfaction. Despite himself, he was unable to keep a thin, icy smile from his lips.

Word of the ‘miracle’ in the grand chamber spread like wildfire throughout the decks of the Bellus, to every Space Marine and serf in the service of the Blood Angels’ Chapter. Arkio’s moment in the pulpit was replayed over and over on devotional screens dotted throughout the battle barge, and the effect was electric. Believing their mission ended, the morale of the Space Marines abroad the Bellus had dipped once they had set course for home. Each of them had been proud to have completed their task and they were looking forward to seeing Baal again, but a subtle melancholy was stalking the ship all the same. The Bellus crew knew their odyssey was nearly at an end, and it saddened them

But no longer. Arkio’s presentation of the spear rekindled the bright fury of the Blood Angels and for the survivors on Cybele it became a rallying point. Men who had stood with Rafen and been ready to welcome death with open arms changed overnight. Suddenly they became fierce and blood-hungry. During firing rites and maintenance duties, even in the midst of daily battle drills, conversations turned towards the battle-brother the men called ‘the Blessed’, and the burning need for vengeance on the denizens of Shenlong.

Bellus remained in orbit of the mausoleum planet for several days as work on the engine repairs approached completion, and it came as no surprise to Rafen when Sachiel ordered an increase in tactical ground assault drills. He tried to find Sergeant Koris, but the aged veteran was elusive. Change flashed through the air aboard the battle barge, and in its wake a need for war resonated in the hearts of every Space Marine. If blood was not soon shed, he reflected, the men would go wild.

Rafen’s mind was a storm of conflicts. He had not laid eyes on his sibling since the end of the ceremony for the fallen, but Arkio had constantly remained at the forefront of his mind. Try as he might, he could not shake the indelible image of his younger brother cast in the guise of Sanguinius. The vision in the grand chamber echoed the brief moment of dislocation he had experienced on Cybele during the Word Bearers’ assault. At the time he had thought himself fatigued and distracted by the turn of events, but now the incident had taken on another, more troubling quality.

Rafen was no psyker, nor some mind-witch cursed with aberrant sight, and yet the brief visions had been clear as day. In other circumstances, he might have suspected that the flaw was exerting its insidious influence on him, but the taint of the black rage was a maddening, berserker force and never so subtle. Turcio, Lucion and Corvus all spoke of the pulse of light and the silence that followed it. Their voices were reverent with awe when they mentioned Arkio’s name, and Rafen soon grew weary of Blood Angels he did not know pestering him with inconsequential questions about his brother. He kept his own counsel, but in truth, Rafen was not sure what to make of Arkio’s so-called ‘blessing’. He loved his brother, and he knew him as well as only those bound by family could, but something rang ill in his mind. It lurked, faint and dim in the corners of his thoughts, colouring his every waking moment. With such doubts in his soul, he went searching for Koris.

Inquisitor Stele had made good use of the interrogation chambers on Bellus throughout the duration of its mission to find the Spear of Telesto. Many were the victims that had passed through the brass iris hatch to gaze upon the last thing they would ever know in life: the engines of inquest, the tables with fans of sinister blades and the chair bolted to the deck. Over the years as Bellus had moved from world to world, Stele had ordered his retinue to alter the basic mechanisms used by the Space Marines to hold prisoners. They had gradually crafted an inquisitorial tool that resembled the great siege perilous in the schola hereticus where he had studied. Stele ranged his gaze around the chamber as he entered, taking in the dark metal stanchions, the wreaths of incense and the shadowed deep beyond the floating glow-globes. It was a fine stage for a player such as he.

Removing his cloak, he brushed a little dust from his fingers before crossing to the torture chair. The Word Bearer, the heretic that called himself Noro, was restrained there. He was bloody and pallid, but he still lived. Stele gave the bullet wounds on his torso a measuring gaze. They had scabbed over with flecks of black matter, but continued to weep pus and thin fluids. It would be a while yet before he would die.

‘Eminence,’ said the lexmechanic, announcing itself with a grind of leg-irons. ‘I have continued to transcribe every utterance of the Traitor. He has done little but bombard me with foul language and unholy curses.’

The inquisitor nodded, his gaze flicking up to the servo-skulls that orbited around him in languid circles. ‘Seek penance once your duties here are complete, then,’ he ordered. ‘Cleanse yourself of exposure to such apostasy.’

‘Your will.’ The servitor bowed.

Stele approached the Word Bearer and with great effort, the enemy soldier raised his head. He had to smother a flicker of pleasure when he saw the fear ignite in Noro’s eyes. Nothing excited Stele more than the certainty that he instilled terror in others. He put on a mocking face. ‘Does it hurt, little traitor?’

Remarkably, the Word Bearer summoned some strength and threw him a defiant grimace. ‘Death to you and your corpse-god, maggot excrement!’

A smile crept across the inquisitor’s face. ‘Ah, good. You still have some fight left in you. There is no challenge in draining the mind of one utterly broken, I have found. Such easy tasks dull one’s skills.’

‘Begone!’ snapped Noro, his voice cracking. ‘Leave me and take congress with animals, man-filth!’

The lexmechanic twitched as if the insults were a physical blow. ‘Lord, what purpose is served by keeping this specimen alive? I intuit that it is an inferior heretic, not privy to any information of value beyond what you have already extracted.’

‘No, I beg to differ,’ said Stele, glancing at the servitor. Then he looked away and in an utterly different voice he said a single word. ‘Somnus.’

The statement hung in the air like coils of smoke, and it made the lexmechanic twitch. Then without warning, the bondsman’s eyes rolled white into his head and he lolled in a nerveless slump. Behind him, the three servo-skull monitors settled gently to the floor and fell silent. The utterance triggered a post-hypnotic suggestion that Stele had long ago planted in the lexmechanic’s mind, and in the brains of the centuries-dead servants whose skulls were now his mechanical guardians. Until the inquisitor chose otherwise, he and his victim were alone in this place. Every monitor and sensor that studded the interior of the rest of the Blood Angels’ battle barge was diverted from this room. It had been one of the first things that Stele had done after boarding Bellus ten years earlier.

Noro was fully aware of what was happening around him, and confusion crossed his face. Stele spared him a look and then stepped very close to the Word Bearer. Noro tried to avoid the inquisitor’s touch, but with his body held to the chair by thick iron rods, there was little that he could do to stop him. Stele cupped the Traitor Marine’s head in his hands and for one terrifying moment, Noro thought the bald man was going to kiss him. ‘What… What are you doing?’

‘You will tell me all you know of Shenlong’s defences, creature,’ he whispered.

‘I’ll give you no more. You took the planet’s name from me, and for that alone I have failed my covenant…’ He took a shuddering breath. ‘Go to Shenlong, human, go there and meet my brothers! They’ll devour you raw!’

The inquisitor pressed his jaw shut. ‘Soon enough, but first we must sit a spell and talk, you and I.’

‘No–’ the Word Bearer forced out a denial. ‘I’ll die first.’

‘In time,’ Stele agreed, the aquila electro-tattoo on his forehead glinting, ‘but before you do, you will show me all.’

Noro’s face went cold as the heat from his feverish skin was sucked away by the inquisitor’s icy fingertips. He felt his rough, diseased flesh shift and melt. Stele’s digits merged into his epidermis and then through it like soft clay, into the bone and brain matter inside. The Word Bearer tried with all his might to force out a scream, but Stele closed his throat with a slight gesture of pressure.

Just as before on the surface of Cybele, the inquisitor filled the Traitor Marine’s vision, but this time he grew and grew, flowing like liquid to fill the empty vessel of Noro’s perception. With him came an ink-black shroud of silence that suffocated the heretic; it was an immutable shade, the colour of terror. The Word Bearer had served the lords of Chaos all his life and revelled in the dark ways of the eightfold Undivided, but now what he saw uncoiling from the man-thing’s mind struck him as the absolute purity of evil. Noro had never dared, never in his most savage and murderous moments, to believe that something so utterly abhorrent to life could exist. This was no human psyker phantom; it was the undistilled taint of hatred, clinging to the man like a parasite. As Noro’s sanity came apart inside him, the Inquisitor Lord Ramius Stele began the slow and deliberate rape of the Traitor’s mind.

The lexmechanic had been correct: the Word Bearer was no more than a line soldier, a Chaos Space Marine with nothing other than the will to fight and die for the word of Lorgar. A higher-ranking veteran would have direct knowledge of military dispositions and troop concentrations, but Noro could only offer fleeting memories of the invasion of Shenlong – flashes of atrocities and bloodletting that lodged in the killer’s mind.

‘Nothing–’ Noro managed to shove the word from his lips.

Stele’s eyes narrowed, and he marshalled the dark around him, coiling it into razored ribbons of psi-stuff. Then, with abominable precision, he flayed open the heretic’s memories. Noro began to shake and twitch as the floodgates of experience opened in him. Suddenly everything that had ever happened to him was recalled at once, and his mind shrivelled under the weight of it. Casting through the ocean of recall, Stele trawled for the smallest of incidents, patterning them and weaving them together against the black. He took sideways glances, momentary snatches of conversation overheard, and blinks of remembrance. Stele discovered a myriad of fragmentary sights that not even the Word Bearer was aware he had seen and laced them into a whole. There, in jigsaw-pieces, were the approaches to Shenlong, the paths along the ever-shifting corridors between the minefield blockade that encircled the forge world.

Swiftly he withdrew from the heretic’s flesh and mind and stepped away. A thin sheen of sweat coated his brow. ‘Ah,’ Stele croaked, dry-throated. ‘Thank you.’

Noro vomited explosively, throwing up bile and blood. ‘What…’ The Chaos Space Marine’s voice was a hissing shriek. ‘For hate’s sake, what are you?’

The inquisitor stepped around the inert lexmechanic and recovered a dull metallic object from a secret inner pocket of his cloak. He did not grace the Word Bearer with an answer.

The prisoner had fouled himself in fright. Mad alarm shone bright in his reddened eyes. ‘No human could…’

Stele walked back to the torture chair, concealing the thing in his hand. ‘What are you babbling about, creature?’ he asked idly.

Noro indicated the lexmechanic, the hatchway and the world outside it with spastic jerks of his head. ‘They can’t see it…’ The Word Bearer suddenly broke into hysterical laughter, ‘but I can!’

‘Be silent.’ Stele’s hand came around to Noro’s throat. In a blur of motion the weapon in his hand cut cleanly across the thick meat of his neck as if it were passing through thin air. Thick blood flooded out in a gush, choking the Word Bearer into stillness. After a moment, the inquisitor began the careful task of cleaning the stiletto molly-knife he had used to dispatch it. The weapon’s fractal blade was so sharp that the task of wiping blood from it took slow and careful deliberation.

When he was done, Stele spoke the command word again. The lexmechanic and servo-skulls returned to wakefulness with no perception of missing time. He was halfway to the door when the servitor remarked. ‘The specimen… He appears to have taken his own life…’

‘Yes,’ Stele noted absently. ‘You saw it happen, didn’t you?’

The lexmechanic gave a slow blink, as if the progress of that thought was particularly sluggish in its mind. ‘I saw it happen,’ it replied, after a lengthy pause.

‘Have it dissected,’ said the inquisitor, and then as an afterthought, he added, ‘and the heart and the skull – have them sent to my quarters.’

Rafen found the veteran in heated debate with Sachiel as he entered the Bellus’s tacticarium. Normally, a rank-and-file Space Marine of his standing would have been denied access without the permission of a senior battle- brother, but his connection to Arkio suddenly made such concerns trivial in the eyes of the men-at-arms who guarded the hatchway.

‘Why ask my opinion if you do not heed it?’ Koris was saying. ‘Or do you merely wish me to tell you what you want to hear?’

Sachiel’s face hardened. ‘Your words are always noteworthy, Brother Koris, but that does not guarantee I must follow them. Do not forget yourself, sergeant!’

Rafen noticed Arkio standing to one side, back-lit by the glow of a hologrammatic display tank. His sibling caught his eye and nodded a greeting. Rafen saw the mirror of his own face there, drawn by fatigue. Perhaps the ‘miracle’ had been harder on his brother than he suspected.

‘I have conferred with the inquisitor and I concur with his recommendations. Bellus will withdraw from orbit and set out for Shenlong with all alacrity,’ said the priest. ‘It is only fitting that we take the Word Bearers the reprisal they are so richly due.’

Koris snorted. ‘What does a torture-master and questioner know of Space Marine tactics? Think, Sachiel! Shenlong sits amid an ocean of nuclear void mines that an Imperial grand fleet would have difficulty in destroying! I would never deny that the Chaos rabble deserve to drown in their own blood, but Bellus is just one ship – how can we hope to penetrate such defences?’

The priest flicked a glance at Arkio. ‘Sanguinius will provide the means,’ he snapped.

‘Really?’ Koris arched an eyebrow, and looked at the young Space Marine. ‘Tell me, will he reach out and sweep the mines from the sky for us?’ He snorted. ‘I have been a son of Sanguinius for twice your life span, Sachiel, and I know that he helps those who help themselves… And without help we cannot crack Shenlong!’

‘The inquisitor has secured the secret approaches to the planet,’ Arkio said quietly. ‘The way through the mines is known to him.’

Sachiel smiled thinly. ‘You see, Koris? Your concerns are unfounded.’

‘Are they? Suppose we do make it to strike range of the surface, what then? With our losses on Cybele, this battered company is well below full strength.’

Rafen spoke for the first time. ‘The Word Bearers’ forces on Shenlong will be superior in numbers,’ he said, announcing his presence.

The priest eyed him. ‘A single Blood Angel inspired by the righteous power of the Emperor is worth a dozen Traitors! We do not fear them!’ He rounded on Rafen. ‘You lack faith in the decisions of your superiors, Rafen, I see it in your eyes! We must strike while we have the element of surprise… Every day we tarry, the corrupted reinforce themselves on a world they stole from the Imperium!’

‘If it pleases the high priest, all I suggest is that we seek reinforcements from Baal,’ retorted Rafen. ‘We should remain at Cybele until Commander Dante can send us more ships, then we can leave a holding force here and sortie to Shenlong in good order–’

Sachiel silenced him with a shout. ‘No! We have the blessing of the primogenitor on our side and our victory is assured! Look around you, Rafen!’ He cast his arms wide to encompass the other Blood Angels in the room. ‘Your brothers are blood-hungry! They do not wish to wait for reinforcements; they want to make the Word Bearers pay! Pay for every soul taken and inch of earth soiled with their worthless lives!’

Rafen felt a light touch on his arm and looked up into Arkio’s eyes. ‘Trust me, brother, when I promise you we can succeed.’

Sachiel turned his back on Koris, dismissing him, and called to the serf attending him. ‘Pass the word to Captain Ideon. Under my orders, the command is given! We weigh anchor and warp for Shenlong!’

Koris stalked from the room without another word, leaving Rafen to watch his old mentor go.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The warp boiled at the edges of Ramius Stele’s mind. The hot touch of the raw, inchoate energies licked at his soul in searing, unearthly caresses. And yet these were merely faint ghosts of the true power of the empyrean, refracted through the ever-present barrier of the ship’s geller field. The inquisitor delighted in it. He was alone in his private chambers aboard Bellus, and he had the freedom to direct himself into the trance-state where his mental vigour had free reign. As the battle barge carried itself through the trackless gulf of the empyrean, Stele willingly relaxed the complex psionic shields that guarded his mind and allowed himself to hear the babbling screams and entreaties of the things that lived in the non-space realm. Giddy with it, he let himself teeter on the edge of the psychic abyss, excited by the danger and the adrenaline rush like a climber atop the highest mountain. Only he had the power of will to hold himself back from the brink of madness where other men would have faltered. Only Ramius Stele was possessed of such mental strength as to resist the siren call.

Life moved out there, not the shapes of organic substantiality that lived in the material domain, but constructs of pure thought and raw, raging emotion. He listened to them as they cut invisibly past Bellus, rode their wakes and took the smallest morsels of mental sustenance from their passage. This was Stele’s most secret vice, the sin that he hid deep in his soul, far from the casual telepathic probes of the few Blood Angels Librarians that still served aboard the ship – and for that, it was made all the more sweet. Each time it became a little harder to reel himself back into the world of crude matter, each time he dallied a little longer than before. But he revelled in it, even though he knew it might destroy him.

When Bellus made the transit from the Immaterium and into the void at the edge of the Shenlong system, Stele gave a wan sigh and gathered himself together. The inquisitor observed a minor engagement from the window of his chamber, as Bellus caught a Word Bearer Iconoclast-class destroyer on picket ship duty. The vessel’s commander had been hideously inattentive, and barely had half his void shields been raised before the battle barge’s main guns had ravaged the knife-blade hull. Burning like an oil-soaked rag, the slaughtered destroyer tumbled away into space. Stele gave a nod of approval. The quick killing of the Chaos starship guarding the warp point would allow Bellus to continue its approach to Shenlong undetected. If his schemes fell into place as he had foreseen, the Blood Angels would be well within strike range of the forge world by the time the Word Bearers knew they had intruders.

He mumbled a short prayer of petition to the hololithic display tank in his quarters, and the device obeyed. It projected an image of Shenlong from the ship’s long-range sensor pits. Hazy and indistinct, the unremarkable planet drifted with vast bands of tiny spheres girdled about it. Stele extended a finger into the hologram and ran it over the floating dots. Each one was a compact thermonuclear charge, a city-killer warhead riding a thruster nest with a simple logic engine to command it. As the planet turned, so they communicated with one another to form a perfect, impenetrable net about the manufactory world. The inquisitor dragged up a fragment of memory from the stores of hypno-taught facts impressed into him as an initiate of the Ordo Hereticus. Shenlong had been a weapons fabricator since the Dark Age of Technology, here they built shells and bombs for a billion little wars in continent-sized production plants. The secrets of the minefield that shrouded it were, like so much in the Imperial era, lost to terra’s tech-magi. Stele gave a slight sneer. The curtain of atomic death had not stopped the archenemy from perverting men in positions of power, to grant them the secret corridors through the ever-shifting field of weapons. And now he had done the same, ripping the way from the memories of the dead beast Noro. Still, it would be a slow and dangerous approach. They would have to avoid other Chaos patrol ships and hold fast to a course that was as reliable as the mind of a maddened killer.

The inquisitor turned as the faint taste of a psyker reached his telepathic senses. Smothering his disdain, he gestured to a machine-bound servitor and it released the seal on the door to the chamber. The hatch dilated to reveal a pair of Blood Angels and a hooded figure trailing a train of mechadendrites behind him.

The aged Master Horin. Stele knew the astropath before he saw him. After all this time, he could mark the mind-scent of every psyker on board Bellus with perfect accuracy – and this one he found particularly objectionable. The bony old fool was a stubborn creature, and far less susceptible to subtle coercion.

‘Lord inquisitor,’ began the telepath, ‘as your orders command, I bring you a communication of the utmost urgency. A message arrived after our emergence from the warp.’

Stele studied the stunted man-thing. Vitae tubules and connectors that webbed Horin into his machine pulpit trailed across the floor behind him, drooling out watery nourishment fluids. The astropath had forcibly extracted himself from his console and come to Stele’s chambers, rather than dictate the signal to his coterie of quill-servitors. Did he detect some faint irritation in Horin’s sibilant voice? A glimmer of resentment at being forced to take the message he carried not to Captain Ideon, but to Stele for first approval? The inquisitor gave a slight smile. It was difficult to read the emotional states of an astropath – if they even had them at all. ‘Warriors, you are dismissed,’ he said. ‘Wait outside.’

The astropath gave the slightest sideways glance at the Space Marines as they left him alone. It was irregular that a command-level communication would not be voiced within earshot of a senior Blood Angel. Stele watched him intently. The inquisitor’s mental feelers wove invisible patterns in the air, seeking some sense of the moment.

‘You have news from Baal,’ Stele said slowly, the smile fading. ‘You have told no one else?’

‘Your orders demanded nothing less,’ said the astropath. ‘I have not spoken the signal until now.’

The inquisitor came closer, the action deceptively casual. ‘Then speak.’

Harmonics inside the astropath’s augmented throat resonated for a moment, and then it uttered a string of numbers. ‘Cipher, omnis secunda. Directed to Ideon, brother-captain commanding warship Bellus. Telepathic duct, Astropath Horin. Penned by his High Lord Commander Dante of the Blood Angels.’

Stele frowned at the mention of Dante’s name and began formulating the steps he would be forced to take.

The timbre of the astropath’s voice took on a more husky tone, but the words came in faltering starts. Horin carefully reconstructed the message, careful to speak it in the order that it had been written. His words were Dante’s, parroted from across the void. ‘Honoured Captain Ideon, and the Lord Stele, my greetings to you… The Celaeno’s call for succour has reached us and we are gratified that Bellus may come to the aid of our brethren.’ Horin licked his dry lips. ‘It is my decree that Bellus remain on station and assist in holding the Cybele outpost. Secure the planet and communicate your status with haste. A relief force will be dispatched on receipt of your reply.’ There was a moment’s pause, and Stele wondered if the astropath was eyeing him, ‘This is my command, for the glory of the Emperor and Sanguinius. Dante, Chapter Master of the Blood Angels.’ The psyker twitched, and punctuated the ending of the message with a quiet cough of sound.

Stele was quite close to him now. ‘Thank you, Horin,’ the bald man said, using the astropath’s given name for the first time in ten years.

He nodded. ‘By your leave, then, I will inform Captain Ideon that we must return to Cybele.‘

‘No, that won’t do,’ Stele said conversationally. ‘That won’t happen.’

Horin’s mechadendrites stiffened. ‘The message stated–’

Stele shook his head. ‘There was no message. You came here to kill me.’

The astropath’s hood jerked, as if the statement had been a slap in the face. ‘What is the meaning of this?’

The inquisitor cocked his head to get a look at Horin’s hidden face, and from nowhere, hot sparks of colour began to lick around his fingers. Stele’s eyes flashed with witch-fire. ‘Dance for me,’ he whispered.

The astropath froze, he had been granted one terrible moment to understand just what Stele’s intentions were. Then his muscles rebelled against all conscious controls and the elderly psyker’s mind-barriers shattered. Unable to stop himself, he launched at the inquisitor with clawed fingers and bared teeth. ‘Nuuuuhh–’

Stele worked a bore of mental energy into the centre of Horin’s mind and twisted it. The astropath spat and hissed like an animal. His eyes revealed the terrified truth that he had no command over his own flesh. ‘Guards!’ Stele shouted at the top of his lungs. ‘Help me!’

The two Blood Angels raced into the room to see the inquisitor wrestling with Horin. ‘The astropath is tainted! The warp has poisoned him with madness!’ Stele gave the old man a vicious shove and he stumbled back a few steps.

The Space Marines needed no further prompting. They tore Horin apart with snap-fire bursts from their bolters. Shells ripped exotic metals and bionics from age-spotted skin and brittle bone.

Stele slumped to the ornate tiled floor, and one of the Blood Angels came to him. ‘Lord, are you injured?’

He made a play of weariness. ‘Terra be praised, I am unhurt. If you had not been so quick, the turncoat could have killed me…’

The other Space Marine nudged Horin’s corpse with his boot. ‘It is dead,’ he pronounced, somewhat redundantly. ‘Another warp-witch too weak to resist.’

‘Yes,’ Stele agreed, rising to his feet, ‘the siren call of the empyrean is strong enough to exploit even the smallest deficiency in the servants of the Emperor.’

The grand chamber was dark now, each of the biolumes and braziers that had glowed with light during the remembrance ceremony were now dull and black. The only illumination came from infrequent clusters of candles dotted here and there inside the wrought-iron frames of devotional sub-shrines. Rafen savoured the smell of the hot wax as he passed them, the scent of the pungent Kolla tallow bringing sense-memory of valleys on Baal Primus to mind.

The thoughts fell away as he approached the head of the chamber, his boots tapping on the stone flooring. A knot of silent Space Marines parted to let him through, and there at the foot of the altar knelt his brother. Arkio completed the last few words of the prayer of the red grail, and then looked up at him. Rafen was struck by a sudden sense of distance in Arkio’s eyes.

‘Brother,’ he said. ‘You are still troubled.’

Rafen knelt alongside him and made the sign of the aquila. ‘By a great many things.’

‘And am I one of them?’ When Rafen hesitated, Arkio continued, ‘Do not be concerned, kinsman. I do not fear, and neither should you.’

‘I… Saw something, a light, when you touched the holy lance…’

Arkio nodded, and turned his eyes up to the glass portrait of Sanguinius. ‘That was his blessing, Rafen. On me… On all of us. Do you recall the lessons when Koris told us of the Emperor’s divine weapons? Did we ever dare to dream we would one day see such a thing?’

Rafen gave a slow nod. The legendary armaments from the rise of the Imperium were spoken of in hushed reverence. Weapons like the Spear of Telesto and its cousins the Frostblade Mjalnar and the Soul Spear, the great Blade Encarmine and the Black Sword of the Templars, all of them forged in the fires of the Emperor’s righteous fury. Any one of the blades would elevate a man to glory, if he had the will to wield it.

Arkio’s elder brother struggled to find the right words, but every sentence that came to his lips felt clumsy. Emotion and thought churned inside Rafen. Where was the bright, dauntless young novice Space Marine that he remembered from their days of training on Baal? How had his sibling changed from that to a taciturn and introspective man, heavy with the weight of dogma? ‘This miracle,’ he said carefully. ‘It has altered you…’

A rare smile escaped Arkio. ‘How could it not, Rafen? I felt him touch me, brother, I felt the primarch’s hand across my brow, and the bequest of his inheritance.’ He looked away. ‘I am changed, of that there is no doubt. The boy who joined you at Angel’s Fall is gone now.’

Rafen suddenly felt alone. ‘And yet, I remember that time as if it were yesterday.’

On the day they arrived, the blood-red sun was at its apex above the stone floor of the amphitheatre at Angel’s Fall. The red giant cast a punishing heat across the length of the arena, beating down on the crowd of aspirants gathered there. Like all the other trials they would face, it was one more test to weed out the weak of heart and impure of soul. They were a rough and wiry bunch; muscles honed in the hard way of life that Baal’s worlds forced upon its people. None of them were more than fourteen summers old, but to call them immature would have been a grave misnomer. There were no children here.

Outside the natural stadium, they would have sported tribal pennants and colours – and some would have been at each other’s throats because of it – but here within the walls of the proving ground they were no longer sons of the tribes of the Blood: they were postulants clamouring for a chance to ascend to the near-godhood of the Adeptus Astartes. From the stone ridges around them, hooded figures kept watch with slug throwers and long blades. These men were the unchosen, the warriors who had pledged to guard the place of the trial until death. They scanned the skies and waited; the sons of Sanguinius would arrive soon.

In the weeks leading up to the time of challenge, Rafen and Arkio had set out from the lands of the broken mesa clan with three more youths. They were the very best that the tribe had to offer, each of them lethal fighters hardened at an early age by living in one of the planet’s most hostile regions. They were ideal candidates to be risen, so the clan masters said. Rafen thought otherwise. He was a firebrand youth then, undisciplined and wild, quite unlike the man he would one day become. Some of the tribe said that he was sent to the trials not because he was capable of winning, but in hopes that he would die. Rumour had it that they were to rid them of his recklessness.

Rafen was determined to prove them wrong, even if he was honour-bound to protect his younger brother Arkio. For his part, Arkio’s heart was strong and open. He was forever willing to see the wonders of the universe in every new experience, but he was guileless and trusting, too naïve for the brutal future that awaited them as Space Marines. Along the way, the other three were killed: one was turned to a dry husk by thirstwater, another dashed on to rocks when his angel’s wings – the primitive gliders the Blood used to navigate the canyon winds – came apart in a sandstorm. Rafen was forced to break the neck of the last when he succumbed to the incurable venom of a shellsnake.

And so the trials began. The sky chariots fell from the air; the machines that he would later know as Thunderhawks landed in screaming gusts of flame. From within came men in shining red greaves and vambraces, and helmets adorned with the most holy symbol of the pure one. The Blood Angels walked among them like figures from some fantastic dream, picking out aspirants who sported the taint of mutation for cancellation, or dismissing those they saw as wanting. One Space Marine approached Rafen and Arkio, his helmet clasped under one arm.

‘Do you whelps have the temerity to think you could serve my beloved Chapter?’ His face was grizzled and iron-hard.

Arkio had been properly reverent in his answer, but not Rafen. ‘Test me and we shall see who has the courage, old man.’

The Space Marine did the last thing Rafen expected of him: he smiled. ‘Indeed we will. I am Koris, brother-sergeant of the Blood Angels Fifth Company. Impress me, if you can, lad.’

They made them fight with lances and staves, knives and short-swords, staffs and weapons made from chains and weights. Koris pushed them through mazes where the walls sprouted blades and arcs of electricity; he made them run races with heavy pack and gear while other Blood Angels strafed them with gunfire. They drilled and they fought and many of them died. Rafen would see Arkio in passing as the brothers went to and from each gladiatorial combat; they would exchange a nod or a wave with a bloodstained hand. Each time, there were fewer and fewer of them, and as the tournaments extended into days, the numbers of the aspirants dwindled still further. From the survivors would be drawn the fifty who would board the sky chariots for Baal, the mother world of the secundus moon that hung across the night like a baleful eye. Rafen excelled even his own arrogant standards, beating off every challenger until he found himself under the gaze of Koris once more. The veteran sergeant was an arbiter of the challenges, and those chosen by him would join the Space Marines.

With Koris as his audience, Rafen soundly beat his opponent – Toph, a pup from the junkhunter folk of the great sear – never realising that the sergeant saw his insolence as the seed of his undoing.

‘Do you believe you can fight all your enemies alone?’ Koris asked him.

Rafen sneered. The question was ridiculous. ‘Of course.’

‘No Blood Angel fights alone,’ said the sergeant. ‘All Blood Angels fight as one, as a brotherhood in the name of the Emperor. If you cannot understand that, then you have already failed.’ Perhaps Koris believed that Rafen could be trained, that he could be broken of his complacent manner. In any event, he allowed the boy to remain in the trials, and for his next test he faced a youth named Sachiel. ‘Are you ready to face defeat?’ Koris asked him.

‘I will never be ready to fail!’ he retorted hotly.

Sachiel was the very opposite of Rafen: he talked too much; he appeared soft, almost pretty compared to the hard aspects of the other aspirants. But he was cold and capable in the fighting pit. Sachiel felled Rafen and mocked him for it. ‘Ready for that, were you?’ he sneered, ‘Rafen the Ready, ready to lose?’

Arkio helped him patch his wounds as best he could and in a moment between bouts the younger brother implored the elder to curb his nature. ‘Rafen, you and I can survive the challenges if we are strong for one another. Our bond mirrors that of the Blood Angels. Together, we are unbeatable.’

Rafen waved him away. ‘You are too credulous, boy. A man fights alone; he dies alone. That is the way of it.’ Arkio said nothing more. Rafen’s fierce determination to become a Blood Angel initiate consumed him. It was born from the overwhelming desire to prove his worth to Axan, their father and war-chief of the broken mesa clan. If Arkio returned a failure then it would be expected and accepted because he was the second son, but as the elder brother, Rafen would suffer a disgrace that would follow him for the rest of his life.

The next day they ran the shifting maze, carrying an electrified baton in a relay race to the finish and Rafen – arrogant, purposeful Rafen – ran it alone, leaving his team mates behind to beat Sachiel into second place. He lit up the air with his fierce defiance. ‘Anyone!’ he growled. ‘I can beat anyone!’

‘Can you?’ Koris stepped forward and removed every piece of his armour, until he stood disrobed before the youth. ‘The time has come to make an object lesson of your pretension, lad.’ He threw Rafen his bolt pistol. ‘I have no armour to protect me, nothing to augment my strength. Hit me with the gun, just once, and I’ll declare your trials complete… But if I touch you, you fail.’

Ignoring Arkio’s pleas, Rafen picked up the pistol and let fly, chattering bullets snapping through the air at the Blood Angel. But Koris was no longer there, he moved like a hawk, impossibly fast. Rafen had barely felt the recoil from his first shots before the sergeant kicked his legs from under him and ground the youth’s face into the dust.

‘To become a Blood Angel, a man must know the pride of great Sanguinius, but also his humility as well,’ Koris told him, ‘You wallow in the former and show none of the latter. You are dismissed.’

The sergeant left him there in the sand, and on his knees, he watched the old veteran cast his endorsement of Sachiel and Arkio to become initiates to the Chapter. Unable to meet the gazes of those around him, Rafen drew up what little of his strength remained and left Angel’s Fall behind. Broken and dispirited, he wandered out into the desert without direction; a colossal storm descended on him. There, in the razor-winds, Rafen waited for death, too late at an understanding of what his insolence had cost him.

He had been found wanting and in this harshest lesson Rafen realised that he had squandered his chance at greatness. He took what little, bitter comfort he could from the knowledge that Arkio would walk with the Astartes. But for him his life was over. In the midst of the raging tempest, Rafen became lost in the territory of the fire scorpions, Baal’s most fearsome predators. Soon an immature warrior male was stalking him, acidic flame-venom dripping from its barbed tail in anticipation. As big as a full-grown man, the beast fell on the youth, enraged by his violation of its domain. So overcome with despair was he that Rafen was almost willing to let the animal end his life, but then in the thunderclouds he glimpsed a vision of something impossibly bright and powerful. Perhaps it had been a trick of the mind, some hallucination brought on by melancholy and fatigue, but in that moment Rafen saw the face of Sanguinius watching him. The pure one stood in judgement of the boy, and Rafen realised that this was the true test of his mettle: if he died here, lost and alone in the wilderness, then he would truly have failed every tenet that the tribes of the Blood and the Adeptus Astartes lived by.

Fuelled by his revelation, determination flooded back into the lad, and with the fierceness he had shown in the arena, Rafen pierced the creature’s carapace with a stone knife and killed it, just as Sanguinius had done in the legends of the angelic sovereign’s childhood.

It was only then that Rafen realised the lights he had seen in the sky were those of a stricken Thunderhawk plummeting to the ground. Damaged by a violent blast of lightning as it made for orbit, one of the Blood Angels’ ships crash-landed a few kilometres away from him, in the very heart of the scorpion hunting fields. Rafen rushed to the aid of the survivors and found a handful of aspirants there: Arkio, Toph and Sachiel among them. The old warrior Koris lay bloodied and unconscious, and the rest of the senior Blood Angels aboard were dead. Sachiel stepped forward to assume command and demanded Rafen leave them; a failure had no place alongside true sons of Sanguinius.

Such an insult would normally have boiled Rafen’s blood, but he had taken the sergeant’s lesson to heart and stood firm. He had hunted in these lands since he was old enough to carry a spear and he knew the ways of the fire scorpions. With such an outright invasion of their territory, the pheromone scents of the beasts would go mad and they would attack in massive numbers. Resisting the urge to do battle alone, Rafen rallied the aspirants to fight as a team, holding off the warrior scorpions until the insect’s giant queen revealed itself amid the swarm. The youths fought like lions, and even as the brave Toph died in the claws of the queen, Rafen killed the animal and set the scorpion pack in disarray. When the storm broke and a rescue ship arrived, they came to find Koris still alive and a dozen young men surrounded by a sea of dead enemies.

As the veteran was awakened from his healing sleep, Arkio relayed the tale of Rafen’s leadership and argued for him, even to the extreme of refusing his own ascension if his brother’s victory was not acknowledged. For his part, Rafen bid to take his leave and wished Arkio a fond farewell, believing that he would never see his sibling again. But Koris commanded otherwise. ‘The veil lifts from your eyes, boy,’ the old warrior said. ‘You have at last understood the teaching that eluded you for so long.’

‘Yes,’ Rafen admitted. ‘He who fights alone dies alone, but those who battle as brothers will live forever.’

The veteran smiled again. ‘You have redeemed yourself, Rafen of the broken mesa, and with the death of the aspirant Toph I have need of a courageous soul to take his place.’ He held out a hand to the youth. ‘Will you follow me, Rafen? Will you tread the path of the primarch and embrace the brotherhood of the Blood Angels?’

The words leapt from his lips. ‘I will. This day I vow to become a Blood Angel worthy of the Lord Sanguinius himself!’

And so for the first time, the sons of Axan left the cradle of their birth and crossed the chasm of space between Baal Secundus and the mother world Baal. If they thought they knew hardship, then Rafen and Arkio were proven wrong as they crossed the arid wastes of the massive desert world. Here they glimpsed the crumbling stumps of what had once been magnificent cities. There, amid the pinnacles of mountains that cut at the sky with blade-sharp peaks, stood the fortress-monastery of the Blood Angels. None of the aspirants had ever seen so huge a structure before, not even the mighty carving of Sanguinius cut from the bare rock of Mount Seraph. It thrilled and terrified them in equal measure.

Koris led them into the chambers of the abbey keep where they walked among the number of the Blood Angels’ brethren, eyes wide as saucers at the inhuman nobility and beauty of the warriors. Like their primarch, the fully-fledged Blood Angels carried the genetic mark of Sanguinius and the shadow of his exalted countenance in all their aspects. In comparison, the malnourished and weather-beaten youths of the Baal moons were feeble waifs. The Sanguinary Priests in their armour of white and crimson came for the aspirants, and took the fifty to the great chapel where they were locked in for three days and nights. They stood vigil without sleep, without food or water. Alone, Rafen would not have been able to endure the test, and as the hours crawled by, he saw some that dropped from exhaustion. They were removed by the priests, and their fates never spoken of, but with Arkio at his side, the brothers kept each other strong. When at last the fourth day dawned, they were still standing to meet the bearers of the red grail when they sundered the holy seal on the chapel door.

The handful of men who remained drank from the sacred cup, and Rafen’s weary mind came alive as the fluid touched his lips. Rich and coppery, the liquid in the chalice flowed from the veins of the most senior of the Sanguinary Priests – and through their bodies flowed an iota of the very blood of the angel lord himself. Energies and thoughts at once alien and familiar to Rafen coursed through his body, the touch of the fluid laying his soul bare to scrutiny by the Chapter’s brethren. Rafen embraced it and cast away the last ties to his old life. The warrior boy of the broken mesa clan was gone now, and in his place stood a man whose future stretched away before him in a golden path of glory and adventure. Darkness, warm and calming, enveloped the aspirants, and the sleep of change was upon them.

Rafen remembered with absolute clarity the moment the sarcophagus was opened and his altered, enhanced eyes took in their first sight. Perhaps fittingly, it had been of Arkio. His brother was standing in mute shock at the changes wrought on him, and studying his fingers and his hands as if they belonged to someone else. Rafen saw the face of the Space Marine before him – for he was no longer a mere man – and knew it to be his kinsman, even though this new Arkio stood twice as tall, was broad with muscle and crowned with a face that by turns mirrored his countenance, his father’s, and that of Sanguinius. The gazes of the two siblings met as the blood-servitors removed the probes and channels from their bodies. As one they broke into laughter, amazed and relieved and surprised at what fate had granted them.

Rafen could not be sure how much time had passed. Later he learned that they had been taken from the chapel after the vigil and locked in the hall of sarcophagi under the chants of the credo vitae. There, they had lain for a year in the sleep as a potent cocktail of nutrients, modificational potions and blood from the red grail coursed through their systems. In those months, the servitors had implanted the hallowed gene-seed of the Chapter and watched it remake them.

As Rafen, Arkio and the other aspirants had slumbered in blood-warm dreams kindled from the genetic memory of the primarch, their bodies accepted the potent new organs that made them into Space Marines – the secondary heart, the catalepsean node sleep-killer, multi-lung, occulobe, the omophagea, ossmodula and others. They stepped into the light as the living avatars of the gods they had once worshipped, but this was just the first of many steps. No human would have been able to withstand the training they endured, the impossible hardships and extremes of physicality that the instructors forced upon them. At all times, Koris was there, pushing each of them beyond the limits to achieve more, to go deeper, to fight harder. Through every challenge, Arkio and Rafen supported one another, kinsmen in blood and brothers in battle, drawing strength from their unbreakable bond. And as much as they changed, their hearts remained the same. Rafen’s unswerving fortitude and his relentless bravery grew tenfold, while Arkio kept his courage and his unbreakable spirit of adventure.

Until now.

Rafen’s reverie faded as quickly as it had come and he returned to the moment. His brother’s gaze was steady and cool on him under the dim glow of the grand chamber’s candles. He could see it in Arkio’s eyes as clearly as if it were inscribed like the scriptures in the stonewalls. The humble soldier his younger sibling once was had vanished, subsumed into the man before him now, just as the wiry clan boy of his youth had been transformed inside the hall of sarcophagi.

With effort, Rafen pushed a question from his mouth. ‘I cannot believe that you… that you liken yourself to our primarch? No man could dare to take such a mantle upon himself…’ His lips trembled as he spoke.

Arkio smiled, and the gesture made Rafen’s heart freeze in his chest. ‘But I am not a man, brother. I am a Blood Angel.’

He was unable to speak. Then, a shape in jet-black armour adorned with bone-white skulls and purity seals hove into view. ‘Brother Arkio,’ said the Chaplain, ‘if you would attend me? There are… questions.’

The Space Marine nodded and came to his feet. ‘Do not fear, Rafen,’ he whispered. ‘Trust in me.’

Rafen gave no reply. He was locked in a cycle of dread about what his brother’s words could mean. He is lost. The thought shocked him. My brother is lost to me and I am caught between the ties of blood to my family, and my duty to the Chapter…

CHAPTER NINE

The Shenlong minefield was a death zone. As Bellus edged her way into the outer reaches of the belt of warheads, Brother-Captain Ideon registered the shapes of broken hull metal and shattered rock. The mines were complex and intricate devices, so his Techmarines had explained to him; they possessed a logic brain capable of determining the difference between an inert form like an asteroid and an active craft like a manned warship. Scattered about the battle barge were the remains of men who had not possessed such information, who had blindly charged into the zone, casting their fates to chance in hopes of running the forge world’s blockade. He detected pieces of an ork rok and other remains that might have been from reavers or perhaps an Imperial ship caught when the Word Bearers took the planet for themselves. Shenlong had become enemy territory, a vast trap for the unwary.

The Bellus was solely his responsibility now, and he extended himself into the ship’s systems. His mind embraced the warship’s machine ghost like a trusted comrade-at-arms. The rudimentary spirit of Bellus knew Ideon well and it welcomed him in, letting the Blood Angel move his consciousness from the fleshy form connected to the bridge throne deep into the barge’s command pathways. Ideon’s psyche sent out impulses that might normally have made fingers or toes flex gently; instead, they made etheric rudders twitch and retro-rockets spit in readiness.

From a great distance, he heard his own synthetic voice issue out from a throat voxcoder. ‘Set condition one throughout the ship, special alert status. All exterior running lights are to be doused. All hatches sealed. All zero critical systems are to be quiescent.’

‘Confirmed,’ Ideon was aware of his aide, the veteran sergeant Solus, as the Space Marine read the ship’s status from a pict-plate. ‘Silent running.’

Irritation underlined Solus’s words, and Ideon felt a swell of sympathy. Like every Blood Angel on board, Ideon’s heart raced at the prospect of action, and the stealthy, slow approach they were now forced to make chafed at him. Ingrained in every one of them was the appetite for combat – not the distant, ranged affair of some warfare, but the immediate thunder of close quarter fighting. Blood Angels lived for the scent of the foe’s open veins, the scream of the dying enemy and the hot rush of power that came from watching them perish, and feeling the blow of their last breath. Ideon knew that some of this brethren pitied him. They saw the crippled old warhorse bolted into his command chair, never to stand again or to rip the unholy apart with his bare hands. But here, in a sacred symbiosis with the Bellus, Ideon still knew the delirious, giddy rage of bloodlust – only now, his hands were energy lances and his fangs the fusion torpedoes eager in their launch tubes. When Bellus killed an enemy vessel, Ideon knew it as if it were he that cracked open the hull and sucked the adversary’s life into the void.

Sensing itself in his thoughts, the battle barge’s machine spirit growled softly at the edges of the captain’s mind. It too was impatient at such slow progress. Ideon calmed it as he did his own anger: he forced the need away. With the hundredfold eyes of the Bellus’s servitors, he watched the broken fuselage of a frigate drift past, bereft of life where some imprudent officer had let zeal outstrip intellect. Such a fate would befall Bellus if Ideon’s control slipped, even for a moment.

The mines were never still. As one, the huge flock of spheres rotated with Shenlong’s day and night cycle, gradually moving to remain equidistant to one another. An elaborate cognitive engine on the planet below monitored the weapons constantly, so Stele had said, and it randomly generated tubes of open space within the field to allow ships safe passage from orbit to surface, in order that Shenlong’s contribution to the Imperial war effort be maintained. But the cargo lighters that carried the tonnage of krak missiles, fusion charges and the giant atlas- and proteus-class warheads were either grounded or destroyed, and the manufactory’s mighty engines of creation were silent down there. Perhaps the Traitors intended to ransack Shenlong and steal every bomb and bullet upon it, or perhaps they wished to make the forge world their own; Ideon cared not. For now, his mind was engaged in the singular task of bringing Bellus to operational range of the surface. That this world had once been a shining jewel in the Imperium’s industrial crown was of no concern; Shenlong belonged to the Word Bearers now, and they had stained it black with their profane presence.

He was dimly aware of someone entering the command sanctum, and the Bellus obediently showed him a display of the upper tier. He saw his own body there, at rest in the throne as if in a light doze, Solus to his right. Then Inquisitor Stele came into view, accompanied by his lexmechanic and the ever-present servo skulls.

‘Grave news, brother-captain,’ Stele began, his face a grim mask. ‘The astropath Horin is no more. He fell from the Emperor’s light and forced his death upon me.’

‘Horin?’ Solus grated. ‘He has served this ship for three centuries!’

‘How did it occur?’ Ideon asked. His face remained immobile, but mentally he frowned. This was not a matter he wished to address while gently directing the helm-servitors on the course ahead. He turned a degree of his attention to the bridge and away from the ship’s navigation.

Stele described Horin’s falsification of a signal from Baal as an excuse to gain access to the inquisitor. He told of his sudden attack, and the astropath’s death at the hands of the Space Marines. ‘I took it upon myself to examine his body,’ he finished, ‘and I found this.’ Stele displayed a glass cylinder, within which floated a fat maggot nesting inside a diseased black organ. ‘In his heart is the pupae variety of some poisonous daemon. I suspect that it may have formed within him over a long period of time.’ He held the jar close to his face. In truth, the corrupted flesh it contained had never been anywhere near Horin; it had been harvested instead from the corpse of the dead Chaos Space Marine Noro. This small piece of theatre would allow Stele to affirm his killing of the astropath.

‘Have that pestilent object destroyed at once!’ Ideon’s voice snapped with static. ‘Jettison it into the void, but I will not have such foulness aboard Bellus!’

‘Your will, brother-captain.’ Stele agreed. ‘I will attend to it.’

The inquisitor’s words had barely left his mouth before one of the servitors droned out a warning. ‘Collision alert. Incoming, port quarter, upper deck.’

Ideon resisted the urge to curse his luck and forced a hard turn from the rudder. The Bellus showed him the object, a lone mine drifting silently toward the battle barge’s prow. The inquisitor’s arrival had been enough to divert his attention for a crucial second. Now the warship was within strike range of the weapon.

‘Stand aside!’ Solus yelled, anticipating the captain’s next command, and Stele obeyed. Although the inquisitor held sway over the mission of the Bellus, Ideon was still the ship’s commanding officer and in matters such as this, the superior voice.

As large as it was, and even with full reverse thrust the battle barge would take long minutes to negate its forward speed and come to a halt – and such an action would register like a flare on the sensor webs of the other mines. His dour face unchanging, Ideon ordered the helm-servitor to alter course and turn Bellus toward the approaching mine.

The ship’s machine spirit quarrelled and snarled, railing at Ideon for such a suicidal action. Now the device was seconds away from impacting the hull and nothing would stop it. The captain saw Solus’s knuckles turn white where he gripped a stanchion. The mindless servitor continued to obey, and Bellus presented her hammerhead bow to the bomb. There was a moment when it seemed that Stele was about to say something; then Ideon felt a dull ring from the ship’s outermost extremity.

‘Impact,’ the servitor reported tonelessly. ‘No detonation.’

‘How did you know?’ Stele asked, a half-smile playing on his lips.

Ideon’s body did not move, but the ersatz voice from his voxcoder belied his relief. ‘I served aboard the strike cruiser Fidelis at armageddon. She was a mine-layer, among other things, and in my duties I learnt the limitations of that weapon.’ He activated the holosphere, displaying the schematic of a mine. ‘It is my understanding that Shenlong-pattern warheads have a delayed fusing mechanism. I closed the distance to ensure that the mine did not have time to arm itself before it struck the ship, so it did not explode.’ There was a sound like a sigh. ‘Such a tactic will not work twice, though. We were lucky… I estimated our success at only one chance in ten.’

‘Sanguinius protects,’ said Stele.

Sergeant Solus studied the new data as it scrolled across his pict-plate in thin lines of high gothic. ‘Brother-captain, the mine… It did not disintegrate when it struck us. The device remains lodged in the outer hull.’

‘Dispatch a tech-adept to ascertain the weapon’s status,’ Ideon replied. ‘Horin and that creature… There have been enough unpleasant surprises this day. I’ll not brook another.’

Solus nodded. ‘I will send Brother Lucion.’

‘He may need assistance,’ the inquisitor broke in. ‘Perhaps Brother Rafen should accompany him?’

Solus looked to Ideon and the captain’s voice hissed from the speaker on his throat. ‘So ordered.’

With careful deliberation, Rafen placed his metal-shod feet on the exterior hull of the battle barge, one step after another. He was alert for the hollow thump as the magnetic adhesion pads in his armour held fast. A few feet ahead of him, Techmarine Lucion ambled easily across the ship’s fuselage as if it were second nature to him.

And indeed, it probably was. Rafen’s years of fighting experience as a Blood Angel had taken him to dozens of different environments, from ice worlds like Tartarus to the Zaou marshlands, but his company had fought in the vacuum of space on rare occasions. Lucion, by comparison, had been billeted aboard Bellus since his passage from initiate status, and he knew the outside of the massive battle barge as well as the corridors within it. Rafen listened to the echo of his own breathing and warily followed the Techmarine. Something about the dead silence of space unnerved him and made him feel vulnerable; he preferred to walk in places where the sound of an enemy’s approach could be heard.

The Techmarine’s gait was that of an experienced spacer, he reflected. Every one of the machine-adepts that served the Adeptus Astartes seemed a breed apart in many things, not just such small details as this. While his power armour was no more powerful, Lucion seemed to be able to move more easily in it, and Rafen found himself wondering if the Techmarines used their superior skills with such things to enhance and alter their own wargear.

Indeed, Lucion’s armour was already heavily modified as that of all his kindred were; from the backpack power unit that supplied energy to the sealed suit, the tech-brother sported the folded metal sculpture of a servo-arm. Collapsed now, the additional limb ended in a deceptively large gripper, which the adept could operate like an extension of his body. Rafen had seen Techmarines use the devices to tear bolts from a stuck land raider hatch or to manipulate eggshell- thin circuit plates. Not for the first time, he considered the rumours that shrouded the way of the tech-adepts. Some said that during their apprenticeship to the Adeptus Mechanicus they were altered in some fashion, their loyalties split from their mother Chapter. Did the quiet, affable Lucion conceal some other agenda? Rafen shook the thought away, dismissing it; recent events were making him see contrivance in everything around him.

‘Hail, Brother Rafen,’ Lucion called over the vox. ‘To the starboard, do you see it?’

Rafen followed Lucion’s outstretched hand and saw the distended sphere embedded in the fuselage. ‘Is it active?’

‘Let us pray not.’

They approached the weapon and Rafen kept a respectful distance from the device. Lucion threw him a look and beckoned him closer. ‘It won’t bite, brother.’

Rafen was not so sure, but he stepped over all the same. In the silence, the Techmarine’s servo arm quivered into life, opening to its full length. With all three of his limbs, Lucion made a complicated sign in the space above the device, and Rafen caught the faint whisper of a secret litany in his ear-bead. With deft, economical movements, the adept set to work removing rune-engraved screws from the mine’s outer casing, placing each one in a drawstring bag tethered to his waist so that they would not float away in the zero gravity. ‘Maintain a close watch,’ said Lucion, his helmet inches away from the blackened exterior of the mine. ‘If I am distracted by some enemy, we may both die because of it.’

In actual fact, it was highly unlikely that the Traitors even knew that Bellus was here. And it was even less likely that they knew what was transpiring on her hull – but the sacred edicts laid down in the ashes of the Heresy, committed to the Codex Astartes, the Space Marines’ war book of tactics and conduct, demanded that no Space Marine ever set foot outside an airlock alone. Rafen wondered why he had been chosen to stand guard over Lucion. It was not a task without risk; if the adept made an error or did something else to displease the mine’s machine spirit, their proximity to the resulting detonation would turn them both to wisps of plasma. A sobering thought, he reflected.

The Techmarine’s actions held Rafen’s attentions, but only for a moment. He had never been one to wonder about the intricate working of the machines that powered the might of the Imperium. Beyond his typical training in the maintenance and operation of his weapons, Rafen simply accepted that the Chapter’s technology served him and fulfilled its purpose, just as he did for the Emperor. He had no desire to steep himself in the doctrines of the Machine God, the divergent aspect of the divine regent that the Adeptus Mechanicus paid fealty to. He heard Lucion give a brief prayer of thanks to the Omnissiah as the warhead’s access panel slid open on century-old hinges.

Rafen cast a glance over his shoulder, back along the hull of the Bellus. Dark and dormant, the massive starship seemed less like a vessel ready for battle than a broken piece of pitted landscape, cast off the surface of a world to float as a cold island in the void. The vessel’s angular conning tower rose over the plain of the mid-decks, as broad and threatening as a thunderhead. Not a single sliver of light escaped the shutters sealed over all the windows and vents; nothing betrayed the battle barge’s intent to pour red death on Shenlong’s cursed overlords.

If the dorsal fuselage of Bellus was his point of reference, then Shenlong itself floated like a gargantuan rising moon, slowly advancing up and over the ship. Badelt, the forge world’s actual moon, was invisible from this angle. The vessel’s orbit had been carefully plotted by Ideon’s navigators to ensure that sunlight reflected by the lone natural satellite would not illuminate Bellus in any planetside optical telescopes. Rafen watched the lazy progress of the planet; it was turning into night as it rose, the hazy grey of the Terminator crossing the surface as it banished day. The Blood Angel studied the darkening world and saw the glows of cities engulfed in flames, and the curls of cloud lit from within where tactical nuclear bombs had cut radioactive scars in the earth. Even in the hard light of day, little of Shenlong’s true face could be determined; millennia of combustion and fumes from factory cathedrals as big as nations had long since cloaked the industrial world in dirty smoke.

Rafen felt the familiar twitch in his fingers again. Down there, uncounted numbers of Word Bearers were casting the Emperor’s likeness down in flames, and erecting their own foul temples and tormenting the populace. Even though the rational, logical part of his mind knew that the enemy forces were vastly superior, the passionate energy in his blood boiled for a chance to kill and destroy the Chaos filth. As he and Lucion had made their way to the airlock, both the Blood Angels had sensed anticipation in the atmosphere. All about them, warriors drilled and prepared for combat, or armed themselves. Some were sitting at the feet of battle Chaplains, their heads bowed in war prayers. It was almost a palpable thing, like a faint musk upon the wind. The tethered might of Sanguinius’s bloodlust was straining at the leash to be free, free to unleash a crimson hell on all those who dared oppose the God-Emperor of Mankind. Rafen’s lips drew back from his teeth in anticipation, his fangs drawn with predatory desire. It was almost enough to distract him from his deeper, more troubling concerns. Almost.

He looked to the place on Shenlong’s dark surface where, by his rough reckoning, the planet’s capital city stood – and at its heart, the ferrocrete edifice of the Ikari fortress. Rafen had heard tell that the fortress was a twin to any of the great monastery citadels of the Adeptus Astartes, an enormous strongpoint from which Shenlong could be governed. The history books said the Ikari fortress had been inspected by no less than Rogal Dorn himself, the primarch of the Imperial Fists Chapter. Dorn had apparently declared the fortress to be ‘adequate’, high praise indeed from the dispassionate lord of the Imperium’s greatest siege masters. Rafen’s doubts reasserted themselves, as he understood just how hard the Blood Angels would be tested to break such a fortification.

He looked away from the planet, and blocked out the misgivings that rumbled at the back of his mind. These distractions were cancer to a member of the Legion Astartes. The smallest seed of a doubt could bloom into hesitation that could cost him his life on the battlefield. The fight for Shenlong would be difficult enough without him letting his concentration go elsewhere. These thoughts played on him as Lucion did something to the mine, and the limpid green glow from within the warhead’s workings faded out to nothing. The Techmarine’s task complete, he stepped back from the inert munition and once more sang a short, quiet litany of thanksgiving. Lucion’s speech was soft in Rafen’s helmet, but he caught the words of respect paid to Sanguinius, to the Machine God – and to his brother.

He spoke Arkio’s name in the same breath as our liege lord and the Emperor. Rafen could hardly believe such a thing. What insanity is this?

Lucion turned to face him, and something about the Techmarine’s body language told Rafen that he knew he had been overheard. ‘The weapon’s ghost has been silenced,’ he said carefully. ‘It sleeps now.’

‘We just leave it there, then?’ Rafen was surprised at the annoyance in his own voice. ‘Lodged in the hull like a tick?’

The Techmarine’s head bobbed. ‘It cannot explode now, brother. Not even a lightning bolt from the Omnissiah himself could return it to life.’

‘Very well, then we go.’ Rafen smothered his irritation and began the steady walk back along the hull. Lucion fell in by his side, his gait easy beside Rafen’s slow-footed strides.

After a long moment, Lucion spoke again, and this time it was with the air of an expectant child. ‘Rafen… I must ask you… What is Brother Arkio like?’

Rafen grimaced behind his breather mask. ‘Like? He is a Blood Angel,’ he replied tersely. ‘He is my sibling.’

‘But his manner, his bearing,’ Lucion pressed. ‘I never knew him… Before. What was he like when he was younger?’

The Techmarine’s idolatry fuelled anger in Rafen’s chest and he fixed him with a hard look. ‘What would you have me say, Lucion? That he cut stones in two with nothing but a word from his lips? That he fell from the sky on wings of fire?’ He turned away, pulling open the airlock’s outer hatch. ‘Arkio is a Space Marine, no more and no less. Ask him yourself and he will tell you the same.’ Without looking to see if Lucion was behind him, he advanced into the chamber beyond, his mood darkening like the Shenlong sky.

Stele stalked the corridors of the Bellus like a shadow, a ghostly presence at the edge of perception. He watched for the slightest hint of any mental essence extending beyond the hull walls, alert for the smallest iota of thought that might be detected by the traitor psykers below. He found nothing, and it gave him cause to smile thinly. The players and the setting were ready for the execution of the next great act in his performance, and Stele toyed with the delicate thrill that the gambit brought him.

Ramius had always been at his most alive in the construction and execution of his schemes, even from the earliest days as an ordo initiate; such things, after all, were the meat and drink of his sect. He considered the development of his plots and counter-plots to be like a perfect clockwork construction, a grand creation of gears and cogs cast from the emotions of men. Stele could never slake the sweet anticipation that dripped from such moments as this one, as he finally set the wheels spinning. It was his intention that there would be war on Shenlong, and it would be bloody and glorious.

Grave-silent and watchful, Bellus hung in low orbit and waited. No stray energies or signatures radiated from her, no action on board was taken without careful deliberation and pace. To the machine eyes on the surface, the warship appeared as one of a thousand pieces of space debris, adrift in the night sky on a slow course toward a fiery death in re-entry.

The inquisitor left the ranks of Chapter serfs and men preparing wargear and marshalling weapons to return to his sanctum. It was necessary for Stele to be correctly garbed, and his shipboard robes were ill suited. There was a field-habit of fine grox skin that would better suit the circumstances.

On reflex, Stele’s hand snapped toward the blade concealed at his waist as he entered his sanctum. There were intruders here, and the brief moment of smug satisfaction had blinded the inquisitor to their presence. His fingers were almost at the pommel before he halted. Seven Space Marines stood in a loose semi-circle in the middle of his chambers, and as one they had all raised weapons at his brisk activity. Forcing back a grimace, Stele turned the movement of his hand into a brushing motion, as if he were flicking away some particles of dust from his cloak. He hid his annoyance well, through years of practice, aware that the Blood Angels were evaluating everything about him.

At the centre of the group stood Brother-Sergeant Koris. The crimson armour of his form seemed utterly out of place in the dim shades of Stele’s sanctum. And out of place he was, for it was only by the inquisitor’s express summons that a Space Marine was allowed to enter. The presence of Koris and the others here and now was an unsubtle message from the veteran warrior. You cannot keep us out.

‘My lord inquisitor,’ Koris said levelly. ‘I would speak with you.’

Stele gave him a gracious nod and moved into the chamber, as if it were he who had ordered them to this meeting. ‘Of course, honoured sergeant, how may I assist you?’ In the shadows at the edge of the room, one of Stele’s helots cowered behind a plinth and he shot the slave-servitor a brief, venomous look. The pathetic creature would pay for failing to alert him to the arrival of the Space Marines.

‘The mission on which we are about to embark troubles many of us,’ said Koris. ‘Although we desire the death of the Traitors, we are concerned that the odds make this a pointless endeavour.’

Stele studied the faces of the Blood Angels. Like Koris, all were seasoned soldiers with centuries of battle experience behind them. Most of the men were survivors from Simeon’s company on Cybele, but there were also sergeants from the Bellus contingent. None of them were cowards or men shy of battle; they were intelligent, ruthless warriors and they knew the jaws of a meat-grinder were opening before them. The inquisitor let none of this show on his face.

‘Yours is not to question the word of the Emperor, Koris. If he orders you to march to your deaths, then march you shall.’ Stele’s voice was airy, as if he were commenting on the taste of some fine morsel of food.

‘So we would,’ Koris’s eyes narrowed, ‘but these are not his commands. The priest Sachiel’s skills in the way of the Blood are unquestioned, lord, but he is no tactician. He plans to commit our forces to an all-out assault… And I fear that our brothers will be dashed on the walls of the Ikari fortress while the Word Bearers take only minor casualties. A staged series of small raids would be far more effective.’

‘Why do you tell me this?’

‘If it pleases the lord inquisitor, you have Sachiel’s ear. You could intercede, persuade him to alter his plans.’

Stele gave Koris a bored look. ‘Surely you have made your concerns known to him, yes? Yet he chose not to take your advice?’

The sergeant gave a single sharp nod. ‘He suggested I was lacking in faith.’

Stele took a step closer to Koris. ‘Are you?’

Caged fury illuminated the old soldier’s eyes. ‘I am a son of Sanguinius,’ he hissed, ‘and my faith is hard as diamond!’

How easy it is to kindle the warrior’s fury. The Space Marine was following the path Stele was setting for him; he was one more piece of the clockwork ticking along its pre-destined route. ‘I do not doubt that, but why do you not share his certitude in our victory? Sachiel believes, as I do, that your lord primarch has blessed us. You doubt this insight?’

For the first time, hesitation crossed the sergeant’s face. ‘We… I… am unsure, lord.’ He licked his lips. ‘The youth, Arkio… It is difficult to accept…’

Simplicity, Stele told himself, it is so simple to manipulate men like Koris. They may pretend to question their dogma, but in truth they are the most steadfast and inflexible believers of them all. ‘Koris, did you think it easy for me to accept? I, who have travelled to thousands of worlds and seen sights to chill the marrow and uplift the heart? You will be able to return to your homeworld of Baal after the raid on Shenlong is over to hero’s honours, but before that may happen you must release your scepticism!’

‘But did Commander Dante himself not say that a Blood Angel who does not strive to question is no better than a mindless servitor? I cannot accept that we will be victorious on Shenlong by faith alone!’ Koris looked away, his rush of words a shock to himself.

The inquisitor gave a staged sigh, seamlessly changing tack. As with every plan of his creation, Stele kept it hidden beneath a bodyguard of lies: Horin’s murder, the blackened heart cut from the Word Bearer, each was one more distraction from the truth of the inquisitor’s plan. Now, he unveiled another falsehood, one sharpened and targeted like a missile directly at the Blood Angel’s Achilles heel – his sense of duty. ‘Very well, then, you leave me no choice, sergeant. What I am about to tell you must not leave this room.’ Stele approached his hololithic projector and called up a display of the Ikari fortress. Like most of the records of the obelisk keep they were sketchy and vague, but these were different from those in the Bellus’s librarium. A deep passage was shown under the construction. ‘I want your oath, Koris,’ Stele said with force. ‘All of you.’

Each of the Blood Angels looked to the veteran and he nodded. ‘You have it.’

Stele pointed at the falsified display, so perfect in its mendacity. ‘Sachiel is a fine priest but he is, as you have said, not a soldier as we are. And so, I kept this information from him.’ He glanced at the Space Marines, who were all watching him intently and hanging on his every word. Gently, he allowed his mind to probe at them, easing them a little closer to his turn of thinking. ‘Only a select few men know that the Ikari fortress conceals an ancient Adeptus Mechanicus laboratory, and inside that lies a device of incredible power.’ The image showed the blurry rendition of an eldar webway portal. ‘Our goal on Shenlong is not to drive out the Word Bearers, as Sachiel thinks, but to secure or destroy this device on pain of death.’ Stele gave Koris a comradely nod. ‘Now do you understand the importance of this mission?’

The sergeant examined the scan carefully. Stele kept his face neutral; the forgery was utterly impeccable and certainly good enough to fool a rank-and-file Space Marine. In reality, the lower levels of the Ikari fortress concealed nothing more than a waste recycling system and a network of torture cells. This lie would serve him by silencing Koris with his own duty. In ten years of service on the Bellus, the inquisitor had come to realise that all men wanted something to believe in, and it was the very nature of a Space Marine to crave a cause. If Koris and his dissenters would not follow Arkio, then it was merely a matter of fabricating a reason that they would die for.

The veteran spoke, and Stele knew then that he had snared the Blood Angel. ‘Why did you not reveal this earlier? Why conceal it, inquisitor?’

‘You know the ways of the Ordo Hereticus,’ Stele said confidentially. ‘They would see me executed if they knew what I had just told you. But I have always trusted the word of a Blood Angel.’

Koris was grim-faced. ‘Then we will take this mission as Sachiel orders. It will cost us, but we cannot let the Chaos filth hold such a threat against the Imperium.’

Inside, Stele was jeering at them. ‘Even if it costs your lives?’ The sergeant nodded and the inquisitor turned away, summoning a servitor. ‘Then, comrade brothers, before you depart to prepare for the assault I would ask you to grant me a small boon.’

‘Name it,’ Koris said warily.

The servitor returned with a tray; on it was a replica of the red grail and eight ornate steel cups. ‘I would share a benediction with you all.’ He poured a measure of the thick crimson liquid into each goblet and they all took one. ‘To victory on Shenlong,’ Stele toasted. ‘For the glory of the Emperor and Sanguinius.’

‘For the glory of the Emperor and Sanguinius.’ The seven men repeated the words with one voice and sipped from the cups.

Silence held sway for a long moment, then the veteran spoke. ‘Perhaps… I may have been hasty in my evaluation of you, lord inquisitor,’ said Koris.

‘An occupational hazard,’ Stele noted.

The sergeant said no more, and with a circumspect salute, the Space Marines left the chamber.

Stele spoke a word of power and sent out a cantrip to seal the iris shut behind them. Then he drained the rest of the fluid in the chalice and let out a bubbling, hateful laugh. The liquid rolled down his chin and dripped to the floor. It was sacred blood, after a fashion, but not the vitae of Sanguinius.

He glanced at the cowering servitor, and then paused briefly before beating it to the floor. Then, with slow deliberation, the inquisitor used his heavy boot to crush the serf’s throat.

Satisfied, Stele swung his arm and threw the grail at the wall of the chamber, where it shattered in a wet crash of sound. The fools will learn too late that my schemes are not to be disrupted, Stele told himself. Shenlong’s skies will weep blood!

‘I command it!’ he shouted, his voice echoing about the empty room.

CHAPTER TEN

Rafen bowed his head as the Barbarossa hymnal came to a crescendo. A thousand voices carried the sacred lyrics up to the roof of the staging deck. On all sides, Blood Angels made their prayers to the primarch and the God-Emperor. As the song ended, he ran a bare hand over his bolter, to touch the inscriptions that he had painstakingly etched there over the decades of his obligation. No two weapons in the service of the Chapter were alike; every Space Marine turned his own into a combination of gun and prayer icon. Rafen’s firearm carried the listing of each battle he had fought, as well as passages from his favoured Chapters in the book of the lords. He knew them all by heart, but the presence of the words was a comfort that strengthened his resolve. Turning the gun to face away from him, he opened the breech in the ritual manner and waited for the war blessing from a Chaplain.

His eyes ranged around the deck. Columns of vehicles were shunting slowly into the mouths of Thunderhawk drop-ships, Baal-pattern Predator tanks rumbling in line with Rhino and Razorback transports. He and the majority of the other Blood Angels would be taking a different route to the surface of Shenlong; the elongated teardrops of dozens of Deathwind drop-pods were laid open before the assembled troops. Rafen fancied they looked like some strange seed from a giant metal plant. Indeed, when they fell on the Word Bearers, they would sow the germ of the Emperor’s revenge upon the stolen forge world.

A sudden commotion drew his attention. In the forward ranks, hushed voices spoke in urgent tones, breaking position to cluster around one of their number. Rafen came up from his knees and approached. He saw Turcio, and the battle-brother turned to face him.

‘Rafen, perhaps it is best if you stand clear–’

He pushed past and saw Sergeant Koris kneeling in what appeared to be deep, reverent prayer. Then the old warrior’s body twitched and a low growl escaped his lips. Rafen went cold; he recognised the signs immediately. ‘When…?’

‘He was sullen when he arrived,’ Turcio whispered, ‘and as the hymn continued, he seemed to grow more distracted.’ The Blood Angel licked his lips. ‘I fear this is a matter for the Chaplain.’

Rafen ignored him and dropped to his haunches so that he might look Koris in the face. ‘Brother-sergeant? Do you hear me?’

Koris raised his head and the breath caught in Rafen’s throat. The veteran’s face was flushed with barely suppressed rage, his eyes dark pits of animal hate. He showed his teeth and flecks of spittle left his lips. ‘Rafen!’ he snapped. ‘Ah, lad, the wings, do you hear them? The sound of the foe and the clarion of foul Horus?’ Muscles stood out on the sergeant’s neck as he strained to contain the boiling passion inside him. ‘The Emperor’s palace lies breached, you see?’ Breath hissed through his teeth. ‘Is this real? I see it and yet I do not see… The cup! Is it poison?’

Turcio gave a curt nod. ‘It is the black rage.’

The gene-curse. To speak of it was almost a taboo among the Blood Angels, and yet the black rage, the flaw, the red thirst, whatever name it was given, was the very thing that defined the character of the Chapter. Space Marine scholars and the historians on Baal would often speak of the genetic legacy of great Sanguinius in reverent tones. So strong was the potency of the pure one’s gene-seed that even ten millennia after his death at the hand of the traitorous Warmaster Horus, the psychic echoes of that last horrific confrontation were indelibly imprinted on the cells of every Blood Angel. At moments of great stress, the power of that trauma rekindled itself in them, as it had in Koris. To a man, each of them knew the delicious might of the rage as it beckoned from the ragged edges of their battle frenzy, but it was the constant test of their character to hold back from the madness of the berserker. This force that lurked in the collective race memory of the Baalite warrior sect would come to the fore – and as it was now, on the eve of battle a Blood Angel would become consumed with the imprinted recollection. They would see the world as Sanguinius saw it, and come to believe that they were the primarch himself, fighting Horus to the death while great Terra burned around them. To men so touched, the gates to madness would swing wide.

Rafen placed his hands on the sergeant’s shoulders. ‘Koris, listen to me. It is Rafen, your friend and student. You know me,’

‘I do…’ Koris managed. ‘You must beware… The foetid blood! The tainted chalice…’

‘These are visions you see. You must not let them overcome you, or the rage will engulf your reason!’

For an all too brief moment, Koris’s glazed sight seemed to clear. ‘I feel the pain of his death like it was my own! It races through me… But something… Wrong…’

Rafen was aware of a shape in black armour approaching. ‘Brother, stand aside,’ said Turcio. ‘You must not interfere!’

‘What transpires here?’ The Space Marine looked away from the old warrior and into the monstrous skull-mask of a Chaplain. Rafen recognised the priest as Brother Delos, the same man who had approached Arkio in the grand chamber.

‘Your eminence,’ Turcio began. ‘I fear that our honoured Sergeant Koris teeters on the brink of the flaw.’

Rafen turned on them both, anger building. ‘I will not hear of this! He has looked into the face of the rage a thousand times and held his soul from it, this time will be no different!’ Even as the words left his mouth, Rafen knew it would not be so.

Delos slid back his visor and laid a hand on Rafen’s arm. ‘You cannot win him back with words, brother,’ he said softly. ‘The thirst takes the greatest of us… Lestrallio, Tycho at Tempestora, even Mephiston–’

‘Mephiston did not yield!’ Rafen barked.

The Chaplain studied Koris with a skilled eye. ‘But only Mephiston. Your mentor will not resist the pull much longer. Would you let him go mad from the pain, brother? Or will you stand aside and let me grant him a chance for peace?’

Rafen felt the fight leave him. Delos was right. ‘But why now? The rage does not simply appear like this! I have fought with Koris time and again, and never before have I seen him so stricken!’

‘One cannot know the way of the great angel,’ Delos said solemnly, helping Koris to his feet. The veteran’s eyes were glassy, and each of them knew that what he saw now was a battle ten thousand years past, not the decks of the Bellus.

Remorse cut into Rafen like a blade as Delos signalled to another black-armoured figure to guide Koris away. The sergeant tensed and threw a growl over his shoulder. ‘Rafen! Beware… traitors!’

Turcio shook his head sadly. ‘Already he confuses this moment with the duel against Horus.’

‘Are you sure?’ Rafen retorted bitterly.

Delos weighed his crozius arcanum in his hand. Light glittered off the red wings of its skeletal escutcheon. ‘Koris is not the first to fall to the thirst this day, and I fear he will not be the last. It is another omen, that Sanguinius stands close to us and there are those who become consumed in his radiance.’ At a subtle signal from the elder priest, the Blood Angels’ Chaplains began the sombre chant of the mass of doom.

‘The moripatris,’ breathed Turcio. ‘The way is opened toward the Death Company.’

‘This is not right!’ Rafen’s voice was a growl. The old warrior had been a mentor to him for as long as he could remember, a successor to his father now long turned to dust in the lands of the broken mesa. It seemed unconscionable to simply let him go without a struggle after so many battles hard-fought. ‘You heard him say it, something is wrong!’

Too late, Rafen realised that his outburst had attracted unwanted attention. From a gantry above the deck he saw Inquisitor Stele fix him with a steady gaze. In moments, the ordos agent had descended to approach, with Sachiel following at his heels. ‘What did Koris say?’ Stele asked without preamble.

‘He spoke of traitors,’ Rafen replied. ‘He talked of a poisoned chalice.’

Stele said nothing as Sachiel nodded thoughtfully. ‘That is to be expected. In the rage, many things become confused. Koris no doubt referred to the traitors of Horus.’

‘Traitors who served Chaos while pretending to serve the Imperium.’ The words were out of Rafen’s mouth before he could stop them.

‘At first,’ Stele’s jaw hardened a little. ‘But Horus had turned against the God-Emperor long before he fought Sanguinius.’ When the Space Marine did not answer, the inquisitor threw Sachiel a glance. ‘Priest, it is your authority that shall be affected by the loss of Sergeant Koris.’

‘He’ll serve the Chapter as well in the throes of the thirst as he would elsewhere,’ said Sachiel, ignoring the pained look on Rafen’s face. ‘He will become one of the Death Company, as all those who succumb shall.’ He stepped forward and gestured. ‘Brother Rafen, you will assume command of the sergeant’s squad for the assault on Shenlong.’

As protocol demanded, Rafen gave a shallow nod of obeisance. ‘Your will.’

Sachiel raised his voice and spoke to the air. ‘To arms!’

Outside the walls of the Ikari fortress, the raised sounds of chants and moans turned Shenlong’s smoke-choked sky into a hellish hall of discord. Iskavan turned away from the window to survey the fire-damaged chapel interior. His gaze passed over Falkir, the Word Bearer commander in charge of the Chaos occupation force on planet. ‘If it pleases the Dark Apostle,’ said the Traitor Marine, ‘I would ask how I can serve this host.’ His coarse voice echoed off the walls.

Iskavan gave the voluptuous form of a Slaaneshi daemonette an appraising look and then turned to face Falkir. ‘As well you should, Castellan.’ He sneered at the honorific as if it amused him. ‘Turn your troops to their posts and have them prepare for war. Open the cages of your warbeasts. Run out your guns.’

Falkir’s face twitched and he glanced over at Tancred. The torturer returned a neutral aspect to the Shenlong garrison commander. He was unwilling to commit even the smallest tic of emotion to the debate. ‘Eminence, this pathetic world is ground beneath our heel! I admit that some of the human cattle here still resist the path that Lorgar has brought to them, but we will see to that–’

‘Idiot!’ Iskavan snarled. ‘I care nothing for the meat you lord over on this blighted ball of rust! They are no threat! I order you to prepare for an enemy from without!’

Falkir’s obsequious manner vanished. ‘Do I understand you correctly? You have come to my prize world with an enemy at your backs?’

‘You dare?’ The Apostle ground his gauntlet into a spiked fist. ‘I have commanded you! See to it!’

Falkir spat. ‘Shenlong’s skies brim with killers. No human could penetrate the minefield.’

‘They come.’ Iskavan looked away, studying the night sky. ‘Garand himself spoke of it. They come and we will crush them against the anvil of our hate.’

‘What poor prophecy is this?’ Falkir demanded. ‘You have come on a fool’s errand–’

From the horizon, a flash briefly turned night into day, and rumbles coursed through the stone of the fortress. Iskavan faced Falkir with a cold smile. ‘You see?’

Another blast lit the sky again, closer this time. Then another, and the third struck the castle keep like an earthquake.

It was not true that Space Marines know no fear. All the warriors understood the stark power of that raw emotion, but unlike common men who served in other armies, the Adeptus Astartes were the masters of their fear. They took it, moulded it, and turned it against their enemies. They assumed its mantle; they became fear incarnate. It was to them an honoured comrade that joined them on every sortie and sharpened their lust for bloody combat. Chaplain Delos drank it in now as the Death Company Thunderhawk punched through Shenlong’s cloud cover and turned toward the Ikari fortress.

A dozen crimson gunships followed the black-painted warbird in a loose delta formation, lit by the fires raging across the capital city. Fat balls of hot flak peppered the air about them. The wings of the flyers rocked as they passed sudden updrafts and pockets of turbulence. At the head of the Blood Angels’ invasion, at the tip of the spear, the ebony Thunderhawk screamed, her array of cannons and missiles spitting at the fast-approaching fortress walls. The ship was as dark as the night, brilliant crimson saltires the only decoration over her fuselage. The same pattern was repeated inside the craft, on the armour of the men who rattled and snarled at enemies seen and unseen. Each warrior had ritually altered the livery of the Chapter’s wargear. The crimson banished beneath a coating of black paint and crested with red crosses. Black as murder and red as ruin, they howled for annihilation.

Delos cast his eyes over the figures before him. He alone maintained a grip on his sanity as the Death Company’s Chaplain, every other Space Marine was wracked by the terrible power of the thirst. Some were silent and introspective with it, while others raged in maddened chorus at traitorous foes long since dead. This was Delos’s lot, to take those who had fallen from grace and to lead them into the jaws of battle. They would fight with the assurance of men who held no dread of death, their fears washed away by tides of blood. Delos was simply a herdsman, a pastor and guide who served only to direct them and then unleash these poor souls in a dark hurricane.

‘The barrier falls!’ cried a voice, and Delos saw Koris surge forward against his restraints, hand clutching the hilt of a brazen power sword. ‘Horus bears his throat, Dorn! Summon Guilliman and press the attack!’

The Chaplain could not keep a frown from his face. He is lost in the primarch’s memories and sees us all as figures from the past. ‘Of course, brother,’ he said. ‘It will be done.’

‘I’ll carve my name into the arch-traitor’s heart!’ Koris pointed. ‘There! The nest of the enemy!’

Delos saw a shape emerging from the smog: it was the Ikari fortress. It was a volcano grown in the middle of a cityscape. The massive conical construction rose into a flat mesa where bristling gun towers clawed at the sky. In rings around the girth of the keep there were missile carriages, between balconies and the ruins of ornate carvings.

Weapons turned to track the Thunderhawks and the passage became violent. The Chaplain spied the points in the outer walls where lance fire from orbit had made lucky strikes – yes, there to the west, a lengthy crack in the fascia that cried out to be opened still further.

Koris recoiled and released a moan of pain. ‘The blood!’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘The cup of blood was poison! Damn his eyes!’ Delos reached out a hand to reassure him, watchful of the veteran’s countenance. The Chaplain had shepherded many Blood Angels to their last in the Death Company, and each took a different path into the abyss. ‘Curse him! He means to destroy us all!’

Delos gave a slow nod. ‘Horus will perish brother, we shall see to it.’

‘Horus lies dead!’ Koris shouted, and his sight seemed to clear for a moment, ‘The traitor… Stele!’ Pain rose in the warrior’s body and he went rigid.

The Chaplain nodded again, the words misconstrued. ‘Fear not, Koris. Lord Stele will know of your bravery–’ Delos’s sentence was lost as a laser struck a chunk off the Thunderhawk’s undercarriage. He bellowed a command to the pilot. ‘Report!’

‘We are undone!’ came the reply. ‘We cannot land!’

‘Then we shall not land!’ Delos retorted. ‘Power to the thrusters. Take us into the breach. Unlock all weapons and munitions, release the seals on the engine-soul!’ Without waiting to see if his orders were followed, the Chaplain pulled at a lever on the wall and a series of explosive bolts ignited along the length of the hull. Planes of steel plate fell away from the Thunderhawk as hatches were ejected into the air, and the restraints holding the black-armoured warriors snapped open. The hot Shenlong wind roared into the open cabin, and the Death Company answered it. ‘Brothers, take to your wings!’ Delos held fast his crozius, its blue light illuminating him.

Koris let out a wordless cry of vengeance and bared his sword; the thirst had consumed him once again, and without pause he leapt into the air. Delos followed, along with the rest of the men. The yellow jetpack flame buoyed them up and away from the plunging drop-ship.

Anti-aircraft fire converged on the Thunderhawk and set it aflame, but still it fell like a blazing arrow toward the breach in the citadel. Delos saw the aircraft strike with perfect accuracy then the dark metal form vanished in a sphere of white release, and the Ikari fortress trembled. The Death Company fell into the flames, weapons erupting, and the Traitor Marines died with barbarous laments on their lips.

The Thunderhawks had come on the heels of the orbital bombardment from Bellus; so now in the wake of the gunships came the fall of drop-pods bristling with battle-ready Space Marines. Rafen’s mouth formed the words of the litergius sanguinius as the hold of Shenlong’s gravity pulled his pod down toward the surface. Above his head in the array of thruster jets, a simplistic logic engine shifted the descent of the capsule and aimed it squarely at the heart of the enemy stronghold. He felt the aspect change as the pod altered course and he gripped his bolter in anticipation.

Rafen looked around the men crammed in alongside him – Alactus, Turcio, Lucion and others – and saw how they looked to him with unquestioning loyalty. He was in command of their squad now, Sachiel had decreed it. He had ordered the other Space Marines to show him their deference as they had to Koris. Rafen looked away. He felt unworthy of such an honour so wrongly earned. Rafen fully expected to rise to leadership rank in due time, but to have it thrust upon him in the same moment as his trusted mentor was snatched away by the flaw… His mind was a whirl, and once more he murmured the words of the litergius, hoping that he would draw guidance from them.

A glyph illuminated on the lander’s inner wall. ‘Prepare for deployment!’ he ordered. The squad secured their weapons and chanted the prayer of engagement. Rafen made the sign of the aquila as the capsule’s descent rockets flared. Rich chemical foam gushed in to fill the interior, forming a glutinous cushion about them. It was to be a hard landing.

Shedding waves of re-entry heat, Rafen’s pod joined a hundred others as they crashed into the barrage-ravaged walls of the fortress. Some of the craft touched down in the plaza below, settling amid chattering defilers and legions of tanks. Others used the velocity of their passage to pierce the castle bulwarks, slamming through rock like the fists of an enraged god.

Rafen blacked out for a moment as they hit. The shock-gel around him had absorbed most of the g-forces, but still the impact rang the drop-pod like a cloister bell. Then the foam was sinking away, and the spitting hiss of displaced air signalled the opening of the hatches. He was on his feet, the awesome energy of his Astartes physiology shrugging off the effects of the concussion.

‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’ The call leapt from his lips, and although he had uttered it a thousand times, the exultant cry did not diminish in force. Rafen threw himself from the pod. The capsule had blown through a gunport and spent its kinetic energy forcing a channel down through two levels of the fortress. It had come to rest in a chapel once used by Imperial weapon crews. Rafen’s first sight was of a statue of the God-Emperor, decapitated and fouled with plasma burns. A hot knife of hatred surged through him and he cast around for something to kill in revenge for this besmirching.

There were perhaps a dozen Word Bearers scattered about; it was difficult to tell exactly how many, because the pod’s explosive arrival had smashed them into a mess of limbs and torsos. Still, something wailed in the wash of red gore, and a body rose to aim a bolter. Rafen moved as if he were liquid mercury, fast, untouchable. Dodging clumsy fire from the injured Traitor Marine, he sent a burst of rounds into the warrior, ending him.

At the chapel entrance, a bent, hooded figure moaned an entreaty to Rafen, his scarred hands begging him for help. He assumed it was a man, perhaps some servitor that had survived this long amid the occupying army. Rafen stepped to him and took off the head, hood and all, with a single swipe from his combat knife. They had no time for liberating prisoners, and the figure might just as well have been a turncoat. He regarded the headless body as it fell, fountaining crimson. If he had been a loyal subject, then he was beside the Golden Throne now.

Lucion approached, the arcane display of his signum raised. ‘Our position is confirmed,’ said the Techmarine, reading a datum. ‘We are but a short distance away from the breach.’ He pointed away along a corridor. The pod’s calculating machines had worked well: they had been deposited close to the main thrust of the attack. Under Sachiel’s orders, all the Blood Angel forces were to converge and seize the fortress’s central access shaft. Once this had been taken, every level of the keep would be open to them.

Rafen allowed himself a moment to consider Koris. He would have been there now, fighting and killing in the Emperor’s name, each sword-blow a step closer to his own ending. ‘Take the pace!’ he called, setting off at a run. ‘Swift and deadly, Blood Angels!’

The Ikari fortress mimicked the cone of a volcano from the exterior, but the pattern of the natural formation extended within as well, like a real cinder mountain. The stronghold was webbed on every level with a network of horizontal channels, along which ran trams that could carry men and hardware to all points of the building. Each of these fed from a central well that fell from the crest of the tower to the deep sub-levels. Instead of boiling magma, the lifeblood of the fortress was manpower, and under Imperial rule it had flourished. The Word Bearers had taken the building in a day, thanks to the perfidy of a cadre of Nurgle cultists that had infiltrated the tower. These death-worshippers had spread a fast-acting plague that indiscriminately killed the defenders, opening the way for the invasion.

Falkir, spying his point of entry as the most logical target for a counter-strike, reinforced the roof with guns and men. He had never expected the Blood Angels to hammer their way through solid rock instead. Rafen’s squad converged on the aperture made by the ship guns, and when they reached it, they found carnage of a like that gloried their Chapter’s name.

It was all Delos could do to keep up with the Death Company as they ran like screaming banshees into the thick of the Word Bearers’ forces. The Chaplain buried the fizzing head of his crozius in the chest of a Traitor Marine and gutted him. Hot blood exploded from his victim. He flicked the gore away with his free hand and spotted Koris at the lip of the central chamber. The veteran’s sword was a blur of motion, carving apart Word Bearers while the twin-barrelled bolter in his other hand thundered into a mass of furies. A breed of primitive, predatory daemon beasts, they resembled mutant gargoyles with heads full of eyes and teeth, claws sprouting from every limb and a mad lust for killing. The screeching lizard-daemons snapped at him, and in return he tore them limb from limb, forcing the gun barrel into the mouth of one before opening the beast up with fire.

Reinforcements poured in from the side channels – the enemy was not ready to give way so easily – and they met Rafen’s men and a dozen other Blood Angels’ squads like two crashing waves. Gunfire and wrath blazed across the complaining metal floors, once again blood-red and gore-red armour clashing as they had on Cybele.

The furies came in a flood of green scales and yellowed teeth, rolling up over the walls from the lower levels. They threw themselves into the mass of Space Marines with abandon, and Rafen was dashed to the floor. For a moment, he was facing straight down, and through the iron grid decking he could see the shape of the central lift dais on its way up from the sub-level. His optics focused; the oval platform was a writhing mass of horned things baring head-splitter axes.

‘Bloodletters!’ he shouted, rising to his feet. ‘Below!’ There were moments before the lift reached their level, and when it did, the odds would tip in favour of Chaos. Sachiel’s brutal plan of attack would be blunted here in the mouth of the wounded tower. Rafen punched the heart out of a screaming fury, and threw the corpse aside, forcing himself toward the edge. Caught in the throng of the battle, he would never reach it before the elevator arrived.

Beyond, he saw Koris, black and red in his rage, step up to the guardrail of the chasm. With a single swipe he decapitated three Traitors and then called out. ‘I see him! Guard the redoubt, Guilliman! I go to face Horus!’

‘Koris, no!’ The words left Rafen’s lips as the sergeant leapt over the rail and fell into the mass of Khornate creatures. Hot rage engulfed Rafen and he cried out, murdering and killing to feed his anger.

The bloodletters tore at Koris’s dark armour with their hellblades, ripping shreds of ceramite from his torso and shoulders. He did not need to aim his blows; everywhere his power sword fell there was a shrieking daemon-beast to die by it. His target lay at the middle of the massing throng, and he cut his way forward.

‘Horus!’ he bellowed. ‘Face me! Face Sanguinius!’

It turned. Koris, maddened by the rage, saw the face and form of the arch-traitor there, the fiend that had butchered his liege lord. What the delusion hid from him was a dreadnought, a clanking hulk of warped metal baring clusters of autocannon and a buzzing chainfist. The awful mechanism fired at him, burning into the crowd of daemons, killing more of them as it swept up to find him. Koris leapt, the strength of his primarch racing through him. He discarded the spent bolter, and two-handed, he took off the infernal device’s right arm with the sword like an arc of blazing steel. Hooting with the neuro-shock, it slammed him to the deck with a steaming cannon muzzle and stomped on Koris, hard. A clawed foot splayed over his chest and ground him into the platform.

Bones cracked and organs burst inside the veteran. Yes, now he was at one with Sanguinius, in the blessed grip of agony, the ghostly sensation of broken wings at his back. All things seemed to be in double vision for Koris. One was the face of events here on Shenlong, and the other a return to the ancient conflict aboard the battle barge of Warmaster Horus. He was Koris, veteran sergeant of the Blood Angels, chosen of Dante, warrior of the Death Company – but he was also Sanguinius, lord of Baal, the angelic sovereign and the master of the red grail. ‘Chaos filth!’ he spat, coughing out tissue and clotted blood. ‘I name you traitor! Face me and die!’

The dreadnought loomed over him and laughed, just as the elevator drew level with the breached floor. The veteran heard Blood Angels fighting and dying there. Koris pulled his muscles into line one last time and screamed with the pain of it. He forced himself up and out from under the steel foot. Fists mailed about the hilt, he rammed the power sword into the machine’s groin, then up and into the chest, to the rotten core where a crippled Word Bearer lay coiled like some aborted foetus.

It struck him back by reflex, throwing the Space Marine clear across the gantry, before sinking to its rusted knees. With only a brace of autocannons in place of a hand, it could not remove the blade that pierced the power core at its heart. Scattered around the machine-form in disarray, the horned bloodletters milled and chattered in anger and frustration.

The Word Bearer dreadnought had served his Legion for uncountable ages. As a flesh and blood warrior, he had stood in the service of the Emperor in the years before the great awakening, as his kith knew the Heresy. He marched at the purging of Fortrea Quintus, and had willingly followed his Primarch Lorgar into the Maelstrom. He did not know his own name, it had been lost to him in a war with the Ultramarines at Calth, and there too his body had been surrendered to this ambulatory coffin, where he could better serve the Dark Apostles against the corpse god. Thus, without name and without epitaph, the dreadnought died flailing as the reactor in his heart overloaded.

The blast threw everyone to the ground, enemy and ally alike. Seeking the path of least resistance, the shock blew along the central shaft, immolating a handful of loitering furies and making ash of the bloodletters. And then, with a lowing moan of tortured metal, the elevator came apart in molten leaves. Aflame, great axe-heads of decking cut away and tumbled down toward the lower levels, sending up storms of sparks where they collided with the stone walls.

Rafen regained his footing and threw aside the ragged hunks of flesh that had recently been a daemon-form. He caught a Word Bearer who moved a fraction too slowly and granted it the last bolt in his weapon’s magazine. The Traitor did not die instantly, so Rafen beat it to death with the burning muzzle of his gun, striking the thing’s ugly face over and over again until it became a mess of indistinct matter. The explosion had turned the Blood Angel’s hearing into a cascade of sharp ringing, and without voice from any of his brethren, Rafen reloaded and tore into whatever living things he could find that bore the mark of Chaos Undivided. He gave them all an invocation cut from hateful curses. He damned them to the Emperor’s cold mercies as he severed them from their lives. The floor became slippery with mixed blood and other fluids, which drained and fell into the darkness of the lower levels. Silence fell there as the Blood Angels asserted their superiority. Now and then, a blast of gunfire signalled that Alactus or one of the other men was executing someone who was still alive.

Rafen killed for the red thirst; he felt it gather around him. He longed to let it in and engulf him, or to feel something of the same madness that had taken his mentor. But it ebbed and receded from him wherever he tried to find it. If a time were to come when he sank into the grasp of the blessed angel, it would not be now. He came across Delos, his Chaplain’s armour was glistening. His grinning death mask helmet was streaked with gore. The horrific aspect was at odds with the delicacy he showed as he spoke the words of the Emperor’s peace over a fallen member of the Death Company. Rafen knew the dead man – he was a veteran Space Marine, an associate of Koris’s from Captain Simeon’s command.

‘Too many elders took the scarlet path this day,’ said Delos, as if reading his mind. ‘Noble, senior brothers, all drawn by the flaw as if from nowhere.’ He shook his head. ‘This omen may be good or ill, Rafen.’

‘We… We have taken the well.’ he replied in a dead voice. ‘Sachiel’s plan unfolds.’

‘Rafen!’ Turcio’s yell hung in the blood-wet air. ‘Here, quickly!’

‘What is it?’

‘Koris! He lives, but not for long! He asks for you!’

Rafen sprinted across the heat-warped decking to a darkened corner of the chamber. Turcio backed away, a look of trepidation on his face. ‘You… You should speak to him.’ He said carefully, avoiding looking directly at the veteran’s broken body. Some among the Blood Angels thought of the black rage as a virus, and kept their distance from those who exhibited it. Rafen angrily waved him away and knelt next to his old mentor.

Koris’s wounds were horrific, and his voice was thin and distant. ‘Rafen. Lad, I see you.’

‘I am here, old friend.’ Rafen’s throat tightened. In his agony, the veteran had regained some small measure of lucidity.

‘The pure one calls me, but first I must… Warn…’

‘Warn me? Of what?’

‘Stele!’ he spat. ‘Do not trust the ordos whoreson! He brought me to this, all of it!’ Koris’s hand gripped his wrist, the strength ebbing from him. ‘Arkio… Be wary of your sibling, lad. He has been cursed with the power to destroy the Blood Angels! I see it! I see–’

Then the light faded from the old man’s eyes, and Koris was finally lost to them.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Bellus awoke from her slumber with terrible violence. The shutters covering her bow peeled back to open the angry mouths of lance batteries and torpedo tubes. The battle barge disgorged shells laden with explosive charges and other warshots that carried men instead of combustibles. Captain Ideon planned each launch down to the split second, and in a perfect ballet, drop-ships and bombs rained down on Shenlong. Ideon did not trouble himself with concerns about civilians or loyalists down there; the Word Bearers had taken the forge world only recently, and it was likely that Imperial patriots, perhaps planetary defence force troopers or even Guardsmen, were still resisting the Chaos invaders. Those men and women would die tonight. They would be erased from existence in the same crushing fists of fire that tore apart the Traitor Marine divisions. But such collateral damage was the manner of orbital bombardment and those who went to the Emperor tonight would be counted as heroes.

Immobile on his command throne, the captain’s mind looked in every direction at once. He was waiting for the sign that would begin the next phase in his battle plan, and as if on cue, a shape emerged over the curve of Shenlong, rising up from an extremely low orbit.

‘New contact,’ sang one of the sense-servitors. ‘Murder-class cruiser on intercept vector, closing at high speed.’

Ideon’s pale face moved rarely, and the musculature in his skin was flaccid and ill-used these days. Nevertheless, he managed to peel back his lips in a faint, predatory smile. ‘Well met, Dirge Eterna,’ the captain said to the Chaos warship. ‘You’ll not flee the field this time.’

Ranged at the observation cupola at the head of the bridge, Sachiel glanced at Arkio and grinned. ‘The skills of our brother-captain are uncanny, yes? He predicted that the Traitor ship would take such an orbit and leave us a brief window of attack on the capital.’

Stele stood behind them, and answered first. ‘Ideon understands the behaviour of these Chaos filth. Their paranoia would never let them hold in geostationary position – they fear attack from all sides at all times, and so they circle the world like a jackal guarding a carcass.’

Arkio’s mind was elsewhere, his hands gripping the brass guide rail. ‘Forgive me, high priest, but how long must I remain aboard ship? Even now, the last of our invasion force departs for the surface and I hunger to join them.’

Sachiel smiled, aware that Stele’s eyes were upon them both. ‘Soon, Arkio. Very soon. The inquisitor has something special planned for the Traitors, and it will be your glory to take it to them.’

The young Blood Angel’s eyes glittered with anticipation as he met Sachiel’s gaze. The Sanguinary Priest was struck by the play of reflected laser-light off the youth’s aquiline face, the gaunt and noble cut of his chin and cheekbones. By the grail, the boy could be Sanguinius himself.

‘Entering firing range,’ said the scanner servitor.

Stele turned in place to watch Ideon. ‘Captain, at your discretion?’

Ideon did not need the inquisitor’s permission, and the comment irked him slightly. Then the Dirge Eterna rose in his weapon sights and he felt a swell of anticipation. ‘Bow guns stand down, power to void shields.’

‘It is done,’ Solus replied, glancing up from the console pit beneath the captain’s bronze throne. ‘The engineseers report that the sub-light drives are content and prepared for full thrust.’

‘All ahead full,’ Ideon’s reply came without pause. ‘Bring us to the bastard.’

The Bellus’s executive officer relayed the command into a mouthpiece at his neck, spreading the word throughout the battle barge. Instantly, the warship’s thruster grid crashed into life, and forced the vessel forward with a gut-wrenching lurch of motion.

At his vantage point, Arkio saw the inner edge of the minefield receding. The three-dimensional warfare of starships was not his area of expertise, but he understood the pattern to which Ideon was working. Although there were hundreds of kilometres of vacuum between them, Bellus and Dirge Eterna had little room to manoeuvre. They were sandwiched between the wall of mines in high orbit over Shenlong and the planet’s atmospheric envelope below. The orbital corridor they fought in had barely enough room for a ship the size of Bellus to turn about at maximum thrust, and Ideon’s plan to engage the Chaos cruiser was dangerous. The smallest delay or a mistake in orders would send the battle barge into the ionosphere and burn her to the keel. It was like two men conducting a knife-fight in a coffin.

‘Incoming fire from the Traitor,’ said Solus. ‘He’s trying to push us back into the mines.’

‘Ignore it. Have the bow crews reload with the special warshots. Give me the status of the port and starboard batteries.’

Brother Solus relayed the data, and as the information flowed directly into Ideon’s mechadendrites, the first licks of laser flame struck Bellus hard. The aged warship took the blow in her stride and turned into it, bringing as little of her aspect as possible to face the Dirge Eterna. ‘All parallel guns answer ready.’

‘Then, by the Throne, fire at will.’

Arkio watched. On one level, he hated the idea of being nothing more than an observer, but on another he found himself fascinated by the steady, deliberate pace of the combat. He absently ran a hand over his face. Strangely, the engagement felt familiar to him, as if he had watched other battles like this from similarly lofty heights. For a moment, he blinked and saw not Shenlong and the Dirge, but a different, blue-green planet and a massive Chaos barge, hideously beweaponed and blasphemous in its arcane geometry, then the image was gone.

The Murder-class ship presented its port side to Bellus as the two vessels came alongside one another in a deadly jousting pass. In a tactic dating back to the birth of mankind’s naval wars, both starships unleashed a punishing broadside, and for a second the space between them was threaded with hot lances of light and the thin trails of missile salvoes. Bellus rocked with the impact and lost pressure on a dozen decks. Huge petals of hull metal shredded from her flank along with fountains of breathing gas and water ice. Vacuum-bloated corpses followed them.

Ideon did not ask for a damage report. He felt each one of Bellus’s wounds as keenly as if it had been cut into his own hide. As the two ships moved out of the merge, he barked out his next orders. ‘On the word, emergency turn, maximum displacement!’

Solus blinked. ‘Engineseers report that optimal power is not available, lord. The machine spirit is reluctant–’

‘Damn the thing!’ Ideon grated. ‘The word is given! Turn the ship!’

Ideon’s aide nodded again and sent the command, gripping the closest stanchion for dear life. Arkio felt a shift in gravity in the pit of his gut and the deck threw him into the guardrail.

Bellus moaned like a wounded animal as she suddenly bled out the acceleration force of a dozen gravities. Massive thrust jets fired along her port flank as one to bodily ram the ship around. The barge bowed under the massive stresses, losing more air and men. On the bridge, a hololithic screen spat sparks and exploded, killing a servitor instantly and maiming a Blood Angel’s officer.

‘Turning!’ called Solus, ‘Aspect change on target!’

Ideon ignored the pain and his voxcoder crackled with venom. ‘Too slow, Dirge Eterna! I have you!’

The Word Bearer ship was also coming about, but with none of the wild daring that Ideon had demanded of his vessel. Slowly, inexorably, Bellus brought her bow to aim at the cruiser. Now the positions were reversed, and it was the Dirge trapped between the minefield and their enemy.

‘Bow guns!’ Ideon snapped.

‘They… Do not answer,’ Solus admitted, ‘Perhaps the crews were injured–’

Ideon cared not. ‘All tubes, fire for effect.’

Once more, Solus relayed the order. If the men in the forward weapons channels had been slowed in their duties by the force of the fierce turn, the firing command would see them vented into space as the gigantic torpedo tubes yawned open.

From the crimson maw of the Bellus, a fusillade of dark shapes emerged and raced toward the enemy ship. Arkio watched them go. His throat tightened as he suddenly realised they were flying wide of the mark. Incredulous, he could do nothing but stare as they passed the Dirge and blew apart in puffballs of flame and glittering metal. ‘A miss!’ he cried.

‘No,’ said Ideon. ‘Watch.’

Where standard warheads had just an explosive charge, the torpedoes that Bellus had fired carried jury-rigged cases of metallic chaff and heat flares – and on the artificial sensors of the silent mines behind the cruiser, the colour of their blasts registered like the eruption of a dozen suns. Techmarine Lucion’s examination of the mine that hit Bellus had revealed exactly how the devices had worked, and Ideon’s tech-adepts exploited this new knowledge. As if they were a swarm of wasps brought to sudden anger, the docile mines nearest Dirge Eterna fired their thrusters and dived into the craft. Each detonation attracted another, and then another, until the enemy ship was smothered in bursts of nuclear fire.

‘Bring us to a stable altitude,’ the captain’s voice betrayed a veil of smug satisfaction. ‘Damage control details to their stations.’

Sachiel blew out a breath. ‘And now the Word Bearers are stranded on Shenlong.’

Arkio turned away from the burning ship, eyes keen with anticipation. ‘We shall make it their grave marker.’

The Word Bearers were waiting for them on the ground level of the fortress. The broadest part of the entire tower, the vast circular floor spread out around the central shaft like a desert of metal decking. The atrium was so high and wide that entire city blocks could have fitted in the gaps between the ranks of handling gear and machinery. Open doors that led into a spray of manufactory hangars yawned open, through gates as big as the Bellus. Overhead, mechanical gantries and hanging monorail trams stood mute witness to the maelstrom of carnage below. There was no moment of peace to be found anywhere here, only the constant disorder of unfettered warfare.

Methodical and inexorable, the Chaos Space Marines came forward in ranks, flowing around the obstacles in their path. The incessant braying of the demagogues rebounded from the metal walls, a ceaseless cacophony of monstrous and profane screaming. The Blood Angels met them with equal ferocity, flooding out from the open shaft in a storm of brazen red. Rafen and Alactus fought side-by-side, thrown together by chance, bolter and plasma gun shouting death back at the enemy.

No man among the Space Marines would have voiced it from his position deep in the killing frenzy, but the Word Bearers were forcing them back inch-by-inch. For all the reversals of their fortunes, for all the time that Koris’s mad sacrifice had bought them on the upper floors, there were simply more of the Traitors than there were of them. Bloody attrition would tell the day, and with each surge of men who dived gleefully into close-quarter combat with the magenta-hued enemy, less and less of the Astartes warriors remained to hold the line. Eventually, the press of corrupted flesh and steel would force them into the walls. There was nowhere else to go: if they could not break through the enemy the only other route was pure suicide, down into the sub-levels where the Ikari fortress’s prison cells lay. In those dark warrens crammed with wretched and broken civilians the Word Bearers would be able to bottle them up and slaughter them at will. At least on the open deck, they had a chance to fight and die with glory. With their rage ignited, retreat was not an option.

Rafen was a furious engine of destruction, a whirlwind of razors as he cut into a pack of Chaos Space Marines. As Alactus felled targets by plasma immolation, Rafen ran the monsters through with his combat knife and the shells from his trusted bolter. In the brilliant crimson heat of his fury, he sheared heads and limbs in clean strikes, and when the opportunity presented itself, the Blood Angel let his fangs rip into those who were fool enough to bare their flesh. The perfect sheen of his battle armour was streaked with gore, and he paused to spit out a glutinous flush of bile. His face soured. The blood of these mutant blackguards was of a poor vintage, thick with taint and worthy only for spilling.

‘Do you see him?’ Alactus shouted over the crackling hiss of steam rising from his gun muzzle. ‘There, the great horned pestilent from Cybele!’

Rafen looked, and in the middle distance saw the hulking shape of the Dark Apostle Iskavan, bellowing some foul cry with his dripping crozius raised high overhead. ‘Curse the warpspawn!’ he retorted. ‘We could not be so lucky to find him dead, eh?’

Alactus fired a few shots in Iskavan’s direction in reply. ‘No matter, we’ll gut him as we have the rest of his breed!’

Rafen answered with fresh gunfire, but the rational, tactical part of his mind knew that the odds were thinning. Beyond Iskavan’s personal guard, Rafen could see fresh numbers of Word Bearers walking at steady parade ground pace, up from the mouths of the shell factories beyond the fortress proper. For a fanciful moment, he wondered if the fabricator plants were stamping new Word Bearers out of plate steel, just as they did stubbers, grenades and warheads. Just then a lick of burning promethium from a Chaos flamer almost cut him down, and he fired blindly. The Emperor gave him his eye for that moment and a lucky round penetrated the Traitor Marine’s fuel canister. With a cough of displaced air, the flamer bearer turned into a torch and wailed, dying.

Iskavan was drowned out by the roar of his men as he came to the last words of Lorgar’s great invocation. He felt their excitement ripple through him like a delicious wave. At his flank, Falkir spat harsh, clipped commands to his subordinates and turned to face the Apostle, an ugly grin on his shark-toothed features. He crowded out the torturer Tancred, who hung back and watched the unfolding melee with a grim countenance.

‘Master, I bring you my finest and most puissant warriors!’ Falkir made a theatrical gesture with his clawed hand. ‘Behold, the vox baiulus obliterati!’

Iskavan raised a pallid eyebrow. He was amused by the Castellan’s melodramatic presentation and favoured him with a flicker of his tongues. From the midst of the rank and file Word Bearers came a Legion of Chaos Space Marines unlike any that stood on Shenlong. These were no longer beings that could be called man or daemon, but some otherworldly union of the two. They came in a slow and purposeful march; the thick stocks of their limbs were as wide as tree trunks. It was difficult to see where the lustreless corpse flesh of their heads and arms ended and the bruise-coloured metals of their power armour began. Great pipes of horn or hollow cartilage undulated up from their spines and knotty ropes of sinew fat as telegraph cables webbed their arms. Perhaps at one point they might have had hands and fingers as Iskavan knew them, but now the great clubs of meat that were their forearms sprouted hooked blades and an organ-pipe profusion of gun barrels.

‘Obliterators!’ Tancred breathed. ‘By the eye, they are magnificent!’

Iskavan gave the torturer an arch look. ‘You think so? Then you may lead them.’

Tancred hid his surprise. It was ever his way to remain within his master’s reach and it had been so for centuries of service together. The Apostle bore down on him and showed him a mouth of wicked fangs. ‘Do not tarry, Tancred,’ he growled. ‘Go to the enemy and show your mettle. It has been too long since you tasted blood at the front.’

The torturer was aware of Falkir watching him. He was ready to strike him down if he dared to disobey. Tancred’s tentacle hand betrayed him and twitched as he tried to formulate an excuse. ‘Dark one, I–’

‘You are favoured by me,’ finished Iskavan. ‘Have you not foreseen victory for us, Tancred?’ He pointed at the main body of the Blood Angels with his crozius. ‘Go now, and fetch it to me.’

The Word Bearer priest’s death-vision glimmered at the back of his mind and he forced it away. To admit such a thing now, after he had concealed it for so long, would mean execution. He nodded and stepped into the horde of obliterators. ‘It is my honour to serve,’ he said, unable to mask the bitterness in his tone.

‘Yes,’ agreed Iskavan. ‘It is.’

The grotesque hulks of meat and metal lumbered onward, the line troopers falling aside as they continued their ponderous advance. Around Tancred, their arms merged and reformed into lascannon maws, the tines of radiating power mauls and meltagun muzzles. At his order, they began a constant stream of fire into the Blood Angels, and in their dozens Imperial Space Marines were cut apart by bolt and beam.

Rafen poured rounds into the torso of the nearest obliterator and growled with frustration. The thing’s head retreated into the muddy pool of flesh-metal between its shoulders and howled back at him. He spat out an order and Turcio answered it with return fire from a missile launcher. Rockets looped and struck the Chaos puppet with bright orange impacts. The Word Bearer fell, and was ground underfoot by its inexorable brethren.

‘Is there no end to the blasphemies of the foe?’ Alactus demanded. ‘What unholy fiends are these?’

‘Hybrids,’ said Rafen. ‘A godless amalgam of human flesh, daemon and armour. Every breath they draw is an offence to life!’

Alactus poured plasma flame at Tancred’s force. ‘We’ll end them, then!’

‘Aye!’ Rafen joined him, and another obliterator sank to its knees.

There came a pronunciation from every communicator in the Blood Angels’ line, strident and high, broadcast from the Bellus high above them. ‘Sons of Sanguinius! Stand to and hold the line!’

Rafen recognised Sachiel’s voice and he grimaced. ‘What does he think we are doing?’ he said aloud, low and angry.

‘The rout of the archenemy begins now!’ said the Sanguinary Priest, his words bubbling over with ecstatic power. ‘As our liege lord did, so our vengeance falls from the sky on burning wings!’

Deep in the mass of the Word Bearers’ advance, beyond the ranks of the advancing obliterator cult and the frothing waves of Chaos Space Marines, an actinic glitter of light unfolded out of the air. Hard jags of artificial lightning leapt from it to strike Traitors dead where they met its path, and the air went hot with ozone and the screams of tortured energy. Rafen instinctively knew what it was; the crawl of his skin and the sudden sympathetic lurch of his gut warned him of an imminent teleport arrival. The pinprick of light expanded and shuddered as the laws of matter and space were briefly circumvented in the halls of the Ikari fortress. A flat crash of displaced atmosphere echoed and sent a bow wave of spent energy across the decking. It scattered the Word Bearers in a perfect circle, and there, stood atop the bodies of a dozen Traitors twisted into warped slag, were ten figures.

Seven of them were Blood Angels, and all but one of those wore the jump packs and polished gold helmets of the honour guard. Rafen saw Stele there among them, he held a vicious force axe in his right hand and his ornate lasgun in the left. Two gun-servitors, their forms not unlike the Chaos obliterators, flanked him and began to fire at anything wearing magenta. Sachiel’s voice rose in a screaming hymnal, the bronze grail in his hand raining hot blood about him. Each Space Marine was shocked by the sight of the warrior standing with the Spear of Telesto in his grip. Its shimmering colour wreathed its blade in an illustrious, ephemeral banner.

‘Arkio!’ Perhaps Rafen said the name, or perhaps it was Alactus, it mattered not. The sight of the spear and the youth in the gold helmet was like the ignition of a flash-fire amid the Blood Angels, and as one they tore fire into the Word Bearers’ assault.

Rafen was on his feet and surging up over broken fragments of cover before he was even aware of his own actions. Alactus was steps ahead of him, the blue-white generator rings of his gun bright with discharge. Battered and injured, the Space Marines found their second wind and tore into the Traitors with hellish ferocity. Turcio rammed the mouth of his missile gun into the chest of a towering obliterator and blew it apart in a flaming discharge, spattering Rafen and Alactus with hot globules of daemon-flesh. Everywhere Rafen looked, he could see the divine radiance of the holy lance falling across the gore-streaked wargear of his battle-brothers, lighting them up with a righteous fury the likes of which even the Emperor himself would have applauded. Some part of the Space Marine wanted to rein his excesses in and exert control, but too much of him gloried in the bloodletting. It was not the black rage that consumed him now, but the desire for revenge: for Simeon, for Koris, for every Throne-fearing man, woman and child that had died at the hands of Chaos. Rafen longed to have the spear and see it cut the enemy to ribbons.

Stele was lost in the tumult; he was surrounded somewhere by packs of snarling furies and the helldog forms of flesh hounds. He let his servitors make short work of them, as he channelled his mind-essence through the force axe. Nothing stood to fight where the inquisitor walked, and even as he killed and killed, his psyche ranged above the battlefield, prowling like a hawk. Sachiel, his guardsmen tight about him, led the new arrivals into the thick, shredding Word Bearers.

Without reason or conscious choice, Rafen found himself leading the charge across the metallic decks. In that moment of ellipsis something chose to push him to the head. Without pause he took the chattering bolter in his hand and struck an obliterator where its lascannon arms were bleeding coolant and oily fluid. The thing spun and gave out a thin scream, disturbingly childlike for something so huge. He sprinted and leapt over the corpse with a war cry on his lips – and there he saw the face of the torturer from Cybele.

Tancred had his vibra-stave gripped in his nest of tentacles and a lasgun in the near-human talons of his other limb. A panicked beam shot scored a finger-wide gouge in Rafen’s vambrace but it did not stop the Blood Angel. His combat knife flashed and Rafen cut the torturer’s hand off at the wrist, gun and all falling away in jets of adulterated blood. Tancred rammed the stave into Rafen’s side and the sparking tip skittered off his inviolate armour. The Space Marine’s mind possessed the strange clarity of pure fury, as if seeing everything through some perfect lens of hate. He caught Tancred’s stave in his free hand, and instinctively forced it back at the torturer’s face. The Word Bearer saw then the instrument of his own death: the ghost-shape from the blood augury resolving into his weapon, and it was gripped in the hand of a crimson assassin. Rafen drove the vibra-stave up through Tancred’s jaw and out through the top of his distorted skull.

Iskavan felt Tancred’s ending and cursed. On some level he sensed regret, but only for a brief moment. He roared at Falkir and the rest of his troops, pointing at Sachiel’s honour guard. ‘This is their reinforcement? Ten men? By Skaros, we’ll make flutes of their bones!’ His accursed crozius hummed in mad rage. ‘Destroy them!’

The Spear of Telesto worked and Arkio felt as if he were merely a vessel for the weapon, like the igniter for an explosive power so far beyond him as to be unimaginable. And yet, every second the weapon sang in his grip, and the teardrop blade brought ruin to hundreds of Traitor Marines, he felt himself changing. Power the likes of which he had never dared imagine coursed through Arkio, and his mind struggled to grasp it. The closest thing he could approximate it with was his rebirth when he left the sarcophagus on Baal for the first time, but even that was a pale shadow compared to the majestic force running through him now. He was a hundred feet tall. He could see the passage of bolts and laser blasts as if they were suspended in the air. He was invincible. By the lords, he was godlike.

Arkio counted the Word Bearers in an eye-blink. There were too many, the spear told him. Their numbers must be thinned, and not at the sluggish pace of gun and chainsword. The Blood Angel saw it clearly: action and reaction surfaced in his mind as if he had always known precisely how to wield this weapon. Arkio swung the spear about him and drew in energies untouched since the heresy. He gathered them effortlessly at the tip of the teardrop blade. In the golden backwash of light, he felt the bones of his face altering, becoming the mask of someone else, someone unaccountably older and wiser.

Now! Mellifluent flame spilled forth from the holy lance in a wide fan and washed over the battle like a flood. Every Word Bearer it touched caught fire and burned alive, and ahead of the wave rode a psychic storm of absolute terror. Those Chaos Space Marines not kindled into powder ran screaming in fear. Iskavan himself pitched his own men into the fire’s path and broke, all sign of his unstoppable resolve shattered before the might of the spear.

The firestorm lapped over the corpses of the dead and engulfed the Blood Angels. Rafen saw it coming. His body froze at the sight of it; he was unable even to throw up his hands and cover his face. He saw himself dying along with the rest of his brethren as his sibling’s uncontrolled release of the lance’s power killed enemy and ally alike. But the gold flames crashed over them leaving nothing but a surge of adrenaline as their primarch’s legacy brushed past. The uncanny sophistication of the Telesto weapon saw the markers of Sanguinius’s own bloodline in all the Blood Angels and turned its power from them.

Silence fell across the Ikari fortress as the last flickers of light died out around the spear. Slowly Arkio removed his golden helmet to drink in the destruction he had wrought. Across the carnage, his gaze met Rafen’s and the smile on the younger man’s face was a warped mirror of the sanguine angel himself. But instead of nobility and purity dancing there, Rafen saw an aspect as cruel as a razor’s edge and his heart froze in his chest.

Winds of ash blew across the plaza before the fortress, billowing in great, silent wreathes. The atomised remnants of Word Bearers, the cinder gathered in drifts of grey snow, pooling in the lee of revetments and towers. Rafen left boot-prints in the matter of the dead as he crossed the broken square, to wind a course around the wrecks of burnt-out Blood Angels’ Razorbacks and Chaos defilers; the latter were surrounded by wards made from tapes of parchment shot through with holy text, in order that the unhallowed influence be held at bay, even in death. At the edge of the plaza, Rafen found Brother Delos supervising the Chapter’s serfs in the collection of the deceased.

The Chaplain gave him a solemn nod. His face was streaked with soot. He did not need to ask what Rafen wanted. ‘Over there.’ He gestured toward a line of canvas bags, each dotted with purity seals and generic prayers in High Gothic. Delos turned his back and gave Rafen the privacy he needed. Although the bodies of the honoured dead would be properly venerated in ceremonies aboard Bellus in the days to come, he knew from personal experience that some men needed a moment of solitude to bid their comrades farewell.

When he was sure he was unobserved, Rafen gently opened the canvas to reveal the face of Koris’s corpse. The pain the veteran’s face had displayed in the moment of death was mercifully absent, and the Blood Angel found himself heartened that his old mentor was at peace now, sitting at the Emperor’s right hand.

‘Rest now, my friend,’ he whispered. But as he spoke Rafen’s heart felt hollow. Koris’s last words were burnt into his mind like a livid brand. The sergeant’s gaunt face implored him: Be wary of your sibling, lad. He has been cursed with the power to destroy the Blood Angels! What was he to make of such an avowal? What glimpse of truth had Koris been granted as his soul briefly merged with that of Sanguinius?

That Koris had not trusted the Inquisitor Stele was a matter of course, but in his dying breath he had cursed the ordos agent, and blamed him for his fall to the black rage. Perhaps it had been some final spite of the bloodlust madness that had consumed the veteran, striking out even as he died. Yet Rafen could not shake the sense of utter wrongness that surrounded him. Sergeant Koris fell to the flaw too quickly, too easily. How convenient it was that one of the most respected – and outspoken – elders in their warband had died, leaving Stele’s influences unopposed.

Rafen was shocked at his own defiance, and the thoughts that came to mind – thoughts that some would name as heresy of the highest order. He shook his head. These matters, of Arkio’s changed ways, of Sachiel’s ruthless commands and Stele’s manipulations, they ranged beyond Rafen’s experience as a warrior and a servant to the Throne.

He placed a hand on Koris’s chest, in a spot where a laser had burnt off the black paint of his Death Company colours to reveal the crimson teardrop beneath. ‘Help me, teacher. For the last time, show me the path.’ In that moment, Rafen saw the head of the sergeant’s vox transmitter, sheared away from his neck ring. The youth bent down and carefully pulled the wire-thin apparatus free. It was a command-level contact rig, capable of sending messages directly to upper echelon units and to ships in orbit. Unlike the unit in Rafen’s armour, Koris’s gear was encrypted with codes and machine keys that gave him access to all facets of the Blood Angels’ command structure – and in an emergency, even to the homeworld itself.

Cold clarity descended on Rafen as he understood what he was honour bound to do. These matters can only be settled by one man, he told himself. The Space Marine spoke into the transmitter.

‘Bellus, respond. Telepathic duct protocol required, expedite immediate.’ The device tingled in his fingers as it sampled his genetic imprint, attempting to verify his identity as a Blood Angel. It would be a gamble, but it was likely that the Bellus crew did not yet have a full accounting of those killed in battle and so the dead man’s cipher clearances would not have been cancelled.

He heard the dull rattle of a servitor voice in the veteran’s helmet. ‘Confirm, Sergeant Koris. Your orders?’

‘Encryption protocol omnis maximus. Direction, to the high office of the Lord Commander Dante, Fortress Baal.’

There was a pause, and for a brief instant Rafen thought he would be discovered. What he was doing now would be grounds for extreme sanction, at the very least. ‘Ready to transmit, Sergeant Koris,’ came the voice. ‘Begin.’

Rafen took one last moment to ensure that no one could see or hear him, and then he took a deep breath, tasting the ashen remains of the dead on his lips. ‘My Lord Dante, I must inform you of recent circumstances on the worlds of Cybele and Shenlong, and aboard your servant starship the Bellus.’ Crouched over the corpse of his mentor, Rafen began to recount the turn of events that had brought him to doubt his faith itself, in urgent and hushed tones.

Perhaps the astropath who carried his message was truly ignorant of Rafen’s deception, or perhaps he chose to send it anyway in some small act of defiance for the killing of Horin. Whatever the motive, the Space Marine’s imperative issued forth unchallenged into the void and raced away along invisible lines of telepathic force, leaping from beacon-mind to relay-psyker, and crossing the galaxy toward the Blood Angels’ monastery holdfast on Baal.

CHAPTER TWELVE

They came from everywhere: from hideaways in the warehouses, from inside inert furnaces and the basements of a thousand tenements. The people of Shenlong emerged into the light of the dawn blinking away tears and raising their hands in supplication. They had been delivered from the defiance of the Chaos demagogues that had stalked their streets promising them only death. The Emperor’s gaze had seen their predicament. He had answered the prayers they had whispered in the ruins of blasted churches. He had sent the Blood Angels to end the Word Bearers’ invasion with devout fire.

Others did not rejoice. There were those who had been quick to accept the word of Lorgar, the ones who had torn down the icons of the Imperium and swiftly built Word Bearer temples in their place. These Shenlongi found themselves ripped from their beds and hung from the monorails, or thrown into the foundry flame-pits to choke on sheaves of infernal propaganda. Blood continued to flow in the ashen, rust-marked city zones, and old rivalries blossomed under cover of the liberation.

Stele observed much of this from his vantage point on the plaza’s edge. The segment of the planet visible to him was a writhing microcosm of all of Shenlong. Word had spread quickly of Arkio’s deeds and since first light civilians had been arriving in ragged packs to see the Blood Angels with their own eyes. And the warrior who held the golden Spear. The inquisitor turned as the Space Marine approached him; even before he heard Arkio’s footfalls he could sense the humming power of the holy lance draw near. Stele’s gaze, like everyone else’s, was drawn first to the weapon, and then to the man who gripped it in his fist. The inquisitor had been the first human to touch the Spear of Telesto in centuries; he had torn it out of the claws of the ork warlord that stole it. The decerebrate beast had not even the slightest inkling of what the blade could do, only that it had value. Perhaps, if it had possessed a smidgeon of true intellect, the barbaric animal would never have dared to take it. But it had, and with the action, Stele’s intricate, clockwork plans had been set in motion.

Still, the archeotech device had never revealed itself to him as it had to the Space Marine. Stele smothered a surge of jealousy. The spear might have kept its secrets, but it would still serve him. In fact, it would be a far better tool in Arkio’s hands than in his.

The people who had made their pilgrimage to see the blessed one parted before Arkio like scythed corn. They were dazzled by the weapon’s radiance even in quietude. How typical of the Imperial citizenry, Stele reflected, so desperate in their bleak little lives that they accept any ray of divinity that shines upon them. He would make good use of that when the time came.

‘Lord,’ said Arkio and nodded. He did not avert his gaze from the inquisitor’s eyes. Already, the potency of the weapon was manifesting through him in subtle, arrogant ways. I chose well, Stele told himself.

‘Comrade Brother Arkio. You performed flawlessly. Truly, you are the vessel for the power of Sanguinius.’

Arkio seemed weary. ‘In his name and in the Emperor’s. I only hope it was enough…’ He glanced at the pilgrims, who shied away under such scrutiny. As an Adeptus Astartes, Arkio was conditioned to expect lesser men to fear him as one of the Emperor’s chosen, but the veneration these people showed was something else. It was something deeper and more primal. ‘Why do they watch me so?’

Stele glanced at Sachiel as he approached. ‘It is my estimation that nothing as magnificent as the spear has ever been seen on Shenlong. These commoners see the radiance of the Golden Throne caught in the blade’s light. Is it any wonder they grovel before it?’

Arkio studied the spear. It was dormant, but still it cast a directionless, honeyed glow. Gently, he returned it to the case brought forth by Stele’s servitors and closed the lid. As the container closed over it, a sense of uncanny warmth faded from the air and Arkio’s brow furrowed.

Sachiel was animated. The Sanguinary Priest was wound tight with energy. His face was florid with delight. ‘I had never dreamed, in all my life that I would be witness to something such as this! Arkio, you prove the blessing for all to see!’

‘Aye.’ The Blood Angel was introspective and sullen.

Sachiel did not appear to notice. ‘The golden helm of the honour guard fits you well, Arkio! You seem born to it.’

Arkio removed the headgear and studied it, as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Perhaps.’ His voice grew distant. ‘I find it unsuitable.’

‘In what way?’ Stele prodded gently.

Watching the distorted vision of his own face in the amber mirror of the helmet, Arkio shook his head. ‘I have… grown beyond the crimson armour of my servitude. I feel I should greet the world clad in gold, yes?’ He looked to Stele for some sort of confirmation, as if the thought had come to him from elsewhere.

‘You would wish to wear armour as our Lord Dante does?’ Hesitation crept into Sachiel’s voice. ‘But…’

‘But what, Sachiel?’ said Stele. ‘You yourself spoke of Arkio’s blessing. Should he not look the part if he is touched by grace?’

The moment of doubt fled the priest’s face. The thought that such deeds might be sacrilegious lasted for less than a heartbeat. Sachiel smiled and addressed the other Blood Angels and any civilians in earshot. ‘You will be able to say you were here on Shenlong when Arkio the Blessed liberated the Ikari fortress! Today we walk on the pages of history!’

‘History?’ Arkio’s voice was a sneer. ‘Today we walk on the ashes of the dead, the corpses of fallen heretics.’ He looked across at Stele. ‘I have liberated nothing!’

‘You won a victory, lad,’ said the inquisitor. ‘You, and your brothers.’

A sudden, livid flare of anger broke over Arkio’s face. ‘There is no victory over the Word Bearers without extinction! Their Dark Apostle fled the field. I saw it with my own eyes! How can we lay claim to this world if that viper slithers in its streets? Answer me that!’

Stele toyed with the purity stud in his ear. ‘Iskavan the Hated still lives and Arkio is correct. Shenlong will know no peace until we unite it under the banner of Sanguinius and kill every last Traitor.’

‘It is their way,’ the Blood Angel added. ‘They turn worlds to their black cause and poison their peoples. If we do not drive them out now, we may never have the chance again… Less we raze this planet and be done with it.’

Sachiel gasped at such a suggestion. ‘We came to return Shenlong to the bosom of the Imperium, not destroy it!’

‘Then what do you propose, high priest?’ Arkio asked, and all trace of the Space Marine’s hesitance was gone. ‘That we wait and allow them to regroup for a counter-attack? We must not forget what we learned on Cybele.’

The Blood Angel absently stroked at a panel of his white and red armour, the bone-coloured sections were daubed with splashes of enemy gore. ‘Yes… Yes, you are correct.’

‘We must follow the path laid for us,’ said Stele. The inquisitor was about to say more, but a cold breeze stiffened the air about him. From orbit, his personal astropath Ulan sent an impression of urgency and concern, a psychic summons. He forced a flat smile. ‘Brothers, I’m afraid I must return to the Bellus immediately. A matter of some importance requires my attention.’ He signalled to the servitors to accompany him with the spear.

‘No,’ said Arkio, without looking to see if his command was obeyed. ‘The holy lance should remain close to me.’

Stele’s flicker of annoyance went unseen. ‘Quite so. How foolish of me to suggest otherwise.’ The inquisitor revised his estimation of Arkio again; he had expected such defiance to manifest, but not so soon. But it would not suit his plans to countermand the Space Marine in front of his battle-brothers. Better to let them believe that Arkio held authority over the weapon. Stele strode past Sachiel and threw a compelling glare at the priest. ‘I will return as quickly as I can.’

One of the veteran sergeants approached Sachiel and bowed as the inquisitor vanished into the ashen mists. ‘Eminence, what are your orders?’

Sachiel gave him a brief nod and the priest indicated the fortress. ‘Sweep the tower and locate a suitable base for an operations centre–’

‘Perhaps we will require a chapel as well,’ said Arkio, off-handedly.

‘–and a chapel as well.’ finished Sachiel.

In the web of sewer tunnels and decrepit flood chambers beneath the manufactory, the Word Bearers walked in silence. They moved in tight lines through pools of tainted, cadmium-laced water and trickles of thin oil that leaked from machines above. Here and there among the groups were packs of feral daemon predators, furies and flesh hounds that lowed, their animal intellects too dull to comprehend what had happened. Falkir followed in the footsteps of Iskavan, with only the Dark Apostle’s back for company, as he led them deeper into the network of tunnels. The warlord was heedless of direction; he seemed to take turns at random. The only sounds were the constant footfalls of their boots across the flowing effluent and the faint hum of Iskavan’s unquiet crozius.

Falkir wanted to question the Apostle, to seek some sense of his plan, but the first Word Bearer that had dared to speak to Iskavan had found eightfold blades buried in his neck, sucking the black blood from him. The Castellan nursed his anger. He had made a good show of his capture of Shenlong, and the forge world was well on the way to becoming a stronghold for Chaos before the Dirge Eterna had arrived. Temples and cursed monuments had sprouted across the planet, forced indoctrinations were taking place everywhere, and Falkir had dared to allow himself a moment of pride. But barely a day had passed since Iskavan the Hated had set foot on the world that Falkir had claimed, and now the Word Bearers were routed, driven into the tunnels by the Blood Angels and that weapon. His hand closed on his chain axe and the Castellan considered burying it in the Apostle’s skull.

Iskavan came to a halt and turned. Falkir was startled. Had the warlord sensed his disloyal thoughts?

‘This will suffice,’ The Apostle gestured ahead with the crozius toward a large open flood chamber, pitted with rust and slurry. It was large enough to hold a thousand men, but Falkir found himself wondering whether there was even a fraction of that number of Word Bearers still alive. ‘We hold here. Send scouts to locate any other survivors and regroup.’

‘Your will,’ Falkir replied tersely.

Iskavan eyed him. ‘You have something to say to me?’

Falkir teetered on the edge of open rebellion, and it was only with a supreme effort of will that he kept himself from decrying the Apostle as a fool. ‘No, Great One. I am merely… fatigued.’

The Word Bearer warlord snorted. ‘You are a poor liar.’ He hefted the crozius. ‘Search for nine humans. Gather them and bring them here, unharmed.’

‘What purpose will that serve?’

Iskavan replied, but he seemed to be speaking to himself more than Falkir. ‘My laxity toward Tancred has cost me dearly, and now I pay the price. His vision was a lie…’ The Apostle stroked the weapon. ‘I shall cast for my own. I will summon judgement for these Astartes filth. I will bring forth a bloodthirster and pay them back in kind.’

Ulan was waiting for him when he docked at Bellus’s secure airlock. The discreet hatch was a fixture on all Imperial ships above a certain tonnage, regardless of their shipyard or force of origin. Uniquely coded to protein-chain code strings implanted in the skin of inquisitors and their agents, the so-called secret gates could only be opened by those sanctioned by the ordos – or those with a plasma torch and several days to waste. The secure hatch allowed men like Stele to come and go at will, without clearance from a vessel’s main docking pulpit. The inquisitor had barely used the gate on Bellus, however. He made it a point to mingle with the Blood Angels to earn their trust and respect. An inquisitor who skulked forever in hidden chambers aboard ship would soon arouse suspicion in even the slowest of minds.

But now expediency overrode his carefully constructed appearance of congeniality. His astropath rose to her feet and the hood about her head slipped back a way to reveal a scalp as hairless as his, ringed with an intricate brass circlet. Ulan was a failed experiment that Stele had rescued from an ordos laboratory. She was a psyker tool with a strong, if erratic, ability. The ornate device about her head held her power at bay until he had need of it.

‘Speak,’ he demanded. The jumble of emotional cues the astropath had sent him earlier made it clear that it would have to be relayed in clumsy words, not the strident colours of her mind-speech.

She kept pace with him as they walked along the isolated tunnel that led directly to his sanctum. ‘Honoured lord, in the ninth hour I sensed a taint, a backwash, a touch in the empyrean. The echo of a message.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘Another signal from Baal, so soon?’

‘Not from Baal, lord. To Baal. Sent from this ship.’

‘What?’ Stele’s face tightened with sudden anger. ‘Who broadcast it? What was the message?’

‘I know not. The ship’s telepathic choir detests me, eminence, and they do not allow me to commune with them in the mindscape of the warp. It was only my chance sense of the echo that alerted me to this occurrence.’

The inquisitor’s nose wrinkled as if he had smelt something foul. ‘Bring them to me, every one of Ideon’s astropaths!’

Reaching the iris hatch, Ulan’s dead face contorted in the rictus that was her version of a smile. ‘If it pleases the lord inquisitor, I anticipated your demand.’ The woman’s spidery hand worked the hatch control and Stele entered his chambers. There before him were the three surviving astropath adepts who until recently had served Bellus under the guidance of the late Master Horin.

Stele did not need to tell Ulan to lock the hatch behind them. He reached out a hand and pulled down her hood, revealing dead eyes cut from black crystal. The inquisitor touched a sequence of jewelled controls on the mechanical crown about her skull, releasing her to unleash her null gift. She closed her eyes and opened the place inside her psyche that held the mindcloak. Ulan fell to the floor in a heap, twitching and weeping, dying by inches as her aberrant power flooded the room. She would perish if Stele used her in this fashion for too long, but he had brought her close to the brink before and she had always survived it.

The astropaths all reacted in the same way – with utter shock. Ulan’s ability cast a bubble of void about the chamber, suffocating the application of any metapsychic phenomenon. The duration of the effect would only last as long as poor Ulan could stand it, but in Stele’s experience most psykers folded like decks of tarot cards within moments of being struck psi-blind by her.

Drawing his lasgun, he wasted no time and spoke to the first astropath. ‘The signal to Baal. Did it come from the ship? Who sent it?’ The psyker pressed at his face, as if that would somehow summon back his powers. ‘You all know I killed Horin. Do you wish to join him?’

The astropath licked corpse-grey lips. ‘I was in a dormant cycle. I know nothing of–’

Stele frowned, and fired a point-blank shot. The corpse fell, joining the whimpering Ulan on the floor. Stele shrugged off his battle-coat and with it, any pretence at civility.

‘Talk, witch!’ He forced the hot pistol barrel into the fleshy wattles of the next telepath’s neck, relishing the scent of cooking meat.

The astropath tried and failed to summon help with a mental yelp. And when it was clear that none was forthcoming, it began to whimper. The psyker gave a nod of its jowls to the last of the adepts. ‘He was the duct. I overheard him.’

‘Good,’ said Stele, and pulled the trigger again.

The last adept was Horin’s protégé, and he tried to cover his terror with a façade of cold indifference. Stele rested the gun on his forehead. ‘Who sent the message?’ He leaned closer and played a guess. ‘Someone on the surface, yes?’ A tiny twitch of the eye answered him as well as any confession. ‘What was said?’

One of Ulan’s moans punctured the air and it emboldened the astropath. ‘Whatever you plan, inquisitor, Lord Dante knows what has transpired. Your machinations will be brought to light.’

The imperious look on the astropath’s face was enough; Stele shot him. He let the body fall then in a sudden fit of fury he tore a dozen more blasts into the corpse, spitting and cursing the psykers.

After a while he calmed himself and brought Ulan out of her trance, reactivating the circlet. She was weak and blood issued out of the orifices in her face. Removing a vial of a xenos medicine from a concealed chest, Stele injected it into one of her skull sockets. After a while, she began to recover.

Ulan showed the death’s-head grin again as she saw the dead psykers. ‘I live to serve,’ she hissed.

‘Yes, you do,’ the inquisitor agreed. ‘You will present yourself to Captain Ideon and inform him that you alone will fulfil the role of the choir from now on.’

Ulan replied with a sluggish nod.

‘You are more than capable,’ Stele added. ‘First, though, you will speak for me.’ He dragged her to her feet and held her tightly, his muscular fingers finding ghost-metal contacts beneath flaps of plasti-flesh on her face. ‘Open the way, girl. I have a message of my own.’

The hunched woman stiffened as her mind expanded beyond the bone cage of her skull, out through the hull of Bellus, beyond the veil of the space outside and into the torrents of the Immaterium. Stele guided her like a rider, aiming Ulan’s telepathy into a core of black null-space lurking above them.

A dark and inhuman form lurking there saw Stele come closer, and it was happy to welcome him.

The stink of spent flamer fuel still hung in the air where the Blood Angels had torched the pennants and cursed banners of the Word Bearers, but aside from some ashen heaps in the corners of the room, the tabernacle was much as it had been when Falkir took it for his throne room. Arkio stalked the perimeter of the chamber and peered into the anterooms that split off from it, as if he expected to find some lurking Chaos lackey cowering in the shadows. He seemed disappointed that he did not, Sachiel noted.

‘The spear should remain here, I think.’ said Arkio. ‘This room is suited for defence. It will be safe.’

‘Well chosen, blessed one,’ the priest replied.

Arkio’s face twisted. ‘Why do you call me that, Sachiel? It does not sit well with me.’

‘I cannot deny the truth of my own eyes, Brother Arkio. No one could look upon you after what you did today and not think you honoured by the primarch.’

‘No?’ Arkio studied him. ‘I have eyes and ears, Sachiel. I saw how my brothers changed their ways toward me after I touched the holy lance during the remembrance. Some looked upon me with bewilderment, and others…’

Sachiel’s smile froze. ‘There are no dissenters here, Arkio.’

He gave a humourless laugh. ‘I would guarantee that Koris would say otherwise.’

‘The honoured sergeant will say nothing.’ Sachiel frowned. ‘In his infinite wisdom, Sanguinius chose to take Koris to his heart and grant him power of the black rage. He and others.’ Arkio said nothing and the priest continued. ‘Certainly, this is an omen. Those who welcome your sanctification are strengthened by the pure one and those who do not… The scarlet path beckons them.’

Arkio looked squarely at Sachiel, and suddenly he was the young Space Marine again, callow and untested. ‘What if I do not want such an honour, priest? What if I long to join my brothers once more, to stand with my sibling Rafen and fight the foe with blade and bolter?’

The Sanguinary High Priest placed a hand on Arkio’s back and gently guided him toward the glass window and the balcony beyond. ‘You have left those days behind you, my friend. Sanguinius has chosen a new direction for you, and we cannot doubt the insight of his choice.’

The two of them stepped out into the weak Shenlong daylight, into the sight of legions of people. Blood Angels stood side by side with tattered PDF troopers and haggard civilians, and with one voice they roared their approval.

Rafen shrugged off the hands of a child who stroked at his greaves with all the reverence of a holy icon. Beside him, Alactus and Turcio shook their bolters to the sky and joined in the battle cry of their Chapter. ‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’

‘Sons of the Blood! Loyal servants of the Imperium!’ Gripping his simulacrum of the red grail, Sachiel’s voice carried from the balcony above the plaza. ‘Hear me! This world sees the light of the Golden Throne once more, and the Lord of Baal casts his beneficent gaze upon it! Behold, the hero of the forge world, the liberator of Shenlong – Arkio the Blessed!’

Before, on other planets, Rafen had seen the masses of the Imperial people enraptured by the God-Emperor, but always from a distance. Now, among them, he was buffeted in the whirlwind of emotion that claimed his battle-brothers as easily as it did the commoners.

‘Arkio held the Spear of Telesto!’ continued Sachiel. ‘By his hand, the Word Bearers were destroyed! Your victory is his!’

The crowd began to chant his brother’s name and Rafen frowned. Sachiel spoke as if it were Arkio alone that had taken the fight to the Traitors, but what of the hundreds of other Blood Angels that had died this day? What of Koris and the Death Company?

‘It is written in the book of the lords that those alone blessed by the Emperor may touch the holy lance and live; but it is only one whose living blood carries the essence of the great angel himself that may command its power!’ Sachiel raised the grail high and turned it so that the crimson fluid inside anointed Arkio’s head. ‘We are all sons of the Blood, my brothers, but today the pure one walks among us once more! Here stands Arkio the Blessed, Sanguinius reborn!’

The force of the priest’s words was so strong that the congregation – for that was what it had become – came to their knees in supplication. Rafen found himself bowing without conscious effort, dropping in with Alactus and Turcio.

‘Glorious,’ breathed the other Blood Angel. ‘We are sanctified…’

Some part of Rafen’s mind shouted at the discord of the moment. This is madness! My sibling, the reincarnation of our primarch? Impossible! And yet, he was still captured by the divine power of the moment.

Then Arkio spoke, and the plaza fell silent. ‘People of Shenlong. Our battle is not yet ended. The corrupted still conceal themselves in your cities and we shall not be free until every last Chaos proselyte is found. I ask of you; where are the Word Bearers?’

A ripple of confusion flowed through the crowd, and slowly voices were raised, men hesitantly admitting that the whereabouts of the Traitors was unknown. Rafen saw Sachiel whisper something in his brother’s ear and Arkio gave a reluctant nod. ‘If you will not answer, then measures will be taken.’ The crackle of a vox command sounded in Rafen’s ear, and as one a handful of honour guard Blood Angels came to their feet. ‘Those who hide the impure will be punished,’ said Arkio.

Without warning, a dozen Shenlongi surged to their feet. Random figures raced forward as a strange madness seemed to sweep through the crowd. ‘Yes, yes!’ cried voices. ‘Show us the way!’

‘We are faithless!’

‘Punish us! We are the lesson!’

On pure reflex, the Space Marines opened fire into the crowds, gunning down the people who rushed at them. To Rafen’s horror, the Shenlongi welcomed the bolter rounds with beauteous smiles and open arms.

In the utter silence of his reclusium, Commander Dante rose slowly to his feet as he formally ended his meditation with the last words of the vermillion catechism. Genuflecting to the two icons before him, he made the sign of the aquila to the largest of the pair, representing the God-Emperor on his Throne, and then the hand-to-hearts gesture of fealty to the statue of Sanguinius. The primarch of the Blood Angels stood before him rendered in the rust-red stone cut from Baal’s desert landscapes. The likeness showed him in hooded contemplation, his mighty wings at rest and the holy crimson cup grasped in his hand. Dante mirrored the aspect of his liege lord and bowed one final time. ‘On this day, as on every other, I ask you grant me wisdom and strength, great Sanguinius, so I may guide our Chapter to ever greater glory.’

Satisfied with his completion of the ceremony, Dante backed away from the altar and donned the long white robes of his office. His chamber stood at the apex of the fortress-monastery’s highest rooftop, set between a pair of towering steeples. One of the walls was given over to a window of invulnerable glassteel. Dante approached it and surveyed the environs of the abbey far below him. There in the parade grounds, legions of men in crimson armour drilled endlessly, not a single one of them out of step or inefficient in his movements.

In the depths of his memory, the commander recalled a time when it had been he that marched there, daring to steal a look up at the distant towers and wondering what it would be like to walk their halls. But that had been more than ten centuries ago, and all the men he had called comrade then were dust now, their names cut into the obsidian glass of the sepulchre of heroes. Dante saw the shape of his own reflection in the window, his hawkish countenance marred by this small moment of introspection. The aquiline jaw and nose were the frame for eyes that missed nothing. He had the aspect of a predator at rest – but not at rest for long. He frowned. A sullen mood was upon him, and he could not pinpoint its source. Dante was no psyker, but millennia of living among the Blood Angels and commanding their path through history had given him a sense for the pitch and moment of the Chapter. He heard the approach of boots from the echoing hall beyond his chambers and instinctively knew something ill was at hand.

Hidden servitors opened the reclusium doors and Dante turned to see the man who served as his strong right arm stride forward. The chief Librarian bowed low, the filigree of skulls on the edges of his red robes pooling around his feet. ‘My lord, forgive this intrusion.’

Dante beckoned him to his feet. ‘Mephiston, old friend, no doors are ever closed to you.’ The commander spoke truthfully, the Librarian’s psionic powers were formidable and if he so chose, there would be little that could bar his way within the fortress’s walls. Mephiston met his gaze easily. Dante did not demand, as some Chapter commanders did, that his men treat him as some avatar of the primarch’s divinity and avert their eyes. The master of the Blood Angels studied the warrior-psychic that the Astartes knew as the lord of death. Where Dante’s face was the mirror of Sanguinius’s patrician wisdom, Mephiston reflected the controlled malevolence that seethed beneath the thin veneer of their civility. Scholars spoke of the Librarian’s ability to transfix an enemy with the potency of his glance, and even Dante could sense the pressure of those burning eyes.

‘A matter of delicacy and utmost concern has arisen, and we must address it with haste, commander.’

Dante bid Mephiston to sit with him on a bench before the altar, but the Librarian refused. Whatever had transpired had wound him tight with tension. The commander’s ill mood washed forward in a surge and Mephiston nodded, sensing the unformed thoughts in Dante’s mind.

‘A signal came to us, relayed across the segementum from the Shenlong star system. Our astropaths confirm that the message originated aboard the battle barge Bellus.’

‘Brother-Captain Ideon’s command,’ said Dante. ‘Was he not ordered to remain at the war graves on Cybele?’

Mephiston nodded. ‘But this is no simple disobedience, lord. The wording was confused, and I suspect it was sent in a hurry, but it speaks of incidents on the battlefields at Cybele and again during an attack on Shenlong.’ The Librarian took a breath. ‘It speaks of a brother wielding the Spear of Telesto as Sanguinius himself did, and of a growing belief that our angelic sovereign’s blessing is manifesting upon him.’

For a long moment Dante found himself robbed of words. He raised his eyes to the statue of Sanguinius for a moment, searching out guidance in the hooded face. ‘Repeat it to me,’ he ordered, and with a nod, Mephiston drew the words of Rafen’s urgent entreaty from his eidetic memory and spoke them aloud.

Dante’s brows knit in concentration as he heard the Space Marine’s account of the Word Bearers’ assault on Cybele, the arrival of Bellus and the subsequent commands of the priest Sachiel and Inquisitor Stele. When the Librarian finished, the commander sat silently for a while.

‘This Sachiel sees the touch of the pure one on the warrior Arkio.’ Dante turned the thought over. ‘Such a conviction is fraught with portent and exigency, and much of it ill starred. What confirmation do we have that this fable is true?’

‘The message bears the code-ident of a trusted veteran, Sergeant Koris of Captain Simeon’s company. I took the liberty of reviewing his chronicle. He is a man of exemplary courage, lord, yet he is given to occasional displays of scepticism. I would not doubt the veracity of his statement… Although there were some troubling anomalies in the voice-print trace.’

Dante nodded. ‘How many times has it been, Mephiston? How many Blood Angels have believed themselves impressed by the spirit of our lord and claimed to be the vessels of his power?’

‘Too many, commander. And yet, are we not all recipients of Sanguinius’s eminence to some degree?’

‘Indeed,’ Dante agreed, ‘but we honour the primarch among all things and do not pretend to usurp him.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘This business of the spear, that the relic should be used so blatantly and without my sanction… It is troubling. We placed our trust in Stele and honoured our blood debt to him, but if we were mistaken…’

‘Such supposition wastes our energies, lord,’ Mephiston said crisply. ‘The way forward is clear – we must isolate this Arkio, and bring him and the holy lance back to Baal without delay.’

‘I order it so. You will charge Captain Gallio with this task. He has served me well among the honour guard and his loyalty to the primogenitor is unyielding. Grant him command of the cruiser Amareo and give him leave to select a force of men.’

Mephiston nodded. ‘If it pleases the commander, I will send Brother Vode also. He is one of my best acolytes and his second sight is unparalleled in seeking out the taint of corruption.’

Dante looked at him. ‘Is that what you suspect to find, brother?’

The Librarian’s hard face did not betray any emotion.’ We cannot afford to step blindly into this matter.’

‘Just so,’ agreed the commander. ‘This message… It would not go well if the contents of Koris’s signal were to reach the rest of the Chapter. There would be confusion, at best. At worst, the seeds of a schism.’

‘I have seen to this, lord. The astropath duct that accepted the transmission has been sequestered on my order. I will personally supervise the erasure of his memory engrams.’

Dante rose to his feet and walked back to the window. ‘Then send the ship, and we shall see the truth behind this “blessing” for ourselves.’

Mephiston paused at the reclusium’s threshold, the doors yawning open before him. ‘My lord…’

Dante heard something in the Librarian’s voice that he had seldom encountered before: a hesitation alien to the lord of death’s awesome reserve. ‘What concerns you so, old friend?’

‘We stand and speak of this Arkio as if he is already proven false… But what if the lad truly has been touched by the Deus Encarmine?’

To his dismay, the commander of the Blood Angels had no answer for his trusted comrade’s question.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The corridors of the fortress were choked with repentants, shabby in torn clothing and bloodied bandages. These pathetic souls were the survivors of the occupation, the ones who still had strength to walk, to petition the Blood Angels for succour. On the lower levels, Rafen had passed gangs of Chapter serfs under the supervision of a Sanguinary Priest as they divided the spoils from storehouses from beneath the tower. The cases of medicines and food were divided among the starving, sickened civilians. There was little to go around, as much of the perishables had been put to the torch by Falkir’s battalions. Like those swarming the plaza, the people who blocked Rafen’s way as he walked the building seemed to be subsisting solely on faith.

The Blood Angel was troubled. Over and over, the sight of the honour guard picking out and cold-bloodedly murdering civilians replayed in his mind, disgusting him to his core. Rafen did not shun hard deeds when they were needed, but that casual display of callousness made his gut tighten. The Shenlongi people had been liberated, and to squander their lives in order to make a point went against every moral fibre of the Space Marine’s being. But worse than the act itself was the doe-eyed acceptance of the non-combatants, the way they were almost joyful to embrace the burning bolter rounds, as if their willing sacrifice was worthwhile.

Someone jostled Rafen and his temper flared. ‘Get out of my way!’ he snapped, turning a stern face on the man who had touched him.

‘Forgive me, lord, but I wanted to thank you…’ He was thick with dirt and a patina of brick dust, but through it Rafen could still clearly make out the pattern of a tattered planetary defence force uniform. An officer, by the look of the sigils on his sleeve.

‘For what? I do not know you.’

‘Oh, no, it is not for myself, lord, but for my sister. Not only did your Chapter release us from the grip of Chaos, but your kinsmen granted her the murdergift.’ He bowed his head as he spoke.

‘Murdergift?’ The strange word left a foul taste in Rafen’s mouth. ‘You thank me because your sister was shot dead by the honour guard? No, no–’

‘Please!’ The PDF soldier pressed closer to him. ‘You must understand, we were so close to cracking! If another day had passed without an answer to our prayers, many of us would have been sure that the Emperor had turned from Shenlong…’ His voice dropped to a confessional hiss. ‘Some of us… We were almost ready to submit to the word of Lorgar…’ Then he beamed at Rafen. ‘But you saved us from that! My sister gladly gave herself in payment.’

‘Madness!’ Rafen tore his arm away from the man and drew his combat knife in a bright arc of fractal-edged steel. ‘Tell me, if I told you to plunge this into your heart, would you do it?’

The officer tore open his tunic without hesitation and exposed his pale chest. ‘My life has value only by your command, lord!’ He seemed ecstatic at the possibility that Rafen might kill him, then and there.

The Blood Angel’s face twisted in disdain, and he backhanded the man with the pommel of the blade. ‘Begone, craven fool!’ Rafen stalked down the corridor, furious. Was this the state of the people he took an oath to protect? Were the men and women of the Imperium so weak of mind that they would spring on any edict, no matter how loathsome, and claim it as the divine word of the God-Emperor?

He reached the towering copper doors that opened into the chapel from which Arkio had made his address. Senior battle-brothers entered one by one, under the expressionless eyes of two honour guardsmen. They carried slung power axes and hand flamers, the ignition torches dancing at the end of the funnel-shaped muzzles. One of them blocked Rafen’s path.

‘You will remain outside.’ It was a voice that expected no argument.

‘On what authority?’ Rafen demanded. ‘I am Brother Rafen, sibling to Arkio–’

‘We know who you are,’ said the other guard. ‘This conclave is for the veterans of our Chapter, and you are not one of them.’

Rafen pressed against the first guard’s chest, daring him to push back. ‘I will speak to my brother, and no man, golden-helmed or otherwise, will prevent it!’

From the corner of his eye, Rafen saw the second Space Marine’s gauntlet drop toward his axe and he tensed. But then a strong hand pulled him back. ‘We’ll have no trouble here!’ said Delos, and Rafen turned to face the Chaplain’s skull-mask.

‘Rafen, speak to me.’ Delos led him to a quiet alcove. ‘What is wrong?’

He looked away. ‘Cleric, I cannot hold my tongue any longer. The events of recent days, the changes that have been wrought… My mind is awhirl with contradictions and I fear I may drive myself mad with them!’

Delos nodded slowly. ‘I understand, brother. This has been a trying time for all of us, and our faith has been challenged.’

‘Yes! Yes!’ Rafen retorted. ‘You understand, Delos. This… miasma that has swept through our ranks, it is unconscionable. I cannot explain what has happened to my brother Arkio… And what took place in the plaza, never before have I seen the like–’

The Chaplain nodded again and there was a smile in his voice, incongruous as it issued from the mouth of the steel skull. ‘You are confused, Rafen, and that is natural. Much has happened since Bellus arrived at Cybele and we all feel the strain of it. Too many brothers have passed, your mentor among them, and it gnaws at you.’ He pressed a black-gloved hand on Rafen’s chest. ‘You would not be a son of Sanguinius if you did not feel each death as keenly as we do our lord progenitor’s, but he has extended a hand to us from the past, my friend, and Arkio is his vessel.’

Rafen’s expression froze. He could not see Delos’s face, but he knew that the Chaplain had been drawn into the same influence that spread wide among his battle-brothers. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said in a neutral voice. ‘Thank you for your wisdom.’

Delos beckoned him. ‘Come, Rafen,’ he said, ‘it is only fair that you be present to hear the words of your sibling as well. Accompany me.’ The Chaplain waved away the two honour guards and Rafen followed him in, ice forming in the pit of his primary stomach.

There were dozens of Blood Angels arranged in a loose pair of semi-circles at one end of the chamber. At the opposite side of the chapel, where the glass window and the balcony lay, Rafen glimpsed more men with golden helmets, weapons slung but nonetheless watchful. Beyond them, he saw the telltale blink of white and red. Sachiel was there, conversing with another Space Marine. Arkio had his back to the group, and were it not for his posture, one might have thought him to be a normal Space Marine. All soldiers of the Legion Astartes were genetically engineered for superiority in both mind and body, and the legacy of that alteration extended into the most basic of things, including stature and carriage. Every Space Marine carried himself like a stormwalker, well over two metres of pure-bred warrior striding among the lesser races of common men like some figure of legend made manifest. Yet Arkio seemed to stand even taller than the rest of them. It was undeniable. Some aura, intangible and commanding, bled into the air around his sibling from his sheer force of presence.

‘What has my brother become?’ Rafen whispered to himself.

‘This is a proud moment for all Blood Angels,’ said Delos, and Rafen could not be sure if the Chaplain had heard his comment, ‘I would submit that even Dante himself would sit a while to see what will transpire here.’

Rafen’s gaze swept the room, surveying the faces of the Space Marines who went bareheaded and the body language of those who did not. Each of them was tense with anticipation, earnest with questions for the blessed one. The cold in his chest gripped Rafen’s hearts with icy fingers. They all look upon him with reverence. By the grail, what if I am the only one who doubts? With Koris dead, could it be that I alone question this? And then a more insidious thought pushed its way to the front of his mind: what would Rafen do if he were wrong? If Arkio were truly touched by the hand of the great angel, then to voice any mistrust of his divinity would be tantamount to the highest of heresies. And yet… I cannot shake this sense that something is very, very wrong…

With this vicious cycle turning through his mind, Rafen saw Inquisitor Stele emerge from an antechamber, his lexmechanic shuffling along behind him. The ordos agent spoke quickly to Sachiel and then stepped up to the chapel’s lectern.

‘Comrade brothers,’ Stele’s voice was firm. ‘Matters have come to a point where we must chose a path forward, and so I set before you this design.’ He paused, scanning the room and taking a moment to gauge the mood of the Astartes veterans. Stele’s eye lingered on Rafen where he stood at Delos’s side, and a frown threatened to form on his bald pate. The inquisitor leaned forward, his aquila electoo catching the light of the photon candles. ‘The archenemy on Shenlong is bloodied but not defeated, and he has exchanged his strengths for new ones. Where we were the fluid force striking at a stationary target, now the Word Bearers are scattered and mobile, and it is the Blood Angels who are pressed into defending the Ikari fortress. We all know the battle doctrine of the Word Bearers. They fight until death, and although the blessed Arkio may have broken them, they will regroup and return to plague us.’

‘We shall garrison here, then?’ said a seasoned sergeant from the assault company. ‘Seek out these scum and kill them before they can hit and fade?’

There was approval from Stele. ‘This forge world owes its life to the Blood Angels, and we shall not soon release it.’ He glanced to where Arkio sat, as if seeking permission to continue. ‘Shenlong’s planetary governor was murdered on the first morning of the Chaos occupation, and none of his staff have been found alive.’ The inquisitor knew this for a fact. He had made personally sure of it by quietly executing three ministorum functionaries in a cell deep below the chapel. ‘I am therefore assuming the duties and position of interim governor, and I choose this building as my stronghold. In this role, my first edict will be to petition the Blood Angels to eradicate the stain of Chaos from this world.’

‘It will be done!’ said Sachiel, his voice tight with eagerness.

‘Of that I have no doubt,’ the inquisitor replied smoothly. ‘Now I yield the floor to Brother Arkio.’

Rafen sensed the flood of scrutiny that raced through the other Blood Angels as his younger brother took the lectern. Arkio gave the assembled men a cool smile. It hung strangely on his sibling’s face. It was not an expression that Rafen could ever remember seeing on him before; it was an aspect that was at once imperious and commonplace, infinitely old and undeniably youthful. He wondered that if their father were here in the room, would the grizzled old clansman have even recognised his second born son? Almost as the days passed, Arkio’s face bore less and less resemblance to his former self and more and more the idealised, noble contours of the high angel of blood.

Delos mumbled a prayer beneath his breath and Rafen heard him speak of ‘Arkio the Blessed’ – the same litany that Lucion had uttered on the Bellus. Arkio’s legendary exploits were already accreting their own mythology, his faithful feeding their own beliefs. Rafen found he could not meet his brother’s gaze, for fear that the youth would see the doubt in him. On some level, he wished that he could embrace Sachiel’s declaration of divinity. In a small way he envied the other men for their unquestioning devotion, but Rafen’s hearts and soul were tied irrevocably to the edicts of his Chapter and the word of the God-Emperor, and there was no provision there for the coming of a new Sanguinius.

‘Brothers, your support gladdens me and I am honoured to accept it.’ Arkio indicated the chapel window. ‘We will purge the taint from Shenlong together and make this world a beacon of righteousness.’ There was a scattering of agreement throughout the group. ‘I… We have been tested, kinsmen. Tested and found ready for the greater challenges ahead. Shenlong is but the first world we will liberate. In the years to come, we will look back and say here–’ He slammed the lectern with a hand, a fierce grin on his face. ‘Here was where our Blood Crusade began! I have accepted the counsel of Lord Stele and his eminence Sachiel and now I put to you a plan that will begin a new era in the chronicle of the sons of Sanguinius.’ He paused, and the air was thick with tension.

Rafen watched, awe-struck. With just a few simple words, Arkio was holding men with ten times his experience and age as enthralled as the newest initiates.

‘We will take the Word Bearers and break them as they tried to break this world, and as we do, I will call upon the people of Shenlong to join us in our struggle. In the name of Sanguinius, we will raise a force from these blighted souls and in his glory return to Baal in triumph, with Iskavan’s head atop our standard! And there, we will rally our Chapter for a campaign the likes of which even the God-Emperor himself has never seen!’

‘Assemble an army?’ said the assault sergeant. ‘Blessed, we are Adeptus Astartes, each man an army of one. It is not our way to recruit common soldiers.’

Sachiel answered him a nod. ‘You are correct. Not the old way – but the path we travel now will take us beyond the unwavering creeds laid down in the Codex Astartes.’ He smiled. ‘Our fealty to Guilliman’s ancient treatise has never been the strongest, as we all can agree. We are Blood Angels and what suits us is anathema to the stolid Ultramarines and their kindred…’ Several of the seasoned troopers murmured an accord. The Space Marine warbook of sacred battle doctrines had been crafted by the authoritarian primarch of the Ultramarines Chapter, Robute Guilliman, but his suspicion of the Blood Angels had been well documented and, even ten millennia past his death, the warriors from Macragge were still antagonistic toward them. ‘We’ll write our own principles, a vermilion codex better suited to men who know blood and who have been blooded!’ This time the ripple of agreement was more forceful and aggressive.

‘And what will we do with these conscripts?’ Delos dared to venture a question.

‘We will take a thousand of the best that this war-beaten world can offer us and turn them into a legion of aggressors sworn to the banner of the blessed! They will be the first warriors of the reborn, for the greater glory of Sanguinius!’

Stele had been silent but now he took the priest’s words as his cue to interpose himself. ‘The way ahead is clear, but it is also dangerous for us.’ He spread his hands. ‘We witnessed the power of the great angel unleashed, aboard Bellus and again in his divine fury within this very tower. We cannot question what we have seen with our own eyes, and yet… Distrust still festers among us.’ The inquisitor did not look in Rafen’s direction; he did not have to. ‘I have learned that a person – a sceptic – saw fit to communicate with his fellow doubters on your homeworld of Baal. The contents of this communication are lost to me but I have inferred the essence of them.’

A grim silence descended on the room, and Rafen forced himself to remain unmoved by the inquisitor’s veiled probing. If there were any other men here who were not wholly convinced of Arkio’s sanctification, then their hesitancy would be withering now beneath Stele’s baleful glare.

‘There are those who do not accept change,’ he continued, stalking along the edge of the room. ‘They cannot release their adherence to ancient, decrepit dogma even when the proof of its inadequacy is put before them. These men keep our beloved Imperium locked in a state of ignorance and stagnation. They will not accept anything that challenges the status quo, and they are willing to kill whole worlds to preserve it.’ He hung his head. ‘I have seen it, among my own fraternity in the Ordo Hereticus, and now this message concerns me that such conspiracies may touch the brotherhood of the Blood Angels as well.’

Delos shook his head. ‘With all due respect, Lord Stele, you must be mistaken. No Baalite son would ever embrace such duplicity!’

The inquisitor tapped his chin. ‘I can only hope that you are correct, Chaplain. But as Arkio accepted my counsel, I would ask you all to do the same. Be watchful, comrade brothers, for the Word Bearers may not be the only enemy we face here.’

With this dire caution hanging over them, Sachiel distributed data-slates with single use code strings so that orders could be read before self-deleting. He dismissed the veterans and watched them file from the chapel mulling over the commands they had been given. As Chaplain Delos exited, Sachiel saw a single Space Marine remaining. ‘Rafen.’

‘High priest. I would speak with my brother.’

‘Indeed?’ Sachiel arched an eyebrow. ‘Perhaps your time would be better spent preparing your squad for combat. I’ll overlook your clandestine entry into a meeting that you were not cleared to join, but I strongly suggest you leave now. What little good favour you have is running thin, Rafen.’

‘Are you afraid I might talk some sense into him? He scoffed. ‘Stand aside, Sachiel.’

The Blood Angel’s face flushed red, matching the crimson of his wargear. ‘You will address me as Sanguinary High Priest!’

‘What is this?’ Arkio asked, detaching himself from conversation with Stele. The inquisitor gave the room a deceptively vague look and left, the chattering lexmechanic at his heels. ‘A disagreement?’ said the young Blood Angel, the potent clarity of his voice silencing the argument before it could progress.

‘There is a point of doctrine that we do not see eye to eye on,’ said Rafen.

Sachiel’s colour was high but he forced his voice to remain level. ‘Your sibling wishes to speak to you, blessed.’

‘Alone,’ Rafen added.

The priest gave a rigid half-bow to Arkio. ‘By your leave?’

Arkio nodded, and Sachiel strode away after Stele. Rafen’s brother cocked his head. ‘I have asked you this before, and now I say it again. You are troubled.’

Rafen watched Sachiel’s back recede until he was sure he was out of the room, and beyond earshot. ‘You dismiss a high priest without a word, Arkio. You, a battle-brother with only one service stud on his brow. How has this come to pass?’

Arkio looked away. ‘I did not seek this gift, brother. It came to me of its own accord.’

‘A gift, is that what it is?’ Rafen said with disquiet. ‘From where I stand I wonder if it is a curse. What else could drive men to murder the innocents they swore an oath to protect?’

‘I regret those deaths, but perhaps those repudiations were necessary.’

‘You have a name for these executions? So do the Shenlongi! They call them the “murdergift”, like it is some benediction! What insanity is this?’

‘I take no pleasure in it.’ Arkio fixed him with a hard gaze, and for the briefest of instants Rafen felt his resolve weaken. ‘But we cannot hold to the old codes, kinsman. We cannot continue to cling to the ways of the past. We must be brutal if we are to forge a path to the new future…’

Rafen’s fists balled of their own accord. ‘You talk but you say nothing. All I hear are empty phrases and rhetoric better suited to politicians than Space Marines! Brother, I don’t pretend to understand what has happened to you but I know this – your new path veers away from our sacred pledge to holy Terra! Can you not see, if you go on you will damn us all as heretics!’

Arkio’s mood altered in a heartbeat. His face darkened. ‘You dare speak of heresy? You, who look upon me with doubt as plain as day? How can I win the hearts of my battle-brothers when my very blood himself thinks I am false?’

‘I have never said–’

‘I thought I would be able to confide in you, that you would understand, but I was mistaken! Perhaps Sachiel was right when he said that you would be jealous I was chosen.’

‘It is not jealousy!’ Rafen growled, his voice drawing the attention of the honour guards. ‘I am concerned for you.’

‘Ah, yes,’ Arkio said, ‘the oath to father. Even after all this time, you still see me as the skinny boy in need of protection, yes?’ He summoned the guards with a nod. ‘I told you before, that Arkio is gone. I am changed.’

Rafen felt defeated; his words were clumsy and harsh, and now he had done nothing more than drive his brother further away. ‘Arkio, I have a duty…’

His sibling’s face softened, forgiveness in his eyes. ‘So do I, Rafen, and I hope you will realise that they are one and the same.’ Arkio looked at the gold-helmeted Space Marines. ‘My brother is leaving. Secure the chapel after him. I must meditate.’

Rafen saw Arkio reaching for the case that held the Spear of Telesto as the copper doors slammed shut.

Falkir’s men used chains stolen from the factory zones above to hold the nine offerings in place. They tied loops of the heavy metal rings around their ankles. The Chaos Space Marine examined them with the same regard he would have given the sewer effluent that fouled his boots – these humans were such fragile, mewling little things, so far removed from his monstrous form that the Castellan found it hard to accept that he had ever had even the remotest kinship to their race. He drew up ancient recollections of the Word Bearers’ birthworld of Colchis and the humans that had scurried there. These Shenlong people were the same, puny and without value. Despite Iskavan’s orders to keep them alive, Falkir toyed with the idea of gutting one, just to amuse himself.

As if he was summoned by the thought of him, the rumble of the cursed crozius announced the Dark Apostle’s presence. Iskavan scowled at the scraps of his army where they stood in sullen groups around the perimeter of the flood chamber. His displeasure flowed off him in waves, more potent than the stinking fetor of the drain ducts.

‘Shall we proceed?’ Falkir asked.

Iskavan spat and pushed him away. ‘Stand aside.’ The Apostle reached under a ruddy skin-cloak that dangled near his bolter holster and removed a fat tome from within its folds. There were chains around the book that glittered with threads of rare orihalcium. Each link was worth the price of a man’s life. The Word Bearer commander looped them around his wrist and the sorcerous codex obediently snapped open at pages filled with spidery text in iridescent inks. ‘That one,’ he said, pointing at the closest offering – a swarthy-skinned man in the garb of a balladeer. Falkir grudgingly clasped the man by the scruff of his neck and bent him down. The bard had soiled himself in fright.

Iskavan began to read aloud from the book. The words were sounds that did not fit in the material world. They resembled inhuman ululations and strange cadences that made the air shiver with their passage. As he spoke, the Apostle reversed the grip on the crozius and used the sickle-sharp blade on the lower end to slit the offering’s throat. A fan of blood tore out of him, but instead of falling to the floor, it whirled into the air, each droplet hardening into a ruby bullet. The eight other humans screamed and wailed, sensing their deaths would be next. They pulled fruitlessly at the chains, only to stumble and fall as the bloodstorm ripped into them and cut them to ribbons. The globules spun about in a swarm of red.

Flesh and crimson fluid began to coalesce in the middle of the remains of the sacrificial victims, organs and meat tearing out of the corpses to come together in a purplish mass of matter. Iskavan waited patiently for the shape of a Khornate bloodthirster to form, but no daemon emerged. Gradually a formless blob of protoplasm congealed into something barely recognisable as a face. The wet orb of gore spun in the scarlet rain.

‘Not enough!’ it screamed. ‘Need more! More more more!’ Iskavan studied it with a frown. This was not supposed to happen. The summoning should have been sated and allowed the chosen of the skull throne to manifest, not beg for more.

‘It’s still hungry,’ said Falkir. ‘What else can we feed it?’

‘You.’ The Apostle didn’t hesitate, and kicked Falkir’s legs out from under him. The Word Bearer swore as he fell face-first into the bloodstorm.

With a gust of coppery vapour, the rain of liquid engulfed Falkir and filled him up like a vessel. Iskavan watched intently, waiting for the telltale horns, tail and batwings of a bloodthirster to burst from the seams of his armour. The Khornate creature would corrupt Falkir’s body still further and it would emerge from his mortal form armed with a hellfire whip, a heartseeker axe and a desperate desire to kill.

But to his slow dismay, that did not occur.

Whatever possessed Falkir slowly got to its feet and confronted him. Where the Word Bearer’s ruined face had been there was now an ever-shifting mass of warped flesh. It was never static, it constantly morphed from form to form. It seemed to smile at him.

‘What are you?’ the Apostle demanded. ‘By Lorgar, I summoned the child of Khorne, not some pathetic changeling!’

‘Show respect to the servant of Tzeentch, beastling!’ it cackled. ‘No bloodthirster for you! The Warmaster Garand has forbidden it!’

Iskavan’s tongues twitched. ‘How dare you presume–’

‘A messenger instead for the master of the ninth host. Hear this! I am the conduit for your lord’s most black and hurtful displeasure!’

Before the eyes of the Word Bearers, the daemon’s chimera face took on the terrible aspect of the High Warmaster Garand, battle commander of a thousand hosts and the Dread Witchprince of Helica. Many of the Chaos Space Marines knelt in demonstration of their allegiance, but Iskavan remained standing. The dark realisation that was building at the back of his mind kept him on his feet.

‘Iskavan, you blind, stumbling fool!’ Garand’s voice spat from the changeling’s mouth. ‘In the maelstrom’s name, you cannot even be trusted to fail!’

‘Why have you interfered with my summoning?’ growled the Apostle, ignoring the insult. Iskavan’s black heart hammered in his malformed ribcage. The Warmaster’s powers were potent indeed to have reached across the Immaterium and turned aside the daemonic invocation.

‘You shall have no reinforcements from the warp, worthless dolt! You should be corpseflesh now! I sent you to Shenlong to perish on Blood Angels’ blades, and perish you shall!’

‘No!’ Iskavan snorted, waving his crozius, fighting away a sudden confusion. ‘You could not… It is not–’

Garand’s psychic presence was like a lead weight pressing down on the warriors in the chamber. ‘Weakling! You are the least of my army, Iskavan! The victories you brought me have never been sufficient, your conquests irrelevant, your temples to our gods found wanting! Now I rid myself of your dead, useless band!’

The Apostle tried to deny the charges, but a voice inside him saw the truth in the Warmaster’s words. The ninth host were the poorest of the Word Bearers; they were constantly one step behind the glories and honours of their corrupted brethren. ‘My warriors have served the greater cause of Lorgar’s word for centuries!’ he retorted hotly.

Garand’s voice roared with cruel laughter. ‘As cannon fodder, perhaps. You are fit for nothing else. Even now you are too dense to comprehend! You are a throwaway, Iskavan! The ninth host is nought but a grand sacrifice!’

‘The retreats you ordered on Cybele?’ said the Apostle. ‘The orders changed without reason or purpose? What have you done?’

The Falkir-thing stepped closer. ‘Know this. I have willingly renounced your forces in order to bring the Blood Angels to Shenlong, wretch!’

Garand’s words aboard the Dirge Eterna flooded back to Iskavan. A larger plan. The daemon nodded as realisation dawned on the Word Bearer’s face. ‘Yes, you see it now? The design that I oversee is no less than the corruption of the entire Blood Angels’ Chapter!’

‘Impossible! Their sickening loyalty to the corpse god is unquestioned! It cannot be done!’

I have allies,’ Garand was dismissive. ‘In the despoiler’s name, I will rival Horus in his grand turning with this deed – and you, Iskavan, your blood will oil the wheels of its consummation!’

‘No, I will not allow you to throw away our lives–’ he began, fighting the waves of controlled agony that radiated from the Warmaster’s psi-surrogate.

‘Allow?’ Garand jeered, ‘You cannot prevent it! The lie-spinner Tancred knew it to be true, he saw your doom in the entrails of the dead!’

‘Tancred? But he said he saw nothing…’

Again, the laughter pealed off the stonewalls. ‘Look how useless you are! Even your minions hide the truth from you!’ Falkir’s possessed body launched itself at the Dark Apostle. ‘You are a disgrace to the eightfold star! Iskavan the Hated? You are Iskavan the Mocked! You could not live like a warrior of Chaos, but perhaps you will be able to die like one!’

‘No!’ The Apostle’s bellow shattered the spell Garand’s voice had cast, and with a strike of his crozius, Iskavan batted the messenger daemon across the chamber. The flesh-form cracked against the far wall and shivered. The Warmaster’s face began to melt away as the psychic link faltered. The Word Bearer commander stormed across to the creature and roared into its face, his rage manifesting in coils of searing lightning. ‘Hear this, Garand! We are sons of Lorgar and not mere pawns for you to play and discard in your games! I’ll raze this world to ash before I surrender!’

He dropped the daemon to the floor and turned to face his men, the full force of his dark soul boiling to a murderous intensity. ‘Gather all weapons! Muster the furies and the hounds!’ The Apostle’s venom made his crozius wail in sympathetic anger. ‘For hate’s sake,’ he cried. ‘We will put this world to death!’

The effect of Iskavan’s passion was instantaneous. With one voice, the Word Bearers cried out, ‘Unto the blood of revenge, we bring the word of Lorgar!’

Without the stifling edicts of the Warmaster’s orders to shackle him any longer, a hundred horrors scratched at the edges of Iskavan’s mind, a hundred terrible revenges to inflict upon the Blood Angels and the Shenlongi cattle. He smiled. He would begin with the wounded, the women and the children.

Something nudged his leg and he glanced down. There, coiled at his feet, the warped flesh that had once been Falkir blinked back at him in hopeful entreaty.

‘The messenger daemon still lives,’ remarked a grizzled Havoc Space Marine, drawing a bead with a man-portable lascannon. ‘What is to be done?’

‘Bring it,’ Iskavan said after a moment. ‘I’ll find someone for it to kill.’

The wind was the colour of old blood. It carried flecks of rusted metal in whirls of razored fines. And it carried something else to the plaza, where Rafen stood alone in contemplation. The wind bore shrieks of the like that only the worst of fears can conjure, sounds that death itself would recoil from. Rafen’s enhanced hearing read them as clearly as if they were broadcast over his vox-link, and he remembered the winds of another world’s screams.

Another Blood Angel beside an idling Rhino pointed southwards. ‘Do you hear that? I think it’s coming from the valetudinarium.’

‘The wounded,’ Rafen gasped, and then in a flurry of motion he grabbed at the transport’s roll bar. ‘You can drive this thing?’ he asked.

‘Like the wind,’ said the Space Marine.

‘Then we go,’ snapped Rafen. With a thunderous roar, the Rhino’s tracks bit into the stone road and it leapt forward, into the screams.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The rapacious pace of conflict in the 41st millennium was fed by myriad worlds, each churning out megatons of military hardware by the freighter-load. Shenlong’s speciality was its shells: from tiny, low-calibre bullets suitable for an assassin’s kissgun to the colossal ship-cracking torpedoes fired from battleships. Munitions rolled out of the forge world’s manufactoriums to stoke the unending inferno of the Emperor’s wars. Every centimetre of the rusty planet’s surface was thick with factory complexes, worker-towns and warehouses. There was nothing that did not orbit around the needs of the mills: schools and cathedrals, agri-domes and heat sinks, water plants and sewerage works were all squeezed into the gaps between the looming walls of the weapons shops.

In such a place was the valetudinarium of Saint Mandé the Amber, a hospital founded by the order of the eternal candle in the wake of the Hoek Insurgence. Built atop a cavernous factory, the clinic dealt mostly with the outbreaks of military-grade viruses that regularly affected the workers. These men and women fell foul of the toxins they were forced to load into planetary-denial bombs and other scorched earth munitions. In the careworn halls of tile and stained glass, priests ministered to wounded civilians crowded into the overflowing wards. Few of the Adepta Sororitas hospitallers posted there had survived the initial Word Bearers’ attack. Those that had lived made their prayers to the Throne and paid thanks for their liberation, only to discover they had been premature.

Buoyed by rage at Garand’s deception, Iskavan’s Word Bearers emerged from the watercourses under the valetudinarium in a tide of murder and hate. The lowest levels of the hospital were the most fortified, and it was there that the sisters had hidden the sickly children, the pregnant women and the old. The Traitors rose among them, their nightmares given horrific, blade-sharp form. Iskavan personally murdered the last Sororitas on Shenlong as his brethren hung innards from every wall, painting the corridors with innocent blood.

They met weak resistance from a handful of hobbled PDF soldiers as they rose into the main levels of the clinic. The blinded and crippled took up guns and fought to the death. Iskavan let his men have their butchery without sanction, while he slipped away to find a tool that would enable him to unleash his hatred on the entire planet. The screaming horrors wrought inside the valetudinarium leaked into the air.

Black jets of smoke shot past Rafen’s face from the Rhino’s exhausts, popping as the vehicle’s over-charged engine roared like a caged animal. The driver cut sparks from the roadway as he forced the transport around a corner without losing momentum. The Rhino’s tracks bit into the ground and clawed through debris. A makeshift roadblock built of pieces of furniture and oil drums exploded as the Rhino’s spiked dozer blade swept it away.

Rafen’s torso protruded from the vehicle’s rooftop hatch, and he held fast to the pintle-mounted storm bolter. A coil of belt-fed shells fed from under his feet, clattering over his armour as he turned in place, lancing tracer where enemy troopers appeared to snap-fire at him.

‘There it is!’ The driver’s voice yelled.

The road terminated in the forecourt of the hospital. The arching gates that had once blocked the way were long gone, destroyed by whatever had blown down the walls. Beyond, Rafen spied the flares of gunfire inside the building. The Rhino rumbled over the entrance. ‘Full throttle!’ Rafen shouted, ‘Shock deployment!’

‘Aye!’ came the hearty reply, and the transport’s motor revved louder.

Rafen let fly with the bolter, cutting into the hospital’s portico, and at the last moment he dropped down into the Rhino’s hull. The driver reversed traction on the starboard track and the transport came about, the portside face turning into the ruined entranceway. The Rhino broadsided the building and took down a length of wall as it did so, sliding to a screeching halt in the main atrium.

Rafen knocked out the pintle’s anchoring pin and tore the storm bolter free. Then he was out of the hatch and firing. Glass as old as the Blood Angel himself crunched beneath Rafen’s boots as he ran. Ruined urns spilled plant matter in drifts where stray rounds had cut them open, and everywhere there were corpses. Figures in white, clinic functionaries and medicae; others in rags, the sick and injured.

The Space Marine saw the shape of a Word Bearer warped to slag by a melta blast and grinned. At least the enemy was not advancing without cost.

Something moved at the edge of his vision and he twisted. A soldier loped toward him, a pistol in one hand. The man’s face was hidden behind bandages, and below his left knee there was only a ragged stump.

‘Lord,’ he said. ‘We were afraid no one would come…’

‘We heard the screams,’ Rafen said grimly. ‘Report?’

‘Swarmed on us like ticks.’ The trooper halted. His breathing was laboured, and Rafen could see where his fatigues were coloured with blood. ‘Got in through the lower levels and cut us to pieces.’ He gestured with the gun. ‘It’s madness in there… Traitors gunning down anything that moves, no rhyme or reason, just killing for the love of it…’

‘How many other troopers?’

The man reloaded as he spoke. ‘Too few to make a difference.’

Explosive charges grunted on the upper levels, and a fresh shower of broken glass rained down on them. Rafen followed the sound and saw shapes in magenta ceramite moving along a raised balcony. ‘There!’ As one, they opened fire, storm bolter and pistol bellowing a murderous harmony.

A hapless Word Bearer took the brunt of the salvo and danced a frenzied jig as he was torn apart. Lascannon bolts seared the air in return and Rafen made for cover. The trooper stumbled after him. He fired again, the ammunition belt whipping and snapping at the air as it fed into the weapon. Rafen’s fire ate chunks from the pillars and statuary as the enemy tried to use them as cover. The wounded trooper was careful and slow with his weapon, firing at Word Bearers as they popped up or unwittingly exposed a limb in their haste.

The storm bolter fell silent and Rafen discarded it without hesitation, unlimbering his trusted bolter from the strap on his back. He glimpsed movement on the upper level, and for a second he saw the hulking form of the Dark Apostle between two gnarled columns; then the loathsome figure was gone.

‘If he is here, then hell will be two steps behind him.’ Rafen said aloud.

The noise of the explosion reached Arkio’s ears. ‘There!’ He stabbed at the air with the spear, and the holy lance hummed. ‘Do you see it, the smoke rising from the hospital?’

Sachiel gave a curt nod. ‘Blessed, there’s nothing in that quadrant but sickly natives. It’s a diversionary raid.’

Arkio turned on him with such swiftness that the priest actually recoiled. ‘No! There will be no diversions, no feints – The Word Bearers have nothing to lose, and we must meet them before they can use that against us!’

‘What can they do?’ Sachiel scoffed. ‘After your victory there can be no more than a handful left. We could garrison here and let them batter themselves to death on the walls of the fortress if you wished–’

Arkio’s face was hard with fury. ‘I do not! They have presented themselves and we must destroy them! No other outcome will suffice!’ He stepped away from the priest and vaulted up on to the parapet. ‘Remain here if you will, Sachiel. I go to take the fight to the foe!’ Without warning, Arkio projected himself off the balcony and dropped, plummeting downwards.

Sachiel reached for him, too late to stop the young Blood Angel. The priest saw Arkio’s fall, convinced that he would witness the blessed broken apart by the impact of his landing. The blazing rod of the spear glinted as he descended.

Men in the plaza saw him coming and parted like a breaking wave. Arkio struck the stone with a concussion that cut a shallow bowl in the square. Without a scratch or an injury upon him, Arkio rose from the crouch where he landed and crossed to the ranks of a bike squadron. Awed silence followed him, and no one, not Blood Angel or Shenlongi, dared to speak.

Arkio selected a bike and mounted it, kicking the starter into life. He swung the humming spear across the handlebars, like the lance of a jousting knight. ‘Men who would follow Sanguinius,’ he called, gunning the motor, ‘Follow me.’

The cycle ranged away along the road like a guided missile. In its wake, Space Marines and civilians alike followed with Arkio’s name on their lips.

The ironwood door narrowly missed Adept Pellis as it blew off its hinges and slammed into the wall. Splinters from the frame clipped his face and made him yelp. He scrambled desperately for the small window in the cramped fasciculus, sending cascades of parchment scattering behind him. The window was bolted into the stone walls, but any rationality Pellis once had was now washed away in a tide of fear. He clawed pointlessly at it, tearing the skin on his fingers and weeping.

Pellis chanced a look over his shoulder and regretted it. A man-shaped thing bent its head to enter the room, and it snarled as it tried to stand up. The low ceiling of the file store forced the monster to bend its warped neck. ‘You,’ it said, in a voice like snapping bones. ‘Adept Biologis?’

In spite of everything, Pellis’s bloody hand grabbed at the insignia on his robes that signified his ranking among the magis biologia. The adept had never known that fear could be as strong as this, and the approach of the man-thing made his body rebel, his bladder loosening.

The Chaos Space Marine looked away to address one of its fellows. ‘Are there no others?’

‘One, great Apostle, but very injured. The human attempted to take its own life with an ornamental dagger. It’s bleeding to death.’

Pellis nodded robotically. That would have been Thelio. The aged Adeptus Mechanicus priest had always been overly proud of his gaudy decorative knife. The Word Bearer accepted this and hauled Pellis to his feet. ‘You understand the germs and infections used beneath?’ The huge monster pointed his spiked crozius at the floor, indicating the factory far below.

Again, Pellis nodded with mechanical precision. That seemed to satisfy the beast, although the angry sketch of a face did not alter in aspect. ‘Then come. I have a task for you.’

Rafen left the trooper – he never stopped to ask his name – in the atrium and followed the sounds of sporadic gunfire out into a courtyard between the hospital and the slums surrounding it. Great oval vents protruded from the floor, as tall as a man, venting streams of thin, warm smoke. Corners of buildings were collapsed into one another, and a wide crack in the decking allowed sounds from the manufactory to fill the air. The scene could have easily been the surface of any inhabited city after a firefight, but the rent in the ground showed that the footing beneath Rafen’s boots was only the roof of a far larger complex below. The actual surface of Shenlong was perhaps twenty levels below him.

He hesitated in the shadow of one of the vents as a string of bolter fire echoed behind him. Rafen heard rough laughter and then a death-cry that could only have come from the injured soldier. He cursed and sank into the shade as a column of Traitor Marines emerged. At the forefront strode the Dark Apostle Iskavan, and he held a struggling man in one hand, dragging him by his robes.

The moment of hesitation on Cybele returned to Rafen. He had placed the Word Bearer in his sights and had not fired on him that day, in deference to orders from a brother now cold and dead. By the Emperor’s grace, here he was again, and this time there was nothing to stop him. With infinite care, Rafen gently raised his bolter and laid aim on the Apostle’s horned scalp. He would get one shot; it would have to count.

Rafen braced himself, took half a breath. He fired.

By some irony of fate, the bolt round in the breech was one that had been forged on Shenlong more than two hundred years earlier. It crossed the distance to Iskavan’s skull and impacted with a shriek of savaged air, knocking the Word Bearer to his knees.

Rafen charged out of cover, turning the gun to fully automatic fire, cutting into Iskavan’s honour guard. The Word Bearers split, some firing back, some taking cover. Rafen performed a swift shoulder roll and rose where the Apostle had fallen. He would take no chances; one bolt would not be enough to end the Traitor’s filthy life.

Part of a broken statue by his legs blurred, distracting the Blood Angel. A bifurcated stone cherub suddenly turned from stone white to blue-green-gore-red and came at him. It moved so fast that Rafen’s eyes could not catch it, forms shifting and changing. The thing morphed into a mass of teeth and bowled him over, snapping and biting. He shot at it in searing point-blank blasts, but each round seemed to flow through a new hole in its mass.

It distracted the Space Marine long enough so that powerful hands could grasp the hilt of a fallen weapon and strike at his back. The impact of Iskavan’s crozius threw Rafen at one of the vent tubes and he bounced off it. Bones fractured inside his armour. Before he could even stop his fall, Rafen’s injured legs lost purchase and he slipped into the rent in the ground, the breach in the stone flooring swallowed him up, bolter and all.

Iskavan took a step forward and strained, the muscles on his face bunching. The black disc of the bolt’s entry wound steamed as the flattened bullet head slowly eased itself out of the bloody hole. The Apostle dug his nails into the skin and tore the round out of his skull, flicking it away with a growl.

The daemon giggling inside Falkir’s warped host-body keened, blinking too many eyes at the fissure that had taken the Blood Angel from him. Iskavan gestured with his weapon. ‘Make yourself useful. Kill that wastrel.’

The messenger-creature whooped with joy and flowed across the stonework like a maggot. Its skin flickered in and out of colour synch with the red rock.

The Dark Apostle gathered up Pellis from where he had fallen. ‘There is a funicular tram to the lower levels. Show it to me.’

Pellis nodded, head jerking and unable to stop.

For a moment it seemed like Rafen was hovering there in the hot smoke that billowed up from the mills below. Then he was falling, dropping past strings of cables and rusted girders, plunging toward the foundries where pots of molten steel yawned like orange mouths. Something clipped his leg and he spun: a hanging wire. He had an instant to glimpse a web of metallic lines then he landed with a bounce in a net of filaments. Rafen rolled over, bobbing up and down like a cork afloat on the ocean. The wires around him clicked and sang. He was suspended in a cargo net, high above the factory floor, and as he scanned the air around him with his enhanced eyes, the Blood Angel could pick out crossbars, knots of cable and hanging gantries.

Over the loops of greasy wire came the hooting Tzeentch-thing, sloughing off bits of the decayed Word Bearer and sprouting limbs wherever it needed them. Rafen still had his bolter, held tight in a rigid grip.

The daemon sprang at him. It was so close he didn’t bother to shoot it, instead batting the thing aside with the gun. The Falkir-thing chittered and growled, one spider-leg producing the dead Word Bearer’s chain axe. It struck out, and missed Rafen but cut through a dozen steel cables. The net complained and tilted, dropping Rafen another five metres onto a train of cargo containers. He scrambled to move as the daemon flung itself down after him.

The Blood Angel ran, leaping the gaps between the containers, advancing along the train as the line of pods drew toward an automated loading crane, which loomed large over the monorail like the raised tail of some vast scorpion made of black steel. A broad sunflower of metal petals fanned out above the train as the cargo pods passed beneath it, and Rafen saw his chance. Ignoring the agony lancing through him from the wounds on his legs, he turned every effort of his might into an upward leap and snatched at the claw-grab. His free arm found purchase, and Rafen flipped himself up and over. He landed badly, and almost slipped off the greasy metal of the derrick. Below him, at the far end of the train, the messenger-thing coiled and spat at him, ready to jump.

Rafen fired again. He was rewarded with a shriek from the creature as hot rounds tore off a chitinous limb. It skipped over the train of containers, springing from one to another, dodging his fire. Rafen caught a glimpse of a cargo module just ahead of him. It was marked with the livid warning runes for liquid promethium. He angled his gun down. As the daemon’s clawed feet landed on the module roof, the Blood Angel sent a cascade of shells into the tanker wagon, punching into the volatile fluid within. The resulting detonation turned the train into a snake of fire, and in an eye-blink the creature was immolated. Fatty globules of warped flesh, broken shards of bone and other twisted pieces of organic debris blew into the air accompanied by the thing’s unnatural death-scream. The backwash battered Rafen with a fist of woolly heat and the Blood Angel looked away.

Below, a glitter of unholy light illuminated the eightfold blade of a corrupted crozius. Rafen let his helmet optics bring the sight closer. There was the Apostle, advancing from a rail carriage with his men and the captive adept. He followed the direction they were heading in and saw it just beyond the glow of the foundries: a tank farm of pressurised cylinders tall as obelisks, nested in ferrocrete and adorned with symbols of skulls and interlocking circles. The bioweapon crèche.

Many of the Word Bearers had been left to indulge their base desires while Iskavan escorted Pellis below. They were a ragged approximation of what they once had been. They were no longer the precise, drilled squads with their inexorable martial might but raging hurricanes of weapons fire and uncontrolled violence. Hordes of them congregated on the quadrant outside the hospital, roaring profane exaltations and fashioning obscene altars from the bodies of the dead.

From the rust-laden mist that ghosted Shenlong’s streets came the building thunder of engines, a wall of sound that advanced across the Traitor ranks and gave them pause in their ministrations. The gore-spattered warriors presented their weapons to the haze and shot into it; fierce returns of bolter fire lanced back at them. Twin guns mounted on the prows of a legion of attack bikes screeched as Arkio led the Blood Angels’ charge.

Red machines threw themselves out of the rust storm and rode down the Word Bearers, and at their head was the Blessed. Arkio stood in his saddle and rolled the Spear of Telesto over his head, cutting hot glyphs of gold lightning though the bodies of the enemy. Chaos Space Marines, havoc troopers and a handful of obliterators, all were penned in and gunned down by the Blood Angels. Bright fountains of arterial fluid issued into the sky and the sons of Sanguinius opened their mouths to it, drinking in the gifts of their enemy’s death. Warriors leapt from bikes at full throttle, tearing their foe’s throats from them and biting deep into exposed flesh. Blood, dark and clotted, flowed in rivers.

Men on foot followed behind the bikes. These were not Adeptus Astartes, these were commoners, some with looted guns but most with tools and blades. Many of them wore hastily made sashes with crude symbols – a version of the Blood Angels’ winged droplet crossed by a golden spear. These people had been the ones who had never dared to even look upon a Traitor’s face. Now they poured over them, dying in their hundreds as they hammered the Word Bearers with spanners and rocks. They offered the blood of the fallen as boons to the men in crimson armour.

Arkio rallied them with a clarion call. ‘No survivors!’ The holy lance sang in his grip, leaving trails of red in the air as it gutted the unworthy.

Iskavan threw Pellis down in front of the control pulpit and let the crozius hover near his face. The adept felt like he was standing too close to a naked flame, his skin steaming.

‘These are the germ weapons?’ The vile apostate indicated the tanks.

The little man kept nodding. The monster had demanded he lead them to the storage facility. He had obliged, desperate to do anything that would keep him alive for a few more minutes. Pellis retched in fear. The vent levers before him were the emergency shunts that would open the bio-toxin tanks to the air. They were protected by hundreds of wards and purity seals glued to their faces. These immense containers held the gaseous forms of a hundred different poisons. NeoZyklona. Rot-bane. Agent Magenta. The Fell Breath. Their names were a litany of the death-dealer’s art; weapons kept for those whose crimes had been particularly offensive to the Emperor.

The Dark Apostle nodded at the banks of gauges and valves. ‘Open it.’

‘Which one?’ the adept whimpered.

Iskavan did something horrible: he smiled. ‘All of them.’

‘We’ll be killed!’ Pellis shrieked.

‘Chaos never dies,’ said the Word Bearer, and with one stroke his weapon turned the seals into flaming confetti. ‘But this world will.’

Too far away, Rafen told himself. Too many of them. Dangling on the crane, the Blood Angel felt useless as the mechanism moved on its slow circuit of the manufactory. Hundreds of worker-helots and servitors huddled around the shadows of the noisy fabricators, looking up at him with masks of utter fear. These were the lowest of the Shenlongi, the broken and the mind-wiped, and he would get no support from them. Rafen suspected that these pitiful wretches had been slaving away down here since before the Word Bearers’ arrival on the planet, turning out shell after shell, and never knowing if the master they served reigned from the Golden Throne or the Eye of Terror.

Even Rafen’s powerful hearing could not bring Iskavan’s words to the adept to his ears, so loud were the machines about him. But he could intuit the Apostle’s plan. It was the ultimate act of spite, a final brutal sting of revenge. Iskavan would condemn himself and his host to agonising deaths, but knowing that this city and then eventually all of Shenlong would perish as well.

‘This shall not be,’ Rafen declared, and stabbed at the crane’s control pulley with his combat blade. The grab was passing over a large ceramic cup, filled with molten steel bound for the casting forge. The Blood Angel punctured the workings, and was rewarded by a shuddering groan from the crane’s cable brakes. The heavy grab twitched, and then it fell, reeling out the pulley behind it as the claw head dropped toward the factory floor, with Rafen clinging on. As he descended, the Space Marine ignored the fat sparks that fountained from the brakes and drew a bead on the huge pot. His old mentor’s training returned to him and saw the target through Koris’s eyes. Yes. There!

Rafen’s weapon rattled as he let the rounds spark off the sides of the cup, licking at the bolts that held it upright. He ignored the approach of the ground, seeing only the void between his weapon and his mark. The bullets demolished the couplings, and the cup fell, tumbling to the floor like a goblet falling from the fingers of some drunken giant. The canister threw a tidal wave of molten metal at the Word Bearers, and they broke apart like a flock of startled birds.

Rafen never saw the liquefied steel engulf them, the crane grab struck the ground and threw him into a mess of pipes – but he heard it. Rough screaming. The sickening crackles as incredible heat embrittled their ceramite armour and flash-burned their flesh. The unprotected adept would have been cooked instantly under the seething breaker, and workers had probably died too – but that was a small price to pay. The scent of burnt meat reached his nostrils and Rafen felt a sudden surge of hunger in return. The Blood Angel struggled to his feet, his muscles alive with pain. A drool of backwash hissed and lapped at his boots.

Then a huge and wrathful shadow surfaced in the tide of glowing fluid and tore itself out of the thick, searing embrace. Iskavan the Hated leapt out of the shimmering river and came at Rafen, gobs of cooling steel streaming out behind him in a silver halo.

Twenty levels above, Arkio froze as a shudder of sympathetic pain lanced through him. The flash of a mind-image: a massive shape made from steaming metals and boiling flesh, suffocating him in darkness. The Blood Angel reeled from the sensation, the spear humming in pity.

A voice came to him. ‘Brother?’ Alactus reached out to help steady him, but hesitated, afraid to lay a hand on the bearer of the holy lance. ‘Blessed?’ he asked. ‘What is it?’

Arkio shook off the sensation and cleared his head with a shout. ‘Below!’ he cried, whirling the spear about and slamming the teardrop blade into the ground beneath his feet. ‘The true battle lies below!’

Alactus backed away as a white sphere of energy collected at the tip of the spear. Arkio threw back his head and bellowed, his fangs bared to the russet skies above. The sacred weapon punched a void in the grounds of the valetudinarium and a hot wind gushed out. The manufactorium was now revealed; it ranged away into the depths and the thrashing metal shapes of the mills were in constant motion. There, beneath Arkio’s feet, he could see the light of weapons’ fire and the distinctive blue aura of potent psychic discharges.

At Angel’s Fall, when Rafen had been an aspirant and his arrogance had forced Brother Koris to best him in single combat, the Blood Angel had known what it felt like to be overmatched. That day under the hot rays of Baal’s star was here again, replayed in the iron pit of the weapon shops of Shenlong. But now the foe that stood before him was a Dark Apostle bristling with the black power of Chaos. This time, the lesson Rafen would learn would cost him his life.

Iskavan’s dousing in liquid steel had scarred him beyond recognition. He had lost one of his tongues. The pain of the burning metal was so strong that he had bitten it off in agony. His deconsecrated armour was no longer the dull, magenta hue of the Word Bearers’ Legion, but a sooty-black, the tone of torched flesh. The spines that sprouted from his back were bent or broken, leaking clear pus. He had lost at least two of the bony horns from his face. Yet still he came on, a rage that towered like mountains animating him through a painstorm that would have killed a hundred men. Such was his anger and agony that the licks of psionic energy discharging from him arced across the decking and murdered workers too slow to avoid them. This was the foe that Rafen faced.

Bolts thudded into Iskavan to no effect, and the Apostle laid into Rafen with his crozius. Snatching his knife from its sheath, Rafen buried the blade to the hilt in the Word Bearer’s exposed neck. Iskavan did not appear to notice, and kicked the Blood Angel away from him. Rafen rolled with the impact and shot again.

Iskavan shouted wordlessly, perhaps in pain, perhaps not. He was batting bolt rounds out of the air with the vibrating force weapon. He swept the eightfold blades down and the Space Marine barely dodged, the serrated edges scoring his armour. The Apostle drew back for a killing blow and Rafen emptied the gun into the Traitor’s free hand. At so close a range, the blaze of bullets ripped away everything from the middle of his forearm, shredding bone, muscle and blood into a mess of gelatinous fragments.

‘Bastard!’ The Apostle poured centuries of hate into the curse and slammed his crozius into Rafen. The blow was imperfect, borne from fury and without any semblance of control, otherwise it would have killed him instantly. Instead, the Space Marine was thrown thirty metres to slam into the side of a cargo unit. Most of Rafen’s torso armour was gone, the ceramite ripped away. Bunches of artificial muscle twitched beneath. He felt the full weight of his wargear as the thermal dissipaters in his backpack clogged and shut down. The Blood Angel’s head lolled. He had lost his helmet somewhere, and a wound over his brow gummed his right eye closed. Rafen tried to move, and felt broken ribs spearing his lungs from within.

Licking the gore spattered on his face, Iskavan approached, the chain linking the crozius to his arm rattling. ‘Ah,’ he growled, savouring the taste, ‘I know this blood. I know you. From Cybele…’ He raised the weapon again, this time for the final blow. ‘I gift you with the boon of pain,’ he spat, ‘to feed the hunger of the gods.’

‘No–’ Rafen managed and then a bright red dart fell from the dark roof and landed amid the cooling steel.

Iskavan whirled to see a ring of liquid metal surge away from the point of impact. He hissed as he recognised the whelp that had borne the archeotech weapon inside the fortress. And beyond he saw more Blood Angels swarming down walkways and elevators, engaging in firefights with the few Word Bearers he had left to guard the approaches.

‘You will injure no more of my brothers,’ said Arkio, his voice carrying.

Iskavan roared a battle cry and sent rods of lightning at the youth. Arkio knocked them away with the Spear of Telesto and in a flash he was at the Word Bearer’s throat, the lance slamming into the crozius with shrieks of tortured metal. Iskavan’s weapon warped the air around it with redolent malevolence and the two warriors went back and forth across the slick decking, blood jetting from wounds where blades made brief contact.

Arkio struck Iskavan’s bleeding stump with the blunt end of the spear and he let out a sound that chilled the marrow. The Apostle savagely returned the attack and found a tiny gap in Arkio’s defence. A solid hit spun the Space Marine in place and he stumbled. Iskavan, infinitely older and more heartless than the young Blood Angel, did not hesitate to follow the blow and struck once more. The fan of blades locked into the cables and fastenings that held Arkio’s backpack in place and severed them. The compact fusion reactor and the back plate of his armour, all went away in a flood of hurt. Arkio fell in a heap, barely able to hold on to the spear. Unable to move, Rafen watched in horror as the Apostle drew the last reserves of psionic energy from within himself and channelled them into the humming crozius.

The crackling disc of knives fell on Arkio like the will of a vengeful deity – and it met the teardrop blade with a blinding amber flash. The Chaos weapon shattered with the impact and Iskavan staggered back. Rafen’s brother slumped as if the effort had drained him of any more fight. But the Apostle was still standing. Iskavan looped the broken chains that had tethered his weapon in one hand and threw it over Arkio’s neck.

Rafen tried to drag himself toward his brother, his chest burning. The Traitor pulled the chain tight and choked the life from the Blood Angel.

Arkio’s body buckled and shivered. A sound like crackling thunder issued out of him, and he flexed suddenly, the motion throwing Iskavan off him, snapping the chain. The Apostle tumbled away and landed atop the inverted claw grab, the metal fingers cutting into him.

But Rafen saw none of that. His eyes were locked on the brilliant white wings that had emerged from his brother’s back. Arkio turned; he was radiant. Golden haloes lensed the air around him, and his face glowed. The expression there was hawkish and noble – but as baleful as hell itself.

Arkio’s seraph wings threw him into the air with a single stirring, and he rose to hover over Iskavan’s form. With an uncanny economy of motion, he summoned the spear and it flew to his fingers. The Apostle saw his fate coming and tried to pull himself to his feet. Arkio nodded to him, a benediction of sorts, and then his fangs were bared in a terrible cry. He threw the spear like a thunderbolt and it pierced Iskavan’s black heart. Rafen watched a flash of gold light envelop the Word Bearer lord. When it faded there was nothing but the lance and ashes.

Time blurred, and then Arkio was at Rafen’s side, a gentle warm hand on his neck, feeling for a pulse. ‘Brother?’ he said. ‘You will live. Trust me.’

Rafen’s heart hammered. The being before him, the face and the wings, the spear… It was no longer his sibling but the ancient artworks of Sanguinius given human form. Arkio knelt next to him, the very aspect of the great primarch reborn.

‘What… are you?’ He forced out the words, tears clouding his vision.

Arkio smiled, the beneficent expression of a million chapel windows there on his lips. ‘I am the Blood Angel, brother. I am the Deus Encarmine.’

Rafen tried desperately to shake his head, to deny it; but then the merciful void of unconsciousness swept up to take him, and he willingly submitted.

EPILOGUE

A messiah was created that day amid the people of Shenlong. In the depths of the factory, the low born joined the Blood Angels and the people of the upper cities, killing every last Word Bearer that dared to defile the planet with their existence. The lesser daemons that Iskavan had released were culled and their bodies were burnt in the huge fusion smelters that made the biggest of the Empire’s bombs. Across the city the voices of Astartes and civilian alike praised Arkio’s name. He walked among them, the ragged remains of his armour clinging to his chest and the great angelic wings unfurled behind him like magnificent white sails. The rise of the new crimson angel began on the ashes of traitors, as it was meant to be.

Rafen awoke to find Alactus standing over him. ‘Gently,’ he said. ‘Your healing trance is not long ended…’

‘Arkio…’ Rafen began, coming to his feet. His head swam and there were darts of agony all over him, but his flesh felt whole. He knew this uncomfortable, vulnerable sensation from battles past. His bones were still knitting, and his altered skin and organs were working him back to full strength. By the colour of his new scars, he knew that little time had passed since the battle with Iskavan.

‘The Blessed speaks today.’ Alactus said. ‘He personally charged me with the task of standing sentinel here.’ The Space Marine practically beamed as he said it. Rafen frowned; where was the man who had disputed Arkio on Cybele?

Rafen cast around for his equipment. ‘My wargear?’

‘Ruined,’ Alactus replied. ‘The tech-adepts have salvaged some elements, but it will not serve you again. Sachiel has ordered a fresh suit of armour be consecrated for your use.’ He paused. ‘Your bolter survived intact. It is at the armoury.’

Rafen donned a set of robes, noticing the altered Blood Angel’s symbol on them, with the gold halo and spear. ‘What’s this?’

‘The people have created it. They wear it to honour him.’

Anger crossed Rafen’s face and he tore the sigil off. ‘I’ll carry the mark of our Chapter and no other,’ he growled. ‘Take me to Arkio.’

‘That may not be possible. The Blessed is preparing to address the warriors of the reborn–’

‘Then take me to the chapel!’ Rafen broke in. ‘Or else get out of my way!’

Stele glanced over the balcony at the plaza. There was barely an inch of room out there, with the red shapes of the Blood Angels massing in silent, reverent ranks and the crimson sashes of the zealot army. Already, the warriors of the reborn were swelling with new conscripts every day, more even than could fit aboard Bellus. He tapped a finger on his lips as he studied them. Soon, he would have Sachiel select a thousand of the most ardent to accompany Arkio on his return to Baal. A smile threatened to emerge as he wondered what the great Dante would say when confronted with such a sight.

He sensed Ulan’s approach and turned to her. She bowed low. ‘Lord inquisitor, I bring news.’

He raised an eyebrow. It would be something important if the astropath was unwilling to transmit it from orbit. ‘Tell me.’

‘In the telepathic ducts I spied a remnant of the unauthorised signal that was sent from our vessel to Baal. It required several days of meditation to unfurl it, but I had some success.’

‘What was said?’ he asked in a low voice.

Ulan faltered. ‘That… datum was lost to me, lord. But I did intuit the code key of the brother who sent it. Veteran Sergeant Koris.’

‘Impossible.’ Stele snapped. ‘Koris was deep in the hold of the black rage, I saw to that.’

‘There is no doubt,’ she insisted. ‘The code was his.’

‘Who would dare use the vox of a dead man?’ the inquisitor asked. ‘These Astartes would not desecrate the armour of the fallen, it is one of their most sacred tenets.’ He fell silent as he saw a two figures making their way through the soldiery below, one in armour, the other hooded in robes. Stele knew instantly who he was looking at. ‘Rafen.’ He glanced at Ulan. ‘Return to Bellus. I will have need of you later.’

The astropath departed and Stele returned to the chapel where Sachiel stood over Arkio, at once commanding and servile. Chapter serfs crowded around the Blessed, dressing him in a suit of hallowed artificer armour, anointing it with oils.

‘Magnificent,’ Sachiel breathed, a spellbound look in his eyes.

Arkio did not look up. His ice-blue eyes were fixed on the floor of the chapel, unfocussed as the symphonies of battles fought untold centuries past whispered in his ears. Instead of the flat shapes of the Blood Angels’ armour that he had worn before, Arkio was now adorned in sheaths that glistened like bright summer sunlight. The arms and legs were moulded to suggest broad skeletal bones or powerful muscles straining beneath the ceramite, while the chest was broad and chiselled. Wings cast in white gold that matched those rising from his back adorned the breastplate, framing a single tear cut from a giant ruby. The design repeated on his left shoulder, while his right bore the image of the holy lance. Every inch of the armour was layered with new engravings, the words of freshly created prayers to the reborn angel. The wargear fitted him as if he had been born to wear it.

‘Vandire’s Oath!’ The curse brought all eyes to bear on Rafen as he entered the chapel. ‘You wear the gold?’

Sachiel stepped down to block his path. ‘He does, Rafen.’

‘But–’

‘But nothing.’ the priest growled. ‘You saw the emergence. You were there. Do you doubt your own sight?’

Rafen tried to find the words but they fled from him. He felt Stele’s iron gaze boring into him and his knees went weak.

‘Rafen, you have brought this moment upon yourself,’ Sachiel said, and he drew his reductor with one hand and the red grail with the other. ‘It is only by virtue of your blood kinship to him that I have tolerated your questioning of the Blessed’s divine nature, but now you have come to a moment of choice.’ He held the pistol before Rafen’s face. ‘Choose now, brother. You must swear your loyalty or stand against him. Kneel.’

He hesitated and Sachiel shouted, loud as a gunshot. ‘Kneel!’

Before he was even aware of it, Rafen dropped to one knee and saw the grail near his lips. Dark fluid swirled within.

‘By this oath, you pledge your life and your blood to Arkio the Blessed, Sanguinius Reborn, Lord of the Spear,’ intoned the priest. ‘Your faith and your honour, until death.’

Rafen looked up, and he met his sibling’s gaze. There was nothing but lordly hauteur there, and the subtle menace of coiled violence beneath. If I die here, then the last dissention is silenced, he thought, but to take this oath…

Sachiel’s face twisted in a cruel smile and his finger tightened on the trigger. But then Rafen denied him, reached out and took a drink from the cup.

‘By this oath,’ Rafen began, ‘I pledge my life to Arkio the Blessed.’ The blood was cold in his mouth, and sour like the ashen words he spoke aloud. He had denied it for too long, but now Rafen saw the truth of his path unfolding before him.

His brother was something strange and terrible, no longer a child of Baal, no longer sworn to their code. With the burning clarity of the rage racing in his veins, Rafen knew that soon a reckoning would come between Arkio and he that only one of them would survive.

Arkio smiled then, and it was awesome to behold. ‘Welcome, brother,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the New Blood.’

BLOOD DEBT

Author’s note: This story takes place several years before the events of
Deus Encarmine and the Third Armageddon War.

They abandoned the groundcar at the port gate when blood began to drool from the ventilator grilles. The machine grunted and sighed, the glass in the windows popping as it shifted and changed shape. The two of them ran, boots hammering across the road, shouldering their way through the swarming throng of terrified people.

The woman surveyed the crowds with care. It was not the first time she had been in the thick of a frightened mass, and she knew the capricious nature of a mob’s animal mentality. With the right demonstration of force they could be cowed, but just as quickly they might turn murderous. These screaming, weeping, scrambling hordes were heavy with fear. They wanted so desperately to live, and yet she knew that to a man they would be dead or dying before sunset.

She threw a glance over her shoulder and her companion gave her a frown. He had never once looked back at the city they were leaving behind, not from the moment that they had embarked on their headlong flight. In the distance, she could see where some of the taller hive towers had collapsed, parts of their structure altering on the molecular level, steel skeletons running like melted butter as the changes touched them. Buildings that had stood proud and defiant in the most Imperial of manners were now shambolic, tattered things, flayed of stone and bearing their iron ribs to the sky.

Dots ducked and wove in the air overhead – perhaps carrion birds, or maybe men and women like the ones she had killed to get the car, humans with newly-sprouted wings still wet with amniotic fluid.

Hot exhaust fumes threw a sudden curtain of spent-fuel stink over them as a transport thundered upward, the spitting engines vibrating and complaining. She watched it struggling to gain height, the cargo pods clustered beneath dangerously overloaded with refugees. Something inside broke with a cough of grey vapour, and the craft dipped sharply toward the ground. She grabbed her companion’s cloak and pulled him into the lee of a blockhouse just seconds before the ship crashed. The concussion blew down the crowd like falling timbers, and for long moments her hearing was replaced by a low, hissing whistle.

He stood first, his mouth moving even though his voice was lost to her.

‘This way. Keep going’.

She nodded. Acrid chemical smoke pooled around their ankles as they ran, the rough winds across the landing fields catching the hems of their cloaks and flapping them back like sails. They wore the simple robes of pilgrims, the clothing common to the endless migrations of penitents that came to Orilan to visit the tombs of the Faded Lords; but no pilgrims carried the combat webbing or weapons holsters that they wore underneath. Other ships passed over them, climbing on spears of white fire toward the high clouds. The horizon was full of fleeing silver darts, desperate to escape the horror engulfing the planet.

In the first few hours of the outbreak, the vox-casts had described the effect as a virus, warning people to stay in their homes and avoid large congregations; but it quickly became clear that the changes were not the creation of some malignant micro-organism, nor were they limited to humans. Animals, insects, even plants began to shift and mutate. New forms arose on every corner, disgusting and loathsome things that sprouted horns or festoons of lapping tentacles. And then the inert and inorganic fell prey to the creeping aberration, as iron, stone and plastic warped beneath its touch. Some of the hysterical bulletins spoke about night-dark shadows wafting through the canyons of the city, leaving surreal and unnatural malformations in their wake. Sanity itself seemed to have fled Orilan, allowing things that were once corralled in nightmares to run wild in the cold light of reality.

She shook her head to clear it and blinked. Her companion stabbed a finger at a shifting cluster of people clinging to the edges of a boarding ramp. ‘That one,’ he said, ‘yes?’

‘Yes,’ she replied. Atop the ramp was a planetary lighter, an orbital shuttle of a crude but quite speedy type. Similar ships were employed across the Imperium and she knew that if circumstances required, she would be able to pilot the craft herself. The lighter wore the logo of a freight haulage agency that carried cargo and passengers from platforms in the orbital rings, to the surface of the planet and back again. She estimated that with enough reaction mass and a good course, the ship might get them to Orilan’s outermost moon.

Where the ramp ended, a large servitor drone was blocking the open loading hatch, picking figures from the swarming throng with rough metal grippers. Valuables and items of all sorts, from coin bags to barrels of amasec and musical instruments, lay in a pile near its clawed feet. There were perhaps a hundred and fifty people between the two of them and the servitor. Her face set in a grim mask, the woman’s hand dipped into the slit in the folds of her cloak, fingers touching the careworn butt of an old but steadfast stubber pistol. She scanned the people, looking for a target that would make the most disruption when she hit it.

‘Wait.’ His left hand touched her elbow, and she saw that his right was also swallowed by the mass of his robes. He had that look in his eyes, the misty, slightly vacant glitter that came on him when he was reading people. ‘Be ready.’

The words had barely left his lips when a commotion began in the heart of the crowd. A peculiar ululating scream flew from the mouth of a gangly dockworker in a coverall. The unfortunate threw himself about, crashing into other people, screeching as he collided with them. Those around him struggled to get away, sending ripples of motion through the crowd. Figures at the ramp’s edges were pushed off into the sheer well of the exhaust pit below. Ripping sounds came from inside the man’s clothing, and dark fans of blood discoloured his torso. From places on his chest and face, forests of needle-like spines erupted, tearing out of him. He jerked wildly, a puppet pulled by pain. The mob cried out in shock.

She watched the change take the dockworker with grotesque fascination. Since the morning, she had seen it occur more than a dozen times, but each riotous mutation was different from the last, horribly watchable in its repugnant display.

‘Now!’ said her companion, and her fascination snapped like a thread. He was springing forward, the ornate shape of a master-crafted lasgun filling his fist. She fell into the confusion behind him, drawing her own weapon. It was less fancy than his, but just as elegant in its lethality. They reeled from him as he moved. He laid hands on them, brushed them with his fingers, and people recoiled as if they had been burned. Sweat beaded his brow despite the cold air, the effort of it straining him.

Amid the screams and howls, they forced their way through the crowd as ocean predators would knife through a shoal of fish. She felt her gut tighten as the ramp shuddered; the cargo hatch was beginning to descend, preparing to seal the shuttle. ‘Two more. Two more,’ grated the servitor, taking the coat hems of a merchant gentleman and his mistress, dragging them forward. ‘Last ones. No more.’

Had it been necessary, her companion could have communicated his intent to her with a brief thought; but they had been together for so long, faced so many situations such as this one that neither of them needed to consider their next move. The two of them raised their guns and shot the gentleman and lady through the backs of their skulls, blowing brain matter and bone across the servitor’s carapace. The machine-slave obeyed its programming automatically and dropped the dead bodies. ‘Two more,’ it said. ‘Last ones.’

Some people understood what was transpiring and tried to push forward, but by then it was too late, and the woman and the man were ducking to get under the hatch, followed by the stooped servitor, it’s manipulators full of swag. Fresh blood still dripped from it as the helot worked the locks. Fists rang on the hull, dull thuds resonating into the cargo bay.

The bay’s interior was a web of netting and spars, to which dozens of Orilani had attached themselves, terrified that they would be torn out of their escape vessel before it made lift-off. She saw the servitor lock itself into an acceleration couch and grabbed at a loose curl of webbing. Below their feet, the rocket motor spat out flame, burning alive the people they left behind as it rose into the air.

The lighter presented its blunt prow to the sky as it lifted away from the chaos of the starport, sweeping across the edge of the city. The engines laboured to hold the vessel on course, but by the Emperor’s grace there was fuel enough in the tanks to burn the boosters hot. The ship clawed into the air, threading through thin streaks of cloud and the sooty plumes of burning buildings.

Something in the haze of corruption moved in a way that windborne smoke never would have. By turns and heartbeats, a black glitter of movement came falling towards the sweating, groaning ship. It was ephemeral and gauzy, a shimmer on spoiled waters, a glow from the wings of an insect swarm. It touched the vessel’s fuselage and coated the hull like wet paint, rolling in coils across the metal fuselage, down and about.

Searching. Feeling. Seeking a way inside.

As the vessel rose into Orilan’s upper atmosphere, the inky shroud at last found a microscopic flaw in the hull. And with a controlled, fierce will, it poured itself in through the gap.

Vonorof felt empty and sick, as if the G-forces pushing him into the pilot’s couch were leaching his very life essence away. As the blackness of space unfolded across the cockpit window, the pestilent sights he left behind still dogged him, replaying over and over in his mind’s eye. The tree outside the chapel as it turned about its length to present a maw of teeth. The roadway that melted under his feet. His daughter wailing as her eyes fell from her head, her face sprouting tendrils and cilia. As hard as he tried, Vonorof could not shake the images away. He blinked. He was still crying. He had been for quite some time now. The hatch behind him irised open and he gave a start. Panic rolled around inside him and he steeled himself, at last daring to turn and face the figure that had entered.

A pilgrim, his face haunted and drawn. About his neck pooled a rough-hewn hood, framing a bald head dominated by an electro-tattoo of the Imperial aquila. In one ear glittered a single purity stud of old pewter.

Vonorof suddenly found his voice. ‘You shouldn’t be up here! This is a restricted area–’

‘Not to me,’ the man’s voice was flat with fatigue, but it brooked no argument. He pushed into the cockpit and the pilot glimpsed another figure behind him in the gangway, another pilgrim hanging back. ‘Change course,’ said the bald man.

Vonorof felt a peculiar tension around the thick brass sockets in the base of his neck, where the sinuous mechadendrites of the lighter’s command chair connected directly to his brain. A subtle pressure, pushing on his will. He tasted a greasy sensation in the stale recycled air of the cabin. In all honesty, he had not given a lot of consideration to where he would go when he lifted the ship; he had half-expected not even to get this far. The vague, animal need to escape the insanity on the planet had been driving him with its directionless energy. ‘Where to?’ he asked, slipping into a position of inferiority before he was even aware of it.

The man pointed; in the distance, starlight glittered off the hull of a vessel in high orbit. Direct machine code feeds from the lighter’s cogitators told Vonorof that it was a Gladius-class frigate, a warship of a kind only employed by the Emperor’s Space Marine legions, the Adeptus Astartes. ‘Approach that craft.’

A flood of panic seized the pilot. The frigate was the colour of old blood, a red scar in the sky, and even from this distance he could see the clouds of debris that were all that remained of craft that had strayed too close to it. ‘A blockade ship,’ the words spilled from his lips in a rush, ‘they’ll destroy us, even if there are no infected on board!’

‘There is no disease,’ said the pilgrim, the weariness hollowing his voice. ‘Do as I say.’

Vonorof glanced from the viewport and made eye contact with the man. Instantly, any arguments died in his throat and the pilot found his head bobbing in a wooden nod. The pilgrim’s will overpowered him easily, and he turned the transport with quick motions, bringing it on a direct intercept course with the frigate. On some level, a small part of Vonorof’s mind rebelled at the sudden compulsion that had come over him, but it was a weak and feeble voice that railed against the man’s dominating presence.

He wiped a sheen of sweat from his head and licked dry lips. Retreating from the cockpit, he found his companion waiting in the anteroom, watching him with a level gaze. He saw accusation there, a telltale so subtle that only someone who knew her as well as he did could notice. He ignored the flicker of irritation that coiled inside him and sealed the hatch, leaving Vonorof to fulfil his orders.

‘You are putting us at risk,’ she told him. ‘The Astartes will surely obliterate this shuttle.’ The woman threw a nod in the direction of the frigate. ‘You saw the hull livery. The Blood Angels. They’re not known for their mercy.’

‘Fortunate for me then that I do not seek it.’

She shook her head. ‘We should attempt a stealthy approach to the outer lunar colony and then–’

He held up a hand to silence her. ‘Marain, I know what I am doing. Trust me.’

Her eyes narrowed and an unspoken emotional charge passed between them. The issue of trust was a raw wound, a chasm yawning wide between them. After a long moment, he pushed past her, a new kind of weariness in his bones.

Marain watched the man pick his way through a mass of hastily stowed possessions, rooting in the depths of an equipment locker.

‘You are so sure of yourself, Ramius.’ She studied him with different eyes; curious that he could have that effect on her, not once or twice, but over and over. The first time Marain had laid eyes upon him, she had been afraid of Ramius, although her training forbade her to show even the slightest inkling of it. The man she had feared that day differed from the person she had learnt to respect; in turn, that man was different from the Ramius who had bedded her and shown her love of a sort, for a while; and again, that man was not the man she saw now, drinking from a water pack, pressing at his face as if the skin on it were a poorly-hung mask.

‘Your soldier’s eyes,’ he said quietly, the ghost of a smile on his lips. ‘Watchful.’

‘It’s what I am,’ she retorted. ‘What I do.’

Ramius turned away. ‘There’s no war here.’

‘You’re wrong,’ Marain told him, ‘There’s always war. If there were not, you would have no need for someone like me.’

He peered through a porthole. ‘You are more than just a protector…’

The unspoken remainder of the statement made her lip curl. ‘Once, perhaps, but not now. That road is closed to us.’

Ramius turned swiftly to face her. Was that hurt in his eyes, some flash of betrayal? Had he expected Marain to take his side in all of this? She held away any reaction, keeping her aspect utterly neutral.

He read her thoughts in her eyes; he could have laid them bare and known her mind inside out if he was prepared to expend the psychic effort, but Ramius was spent from tension and, although he hated to admit it, guilt. Marain’s accusing face, her tawny skin framing a hard line of lips and dark eyes, arranged in judgement of him. In reproach of his mistakes, his folly.

She blamed him for it all, for the madness on Orilan. He could not dispute her. The truth of it was, his curiosity and arrogance would cost a world its life.

Marain came close to him, and he felt a surge of adrenaline as her lips spoke at his ear in a hushed murmur, too low to carry beyond the intimacy of the anteroom. ‘You must atone, Ramius. Admit your errors and ask for forgiveness.’ For all the quiet of the whisper, it was as loud a demand as a shout. He pulled away, unable to cover the sudden, naked fear on his face.

‘I… I cannot.’ Ramius husked.

Marain’s disappointment coloured her words. ‘You will die at the hands of the Blood Angels, along with everyone else on this scow. You have until then to consider your repentance.’ She left him there to muse on her words, dropping back into the tunnel to the lighter’s cargo decks.

The ship had one compartment that could be considered to be ‘luxury’ accommodation, at least by the standards of comparison to the rest of the craft. The addition of some threadbare acceleration couches retrofitted from a fire-damaged starliner and a broken entertainment holosphere were all the lighter offered. The cabin was full of people, every seat taken, every inch of tattered carpeted floor filled with human traffic. The air was thick with body odour as the ventilators laboured to handle the miasma generated by the refugees. Under other circumstances, fights might have broken out as people jockeyed for more room; but not this time. The passengers who had bribed or cajoled their way on to Vonorof’s shuttle were too afraid to do anything other than watch one another for signs of the change. A dead woman lay in one of the aisles, her skull crushed by the boots of her neighbours. Just prior to lift-off she had begun to writhe, and as one they had piled upon her and murdered her where she sat, terrified that the mutations would burst from her body and turn upon them. Fear drove them, none of them caring if her palsy was caused by something else. No one dared to cough or to speak. None of them wanted to be next.

The compartment adjoined an engineering space. Running the length of the ship, it was filled with pipes for breathing gas and conduits labelled with arcane symbols that only Mechanicus adepts understood. Through this cluttered artery the darkness moved like liquid, flowing across every surface. When it passed the cabin wall it paused. It sensed life in there, very close. Very afraid.

The black form drew the gossamer edges of itself together into a ball of diamond hardness, fashioning a blade-point. A flicker of motion forced it into the metal and a finger-thick hole popped open, directly behind the shoulders of a corpulent, sweaty man. Held in place by the press of flesh, he could only flap his hands and wail as the shape punched through his spine and bored through his torso. His dying act was to tear the shirt from his chest; and then the darkness erupted in streams from every pore of his skin, turning him inside out.

People either side of the fat man warped like flowing candle wax, growing fans of teeth or eyes that popped open from boils. Everyone reacted at once, screaming, scrambling, a mass of humans all trying to force themselves through a narrow hatch and away from the tide of changes. The blackness swooped, kissing them with corruption and shredding their bodies. It formed a rudimentary maw from thin streams of matter and contorted, pressing air out of its makeshift mouth. The squeal of noise distorted until it became a recognisable word.

‘Ramius.’

Marain heard the horrible voice and her blood ran cold. The name tolled like a bell, the ghostly moan resonating down the tunnel. Where the bare skin of her hands clasped the rungs of the access ladder, she felt the metal under her fingers grow warm and pliant, turning fleshy. The air in the conduit became damp and breathy with the bouquet of rotting meat. The tunnel began to undulate and move, growing ribs and coils of cartilage. The sound of bone cracking spurred her into action and she let her weight carry her down to the cargo deck level. Wet trickles of stringy spittle followed, pooling at her feet in frothy puddles. She threw a quick glance up; the tunnel was turning into an open throat, some giant mutant oesophagus. Marain’s gun was in her hand as she sprinted forward, shoving blank-faced refugees out of her way.

Ramius detected the psychic spoor of the dark-thing moments before his physical senses registered the stink of rended flesh. Inwardly he cursed; he had tired to the point that his well-honed warning senses had let him down. Tendrils like aerial roots crawled up the walls of the antechamber, probing and tasting. In the places where they touched objects, the tentacle-things split to reveal toothed lips, enveloping each new discovery like a snake eating a rodent. Ramius’s gun shrieked, ozone searing the air as laser bolts shrivelled the invading probes. The shots beat them back, but it was only a temporary respite. With cold honesty, he understood that his mistakes had come to gather him to their breast, understanding that his hopes of escape and denial were childish and unrealistic. From below, the mutation hooted its terrible rendition of his name once again.

The clinical aspect of his nature assumed control. Based on his experiments, he had a rough approximation of the time it would take the change to sweep the shuttle. He imagined that outside now, the sleek metal lines of the lighter were slowly turning into swathes of skin and scale. Ramius forced open the hatch to the cockpit, holstering the gun and discarding the pilgrim robes as he did.

The pilot’s face was florid; he would be the worst off, Ramius mused, wired into the vessel, feeling each moment of warping as the ship was transmuted. It would not be long before the man would become subsumed into his console, meat and pseudo-flesh merging together; and so time was of the essence. ‘Hail the frigate,’

‘Wh-what is happening–?’

Ramius slapped him hard across the face. ‘Hail them!’

Vonorof worked a set of glyphs and the tinny hiss of a short-range vox issued from a transceiver. ‘They won’t answer. They’ll kill us!’

The cloak fell about his ankles, revealing the ceramite-plate battle jacket beneath, the vest of fine Phaedran silks. He drew an icon from inside the folds where it hung on a thick chain and gripped it. The object responded with an inner fire, lighting the black eye sockets of the skull carved upon it. Vonorof knew the shape of the thing instantly; a thick gothic letter ‘I’ adorned with runes and chasings.

‘Astartes, hear me,’ intoned the bald man, ‘know my name and purpose. I am the Inquisitor Ramius Stele of the Ordo Hereticus. My agent and I are trapped aboard this vessel and we require rescue. I carry the Emperor’s divine sigil. I must have passage!’

The pilot’s lips trembled. Inquisitors were things spoke of in hushed whispers on Orilan; in the streets of the unremarkable outworld. Vonorof had heard stories of men who had actually seen them, but they were more myth than fact, spun with lies and mad truths. He gaped at Stele as the man ignored him, all his attention on the growing shape of the frigate. It was too much for his simple, parochial mind to accept.

‘Brother-captain,’ said Simeon. ‘A development.’

Tycho glanced up, the glow of the pict-plate map beneath him casting a sinister light across the half-mask covering the right side of his face. In the sullen glow of the warship’s tacticarium, the haze of hololithic light from the consoles ranged around them gave everything a baleful aspect.

‘Speak,’ he demanded, the ever-present edge of irritation in his tone, ‘I tire of culling these infected wretches, brother. I hope you have something more challenging for me.’

Simeon nodded. ‘A signal from this ship,’ he tapped at a moving dot on the map. ‘The codes are present and correct. It would appear that an inquisitor of the Imperial Church is aboard. A man of some import and rank among the Ordo Hereticus, so it would seem.’

‘Indeed?’ said Tycho. ‘Unfortunate. Be certain to have a servitor take his name so that his death will be duly noted.’

Simeon shifted slightly. ‘You misunderstand me, captain. The man demands assistance. He calls for a rescue.’

Tycho raised an eyebrow at the temerity of the statement. ‘Nothing is to leave Orilan alive, Simeon. Those were our orders. The gunners have the ship in their sights, so bid them to fire.’

‘With respect, lord, those orders are open to your interpretation.’ The other Blood Angel frowned. ‘Captain, this is a direct command from a member of the Ecclesiarchy. We cannot simply ignore it.’

Simeon’s commander ran a hand over his chin, his eyes narrowing. ‘We risk contamination if we enter the craft,’ he said, thinking aloud. ‘A great hazard.’

‘There will be mutants on board,’ Simeon added. He knew Tycho well, having served under him for many decades. He could almost see the turn in the captain’s mood as it rolled forth like a storm cloud across the sky. Moments earlier, Tycho had admitted to his distaste at a mission better suited to a picket ship of the Imperial Navy; Simeon did not for a moment believe that the rescue would be a hard sell to his commander. They were Blood Angels, after all. They craved the cut and thrust of close-in action, not this paltry stand-off battle. He pressed the issue a little more. ‘If the vox-casts from the planet are anything to go by, organics and inorganics will be changing into predatory forms. I would measure the inquisitor’s life span in minutes, lord.’

A thin line of amusement pulled at Tycho’s lips, and his hand twitched. There; that was the choice made, then. ‘Perhaps we should respond. It is only right.’ He stood up and strode away from his command dais, Simeon turning to watch him go. ‘Have a skirmish force of men meet me in the teleportarium. Tell them to arm for a close quarter engagement.’

Brother Simeon took a half step after Tycho. ‘Captain, there is no need for you to go in person. I would gladly take the–’

Tycho silenced him with a look. ‘There is every reason for me to go.’ The eagerness to taste battle, even something as brief as this, danced in the captain’s single human eye. ‘Tell this inquisitor that his salvation is on its way.’ A slight smile flickered on his lips, and was gone. ‘You have the bridge, Simeon.’

Marain.

She could tell by the weakness of his mind-touch that Ramius was at the limits of his mental reserves. The telepathic message was a ghostly caress, and she almost missed it in the melee. She broke off the neck of a howling, eyeless mutant child with the butt of her gun as she fumbled out a fresh ammunition pack for the weapon. Marain ignored Stele’s entreaty as she reloaded, allowing him to see through her eyes. She gave him freedom to touch her surface thoughts; it was far easier than framing a verbal answer.

Attend me, quickly. The Astartes are coming. Leave these people, they are already dead.

Her face twisted in a grimace. ‘Get to the saviour pods!’ she yelled at the untainted ones, ‘Leave everything and go!’ Marain bracketed the shambling, warped things with gunfire, but the more she killed, the more they recruited from the ranks of the panicked Orilani. It was a losing fight.

She forced an elderly man into the nearest pod with an angry shout, trying not to dwell on the logic of her actions. Marain’s conviction was fuelled by guilt and responsibility, even as part of her tried to forget that the passengers were just as likely to mutate in the saviour pods as anywhere else. Even if the pods actually launched, what good would it do? Drifting in space, the escapees would suffocate or be shot down, and if by some miracle they made it down to the surface, what would be waiting for them but more new kinds of death?

Ramius was still in her head, leafing through her thoughts as if he were thumbing the pages of a book. She showed him her intent to stay, at least until these poor wretches had escaped this death ship. Ramius tugged on her memories, on the threads of loyalty that she had for him; with a savage mental swipe, she cut them off, heat building in her cheeks, hot tears prickling her eyes. Marain tasted his shocked understanding as he realised she had rejected her unswerving fealty to him. The guardian’s sense of duty had been outstripped by Stele’s perfidy.

He saw things he had never dared to search for, as she showed him her hidden self, the doubts and fears she had concealed from him. Her training had acquitted itself well, and never once had the inquisitor suspected that Marain would harbour such ill will toward him. The woman had known all along about the nature of his research, the arcane prohibited experiments that he had been conducting. She had known and said nothing, such was her allegiance, her dogged dedication to him.

But now that had changed; Stele had gone too far, and Marain would be silent no longer. He saw her intentions, to reveal him to the Ordo Hereticus, to disclose the whole sorry story of his transgressions. If she lived, she would expose him.

Marain felt him leave her mind in a gust of psychic cold, a melancholy, sad wind fading away.

Ramius staggered with the impact of what he had sensed and bumped into the cabin wall. He felt hollow. Marain, the one unchanging rock in the seas of his doubt, and she had elected to betray him. He shook his head. Could she not understand? He had never intended things to get out of control! He had only wanted to learn, to understand. Was that so hard for her to comprehend? Did the quest for knowledge make him a traitor? He felt sick inside as he realised that for Marain, the answer was yes.

The pilot slumped forward, dying along with his ship. Stele ignored him, ignored the growing wetness in the atmosphere as the shuttle’s metallic slowly turned into fleshy stomachs and stinking gut-chambers. He felt an overwhelming sense of despair that blocked out everything else. Everything was going wrong, and now she rejected him. As quickly as it appeared, the emotion in him became hot anger. How dare she? How dare a mere soldier sit in judgement of Ramius Stele?

That she has been his lover gave her no right to castigate him or his methods. So be it, then. She had deserted him, and he would do the same to her. Let her stay on this ruined barge and die with the rest of these unfortunates.

Distracted by his own thoughts, Stele’s attention wandered and he did not see it until it was too late.

Vonorof’s twitchy body did something unspeakable and lightning-fast, bones snap-cracking as they reversed in their sockets, new lines of mouths opening in fanged maws. The pilot-mutant sprang at him, and Ramius drew back, but there was nowhere to go. The creature’s attack knocked the lasgun from his fingers, and before he could muster a spark of psyker force, it was on him, battering his skull against the decking. It screamed and gibbered, words turning into a mush of slurred sound.

Spirals of colour lit behind Ramius’s eyes and the breath left his lungs, blood trickling into his vision. He was dimly aware of something else entering the cramped chamber, something larger and deadly. His mind briefly touched the edge of a cool, killer’s intellect.

The chattering mutant reared up, ready to tear out his throat; and just as quickly it exploded in a wet gout of purpled matter.

Ears ringing, his vision tunnelling, Stele barely managed to slide free of the mutant’s steaming torso as a huge figure hove into sight. He wiped contaminated blood from his eyes to see shimmering greaves of brass and crimson filling his vision. Atop the tower of armour was a face that was half pale flesh, half gold mirror. A sneer coiled on the lips of the lofty figure. ‘Bring him,’ it rumbled.

‘There are others still alive on the lower decks of the lighter.’ The second voice came from a red giant standing at the hatchway. ‘What is to be done, lord?’

‘Save what you can,’ said the half-face, the words following Ramius into the darkness of unconsciousness. ‘Cull the rest.’

His mind floated in an ocean of crystal voids, sharp jags of memory and sensation ripping into him, needles of recollection tearing across the inquisitor’s psyche. On some level, he understood that his corporeal body was teetering on the edge of coma and within, his psionic essence was undirected and broken, wandering the caverns of his soul. He sensed the boil and churn of the empyrean out there, just beyond the real, the realm of warp space where unknowable things lived. Even as he feared them, there was much of Ramius Stele that coveted the knowledge of these creatures, of how and what they were.

He knew that emotion all too well. It was this drive in him that had brought ruin to Orilan.

There was laughter.

Cruel and mocking, amused at his plight. Stele tried to shy away from it, but it found him wherever he hid.

‘Look what you have wrought,’ The words were the breath of corpses. ‘Do not hide from it, inquisitor. See it. Know it and own your deeds.’

Against his will, Stele’s mind reeled back to the library once more, forced down through the years to the point where it had all begun.

Always the library, the place where he had first glimpsed the great potential for himself. It had been on Ariyo, after the burning of the Simbasa Heretics; there, as the Guardsmen put the torch to the storehouse of unhallowed texts, Ramius had dared to read from a volume that fell open at his feet. It had been an accident, just a small thing. He had looked, just dared to look. And what he read, glimpsed even…

What he saw there planted seeds of fervent interest, nurtured by the radicalism already seated in his heart. As the years passed, as he grew more disenchanted with the decrepitude of the Ecclesiarchy and the lackwits among his superiors, Ramius concealed his disgust while he sought out more forbidden knowledge and plumbed the greater depths of psyker witchery.

‘Do you remember the day I spoke to you?’ The voice was enthralling, just as it had been the first time. ‘You thought I was a dream. But I was the wind of change upon your limited mind. I opened you, Ramius. You welcomed me.’

Perhaps this was an illusion, he wondered, some product of his injuries.

‘You know better than that.’

And then he tasted the name of the creature in his mind.

Malfallax.

‘Yes.’ A hot pressure shoved Stele’s memories to the secret chamber beneath the old temple on Orilan. To the place where the death of the world had begun, hours ago now, days past.

‘You were unready. Too eager. Look what it brought you.’

The inquisitor watched the events unfold as if he were a passive observer, merely an audience member at some gaudy theatre play; he struggled fruitlessly, as if he could somehow throw a warning back in time to himself not to begin the Rite of Binding. He had made a mistake. It was so clear to him now in retrospect; one single ritual syllable spoken incorrectly, the emphasis on the rising glottal stop instead of the falling fricative…

A small thing. But enough to uncage the Tzeentch-thing he had called to the chamber.

Stele watched it happen again, sensing his tormentor taking amusement from his squirming. He saw himself walk through the drawing of the circle and the eightfold star within. Then, the lengthy and brutal murder of the vagrant to grant the blood sacrament. At last, the coming of the funnel of swarming shadow shaping into form in the middle of the stone basement. His rapt expression of delight – and then the sudden turn to terror as it struck out, metamorphosing the rock and metal into gnashing teeth, ripping out past the feeble wards he had been sure would hold it. Into the city, hungry for sustenance.

Screaming. Fading.

Free.

Weak denials formed in Ramius’s mind. How could I have known? It was an accident! He had never intended to unleash the thing, only to capture and study the monstrosity so he might gain insight into the nature of the Change Lord.

Malfallax smiled. ‘You delude yourself, Stele. Deep in your heart, you wanted to let it go. There is a part of you that hates the old order, the staid and the static. You lust for change and metamorphosis.’

When he tried to find a way to frame a retort, Ramius discovered his thoughts frozen by the damning truth in the warp creature’s words.

‘If this is not what you wanted, you could have stepped back from the brink. You chose not to. The willingness to sacrifice the woman is all the proof I require. You want this. You desire to know the the way in which Malfallax overpowers you.’

Stele’s psyche recoiled beneath the awful, unstoppable reality. ‘And with your own longing you make yourself my willing cohort.’

The laughter faded and he let the blood-warm darkness swallow him.

The Blood Angels marched the survivors into the frigate’s launch bay, forcing them into a huddled group in the middle of the deck. Medicae servitors probed and examined them while Space Marines with loaded bolters walked in steady, watchful orbits around the poor wretches. They had all expected to die on the shuttle, but to be rescued by these crimson-sheathed giants was like the hand of the God-Emperor himself reaching down to scoop them from the jaws of death. Panic and terror had been replaced with a different breed of fear, one borne of reverence and a lifetime of awe.

A hatch in the wall irised open to admit one of Simeon’s officers, a taciturn Codicer in blue armour, his grizzled face lined with age. The Space Marine took a few steps and stumbled to a sudden halt, his jaw dropping open.

One of the Blood Angels guarding the refugees caught sight of his reaction and approached him. ‘Brother Varon? Is something wrong?’

‘Daemon!’ Varon suddenly shouted the word, his finger stabbing out at a nondescript woman in a tattered evening dress, rocking gently side-to-side amid the rescued. Corded muscles stood out on the psyker’s neck as his preternatural senses tasted the psychic stench of something monstrous hidden inside the cowl of her flesh.

The other survivors threw themselves aside as the woman sighed, each of them all too familiar by now with the ways of the change.

Her body twitched and deflated, crumbling in on itself. A swarm of black motes issued from her eyes, her nostrils, ears and mouth. The Blood Angels opened fire on reflex, cutting down those too slow to get out of the way, laying a spread of bolt shells into the host-corpse. The dead woman flew apart in wet hanks of fast-decaying flesh, but the dark-thing was already free. It looped around like a streamer of liquid shadow and threw itself at the psyker Space Marine, becoming a glistening spear.

Varon marshalled all his ability at once and channelled his Quickening into a mental shield; for an instant he thought it might have been enough.

The force of the daemon’s murderous attack shattered his ephemeral defence like brittle glass, melting into the ceramite armour protecting his chest and tearing him inside out like a long and bloody streamer of meat. The shade came around, trailing Varon’s blood and viscera, and beheaded a screaming Chapter serf with callous abandon, playing with the disorder it was creating.

In the frigate’s chirurgery, Stele bolted awake. He reeled up from the examination table where he lay, scattering trays of instruments and knocking aside the medicae servitors tending to him.

‘It’s here,’ he spat, ‘aboard the ship!’

The shadow-creature warped the flesh of human and Astartes alike, murdering them by forcing unholy new shapes from their bodies. Some perished as their bones and organs were forcibly altered into eight-pointed stars and hate glyphs. The daemon enjoyed this recreation, but it was secondary to the real reason it had come this far.

With a breathy sigh, it left its toys behind and the creature gathered up enough sustenance from the shrivelled dead. It surged down the corridors of the frigate, painting taint and corruption where it passed. It left a few survivors here and there to speak of what it had wrought; there was no sense in creating such great art if no one lived to witness it.

Down through the decks, shunting and flickering, dodging through barricades and the hastily-erected psyker wards of Tycho’s Librarians, it fell through microscopic cracks in the metal and ceramite, tasting power in the air, moving toward it.

In the beating heart of the ship, past the locks made of heavy, poisonous phase-iron and the pitiful spirit deflectors, the shadow at last entered the holy chamber of the frigate’s stardrives.

Tech-priests who had never ventured beyond the confines of the drive core scattered, babbling prayers to the Omnissiah or weeping blood. Enginseers brandished tools as weapons and died screeching where they stood.

The daemon made itself into a vague man-shape and drifted to the huge cylinders of the warp engines, stalking forward on pointed, glassine legs.

Beneath the casings of the mighty drives, technologies almost akin to magic seethed and roiled, great powers capable of remaking the laws of the universe barely held in check by weakling organic men with little comprehension of their true potential. The creature smiled and spread itself thin, touching the matter of the engines and changing them by degrees. Slowly it gathered in flesh and metal, and began to build itself a nest.

Captain Tycho came to him eventually, as Stele knew he would. He watched the sullen light of the floating glow-globes caress the finely-tooled mask across Tycho’s cheek and he wondered about what the Astartes hid beneath it. He had picked rumour and hearsay from the minds of the Chapter helots in the medicae chamber – something vague about a disfigurement caused in combat with an ork psyker. If it were true, then little wonder that the brother-captain hid his mutilation. The aesthetic sensibilities of any Blood Angel would be offended by such a sight. On another day, if Stele were not so fatigued from all that had transpired, he might have been able to pluck the whole story from Tycho’s mind itself; but Ramius was unwilling to risk such an intrusion, not when his life depended on the goodwill of the Sons of Sanguinius.

The captain wasted no time with preamble and fixed him with a hard eye. ‘What is this monstrosity that has come aboard my ship, inquisitor? Tell me what madness unfolded on Orilan that it could spawn something so aberrant?’ His face – what Stele could see of it – was locked in a hard grimace.

Ramius measured his every gesture with the skill and care that had been drilled into him since his days as an interrogator-apprentice. One hint of a lie and he knew he would be vented to space. Tycho would be able to do it and claim Stele was consumed by Chaos; he doubted any of the captain’s men would leap to the defence of a servant of the Ordo Hereticus. They respect only brute strength, he reminded himself. I will have to display some measure of that in order to sway them.

He gave a sigh of remorse, calculated to be long enough and deep enough to seem real. ‘Captain Tycho, if only you had seen what I have seen…’ He shook his head sadly. ‘A nest of cultists infesting every level of the hive city. I regret… my own caution led me to them too late. By the time I arrived in their concealed lair, they had already summoned the creature.’ In reality, Stele had fabricated evidence to cover his own tracks weeks before he had arrived on the planet, inventing a dozen false identities and faked verification that ‘proved’ the presence of a cult of Tzeentch in Orilan’s capital hive. ‘I killed them all, but it was a hollow victory. The damage had already been wrought.’

Tycho watched him, the stony cast of the Space Marine’s flesh as immobile as the brassy mask on the other. ‘You brought it here.’ It was a statement, not an accusation. The Blood Angel seemed to sense the inquisitor was lying about something. It was the nature of the ordos, after all; falsehood was to Stele’s kind as armour was to Tycho’s Chapter. ‘A number of my men, some of my serfs, an untold number of servitors… All lie dead and defiled by the hand of this…thing. Those that were not killed outright I have been forced to put down.’ He advanced a step and Stele thought he could smell stale blood. ‘Now it chews on the heart of this ship like a dog with a shank of meat.’ With a sudden shock, the inquisitor sensed Tycho’s surface thoughts as the captain made his demand of him. ‘I want this fiend ejected from my vessel, lord inquisitor. You will assist me in achieving this end.’

Stele clamped down on his reaction immediately. The last thing he wanted was to find himself in a room with the daemon once again; but to refuse outright would seem like cowardice and lose him the small measure of reverence his high office granted him. ‘Captain, with respect, this creature is one of the most powerful daemons I have come across. It is a most deadly enemy, the very essence of change and mutation. It thrives on disorder and–’

‘Chaos?’ Tycho snapped, his tone cracking like brittle ice. ‘I want it dead, Stele, and you will help with that desire.’ He could sense it clearly now, the blood-need in Tycho’s mind. The unchained fury desperate for the battle to come. ‘Or should I assume that men of your ilk are as spineless in the face of the Archenemy as I have been led to believe?’

Stele’s eyes narrowed. I must play the warrior’s game, then. ‘I warn you, captain, keep a civil tongue in your head. I am as staunch in the Emperor’s light as you!’ The lie glided from him like smooth glass, and inwardly Ramius felt ice form in his stomach. The pull of his oath to the Golden Throne waned with every passing day, conflicting him with the sweet nectar of the warp’s promise. A nerve jumped beneath his eye; despite his fears, he still wanted to face the daemon, to know it.

‘Good,’ said the Space Marine, glancing over his shoulder at his second-in-command. ‘Simeon, return the inquisitor’s lasgun, and prepare a squad.’

‘Your will,’ said the other officer.

The ghost of a smile returned to Tycho’s face. ‘And be sure you lock the hatches behind us.’

They began a decent into a freakish hell, into a passageway of nightmares.

The things lurking inside the corridors of the drive decks dwarfed the stomach-turning mutants Stele had seen on Orilan. Shapes made of skin and bone coated the walls, stretched to impossible heights, pulled thin and taut. Horribly, many of the fleshy forms were still alive, some moaning, others weeping.

Ramius moved amid the towering armoured forms of the Blood Angels as they walked forward with lockstep, stoic caution. As well as returning the lasgun, Simeon had also has Stele’s body armour cleaned and patched. It felt heavy and warm on his shoulders, and he fingered the edge of the ceramite plate where it sat beneath his silken vest, knowing that it would not save him from any sort of direct attack.

His gaze moved over the remains of the enginseers, fascinated by the strange inventiveness of the display. The daemon was getting better at what it did, like an artist learning the strengths of a new medium, able now to uncoil better horrors from the sculpted flesh of its victims. Stele wanted to know how that was done. He wanted to understand how a man might take living flesh and mould it so, or sift it through his fingers like dry sand.

Some of the remnants – Ramius found himself thinking of them as such – were still ambulatory, and they crowded toward the Space Marine squad. Tycho led the way through them, rending their warped forms with flares of killing fire from his combi-weapon, the melta gun flashing, catching the ones that got too close with ruby threads cast by lasers in his gauntlets. They screamed and died, boiling to death as they cried out for mercy. The Blood Angel captain’s face was grim. Stele sensed his surface thoughts as Tycho forced away any recall of the men these things had once been.

The moist, blood-warm halls were red like raw flesh, and around them steel had turned into arcs of wet bone. Weak orange light spilled in radiant pools. Tycho’s metallic armour made him seem like a bronze statue, one that had grown bored with standing atop its plinth and stepped down, away to seek foes to kill.

Deeper they went, and the freak show grew more nauseating. The mutants attacked in small groups, then in waves that came back and forth. Perhaps they craved pain or just the nothingness of release; Stele folded closed his mind to them, searching instead for the pulse-beat of the daemon itself. Searching and finding.

All about him the Blood Angels fought with ruthless, passionate fury, gunning down creatures who had been their Chapter serfs only hours earlier. The inquisitor kept his lasgun close, pressing it to his chest like a talisman of protection, now and then daring to venture a shot at something that caught his eye.

They passed through flaps of rubber that resembled the valves of a heart, and then they were inside the core. Obscene geometry and ranges of bony spars spread out above them, glistening with new change. The shapes of the drive chamber were subsumed under undulating sheets of skin, the remains of a dozen enginseers flayed and merged together; it was impossible to see where the frigate ended and the monster began.

Concentrating, he let his preternatural senses sweep the chamber. And there, there it was, resting inside a nest of bones. Stele found the heart of the creature with his second sight, inherently sensing the collection of clouded, alien thoughts inside a rough bole of flesh atop the primary reactor dolmen.

Tycho watched his reaction and read what he needed from it. ‘There!’ he shouted, pointing upward. ‘Fire for effect!’ The Blood Angels unleashed shot and shell against the daemon, and in return it extruded sinuous arms with teeth and barbs, slashing in scythes at the Space Marines.

Stele broke from the group and sought cover as Tycho’s men died, cut into pieces or beheaded; others were quicker, ripping at the claws with power fists, blasting them with bolters. Black, oily blood jetted across the undulating deck and the Tzeentch-thing screamed.

Ramius aimed his gun but hesitated, his finger frozen on the trigger. He found himself enraptured by the unbearable shapes of the monster above. That such things could be done – and this was only a servant of the Malfallax, which in turn was only a princeling daemon. Stele did not see chaos or order; he saw only incredible power, enough to remake the galaxy if one could only master it. He lost himself in it, the fight ranging around him unnoticed.

A helmet with a Space Marine’s head still within it bounced to a halt at his feet, and Tycho’s bronzed form blurred toward him, shoving the Inquisitor aside as a spidery thing on nerve tendon tethers clawed and snarled. The Blood Angel killed it with a crash of bolter shells and Stele blinked, returning to the moment.

‘What are you dithering for?’ Tycho snarled, ‘My men are dead, only we still stand! Work your witchery, psyker, or you are useless to me.’

Distracted for only an instant, the brother-captain missed the approach of a blunt hammer of fatty meat. The flesh-club struck him in the head, and Stele, rooted to the spot, saw Tycho spin away like a discarded rag. The Blood Angel warrior careened off a piece of steel plate and fell to the deck with a massive crash of stressed metal.

Stele ran to his side, panic rising in him. Tycho was the only thing that could protect him from what he had unleashed on Orilan; without the Blood Angel, he had nothing, no armour, no defender… ‘Captain!’ Ramius shook the Astartes, but Tycho did not respond. The warrior was insensate, but his chest still rose and fell in shallow breaths. Unconscious then, but still alive.

He saw Tycho’s combi-weapon lying on the floor and took a half-step toward it. The idea of taking it up himself died in this mind; the gun was so massive he would never have been able to lift it.

Icy fear and tingling adrenaline flooded Stele’s body. He looked up, searching for a means of escape, and instead found a nest of eyes blinking at him from the topmost tiers of the warp towers. It sent claw arms down toward him, slow and steady. The sinuous limbs wandered around him, tapping disinterestedly on Tycho’s armour, scraping at the floor. Ramius saw that they were made of human flesh; he saw a bondsman’s tattoo visible on one elongated stabbing arm.

‘Human,’ said the daemon, the voice echoing with the resonance of its distant master. ‘What will you do now?’ Across some great vastness, the Malfallax was working the shade-thing like a marionette, talking through it to him. ‘If fear is all you have, then your life ends here. If not…’

Ramius had the sudden impression that he was being offered something. ‘I am afraid,’ Stele said aloud, ‘but I am more hungry than fearful. Hungry for knowledge.’

Dark laughter boomed off the shivering walls. ‘Such greed. Your species has an almost infinite capacity for it.’ Part of the eye cluster detached from the large mass, transforming into a wispy shadow as it drifted down to approach him. ‘The path branches before you, Stele. Defy me and perish, or take my blessing and walk the Way of Change.’ When Ramius hesitated, the shade congealed before him, becoming vaguely human in shape. ‘You want to know, don’t you?’ The question made his mouth fill with saliva. ‘There is no better way than the one I offer. Take it, and your mind will be opened to sights you never dreamed of.’

Stele closed his eyes and felt himself nodding. Had there ever really been any doubt? Now that the offer was there before him, had he ever really considered refusing it? No.

Ramius felt the frigid, exhilarating rush as a tiny fraction of the essence of the Malfallax entered him, and made itself a nest inside his mind. A hard seed of blackness formed in the core of his psyche, and in a strange way, he felt free.

Marain. He banished her as his last regret, the last connection that held him to humanity. She had been the voice of his conscience for so long… but now he understood that such a thing only held him back from greatness.

And then there was the voice. ‘Ramius!’

He spun on his heel, suddenly dizzy, dislocated from the world around him. A voice from the grave? Even as he banished her from his mind, he heard Marain’s words.

He stared, incredulous, as she crossed the chamber toward him, her gun in her hand, tears streaming down her tan cheeks. For a moment he thought she was some apparition, perhaps a mind-ghost conjured by the daemon to taunt him; but in the next instant, the raw energy of the seed the Malfallax planted inside him shot power through his psyche and he read her like a book.

Ramius understood instantly; she had survived – how like her to do that – and come aboard Tycho’s ship with those from the shuttle. But the joy that might have once touched him at the sight of her was gone, swallowed by his new master’s touch. His affection for her was absorbed, dissipated. Gone. A surge of resentment rose and then fell under the weight of his new insight.

She aimed her weapon at him. Yes, he understood. She had followed the Space Marines down through the ship, stalking him. ‘Heretic!’ spat the soldier. ‘It sickens me to think I laid with you! You have discarded everything you swore an oath for!’

Harsh and bitter laughter bubbled up from deep inside Stele’s chest. There was no humour in it, only a dark and terrible knowing of his own soul. ‘Marain, you do not understand. You are so limited in your sight, you cannot see–’

‘I see enough!’ she cried. ‘You are a traitor!’

The sinuous, rustling whispers of the daemon knitted in a blasphemous chorus over their heads. The inquisitor was aware of the Malfallax watching them both, enjoying the bitter hate radiating off the woman as if it were some rare and delicate wine. The creature was doing nothing to intervene, content to let the moment play out as it might.

He spoke Marain’s name again and took a step toward her. ‘There are none that know me as you do. There is no living soul that has shown me the loyalty you gave. Do not end that now.’ He extended a hand to her, and beneath the surface of the skin black clots of fluid swarmed and moved. ‘Cast off your doubts. Join me. We can discard the petty dictates of the Emperor and forge our own path. Together.’ Stele meant every word; he was standing on the brink of something incredible, and to have her follow along with him… to share it would be glorious.

There was a moment – he saw it there, as bright as daybreak in her mind – when Marain allowed herself to consider accepting his offer, just for the briefest of instants. She teetered on the edge of agreeing to it, just to be with him again, just to fulfil the edict that had been drilled into her since birth; but then the colour of the thought faded into nothing and white-hot hatred unfolded in its place. The crude maw of her gun danced in front of him, and he had no doubt that she aimed it at a place where it would kill him with the first shot. Marain swore a gutter oath that curled his lip in kind. He had his answer, then.

‘Fallen whore of the Ruinous Powers,’ she shouted, ‘you dare to try to tear me from my God-Emperor! I will kill you!’

‘Then do it,’ echoed the daemon voice, finally venturing to speak. ‘But she can’t, can she? A man she has sworn her life to protect, a corpse-god she has sworn to obey, and now she must destroy you to appease the other.’ Every mouth of the Malfallax smiled. ‘What delicious pain.’

‘Marain–’ Stele began, but her only reply was a face of rage and a storm of gunfire.

‘End you!’ she spat, throwing herself at him, stitching a line of incendiary bullets across his torso. Stele howled and tore his silken vest from him as it burst into flame. Shots that would have ripped him open before warped and deflected about him, the black power of the mutation inside him charging his psyche with monstrous force.

The inquisitor opened himself to the dark and embraced the rage. ‘You faithless bitch!’ he thundered at her. ‘You are nothing to me!’

Tears of anger and pain streamed down Marain’s face as she emptied her gun into him. She drew her fractal knife and made to plunge it in his heart.

‘No!’ Stele shouted the word; perhaps it was a cry against her, or perhaps against himself, but the result was the same. Conjured from the warp itself, a haze of pure purple-white fire blazed from Ramius’s fingers and enveloped the woman’s shrieking body.

It was over in a split second. Marain twisted, became a charcoal sketch against the glare, then ashes.

Then nothing.

The daemon began to laugh, the voice growing louder and louder until it beat at Stele’s mind, mocking him for his towering folly.

‘Silence!’ he spat out a scream that rended air and matter, the hellbolt that killed Marain magnified a thousandfold; for one brief instant the inquisitor became a tornado of psychic force, and with it he ripped the shade-daemon from existence.

As the power abated, he dropped to his knees amid the decaying meat and wept.

In the aftermath, Simeon came to the chambers they had assigned to him and gave a shallow bow. The Blood Angels treated him differently now; despite his commander’s orders, Simeon had followed Tycho into the drive decks rather than seal them shut behind him. It was he who found Stele crouched by the brother-captain’s body, while all around him was dead and disintegrating, the binding power of the shade-creature gone.

Tycho’s wounds had been grave, and even now, days later, he still lay in a healing trance, but Simeon informed him that the Blood Angel would live to fight again, in no small part thanks to the inquisitor’s help.

He nodded, holding back a hollow smile. Ramius wondered; did the Malfallax foresee this turn of events? When the Blood Angels entered to find the daemonic presence banished and only he and Tycho still alive, it was Simeon who assumed that Stele had marshalled his abilities to save their vessel. Had the Malfallax goaded him into obliterating its avatar, in order to cement a respect for him among these Astartes? He had no way of knowing; but Ramius had always been a man with an eye for circumstance and the knowledge of how to turn it to his advantage.

With Tycho in the depths of unconsciousness while Stele made his pact with the warp, no other soul that drew breath knew what had happened in the engine room, and they never would. Only Marain had been witness, and she… she was cut from his life.

His heart hardened. It was all he could do not to mock them when the earnest and serious Blood Angels praised him for his heroic act in saving the frigate. He listened intently, nodding in all the right places, as they told him that he would accompany them to their fortress-monastery on Baal. There the honour of a ‘blood debt’ would be granted to him. Such gestures of respect and trust were rare. He said the right words and accepted graciously, while inside the privacy of his own thoughts he considered how he might use that misplaced confidence to greater advantage. Not now, perhaps, but one day.

From the bridge he watched storms of cyclonic torpedoes obliterate Orilan, erasing the last traces of his apostasy. In the fires he thought he saw Marain’s face, her dying image dragging away with it the last human part of his soul.

Eventually he left the Blood Angels behind, and retreated to his sanctum, peeling back the layers of his mind to touch the immaterium beyond space as the ship ventured into the warp. A malleable, ever-changing voice was waiting for him with plans and ideas and subtle whispers.

Willingly, Ramius Stele followed it into the darkness, turning his face from the Emperor and opening a path toward the Ways of Change.

DEUS SANGUINIUS

CHAPTER ONE

In the midst of all the madness, the warrior found himself a small corner of darkness where he could shut himself off, a tiny sanctuary of silence. It was his shelter, after a fashion, a bolthole in which he could shutter away the churn of doubts and fears and concentrate instead on finding answers to the questions that plagued him. The room had once been a basement store for volatiles and dangerous chemicals, and it still carried the tang of free hydrocarbons in the thick air, the very stink of them embedded into the dull iron walls.

He peered out of the doorway to ensure that he was not being followed, and then shouldered shut the heavy hatch. It met the frame with a low booming, and he closed the latches. The biolume in the ceiling was cracked and dull, a thin trickle of greenish glow-fluid staining the cage around it. The chamber’s only real light source was the grille near the top of the wall, which peered out at ground level to the streets beyond. Now and then, the faint snap-crack of a lasgun discharge passed through the vent, and the wave-like rush of a distant cheering crowd.

He removed the heavy hessian sack from the cord across his shoulder and dropped the bag to the floor. The delicacy he displayed seemed at odds with the huge, muscled figure he presented. Even out of the characteristic power armour of the Adeptus Astartes, the warrior manifested an impressive sight in his tunic and robes; he would tower over normal men even when barefoot, and the Space Marine filled the room with his presence. Gently and with reverence, he drew the sackcloth from the object he had so painstakingly recovered from the rubble of the street chapel. It had been buried there, forgotten by the people who had once paid fealty to it in favour of a new subject of devotion. That thought brought the beginnings of a glower to his hard, blunt features, and he forced it away.

The hessian bag fell away and in his cupped hands the Space Marine held an icon of the One True Master. It was a representation of the God-Emperor of Mankind, there in his infinite sagacity at rest atop the Golden Throne of Terra. He ran his fingers over the old, careworn idol; it had been made from brass off-cuts, from a factory that forged shells for the Leman Russ tanks of the Imperial Guard. He placed it on an upturned wooden box so that it rested in the shaft of light falling from the vent grille, the rays of the tepid orange sun casting it with a faint halo. He folded his arms over his chest, hands like flat blades, wrists crossed; the fingers and thumb taking on the shape of the double-headed Imperial aquila, one eye looking to the past, the other staring into the future, unblinking.

The Blood Angel bowed his head and sank to his knees before the Emperor, then spread his arms wide to show his wrists to the air. A mesh of faint scars caught the light on his forearms, the silent trophies of a hundred battles. Across one limb there was the red ink of a tattoo, showing a single drop of blood framed by two wings.

‘In the name of Holy Terra,’ he said, his voice low, ‘in the name of Sanguinius, Lord of the Blood and the Red Angel, hear me, Master of Man. Grant me a fraction of your most perfect insight and guide me.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Hear these words, the contrition of your errant son Rafen, of Baal Secundus. I beseech you, Lord Emperor, hear me and my confession.’

The inquisitor Ramius Stele rose to his feet, his meditation at an end, and gathered himself together. He rubbed a hand over his brow, touching the aquila electoo on his bald pate, and frowned. The closer he came toward the fruition of his plans, the more it seemed to fatigue him. He sniffed and his fingers wandered to his nostrils; they came away with a trickle of blood on them, and the inquisitor grimaced at the dark, purple-black fluid. Cautiously, he dabbed away the liquid with a kerchief and watched the stain spread across the cloth, moving like a cancer over the cotton threads.

Stele balled the kerchief and stuffed it into an inner pocket of his robes, dragging the heavy coat of his office about his shoulders. The symbol of the High Inquisition, the stylised capital ‘I’ in brass adorned with a white gold skull, hung from a chain about his neck, and Stele fingered it absently. There were times when it felt as if the medallion was a noose upon him, weighing him down, tying him to the petty world of men. He glanced at the emblem, rubbing away a faint bloodstain from its surface. Soon enough, he would be rid of it, rid off all the trappings that bound him to the corpse-god.

Stele took a moment to look about him, at the walls where dull brown handprints and splashes of old gore still marred the walls. In the battle for Shenlong, this place had been the site of one of the Word Bearers Chaos Space Marines’ most brutal atrocities, where civilians had been gutted alive as a penitent sacrifice to the Ruinous Powers. While many of the chambers in the Ikari fortress had been cleaned and reconsecrated, Stele had quietly ensured that the death room had remained as it was. Here, where the screaming souls of the brutalised dead had etched their pain into the stone and mortar, the inquisitor found the membrane between the world and the warp to be thinner. Resting here, letting his psyche drift free of its organic shell, Stele could taste the faint, seductive texture of the empyrean just tantalisingly beyond his reach. It was for him a far more divine experience than kneeling in false piety to the Emperor of Man.

Stele left the dank room behind and exited, to find his honour guards waiting outside. Towering above him in their crimson sheaths of ceramite armour, bolters at arms, they seemed less like men and more like animated statues cut from red rock. Only the brilliant polished gold of their helmets set them aside from the rank and file of the Blood Angels Space Marines. Stele paid them no heed. He had no idea of who these men were, their names, hopes and dreams, anything; in truth, he cared less for them than he did his automaton servo-skulls, which rose from the floor on gravity impellers as he strode away. The silver orbs hummed after him, watchful as hawks, with the Space Marines two steps behind.

At the junction of the corridor, Stele’s lexmechanic stood waiting, lurch-a-backed. Its head bobbed by way of a greeting. ‘Your meditation is concluded?’ The servitor became nervous in the confines of the room and it had elected to remain outside for the duration. ‘Matters present themselves for your attention.’

‘Indeed,’ he replied. The last traces of the dark miasma clouding Stele’s mind faded away, the seductive vestiges of the warp’s caress retreating. He missed it.

‘Your servant Ulan has descended from the Bellus with news,’ the lexmechanic continued. ‘A concern which she was unwilling to confide to me.’

Was there wounded pride in the servitor’s voice? Stele doubted it; his helot’s mentality had been so thoroughly expunged in its service that there was little vestige in it that could be considered to be a personality. ‘She waits in the chapel for your indulgence, inquisitor,’ it added.

‘Good, I will attend to her before I–’

An anxious, wordless shout broke through the air and Stele whirled in surprise. His hand drifted toward the butt of the elegant lasgun in his belt, but his action was slow and leisurely compared the whip-fast movements of the honour guards. The Blood Angels had their bolters to bear in an instant, training their weapons on a trio of figures framed in a side corridor.

At the head of the group was a man, florid-faced with watery eyes. His clothes, and those of the two women with him, were worn and slightly unkempt but in a rich, opulent style. Stele decided that they were most likely from Shenlong’s mercantile class, dispossessed land-owners still clinging to the courtly ways of life from before the Word Bearers invasion. ‘My-my lord inquisitor!’ said the man, lips trembling. ‘Forgive me, but–’

He took half a step closer to Stele and suddenly one of the Space Marines was there, blocking his path like a crimson wall. ‘Stay back,’ grated the Blood Angel.

The lexmechanic turned on the other Space Marine. ‘How did these civilians get in here? These levels of the Ikari fortress are prohibited to all but the servants of Arkio the Blessed and the God-Emperor.’

A pair of gasps fled from the lips of the two women at the mention of Arkio’s name. The man made the sign of the aquila and bowed his head. ‘Please, forgive me, lords, but it was in devotion to his name that we dared to venture past the wards below…’

Stele raised a quizzical eyebrow and stepped forward, gently pushing the Space Marine’s bolter away. ‘Really? And what devotion do you have to share?’

The man licked his lips. ‘I… We… Hoped to lay eyes upon the Blessed himself. To ask for his benediction.’ He wiped a tear from his eye. ‘All that we have was taken in the invasion. We have nothing now.’

Inwardly, Stele sneered. This pompous oaf was weeping over the loss of his money and chattels while others on Shenlong could barely feed themselves. The man’s words did nothing but reinforce the inquisitor’s hatred for the corruption of the Imperium, the maggot-ridden carcass of a society that served only to glorify the empowered and the rich. Stele betrayed none of these thoughts outwardly. ‘Those of us who show our devotion to the Blessed will be rewarded,’ said the inquisitor. ‘Will you do so?’

A flurry of nods came from the merchant. ‘Oh yes, yes! For the one who liberated us, I would gladly give all that I can, and ask only for his beneficence in return.’

‘You would give all that you can,’ Stele repeated, allowing the hint of a smile to cross his lips as he studied the women. The resemblance between them was clear. The younger of the two, perhaps no more than sixteen summers, watched him with wide eyes. She was attractive, in a virginal, parochial sort of way. The other, closer to his age, had the docile look of enforced pliancy about her. Stele considered them both; perhaps he could grant himself a distraction. ‘This is your wife and daughter?’ he asked, the question trailing away into the air.

‘Uh…’ The man fumbled at a response and found none.

Stele nodded. ‘Take them to my chambers,’ he told the honour guard, and the Space Marine obeyed, ushering the women away under the eye of a bolter. ‘I’ll call upon them at my leisure,’ The inquisitor threw the man a nod. ‘Your devotion is great. The Blessed has a worthy servant in you.’

As he continued on his way to the chapel, Stele heard the man mumble out ragged, broken words of thanks.

Rafen had not dared to enter any of the tabernacles inside the Ikari fortress, all too aware of what he would see inside. Troops of Shenlongi had taken hammers and chisels to the intricate mosaics and the friezes that the Chaos invasion force hadn’t already destroyed, and pulled them up. The enemy was gone now, routed and killed, but the people they had briefly subjugated completed the deconsecrations the Word Bearers had begun. Only the object of their veneration differed. In place of sanctioned Imperial idolatry they had daubed crude renditions of the Blood Angels sigil and the newly-created icon of their Blessed Arkio, the golden halo crossed by a shining spear. The sight of it burned in Rafen’s heart like a torch, but he could not dare to speak openly of the doubts that thundered about him, much less even consider giving a confession in such a place. There was no doubt in his mind that any words he spoke would be spirited away to the ears of High Priest Sachiel, and to have him listening to Rafen’s heartfelt thoughts would be a grave mistake.

Neither could Rafen visit one of the churches that the commoners and citizens used, down in the city-sprawls crammed into the gaps between Shenlong’s kilometres-high factory cathedrals. The sight of a Space Marine, even one without his hallowed armour, would never pass unnoticed among the populace – and just as the people had taken Arkio to their hearts in the fortress, so the man they called the New Blood Lord had also supplanted the Emperor in chapels all across the forge-world.

So here, in a dim and ill-lit chamber, in a street ruined by shell fire and abandoned by life, Rafen had created his own place of worship, some small and safe conduit to his messiah where no prying ears would spy upon his prayers.

‘I must confess,’ he told the brass idol of the God-Emperor, ‘I was forced to forsake my oath to the liege lord of my Chapter, to turn from Sanguinius to my sibling… the man they call Arkio the Blessed.’ Rafen bit back the tremors in his voice. ‘I know not what my brother has become, but only that my heart cannot accept what Sachiel and Stele claim to be self-evident. I cannot accede that Arkio is Sanguinius Reborn, and yet knowing this I took an oath of fealty to him.’ He shook his head in answer to an unspoken question. ‘This is not cowardice on my part, I swear. The Sanguinary High Priest Sachiel would surely have executed me had I not knelt before Arkio, but with my death there would be no voice to speak out against this insanity. Forgive me, lord, for this duplicity.’

Rafen drew a shuddering breath. ‘Grant me insight,’ he said, entreaty in his voice, ‘show me a path. I ask of you, what do you wish of me? On Cybele, against the assaults of the foul Word Bearers I was ready to give my life and come to your right hand at the Throne, but in your wisdom the warship Bellus came to our aid and with it my young brother. I thought I was blessed to see my sibling after so long apart… Our ties of blood are as strong as the fellowship of my battle-brothers.’

The Blood Angel recalled the instant on the war grave world when Arkio rose in their moment of blackest despair, with a plan to turn the fight against the Traitor Marines; Arkio’s uncanny flash of brilliance led them to bring down a Word Bearers warship and beat back the Corrupted from Cybele. At first, it seemed no more than a chance insight from Rafen’s sibling, but then the young Space Marine had single-handedly saved Sachiel’s life from a daemon creature, rallied the men and become the figurehead which turned the tide against the Chaos forces. By the time they had left Cybele aboard the Bellus, there were men wondering aloud if Arkio was not touched by Sanguinius himself, and then came the moment when the Spear of Telesto seemed to prove the truth behind the whispered rumours.

Stele left his guard at the tall copper doors to the chapel and strode inside, the lexmechanic’s clawed iron feet clattering after him. The astropath Ulan stood in the centre of the chamber, arms folded. Her sightless eyes glanced up from the hood of her dark robes and she gave a half-bow. ‘My lord inquisitor,’ she began, her quiet tones a whisper of wind through gravestones.

He approached her, for one brief moment letting his gaze stray to the titanium canister that lay atop the altar. The thought of the coiled power inside the long container made him thirst in a way that nothing else could slake. With a near physical effort, Stele turned his whole attention to the thin psyker girl. ‘Speak to me.’

Ulan glanced at the lexmechanic, and Stele nodded, turning. ‘Servitor, wait outside.’

The machine-slave turned on its heel and left them to their privacy. As the chapel door thudded shut, Ulan began to talk. ‘Matters aboard the Bellus proceed, Lord Stele,’ she said carefully. ‘Questions as to the fate of the astropath Horin and his chorus have been suppressed. There is no other conduit to the galaxy at large now, save me.’

Stele made a dismissive gesture. ‘You came to tell me that which I already know?’ Without his notice, the inquisitor’s trigger finger twitched, unconsciously repeating the action it had performed when Stele executed the Bellus’s cadre of telepaths. ‘I installed you aboard the battle barge to be my eyes and ears.’

‘And so I am,’ she replied. ‘I have news. The warning that was sent from Shenlong to Baal, the message to the Blood Angels Commander Dante… It has been heeded.’

‘Dante has replied?’

She shook her head. ‘The master of the monastery on Baal favours a more direct approach, Lord. A ship is on its way. I have intercepted the shadows of signals from the depths of the immaterium. It will arrive soon.’

Stele accepted this with a nod. ‘Do you know what kind of vessel? Something more powerful than the Bellus?’

‘Unlikely,’ she noted. ‘There is but one Blood Angels ship matching the tonnage of the Bellus within operational range of Shenlong, and that is the Europae, the Lord Mephiston’s personal command.’

‘Dante would not send his lieutenant Mephiston without good cause,’ Stele spoke his thoughts aloud. ‘Not yet, at any rate. No, it will be a smaller craft.’

‘The advent of any Adeptus Astartes reinforcements will jeopardise the strategy,’ Ulan said flatly. ‘They will be outside our sphere of influence, an incalculable variable. The matter must be addressed.’

‘Yes, and so it will be,’ said the inquisitor, considering the situation. ‘Return to orbit and maintain your post. You are to contact me the instant Dante’s envoy reaches contact range.’ Stele toyed with the silver purity seal stud in his ear. ‘I must prepare.’

‘New arrivals will not be turned so easily to loyalty to the Blessed,’ the psyker warned. ‘Termination presents the better option.’

‘You are too narrow-minded, Ulan. Commander Dante is about to deliver me a valuable object lesson.’ Stele dismissed her with a wave of his hand. ‘Go now.’

When he was alone, the inquisitor let his control slip away and he crossed to the altar and the metal box upon it. The grey cylinder bore sigils and purity seals showing the oaths of the Ordo Hereticus and the Blood Angels, some engraved in the titanium itself, others on strips of sanctified parchment, fixed by fat discs of sealing wax embossed with devotional symbology. He laid his hands on the surface of the container and felt the warmth radiating out from the object inside. The Spear of Telesto, one of a handful of battle weapons and hallowed objects forged – so the myths would have it – by the very hand of the God-Emperor himself. The inquisitor felt himself drawn magnetically to the umbra of the device, even now as it lay in quietus.

Stele smothered a surge of jealousy; the reaction was the same each time he considered the Space Marine Arkio and his affinity with the artefact. On the mission of the Bellus into ork space to recover the archeotech weapon, it had been Stele who wrested it from the grip of a greenskin warlord, Stele who held it high in victory, but only in Arkio’s hands had the Holy Lance awakened. On some basic, animalistic level, he could not excise the constant core of resentment he felt for the young Astartes.

He shook the thoughts away. The higher part of Stele’s mind, the ice-cold engine that calculated the intricate clockwork of his schemes, knew better. Arkio was the ideal candidate to wield the spear, the perfect subject for veneration by his battle-brothers – and in the end, Stele’s guidance of his path would lead the inquisitor to such power that would make the spear seem like a child’s toy in comparison.

‘My brother laid his hands on the Spear of Telesto,’ Rafen’s words echoed off the iron walls of his makeshift meditation cell. ‘The Holy Lance that Sanguinius himself once commanded, and then…’ His voice trailed off, the memory as fresh now weeks later as it had been the moment it happened. For a brief instant, Rafen felt the divine radiance of the spear on his face again, the golden light shining off the teardrop blade as Arkio held the haft high in the Great Chapel of the Bellus. Try as he might, Rafen could not explain what he had seen that day. The sudden vision of his sibling’s face melting and merging into a brief incarnation of the long-perished primarch of the Blood Angels, the winged Lord Sanguinius.

‘It was his example that lit the way to this blighted world.’ The Blood Angel’s head bobbed as he considered the desolation of Shenlong. ‘Fired by the oratory of Inquisitor Stele, my brethren clamoured for a chance to visit retribution on the Word Bearers who had desecrated Cybele. It was only Brother-Sergeant Koris and his fellow veterans who spoke of caution, and they were censured for it.’ The words were suddenly flowing from Rafen’s lips in a torrent; it was as if speaking them aloud lifted a great weight from his shoulders. The icon of the God-Emperor watched him with calm and unmoving eyes, silently listening to the Space Marine as he unfolded the tale.

He opened his mouth to speak again and a knife of emotion cut into him. Rafen saw Koris’s face there before him, the craggy old warhound, eyes hard but never without honour. It had been one of the greatest privileges of Rafen’s service to count the veteran as a mentor and a friend, but all the strength the Space Marine could muster did not stop his former teacher from falling into the dark grip of the Blood Angels gene-curse, the warped berzerker battle lust known as the black rage. Inducted into the Death Company, as all men who succumbed to the red thirst were, Rafen had watched Koris as the old warrior relived the great battle of Sanguinius against the arch-traitor Horus, played out in the depths of the Ikari fortress. ‘He died there,’ Rafen told his god, ‘and you took him to the peace he deserved… But he did not release his grip on life easily. His words… He left me with a warning.’

The moment replayed in the Space Marine’s mind.

‘Rafen. Lad, I see you.’

‘I am here, old friend.’

‘The Pure One calls me, but first I must… Warn…’

‘Warn me? Of what?’

‘Stele! Do not trust the ordos whoreson! He brought me to this, all of it! Arkio… Be wary of your sibling, lad. He has been cursed with the power to destroy the Blood Angels! I see it! I see–’

‘Gone now,’ Rafen admitted, ‘and without him I felt cut adrift and alone, while my brothers took up Arkio’s cause as their own. I saw no other path to take… I broke the disciplines we swore to and damned protocol…’ He shook his head, calculating the enormity of his transgressions. ‘Under cover of lies I sent word to the monastery on Baal and the Lord Commander Dante, in hopes that he might come to end this madness… But in your wisdom, you have yet to guide him here.’

Rafen opened his eyes and looked into the unmoving face of the God-Emperor. ‘I beg of you, lord, I must know. Am I the heretic, the dissenter, the apostate deserving only of death? If Arkio truly is the Great Sanguinius reborn, then why do I doubt it so? Which of us is the one fallen from the path, he or I?’

‘Lord inquisitor?’

Stele turned to see Sachiel approach, a questioning look on his face. The Sanguinary High Priest’s battle armour caught the light through the chapel windows, glinting off the white detailing that marked his wargear. Stele stepped down from the altar and fixed him with a sullen eye. ‘Sachiel. Where is Arkio?’

‘The Blessed observes the trials in the plaza below, Lord Stele. He bade me to find you.’ Sachiel paused, frowning. ‘He has questions…’

Stele crossed to a set of stained-glass doors and waved his hand over a discreet wall sensor. On ancient mechanics, the glass gates parted to reveal a broad stone balcony jutting from the equator of the fortress. The instant the doors opened, a wall of sound thundered into the chapel; all at once, there were chants and cheers of victory, the screaming of the dying, the discharges of multiple weapons. The inquisitor walked out into the noise, to the lip of the balcony, and Sachiel followed.

Below them, the vast open plaza fronting the Ikari fortress was a ring of shanty-built grandstands and huts ringing a makeshift arena. The floor of the stadium was littered with the dead and a few pieces of broken cover. Gunfire flashed and snapped back and forth as figures swarmed over one another, some armed only with blunt clubs and crude knives, others clinging to lasrifles or ballistic stubber guns. In the stands, the faithful roared in approval as kills were made and the numbers of the fighters gradually diminished.

Stele glanced at Sachiel. The Blood Angel observed the unfolding battle with an arch look, clearly unimpressed by the crudity of the fighting. ‘How many so far?’ he demanded of the priest.

‘Three hundred and nine chosen at last count,’ he replied. ‘The Blessed himself is making the selections.’

Stele saw the sunlight glinting as it touched a huge figure in golden armour, drifting over the battle on angelic wings. As he watched, the messianic shape singled out a wiry man wielding two swords and nodded to him. He dropped his weapons and wept with joy, the crowd chanting its accord once again. ‘One more,’ said Stele. ‘We’ll have the thousand soon enough.’

‘As the Blessed chooses,’ said the priest. ‘He will have his army.’

The inquisitor looked away. ‘You don’t approve?’

Sachiel’s face flushed red. ‘How can you ask such a thing? It is as Arkio commands, and he is the Reborn. I would not question his wisdom.’

Stele smiled. ‘The Warriors of the Reborn,’ he said, gesturing to the men penned into a holding area at the edge of the arena. ‘A thousand of the most zealous and devoted to the name of Arkio… And yet, there are Blood Angels who hesitate at his decision to raise this helot army.’

Sachiel blinked. ‘We do not doubt,’ he snapped, ‘It is only… new to us. Understand, inquisitor, we have lived our lives to the tenets of the Book of the Lords and the Codex Astartes, and the recruiting of these commoners goes against those convictions.’

‘We are past the time for ancient dogma,’ Stele replied, ‘Arkio the Blessed ushers in a new age for the Blood Angels, and the Warriors of the Reborn are merely an aspect of that.’ He pointed into the crowd of tired, bloody fighters. ‘Look at them, Sachiel. They have fought all day and still they would cut out their own hearts if Arkio demanded it of them. When he embarks on his glorious homecoming to Baal, the chosen thousand will accompany him. They will be the vanguard of a new breed of initiates to the Blood Angels, a new generation of the Adeptus Astartes.’

When the priest did not answer him, Stele turned to press him for a reply; but instead he saw the look of surprise on Sachiel’s face.

‘The Blessed…’ began the priest.

From nowhere a sudden rumble of wind beat at Stele and he staggered back a step, forcing down the urge to shield himself with his hands. A shape, swift and brilliant, rushed up before the edge of the balcony and hung before him, blotting out the glow of the Shenlong sun. Sachiel fell into a deep bow and tapped his fist to the symbol of a winged blood droplet on his chest plate. The inquisitor looked up into a face of striking nobility, a countenance that combined a most patrician aspect with the promise of a darker heart beneath. A face that mirrored that of Sanguinius himself.

‘Stele,’ said Arkio, hovering there on wings spread like wide white sails. ‘I would speak with you.’

‘I saw him turn death upon innocents,’ Rafen’s voice was heavy with anguish. ‘By my blood, I watched my own brother cull men and women all too willing to accept murder, as if it were some horrific benediction. This is not the promise to which I granted my life as an aspirant. This is not the Emperor’s will, I hope and pray that it is not. Arkio rules this world now by force of temper, with Sachiel as his instrument and the Inquisitor Stele as advisor forever at his side. It is not right. By the Red Grail, the marrow in my bones sings it is not so!’ Anger boiled up inside Rafen and he came to his feet, fists balling, his words bouncing off the chamber walls. ‘I pray that Lord Dante will have the grace and wisdom to end this matter before our Chapter is split asunder beneath its weight, but until that moment comes I must answer the call of my blood.’ He took a breath, his burst of fury subsiding. ‘Until a sign comes to me, bright and undeniable, my heart will set the compass of my deeds from this moment forth.’

Rafen laid a hand on the icon of the Emperor and bowed his head once again. ‘Hear me, hear the pledge of Rafen, son of Axan, child of the Broken Mesa clan, Blood Angel and Adeptus Astartes. I recant the false oath I have taken to Arkio the Blessed and in its stead I restore my allegiance to Sanguinius and the God-Emperor of Mankind. This I swear, my blood, my body, my soul as the price.’ The declaration seemed to take all the energy from him, and Rafen staggered back a step. ‘This I swear,’ he repeated.

After a long moment, he gathered himself together and opened the hatch, pausing to throw the holy icon a last glance. Here, in this forgotten place, the symbol would lie safe from the hands of those who sought to revise their beliefs in the face of Arkio’s new Blood Crusade. ‘There is one thing of which I have absolutely no doubt,’ he told the statue. ‘A single act for which I know I and I alone will be responsible. By what means and when are unclear to me, but my brother Arkio will perish and I shall be the one to end him. I know it in my blood, and it damns me.’

Rafen left the room behind, the leaden burden of his dilemma pressing down upon him as he stepped back into the Shenlong sunlight. He picked his way through the ruined streets and did not look back.

Before him, the vast cone of the Ikari fortress rose to fill the horizon like a monstrous volcanic mountain.

CHAPTER TWO

Arkio dropped to his feet on the balcony with a whisper of air through the wings at his back, and cocked his head. Sachiel fell to one knee and averted his gaze, while Stele gave a shallow bow. The gestures seemed to satisfy the Blood Angel. ‘Lord inquisitor, I have questions.’ His voice was cool, assured and direct, with none of the hesitation that had plagued him in the past as a youth.

Stele resisted the urge to smile. ‘Blessed, I will answer them if I can.’

‘Your counsel has meant much to me in these past few weeks,’ Arkio began, ‘and your guidance has helped me to understand the path Sanguinius has laid before me.’

‘I am merely the lamp to light the way, Great One,’ Stele allowed. ‘I took on the governorship of this blighted world only because I saw it wanting. No honest servant of the Imperium would have done any less. That I could help you into the bargain…’

Arkio accepted this with a cursory nod. ‘And we have done well here, have we not? The taint of Chaos has been burnt from the streets of Shenlong.’

Sachiel cleared his throat self-consciously. ‘All the Word Bearers that intruded on this planet lie dead, lord, that is true… But our search still continues to find and purge any sympathisers.’

Stele watched Arkio assimilate the priest’s words; only a short time ago, it had been Arkio who had suggested they annihilate this world completely rather than chance the survival of any cohorts of the Chaos Gods. But that was before his transformation, before Arkio’s brutal duel with the Dark Apostle Iskavan the Hated in the manufactorium below the city. With his physical changes, Arkio had also altered within. He had become, to all intents and purposes, the living reincarnation of the Blood Angels primogenitor, and the former Space Marine revelled in his newly found divinity. He wore the sacred golden artificer armour of his Chapter with the arrogance and hauteur of one whom had been born to it. Yes, Stele told himself, I chose him well.

‘The men speak in whispers and keep their fears from me,’ Arkio turned his back on them and wandered to the edge of the balcony, watching the continual pit-fight. ‘But yet I hear them.’

Sachiel’s face twisted. ‘What dissent is this? Lord Arkio, if there are weaklings and craven among our forces, I would know it. The honour guard will see them repudiated for such failings!’

Stele arched an eyebrow. With little prompting, Sachiel had stepped into the role the inquisitor had laid for him with gusto. So focussed was the priest on adhering to the word of his new master that he hardly noticed he was sanctioning the censure of his own battle-brothers.

Arkio shook his head slowly. ‘No, Brother Sachiel, no. These men are not to be chastised for their fears. What leader would I be if turned away every Space Marine who dared to wonder? A fool myself.’ The warrior’s wings had folded back on themselves now, and they lay flat against Arkio’s sun-bright armour.

‘If it pleases the Blessed,’ said Stele, ‘what have you heard?’

‘My brothers are conflicted, inquisitor,’ said Arkio. ‘They look upon me and see the truth of my change, of the Great Angel’s hand on my soul, and they believe. But word spreads now among the ranks of the Blood Angels here on the planet and above on the Bellus.’ He gestured toward the sky. ‘I have heard men speaking of Dante and Mephiston, and questions of our Chapter brethren on Baal.’

‘They fear you will not be accepted by the Lord Commander,’ Stele said gently, providing the words to the rumour that he himself had quietly seeded. It had been a simple matter to fan the flames of righteousness in the Space Marines who had laid their fealty at Arkio’s feet; it was the nature of the devout to seek enemies in all those who did not share their beliefs.

Sachiel made a negative noise. ‘Lord, this matter trivialises your Ascension. I grant that yes, perhaps our battle-brothers at the Baal monastery may have their doubts about you, but when they lay eyes on you, they will know as I do – that you are the Deus Encarmine, the Reborn Angel.’

Arkio hung his head for a moment. ‘Can you be sure, my friend? I still look to my own face and wonder at the changes wrought on me by fate. Mortal men could do no less.’

Stele took a calculated pause before answering. ‘Blessed, as you speak of this now I must admit that I too have heard these misgivings among my comrade brethren. I chose to keep it from you as I believed it to be beneath your concern.’ He shook his head, adopting a look of contrition. ‘I am sorry.’

‘Then tell me now, Stele. What is said?’

‘As you say, Great Arkio. The men see themselves set apart from their brothers elsewhere, blessed by your arrival in their midst – but they fear Dante’s reaction to your Emergence.’

The Blood Angel fixed him with a questioning look. ‘But why, Stele? Why should they be afraid of that? Dante is a good and honourable commander. He has led our Chapter through adversity and strife for more than one thousand years, his character is impeccable.’ Arkio gave a quick, bright smile. ‘I welcome the moment when I will be able to face him with this miracle.’

And there it was, the opening Stele had been waiting for. With care, he marshalled his lies and pressed them home. ‘But will Dante welcome you, Blessed? When you enter the grand annexe of the fortress-monastery, will Dante kneel and give you his fealty as we have? Will his Librarian Mephiston bow to you? What of Brothers Lemartes, Corbulo or Argastes? Will they see the truth of it?’

‘Why would they do otherwise?’ Arkio said darkly. ‘Why would they doubt me?’

‘Dante did not witness your miracle,’ broke in Sachiel, ‘He would ask for proof…’

‘Proof?’ Arkio snapped, and his wings unfurled in a flash of white, his eyes shining with sudden intensity. ‘Proof denies faith, and faith is all that we are!’

‘You yourself said that Lord Dante has commanded the Blood Angels for over a millennium,’ Stele took a step closer to Arkio, ‘and some might argue, too long. Such a man would not step aside easily, Blessed, even in the face of such divinity as yours. And Mephiston…’ He shook his head. ‘The psyker they call the Lord of Death has always held himself to be the heir apparent to the mastery of the Chapter. These men… I would not vouch for their magnanimity in this matter.’

Arkio shook his head again. ‘No. I will not hear this. What has happened to me is a blessing from the Emperor for every Blood Angel, for our entire Chapter, not just the Space Marines here on Shenlong and the crew of Bellus. I have been chosen, Stele. Chosen by fate to be the vessel for a power far greater than myself! Sanguinius makes himself known through me, returns to us after so long departed. I will not conceive that this marvel…’ He paused, his fangs bearing in a snarl as he fought down his anger. ‘That I will be the cause of a schism among my brothers. No! It shall not be so.’ In one single bound, Arkio stepped up on to the lip of the stone balcony and swept off it, a crash of air filling his wings. The golden figure dropped back into the arena, into the thunderous adulation of his warriors and his subjects.

Stele watched him go, aware of Sachiel as the priest came closer. ‘Would that his wishes become reality,’ said the inquisitor gravely, ‘but it may not go as the Blessed would hope.’

Sachiel had a faraway look in his eyes, as if the Apothecary’s mind was focussed on some distant vanishing point, on events yet to come. ‘You… could be right, lord inquisitor. If Dante denies the Ascension of Arkio, it will split the Blood Angels asunder.’ The sombre thoughts were hard for the priest to articulate. ‘There could be a… a civil war. A severing greater than anything our Chapter has ever known before.’

‘Indeed,’ Stele intoned, ‘and such a break would not be as congruous as those that created the Successor Chapters, the Blood Drinkers and the Flesh Tearers, the Angels Vermilion, Encarmine and Sanguine…’

‘We will find adherents in those bands,’ Sachiel said quickly, ‘once word spreads of the Blessed. If what you suspect comes to pass, Dante will be unable to deny the Rebirth when all our battle-brothers give credence to it.’

The inquisitor gave a sigh. ‘Perhaps, Sachiel, perhaps. I hope that these dark possibilities we consider now remain just that – but if not, we must be prepared.’

The priest watched Arkio as he swooped and dove over the great arena. ‘To do what, lord? To go to war with our kinsmen? I hardly dare to speak such a thing.’

‘If the Blood Angels on Baal are unwilling to accept Arkio for what he is, as the avatar of the Sanguine Messiah, they may need to be encouraged to believe.’ Stele met Sachiel’s gaze and held it with his cold, glittering eyes. ‘If they do not, then those who resist the divine design must be purged.’

The High Priest replied with a slow, serious nod, and Stele drew away a smile.

Rafen kept off the more heavily trafficked streets as much as he could, but eventually he was forced to walk out in the open, amid the endless confusion of markets, portable shrines and thronging Shenlongi citizens. He was on the far side of the Ikari fortress to the combat arena, but still the sounds of the chanting crowds were filling the air, humming up and down the octaves like distant surf breaking on a shore. The Space Marine spied several knots of excited natives clustered around jury-rigged speakers in shop doorways and windows, the sound boxes hastily tapped into the webs of lines from the factory-city’s vox-net. Tinny commentaries issued out of the speakers, encouraging hoots of excitement from some and groans from others. The fruits of wagers, dog-eared handfuls of Imperial scrip, changed hands as candidates for the Warriors of the Reborn died off or were chosen for the thousand.

Rafen did his best to keep to the edges of the highway, head bowed and hood up; but there was little he could do to avoid towering over the civilians, the tallest of whom could barely reach the Space Marine’s shoulder. With awed whispers they parted in front of him like water flowing around a rock. Some of them, the more daring, would reach out and run a finger over the hem of his garment. He considered giving them a flash of his teeth and a snarl to keep them at bay; but what good would it do to instil an even greater fear of his kind in these people?

Something crunched beneath the sole of his sandal and Rafen paused. With the tip of his foot he nudged a broken tin object out of the dirt. It had been cut from an old recaf can and bent into shape as… what? The Space Marine became aware of a skinny child watching him with an open, gap-toothed mouth. The street urchin was smeared with rusty dirt and bore a scarred cheek. In front of the child was a box filled with more tin shapes. Rafen looked closer. Some of the crafted things were crude copies of the Blood Angels crest, others a model of the Spear of Telesto, even a miniature figure of a winged Space Marine. He indicated the object at his feet. ‘You made this?’

The child nodded once, with no change in expression. Rafen picked up the ruined effigy and deposited it back in the box. Closer, he could see that the juvenile was a girl. On the blemished side of her face she was missing a patch of hair. He nodded to himself; the child had been caught in the nimbus of a plasma shot. ‘You are lucky to be alive,’ he told her.

She nodded again, and closed her mouth. On her dirty tunic, Rafen saw a rendition of the spear-and-halo badge that Arkio’s supporters were popularising and frowned. He surveyed the contents of her box, then looked up and met her gaze. ‘There are no icons of the Emperor here,’ he said quietly. ‘You will make no more of these others from now on, understand? Only symbols of the God-Emperor.’

‘Yes, lord.’ At last she spoke, and it was with a piping, tremulous voice.

Rafen turned and walked away, resuming his path toward the fortress. Behind him, the people on the street scrambled to press money into the girl’s hands, suddenly desperate to buy an icon that a Blood Angel had touched.

Chaplain Delos was waiting for him at the foot of the fortress tower. ‘Rafen,’ the black-armoured priest beckoned him closer. ‘I did not see you at prayers–’

‘Forgive me, but I took my devotion alone today, Chaplain,’ he replied. ‘I required… solitude.’

‘Just so,’ said Delos. ‘The arming ritual demands your most serious mind. It is good that you have prepared.’ The priest walked him into the massive inner atrium of the fortress, past the metre-high piles of devotional objects and invocation plaques left by the citizens. ‘I know these times have been difficult for you.’

Rafen said nothing and walked on.

The Chaplain took his silence for assent. ‘The deaths of your Captain Simeon on Cybele, the fall of Koris to the red thirst…’ He shook his head. ‘And your sibling… None of us have been through the maelstrom of things as you have. But it pleases me that you have come to understand the glory of Arkio’s blessing.’

‘Yes,’ Rafen kept his voice neutral. Delos did not seem to notice.

‘That you took his oath, that gladdens me, Brother Rafen. I was afraid you might also succumb to the red thirst as Koris did.’

‘Were there any men who refused?’ Rafen said suddenly. ‘Did any battle-brother refuse to bend his knee to Arkio?’

Delos looked at Rafen with a confused smirk. ‘Of course not. Not a single Blood Angel could deny his Ascension.’

‘No,’ said Rafen, ‘of course not.’

The Chaplain stepped forward and opened the doors to the consecration chamber and beckoned him inside. It was gloomy in the room, the light of hovering biolumes casting a viridian haze over everything. A spider of metallic arms moved in the shadows and a Techmarine emerged.

‘Brother Lucion,’ said Rafen.

Lucion gave him a nod of acknowledgement and gestured to a low iron bench. Across the surface were the parts of a suit of Adeptus Astartes power armour, and around the table a trio of hunched servitors twitched, awaiting the Techmarine’s command.

‘We shall commence,’ intoned Delos.

Without ceremony, Rafen disrobed, discarding his common cloth and sandals, revealing the glistening ebony sheath of his black carapace. A living compound of plastics and alloys, the dark material had been implanted under the skin of his upper torso in his seventeenth year, as the final part of his initiation and transformation from Baalite tribesman into Blood Angels Space Marine. The neural sensors and transfusion shunts that bloomed from the surface of the carapace opened like the yawning mouths of tiny birds, ready to accept the interface jacks of his new armour.

As Delos began the Litany of Armament, he set a grail-shaped censer swinging from his hands. Lucion gave a burst-command in chattering machine code, and as one the servitors went to work, fitting the components of the Mark VII codex power armour to Rafen’s body. The Space Marine joined in the chant where his answers were needed to complete the rite. Thermonic garments slid across him; flexible myomer muscle encircled the meat of his limbs, arranging itself to enhance and augment his physical strength; over this came the outer layer of bonded ceramite and plasteel weave, tough enough to turn a glancing bolt shell at twenty paces. Rafen slid his bare feet into the hollows of his greaves, the gyroscopic stabilisers in the broad boots humming into life.

As the armour wrapped itself around him, the Blood Angel felt a measure of comfort from the familiar touch and scent of the wargear. The power armour he had worn since his initiation had been destroyed in combat with the Chaos champion Iskavan, the centuries-old hardware ruined by the claws and blades of the Word Bearer. Perhaps some elements of his old gear might remain among the components he now donned, but for the most part he was clothing himself in the armour of dead men. On the inner surfaces of the boots, the wrist sheaths, the chest plates, there were lines and lines of tiny scripture, etched there by blade-point over hundreds of years. Each piece of the codex armour carried the history of its wearers, a roll of honour naming the men that had borne it into countless battles. The gear that Rafen would now call his own had been in service to the Chapter for half a millennium or more.

One of the servitors handed him a gauntlet, and Rafen paused. Etched in the ceramite about the wrist guard was a name that he knew. ‘Bennek,’ he said softly.

‘Brother?’ Lucion gave him a questioning look. ‘Is something amiss?’

Rafen shook his head, remembering Bennek’s death on Cybele. His comrade had been struck by enemy plasma fire and crushed beneath a horde of Word Bearers. Rafen thrust his hand into the gauntlet and made a fist with it, silently vowing to avenge his battle-brother’s death.

Lucion leaned in and attached Rafen’s left shoulder guard, running his claw-hand over the winged tear of blood embossed on the surface. The Techmarine gripped the opposing piece and moved to place it over the right arm, but Rafen’s eyes narrowed and he blocked Lucion with the flat of his hand. He pointed at the other shoulder guard. ‘What is this?’ Along with the traditional white teardrop design that symbolised the Third Company of the Blood Angels, the armour bore a new sigil – a golden spear surrounded by a halo.

The Chaplain and Techmarine exchanged glances. ‘In honour of Arkio, brother,’ said Delos. ‘To signify our presence here as witnesses to his Emergence.’

Rafen hesitated, thinking of his oath, then looked away with a nod. Lucion attached the pad without comment. Finally, the litany concluded with the Chaplain’s benediction over Rafen’s helmet. The Space Marine allowed the servitors to place it over his head, and he heard the hiss and click of the neck ring sealing him into the wargear. Inside the accustomed confines of the armour he felt alive again, the second skin of metal and plastic as natural to him as breathing. Rafen dropped to one knee and made the sign of the aquila.

‘I am armoured by the Emperor himself,’ he said, recalling the words of Dante from the eve of the Alchonis Campaign. ‘Righteousness is my shield. Faith is my armour and hatred my weapon. I fear not and I am proud, for I am a Son of Sanguinius, a protector of mankind. Aye, I am indeed an Angel of Death.’

‘Blood for Sanguinius,’ Lucion and Delos spoke together. ‘Blood for the Emperor. Blood for Arkio, the Angel Reborn.’

Beneath the blank mask of his helmet’s breather grille, Rafen’s face soured at the last words, and he came to his feet. Lucion presented him with an object wrapped in red velvet. The Space Marine unfurled the cloth from his bolter and ran his fingers over the gun’s surface. This was the only piece of his equipment that had survived the clash with Iskavan intact, and Rafen felt a curious sadness as he read the engravings he had placed on it during his years of service. The bolter was a remnant of the old Rafen, he realised, the Blood Angel who had been content in his service to Chapter and God-Emperor, never daring to question his place in the scheme of things; not so now. He worked the slide on the weapon and loaded it, the last action in the ritual completed. Rafen brought the bolter to a battle-ready stance with a snap of boots on stone.

A voice came from the doorway. ‘Ah, my brother is whole once more.’ Delos and Lucion bowed as Arkio strode into the chamber. Even in the poor light of the room, the Blood Angel’s golden armour seemed to glow with an inner luminescence.

‘Blessed,’ began the Chaplain, but Arkio waved him into silence.

‘Delos, if you would permit me, I would speak with my sibling alone.’

‘Of course.’ The priest gestured to Lucion and the two Space Marines took their leave, the tech-servitors waddling out after them.

Arkio placed a hand on Rafen’s shoulder and smiled. ‘I promised you that you would live, did I not?’

Rafen recalled his brother’s words in the wake of the duel with Iskavan. ‘Yes. I thank you for my life.’

The smile broadened, and once again Rafen was struck by the uncanny similarities between Arkio’s new aspect and the renditions of Sanguinius that hung in the chapels. ‘Formality is not needed between us, Rafen. You are my blood kin as well as my battle-brother.’ He tapped the sculpted breastplate of his armour. ‘I want you close by my side. We have great works ahead of us, kinsman, high deeds that will be spoken of throughout the galaxy.’

The display inside Rafen’s helmet told him the comparative positions of the nearest Blood Angels. There were four honour guards outside the chamber, along with Delos and Lucion; even the swiftest of them was a full ten seconds away. Arkio stood within arm’s length of Rafen, his mood relaxed and his guard apparently lowered. His brother was without headgear, the bare skin of his throat visible. Rafen was aware of the weight of his bolter in his mailed fist, a full magazine of shells there in the clip. It would not take much; just a jerk of the wrist to bring the muzzle of the gun to press against Arkio’s chest, one squeeze of the trigger to discharge a point-blank burst of fire. Even the hallowed gold artificer armour would not be able to withstand such a strike. In that moment, Rafen imagined the look of shock and pain on Arkio’s face as the bolt shells tore into his torso, punching his organs through his back in a riot of fluid and matter. He could almost smell the hot blood, the taste of it on his tongue flaring as the red thirst caressed the edges of his mind. The opportunity was here, now. All Rafen need do was raise his weapon and murder his brother, and he would put an end to all question of this Emergence. The thought of it repelled and agitated him in equal measure.

‘What… what deeds?’ The words came out of his mouth of their own accord.

‘A Blood Crusade,’ Arkio said firmly. ‘Once I have united the Chapter under our banner, we will draw together all the successors, all the Sons of Sanguinius. By the grail, we shall cut the cancerous heart of Chaos from our space.’ He gave his sibling a clear-eyed look, the pure power of his disposition overwhelming at such close quarters. It was little wonder that lesser men would die for one such as he.

Rafen’s bolter felt like it was as dense as neutronium, too heavy to move. ‘How?’

‘We’ll begin with the Maelstrom, brother. Fitting that our first target will be the nest of the Word Bearers, yes? I will personally see to it that their foul cadre is purged to a man.’ Like the monstrous Eye of Terror, the horrific realm of warped space known as the Maelstrom was a gateway into the chaotic realm of the Ruinous Powers, and it was in this twisted zone that the Sons of Lorgar had made their throneworld. Arkio nodded to himself. ‘Commander Dante has allowed them the privilege of life too long, I think. As Sachiel said, it is not enough that we drove them from Cybele and Shenlong. We must drive them from existence.’

‘The priest,’ Rafen said in a chill voice. ‘You value his words more than those of our Chapter’s lord?’

Arkio’s eyes narrowed. ‘Dante is not here, Rafen. Dante did not see, as we did, the merciless intent of Iskavan’s hordes. Had we not intervened, a world would have been put to death.’ He looked away. ‘I have always honoured Commander Dante in word and deed, but now I find my perspective changing, brother. During my time on the mission of the Bellus, away from Baal, perhaps it was then that I first began to wonder if his stewardship of our Legion was all it could be…’

Rafen stifled a gasp. ‘Some would call that dissidence.’

‘Who?’ snapped Arkio, ‘Who would dare say that to me? Was it not our old mentor Koris who said that men must question all that they believe, or else they are fools?’

‘And what did it bring him?’ Rafen said bitterly. ‘Lord Dante is a fine commander.’

‘Yes, perhaps. Perhaps he was, five hundred years ago at the peak of his powers, but what of now? It was the inquisitor who drew me to this fact, Rafen – among all their victories, have the Blood Angels truly assumed their place as the first among equals before the Emperor? Look back to the death of our Brother Tycho at Hive Tempestora. One of our greatest falls and nothing is done? We should have led a reprisal force to wipe out a dozen ork tribeworlds as payment in kind. And Dante did not!’ He turned away, presenting his folded wings to his brother. ‘In eleven hundred years at the head of the greatest Chapter of the Legion Astartes, what progress has he made toward the mastery of our gene-curse? None!’

Rafen could not believe what he was hearing, the open scorn in Arkio’s voice. ‘Brother, what has driven you to this?’

Arkio fixed him with a level gaze. ‘I have had my eyes opened, Rafen.’

‘By Stele? By Sachiel?’ He tried and failed to keep a mocking tone from his voice.

The Blood Angel gave a snort of derision. ‘Rafen, you are transparent to me. Now I see why you falter at these ideals – it is not your will that prevents you, it is your pride. Your… rivalry with the priest runs deep, yes? Neither of us will forget that it was he that almost cost you your chance to become a Chapter initiate.’

‘You are right,’ Rafen admitted. ‘But it is not just my dislike of Sachiel that colours my words. I implore you, brother, do not follow the counsel of the priest and the inquisitor blindly–’

‘Blind?’ Arkio repeated, his mood turning stormy. ‘Oh no, Rafen, it is you who refuses to see.’ He paused, moderating his annoyance. ‘But still we have time. I keep you close, brother, because you remind me that no path is the easy one. I question and you question me. You are the devil’s advocate.’ Arkio gave him another brilliant smile and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Thank you.’

Rafen watched him leave, the hand around his bolter’s pistol grip as rigid and immobile as cast iron.

In the silence of the Sanctum Astropathica aboard the Bellus, Ulan drifted in zero gravity, a weave of mechadendrites and brassy cables snaking from slots on her skull to banks of murmuring cognitive engines. The psyker’s mind was spread as thinly as she dared, the energy of it dispersed into a wide net. Her concentration was paramount; if she were to let her thoughts drift further for even an eye-blink, what little there was to call her personality would be picked apart on the winds of the empyrean. She was a spider now, settled at the nexus of a web she wove from her own psy-stuff. Ulan lurked there, sensitive to any perturbation in the rolling non-matter of the warp, looking and watching for patterns.

There were things out there. She was careful not to let her attention turn directly upon them, cautiously watching them only by the wakes they left in passing, the shimmers as the anti-space stretched under their weight. Ulan kept her terror for these things under the tightest control of all; they liked the taste of fear. Even the tiniest speck of it could call them across the void like sea predators scenting drops of blood in the water.

Then they were gone as quickly as they had arrived. Ulan was listening again, watching, waiting.

And there was her target. Very distant but approaching quickly now, cutting through the immaterium like a sword blade. A man-made object, swift and deadly in aspect.

Ulan smiled and gathered herself back together. When she had recovered enough of her potency, she focused on her master and sent him a single word.

Soon.

It was late for Firing Rites, and so the range was deserted. Rafen was inwardly pleased; he did not feel like company for the moment, and the questions and comments of his brethren would have not been welcomed. He loaded a fresh sickle magazine into the bolter and took aim with the naked eye, releasing a series of three-round bursts into the rotating target stands.

He frowned at the results. His weapon had been knocked off true when it fell from his hands in the manufactory. With care, Rafen adjusted the pitch of the foresight. The simple, disciplined action gave him focus away from the churning concerns in the back of his mind. Intent on the work, he realised too late that someone else had entered the chamber.

Rafen looked up and scowled.

‘Here you are,’ said Sachiel, with false lightness. ‘Your new armour fits you well, brother.’

He returned to his bolter, unwilling to waste breath on pretended pleasantries with the Sanguinary High Priest. ‘I will strive to be worthy of it.’

‘I am pleased to hear you say that. The Blessed was quite concerned that you be returned to duty status. Arkio... It appears he has a greater degree of lenity for a blood relative, than for other men.’

Rafen reloaded the bolter and slammed the magazine home with force. ‘Do not play word games with me, Sachiel,’ he said sharply. All at once, his tolerance for the conceited priest vanished. ‘You have come here to say something to me? Speak and be on your way.’

Sachiel’s face reddened but he kept the annoyance from his voice. ‘Your bluntness could be construed by some as insubordination, Rafen. I would pay it mind if I were you.’ He leaned in to speak in a low, loaded whisper. ‘The Blessed may have reason to endure your dispute of his divinity for now, but I would not test him further, brother. A wise man would do well to heed a warning and keep his silence.’

‘Your words could be construed by some as a threat, Apothecary,’ said Rafen, mimicking his tone.

‘They might at that,’ Sachiel agreed. ‘If you continue to challenge Arkio, there will come a time when his favour will wane. And when that moment comes, it will be my pleasure to see you branded a heretic.’

Rafen angrily rose to his feet in a rush from his firing stance, the bolter still hot in his hands. Sachiel was caught by surprise and backed away a step. ‘Your counsel is appreciated,’ Rafen said coldly, shouldering his weapon. ‘But if you forgive me, I have duties to attend to aboard the Bellus.’

‘What duties?’ demanded the priest.

‘The memory of the dead, Sachiel. I must pay my respects to the fallen in the ship’s great chapel.’ He pushed past the Apothecary and walked away.

‘Take care, Rafen,’ Sachiel called out after him, ‘lest you wish to join them too soon.’

CHAPTER THREE

Rafen felt the pull of Shenlong’s gravity lessen as the Thunderhawk rose out of the forge-world’s atmospheric envelope. He glanced through the viewport – the dun-coloured sky beyond had faded to a dirty purple and now it was the black of space. Craning his neck, he could see the curvature of the planet, a blanket of rusty pollution over the industrial landscape.

The transport rocked as it changed course. Rafen knew the interiors of these craft as well as he did the words of the Chapter hymnals, many was the occasion that he had been crammed into the heavily armoured cargo deck of such a vessel, shoulder to shoulder with other Blood Angels. The vibration of the floor beneath his feet never failed to kindle a faint anticipatory thrill in his chest. It was so often the precursor to battle, but not today. The Thunderhawk carried only munitions on this journey. Rafen had half-expected not to find a flight back to Bellus’s anchor at high orbit, but by luck one of the barge’s auxiliaries had been preparing for lift-off. The transport was taking advantage of the forge-world’s full stocks of shells to rearm the warship, ferrying case after case of missiles where it might normally have loaded Rhinos and Space Marines for ground assault. The warheads filled the hull spaces, leaving scant room for anything else.

Rafen was not the only passenger. Personally supervising the cargo was the battle barge’s second-in-command, Brother Solus. Rafen could not recall ever having seen the man outside the bridge of the Bellus before. Solus seemed more like an extension of the will of the ship’s commander, Captain Ideon, than a person in his own right.

Solus threw him a cursory nod as he passed through the cabin. ‘We’ll dock soon,’ he noted. The Space Marine paused and gave Rafen a questioning look. ‘I was not aware you had been ordered to return to the ship.’

Much of the Bellus’s crew had been granted planetfall leave in a gesture of magnanimity by Inquisitor Stele, following his assumption of the brevet governorship of Shenlong. In the wake of the Word Bearers invasion, the forge-world had declared a celebratory holiday and Chapter serfs and commoner crewmen had been only too happy to join the festivities. The carnival mood Rafen had glimpsed in the Ikari district was everywhere, all of it alive with the worship of Arkio. The pressure of that and the knowledge that Sachiel was surely watching Rafen’s every move had driven him to look for solace somewhere – anywhere – away from Arkio. A spell aboard the quiet corridors of Bellus would give Rafen time to think, he hoped. None of this, however, he confided in Solus.

‘My mentor, Brother-Sergeant Koris,’ said Rafen. ‘He lies in the grand chamber aboard the barge. I wish to pay my respects to him, and enter his name in the Book of the Fallen.’

Solus nodded. The ritual was typically performed by a Sanguinary Priest, but often men who had served closely with those who died would carry out the rite as a personal farewell, writing the dead man’s name in their own blood as a lasting salute. ‘I did not know him. From what I saw of him, he seemed an… outspoken warrior.’

‘Indeed,’ Rafen agreed, ‘he was that.’

‘A pity he did not live to see the Emergence,’ Solus continued. ‘A great many of our brothers fell for that piece of dirt.’ He indicated Shenlong with the jerk of his chin. Even though he was Astartes to the core, Solus still had a spacer’s dislike for planets.

A hatch hissed open to admit a bondman in flight crew gear. He bowed quickly to Solus. ‘Lord, we are receiving an alert from Bellus.’

‘To what end?’ the Space Marine demanded.

‘A starship is approaching the planet. Our cogitators believe it to be the strike cruiser Amareo.’

Rafen straightened. ‘One of ours.’ He felt his pulse quicken. The arrival of another Blood Angels vessel could mean only one thing: the clandestine message he had sent using Sergeant Koris’s vox-net transmitter had got through to Baal. ‘Is it known who is in command of the cruiser?’

The serf nodded. ‘Yes, lord. The pennant of Brother-Captain Gallio flies from the Amareo’s bridge.’

‘Gallio…’ repeated Rafen.

‘You know him?’ said Solus.

‘Only by reputation. He was a contemporary of my late commander, Captain Simeon.’

Solus considered this for a moment, then turned to the crewman. ‘Contact Bellus. Inform Captain Ideon that we are diverting to intercept Amareo. Protocol requires that a ranking officer welcome Gallio to the system.’

The serf saluted and returned to the bridge. Rafen watched him go. ‘Lord, should not the Amareo be received by a quorum of senior Space Marines?’

Solus nodded. ‘Correct, Rafen, but with much of the crew planetside for the celebrations of the Ascension, I doubt Ideon could find others to be spared.’ He beckoned him to his feet. ‘You and I will have to suffice.’

The Thunderhawk’s engines throbbed and the light through the window shifted as the ship changed course. Rafen looked out and saw a splinter of silver and red hanging in the dark like a thrown knife; his search for respite would have to be postponed.

Ulan’s warning brought a thin smile to Stele’s bloodless lips. Seated cross-legged in the centre of the bloodstained death room, the inquisitor’s dark grox-hide coat pooled out around him like spilled ink. In the dim half-light, he appeared to be some sort of strange extrusion growing out of the patches of dried crimson. Stele gave a quick look at the door; if he were disturbed, if his concentration was broken, then all of this would be for nothing. There was a shock-ward attached to the inside of the hatch, primed and ready to deliver a massive electric charge into anyone foolish enough to try to open it from the outside.

He reached into one of dozens of secret pockets in the coat and retrieved two vials of bright, fresh blood. Stele had drawn the fluid himself, from the necks of the merchant’s wife and daughter as they had lain spent at his feet, compelling them into death so that the liquid might teem with the vital essence of their brutal, potent murder. Uncapping the vials, he licked his lips as the smell of the liquid reached him. Gently now, it was important not to waste even the smallest drop.

Stele closed his eyes and jerked his wrists; the contents of the vials flickered into the air in a wet arc, tracing precise lines that bisected one another. In that moment, the gloomy, meat-wet room quivered with the psychic fingerprints of agony, and Stele slipped his mind into the non-space at the edge of the warp. To the layman and the untrained, Ramius Stele appeared to possess formidable pskyer talents, but in truth he was a man of only middling mental power in comparison to many of the Imperium’s telepathic agents. Stele’s talents lay not in the brute force application of his psychic ability, like those of his servant Ulan, but in his subtle use of them. Stele’s mind was less a sword, more a scalpel, but still utterly lethal when used correctly.

The inquisitor ignored the thrilling warmth of the energies around him, resisting the urge to dip into them like a welcoming ocean. His resolve firm, Stele let his abhuman senses map the space around Shenlong in shades of psionic force. Up above, where Bellus lay, was the faint ember glow of the latent minds aboard her. Flickering and wavering among them was Ulan’s bright and dangerous psychic imprint. She was a firefly in a bottle, her power bouncing off the walls of the inhibitor coronet he forced her to wear. Had Stele chosen to channel his mind through hers, what he did now would have been far easier, but her erratic character was too unpredictable for something that required so delicate a touch.

He passed further out, ignoring the dots of light on a small craft suspended mid-way between Bellus and the new arrival, letting his spirit-self approach the Amareo. A dart of indistinct fear rose and fell in him as he sensed the clear, steady glow of a psyker mind on board the starship; on some level, he had been concerned that the arch-telepath Mephiston would be the first to come and confront Arkio. For all his arrogance, Stele was not so foolish as to think he could match wits with the Lord of Death – at least, not at the moment. But as he predicted, the Chief Librarian of the Blood Angels had sent a proxy in his place, and it was this trained psyche that glittered before him. It had none of the random, freakish coloration of Ulan’s mentality. This was a keen, acute mind born of the psykana librarius.

All the more reason to tread carefully, Stele reminded himself. The inquisitor raised his hands so that his ghost-fingers barely touched the corona of the psyker’s aura and let the surface details of the Librarian’s mind reveal themselves. The Blood Angel was without his psychic hood for the moment, a piece of good fortune that would make his task easier. The inquisitor’s subtlety was his greatest skill, his target would never suspect that Stele’s dark touch was spreading over his mind like some dark sheen of oil.

‘Your name…’ Stele said aloud to the dank air, ‘You are Brother Vode, Epistolary to Mephiston. He has sent you… Sent you to taste Arkio’s mind…’ And there it was, drifting inside Vode’s thoughts, perhaps even too faint for the Space Marine to know himself, the cold splinter of doubt and suspicion. Stele made a low chuckle in the depths of his throat. Mephiston had dispatched the best of his Librarians on this mission, but in doing so opened Vode to the thought that he would be venturing into the souls of heretics. Stele laid his hands upon Vode’s nascent misgivings and began to massage them, working them deeper. Even at such a distance, the taint of the Blood Angels psyker’s loathing for apostates leaked into the mind-space like black ichor.

With ghostly pressure, Stele nurtured Vode’s doubts, sweat beading his bald brow with effort and concentration.

Brother-Captain Gallio entered the cruiser’s training gallery and found Vode immediately. The Librarian was in the midst of a series of regimented kata, a complex dance of advances, parries, and blocks. In his hand, the psyker held a formidable-looking force axe, a full half of Gallio’s height and forged from bright steel made in the foundries of Luna. The axe head quivered in the light, the crystalline blade flickering with the witch-fire of psionic energy.

The captain’s eyes seemed to slide off the metallic curve, as if his vision could not hold the shape of the weapon in his gaze. Gallio, like most Adeptus Astartes, held a powerful distrust of anything that bore the mark of the psyker. To him, those who had this aberrant curse were to be considered a danger, or at the very best, to be pitied. It was through the lens of such minds that the first gateways to the warp had been opened, and with them the lurking powers of Chaos that made the immaterium their home. This was the fear that lay at the heart of the psychic ‘gift’; those who were weak in spirit would find themselves seduced by the raw energy of the warp space. Such souls could become conduits for daemonic intelligences, flesh vessels for creatures that were hate incarnate.

Gallio approached Vode carefully, watching the precise ballet of the psyker’s fighting style. There was no wasted movement there: each simulated blow of the axe was economical and clear-cut. Every iota of Gallio’s battle instinct was keyed to the war against Chaos, and on some level he believed that such witch-minds deserved only death. And yet, here was a psyker who bore the mark of the Blood Angels. Before him stood a man that embodied both the magnificence of a Space Marine and the dark potential of a monstrous psychic. The duality of the matter perturbed him.

Vode came about and halted, the humming force axe hovering between the two men. Vode had eyes that were so pale as to be almost grey. Gallio resisted the automatic surge of revulsion in his gut as the faint glow from the weapon drew all the moisture from the air.

‘Honoured captain,’ said Vode quietly, showing no concern at Gallio’s expression. ‘I am prepared. What is your bidding?’

The Librarian was nothing like his master, the notorious Mephiston, Gallio noted. The Lord of Death was a gaunt, imposing figure in red-gold ceramite, where Vode was a rugged fireplug of a man with skin the colour of dark wood. ‘A transport approaches from the Bellus. We must be prepared to receive them.’ Unlike the rank and file of the Blood Angels, Librarians wore armour that was blue in coloration, with only a single crimson shoulder pad. It was another factor that set them apart from the rest of their brethren, thought Gallio.

Vode nodded. ‘As you order.’ With care, the psyker drew his axe back to a sling across his armour, the tiny licks of cerulean lightning fading from its surface. Vode’s face twitched slightly and something moved inside the neck ring of his battle armour. From thick bulges about his head, panels made of fine circuitry and crystal matrices extended in a tripartite cowl. Gallio watched with slight distaste as the pieces of Vode’s psychic hood connected themselves to brass sockets in the Space Marine’s skull.

‘Do you… sense anything?’ said the captain.

Vode gave a slight smile. ‘All the myriad ways of the traitor are subtle and complex, brother. I will root them out, if they conceal themselves here. But for now, there is no–’ The expression on the psyker’s face changed in a flash; his eyes narrowed and his lips thinned to a line.

Instinctively, Gallio’s hand dropped to the bolt pistol in his belt holster. ‘Brother Vode?’

Then the moment was gone, and the Librarian shook his head. ‘A passing shadow,’ he said. ‘The taint of the Word Bearers lingers still in this star system, brother-captain. Faint, like fading smoke…’

The answer did little to satisfy Gallio. ‘This way,’ he indicated.

Vode strode after the officer, a frown threatening to form on his face. For an instant, just the smallest of moments, the psyker had felt the touch of something corrupt. He ran his fingers over the trio of purity seals on the breast of his armour, turning the sensation over in his mind, the weight of a new doubt preying on him.

The drop ramp of the Thunderhawk opened like a yawning mouth and Rafen followed Solus down it. Glancing around the hangar bay of the Amareo, he saw a dozen more ships of the same class in launch cradles, armed and set for attack. A troop of Space Marines stood waiting for them in two tight lines, ostensibly an honour guard but just as easily a combat unit. There were other Blood Angels nearby in twos and threes, observing with cold, keen eyes. Rafen’s impression was one of preparation; the men aboard Amareo were unsure what to expect on Shenlong, and they had taken to book and bolter in readiness. He felt a curious foreboding; these battle-brothers were here only because of a secret message that he had sent, and Rafen felt some measure of responsibility for them.

He caught sight of the dark hue of a Librarian’s wargear as they set foot on the strike cruiser’s deck. The psyker hovered at the shoulder of a senior Blood Angel who studied them with a hawkish manner.

Solus tapped his fist to the blood-drop symbol on his chest. ‘Brother Solus and Brother Rafen, requesting permission to come aboard.’

The Space Marine returned the salute. ‘Granted. I am Captain Gallio.’ He nodded at the Librarian. ‘Epistolary Vode, my adjutant.’

‘Your arrival is unexpected,’ said Solus.

Gallio gave Solus a penetrating stare. ‘I think you know why we are here, brother. I have come on the express orders of Lord Commander Dante himself, to see with my own eyes what has transpired on Shenlong.’

‘You come to venerate the Blessed Arkio, yes?’ Solus replied. ‘I suspected as much.’

‘We shall see who will and will not be venerated,’ Vode broke in, his voice thickening. He studied Solus and Rafen with open scrutiny, and both men felt the pressure of his mind upon them.

‘Why did you depart Cybele when orders were sent that Bellus should remain there?’ Gallio demanded. The captain wasted no time in cutting to the core of the matter.

Solus shook his head. ‘I know of no such orders, Captain Gallio. My commander, Brother-Captain Ideon, followed the directives of Inquisitor Stele to weigh anchor and make best speed to this system. Our orders after the rout at Cybele were to contain and destroy the Word Bearers warband here.’

Gallio frowned. ‘Those commands were not sanctioned by Baal.’

‘If that is so,’ Solus retorted, ‘then how did you know to locate Bellus here?’

‘A message was sent to the fortress-monastery,’ said Vode. ‘The contents of that message raised some questions of integrity.’

‘There are only loyal Sons of Sanguinius here.’ Solus said hotly. ‘Who sent this signal? Tell me his name!’

‘Brother-Sergeant Koris.’

‘Koris is dead,’ said Rafen, unable to keep an edge of pain from his words. ‘He was killed in the attack on the Ikari fortress. I witnessed him pass from this life.’

Gallio and Vode exchanged glances. ‘It is the content of the message that is of gravest concern to Lord Dante. Koris, if it were he, spoke of a “transformation”. By Dante’s order, I am to evaluate this occurrence in the commander’s stead.’

Rafen felt his throat tighten. The Librarian’s eyes had not strayed from him, and Vode’s powerful gaze made the Space Marine feel like a tiny speck swarming under the lens of a microscope. He knows. The Blood Angel could sense Vode’s inner sight picking at his mind.

Solus gestured at the Thunderhawk, his face taut with concern. ‘Perhaps you should accompany me back to the Bellus, captain. We could provide you with a complete tactical report on the Cybele battle and–’

‘If this “blessing” of which you speak is true, I will not tarry to debate the matters surrounding it,’ Gallio interrupted sharply. ‘Answer me, Solus. Where will I find Inquisitor Ramius Stele and Brother Arkio?’

The Space Marine’s face darkened with anger. Gallio’s bluntness rankled. ‘Lord Stele has taken stewardship of Shenlong from the Ikari fortress in the capital district. Arkio the Blessed resides in the chapel there.’

Vode broke eye contact and nodded to the Amareo’s commander. ‘Then that is where we will go.’

Solus took a step forward. ‘He is the Angel Reborn. You cannot simply bid him to your beck and call.’

‘Until we make our determination, he is nothing of the kind,’ Vode replied with icy certainty.

Rafen saw an opportunity and spoke again. ‘Brother Solus, this matter will be resolved with alacrity if we proceed as Captain Gallio demands. With your permission, I will accompany the captain back to the surface to assist him.’

Solus gave Gallio a hard look, then glanced at Rafen. ‘Perhaps you are correct, brother.’ He turned back to the Thunderhawk. ‘Once these men see the Blessed, any disagreeable hesitancy will become redundant.’ He threw them a last look as he reached the hatchway. ‘I will return to Bellus and inform the inquisitor of your impending arrival.’

Rafen turned away as the ramp slammed shut to find Vode watching him once again. ‘I am at your command,’ he said.

Gallio indicated a shuttlecraft parked nearby. ‘This way. You will use the journey to tell me all you can about this Arkio.’

‘Yes, Rafen,’ added Vode. ‘We would know more of your younger sibling.’

The statue had been moved from the grand chamber of the Bellus and brought down to the chapel, there to stand in pride of place before the altar. With appropriate ceremony, the icon of the Emperor of Man had been shifted behind the statue, towering over it like a watchful father at the shoulder of a dutiful son. Arkio ran his bare fingers over the ancient stone. The pinkish marble came from a mountain range on Baal Primus.

He touched the face of the statue. The likeness was baring its throat in supplication, eyes closed and mouth slightly open, neck muscles taut. A crown of sculpted jags about the tousled hair of the head signified the solar glow of a halo. Arkio followed the line of the nose, the jaw, down the neck and to the sternum. Of its own accord, his hand came to his own face and traced the same course. The shapes of both were so close as to be almost identical.

He backed away a step, taking in the whole statue of the Blood Angel Sanguinius. His seraph wings arched over his shoulders, the Pure One wore the robes of an initiate priest – a sign of his humility – and his arms were outstretched. In the right, he grasped the skull-shape of the Red Grail, from which fell the four drops of blood that Sanguinius had shed for his Chapter; his left arm was upturned, and from the wrist fell a torrent of his blessed vitae.

With perfect grace, Arkio balanced on the uppermost step of the altar and raised the wings that folded from his own shoulders. The mighty pinions were no longer new and strange to him, now Arkio took his angelic limbs to be as much a part of him as any other. He extended his arms and mimicked the pose of the statue, tipping back his head and showing his throat.

‘Magnificent.’ Sachiel’s voice was thick with barely contained emotion. Arkio opened his eyes and relaxed as the Sanguinary High Priest approached him. Sachiel dropped into a bow. ‘Blessed, it is confirmed. A warship from Baal has taken up station alongside Bellus and a party from the vessel is on the way as we speak.’

Arkio bid Sachiel to his feet and listened intently as the priest relayed the message from Solus. ‘Captain Gallio is joined by Librarian Vode and your brother,’ he concluded, a slight annoyance colouring his tone at the mention of Rafen.

The Blood Angel paid it no concern. ‘So soon,’ he murmured. ‘Dante has moved quicker than I had expected… But this shall not be an issue. Give the order to provide Gallio’s shuttle a priority flight corridor.’ Arkio indicated the ceiling above them. ‘Have his ship vectored to the landing pad on the roof of the fortress.’

Sachiel swallowed hard. ‘My lord, is that wise? Perhaps it might be more prudent to land him at the starport and bring the captain’s party here in a convoy. We could… control them more easily if the circumstances required it.’

Arkio shook his head. ‘What will come to pass, will come. I will look Gallio in the eye and offer him nothing but the truth. Where he goes from there will be his choice alone.’

The priest hesitated. ‘Blessed, as ever you exhibit the wisdom of the Great Angel, but I must confess I fear the reaction of these new arrivals.’

The chapel doors opened as Sachiel spoke to admit Inquisitor Stele and the drifting shapes of his servo-skulls. ‘I will add my voice to my comrade’s,’ said Stele as he approached. ‘He speaks with concern for you and our enterprises, Arkio.’

‘Thank you for attending me,’ said Arkio. ‘I would not wish to proceed without your counsel, Stele.’

The inquisitor gave a gracious nod. ‘Forgive my delay, but I was meditating…’ He patted his brow with a kerchief; there was a thin sheen of perspiration coating his bullet-like head from his mental exertions in the death room.

Arkio studied both men. ‘Your considerations are noted, but I stand by my order. Gallio and Vode will come here to me, and I will answer all questions.’ He straightened, glancing back at the statue of Sanguinius. ‘It is my duty to the Chapter.’

‘Of course,’ Stele demurred, ‘and to that end, might I suggest we proceed as ceremony demands? I have assembled the honour guard to attend you.’

Arkio gave him a cursory nod and stepped away, walking to the balcony where the battle trials still raged below.

Sachiel leant close to Stele’s ear. ‘The moment is upon us, lord inquisitor,’ he said quietly. ‘We will know where the loyalties of Dante’s men lie.’

‘Indeed,’ Stele purred. ‘Arkio hopes for the best, but we… we must prepare for the worst.’

‘Of that, there is no question,’ replied the priest, his eyes bright with righteous fervour.

‘I sent the message.’ Rafen watched the play of emotions over Gallio’s face as the captain considered his words. ‘As Koris lay in death, I used his vox to transmit a signal to the Bellus and beyond.’

‘Subterfuge,’ said Vode grimly. ‘What you have done violates protocols of discipline and rituals of the fallen.’

Rafen gave a rueful nod as the shuttle rumbled through the atmosphere. ‘I am only too aware of that.’

‘The strictures are clear, only a Techmarine may handle the wargear of the deceased in anything other than the most desperate of circumstances,’ Gallio replied.

‘The future of our Chapter is in the balance,’ Rafen snapped, a little more fiercely than he would have liked. ‘What could be more desperate?’

Gallio considered the Space Marine’s words. ‘The issue of your actions is secondary to the issue at hand, Rafen. Any decision that you may or may not have behaved improperly is deferred, for the moment.’ He looked away. ‘What you have told us of this change in Arkio… it is remarkable.’

Vode nodded. ‘Aye. And terrifying as well. I sense forces at work here that reach beyond my ability to define. Great powers, moving into conjunction.’ The Librarian’s hands had strayed to his force axe, unconsciously kneading the grip.

Gallio noted the psyker’s small sign of agitation but let it pass unremarked. ‘Rafen, you would know Arkio better than any man. These physical changes of which you speak are shocking enough, but his soul… I ask you, when you look into your brother’s eyes, what do you see?’

An involuntary shudder passed through the Space Marine’s massive frame. ‘When we were youths, it was I that was the reckless one, captain. Arkio was open and guileless, he was pure of spirit… It was his influence that helped me to turn my ways, the younger helping the elder.’ For a moment, Rafen lost himself in reverie. ‘Now… now that youth is gone. It is still Arkio’s soul that lives behind those eyes, brother, if that it what you truly wish to know… But for all the changes wrought upon him in these passing weeks, it is his manner that is most altered.’

‘Explain,’ demanded Vode, tension in his voice.

‘Arkio is arrogant now, where before he was humble. Whatever the hand that guides his new path may be, Arkio himself believes in it. Within the halls of his heart, he has no doubt that he is the Deus Encarmine.’

‘And if we must disabuse him of that belief,’ Gallio said, ‘what then?’

Rafen found he could not look the captain in the eye any longer. ‘I dread to think,’ he said. ‘I dread to think.’

In the long silence that followed, the shuttle’s deck canted as the craft dropped through thick cloudbanks and down over the factory sprawls.

‘We are close,’ Vode said abruptly.

Gallio gave Rafen a last, measuring look, and then signalled the other men in his personal guard. ‘Prepare for landing.’

A black-armoured figure stood waiting for them as they strode off the shuttle pad, Gallio’s four men in a line behind the captain, Vode and Rafen. The Chaplain saluted the officer and the Librarian, throwing Rafen a wary nod.

‘I am Brother Delos. Welcome to Shenlong, Captain Gallio. It is an honour to receive a warrior of such noted standing within the Chapter.’

Gallio ignored the greeting, and held out a metallic scroll case. ‘I carry the letter of Lord Commander Dante. In this place, I speak for him. Chaplain, I would see the warrior Arkio.’

Delos faltered for a moment, eyes flicking to the scroll case, then to Rafen and finally back to Gallio. ‘As you wish, captain. The Blessed will receive you in the fortress chapel.’ He turned. ‘Follow me.’

Rafen remained silent as they ventured down through the Ikari fortress, boarding the recently repaired elevator platform to descend to the core levels. For the second time that day, he felt the pressure of scrutiny from eyes all around him. As they passed groups of Space Marines, helots and scattered packs of pilgrims, conversations fell silent and barely concealed suspicion greeted them at every turn.

‘They know we have come to judge him,’ Vode hissed. ‘They resent us for even considering the fact.’

The copper doors of the chapel opened to admit them, and Gallio strode boldly past Delos to enter first. Arkio came to his feet from the dais where he sat and the shock of the sight of him almost staggered the captain to a halt.

‘Emperor’s blood!’ Gallio breathed. It was a living, breathing rendering of Sanguinius that stood there, wings bright as sun-fire, the golden armour aglow with honeyed radiance. Arkio inclined his head in greeting and Gallio found himself physically resisting the urge to kneel. A palpable energy of personality crackled in the air, drawing all things to Arkio.

‘By the Throne, it is the Pure One.’ It was one of Gallio’s men that had spoken, his voice hushed and reverent.

Vode smothered his words with a venomous rejoinder. ‘That remains to be seen.’ The Librarian still gripped his force axe; it was not quite in a battle-ready stance, but close enough to make any seasoned warrior wary of him.

Rafen felt a hand on his shoulder. Delos drew him back to halt at the doorway of the chapel. ‘Stand down, lad. This is for the Blessed to decide.’ He hesitated as Arkio approached the men from the Amareo. Beyond his brother, Sachiel looked on with obvious impatience, while Stele stood in the shadows. The inquisitor seemed muted, eyes distant and unfocussed.

‘I am Arkio,’ he began. ‘I greet you as a brother, and honour you as Lord Dante’s proxy.’ The figure in gold gave a shallow bow, the tips of his wings touching the mosaic floor. ‘What would you ask of me?’

‘The truth,’ Gallio replied. ‘To know what force has brought you to…’ He hesitated, searching for the right words, ‘to this transformation.’

Sachiel bolted forward from the altar, an intense expression colouring his face. ‘What force?’ he repeated. ‘Even the blind know the answer to that question. Do you not see him before you? He is the Blessed Angel Reborn.’ Sachiel’s eyes shone. ‘Sanguinius has returned.’

‘All of us carry the vitae of the Great Angel within us,’ Vode snapped angrily at Arkio, ‘but we do not claim to usurp his place. Our primarch lies millennia dead, yet you presume to take his name!’

Arkio gave a gentle shake of the head. ‘I presume nothing. As you asked, so I offer only truth.’

‘Your truth,’ said Gallio. ‘If you are what you say you are, then you will accompany us back to Baal, where the veracity of your claim will be put to the question. You will release this world and Inquisitor Stele will return governorship of Shenlong to the Imperium.’ He paused. ‘Commander Dante gives this order, and you are to heed it.’

Rafen’s gaze happened on Stele; the Hereticus agent rubbed his brow, his gaze fixed on the Librarian Vode. The Blood Angel looked to the psyker and saw him tense with fury.

Then Arkio said the words that Rafen feared the most. ‘I am beyond Dante’s authority now.’

‘Heretic!’ The curse exploded from Vode’s lips, his dark skin shading with rage. ‘The hand of Chaos hides here. You are impure!’ The Librarian’s words sent a shock through the chapel, and white lightning crashed across the floor. It happened so fast that Rafen saw only a blur of blue and yellow. Vode sprang at Arkio, his force axe flaring with psy-flame. The curved blade met the gauntlet of the gold artificer armour and deafening thunder assailed his ears.

CHAPTER FOUR

Vode’s mind was drowning in thick streams of glutinous hatred and black, oily darkness. At first, in that moment aboard the strike cruiser, he had thought nothing of the brief contact that had wafted over his psychic senses, passing like a diaphanous veil. There one breath, vanished the next. The mind-space about Shenlong was still dirty with the passage of the Word Bearers, their disgusting mental footprints like profane scars only visible to a psyker such as he. The bright purity of his force axe was a comfort to him. It was a talisman, a badge of the Space Marine’s charmed life in the Emperor’s service.

Vode listened to Rafen’s words as they approached the Ikari fortress, outwardly fixed on the Blood Angel’s face, but inside, his preternatural intuition buzzed like a warning siren, louder and louder in his ears as they came ever closer to the chapel. The Librarian tried to hold on to the sensations, to cup them in his hands and make some sort of sense to them – but it was like trying to pick out the perfume of a single black orchid through a sea of charnel house stench. And then in the chapel, he laid eyes on the golden armour and knew instinctively that he had found his way to the epicentre of this great skein of corruption. The Blood Angels psyker had faced this breed of witch-kind before: outwardly flawless, perfect and beautiful. Within they were rotted corpse-flesh, maggoty hearts pumping spoiled blood through bone voids.

He struggled to banish the image, blinking it away. For a second, everything seemed to shift and waver, and part of him cried out, No! Deceit laced the air. He glimpsed the man from the Ordo Hereticus across the stone floor, half-clad by shadows. For an instant, it seemed as if he, not the winged one, was the source of all the darkness here. Confusion creased Vode’s brow; he had to be sure.

Then, as quickly as it was there, the impression fled and the hissing pressure behind his eyes returned in tenfold force. Vode looked at Arkio as the armoured figure spoke in silky tones to Captain Gallio. The psyker saw two visions of him, one over the other, each warring for prominence in his mind’s eye. There was the Reborn Angel, a new Sanguinius glorious and unblemished in his holy perfection, radiant as the Throne of Terra itself, and there was the other.

It turned his stomach to see it. The gold armour was scarred and dull, black with shed blood. There were no eyes in the face of cracked, white porcelain, only pits of empty space; and the wings, foul things flensed of skin and barbed with hooks and broken razors. It spoke and the noise made Vode’s bile rise to his throat. ‘I am beyond Dante’s authority now,’ it jeered.

If the others in the chapel saw Arkio as he did, then they were either struck dumb by his awfulness or else bewitched by the apostate’s illusory beauty. From the corner of his eye he saw Stele twitch, but the surge in hate that flowed through him at the same moment made the inquisitor seem immaterial. If no man here could or would act, then it was only Vode that could end this parody of the primarch’s majesty. The thunderous heat of the black rage came upon him and the Librarian sent it crackling into the haft of his force axe. He shouted his malediction at the top of his lungs. ‘Heretic. The hand of Chaos hides here. You are impure!’

Vode’s weapon moved as if it were guided by the hand of the God-Emperor himself, cutting a flashing arc toward the skull of the pretender. Every ounce of mind-power from his Quickening channelled into the force axe. ‘Hell spawn!’ he spat. The crystal blade struck Arkio’s wrist-guard with a roar of rended air. Like water pouring off a glass dome, the blue-white psy-fire fell away from the axe head, streaking around Arkio in harmless rivulets. An invulnerable sphere of crimson and gold danced around him at the edge of perception, the halo blunting Vode’s attack into nothing.

Sachiel’s reductor was in his hand as the Librarian struck, dancing, searching for a target. All about him, Arkio’s golden-helmed honour guard brought up their weapons on reflex, and he glimpsed Gallio’s retinue doing the same. The Amareo’s captain was crying out, reaching with one hand, his other skimming toward the butt of his holstered bolt pistol. A voice was shouting from the chapel doors, an indistinct red man-shape turning in the grip of a black figure; all this in a heartbeat.

Arkio’s other hand came up and punched Vode away. The epistolary flew backwards, boots scraping across the stone as he struggled to keep his balance. With an eyebrow arched, Arkio reached for the force axe where it rested, lodged between plates of gold. The Blessed removed the weapon and, with a tightening of his fist, broke the axe handle in two.

Vode screamed and threw a curtain of lightning at him, racing back to leap at Arkio’s bare throat, fangs flashing. Again, the Quickening parted around his golden form and he shot out a hand. Arkio’s dart-sharp fingers impaled the ceramite chest plate of Vode’s power armour and buried themselves to the knuckle. The Librarian’s bolter was in his grip, and, even as blood bubbled from his mouth, Vode let shell fire crash out and flare across the room.

Unaimed, heedless bolts skipped close to Sachiel and the shock brought him to action. He lunged at Gallio with the reductor, clipping the Blood Angels captain’s scalp. No word of command was uttered, but with the priest’s gesture a tiny hell was unleashed in the chapel. The Blood Angels of Arkio’s honour guard and Gallio’s detachment alike opened fire on one another, burning rounds lancing back and forth across the room in a screaming web of death.

‘No!’ The cry was Rafen’s, but it sank unheard under a tidal wave of gunfire, and with strength that belied his age, the Chaplain Delos shoved him back from the fray.

Arkio flicked Vode’s corpse from his hand like a discarded piece of meat, aloof as bullets keened and hummed off his golden ceramite chest. Gallio’s troop, outnumbered two to one by the honour guards, danced and spun as multiple bolter shells tore through their battlegear and cut them apart. Gallio was the last to fall, thick arterial blood running in rivers from every joint in his armour. His pistol dropped from nerveless fingers and the captain sank to his knees, eyes glazing.

Arkio came to him and cupped Gallio’s chin in his hand. ‘You have brought my worst fear to life,’ he told the dying man. ‘You will not be the last to perish.’

The captain gasped out a final breath, and with that it was ended; the entire exchange had lasted hardly a tick of the clock.

Rage filled Rafen and he punched Delos, turning the black-armoured Chaplain with the blow. He forced his way through the ranks of gold-helmed men and down to the blood-slick mosaic floor. Suddenly among the dead, he felt like weeping.

‘What…’ He could barely speak. ‘What have you done?’

Arkio looked him squarely in the eye and Rafen’s veins filled with ice. ‘These men,’ said his sibling, casting an offhand wave at the steaming corpses, ‘they were here to destroy us, kindred. I knew it from the moment they entered the room.’ He glanced up, addressing every Blood Angel in the chapel. ‘Hear me, brothers. We have been forsaken. These men came to condemn, not to know me.’

‘There was to be no question of truth.’ said Sachiel, taking up the call. ‘Gallio’s psyker was an assassin. Dante fears the Blessed Angel, he fears the threat that Arkio represents.’

‘You have killed our battle-brothers,’ Rafen said in a dead voice.

Arkio shook his head, a flicker of hurt in his eyes. ‘No, Rafen. None of these men were brothers to me, or to any of us. In their blood I see the real truth of it. Dante denies me.’

From the altar came a strangled choke, and Stele stumbled forward, his face drawn and wet with perspiration. His eyes bulging with effort, the inquisitor gasped for air. Rafen felt the same actinic tang of psyker-taint in the air, just as he had when Stele tortured the Word Bearers prisoner they had captured on Cybele.

‘Lord.’ Sachiel said. ‘What is wrong?’

‘The ship…’ Stele choked. ‘May be more of Vode’s kind… More aboard the ship… don’t let them…’

Sachiel met Arkio’s gaze and the figure in gold gave him a sharp nod. ‘I will not put any more of my brethren at risk.’ Arkio cocked his head and spoke into a hidden vox pick-up at his neck. ‘Bellus, heed me.’

The shock of his brother’s intent startled Rafen. ‘Arkio, you cannot–’ Sachiel interposed himself between the two siblings, blocking Rafen’s outstretched hand.

Arkio glanced at him. The weight of ages glittered in his eyes. ‘Bellus,’ he said, his voice instantly carried to Captain Ideon aboard the battle barge, ‘Captain Gallio and his men have revealed themselves as traitors to the way of Sanguinius. We shall not suffer the Amareo to live.’

Rafen’s breath caught in his throat, and for one moment of hope he believed that Ideon would refuse such a command; the brother-captain was a veteran warrior, not a zealot so easily swayed as Sachiel.

Then that hope guttered out and died. ‘Your will, Blessed,’ said Ideon, his voice distant and mechanical through the vox.

High above them, the battle barge’s starboard side rippled with activity as cannon hatches irised open and guns ran out on firing cradles. Missile batteries, lances and lascannon twisted in cupolas and turrets, finding the blade-like profile of the rapid strike cruiser Amareo in their sights. In allied space, with no threat to be determined, the cruiser’s commanding officer had placed no power to the ship’s void shields and so Amareo was naked to the unleashed fire of a ship that dwarfed her by fifty magnitudes of tonnage. Ideon did not flinch from the order; the concept of such a thought never once entered his mind. He had seen Arkio with what remained of his own eyes, tasted the coruscating power of his aura through the sensor web of the Bellus. The brother-captain had no doubts, and he fired.

It was a small mercy, perhaps, that the men aboard the other ship never saw the attack coming. They died without knowing where the blow had come from, lives snuffed out in an instant. Amareo exploded beneath a hellstorm of energy, and once again the battle barge was alone in the skies over Shenlong.

Rafen sat at the edge of the chapel chamber, on the shallow steps leading down to the mosaic floor, and he found he could not move. A distant flash of memory returned to him as he sat there, eyes unfocussed and shoulders hunched. As a boy, when his journey to Angel’s Fall was still a dozen cycles away, Rafen had become separated from the tribe during a migration. As a sandstorm had descended on him, the child had become disoriented and lost, wandering through the stinging dust clouds until at last he beached himself on a rocky outcropping and waited for the end to come. Hours passed as he stared out into the roiling storm, and the lad had known then what it was like to be dwarfed by the force of things larger than he was. Against the storm, his flesh and bone were ineffectual; the realisation of his own powerlessness had sobered him. Rescue had come, eventually. His father Axan emerged from the clouds and carried him to safety – but Rafen had never forgotten the hollow knowing that the storm had forced upon him.

Here and now, with the stink of spent cordite and spilled blood still lingering in the air, he felt that sensation all over again. For all his prowess, all the strength and fortitude granted to him as a Space Marine, Rafen felt powerless and weak as events rumbled on over him, crushing him beneath their passage. He looked but did not see the bodies of Gallio, Vode and the others. The Blood Angel felt empty inside, like the tin icons he had seen in the street urchin’s box. It was his audacity that had summoned the Amareo to Shenlong, his daring to send the secret message to Commander Dante, and now his own warrior-kin were dead. If I had kept my silence, these men would still be alive, his inner voice tormented, their blood is on my hands.

Sachiel summoned a gaggle of servitors. ‘Take these traitors and put them to the torch,’ he ordered. ‘They shall not soil the presence of the Blessed one moment longer.’

Arkio knelt on one knee close to Gallio’s remains, studying the shattered face of the dead man. ‘Wait,’ he said quietly. His words were almost a whisper, but they carried like a thunderclap. ‘Priest, you will harvest the progenoid glands of these men and see them preserved with our fallen aboard the Bellus.’

‘My lord?’ Sachiel blinked. ‘But these recreants have proven themselves unworthy of your beneficence – they opposed you.’

Arkio’s face was downturned. ‘In life, yes. But perhaps in death they can be born anew to the will of Sanguinius.’

Stele mopped his brow with a delicate kerchief. ‘You truly are the Angel’s Son, Arkio. Even in the face of a turncoat, you show forgiveness…’

The figure in gold armour raised his head; tears glittered on his face. ‘I weep for the destiny lost, Lord Stele,’ he told him. ‘These men might have stood beside us if they had been granted the choice. Instead, Dante has indoctrinated them with his fear. Fear of me.’

The inquisitor spied the silent Rafen from the corner of his eye, but he continued on to Arkio. ‘Blessed, it is as I had expected it to be. While the will of the God-Emperor would make our species masters of the galaxy, there are those who turn his words to their own selfish ends…’ He hesitated, breathing hard. The effort Stele had expended influencing Vode’s mind had left him weakened. ‘The noble purpose of the Imperium is smothered under the prejudice of men with limited vision… and you, you are the embodiment of a threat to that.’ He gestured to the dead. ‘Here is proof of it.’

‘What does this mean?’ Delos voiced the question on the minds of all the Space Marines in the room. Each of them having seen the miracle of Arkio’s Emergence themselves, they had no doubts about rallying to his side, but the bloody line they had crossed this day gave each and every one pause. Like the Chaplain, they looked to Arkio for guidance.

Sachiel spoke for him. ‘It means there is a schism in our Chapter, brothers. Commander Dante sought not to learn from the Blessed, but to judge him as wanting and put him to the sword. Dante denies the Ascension, and he must be forced to see the error of his ways.’

‘I have met the commander,’ said Delos, ‘and in his eyes I saw a man not easily swayed. If he will not recant and join the banner of Great Arkio, what then?’

Sachiel scanned the room, meeting the eyes of every man there – all except Rafen. ‘All those who oppose the dominion of the Reborn Angel are faithless, and they do not deserve to bear the hallowed legacy of Sanguinius. The only reward for those men is to share in the fate of Gallio and his assassins.’

Another Space Marine spoke up. ‘What you suggest…’ he was hesitant and afraid, ‘it is tantamount to civil war. We would be forced to turn against those of our own Chapter.’

‘Look around you, comrade brothers,’ Stele broke in. ‘Your hand has been forced. You have already done that!’ The inquisitor stabbed a finger at the broken remains of Vode’s force axe. ‘They came to kill. They came to murder Arkio in order to preserve Dante’s command of the Blood Angels.’

‘But Vode was a decorated warrior,’ said Delos. ‘He would not simply–’

‘Brother,’ said Arkio, and the Chaplain instantly fell silent. ‘The psyker looked upon me and saw nothing but murder.’

Delos gave a slow nod. ‘Forgive me, Blessed. As you say, so it is.’

With an abrupt flash of movement, Rafen came to his feet. ‘So what now, my brothers? Do we declare a holy war against our own kind? Shall we take up arms and lead an invasion to Baal, or perhaps even to Terra itself?’

‘Be careful, Rafen–’ Sachiel began, but Arkio silenced him with a look.

‘No, no, priest. Rafen’s questions deserve answers.’

‘We must not follow this path, Arkio.’ Rafen’s voice was desperate. ‘Turn back and reject it. We cannot have war among the Blood Angels – if we fight amongst ourselves, we will be destroyed as surely as if our enemies wiped us from existence.’

Stele took a shuddering breath, watching the two men carefully. The future came to a balance point here in this moment; the inquisitor’s delicate plans were caught like a fly in amber. Arkio’s response to his blood brother would either release them or shatter Stele’s careful machinations utterly.

‘As ever, my elder kinsman cuts to the heart of the matter, and for that I am grateful.’ He shook his head. ‘No, Rafen, I do not wish to sow insurrection among our Chapter. This matter must be resolved before more blood is shed. You are right, we must strive against war.’ Arkio turned to Sachiel. ‘Dante’s proxy wished to bring me in chains to Baal where I could be prodded and toyed with like some addled mutant. I will not submit to that.’

‘What do you suggest, Blessed?’ the priest replied.

‘Select a location in neutral territory,’ he ordered. ‘Find a world where we can meet face-to-face, on equal terms. Send Dante a message that I wish to resolve this division between us.’ He glanced at Rafen, eyes afire. ‘I would not have embraced the glory of the Deus Encarmine only to see it spent turning Blood Angel against Blood Angel.’

‘Your will be done,’ Sachiel bowed. ‘And what of our followers among the commoners?’

Arkio came up to his full height and strode toward the ornate glassteel doors that led to the chapel’s balcony. ‘I will address the people and my Warriors of the Reborn. They deserve to understand what has transpired here today, and to where it may take them.’ Honour guards opened the doors as he approached. ‘I shall take my thousand with me,’ he declared, ‘and then on to Baal.’ Arkio stepped out into the wan sunlight of Shenlong’s day and the adulation of the crowds blotted out all other sound.

Rafen watched his sibling bask in the glow of their reverence. ‘Do you seek death?’ said a voice close to his ear, and he turned to face Sachiel. The Sanguinary High Priest was standing at his shoulder, his face red with restrained anger. ‘It would be my pleasure to provide it to you, if that is what you wish.’

He ignored Sachiel’s loaded reductor, there in his grip. All other eyes were on Arkio as he began his speech to the factory city. ‘What are you afraid of, priest?’ he said in a low voice. ‘Is your faith in Arkio so fragile that the breath of my voice could send it tumbling?’

Sachiel’s face clouded. ‘It is you who is without conviction!’ he hissed. ‘Even in the face of fact, you refuse to give yourself fully to Arkio’s fealty.’

‘I took his oath–’

‘Did you?’ The priest prodded him in the chest. ‘Did you take it in here?’ Rafen hesitated for a split-second, and Sachiel gave a twisted smile. ‘I thought not.’

Movement caught the Space Marine’s eye; unseen by Arkio and the others, the inquisitor was silently making his way through the shady cloisters of the chapel, toward the copper doors. ‘I am a loyal Blood Angel and a Son of Sanguinius,’ Rafen said to the priest, in tones filled with absolute conviction. ‘That has never been in doubt.’

Now it was Sachiel’s turn to hesitate. ‘I… I have been the Pure One’s most pious servant for as many years as you, Rafen.’

‘Yes,’ Rafen agreed, ‘but piety alone may blind you.’ He pushed Sachiel’s pistol away and stepped past him, following Stele out of the chamber. ‘Remember that, the next time you are drawn to shed another brother’s blood.’

Rafen left the priest standing alone. Sachiel’s brow furrowed and he cradled the reductor, losing himself in the fine tooling and curves of the sanctified device. In the depths of the Sanguinary High Priest’s mind, the smallest splinters of doubt lay waiting.

The effort of each step was weighing heavily on Stele as he moved through the shadowed corridors of the fortress, a casual observer would have seen nothing amiss, perhaps a slight hurry in his walk, a deepness in his breathing. He was a credit to his Ordo Hereticus training. The inquisitor was fatigued, far more so than he dared to show to Arkio and the Blood Angels. Their kind were animal predators. They could smell weakness like the scent of an open wound. His performance had reached a critical phase and he could not afford to be seen as wanting.

Stele paused for a moment and patted at his brow once more with his kerchief, rubbing at the aquila electoo. The knots of tension in his muscles were waning, but he still ached from the sheer physical effort of expending his psychic reserves on Vode. He took a deep breath. There had been a flash there in the chapel when Stele’s keen psychic focus had slipped, just for a second. The epistolary instantly knew it, and turned his inner eye on the inquisitor, for one brief moment seeing him for what he was – the manipulator behind the unfolding events. Stele’s whole plan had almost unravelled right there; if Vode had realised that it was he, not Arkio, that was the source of the dark energies in the room, the inquisitor would have died on the end of Vode’s axe. Thank the warp, it was not so, he told himself. Stele managed to recover, pressing Vode to turn his ire on Arkio once more, and things had unfolded as they were meant to. While he conjured sheets of invisible force to protect the young Space Marine, Sachiel and the others had followed the patterns laid out for them and taken things to their conclusion. The actors were playing their parts, just as he had foreseen it.

The chambers Stele had taken as his living quarters were nearby, and as he approached he could already feel his strength starting to return; still, he would need to take a resting trance in order to be ready for the next progression. He allowed himself a smile. That was the beauty of his plan, the inquisitor considered, the perfection of all the best schemes. It was not that Stele forced these men to veer from their chosen path by sheer brute coercion. Such a performance lacked subtlety and elan. No, Stele’s skills came in the gentle push, the honeyed word in the doubting ear. His expertise was in gently guiding the righteous and honourable into places where it became easy for them to make questionable choices. Men like Arkio and Sachiel. The inquisitor would lead them over one moral line, then another and another, until they were set on a path to damnation.

He had done it many times; he was good at it. But this would be his greatest work. Before it had been men, sometimes nations, that he led astray. Arkio, Sachiel, the Blood Angels… to turn a Chapter of the Emperor’s most loyal Space Marines would be his crowning glory.

The door to his chambers opened under his hand, but Stele hesitated. He felt a presence close by. Inwardly he frowned. Someone was shadowing him, following him through the dim halls of the fortress. Had he been recovered, at his full capacity, he would have sensed the watcher automatically, but his wearied mind still buzzed with fatigue. Careful to ensure he gave no sign of awareness to his observer, he entered the room and allowed the door to remain open behind him.

The hand of Chaos hides here. The words turned over and over in Rafen’s mind as he kept pace with Stele, careful to keep out of the inquisitor’s line of sight. He had seen the way that Vode had stared at Stele in the chapel, the momentary look of pure revulsion on his face. What had the Librarian seen? Rafen’s gut crawled at the thought of the mind-witchery that passed between the two men. As much as he disliked the arrogant Sachiel, Rafen could not bring himself to believe that the Sanguinary Priest would ally himself with the Ruinous Powers, and for all the changes that had been wrought on Arkio, his sibling refused to consider him a traitor.

Stele. He lurked in the background, concealed and yet visible, always there with a word or deed when a choice presented itself. Sergeant Koris had died cursing him, and once again Rafen found himself wondering what insight his old mentor had gained in the throes of the deadly red thirst.

The Blood Angel saw the open door and slipped through it. Inside, the room was muted. The last fading streaks of thin, watery daylight managed to push through thick brocade curtains to illuminate a suite of rooms, dissipating as the sun dropped below the industrial horizon. This had once been the domain of Shenlong’s governor, and Stele had claimed it as his planetside residence in the days after the death of the Dark Apostle Iskavan. Rafen hovered close to an array of tall tapestries that depicted the history of the forge-world, from its discovery in the distant past to the consecration of the planet as a weapons manufactory.

‘Don’t stand on ceremony, Rafen.’ Stele’s voice seemed to come from everywhere at once. ‘Come in.’

The Space Marine’s face twisted in a scowl, but he did as he was bid. Stele emerged from a pool of shadows on the far side of the wide room. The light from the window rendered him in shades of grey, like a charcoal sketch on dull paper.

‘Have you come to kill me, Rafen?’ he asked conversationally. ‘Do you wish my death?’

Rafen scanned the room for any signs of the inquisitor’s hovering servo-skulls and found them humming quietly in the eaves, crystal eyes intent. The needles of small-bore lasguns tracked him as he moved. ‘Would your murder end this madness, inquisitor?’ he replied.

‘Madness?’ Stele repeated, taking a seat in a large chair. ‘Is that what you see in the plans of the Blessed?’ He covered his exhaustion well as he sat.

‘Not since the Horus Heresy has Astartes turned upon Astartes, yet I saw the same crime unfold in the chapel.’ Rafen’s jaw hardened with anger. ‘You did nothing to stop it.’

Stele cocked his head and gave a shallow nod without speaking. Slowly, carefully, he began to gather in what remained of his mental fortitude.

Rafen did not notice. ‘Is it not the code of the Ordo Hereticus to seek out and purge that which falls from the Emperor’s Light?’

‘Are you suggesting that Arkio is a heretic, Rafen?’

‘I…’ The Space Marine faltered at the question, unwilling to voice such a thing. ‘His path… It will lead only to darkness and death.’

The inquisitor made a noise of dismissal. ‘Consider this, Rafen. Perhaps it is not Arkio who is the apostate, but Dante.’

Rafen’s eyes flared with bright fury. ‘You dare to profane the lord commander’s name?’ His hands bunched into fists. ‘Perhaps it is you who is the agent of disorder here.’

He expected the inquisitor to become enraged, but instead Stele fixed him with a strong, unwavering gaze. There was a look in his eyes that might almost have been pity. ‘Comrade brother,’ he began, in a fatherly voice, ‘we are at a juncture of history, you and I. It is no dishonour to be awed by events such as those that have taken place in recent weeks. Your brother’s rise to ascendancy on Cybele, the Emergence that you were witness to in the manufactorium… Lesser men would be broken under the weight of such things.’

Rafen felt his words of reply dying in his throat, his anger fading.

‘But you, Rafen, you are at a different crossroads. Your choice is one that no other Blood Angel faces. You cannot go forward without first resolving it.’ Stele’s voice never rose in volume, but seemed to grow to fill the room, pressing in on the young Blood Angel from all sides. ‘You are filled with questions and confusion,’ the inquisitor continued.

Unbidden, Rafen nodded to himself. The doubts, the unending distrust that he had carried since the battle for Cybele returned to him all at once. Like a black, suffocating coil, the dark thoughts unfolded from the deeps of his soul. Rafen staggered back a step; suddenly, he felt the consequence of them like a physical force.

‘Why do you continue to question your brother?’ Stele urged. ‘Is it because you truly doubt what he has become, or is it because you are jealous of your younger sibling?’

‘No…’ Rafen forced the words out of his mouth. ‘Father… He…’

Stele’s presence seemed to permeate Rafen’s perception. ‘You look upon him and you feel rejected, yes?’ He pointed a sharp finger at the Space Marine, his voice rising. ‘You see him resplendent in the golden armour of the Great Angel and cry out it should have been me!’

‘Yes.’ The reply came from nowhere, startling Rafen even as he said it. ‘No. I do not… Arkio is not ready!’ He staggered backward, his hands coming up to press against his face. Every single doubt and misgiving that had ever plagued Rafen was welling up inside him like a foul surge tide. Clinging wreaths of despair enshrouded him. I am Adeptus Astartes, his mind cried out, I will not submit!

‘But you must,’ Stele answered, the inquisitor’s voice humming in his very bones. ‘You must give up your life for Arkio – don’t you understand? It is you that holds him back from true greatness, your influence that ties him down! You always treated him as the lesser, the unready youth, but in truth it was you that feared him.’ Rafen was on his knees now, and Stele’s tall form arched over him, towering and monstrous. ‘You could never admit that his success would be your failure.’

In the canyons of Rafen’s mind, he relived the moment when he was rejected at Angel’s Fall, when he walked out into the deserts to die an ignoble death rather than face his tribe with his inadequacy.

Stele saw the memory and honed it into a blade, cutting into Rafen’s will with all the psychic force he could muster. ‘You should have died that day. You should have let him go alone on to achieve his destiny…’

‘Yes.’ Rafen choked on the word, staggering to his feet under the weight of the suicidal gloom enveloping him. ‘Father, I failed you…’

Stele could barely contain the cold smile that threatened to break across his thin lips. With one final effort, he rammed home a black psy-knife of pure misery into Rafen’s troubled soul. ‘You can still save him, Rafen.’

Save him save him save him save him save him save him save him. The words echoed through his sensorium. ‘How?’ he wailed.

‘Die.’ Stele’s voice cracked like thunder. ‘Die for your brother, Rafen. End your life and free him.’

Free him free him free him free him free him free him free him free him. ‘No… no… no!’ Suddenly Rafen was running, the corridors flashing past him, the city beyond, crashing through the streets, heedless and broken. You must die, said the voice in his head, betrayer of blood, you must die.

‘I must die,’ he wept, falling to his knees.

Stele’s vision tunnelled and he gasped for breath. The rush of his blood and the thumping of his heart sounded in his ears as he struggled to the chair. The effort of pushing Rafen had left him dry, his psionic will draining the very life force from him to maintain the pressure. He fell to the floor in a heap, a guttural, harsh laugh escaping from his lips. ‘Rafen must die,’ he said aloud, and then sank into unconsciousness.

CHAPTER FIVE

Rafen ran.

The streets of the city, most of them still without power after the Chaos invasion, opened up before him. Warrens of twisting stone canyons deep with shadows drew the Blood Angel in. He crossed rooftops in shuddering leaps, blundering through bombed-out pits where workshops had once stood. He stumbled through voids cut in the city by lance fire and sites where Word Bearers had been put to death.

He ran to escape the pain, the black miasma of despair that snapped at his heels, tentacles of darkness always at his back, hungry for him. He was a heedless engine of motion, mind swept clean of nothing but misery.

He could not stop. If he stopped, the melancholy would engulf him and he would be lost, destroyed by the flood of guilt unleashed from his own psyche. What he had witnessed tore at him like a storm of razors. The transformation of his brother, the deaths of his battle-brothers on Cybele and again on Shenlong, all these things weighed and beat him down. The sheer anguish suffocated him. Rafen watched his comrades die around him, unable to stop it. His mind reeled as he remembered every soul he had known extinguished. He wished that it had been him instead of them.

Mother, perished in childbirth. Omeg, his childhood friend dead from shellsnakes. Toph the aspirant, torn open by fire scorpions. Crucius, shot on Ixion. Simeon, boiled alive by plasma. Koris, lost to the thirst. Gallio, gunned down…

Faces, voices, screams, a torrent of them whirled around him. There was some distant part of him calling, some last inviolate corner of Rafen’s soul still begging him to have strength and resist, but moment by moment the voice became fainter and fainter. The touch of Inquisitor Stele’s psychic force had broken open the place inside the Space Marine where he kept his blackest regrets, and now they were free, boiling through Rafen, drowning him in his own remorse.

Uncontrolled, the Blood Angel found himself falling, tumbling into a steel door. The hatch parted under his weight and Rafen crashed through in a tangle of armour and limbs. Hands clasping his head, he rolled to his knees. Through misted eyes he saw the place where he had come to rest, and a dart of surprise took him for a moment. Around him was a metal-walled chamber, dim and thick with chemical scent. Against one wall, a brass idol of the God-Emperor lay watching him.

‘How?’ he asked the cloying air. Perhaps it was the hand of the Emperor that had guided him here, perhaps blind chance or some animalistic muscle-memory, but Rafen’s headlong flight from the Ikari fortress had returned him to the makeshift meditation cell he had created for himself in the ruins.

Rafen reached out a trembling hand and ran his fingers over the icon; the yellowed metal felt blood-warm to his touch. Under the unblinking eyes of the Emperor, the crushing weight of his guilt came all at once and he let out a moan of anguish, an echoing, feral cry.

‘Holy Master, I have failed you. My life… means nothing. I am broken and defeated, my sorrow unbound…’

The Space Marine’s hand closed around the hilt of his combat knife, drawing the bright steel of the fractal-edged blade from its sheath. His limbs seemed to be working on their own, unwillingly following the suicidal compulsion laid into Rafen’s mind by Stele’s dark influence. The tip of the weapon touched the belly of his torso armour as it dipped downward, the blade inexorably drawn to his flesh.

It was someone else working him now; Rafen was a hollow puppet, woodenly moving through actions that the black power of suggestion forced on him. The knife kissed the red ceramite of his chest plate and scratched a course across the armour as his hand drew it upward.

‘I am ended…’ Rafen’s blade was at his neck, the serrated edge dipping into the meat of his throat. Blood pooled in the lee of the knife as the wound opened, running down the gutter of the weapon, across his bare knuckles and wrist.

Pain came then, pain, and the smell of his own vital fluid. The sensations pierced the shroud of despair gathered about Rafen’s soul, punching through the fog of his mind. He gasped – and in that moment everything changed.

A trembling sensation came upon the Blood Angel, every muscle in his body throbbing like a struck chord. The dual pulse-beat of his twin hearts rumbled in Rafen’s ears, the racing thunder of blood through his arteries suddenly a roaring torrent. Adrenaline heat surged out from his chest to fill his hollow core. He was an empty vessel abruptly filled with molten energy. Saliva flooded the Space Marine’s mouth at the thought of rich vitae on his lips. His vision, clouded moments before with morose shadows, was darkened by a red mist of passion.

Rafen shook with the raw power that welled up inside him, letting it wash away the insidious venom of melancholy. He knew this sensation well: it was the precursor to the black rage. The Blood Angel threw back his head, the brilliant white darts of his fangs baring. The red thirst was upon him, warring with the psychic toxins left behind by Stele’s potent mind-witchery.

And still his knife was at his throat, the metal cleaving flesh and threatening to sever arteries. One small jerk of the wrist would be enough. A war was being fought inside the Space Marine: rage facing despair, fury versus misery, white-hot wrath crashing against cold, soul-numbing anguish.

‘I… will… not… die.’ Rafen screamed. He had come too far, fought too hard to be felled by his own inner fears. ‘I am Adeptus Astartes,’ he roared. ‘I am the Emperor’s Chosen.’ Rich blood tricked down his torso armour, staining the white metal wings surrounding the ruby droplet sigil. ‘Sanguinius, hear me! I am a Blood Angel!’

His sight grew hazy as prickles of gold-white light unfolded out of the air around him. Rafen’s words choked off in a gasp as a pressure rose inside his skull, pushing at the edges of his perception. He glimpsed a halo of honeyed illumination glitter about the brass icon in the seconds before the light overwhelmed him. Radiance touched his bare skin with delicate warmth, like the kiss of a perfect summer day. Rafen’s heart swelled, the pain, the blood, the misery all swept away from him.

His vision collapsed to a single point: a face, a figure, a shape opening there in the void before him, coalescing from the fines of dust in the air itself. It towered over him, made him childlike in comparison; it filled the room even though the chamber could never have contained it. The golden form accreted and took on features – eyes, nose, mouth. Rafen gasped, the thought of it thrilling at his lips.

‘Sanguinius…’

This was no pretender, no Reborn Angel, no mere changed man before him. The mellifluent, achingly perfect face of the Blood Angels primarch bore down on Rafen, a vision of the Great Progenitor of his Chapter invoked from the very matter of the blood surging in his veins. Every battle-brother carried an iota of the Pure One inside him. Since the foundation of the Blood Angels, the conclaves of the Chapter’s Sanguinary Priests had kept the living vitae of their long-dead master in the sacred Red Grail, and on their induction into the Chapter initiates would drink from a holy cup that held a philtre of this hallowed fluid. Rafen felt that blood within his blood sing out as like touched like. The Crimson Angel ran a hand over Rafen’s face and, with infinite tenderness, drew away the bloody knife. Suddenly the blade seemed his again, his body responding to his commands once more and not the suggestions of another.

Rafen lowered his face to the flat of the knife and licked his own blood; the rich coppery taste was strong and heady. The violence within, the clawing feral might of the red thirst ebbed as he drank, receding – and with it went the vision, the gold aura about him disintegrating. Rafen’s hand stabbed outward, fingers reaching for his primarch. ‘Lord, help me!’ he cried. ‘What must I do?’

The crystal blue eyes of Sanguinius took on a sad distance, glancing down at the stained weapon in Rafen’s hand, then back to meet the gaze of the Blood Angel. Rafen mimicked his master’s action, studying the weapon in his grip.

When he glanced up, he was alone. Rafen sat there until sunrise, weighing his knife in his hand and wondering.

There came a heavy pounding on the sturdy nyawood doors and it insinuated itself into the mind of Ramius Stele, dragging him unwillingly from a deep, healing slumber. The noise had been going on for quite some time, so it seemed.

Stele turned where he lay on the floor, a dried patch of dark blood from his mouth and nose sticky on his cheek where it pressed to the careworn stone tiles. Swearing a curse beneath his breath, he pulled himself from the ground to a semblance of standing, the sickly weakness in his stomach making him wince. Energy had returned to him, but he still felt lethargic with the effort of his psionic exertions. He gave a slow shake of the head, forcing away such thoughts. It was time for a communion once again, and it would not do for him to show fragility.

Stele strode to the door, wiping away the caked matter from his face, and opened it. A Blood Angels serf reacted with shock as he did so; the servant had been about to knock again and his hand was raised as if to strike the inquisitor. The serf backed off a step, bowing contritely. ‘Forgive me, Lord Stele, but I was afraid you did not hear me…’

Stele held up a hand to silence him. ‘I was detained with another matter.’ If the helot saw any indication of fatigue in his face, then he gave no sign. ‘Where is it?’

The Chapter serf tugged at something behind him in the shadows of the corridor, and, with atonal footsteps, a crooked woman came forward, led into the wan light by a rope about her neck. Stele pulled a ragged cloth sack from her head to reveal her face and the serf recoiled at the sight, nauseated. The woman had no eyes; the Word Bearers had taken them. Her ears and nostrils had also been sewn shut, and there on her forehead in a parody of Stele’s Imperial aquila electro-tattoo was an eight-pointed star.

The inquisitor nodded. This would be an acceptable vessel. He snatched the rope from the serf and dismissed him. ‘Go now. I will send for you later to dispose of the remains.’

The poor unfortunate had not been asked to take the mark of Chaos Undivided willingly. More than likely, she had probably expected to die in the Word Bearers attack. Instead, some subordinate cohort of the Castellan Falkir, the corrupted invader who had taken Shenlong before the Blood Angels arrived, had picked her to serve as a messenger-slave. There were many of these poor wretches still alive in the warrens of the manufactories. Most had been put to death as a mercy soon after their Chaos masters had been routed, but some had escaped into the industrial zones. Locals had taken to hunting the remainder and bringing them to the fortress as some sort of offering, in the way a feline pet might present its master with half-dead prey. When they brought ones that were relatively intact, Stele arranged for them to be quietly kept in the dungeons below the stronghold. Innocents spoiled by the touch of Chaos; their profaned bodies offered much in the way of arcane potential, if correctly harnessed.

Stele released the rope and let the woman wander blindly across the vast room. It amused him to see panic grow on her face, her hands stabbing out in anxious motions, desperately searching for walls that were nowhere nearby. He watched the slave reach the centre of the room and blunder into the ornate table he had placed there. The jar of ichor sitting atop it upended and spilt on her fingers. A quizzical look on her ruined face, she held up a hand dirty with the matter and touched it to her lips – the only sense she still possessed.

Stele smiled; the concoction brewed from dead Word Bearers hearts stung her throat and she choked off a strangulated scream. The slave dropped to the floor and began to melt like hot wax. Bones and organs, bunches of nerves, raw muscle, all of it shifted and changed, shimmering wetly in the light of photon candles as a whispering metamorphosis took place. Presently, the slave stood, and in the dead sockets it grew new eyes with which to look at the inquisitor.

Stele made a theatrical bow. He had seen this parlour trick too many times to be affected by it. An ephemeral, potent splinter of monstrous psionic will was now inhabiting the helot, turning it into a mouthpiece for his hellish cohort full light years distant from Shenlong. ‘Warmaster Garand. So nice to see you again.’

The tiny piece of the Chaos warlord’s essence examined itself, the molten skin and mealy matter of the messenger. ‘A poor frame for such a force as I. It will not last for long.’ Even as Garand spoke through a broken throat, the Witch Prince’s energy was burning up the life of the slave woman. ‘Perhaps for the better.’

‘How so?’ Stele asked, approaching the possessed form.

‘It means we can forgo your usual tedious prattle.’ Garand bubbled blood. ‘You have been on this blighted sphere for over a solar month, and yet you seem to have made little progress.’

A nerve in Stele’s jaw jumped. ‘What do you know of it?’ he snapped, his fatigue briefly allowing his annoyance to surface. ‘Your blunt intellect has little comprehension of the subtlety of my enterprises.’ He made a dismissive motion at the helot. ‘These communions I am forced to take with you do nothing but divert my attention from the tasks ahead.’

Garand’s fleshy avatar gave him a sideways look. ‘Indeed?’ it mocked. ‘And yet it was my, what did you call it, “blunt intellect” that allowed you to cement your position of authority with these boneless human cattle.’ The proxy padded over to him, the psionic stink of Garand’s mind-spoor clouding Stele’s telepathic senses. ‘I broke the sacred compact of the Word Bearers codex in order to lay the path for your scheme, man-filth! I sacrificed an entire host for this endeavour. Never forget that!’

Stele’s face soured. ‘Don’t make it sound like such a hardship, Warmaster. You yourself would have taken the head of Iskavan the Hated if he had not died here. He and his ninth host were of no value to the Ruinous Powers.’

Garand made a negative noise. ‘But still… I have fulfilled my part of the bargain. You are tardy with yours.’ It spat a globule of necrotic flesh on to the floor. ‘There are larger plans at work, Stele. Larger than the turning of these mewling Blood Whelps… If you cannot fulfil your responsibilities–’

‘I need more time,’ Stele snapped. ‘Already, events gather their own momentum. Arkio’s powers are still unfolding, the faith of his followers grows stronger by the day–’

‘You waste your breath explaining it to me,’ Garand said, and nodded to the shadows. ‘It is not I you must justify your dilatory manner to–’

Stele’s breath caught in his throat as something dark and cold fell across the room like a psychic eclipse. A foetor that could only exist in the unreality of the warp entered the chamber; for miles around, plates of food suddenly spoiled, wine turned to vinegar in corked bottles, births came stillborn. In high orbit aboard the Bellus, Ulan’s blind eyes wept tears of thin blood.

‘No,’ said Stele, the denial puny, minuscule. The word fell against a black curtain of shapes that hissed and whirred about him.

From every dark corner came insects, not in mad swarms or crazed armies, but in careful, quiet and orderly ranks. There were flies of every size and colour, spiders and beetles by their hundreds of thousands. They came together into a formless mass, and in moments they became an unholy daemon-shape, united by a single hideous intent.

‘Malfallax,’ Stele spoke the warp-lord’s name and bowed his head. ‘I had not expected to greet your magnificence.’

‘Better this way,’ it said, in breathy tones that were chitin wings rubbing against each other. ‘Unexpected.’ It bent down and licked absently at the dry patch of blood.

Garand’s avatar dropped to the floor in genuflection. ‘Great Malfallax, Changer and Monarch of Spite. Your presence honours us.’

The daemon did not acknowledge the Word Bearer. ‘Ssssssstele.’ It savoured the name. ‘Our long-held bargain comes to its fruition, but you tarry. Why?’

The sheer psychic presence of the daemon beat at Stele. ‘They… cannot be forced, lord. To guide these Astartes from the corpse-god’s will to the way of eight requires time and guileful purpose.’

‘A luxury you no longer possess,’ the creature replied. ‘In the Eye, time changes and shifts as all things do. You must accelerate your plans.’

Stele frowned. ‘Lord, if we move too quickly, all I have done may become unravelled. Garand’s offering will be forfeit…’

On the mention of his name, the Warmaster’s avatar interposed itself. Parts of the flesh-form were alight now, crisping and burning. ‘He has spoken. You proceed too slowly. You will move forward at once or I will have this world ended and you along with it.’

Baal. The planet had been green once, hundreds of thousands of years ago, back before the Imperium had existed. Once, lush forests and oceans rich with life had covered the world, but those were forgotten myths now. Their legacy remained in fossil records as the planet moved on, catastrophic forces scouring the surface until it was a fierce sphere of blood-red rock and sand. The name of the world came from the depths of human history, a cognomen that men had once given to a daemonic beast king. Like its namesake, Baal was an unforgiving master, a place that would destroy the unwary and the faithless.

Fitting, then, that the Blood Angels had come here and turned it to their own purpose. Commander Dante crossed the battlements of the fortress-monastery, the constant desert wind tugging lightly at the hems of his robes. Above the horizon he could see the shapes of Baal’s moons in the evening sky, their surfaces glittering.

The constant storms of rusty fines in Baal’s upper atmosphere made the skies shimmer with a faint pink glow. Dante’s eyes ranged down over the landscape, tracing the lines of the Great Chasm Rift to the north and the towing caps of the Chalice Mountains. After millennia, the warrior was still touched by the sight. Baal lived in his heart, as it did in all of his battle-brothers. In the Book of the Lords, there was a passage that talked of the planet’s birth, as a place created by the God-Emperor to test the faithful. If that were truly the purpose of Baal, then the Blood Angels had succeeded here. They had taken a world that threw death at anything which dared to stride across its surface, and made it their home. Baal would never be tamed – that was a thing for gods to do, not for men – but it had been taught to respect its masters. The harsh environment lived in harmony with its people. It was only here, in the inner sanctums of the fortress, that the ancient and long-passed character of the planet could still be found.

Dante passed through an ornate airlock made of brass and synthetic diamond plates, and into the arboretum. The air was warm and moist, quite unlike the rasping dryness outside; the slightly sweet smell of rich loam reached his nostrils. From soft soil of dun-coloured earth, trees and plants grew toward a domed ceiling made of oval lenses. Each pane was as large as a leviathan’s eye, forged by some process lost to the depths of history. Perhaps, in the beginning, the diamond windows had been clear, but now they were scarred white by untold centuries of scouring sand, shedding only a milky, indistinct light across the vast garden.

The Blood Angel walked with care through the riot of foliage, picking his way around the boles of tawny trees. Some of his brethren questioned the value of this place; they asked why it was that valuable servitors be maintained in order to keep the arboretum alive. Dante suspected that they saw the place as some eccentricity of his, a personal diversion for the master of the Blood Angels. Perhaps it was all of those things, but it was also a vital link to Baal’s past. Every plant that grew and thrived here was extinct in the wilderness outside. The garden was a portal into deep time, a reminder of how things could thrive, only to become dust as the future encroached upon them. It was a living reminder of life’s struggle against the weight of history.

‘Calistarius,’ Dante said gently as he approached a clearing. Before him, a man in simple prayer robes knelt on one knee, tracing his fingers across the petals of a bed of white flowers.

‘My lord,’ said Mephiston, glancing up at him. ‘I have not heard that name spoken in many years.’ The Chief Librarian of the Blood Angels gazed at Dante with hooded eyes, the burning gaze that so transfixed the minds of his enemies at rest. ‘I have not been Brother Calistarius for an age.’

The commander studied the face of his friend and comrade. Dante had been there on planet Armageddon on the night that he had emerged from the rubble of Hades Hive, reborn as Mephiston, Lord of Death. Calistarius had been lost to the red thirst and buried alive, thought dead until a vision of their primarch had guided him back to life. ‘Forgive me,’ said Dante. ‘For a moment, my mind took me back to days past. To simpler times.’

‘In this place it is easy to lose one’s self in ancient history. Others may doubt the merit of this garden, but not I.’

Dante gave a slight nod; the psyker had picked up on his thoughts. ‘You sent word you wished to speak with me.’

‘Yes, lord. I thought it best we talk alone, less incautious ears or minds catch wind of what I must tell you.’ He gestured around. ‘I often come here to meditate, commander. The tranquillity of Baal’s past smoothes the path into the empyrean.’

Dante’s face became grave. He could tell from his old cohort’s tone that Mephiston’s news would not be good. ‘What have you to tell me?’

‘Vode’s mind was silenced, Great One. Even as I rested here and projected my thoughts into the void, I felt the edge of a ripple from his psychic shriek.’

‘Killed?’

‘Aye,’ Mephiston said grimly, ‘and Gallio along with him. Every man we sent to Shenlong, ended in a blink of fire.’

‘You are certain of this?’ Dante asked.

‘The ways of the warp are never fixed,’ replied Mephiston. ‘Like desert sand, the real slips through my fingers. But on my sword, I tell you. Those men are dead.’

A cold, sickening familiarity touched Dante, one he had known a million times over since his first command as a Blood Angel warrior. He felt the death of each battle-brother as keenly as he had the very first to die under his stewardship. ‘How?’

‘I can only guess,’ the psyker added, ‘but if this Arkio is touched by the ways of Chaos–’

‘There must be another explanation,’ snapped the commander. ‘An accident perhaps, an attack by enemy forces…’

Dante’s old comrade gave a slow shake of his head. ‘No, lord,’ he said, with grim finality.

‘You would suggest our own kind have drawn blood against us?’ Dante growled. ‘I pray you are mistaken.’

‘As do I,’ Mephiston agreed. He was silent for a moment before he spoke again. ‘The Amareo’s mission will not remain concealed from our brothers forever, commander. Despite my best efforts, word of it spreads among the men. Soon, questions will be asked.’

Dante shook his head. ‘I will not reveal news of this “transformation” until we know the truth behind it. If talk of a second coming of the Great Angel grows, dissension in the ranks will follow.’

‘And a schism is something we cannot risk.’ He met Dante’s gaze. ‘My doubts are gone, lord. I believe this boy Arkio is a false messiah. Only out of fear would he have killed Gallio’s party.’

‘But you said that you cannot be sure that is what took place.’

Mephiston frowned. ‘Dark threads gather out there. They knit together in a web of deceit and we are caught in them. Shrouded forces, hatreds incarnate are at work manipulating events. This Arkio is at the hub of them, commander.’

‘We can only be sure by facing him in person,’ said Dante. ‘Until then, he remains an unknown, a tarot card unturned.’

The psyker fell silent again, studying the delicate plants at his feet. ‘You know this flower, commander?’

‘Redkin,’ Dante replied. ‘It has not existed on this planet in the wild since the thirty-eighth millennium.’

Mephiston ran a bare finger over the tough, rubbery petals of the white flower, the serrated edge of it drawing blood. Instantly, capillaries in the petiole began to absorb the fluid, turning the plant scarlet. ‘The flower’s roots mesh with those of the others that surround it,’ the Librarian said, ‘it shares the bounty it gathers.’ In a bloom of crimson, the coloration spread across each of the plants in the cluster. Mephiston’s fingers closed around the flower in his hand and crushed it, spilling a trickle of his own vitae on the rusty soil. ‘Like us, one gives strength to all. But if that unity is broken…’ He paused, cocking his head. ‘We have company.’

Dante turned at the sound of the airlock opening. A spindly messenger servitor ambled over on clanking mechanical feet. Once it had been a human being; now it was a device in service to the Imperium, mind wiped of any personality, a featureless automaton made of flesh and implanted steel. Its blank face swung left and right, finally locating the Blood Angels commander. ‘With your permission, Lord Dante. A message from Shenlong arrives. Your attention only.’

‘Speak,’ he demanded.

‘Via the astropathic duct Ulan aboard the battle barge Bellus, Brother-Captain Ideon commanding, protocol omnis octo,’ it recited, relaying the trance-speech from the monastery’s own psychic communicators. ‘The Sanguinary High Priest Brother Sachiel, chosen of the Blessed Arkio, requests an audience with the Lord Commander Dante on the shrine world of Sabien in nine solar days, on behalf of the Reborn Angel.’

‘The Reborn Angel,’ Mephiston repeated the title with a sneer on his lips. ‘This whelp has no need for modesty, it seems.’

Dante was lost in thought for a moment. ‘Sabien. I know it well. There was a Blood Angels garrison there, in the worst days of the Phaedra Campaign.’ He frowned. ‘Many of our kindred shed blood for every metre of that blighted planet.’

‘An abandoned monument world,’ said the psyker. ‘An ideal location for an ambush.’ He got to his feet, fire dancing in his eyes. ‘Lord, this is so transparent a trap.’

‘Of that, we may be certain,’ Dante agreed. ‘But this priest Sachiel, if he truly speaks for Arkio, knows only too well that I am forced to agree to the meeting.’

Mephiston’s eyes narrowed. ‘Commander, you cannot think to accept this so-called “request”? If Arkio wishes to meet, he should come here to Baal.’

‘He will not,’ Dante retorted, ‘and I will not risk more lives to bring him under force of arms. No, we must seek the truth about Arkio and determine if he truly is Sanguinius reborn or an impostor.’

‘To do that, I would need to turn my gaze upon him, lord.’

Dante nodded. ‘And so you will. You will attend me at Sabien and I will have this Arkio answer for his deeds.’

Mephiston shook his head. ‘I cannot allow that.’

The Blood Angel gave the Librarian a sharp look. ‘Do you defy me now as well?’

‘Forgive me, great Dante, but you are the sworn commander of this Chapter. Your place is here, at the throne of Baal. I shall meet with this Arkio, alone. As your second, I cannot allow you to place yourself in such danger.’

Dante went red with annoyance. ‘In eleven hundred years I have led my men from the front! Now some child presumes to the godhead over my Chapter and you demand I stay behind?’

Mephiston’s iron-hard gaze never wavered. ‘If it pleases the lord commander, I am best suited for this endeavour. For all your greatness, you do not possess the warp-sight as I do. My vision will see the heart of this pretender as plainly as day, and I will not flinch from his execution when the moment comes.’ He placed a hand on Dante’s shoulder, a gesture of familiarity that no other Blood Angel alive would ever have dared to make. ‘My lord, when the men learn of this Arkio there will be questions. They will look to you for guidance.’

‘And so I must be here to answer those questions.’ Dante frowned. After a long moment, he spoke again. ‘Very well. Your counsel has never failed me yet, Mephiston, and I will accept it now. On my orders, assemble a force of your most senior brothers and take command of the battle barge Europae. I grant you full power to speak on my behalf and that of the Blood Angels.’

The Lord of Death tapped his balled fist to his chest and bowed his head in salute. ‘For Sanguinius and the Emperor,’ he said.

‘For Sanguinius and the Emperor,’ repeated Dante.

Rafen entered the chapel unseen and moved from the shadows to the altar. He had barely taken a step when Arkio’s crystal-clear voice called to him. ‘Rafen. I see you.’ His sibling stood up from prayer and beckoned him forward. ‘Come now. We are alone.’

The Space Marine walked into the dimly lit transept. ‘They say that tomorrow Sachiel will choose the thousand and consecrate the Blood Crusade.’ His voice was tight with emotion.

Arkio nodded. ‘It shall be thus.’

‘And how many will die?’ Rafen demanded. ‘How many more Blood Angels and innocents will perish?’

‘Only those who stand against the will of Sanguinius.’

Rafen faltered for a moment. ‘Brother, I beg of you. Go no further. I implore you, in our father’s name, do not do this! You will lead the Blood Angels into self-destruction.’

At any moment, he expected Arkio to turn on him in anger, to strike him down for his presumption, but instead the golden figure gave him a sorrowful, pitying gaze. ‘No, my kinsman. I will free them. With your help, and Sachiel, Stele, all of us, we will begin a new era for our battle-brothers.’

‘Arkio,’ Rafen felt his voice catch. ‘Can you not see the bloodshed that lies ahead?’

His brother turned away, returning to his prayer stance, dismissing him like some irrelevant vassal. ‘I am the eye of the infinite, the Deus Sanguinius. If there is blood to spill, then it shall be spilt in my name.’

Rafen found no more words and fell silent. He turned his back on Arkio and walked away.

CHAPTER SIX

In the confines of the makeshift arena, their war had raged for days and nights without respite. Some of them had been soldiers in the Shenlong Planetary Defence Force, desperate to regain a little honour after failing so miserably against the Chaos invaders, others were just citizens, dispossessed by the Word Bearers, lost and purposeless in the ashes of their city. All of them had spirits that were wanting, great voids in their hearts that could only be filled by one who could offer them hope.

This Blessed Arkio did; the Shenlongi had believed themselves abandoned by the might of the Imperium. Their prayers for salvation had gone unanswered, and as the Traitor Marines subjugated them, the vile demagogues of the Word Bearers cult mocked them for their loyalty to an Emperor that had turned his back on them. Those were the darkest days. Some had broken under the yoke of oppression and taken their own lives, others casting off their fealty to Terra and embracing the bloody way of the archenemy. The people had faced their fate with gloom, convinced that rescue would never come.

Arkio changed all that. On wings of sacred fire, he fell from the skies and smote the Word Bearers with his Holy Lance. In less than a day, the Reborn Angel and his cohorts swept Shenlong clean of the enemy and liberated her people. They were all too willing to cast aside whatever devotion they had given to a distant ghost atop a throne a million light-years away; all too willing to bend their knee for a god that walked like a man, passing among them in a vision of golden light. Arkio was their rescuer, and they loved him for it.

When the Blessed’s priest Sachiel gave word that Arkio was to draw an army from the people, untold numbers of men and women rose to the call. They would be proud to lay down their lives for their new saviour, taking any chance to stand a little closer to his magnificence. There would be a choosing, Sachiel said, the conscription of a thousand souls to join Arkio on his Blood Crusade. Those so ordained would become the Warriors of the Reborn, and for their hearts and souls the reward of life anew was theirs. The penitents spoke in whispers of the far-off world of Baal, the birthplace of the Blessed, where legends said normal men could be transformed into avatars almost as great as he – the Adeptus Astartes. There was no shortage of volunteers.

In the great plaza on the steps of the Ikari fortress they fashioned an arena from fallen buildings, and inside those who dared to aspire to warriorhood took up arms against one another. Only the strongest, the most ruthless would be selected for the thousand. They began their little war, corralled there beneath the mountainous tower, and they fought and fought. Life by life, hour by hour, their numbers dwindled, the survivors nearing the thousandfold as day followed night followed day.

Alactus and Turcio opened the gate as the Sanguinary High Priest approached, the dawn light gleaming off the white gold on his armour. Within the arena, the melee had grown quieter and more infrequent as the massed battles of the early days had given way to attrition. Hundreds of commoners had perished in those first confused free-for-alls, gallons of shed blood turning the flagstones brown beneath them. Some of the weapons were crude – clubs, axes, huge steel spanners stolen from the factory cathedrals – while others were more deadly. A few of the applicants had projectile weapons, flamers, even lasers, the guns looted from the corpses of war dead and brought here to turn against one another.

As Turcio watched, the Blood Angel could see a firefight in progress between two men, one barely able to carry the heavy stubber in his hand, the other snapping shots back with some sort of small-bore lasgun. The figure with the stubber gave out a war cry and tried to rush his enemy, but the weapon was too bulky, too heavy for an unarmoured human to manage. He stumbled, and the figure with the laser stitched him with hot fire. He sank to the ground, his corpse catching alight.

Sachiel paused at the arena gate and spoke a whispered command into his vox. In reply an air raid warning siren keened from a high balcony somewhere on the side of the fortress tower. The lowing shriek settled over the plaza and silence fell after it. This was the pre-arranged signal; the trial was over. All across the arena fights staggered to a halt and weapons were lowered. Those who could still move emerged from cover, into the open space in the centre of the battlefield. In the makeshift grandstands erected along the walls of buildings bordering the arena, people boiled forward in unrestrained eagerness to see who would be selected.

The siren shut off and Sachiel basked in the quiet. It seemed as if every eye on Shenlong was set on him. The Blessed had charged the priest with the task of making the final choices, and it was a duty he was only too eager to perform. He entered the arena, with Turcio and Alactus at his sides. Sachiel’s gaze ranged over the faces he saw around him, all of them bloody and dirty with the effort of fighting. In their eyes was an unquestioning readiness to do anything that he ordered, and the realisation of that made him swell with power. These men would follow Arkio into the jaws of hell and never question.

To think he had harboured doubts about the raising of this army; now it seemed ridiculous to him. Of course, these were only mere men, no match for the might of a Space Marine like him, but still this helot battalion would have its purpose on the field of conflict. The fact alone that commoners were willing to sacrifice their futures for Arkio spoke volumes for the power of the Blessed. When the Blood Crusade began in earnest, the ranks of the Warriors of the Reborn would swell to ten, twenty times this size. His shook off all thought of his previous hesitancy. Who was he to question the wisdom of the Blessed?

A movement caught his eye and looked down to see a straggle-haired female as she tried to rise to her feet. She could not do it; livid, weeping wounds along her side had opened her to the air. Sachiel studied the injury with a practiced eye. A Space Marine might have been able to survive such a cut, but a normal human would have no chance at all. The woman met his gaze, and there in her eyes was an entreaty so pure and heartfelt it gave the priest pause. He stooped over her.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Muh-M-Mirris,’ she coughed. ‘Mirris Adryn.’

Sachiel noted the remains of a small pennant badge on her shoulder. The Shenlongi had a tradition whereby the cadre and rank of a citizen would be displayed through a set of knotted ribbons on their clothing. The woman wore the colours of a mother of three, a teacher. ‘Mirris,’ he said gently. ‘Your children are proud of you.’

‘Yes.’ She forced a smile, tears streaming down her face. She knew death was coming, and that she would never fulfil the dream of joining Arkio’s cohort.

‘Let me give you a gift,’ began Sachiel, and he drew his reductor from his belt. ‘Do you desire the Blessed’s Peace, Mirris Adryn?’

‘Lord, the offering of the reductor is only for Astartes–’ said Alactus, his face a grimace.

Sachiel silenced him with a look. ‘All those who serve the Reborn Angel shall share in this.’

Mirris’s eyes shone, accepting the benediction. ‘Yes, lord. I wish it.’

He gave her a gracious nod and shot her in the heart. The blunt-headed titanium bolt was designed to punch through the hardened ceramite and plasteel of a Space Marine’s power armour and pierce the bone cage projecting the organs within, it was the final, honourable solution for a battle-brother too close to death for recovery. Against normal, unenhanced flesh it blew a cavity in the teacher’s chest as big as Sachiel’s fist. With care, he closed Mirris’s eyes and stood, wiping away the backwash of her blood from the device. ‘Even in death, the thousand will serve the Blessed as a monument to his righteousness,’ he said, his voice clear and hard as it carried across the arena.

Turcio stared at the dead woman, the faint smell of her cooling blood reaching his nostrils through the grille of his armoured helmet. The tang of the scent-taste touched a deep and primal chord inside him. Battle would be coming soon.

Sachiel stepped forward boldly, holstering the reductor and spreading his hands wide. He moved through the crowd of bedraggled and worn fighters, touching some on the shoulders, nodding to others. Each one that he indicated bowed in return, and those around them shrank back to see the greatness in their midst. Man by man, Sachiel chose the thousand. Those that fell short of the benediction watched in mute silence, others breaking into tears. Alactus saw two men place guns in their mouths and end their own lives rather than accept the failure.

In the middle of the arena was the gutted hulk of a Word Bearers Land Raider, a burnt box of warped metal and bony protrusions killed in the opening salvoes from the Bellus. He climbed atop the ruined vehicle to address the people before him.

‘Your lives are over,’ he told them. ‘Whatever you were before this moment, whatever your words and deeds before this day, now they are nought but vapour. You are dead and you are reborn. You are the thousand.’

A ragged cheer erupted from the men in the arena, quickly picked up by the watchers in the stands and the streets beyond. The sound carried like a wave, and Sachiel fancied that he could hear the whole of the planet crying out. ‘You are the first to bear the honour of the Warriors of the Reborn, the chosen of Arkio the Blessed, the servants of the New Blood Angel. Your names will be carved into history alongside the legions of Sanguinius, alongside the name of Arkio himself!’

The thousand rattled their weapons and sent shots into the sky, a clattering clarion of thanksgiving. ‘Mark this day well,’ he told them, ‘for it shall never come again. In the ages, men will look back to Shenlong and see you all as a beacon of principle and loyalty. They will know you as I do – as heroes of the wars to come.’

The roar came again, and this time it split the air like rolling thunder.

A wry sneer formed on the inquisitor’s lips as the noise penetrated the stained glass windows of the chapel. The shouting had such force that the ancient panels vibrated under each exultation, and the priest’s rhetoric made the sound rise and fall like a conductor directing an orchestra. He considered Sachiel with cold amusement; all men bore weaknesses, even such preternatural superhumans as the Space Marines, and the key to manipulating them was to isolate and exploit those defects. For men such as the late Sergeant Koris, it had taken more application than others, and with Rafen the effort had almost killed him – but he fully expected to hear of Arkio’s brother soon, perhaps to be found dead in some dingy corner of the city after taking his own life.

Stele had been forced to drive Rafen into the depths of his own despair to control him, but Sachiel was a different story. A supremely arrogant man among an arrogant breed, the priest’s touchstone was his self-superiority. Stele discovered that in his youth, Sachiel had been born into the closest thing that Baal Primus had to aristocratic nobility. A highly-placed warrior tribe with many dominions on the First Moon, he viewed his ascension to the hallowed ranks of the Blood Angels as a matter of course, and Stele had no doubt that Sachiel imagined a future with his hand on the command of the Chapter in the centuries to come. Stele had worked carefully to cultivate Sachiel, over the years of the Bellus’s mission into ork space to recover the Spear of Telesto, teasing out the thread of vanity that lurked inside him, feeding it and nurturing his pretension. He had allowed Sachiel to advance quickly in rank and in turn gained a trusting ally. Combined with the priest’s fanatical devotion to the cult of Sanguinius, Stele had an agent who would willingly further his plans without ever considering the true motives behind them. As long as Stele kept his purpose cloaked in the mantle of the primarch’s rebirth, Sachiel would follow him unflinchingly.

He looked away from the window. Arkio was not present, and to his irritation, the honour guard stationed at the gate to the inner crypt refused to let the inquisitor enter. The young man was in there once again, communing with the Holy Lance. In truth, Arkio’s affinity with the archeotech weapon was a source of some concern to Stele. He found himself wondering what secrets the device held, secrets that only someone with Astartes blood would ever be able to unlock. The Blood Angel was meditating in the sanctum, hoping to catch some fragment of his primogenitor’s soul from the weapon Sanguinius had once called his own. Stele gave a silent entreaty to the Ruinous Powers that he would find no such thing. If Arkio began to exhibit signs of dangerous independence, all Stele’s carefully-wrought plans would be for nothing.

Another lusty roar brought his attention back to the crowds below. Sachiel was building to a crescendo now, unleashing a blazing tirade.

In his hand the priest held the copper chalice that was the symbol of his high office. He thrust it aloft, and the dawn sun glittered off the replica of the great Red Grail. It held Sachiel’s gaze for a moment. One day, he told himself, I will carry the true Red Grail itself, even if I have to wrestle it from Corbulo’s dead fingers. The naked avarice in his thoughts sent a thrill through the priest. It was a hidden desire, something he would never have dared to speak of openly – and yet suddenly he felt empowered by it, the daring of such dissension making him bold. The thousand bowed their heads under the shape of the chalice.

‘The Blood of ages flows through us all,’ he said, phrases from the Book of the Lords bubbling up inside him without conscious thought. ‘The Sons of Sanguinius will rise to take the galaxy from all those who oppose order and light.’ They cheered him on, frenzied and wild. ‘The Blessed lights the path, we must lead the way along it and welcome those who praise his name!’

‘Arkio!’

‘Arkio!’

‘Praise him!’

Voices all around were raised in adulation. ‘We bring light to those who see the truth, and all-consuming fire to those who deny.’ Sachiel slammed the grail to his breastplate, tapping it to his hearts. He was shaking with raw emotion. ‘Heed me. I am the right hand of the Reborn Angel. I give you all his call to glory. Take up arms, Warriors of the Reborn, take up your weapons and make ready for war.’ Sachiel threw back his head and bellowed to the sky. ‘This day the old order dies. This day we are all reborn anew. This day we begin the Blood Crusade!’

‘Arkio! Arkio! Arkio! Arkio!’ The chant went on and on until it filled the air.

Despite the brightness of the morning, Rafen could see only shadows. From the roof of the fortress he watched the priest continue his bombast, a tiny figure in red and white he could blot from his sight with the thick of his thumb. There was no silencing his voice, though, every word Sachiel said was being broadcast through the vox network of the Blood Angels and the telegraphs of Shenlong’s city-sprawls.

‘Those men who seek to control us, we disavow them!’ came the priest’s cry in his ear-bead, the sound of his voice on the wind reaching him a split-second later. ‘The Imperium is choked with petty bureaucrats and debased fools, weaklings who corral the destiny of mankind laid down by the Emperor. Sanguinius knew this. He died in the war with the arch-traitor Horus so the Emperor might live!’ Rafen’s lip curled in a sour sneer; Sachiel was warping the truth to suit his sermonising. The priest continued, working himself and his audience into a frenzy. ‘But now the Pure One has returned to us, and his sight is unfailing. He came to us because this plague of deficiency has stretched across the stars, even to poison the very highest office of the Blood Angels themselves. We cannot stand by any longer and allow the will of our Chapter, our species to be dictated by impotent men. Now is the day for action, in Arkio’s name!’

The crowd roared his brother’s name, sending a shudder through the rock. Rafen glanced down at the knife in his hand, still stained with his own dried blood. Hours ago he had been within a heartbeat of taking his own life, and now he was again, but this time it was by his own choice.

‘We abandon the rule of these so-called Adeptus Terra!’ Sachiel bellowed. ‘We deny the dominion of Dante. We find him wanting. From now on, we answer only to the command of the Blessed!’ The crowd boiled around the priest and the thousand, demanded answers, begging him for a mandate. They wanted to be told what to do, they would not be complete without an edict to follow. ‘Warriors, I charge you. You will stand as cohorts to the Blood Angels aboard the Bellus, the sacred flagship of the Blood Crusade. Together we will face Dante and excise him so that Arkio may take his rightful place as master of the Chapter!’

‘Vandire’s oath…’ Rafen felt the impact of the words like a physical blow. He had never doubted that sooner or later he would hear such heresy uttered, but still when it came it made him feel like vomiting. Sachiel stood there advocating murder and sedition, and to Rafen’s eternal shame there were battle-brothers who took up the call. All at once he felt tarnished and humiliated, ashamed to admit that he shared blood with these addled turncoats.

‘Baal shall come to our fold,’ Sachiel roared, reaching a climax. ‘All Blood Angels and successors will bend the knee to Great Arkio, or face oblivion.’ The answering cry blotted out everything, and Rafen’s hot shame cooled into an icy anger. Could none of these blind fools see it? As clear as the day, it was there before them, masquerading in comrade’s clothes, appealing to their baser natures, their fears and secret hopes.

‘Chaos.’ Rafen spat the word from his mouth. The hand of the eightfold star moved Sachiel and the others like mindless pawns across a vast game board, marshalling them for ill deeds so huge they were beyond the reckoning of these blinkered, misguided fools. ‘Curse me, but I will not let this go any further.’

‘Brother?’ said a voice behind him, and Rafen spun about abruptly. He was caught unawares, his own dark thoughts and the rage of the crowds distracting him. Lucion approached him, a questioning look on the upper half of his face where it protruded over the half-mask of his breather plate. The Blood Angels Techmarine paused, his arms at his sides but the mechanical servo-limb on his back still twitching with concern. ‘What did you say?’

Rafen glanced from the knife in his hand, back to Lucion in his armour of red ceramite and cog-tooth gunmetal trim. ‘Arkio is no messiah,’ he told the Blood Angels Tech-priest. ‘My poor brother is an oblivious catspaw.’

Lucion’s face went white with shock. ‘How can you say such a thing? You, of all men, the sibling of the Blessed.’

‘How?’ Rafen repeated, advancing on the Techmarine. ‘I say it because I am the only one on this desperate world with eyes still clear enough to see.’

Brother Lucion backed away toward the service platform running the height of the Ikari fortress. ‘No, no,’ he waved all three of his limbs in the air before his face, as if he could banish Rafen’s utterance like a nagging insect. ‘You are mad.’

Rafen produced his bolter and aimed it squarely at Lucion’s forehead. ‘On the contrary,’ he told him. ‘I fear I am the last sane man.’ The black tunnel of the weapon’s maw never wavered. The Space Marine felt an odd kind of calm sweep over him as the final parts of his plan fell into place. Since the day this madness had begun there on Cybele, a slow-burning certainty had been building in Rafen’s soul. In the marrow of his bones he knew the rightness of it, and now it had come to a head. The fear, the constant dark fear that it would be by his hand that Arkio would perish was swept away. As he studied the confused face of the Techmarine, Rafen decided that he would take his own life, and that of every wayward mortal and deceiver that had strayed from the path of light. ‘The beating heart of this fortress, the core. You have spoken with its machine-spirit.’

Lucion gave a slow, wary nod. ‘Only in the most cursory fashion. I do not fully understand the ways of the reactor-spirit, but–’

He gestured toward the elevator platform with the gun. ‘You will take me to it, or I will kill you where you stand.’

They descended through the interior of the conical tower in the open metal cage of the lift. Lucion whispered a quick litany over the controls and, with a squeak of iron on iron, the platform began a controlled fall past level after level. Rafen kept the Techmarine in his sights, never allowing his bolter to shift from a point targeted at Lucion’s skull.

A memory flashed through Rafen’s mind, of a similar elevator in the planetary defence bunker on Cybele. He and Lucion had been there as well, Arkio and Sachiel too, dropping into the dark with vengeance on their minds. It seemed like so long ago, as if years and not weeks had passed between then and now. For a moment, the weight of his weariness threatened to come upon him like a heavy cloak, but Rafen shook it away with an angry blink of his eyes.

Lucion was talking to himself. At first Rafen thought he was praying, or worse, using his vox to call for help. ‘It’s a test,’ the Techmarine was saying aloud, giving voice to his thoughts, ‘This is a loyalty test. The Blessed is testing my devotion.’

‘Would you do anything he asked?’ said Rafen.

‘Of course,’ Lucion replied instantly, as if the answer were as plain as the service stud on his brow. ‘He is the Blessed.’

Part of Rafen felt hate and antipathy for his battle-brother as he listened to Lucion’s answer. Perhaps, in the weaker minds of ordinary men, it was unsurprising that the commoners took up the cause of Arkio’s supposed divinity, but to see it so readily accepted by the rank and file of his own Chapter sickened him. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, brother, that you make a grievous error in venerating him?’

‘Why would I think such a thing?’ Lucion retorted. ‘By the grace of the Omnissiah, Sanguinius has been restored to us.’

All the anger that had been building in Rafen for weeks suddenly found an outlet and he snarled at the Techmarine. ‘He sprouts wings and suddenly he is a god-prince? Are you so credulous that you cannot see past the glitter of the gold armour?’

They had been travelling down in near darkness for several minutes, and so Rafen could only see glimpses of Lucion’s face. Conflicting emotions danced there for a moment before he nodded to himself. ‘A test,’ he repeated. ‘I will not be found lacking, you may carry my word of that to the Reborn Angel himself.’

With a clatter of metal, the elevator halted. ‘Fool,’ Rafen said under his breath, and motioned to the door. Unconcerned that he still had a gun trained on him, Lucion opened the wire-mesh and walked forward into the sub-level of the fortress. A spotlight mounted on his shoulder snapped on, and Rafen followed the bobbing blob of sodium-white glare.

The Techmarine carefully removed a ring of prayer beads from a rotary lock and powered open a series of thick steel hatches. Inside, there were consoles and panels of such diversity and intricate workings that Rafen was instantly reminded of the Bellus’s bridge deck. ‘A question,’ he said to Lucion. ‘Which one of these does the machine-spirit for the power core inhabit?’

Lucion frowned, then pointed at a large, ornate module. ‘Here. Although the spirit-programme extends itself out through the entire reactor system, tending to the fusion heart, the cooling factors, the regulatarium…’

Rafen didn’t understand most of the tech-priest’s terminology, but he grasped enough for his purposes. He drew in a breath. ‘The power-spirit. I want you to kill it.’

Lucion blinked. ‘Did I mis hear you? Rafen, perhaps you are taking this test too far, but I cannot–’

He shook his head, raising the bolter. ‘No test, priest. Do as I say.’

The Techmarine’s face drained of colour. ‘What you ask is madness, brother. Even if I could, such a deed would enrage the fusion core. It would reach critical potentiality in moments and detonate with enough force to punch a hole in this planet. We would all be destroyed!’

‘Arkio, too?’

At last Lucion understood what Rafen’s intentions were. ‘Oh, Holy Terra, no. Brother, please! I will have no part of this.’

He began to babble and Rafen tuned him out; the tech-priest would not assist him any further. He nodded at the console. ‘This one, yes?’ Without waiting for confirmation, Rafen raised his gun and unloaded a full clip of bolt-rounds into the device. Lucion screamed, his voice lost in a sudden clarion of whooping sirens.

The Techmarine staggered forward, shaking his head. ‘Wha-what have you done? What have you done?’

Rafen reloaded his weapon, slamming a fresh clip home. He was trying to find an answer for the priest when the rush of metal-shod feet signalled the arrival of more men. Figures in red armour appeared at a hatch on the opposite side of the room, visible through the smoke from the console and the strobes of warning lanterns.

‘We heard gunfire–’ one of them shouted.

‘Traitor!’ howled Lucion. ‘Rafen has turned against us!’

The automatic reaction of the Space Marines was to raise their weapons and fire. Rafen wheeled away, letting off a trio of wild shots as he went through a tuck-and-roll out of the access hatch to the lift shaft. Stabbing streaks of tracer cut through the control chamber and Lucion was hit in the crossfire. He spun in place and stumbled against the wrecked console.

Rafen made it to the metal cage as the other Space Marines dived out of the hatch after him, bolters chattering. Pushing away all thoughts that his targets were fellow Blood Angels, he fired back. Return fire blazed over his head and struck part of the lift’s cabling, severing it in a blare of noise. Rafen expected the cage to drop suddenly into the stygian dark at the bottom of the shaft, but the opposite happened, the bolts cut into the counterweight control, and suddenly the lift platform shot upward, trailing streamers of sparks. The acceleration threw Rafen to the deck and pinned him there as the lift raced headlong toward the circle of light above him.

Inside the chamber, Lucion inched himself forward, using one hand to keep his intestines and preomnor organ from spilling out of his belly wound. Here, surrounded by the lights and sounds of the Omnissiah’s most holy creations, the Techmarine felt alive even as his blood leaked from him in brilliant red runnels. He took his other hand and tossed away his gauntlet, so that his last sensation would be the touch of his flesh against the sacred technology. Lucion gripped the thick switch rod beneath the rune that read: ‘Emerg. Scram.’ in the old tongue and turned it. With a sullen flicker, the lights inside the fortress winked out as Lucion cut off the fusion reaction before it could become critical.

‘No victory for you, turncoat,’ he gasped, ‘no victory…’

The tech-priests insisted on re-consecrating the room before they would set to work in it, and that took the better part of the day, but as Shenlong’s feeble sun began to dip beneath the horizon, the Ikari fortress and the district around it erupted with light and power once again, and the people cheered for Arkio’s beneficence in saving them from the darkness and cold.

Their idol did not hear their thanksgiving through the veil of rage that shrouded him. ‘Answers!’ he thundered at Sachiel, the sheer momentum of his anger rocking the priest back on his heels. ‘I demand answers. What warpspawn filth could it be that would dare to enter my fortress and render it impotent? Tell me.’

Stele smoothed his formal robes as he entered, giving a cursory bow. ‘I shall do so, Great Arkio, but I must warn you. The news is hard.’

‘Hard?’ he spat, turning from Sachiel to stalk across to the inquisitor. ‘You think me some child you must keep insulated from the ills of the world? Tell me, Stele, or I’ll rip it from you.’

The force of the youth’s words actually made Stele stumble for a brief moment. The awful light of the black rage danced in Arkio’s eyes, turning the patrician, handsome face into that of a fanged, angered god. Arkio’s aspect mirrored the sacred tapestry of Sanguinius in his blood-thirst that hung in the cloisters on Baal. ‘Lord, I have prepared a shuttle to take us both to Bellus. It is not safe here on Shenlong for you any more,’ Stele began, recovering his poise. ‘You will understand my reluctance when I explain myself.’ He gestured at the photon candles around the room. ‘The cowardly saboteur in our midst, the viper at our breast attempted to smother the will of the machines that empower this edifice. Had he succeeded, he might have caused a catastrophe.’

‘Explain, lord inquisitor,’ Sachiel ventured, earning himself a leaden look from Arkio.

Stele continued, finding the meter of his performance. ‘Were it not for the selfless courage and sacrifice of Brother Lucion, the machine-spirit would have become turbulent, perhaps to unleash the fire of the atom from its heart.’ He took a calculated pause. ‘The Ikari fortress and all living things for six kilometres in every direction would have been immolated in a nuclear firestorm.’

‘Who did this?’ Arkio hissed. ‘A rogue Word Bearer? One of Iskavan’s host that escaped the net of our execution squads?’

The inquisitor bowed his head sadly. ‘No, Blessed. It sickens me to say that a Blood Angel was the culprit.’

Arkio froze like a statue, his wings snapping rigid. Behind him, Sachiel took a cautious step closer. ‘And his name, Lord Stele?’ asked the priest.

‘I suspected there was an apostate in our midst when the mind-witch Vode arrived with Gallio and his other assassins,’ Stele sneered. ‘I have since learned that the vox of the late Brother-Sergeant Koris was used to send a message to Baal to summon them. They came only because the betrayer in our midst called out to that fool Dante, and bid him send killers to end you, Great Arkio.’

‘A man still loyal to Dante, to the old order, here?’ Arkio’s voice wavered, incredulous, so sure of his own majesty. ‘After all the miracles I have enacted?’

Stele nodded. ‘But graver still is his identity, Blessed.’

‘Name him.’ Sachiel snapped. ‘Name this treacherous bastard and I will have my personal honour guard hunt him down and tear him apart like a prey beast.’

The inquisitor wanted so badly to smile; but that would have spoiled the act. ‘My lord, the traitor is your brother. The traitor is Rafen.’

The roar of inchoate anger that erupted from Arkio’s throat struck like an elemental force, echoing across the city zones in baleful thunder.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The street was alive with gunfire, shots clipping at Rafen’s heels, whining off the cobbles to punch craters in the walls. The Blood Angel made a daring move, leaping off a low wall to launch himself behind the cover of a cargo pod. He snap-fired a burst at his pursuers, not expecting to do any more than make them keep their heads down.

Rafen glimpsed them as fleeting images, the red of their armour matching his, the brilliant gold of their helmets catching the light. Sachiel’s honour guard had caught him in the alleys and he had led them on a merry dance through the warehouse district. Each time they tried to box him in, he found a route out of their closing net, but each escape was becoming more difficult than the last.

He checked the sickle magazine on his bolter, half-empty. Rafen frowned. The gold-helmeted troopers were wearing him down, making him waste precious ammunition. There were simply more of them than there were of him, and sooner or later Rafen would become too fatigued or too distracted to fight them all. There would have been a time when would have relished the chance to fight against the elite of the Blood Angels, testing his skills against them in a wargame – but this was no exercise, and the battle-brothers who dogged him did not bear harmless marker shells in their guns. The honour guard had been given one order – to capture him, dead or alive.

Rafen chanced a quick look around. In this part of the factory city ponderous monorail hauliers carried crates of shells and warheads back and forth between store yards and assembly lines. Tall construction towers climbed into the dirty sky, dwarfing the blunt wedges of the fabrication barns. He considered his options – unless he could find a way to escape Sachiel’s men, they would run him into the ground. It was taking all his effort just to stay one step ahead of them, and a single error on his part would turn everything against Rafen’s escape. Shots rang off the exterior of the cargo module as the honour guards found his range. A surge of heat pressed at his back as a plasma blast burnt a wide hole in the metal. He had seconds to make a decision.

Rafen’s eyes fell on an enclosure surrounded by racks of missile tubes. The building was dark and silent, probably serving as a temporary storehouse for the munitions. It would do. The Blood Angel took his last smoke grenade and flicked off the pin with his thumb. Dropping the metal egg, he launched himself from cover and into a full-tilt run. He heard shots cracking after him, and then the hollow crump of displaced air as the grenade exploded. A thick veil of metallic haze full of complex chemical strings emerged and filled the canyon of the street. The honour guard came on, moving slowly through the smoke, the visibility of their helmet optics curtailed sharply by the discharge. Their heads bobbed in silent conversation, messages flickering between them on an encoded frequency that Rafen’s vox could not read.

Beyond them, Rafen threw his shoulder into a wooden doorway and it splintered under his weight. He dashed inside to be greeted by a forest of warheads ranging back through the building. Hellstrikes built for the wing roots of Lightning fighters and Marauder bombers were bound like cordwood. There were the fat cigars of Manticore missiles, mounted on wooden stays ready to be loaded on firing platforms. The shells of incomplete Atlas-class megaton bombs stood vertically on their aerofoil fins, the unfinished warheads almost scraping the supports holding up the corrugated iron roof. Rafen shouldered his bolter and wove through the inert steel trunks, slipping deeper inside.

Sachiel would never stop hunting him, that much was certain. Rafen had taken his chance to end this madness once and for all in the reactor core, but his spur-of-the-moment plan had collapsed. He had stood for long seconds on the roof of the Ikari fortress, waiting for the eruption of fusion fire to consume him, but it never came. Once again, he found himself running, and this time there was an entire planet of zealots at his heels. Rafen needed to gather his wits, to plan his next move, but as long as the golden-helmed troopers chased him he would be forced to stay on the defensive. Sachiel would only rest when Rafen was dead – and so he would have to find a way to die… for the moment.

There was a rattle of metal above, and the Blood Angel froze, for a moment believing that the honour guard were coming across the roof for him; but then the sound grew into a rushing, chattering roar and he realised it was the rains. Shenlong’s rust-brown skies opened, releasing a downpour of polluted water that clattered off the metal roof of the manufactorum. Runnels of thin, russet liquid penetrated through breaches in the corrugated iron, pooling on the stone floor. Rafen caught the noise of heavy boots splashing through shallow puddles.

Sachiel’s men followed him into the warehouse, holstering their guns as they entered. A gesture from the veteran sergeant commanding them was the only order they required, and as one they drew their close combat weapons and spread out to search the building. None of the Blood Angels would dare to discharge a bolt or beam in here. A single stray round could end all their lives in a heartbeat if it struck a live warhead.

Rafen moved. On a raised catwalk he located a set of unfinished and skeletal Manticores on a cradle. With a rough jerk, he ripped free the metal petals protecting the inner detonator unit, exposing it to the air. Like most of the other missiles in the store yard, the half-built Manticore munitions were empty of their volatile promethium fuel and still lacked the dense explosive matrix that would give them their murderous power – but the detonator rods were in place, and those alone were the equal of a dozen krak shells. Rafen tore fibrous wires from the missile’s innards and used them to tie a quartet of frag grenades in place. His makeshift bomb was almost complete when the drumming of the rain was joined by a new sound – the ripping snarl of a chainsword.

Rafen reacted instantly, barely dodging the blow from the melee weapon. The honour guard’s strike flashed past him with a blare of tungsten-alloy teeth, cleaving the wood of the cradle into a whirlwind of spitting splinters. He rolled back as the Space Marine struck out again, rebounding off a stanchion. In the confines of the catwalk gantry, Rafen had little room to manoeuvre and the tip of the chainsword blade cut into his armour, skittering off the chest plate and away. The blow left a finger-wide channel in his wargear.

‘Filthy apostate.’ snarled a voice from inside the gold helmet, ‘You’ll bleed for your perfidy against the Blessed!’ Rafen parried a third lunge with an ironwood rod he snatched from the cradle, but the shimmering chain-blade bisected his substitute weapon. The Blood Angel pressed his free hand to his helmet, initiating a vox link to the other hunters in the warehouse. ‘I have him. Form on me–’

Rafen sprang forward before he could finish the sentence, hands clawing into the shoulder pads of his opponent. With a sudden downward motion, Rafen butted the honour guard across the bridge of his helmet’s nose, cracking the optic lenses. The shock of the blow staggered the Space Marine; Rafen was too close for the attacker to turn the sword on him, and he stumbled backwards. The honour guard’s right foot slipped back along the decking and into space where the gantry ended. His balance fled and the Blood Angel fell away from Rafen with an angry howl, the chainsword tumbling from his fingers.

The other Space Marine collided with a nest of tool racks and slammed into the stone floor with a flat crash of sound. Winded, he still had enough impetus to draw and fire his bolt pistol, sending a spray of shots back up at the catwalk, in his fury ignoring the risk of a ricochet. Rafen recoiled and grabbed at a knife-switch set on the gantry, yanking it downwards without conscious thought. The release opened a set of clamps holding a drum of Hellstrikes above them, and the canister fell the height of the warehouse, flattening the honour guard beneath it like the blow of a steam hammer.

Rafen shook off a dizzy, sick sensation as he watched the Space Marine twitch and die under the tonnage. It had all happened so fast. ‘Primarch forgive me,’ he whispered, his blood running cold. ‘I have killed a battle-brother…’ He had always known this moment would come, from the very instant that he had heard Sachiel decry Dante and exhort the Blood Angels to turn on their heritage, but nothing had prepared him for the physical shock it brought with it. The blood of a Blood Angel was on his hands. And he will not be the last, Rafen admitted to himself.

A voice cried out from below him, and Rafen glimpsed red armour and gold masks flashing between the featureless greys of the rocket fuselages. ‘There!’ came the shout, ‘Above. Close in on the traitor and take him.’

Traitor. Rafen felt dislocated from reality to have that hated brand turned on him, but in his beating heart he knew the reverse was true. He stooped, dialling the fuse setting on his grenades, and yanked the firing pin. Bolt-rounds hissed past his shoulders; the honour guards had clearly thrown caution to the wind after he killed one of their number.

Rafen ducked behind one of the inert Atlas bombs and pressed his shoulder into it, rocking the tubular fuselage on its pallet. The tall metal pipe wallowed and shifted dangerously. He threw himself at it again and the weight of the Atlas shifted suddenly, tilting away from him. Rafen staggered back along the gantry as the hollow tube fell against another of its kind, in turn knocking another off its base. The Atlas hulls rang like bells as they impacted each other, and they tottered like giant ninepins, ripping through stanchions and scattering Sachiel’s men beneath them.

In the confusion, Rafen grabbed a chain dangling from the support beams and swarmed down it, swinging to land in a ready stance on the stone floor. He threw a last look at the gantry where his jury-rigged time bomb lay counting down the seconds and sank to his knees. There was a circular grate in the floor, surrounded by small rivers of rainwater pooling from every part of the building. Digging his fingers in the metal grid, Rafen let out a cry of effort and pulled at it. Aged bolts gave way in snaps like breaking bone.

Any moment now. Tossing the grate aside, Rafen pitched forward into the murk of the drainage channel, where fast-flowing floods the colour of tilled earth raced by, swelled by the sudden downpour. He fell into the grip of the sewer water and let it drag him away, scraping his armour across muck-encrusted walls.

The honour guards were reaching for him even as the igniters in the frag grenades burnt down to nothing. The explosives blew apart in a ball of orange thunder, catching the detonators inside the Manticores in sympathetic annihilation. In a tenth of a second, the missiles detonated, rippling fire into cases of battle-ready rockets. Flame set flame, fire birthed explosion, and the entire manufactorum ripped itself to pieces in a blood-red hellstorm.

Kilometres away in the Ikari fortress, a wall of noise cracked the ancient glass of the chapel window in a dozen places.

Sachiel pressed on through the corridors of the Bellus, his stride never slowing as Chapter serfs scrambled amongst themselves to get out of his way. The news boiled inside him; the Sanguinary High Priest was wound so tight with the message he carried that he thought he would blurt it out at any second. Space Marines came to parade ground attention as he passed, mailed fists tapping their chest plates in salute, while servitors and serfs bowed low.

There had been a time when Sachiel would have chastised himself for enjoying the veneration of the faithful. In the Credo Vitae there were edicts and oaths the Sanguinary Priests were required to avow, dedicating themselves to the sacred Blood of the Chapter, foreswearing any glory for themselves, but those old, weak words seemed so distant and removed now. Sachiel’s heart swelled at the notion.

Since Arkio’s Ascendance a moment had not passed where the priest did not think himself blessed to bear witness to such a miracle – and more, to be called by the Reborn Angel to serve as his adjutant and loyal commander. A smile crept across Sachiel’s face as he entered the cavernous cathedral deck, making his way through the cloisters toward the inner sanctums. Since his youth, he had never doubted that he was touched by greatness. Many of his contemporaries had called him arrogant for daring to voice such notions. Let them have their petty jealousies, he thought, because he had been proven right. Great Sanguinius, to whom Sachiel had dedicated his life, had rewarded the priest beyond his wildest dreams. To be present at an event of such magnitude showed the lie of all those who had upbraided him. Sachiel was no mere priest now; he was the hand of the Blessed, and it was glorious!

His fingers fell to the velvet bag at his belt, and the replica of the Blood Angels chalice he carried there. Not for the first time, Sachiel imagined the moment when he would take the true Red Grail in his hands and accept the role of High Priest over the entire Chapter. The thought of it made his blood rush. Power, naked and beautiful, was within his reach.

The priest walked on alone into the sanctum sanctorum, where only the chosen of Arkio were allowed to tread. Normally there would have been Space Marines on guard here but the devastation wrought by the traitorous Rafen had required the recall of all available troops to the planet. A brief flicker of displeasure crossed his thoughts, but he banished it. Sachiel had hoped that he would be able to present his news to the Blessed in person, but Captain Ideon had informed him their high lord was at rest in his chambers. Sachiel accepted this with a nod, even a god-prince rich with a primarch’s potency would need repose on some occasions. Instead, Sachiel would attend Inquisitor Stele and reveal what had taken place on Shenlong. The explosion of the missile store yard had obliterated six square blocks around it. Some of the priest’s most loyal men had been turned to ashes in the conflagration, but their sacrifice had been worth it to end the life of the thorn in his side, the faithless and deceitful Rafen. He would swear upon it; nothing could have survived the catastrophic blast.

‘You are dead, Rafen,’ Sachiel said to the cool, still air of the cloister. Just uttering the words lifted a huge weight from the priest’s heart. Ever since they had first laid eyes upon one another, Sachiel and Rafen had brought the worst traits in each other’s character to the fore. Now the Blessed’s brother was dead, the last tie holding Arkio and his loyalists to the old codes of the Blood Angels was gone, and with it Sachiel’s hated antagonist. He could admit it now and release the feeling that had built up inside him. Sachiel loathed Rafen’s quiet strength, the manner in which he would sneer at every utterance from the priest’s mouth as if he were the holder of ordained office, not the priest. He hated the easy way that Rafen had earned the respect of men he served with, while Sachiel remained aloof and indifferent to the Space Marines he outranked. The pleasure he would take in announcing Rafen’s end would be as sweet as a fine amasec liqueur.

The Sanguinary Priest paused before a stained glass window showing Sanguinius at the Conclave of Blood, and something in the turn of the primogenitor’s face suddenly brought Rafen’s final words back to him. Piety alone will blind you.

‘Fool.’ Sachiel spat out the insult automatically, but even as he did there came a nagging irritation in his mind. He hated himself for admitting it, but the deserter had stirred up doubts with that damning utterance. Sachiel looked into the eyes of the primarch, searching for clarity, and allowed himself the indulgence of hesitation. Arkio’s path had broken with the tradition of his Chapter, shattering old codes of conduct that before had seemed inviolate. As the Reborn Angel had said himself, they were now writing a new chapter in the history of the Sons of Sanguinius, and the laws laid down by aged and passionless warriors like Dante were too confining, too limiting. On some deep level, the indoctrination of decades of Blood Angels dogma and training rebelled at the thought of Arkio’s Blood Crusade and his Emergence – but Sachiel had seen Arkio’s divinity shine through, he had felt the divine radiance of the Spear of Telesto upon him. This was proof, not the dusty words of long-perished men from millennia past.

His moment of weakness gone, Sachiel resumed his passage to Stele’s quarters. Brother Solus had informed him that the inquisitor had left orders that he was not to be disturbed, but Sachiel waved him away. Such commands did not apply to the High Priest of the Reborn, and besides, Sachiel knew that Stele would be as pleased as he was to hear of Rafen’s death. That his body had yet to be found was merely a formality; after such a detonation, all that would remain of Arkio’s brother would barely be enough to fill a drinking goblet.

Stepping past the empty sentry alcoves, as Sachiel approached the door to Stele’s chambers he tasted something strange in the air. A faint, almost undetectable whiff of brimstone and dead skin. Shaking the sensation away, the priest opened the doors and stepped inside. The atmosphere within felt thick and greasy with dark potency. He heard voices; some seemed to be coming from an impossible distance, others made up of rustling and whispering sibilance. Amid all of them he heard the inquisitor murmuring a gruff entreaty. Without waiting to announce himself, the priest pushed through the voluminous folds of black curtains enveloping the doorway and emerged in the chamber.

What he saw there made a wordless cry of shock erupt from his lips, and Sachiel groped for his pistol in self-defence.

Stele’s sanctum was an arched chamber big enough to house a Thunderhawk dropship with its wings at full spread. Stands of photon candles gave weak, yellowish light that died fighting the heavy shadows that wreathed the room. There were a few biolume globes drifting about on anti-grav impellers, but they too were strangled by the arcane, liquid dark that enveloped everything. To one side was a twitching, steaming sculpture cut out of fast-decaying human flesh. Sachiel knew the smell of putrefaction all too well from hundreds of battlegrounds. It was misshapen and ugly as sin, a parody of life warped by the hand of some crazed sculptor. Bones and cartilage in the body had been reordered to present the shape of a hunched, muscular form. It bore the most striking resemblance to the armour of the Word Bearers that they had executed on Shenlong. The flesh-thing opened a wet orifice in its head and let out an angry moan; and with his back to the door, Stele craned his neck around to spy the stunned priest there behind him. The inquisitor was pale and damp with perspiration, the normally hard and unyielding lines of his granite face soft and pallid.

The priest was only aware of them in the most peripheral of ways, however, his gaze was captured by the thing that towered over all of them, writhing and fluttering in an immaterial breeze. It looked like a pict-print of a hurricane, a frozen tower of wind and storm wreckage that had somehow taken on the aspect of a living creature. His mouth agape, Sachiel understood all at once that the shape was made of paper. All about the walls of Stele’s chamber, books lay open, spines broken and covers discarded, their pages torn free to make up the matter of the daemonic creature that rustled and crackled like dead leaves.

‘What is this?’ Irritation bubbled out of the fleshy avatar, steam popping from blisters all across its skin.

Stele gulped air and turned to face Sachiel, shrugging out of the restricting cloak about his neck. ‘You conceited imbecile,’ he hissed, the effort of anger trying him to the limit. ‘I said no interruptions.’

Sachiel tried to make his mouth work, but nothing seemed to come. He could not look away from the intricate folds of parchment across the daemon’s heartless, monstrous face. In a crushing blow of realisation, the priest suddenly understood what he had stumbled into – Stele, the trusted servant of Arkio, was in league with the Ruinous Powers. The thought galvanised him into action. He had to escape, to get away and warn the Reborn Angel that a viper far more venomous than his errant brother lay in their midst…

‘Kill it,’ rippled the daemon, the words hidden in the sound of fanning pages.

‘No,’ Stele grunted. ‘I need him alive… He is useful to me.’

The priest brought his gun to bear and his finger tightened on the trigger, but he made the mistake of meeting Stele’s baleful gaze and abruptly all function in his muscles ceased. ‘Nnnnnn–’ Sachiel’s mind flashed to the moment on Cybele, when the inquisitor had held a Word Bearers sniper in a similar mind-lock. With every gramme of his will, the priest pushed against the pressure in his mind.

‘Ah,’ Stele managed, eyes watering. The effort was hard on him, coming so soon after spending his abilities on the Blood Angels mere days earlier. He wavered, and felt the phantom grip begin to slacken.

Pages of ancient dogma, documents filled with arcane scripture and illuminated proofs, rustled past him, shifting and reforming into shapes that might have been men, might have been beasts. ‘You wish to preserve this manling?’ asked the creature, breaths of polluted air gusting through its manifested form.

‘Yes, great Malfallax,’ Stele bit out. ‘We need him.’

‘Very well,’ said the daemon, and the papers spun around Stele in a narrow typhoon, their edges slicing hundreds of tiny cuts in his bare skin. From its beating heart still floating in the depths of the empyrean, Malfallax projected a concentrated portion of itself into the open gate of Stele’s corrupted mind. A black pearl of raw warp briefly entered the inquisitor – and suddenly all his weakness and fatigue melted away, replaced by a giddy psychic head-rush. ‘A gift,’ the creature whispered.

Colour returned to Stele’s face and his teeth bared. ‘You are most gracious, Spiteful One.’ His eyes bored into Sachiel’s, flaying his mind open to the psyker’s dark will. ‘Kneel, priest,’ he commanded.

Sachiel found he had no resistance within him, and he did as he was ordered, the reductor in his hand falling to the tiled floor. His head swam with a sickening roil of recall, as his recent memories replayed in flash-frame blinks of pain – Stele spun though the Sanguinary Priest’s thoughts as easily as he might the pages of a book.

Stele gave a grunt of laughter, reading his intent. ‘You came to tell me Rafen was dead? Such trivia is hardly worth my notice.’

It was as if Sachiel were kneeling on the edge of a bottomless abyss. The priest’s mind fluttered like an insect caught in setting amber, teetering on the brink of a horrific realisation. Stele is tainted by Chaos, and if that is so then everything he has touched has also been sullied by corruption. By the blood of the primarch, what have we done? I am tainted. The Warriors of the Reborn too? The Spear? Even the Blessed Arkio…

Stele shook his head. ‘Cease,’ he said, halting Sachiel’s thoughts with a gesture. ‘No, priest. I cannot have you venture down that road. Your role is yet to be completed.’ His eyes glittered, and the inquisitor threw an ephemeral dart into the Blood Angel’s mind. Sachiel screamed as Stele unfolded his psyche and deftly excised his memories, painting blackness over them from the moment he had entered the sanctum. A drool of fluid issued out of the corner of Sachiel’s mouth.

‘Frail little men-beasts,’ Garand’s latest avatar said with a grimace, flakes of dead flesh falling from it with each word. ‘Its mind may break beneath your ministrations.’

‘I think not,’ retorted Stele, withdrawing the needle of his psychic power from a blank-eyed Sachiel. ‘He will remember nothing of what he saw.’

Rough laughter crackled through the singed papers. ‘Ah, Stele. You grow ever distant to your human roots and closer to us with every one of your gestures.’

‘It pleases me to hear you say that,’ Stele said, with a forced smile. In his mind’s eye, Malfallax’s dark seed of potency was lodged in his soul, glistening with the eightfold star upon its surface. ‘And while it gratifies me to accept your mark, Great Changer, perhaps it might be better for you to withdraw it for now–’

The pages gave an angry wasp-swarm vibration. ‘Keep it, my friend. It will be important in the days to come.’

‘We shall begin, then,’ grated Garand. With a shrug of broken bones, the Word Bearers Warmaster withdrew from his mouthpiece and let it die.

Gently, the ripped shreds of paper began to drift apart as Malfallax retreated from the material realm, leaving the inquisitor with only a decaying corpse and the silent priest for company. Stele watched the pages settle, at once refreshed and newly afraid of the boon his monstrous master had given him.

The dock was alive with noise and motion, men swarming like ants around the iron wharves and gantries. Dozens of ugly, bullet-shaped orbital tenders waited at rest on vertical rails, plumes of vaporised liquid oxygen hissing white clouds into the air. Cargo pods, normally crammed full of munitions crates and warheads, were being loaded with human freight instead. Hundreds and hundreds of men, a rag-tag army clad in cloaks and scavenged armour, filed solemnly into the modules. Here and there, tall figures in red armour could be seen, calling out orders and directing the erstwhile soldiers to their departure points.

Rafen watched from his vantage point in a burnt-out building, studying the ebb and flow of the crowds, watching the ordered procession with a practiced eye. He kept his vox on the same channel as the Blood Angels on the docks, listening to their terse communications as he rested, tending to his injuries. In the sewers, the explosion of the warehouse had forced a plug of filthy water into a floodhead and carried Rafen along with it, tossing him like a piece of debris. Sealed inside the airtight frame of his power armour, the Space Marine was forced to ride out the shock wave as each impact against the tunnel walls threw him closer to unconsciousness. The headlong surge along the pipes was a blur of rushing noise and blunt pain, but eventually the flood spent itself and deposited him in an overflow chamber on the lower levels of the factory city. Rafen flexed his arm, grimacing. His skin was marred with broad purple-black bruises where he had suffered impact after impact and the limb was slack where it had been dislocated. Carefully, he gripped his wrist and tugged; with a dull click of cartilage, the joint popped back into place. He shrugged off the pain that came with it.

Using an abandoned chimney stack, Rafen had climbed until he found his current hide. He took stock of his situation, examining his weapons and what little he had in the way of supplies. The Blood Angel considered himself behind enemy lines now, and conducted his battle drill accordingly. He had no idea how long he would be able to go unnoticed; certainly it might be days before the rubble of the store yard was picked through and the bodies of the dead men counted. He had a window of opportunity, but it would close quickly.

A roar of rocket exhaust drew his attention back to the dock. With a clang of steel on steel, a launch gantry fell away and one of the tenders threw itself into the dull sky on a plume of yellow flame. Fins folded out of the craft as it ascended and Rafen watched it go, disappearing into a sickly glow as it vanished through the low cloud cover. Another fifty or more men for Arkio’s helot army were on their way to Bellus. There was a flurry of orders over the vox. The next launches were almost fuelled and ready to lift off. Legions of zealots, all of them adorned with the crude halo-and-spear symbol of the Warriors of the Reborn, shifted back and forth, eager to board the ships that would take them to be with their messiah.

Arkio was aboard the battle barge; Rafen had caught a cursory mention of ‘the Blessed’ and pieced together the meaning. With his brother on the Bellus and the army Sachiel had raised from the Shenlongi joining him in their droves, the situation was clear. The Blood Crusade was beginning, and soon the massive warship would be departing. Rafen replaced the gauntlet about his arm and re-sealed his wargear’s links. Twice now he failed to bring this travesty of the Emperor’s will to an end. Alone with Arkio in the fortress, it had been his own weakness that had stopped him from ending his sibling’s life; and in the reactor core, blind chance had prevented the destruction of the tower. If Bellus left without Rafen, then Stele would be free to manipulate Sachiel and Arkio to whatever ends the inquisitor chose. The Space Marine’s mind returned to the vision he had seen in his makeshift retreat, as it had many times in the past few days. He held his combat knife in his hand once more, then slammed it into his boot sheath with grim finality.

Beneath the dock platform was a web of supports extending into the dry mud of the riverbed. Orange knots of rust clustered at every giant bolt and weld, releasing rains of ruddy fines with each rumbling blast of exhaust from the tenders launching above. Rafen made his way through broken catwalks and bent spars and selected a pad on the southern edge of the dock where spindly Sentinel walkers had just completed the loading of a brace of cargo pods. The Blood Angel emerged directly beneath the gaping maws of the ship’s engine bells, which twitched and hissed as the pilot-servitor in the nosecone ran through the final countdown sequence. The modules packed with soldiers were sealed shut – they would only be opened when the tender had safely landed in an airtight bay on Bellus – so Rafen could not enter there. The cockpit, high above him at the tip of the rocket, would not suffice either. Too small, too filled with arcane machinery and Adeptus Mechanicus complexity.

There would be only one route for a fugitive to board the battle barge. He could not chance accompanying other Blood Angels aboard a shuttle or Thunderhawk. Even with the dirt smeared across his armour, he could be seen and recognised. Once aboard Bellus, it would be a different story, the vast starship had many places for a careful soul to conceal itself. Rafen grabbed a maintenance ladder and hauled himself up it, into the nest of pipes and feed channels that poured promethium fuel to the engines. As the rockets hummed into life about him, he pushed his broad form into the open framework and found a vee-shaped stanchion that would accommodate his armour. The thunder of the engines built into a deafening crescendo, even through the noise-dampening protection of his helmet. Rafen gave a last look at the life-support monitor gauge on his wrist; all the vacuum seals on his armour were intact. With effort, he dug his ceramite-hardened fingers into the girders and wedged himself in place. Rafen closed his eyes and began a prayer to Sanguinius as gravity laid into him.

Clinging to the underside of the tender, Rafen hung on in grim determination, as the dock, the city and then the cloud-shrouded landscape of Shenlong fell away beneath him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

In the darkened corners of the landing bay, where only the blind rat-hunter servitors would dare to venture, Rafen was concealed. With care, he rubbed away the thin patina of ice that had formed on the outer shell of his armour, the rimes of frost tinkling as his gauntlet brushed them away. The beating of the Blood Angel’s heart was loud in his ears as the organ worked to supply additional oxygen to his bloodstream, counteracting the lingering side-effects of the trip through hard vacuum. Rafen’s armour had protected him well, but still the incredible cold of space had leached the heat from him, and the Space Marine’s muscles were tense. Typically, a Space Marine would have luxury of a chemical sacrament before venturing into the void. The philtre granted by the Chapter priests stimulated the Astartes mucranoid gland, turning their sweat into a complex compound to protect the skin against such punishing extremes of temperature. Rafen had no such defence, however, and the kiss of the airless dark had touched him with its full force.

The machines and men in the landing bay moved in synchrony as each new transport arrived. The shuttles paused just long enough to disgorge their loads of helot troopers before overhead gantries lifted the ships into refuelling sockets or directed them back out to be launched on a return course to Shenlong. Each new group of Arkio’s zealots was herded away toward the bilge decks by a clattering servitor or a Chapter serf. The serfs held shock-staves to keep the more curious members of the Warriors of the Reborn in check. Rafen used the magnification functions of his helmet optics to watch the motion of the bondsmen; now and then a battle-brother would intervene, overseeing the activity.

Inwardly, Rafen felt uncomfortable and conflicted. He was in every sense past the point of no return. It felt wrong, alien, to be in the midst of his brethren yet also in the thick of his adversaries. Every fibre of his being rebelled against the unwelcome, gut-sick sensation. Like all his kind, Rafen had come to know the camaraderie of his fellow Blood Angels as an extended family, a brotherhood in all senses of the world. By rights, Bellus was supposed to be a sanctuary, a place where he should have felt safe and content – instead, it was a danger zone as lethal as any field of melta mines or bio-web. As long as Sachiel thought him dead, then surprise was on his side, but he had to be careful not to squander his only advantage. Too many men aboard this ship knew his face, so to go unhooded would be an instant death sentence. Even with his armour sealed, if he freely moved among the other Astartes it would only be a matter of time before someone questioned him. Rafen needed to find somewhere that his presence would not be challenged.

He shook off the chill as another cargo lighter rumbled past him, the bullet-shaped vessel settling into a landing cradle with a heavy bump and a shower of orange sparks. The brass and cast-iron rig folded up around the transport like a gripping hand and turned the vessel to present it to a debarkation ramp. Rafen moved out of his cover and balanced on the balls of his feet. As with many starships in the service of the Empire, the Bellus’s tech-priests encouraged the battle barge’s machine-spirit to lower the gravity in the docking bays so that cargo could be manipulated more easily. Rafen felt light here, and he prepared himself for the necessary change in his gait. A cloud of white vapour belched from the lighter’s dorsal vents, momentarily occluding the ramp and the cradle. Rafen sprang out of his hiding place, using the mist to cover him. In the long, loping steps that he had been taught, the Space Marine crossed beneath the slow-moving ship and emerged at the foot of the ramp, as if he had been meant to be there all along. The cargo transporter touched the ramp edge with a hollow thud, and all across its hull gull-wing hatches opened.

Men boiled out of the ship in a ragged wave, all of them shivering and trembling, some from the cold and others from awe. Rafen saw a couple of them drop to their knees. At first he thought they might have been injured, but then he realised that they were kissing the deck, genuflecting in honour of the ship they saw as Arkio’s sacred vessel. All of the conscripts had weapons, after a fashion. Some had guns, others swords, spears and other bladed things that had a makeshift look to them. Many of them wore armour fashioned from metal junk, although a few sported dark ballistic mesh tunics. Planetary Defence Force hardware, Rafen noted; the wearers were either former members of Shenlong’s PDF that had survived the Word Bearers invasion, or else they were opportunists who had looted the bodies of the dead. The Space Marine’s expression soured. Either way, they were not worthy to set foot on a fighting ship like Bellus – even the lowliest of the Chapter serfs were nobler than this rabble.

The warriors came to a stumbling halt as they saw the Blood Angel standing there before them, cowed by his presence as much as by the incredible sight of the cavernous starship interior. Rafen would warrant that hardly any of these men had ever left their birthworld before today. He scanned their faces and found some with the vacant, transported look of a true fanatic, while others were brutal and crude, the most vicious of Shenlong’s dregs. Why Sachiel had selected these men was beyond Rafen’s understanding; none of them would ever measure up to the standards of the Chapter. All they were good for would be to die on the point of an enemy’s weapon and clog the muzzles of guns with their corpses. He suppressed the urge to sneer. Such tactics were base and ignoble, better suited to the traitor-kin of Chaos than to the Sons of Sanguinius.

‘Lord?’ A serf approached him with a questioning look on his face. ‘How may I assist you?’

Rafen glanced at the bondsman. ‘You are to escort these men below, correct?’

‘Yes, lord. Is there some problem?’

He shook his head. ‘No. The priest Sachiel has ordered that I accompany this party… He wishes me to oversee the transfer.’

The serf nodded. ‘As you command, lord.’ With a wave of his shock-stave, the servant directed the soldiers from the ramp.

The shabby figures filed past him, some of them averting their eyes, others studying him with a bald mix of hate and fear. Among the men, a single face suddenly leapt out at Rafen – a sallow, drawn complexion atop the remains of a PDF officer’s uniform. The man bowed his head as he passed and Rafen watched him go. He had last seen the soldier inside the Ikari fortress, after Sachiel’s honour guards had gunned down a group of innocents as repudiation. The man had actually thanked him for the ‘murdergift’ given to his sister who died in the crossfire, as if it were some great blessing. He seemed drained of all spirit now, a hollow shell stained with blood and driven only by belief in Arkio’s divinity.

Rafen followed the group along the echoing corridors of the ship and into the open caverns of the dark lower levels. To call them ‘decks’ would have been a misnomer: the hull spaces resembled a stygian canyon with plates of fungal growth extending from the steep walls. Sections of decking jutted out here and there, never broad enough to meet the vast skeletal ribs of the ship’s inner hull. Webs of cable, nets and rope-bridges looped them together. The warriors made themselves places to live and sleep from jury-rigged hammocks and discarded cargo pods. It was like a series of broken bridges arching over a valley so far below that the floor was lost in utter blackness.

The new arrivals were greeted with a welcome of cold-eyed glares and veiled threats. He lost sight of the PDF officer as the men wandered into the junkyard community, the law of the wild taking precedence as figures among the groups tussled for places to bed down. Rafen left the Chapter serf behind and walked through the encampment, picking his way along creaking gangplanks and between sagging trestles cut from salvage. There were loudhailers dotted about the place, each connected to the ship’s primary vox network with knots of wires, the hasty work of servitors under the direction of Inquisitor Stele. Spitting with reverb and interference, data-slate recordings of Sachiel’s speeches from the victory on Shenlong were playing, interspersed with snatches of Imperial hymnals. Conscripts clustered around some of the speaker rigs, joining in with the broadcasts. Everywhere the symbol of the Reborn Angel was daubed. Rafen paused at one such display and ran a finger over the still-wet marking. He raised his glove to his breather grille and sniffed: it was human blood.

The Space Marine peered over the edge of the gantry he stood on, wondering how many of Arkio’s chosen had already met their end in the darkness below. For all Sachiel’s high words and oratory, the thousand-strong army seemed to be filled only by the most heartless or the most fervid of Shenlong’s populace. To cast them as men in service to the glory of Sanguinius was an insult to the Great Angel.

Rafen moved deeper into the decks, losing himself in the dimly lit spaces. Down here, there would be no man that knew his face and no one to call attention to him. He would hide in plain sight and prepare; when the Warriors of the Reborn were called to arms, he would be there to stop his brother – or to die in the attempt.

‘The last group of lighters is docking now,’ Solus announced in his sombre, level voice. ‘Engineseers report power to drives is optimal. All rites of passage are complete and Bellus is free to make sail.’

‘Proceed.’ The static-choked order issued out of the vocoder implant in Brother-Captain Ideon’s neck, his face immobile. ‘Make preparation for warp transit the moment we reach the translation point co-ordinates.’

Solus hesitated; another man might not have noticed it, but Ideon had served with the Blood Angel as his aide-de-camp for decades and the man’s moods were as clear to the starship captain as the temperaments of his vessel’s machine-spirit. ‘Was there something else?’ Ideon prompted.

As Bellus moved away from Shenlong, the planet slipped from the forward viewport, and with it the wreckage of the Amareo, some of it still burning as it tumbled in a higher orbit. Solus glanced at the fragment and then away. ‘Lord, I–’

The brass leaves of the bridge iris retracted into the walls with a well oiled hiss of hydraulics, and Sachiel entered, his ubiquitous honour guards two steps behind him. Ideon watched him approach through his own eyes and those of the bridge’s sentry servitors, the data flowing into his brain through the complex forest of mechadendrites connecting him to his command throne. Solus fell silent, his words swallowed.

The Sanguinary High Priest seemed fatigued, there were dark circles beneath his eyes and his face was paler than usual. Through the infrared monitors Ideon registered a slightly higher skin temperature for Sachiel. Still, he seemed no less animated than usual, and the brightness in his eyes was a strong as ever.

The priest threw a nod to the captain. ‘Brother Ideon, what is the disposition of the Blessed’s battle barge?’

‘Fully prepared, Sachiel,’ he replied. ‘The navigator assures me that the prayer-computations for the course to Sabien have been completed. Bellus will enter the empyrean as scheduled.’

‘Excellent. Great Arkio demands nothing less than total efficiency.’ Sachiel’s voice rose at the end of the sentence and he blinked, as if the effort of the words were difficult for him. His eyes ranged around the bridge, over the hunched chorus of servitors ministering to cogitator consoles, until he found Solus at the wide oval observation window. He homed in on the Blood Angel. ‘Brother?’ Sachiel began innocently. ‘You seem distracted. What can it be that vexes you?’

Solus looked up, not at Sachiel, but to Ideon. The captain remained – as ever – an unmoving statue on the raised command dais. Solus turned to the priest after a long moment. ‘Sachiel, I would have you answer a question for me.’

‘Name it,’ the priest snapped back, a little too quickly.

‘What enemy do we go to face, brother?’

Sachiel nodded again. ‘Ah, I see. The matter of the Amareo’s destruction, yes? It troubled you to give the firing command on a Chapter vessel, did it not?’ When Solus did not answer, he pressed on. ‘Brother, listen to me. The men aboard that ship were assassins, sent to murder the Reborn Angel and purge anyone who gave fealty to him. That truth is self-evident.’ He came closer and touched Solus’s arm. ‘You did the only thing you could – you helped save the Blessed’s life.’

Solus would not meet his gaze. ‘I… I have taken the oath for Arkio and the Holy Lance, Sachiel, and I would not flinch against its demands but this…’ He glanced out the window at the stars. ‘Those men were our battle-brothers, we fought alongside some of them. That we were forced to exterminate them like some common heretics turns my gut.’

The priest’s voice was low, but it carried across the room. ‘Solus, friend Solus. I understand your feelings. At prayer, I too confessed my mis…’ He halted, his face colouring. Sachiel ran a finger over his twitching eye, as if he were banishing some inner pain. After a moment he continued as if nothing had happened. ‘Misgivings, yes. To Lord... Lord Stele.’ He smiled. ‘But I realised, those men had ignored the path of the primarch. That they came here with murder in their hearts made them our enemies.’

‘We could have talked to them,’ Solus blurted out, ‘reasoned with them. Perhaps they would have thought differently if they had understood Arkio’s great miracle–’

‘No, Solus, no.’ Sachiel’s expression became one of deep sadness. ‘They were lost to us before they even reached Shenlong. Like those who fell from the Emperor’s grace in the dark years, those men had chosen a path that pitted them against us. It was their choice, brother, not yours. You and I, all of us remain true to the Pure One.’ He nodded at the distant wreckage of the strike cruiser. ‘They forced our hand. Those deaths are on their own heads.’

‘Yes,’ Solus said finally. ‘Forgive me my outburst, priest. These past days have tested my faith.’

‘As they should,’ Ideon’s voice buzzed and rumbled from his vox-implant. ‘Arkio brings us a new lease of life, and Bellus will be the chariot that carries it to the ends of the galaxy.’

Sachiel’s head bobbed. ‘So shall it be.’

By the power of forces that dwarfed human understanding, the fabric of space began to writhe and shift around the prow of the Bellus. From the places where thought and energy became a unified melange, the raw mind-stuff of the warp spilled into the reality of matter, slicing open a raw, bleeding gate in the void. It was a violent miniature supernova in the blackness, a whirlpool into which the battle barge threw itself. Time, elastic and flowing like molten wax, enveloped the ship and projected it across vast distances. Bellus vanished from the realm of men and was gone, cast to the wild currents and energy storms of the immaterium.

In another place and time, the same unthinkable inversion of natural laws was occurring. A leviathan ship emerged from the phantasm of the warp in a violent burst of exotic radiation, coruscating colours and sickly hues of lightning trembling across the vast iron hull. Space itself seemed unwilling to let the vessel exist within its body, as if the vast craft were some metallic cancer growing and polluting the void with its presence. Shedding energy in sheaves of arcane power, the battleship fell from the empyrean realm and reverted to steady, obdurate reality. Engine maws, their exhaust bells as big as volcanoes, took on bloody glows as thrust spewed forth from ancient fusion drives, and with deadly purpose the warship Misericorde made speed toward its destination.

She was a horrific sight, an engine of torture almost a mile in length, and on Misericorde’s guns many mewling human worlds had been broken just as men had been broken on the racks of her dungeon decks. In aspect, the battleship was a broad dagger, a serrated arrowhead forming her prow, a haft of razors growing backwards to present the dorsal castle of her bridge, and below the plunging knives of skeletal stabiliser vanes. Guns protruded from every shadowed corner of the craft, punching through the red skin of the hull like broken ribs. The ship was adorned with skulls by the thousand. The largest were made from bones, ravaged from the bodies of dead enemies and fused into shape as badges of victory. At the very bow of the vessel, a design had been shaped out of broken pieces of hull metal and ceramite; centred on an eight-pointed star was the screaming face of a toothed, horned daemon, shouting defiance and black hate at all of Misericorde’s foes. Like the skulls, the sigil was constructed from war salvage, but instead of bone, the monstrous face was cut from the ships and armour of Adeptus Astartes unlucky enough to fall before the vessel.

In the command sanctum atop the bridge citadel, figures moved in a precise, careful ballet around the presence of the Warmaster Garand. The flayed shapes of servitors passed to and fro, clawed metal feet scratching across the decks as they went about their business. There was no speech except for the low, bubbling bursts of machine code between the slaves. The sound reminded Garand of the chattering predator insects on his Chapter’s blighted forge-world, Ghalmek.

Before him, he could see the Misericorde’s hololithic display presenting their destination – the shrine planet Sabien. It resembled a ball of age-worn iron, like the warshots spat from cannon on primitive pre-nuclear planets, it made Garand think instantly of Fortrea Quintus. Recall of the planet sent the Chaos warlord’s mind back through the veil of memory, thousands of years dropping away in an instant.

The Warmaster’s thin tongue slipped out of his lips to lick absently at his chin barbs. Yes, the similarity was quite marked, and the connection brought a glow of anticipation of the commander’s dark heart. Although ages had passed since the day Garand had set foot on Quintus, his memory of the glorious campaign there was still as vibrant and sensuous as ever.

The scent of spilt blood came to his nostrils and he closed his eyes, allowing himself to wallow in the luxury of it for a moment. Garand had been the second-in-command to Brother-Captain Jarulck in those days, when outwardly the Word Bearers still paid lip service to the corpse-god of men. He smiled. Even then, the Chapter had already embraced the perfection of the eightfold path, and the blind fools of the other Legion Astartes had been too pathetic to see the touch of Chaos in their midst. Great Lorgar, primarch of the Word Bearers, had personally charged two thousand men to the subjugation of the planet, and they had taken to it with battle-lust in their eyes. Garand recalled Jarulck’s fiery oratory to the Quintian natives, the words of power that had drawn the commoners to their banner in their droves. When they marched on their enemy’s stronghold in the last days of the conflict, their hordes of followers had perished in the thousands while the Word Bearers lost little of their original number, the bodies of the zealots forming the ramps that Garand’s troops used to ford the battlements. Fortrea Quintus fell, but not for the Emperor. With Jarulck’s blessing, Garand had been charged with the indoctrination of the locals. He ensured that although the world outwardly paid fealty to Terra, its secret face would forever be turned toward Chaos.

When Horus rose on his great jihad against the weak men-filth, Garand had swelled with pride to learn that the Quintians slaughtered every Emperor-fearing lackey on their homeworld within hours. For his part, Garand cemented his place on the path to high command of a Word Bearers Legion with the blessing of Great Lorgar, but Fortrea Quintus had always remained close to his black heart as the site of his first great victory. Now the smile on Garand’s horned and twisted face fell away, his aspect becoming crooked with ill temper.

The Quintus Conversion was at once the source of the Warmaster’s pride and his enmity – for it had not been soon after the death of Horus, when the Legions of Chaos were in disarray and scattered, that his prized victory was rendered into ashes by the supercilious Blood Angels. Garand and his hosts had been distant, fighting running battles toward their nest-worlds in the Maelstrom. The Word Bearers had been cut off from the planets they had turned; they had not been there to resist the so-called ‘cleansing’ by the corpse-god’s legions.

Garand listened in impotent anger to the screamed transmissions of astropaths as the Blood Angels swept across Fortrea Quintus and left nothing alive in their path. The prized achievement of his youth was burnt to ashes, kindling within him a dense, diamond-hard hate for the Sons of Sanguinius. Centuries had come and gone since then, but the rancour had never dulled. In a world of warriors who nurtured their hate like keen knives, Garand honed his loathing of the Blood Angels into something utterly murderous and unyielding in its purity.

Sabien filled the shimmering holoscreen and beyond it, the real planet was visible as an occluded disc eclipsed by a swollen, red-orange sun. The Warmaster was almost salivating in anticipation of the battle to come. He loved the impotent screams of idiot piety his enemies released whenever a Word Bearers host made planetfall on one of their pathetic ‘holy worlds’, how they wailed and wept to learn that the legions of Chaos had sullied their ridiculous worship of that dead freak they so revered. As the Book of Lorgar commanded, the Word Bearers were unique among the apostate Legions of the Chaos Space Marines. They alone retained the priests and dogma that their Chapters had kept during their fealty to Earth, but once they had bent their knee to the Ruinous Powers, their soothsayers and psykers embraced the mark of Chaos Undivided, the Blasphemous Hex. Now, when worlds fell beneath their might, the Word Bearers would erect massive monuments to the dark gods of the Maelstrom, they would profane the human churches and ritually deconsecrate anything that purported to glory the name of the Imperium. This and much more was precisely what Garand intended for Sabien.

The planet was a shrine world for the Blood Angels; the Warmaster knew little of the reasons that the Astartes whelps had named it thus, and he cared even less. It had been the site of some great conflict and in their asinine, maudlin way, the Blood Angels had isolated the planet and made it a place of pilgrimage. Sabien had absolutely no tactical value. It had no bases, no minerals waiting to be exploited, not even a population to be tormented and killed – but for the Word Bearers to set foot here would be as much a blow to the Astartes Legion’s honour as a spit in the eye of their precious Sanguinius.

‘Great Witch Prince,’ a servitor addressed him from the control pit at his feet. ‘We will achieve orbit momentarily. The assault force awaits your blessing for deployment.’

Garand did not grace the slave with eye contact. ‘Send them. Have my personal shuttle prepared. I will attend once the troops have begun their concealment.’

As much as he detested the turncoat Stele, he was forced to admit that the human had provided exactly what was needed. With the galactic co-ordinates of Sabien – a world whose location was hidden from all but the most secret Blood Angels star charts – it had been easy for the swift Misericorde to reach the planet before the other players in Stele’s little drama arrived. He found the inquisitor an unctuous, arrogant sort, far too enamoured with his own intellect. Had circumstances been altered, Garand would have been only too pleased to have torn the psyker’s throat from his neck – and perhaps I may still have that opportunity, he told himself – but it was the High Beast Malfallax’s wish that Stele be the tool they would use against the enemy.

He frowned; the eye of the mighty Abaddon was upon their endeavour here, and it would not go well if it came to nothing. Garand had given much of his Legion to the scheme, allowing that fool Iskavan to be sacrificed for the sake of Stele’s complex gambits, but he could not have anything but cold dislike for the inquisitor. After all, a traitor to his own species was still a traitor, and who could know if he would not turncoat again? Of course, there were those in the Imperium that called Garand and his kinsmen traitor too, but like most of the Emperor’s sheep, they did not understand. No Chaos Space Marine was a traitor. If anything, they were the most loyal of them all, casting aside everything that made them weak to give fealty to the most ruthless forces in all creation.

Garand’s reverie fell away as he studied the thick ring of asteroids girdling Sabien in a wide elliptical belt. He imagined they were all that remained of some moon, no doubt obliterated in the conflict that made Sabien the blighted sphere it was today. Repeaters from the battleship’s machine-spirit confirmed that the shaggy cloud of stones was rich in dense, sensor-opaque ores that would adequately mask the Misericorde’s presence. He glanced up, and saw the twinkle of lights swarming away from the vessel’s hull. The Warmaster’s clawed hand tightened around the blackened iron railing before him in rapt expectancy. The grand plan of his daemon lord Malfallax had moved one step closer to its deadly conclusion. This day would end with the Blood Angels throwing off their allegiance to the Emperor and embracing Chaos, or it would end with their bones joining those of their brethren already perished in Sabien’s crypt-yards.

The dream.

At first it had been a minor irritation, some piece of his past life impinging on the changes that fate had wrought upon him. It came in those moments when he was at rest, the brief periods of repose now less and less necessary as the wonders of his new body revealed themselves to him. In the beginning, it was only when Arkio slept that the dream came to him – but now, as the Blood Crusade took its first steps, the apparition had begun to infiltrate his waking moments. Whenever his mind began to drift from the matters at hand, it was there.

Arkio knelt before the vast frieze of Sanguinius in the grand chamber, the majestic face looking down upon him, mirroring his own in its lines of jaw and chin, in the nobility of mouth and eye. His silver-white wings moved of their own accord, gently unfolding in a whisper of sound, the tips of them drooping to pool around the golden shoulders of his artificer armour like a cloak of snow. At rest there on the altar of red Baalite sandstone was the sanctified metal cylinder that held the Holy Lance. Arkio opened the case so the honey-coloured light from the ancient weapon could be free to illuminate him. As he laid eyes on the Spear of Telesto, so once again Arkio felt the hum of unchained power in his veins. The preternatural potency of the Blood Angel bloodline ran strong in him.

Arkio bowed his head; none of the Chaplains in their black armour and skull-mask helmets had dared to approach him when he entered, and without any spoken orders from him, they had sealed the chamber closed. He could not see them, but he knew they had gathered at the far end of the cathedral’s aisle, watching him in awe-struck silence. Arkio made the sign of the aquila, the reflexive gesture soothing him.

‘Pure One, hear me. Grant me guidance. I am your vessel and your messenger. I will know the way of Sanguinius so I will make it my own. Grant me understanding of this vision that haunts me…’

Arkio closed his eyes and let the dream unfold in his mind. For days now as the Bellus raced through the warp, he had been holding it back, resisting the pull of it. The touch of the empyrean seemed to nurture it and strengthen its influence.

It begins on Baal, as it ever does. At the head of a throng of men and Space Marines a million souls strong, Arkio marches towards the gates of the fortress-monastery. At his shoulders are Astartes in armour all shades of crimson – not just Blood Angels, but warriors from the Flesh Tearers Chapter, the Blood Drinkers, the Angels Vermilion and more. There are men in the black of the Death Company, their greaves crossed with the red saltires that mark them as fallen to the rage, but they walk with him as tranquil as their battle-brothers at rest. His presence alone is enough to calm them.

The wind-scoured gates open before Arkio and the monastery presents itself to him and his crusaders. Every figure within, Space Marine and Apothecary, tech-priest and Chapter serf alike, all of them drop to one knee and bow their heads as they pass. There is none of the rough clamour and bellowed shouts that the people of Shenlong poured forth for him – here on Baal, only the wind is heard, and the silence of these faithful marks their devotion to him. None shall chance to speak in the presence of the Reborn Angel, such is their reverence.

Through the silent cloister and into the grand hall. He sees the faces of the greatest Blood Angels as they salute him, fist to chest as he strides past. Argastes. Corbulo. Lemartes. Moriar. Vermento. Even the honoured dead are here to greet him, Tycho standing shoulder to shoulder with Lestrallio, and for a moment, he spies Koris among them, his aspect a flicker, then shadows.

At the altar beneath the towering statues of Sanguinius and the Emperor stand Dante and Mephiston. There is a moment when both men meet his gaze and Arkio fears that he will be forced to draw the Spear upon them; but then both the high commander and the Lord of Death bow to him. Then, and only then, are the voices of his warriors raised, and they shake the pillars of heaven as they call his name.

But from the shadowed corners, something dark and foetid approaches.

‘Lord inquisitor, what are we to make of this?’ said Delos, his voice barely concealing an edge of fearful concern. ‘See, the light that falls from the Blessed.’

Stele’s face soured as he watched the play of yellow-white colours over Arkio’s golden form at the other end of the grand chamber. The hot glow of the Spear of Telesto crackled around him like summer lighting. ‘Yes, Chaplain, you were correct to summon me. This… This is a manifestation of the Reborn Angel’s will. He prays for guidance in our coming battles…’ The lie tripped easily off his tongue.

Delos exchanged glances with his fellow priests. ‘But his face… It shifts and moves, Lord Stele. I have not seen the like before… And his cries. I would swear that Arkio is in pain–’

‘No!’ Stele snapped, ‘You cannot fathom the ways of the Holy Lance, priest. Arkio communes with the blood within him, no more. He must… He must be given solace to do this alone.’

‘But we cannot–’

‘You must leave,’ the inquisitor thundered. ‘I will stand sentinel for the Blessed.’ When Delos hesitated, he stabbed a finger at the chapel doors. ‘Out!’ Stele’s voice became a roar. ‘By Sanguinius’s name, I command it.’

The moment the wooden doors rumbled shut, Stele broke into a run toward the altar. There was a stench in the air, and it was as familiar to the inquisitor as the sound of his own breathing; dead flesh, hot blood, cold iron.

Chaos.

CHAPTER NINE

The dream colours and darkens. It becomes a nightmare.

And now all transforms into ashes.

In the moment of his greatest triumph, as every Blood Angel living and dead pays fealty to Arkio’s name, the shadows gathering in the corners of his vision flood into sight. A wash of aged blood sweeps over everything, turning the men around him into rotting corpses, their bodies flayed under the tide, ceramite turning to paper, skin curdling over greying bones. The stone walls crack and crumble, ageing aeons in seconds. Baal itself cries out in agony at the pollution spilling across it. The dead are a tide about him, oceans of clawed skeletal fingers scoring into his golden armour. Dante and Mephiston clutch at him, screaming in pain, shrivelling eyes begging him for the reason that he has forsaken them.

Arkio’s mouth will not form the words, and he does not have an answer for them. All he knows is that this great decay is his fault.

The wave of ruin reaches his boots and climbs him like fast-growing fungus. The golden armour turns to tarnished brass, then dull rust, then crumbling dust. Arkio’s voice finds him in time for a soul-shattering scream.

The sound that left Arkio’s lips made Stele pause as he skidded to a halt at the foot of the altar. The cry hammered at the walls of the grand chamber, vibrating the stands of photon candles and the censers that dangled from chains high above. He threw a nervous glance to the doors – they remained closed. At least the Chaplain had taken his order to heart. It would not go well if Delos and his battle-brothers observed what was about to transpire. Stele grimaced as he stepped into the halo cast by the Spear. The touch of the weapon churned up complex, heady emotions inside the inquisitor, and he forced them to the back of his mind. He would need all his ability to concentrate on the here and now.

Arkio was trembling, his skin white and wet with perspiration. Shapes seemed to be moving beneath the surface of his elegant face, thin, worm-like cilia pushing at the curve of his cheekbones and his jaw. Stele swore a curse; the young fool had brought this on himself. Unwilling to simply leave the Holy Lance alone, Arkio had spent too much time in the radiance of the device, and now the architects of his change were in danger of spoiling. Dark lesions, hard and black like rare pearls, were appearing over his neck and forehead. Some of them had opened like eyes.

‘Too soon,’ Stele snapped. ‘It’s too soon. The mutation was stable, I made sure of it.’

He shrugged off his coat and placed his hands about the sides of Arkio’s head. Biting back a sudden urge to throw up, the inquisitor marshalled his strength and let his psychic senses extend through the skin contact. Gently, his fingers began to melt into the matter of Arkio’s face.

The worst of the horrors is left for the last.

Everywhere his battle-brothers have fallen, a new and monstrous shape takes form, rebuilding itself from the debris of bone and armour. Things come. Unhallowed creatures in sick parodies of Blood Angels nobility, their crimson armour stained with the blood of innocents, the white wings of the Chapter sigil now bones and blades, the red teardrop wet with gore. Horns and teeth sprout from them; their abhorrence outpaces even that of the traitorous Word Bearers. Everywhere, his twisted brethren paint eightfold crosses, throwing back their heads to call Chaos to their midst.

Air thickens about Arkio like quicksand. He reaches for the Holy Lance, the last beacon of purity, even as the skin sloughs off his bones. His fingers touch the warm, yielding metal…

Arkio’s arm jerked, a marionette pulled by a careless puppeteer, and his fingertips brushed the Holy Lance.

Hot air sizzled around the two men and Arkio was shoved backward.

The murky infections across his skin bubbled and popped. Out of sight beneath his armoured chest plate, more cancerous growths erupted across Arkio’s flawless body and spat yellow pus. Bony juts of distorted matter pressed at the cage of his skin. The flesh of the young Space Marine, so perfect and magnificent, was rotting inside.

‘No!’ snapped Stele. ‘Not yet. I will not permit it.’ Moving through his flesh, the inquisitor’s fingers buried themselves in Arkio’s spine, probing and feeling for the ebony egg of corruption that had been planted there so many months earlier.

…and the Spear of Telesto rejects him.

Pain, great stabbing swords of agony more powerful than mortals could comprehend surge into Arkio. He recoils and his body shifts; the flash-burned hand knots and writhes. It become a nest of tentacles and claws. He touches his face and finds an orchard of spines and barbs there, black flapping tongues and runny flesh. The black tide is in him now, rewriting his soul. He sees it there, cutting the mark of Chaos Undivided into him.

And there is a roaring beast within him, the hateful heart of the red thirst, that welcomes it. Arkio teeters and falls.

He has become the Unblessed.

There. There it was, clasping the bones of Arkio’s spinal column like a nesting spider. Thin lines of liquid darkness issued out of the egg-form, thousands of feelers infiltrating every organ and element of the Blood Angel’s body. So delicate, so subtle were they that only by flaying him open or ripping up his mind on a psyker-rack would anyone discover the lurking poison inside Arkio. It was a black heart of raw, undistilled Chaos. The object was glassy and hard, a piece of some decayed thought-form created by the Malfallax. The Monarch of Spite had made it from himself, granting the seed to Stele on the day that this intricate plan had become a reality. There was not a part of Arkio that was not touched by the mutations the egg created. Its cilia had infiltrated all of him, warping the youth’s flesh; it had been this that granted him the gift of his wings, his change, his Emergence.

Stele cooed to the egg, stroked it and calmed the malignant parasite. He had to be careful now, while the mutation progressed slowly and subtly, the taint in Arkio’s body would lay undetected – but the foolish whelp’s obsession with the Spear of Telesto had aroused the seed. Unless he could quiet it, all these carefully laid plans would unravel.

Before, here was where the vision ended, but now it went on.

Something comes. A man in crimson ceramite, untouched by the mutation and corruption about him. The tides of foulness retreat about his footfalls. Arkio’s traitor-self spits and loathes.

There is a blink of yellow light; suddenly the Holy Lance crosses the room and settles into the hands of the new arrival. Arkio, lisping through manifold mouths crowded with the buds of crooked new fangs, speaks his name.

‘Raaaaaaffffffffennnn.’

His brother does not know him. Rafen turns the Spear of Telesto on Arkio and plunges it into his heart.

Betrayed, mutated, changed and discarded, Arkio dies screaming.

Arkio sagged and dropped to the stone floor of the grand chamber, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Deftly, Stele withdrew himself from the flesh of the Space Marine’s neck, the skin sealing over like the surface of a pond. A few small rivulets of blood clung to the inquisitor’s fingers and he wiped them away with a silk kerchief.

The figure in gold moaned. ‘Rafen… No…’

Stele grimaced at the mention of Arkio’s brother, watching the lesions on the Blessed’s face shrink back to nothing, the raw mouths of weeping sores retreating into the folds of his skin. Once again, Arkio was perfect, an alabaster ideal of the Pure One. His eyes fluttered open.

‘Stele?’ he asked. ‘My friend? What happened to me?’

The inquisitor displayed a mask of concern that hid his genuine annoyance. ‘Blessed, praise Sanguinius that you are well. I feared the worst…’

Arkio got to his feet, his wings furling behind him. ‘I saw… a terrible vision, inquisitor. A victory snatched away by the tide of Chaos.’

Stele’s face remained utterly impassive. ‘You must be mistaken, Blessed.’

He looked down at his hands, then to the humming form of the Spear. ‘The lance…’ Arkio began, his voice catching, ‘it turned against me.’

‘Impossible,’ said Stele, his tone soothing. ‘Such a thing could never happen.’ He approached the Spear on the altar. ‘Look here, Great One. The Holy Lance is yours alone. Touch it.’

Hesitantly, Arkio extended a hand to the weapon, fingers tracing the shape of a hooded figure on the haft of the lance. The Spear of Telesto glowed beneath his caress. Relief crossed the Space Marine’s face.

‘You see?’ Stele smiled. ‘It was no vision, Arkio. Just the weight of days preying upon you. The Holy Lance is yours,’ he repeated. Inwardly, the inquisitor was relieved. His ministrations had been enough, and the mutations had been suppressed so that the Telesto weapon would not react to them – for the moment.

‘It was so real,’ Arkio was saying. ‘I could feel the hand of the warp inside me…’

‘Your mind changes as does your body and spirit, Blessed,’ said Stele. ‘Only you can know what purpose Sanguinius holds for you. Perhaps this… vision was something of a warning…’

‘Explain yourself,’ Arkio demanded, his hesitance falling away as his lordly manner returned.

‘Perhaps… perhaps the Great Angel is showing you what will transpire if we fail him…’

‘Yes…’ Arkio turned away. ‘That shall never happen, Stele. With your counsel, the Blood Crusade will ignite the stars with its righteous fire.’

The inquisitor gave himself a nod of self-approval. The crisis was passed. ‘Indeed it will, Blessed. And we will begin with planet Sabien.’

Arkio nodded and walked on into the transept alone. Stele watched the feathers on his wings flicker as he moved. It would only be a matter of time before the taint of mutation made itself visible again – but if all went to plan, by the time that happened Arkio and his Blood Angels would be glorying in the name of Chaos, and they would welcome it like the gift that it was.

Jets of spent thruster discharge vented from the underside of the Thunderhawk as it settled under the gravity of Sabien. From the deployment ramp at the ship’s prow there was a scramble of quick, controlled movement. Four Blood Angels, each grasping a bolter in battle-ready postures, fanned out and stepped into a wedge formation. Their eyes and their guns never stopped scanning the landscape for any sign of movement.

Behind them came a figure towering like a dreadnought, striding with cool purpose across the deck. Two more Space Marines, one a grizzled veteran, the other a tech-priest, followed at his heels. ‘Deploy scouts,’ he said, his voice carrying over the rumble of engines as a second and third Thunderhawk landed nearby. ‘I want a secure perimeter established, brother-sergeant. We may appear to be the first arrivals, but appearances can be deceptive.’

‘By your command, lord.’ The veteran saluted and broke into a run, growling out commands to a cadre of lightly armoured Space Marine outriders.

The other warrior paused, listening to a voice in his vox. ‘Message from the Europae, lord. The ship has attained a geostationary orbit above this location. Awaiting your orders.’

Mephiston stepped on to the surface of Sabien and took a lungful of air. Hundreds of scents assailed his heightened sense receptors, his brain quickly processing the smells into familiar categories. Death. This planet smells of death.

‘Lord Mephiston?’ asked the Techmarine, hesitant around the Chief Librarian. Even among the members of his own Chapter, the supreme psyker of the Blood Angels was feared as much as he was respected.

‘The Europae is to remain at maximum battle readiness,’ replied Mephiston, studying the landing zone. ‘What of the sporadic sensor contact in the debris belt?’ He glanced up. Above, a ghostly white shimmer could be seen bisecting the blue-orange sky – the thick band of rocks and captured asteroids ringing Sabien, the remnants of the planet’s largest moon.

‘No further detections,’ replied the Space Marine. ‘Cogitator reports conclude the contact may have been solar refraction from ice crystals or possible thermal outgassing.’

Mephiston curled his lip at that assessment. ‘We shall see.’ He left the tech-priest behind and walked out, the squad of tactical warriors moving with him. He eschewed the use of the more typical honour guard Space Marines on planetside missions; he preferred the company of line trooper Blood Angels, better to see first hand the disposition of the men that Lord Dante commanded, better to watch for signs of dissent or corruption.

This was not the first time Mephiston had set foot on Sabien. Once before, several lifetimes ago, he had stood in the same place, breathed the same air. He had been a different man then: Brother Calistarius, a mere codicer centuries away from the events at Hades Hive that would remake him as Mephiston, Lord of Death. Yet, as much as he had changed in the intervening years, Sabien had not altered at all. The shrine world remained as it was, as it had been for hundreds of years after the smoke and ashes of the brutal Phaedra Campaign had cleared. At that time, Sabien had seen the largest loss of life to the Blood Angels Chapter since the battles of the Horus Heresy, and when the world had finally been pacified at the cost of untold expended lives, the Imperial Church had awarded custody of the planet to the Sons of Sanguinius. The site of their desperate last stand against the enemies of mankind became a place of pilgrimage, and it had been on such a journey that the psyker had first come to Sabien.

Mephiston’s piercing gaze crossed the broken ridges of the skyline. The Thunderhawks had landed in the city square, in the place where the last great engagement of the campaign had taken place. The open space was littered with fallen masonry as far as the eye could see, shattered spars of rusted iron laid down upon the crumbling remains of columns. The remnants of architecture created in the ancient styles of Old Terra were everywhere. Long halls and cloisters mingled with cathedral towers that once had cut the sky with their magnificence. Now, Sabien’s streets were filled with drifts of fallen stone and the towers were humbled. Only a single construction still remained in the middle of the echoing square. Canted at an angle by eruptions of some long-silenced shell fire, a statue on a stone plinth kept watch on the dead city. Somehow, the figure of an angel had never once been struck in all the madness of the fight for Sabien. It remained here now, its features worn to vague shapes, as a symbol of human will.

The Librarian rested one hand on the hilt of his sheathed force sword and closed his eyes. Gently, he summoned the energy of the Quickening that coiled inside his mind, moulding it and absorbing it into his senses. The exhilarating rush of potency ran through him in a shiver, and Mephiston allowed his mind to slip free of its sheath of meat and bone. Gentle blue glows hovered around the horned skulls that decorated his psychic hood and the Lord of Death reached out, searching for life. The ghost of his psy-self slipped through the ravaged streets, a breath of mental power shifting and flowing in a gust of wind.

The dead had left their mark on the psychic landscape of Sabien. In the ruined city there was no place where the scars of violent death could not be found. Anguish and raw pain were burnt into the stonework, as clear to Mephiston’s senses as the scorched shadows of human figures left by a nuclear flare. The faded screams of Blood Angels hung about the edges of his esper perceptions, the phantoms crowding him. A nerve twitched in the Lord of Death’s jaw. Even for a Librarian of his awesome discipline, it was difficult to sift through the white noise of the haunted city and search beyond. He frowned. There seemed to be something out there at the very edge of his mind-sight, but it was ephemeral, hidden in the clutter of the war dead. Perhaps…

Mephiston’s head jerked around in a swift motion, and the Techmarine froze, startled by the action. The Blood Angels psyker looked up into the sky. Evening stars were slowly emerging from the darkening blue, and one steady dot of brightness showed the position of the Europae. ‘They’re coming,’ he whispered to himself, his voice too low for anyone else to hear. Like a new constellation flaring into life, Mephiston’s inner sight could see the cluster of glowing minds approaching the planet at high speed, and among them he could read the strange flickers of a mentality like none he had ever encountered before.

There was a mumbling crackle of communication from the Techmarine’s helmet vox, and he glanced up at Mephiston. ‘My lord, word from the Europae. The battle barge Bellus has arrived.’

He nodded. ‘I know. I can taste him.’

Bellus presented her hammerhead bow to her sister ship as she slowed. The vessels were almost mirror images of one another, the huge slab-like hulls beweaponed with cannons and missile tubes. Each displayed a huge disk with the Chapter sigil beneath a golden crest of the Imperial aquila, but the similarities ended at the surface. Across the gulf of Sabien’s orbit, the crews of both ships eyed one another with suspicion and doubt. It was a rare sight to see two ships of this class in the same place. Such deployments were usually the prelude to war on a huge scale, and there were many Blood Angels aboard Bellus and Europae that wondered if war was what would soon follow.

On the command deck, Captain Ideon scrutinised the other vessel with all the tactical acumen he would have given an enemy warship. ‘Solus,’ he crackled. ‘Detector pallets on the port forward quarter read what looks like a fluctuation in her drive coils.’

Ideon’s aide nodded from his post at the primary cogitator. ‘Agreed, captain.’

‘Log that information with the gunnery servitors. It may prove useful if we are required to engage.’

At the observation window, Stele turned away from his conversation with Sachiel to face the captain. ‘It saddens me that such precautions must be taken, but after the Amareo incident…’

‘You may rest assured, the crew of the Europae are planning the same for us,’ Arkio snapped. He was wound tight with tension, and in long strides he pushed his way past the Sanguinary Priest to face the command dais. ‘Ideon. Do you detect any other starships in the area?’

The captain blinked as he addressed the eyes and ears of Bellus. ‘No, Blessed,’ he answered after a moment. ‘No contacts at this time.’

‘It appears that Dante kept his word,’ said Sachiel. The priest seemed muted, his usual bluster quieted. ‘Perhaps we may yet see a peaceful path out of this cha–’ He stumbled over the word. ‘This… This disorder.’

Stele threw him an arch glance. ‘Indeed. But I respectfully suggest that our watchword should be vigilance. If Commander Dante decides–’

‘Dante is not here,’ Arkio broke in, steel in his voice. ‘I know it in my bones. He has sent his second, the psyker Mephiston.’ The golden-armoured Space Marine looked Stele in the eye. ‘Do you not sense him, inquisitor?’

Gingerly, Stele extended the smallest of mental feelers toward Sabien’s surface, and just as quickly he jerked it back, like a hand too close to a naked flame. ‘The Blessed is correct. The Lord of Death awaits us.’ For the briefest of instants, a glimmer of concern crossed the Hereticus agent’s face.

Arkio approached Ideon and nodded a command to him. ‘Set war conditions throughout the ship, captain. These are my orders – the Warriors of the Reborn will attend me on Sabien. Launch transports and Thunderhawks. I will meet Mephiston at the head of my multitude.’

‘I have selected a company of Space Marines, Blessed,’ added Sachiel. ‘Your army will truly be a glorious sight.’

Arkio nodded. ‘Attend me, priest – and you as well, inquisitor. We go to make history.’

Stele gave a shallow bow and followed the Reborn Angel from the room. Entering the echoing corridors, he hung back a few steps and spoke urgently into a concealed vox in his collar. ‘Ulan, listen to me. Come to the landing bay and prepare for planetfall. I will have need of you on the surface.’

‘Mephiston?’ came the reply.

‘With haste,’ he retorted, quickening his pace.

Elsewhere aboard the Bellus, the cargo lighters were accepting their loads, each of the bullet-shaped ships sealing shut with a warshot of armed, zealous men. Ideon’s orders crackled through the air on every deck of the ship, calling the vessel to arms and preparing the troops for a landing. In the days that had passed between their departure from Shenlong and the arrival here, the Warriors of the Reborn had grown restless and impatient for release. Each group was wired with anticipation as they filed into the transports, their eagerness to prove their worth to Arkio far outweighing their fears.

Rafen carefully joined the rear of a trailing group of helots, keeping as far as he could from the other Space Marines herding the rag-tag army into their troopships. Hidden in the lower decks, the journey had passed quickly for the Blood Angel as he dipped in and out of trance-sleep, his brain’s catelepsean node keeping one half of his brain awake while the other slumbered. Rafen was thankful for the capability of the implant. He suspected that the dreams true slumber brought would not have pleased him.

The slave-soldiers marched up the boarding ramp in a loose, undisciplined group, the very antithesis of the finely drilled formations of the Adeptus Astartes. As they entered the cargo lighter’s interior, a figure pushed through them, giving out terse orders. Another Space Marine.

Rafen licked dry lips; this would be the moment of truth. If his subterfuge failed now, he would never make it down to the planet alive. He gave the other Blood Angel a cursory nod as if nothing were amiss, and strode past him, up the ramp toward the ship.

‘Brother,’ said the Space Marine. ‘You are overseeing this group? I thought that I was to accompany…’ His voice drifted off, confusion in his tone. Rafen recognised him as he stepped into the light, the biolume glow illuminating his face. Alactus.

Rafen kept walking, and made an off-hand grunt that he hoped would be enough.

‘Wait,’ Alactus continued. ‘I know you, do I not?’ His brow furrowed. ‘What is your name?’

How could he not know me, Rafen asked himself. We have served the Chapter together for decades.

‘Brother!’ The shout halted Rafen at the top of the ramp and he half-turned to glance over his shoulder. Alactus had his hand at the grip of his bolt pistol. ‘I asked you a question.’ The Space Marine stepped closer, suspicion clear on his face. ‘Take off your helmet.’

He glanced at the transport; the helots were secure inside now, and none of them could see what was going on outside. Rafen turned to face the wary Alactus. There were no other men around this high on the launch cradles, just the two Blood Angels.

‘Take off your helmet,’ Alactus repeated, and the bolter was in his hand. ‘I will not ask you again.’ The warning in his voice was needle-sharp, the Space Marine would shoot Rafen dead if he did not respond.

Rafen nodded and descended the ramp, unlatching the connector ring on his headgear as he did so. He halted in front of Alactus and turned the helmet off his head. When he met his battle-brother’s eyes he saw shock there.

‘Rafen!’ husked Alactus, ‘but you’re dead…’

‘No,’ he replied, and in a single sharp movement, Rafen swung his helmet at the other Space Marine, rushing at him. He smothered the sick feeling in his gut that welled up as he assaulted his former comrade; to do such a thing made Rafen feel soiled, but he knew that there was no choice here. If he did not kill Alactus, then he would perish in his stead.

Alactus was caught by the surprise attack, and the ceramite helmet struck him hard, knocking the pistol from his hands. The gun clattered away as Rafen hit out again, knocking the other Space Marine to his haunches.

‘Traitor!’ spat Alactus, whipping his combat blade from its sheath. ‘Sachiel told us what you did, what you tried to do. You murdered Lucion.’

‘I didn’t want to–’

‘Liar! You craven wretch, you turned on your own brethren. You tried to destroy the fortress – you would have killed us all, you would have murdered the Reborn Angel.’

Anger boiled up inside Rafen. ‘You fool. It is not I who is the turncoat, it is you. You and everyone who follows Arkio’s misguided insanity!’

‘No.’ Alactus shook his head, ‘I will not hear your falsehoods! He is the Pure One returned–’

‘He is nothing of the kind,’ Rafen retorted. ‘Open your eyes, man. Open your eyes and see the truth, Arkio is just a pawn. Stele is behind this, that ordos mind-witch is clouding everything for his own ends.’

‘Lies!’ Alactus dived at him, the blade glinting. Rafen blocked, but the knife bit down and cut into his armour. ‘To think I trusted you,’ hissed the other Space Marine. ‘To think we fought together in the Emperor’s name when all along you were an agent of Chaos.’ He forced the blade deeper and Rafen bit off a cry of pain. ‘I will kill you as a gift for the Blessed.’

Rafen’s hands snapped up and found Alactus’s neck. Ceramite-encased fingers bit into his skin and squeezed. ‘Forgive me…’ he hissed, the two of them locked together in a death-grip. Rafen felt the knife slashing and cutting, but still he would not release. Blood bubbled from his battle-brother’s lips and bone in his throat cracked.

‘Damn… you…’ Alactus choked and died in his arms, his body turning limp.

Rafen dropped him to the deck and tore the knife from his wound, snarling at the pain of it. He stared at his hands; blood coated them with thick, accusing stains. He remembered the Word Bearer he had killed on Cybele in the same manner, his breath catching in his chest. ‘Sanguinius,’ he asked aloud. ‘Where will this madness end?’

But no answer came to him. Carefully, Rafen replaced his helmet, pausing to recover the bolt pistol before he marched aboard the transport ship. The hatch slammed shut behind him, leaving his comrade’s corpse to vent to the void as the shuttle shot away toward Sabien.

‘The scouts report no contact along the outer perimeter,’ said the sergeant, ‘the landing zone is devoid of life.’

The hint of a sneer tugged at the corner of Mephiston’s thin lips. ‘Just because they have not found anything does not mean that it isn’t there. Be watchful, sergeant.’

The Blood Angel gave a grave nod and pointed into the sky. ‘Look there, lord. Ships.’

A rain of transports and cargo craft descended, touching down on the clearer part of the square in the north-west corner. ‘Prepare yourself,’ Mephiston told his men. ‘Be ready for anything.’

Figures in shabby, makeshift uniforms emerged from the shuttles along with the red dots of Blood Angels. The sergeant frowned, scrutinising the warriors with his long-range optics. ‘What’s this?’ he said in a low voice. ‘The pretender has brought an army of commoners with him?’

Through an ornate set of magnoculars the Librarian watched the figures moving into a poor approximation of a parade line. ‘Ah,’ he said after a moment. ‘Their eyes, sergeant. Look at their eyes. Tell me what you see.’

The Blood Angel did as he was told. ‘They seem… manic, perhaps.’

‘Yes. Those men have the fire of belief kindled in them. And those of their number who do not have ill-temper enough to compensate.’ Mephiston’s fingers drummed on the grip of his plasma pistol. ‘Watch them. Their kind are unpredictable, given the right circumstances.’

The sergeant pointed again. ‘There, lord, do you see him? I can’t be sure–’

The Lord of Death did not need to be told where to look; floating like a mellifluent seraph among a throng of vagrants, Arkio approached them. His armour caught the red-orange glow of Sabien’s setting sun and it glimmered off the gold ceramite like liquid fire. Broad white wings formed arcs above his shoulders.

‘Emperor’s blood…’ breathed the sergeant. ‘He could almost be–’

‘He is not,’ Mephiston grated harshly. ‘Allow yourself to believe that and you are useless to me.’

‘Forgive me, lord, it’s just that… I have never seen the like.’

The Librarian could sense the same thoughts on the surface of the minds of all the Blood Angels in his guard. He set his jaw hard and lightly touched the psychic reservoir of his Quickening. Gently, Mephiston used the power to reinforce the will of his men, erasing any germ of doubt before it could grow larger.

Rafen used rough gestures with the bolter to make the slave-soldiers go where he wanted. Hidden in the mass of the procession, he was far enough apart from Arkio’s loyalist Space Marines that he would not be recognised again. He frowned beneath the visor of his helmet. There, a way ahead of him, marched his brother, and at his side the priest Sachiel, Stele and the inquisitor’s retinue. He saw the shambling lexmechanic, the floating shapes of Stele’s servo-skulls and a hooded female whose features were invisible beneath a voluminous cloak. Rafen elected to bide his time. His plan, such as it was, was taking shape on the fly. Perhaps, if the opportunity presented itself, he could approach Arkio unseen, and then – would he dare to shed the blood of a brother again? And this time, the blood of his own kinsman? He had been unable to do it back on Shenlong, and as he searched his feelings, Rafen could not be sure if he would do it now.

At the foot of a Thunderhawk, Rafen could see another figure, an unmistakeable form that seemed cut from a history book. He recognised Dante’s Chief Librarian immediately, the most powerful psyker in the entire Chapter – and some said, the whole of the Legion Astartes – watching the approach. Rafen recalled his stony aspect from a statue in the cloisters of Angel’s Fall: Mephiston, the Lord of Death. His name was well-earned, for it had been he alone that had looked into the unknowable void of the Blood Angels gene-curse and survived. Only through an incredible force of will had Mephiston passed through the punishing trials of the maddening red thirst and lived to tell of it. Men said that to look the Lord of Death in the eye was to see a window to the black rage and the dark places that waited beyond the realm of life. Mephiston’s burning gaze had been known to stop enemies in their tracks and leave them broken and weeping.

As befitting a man of such stature, the psyker wore a crimson cloak inlaid with a profusion of bone skulls, the death-head symbol large on his shoulder pads. The twin rails of a powerful psychic hood extended above his head, and the armour across his torso resembled skinned flesh, glistening red bunches of muscle crossed with death marks and jewelled blood droplets. He was the darkest end of the spectrum when compared to Arkio’s golden, mirror-bright form.

‘Lord Mephiston,’ Arkio said, inclining his head in greeting, ‘you honour me with your presence here. Thank you for coming.’

The psyker studied the youth. The sergeant had been correct, Arkio’s resemblance to the Great Angel was uncanny. It was almost as if a statue of Sanguinius had shaken off its coating of stone and stepped down from a chapel plinth. Yet, as much as the image matched the legends that had shaped his devotion for so many years, Mephiston could already sense the taint of something foul and corrupt in the air, lingering like spent tabac smoke. He was very careful not to give even the slightest hint of obeisance to the man in the gold armour. This was the one who had ordered Mephiston’s protégé Vode destroyed and Captain Gallio’s crew executed in cold blood, something the Librarian would not soon forget.

But still… There was some small voice inside Mephiston’s mind, some last fragment of his old self as Brother Calistarius, that was awed by what Arkio had become, this perfect living avatar of great Sanguinius. He silenced the discord within him and drew his psy-essence into a single place.

‘You are the one they call the Blessed Arkio.’ It was not a question. ‘You claim that you are the vessel for the Angelic Sovereign.’

‘I claim nothing,’ Arkio said. ‘I simply am.’

For the first time, their eyes met, and from within the dark pits of Mephiston’s soul, he turned his transfixing glare upon the youth; the sheer force of the mental charge between them set other men staggering upon their feet.

‘We shall see,’ intoned the Lord of Death, turning his baleful sight on Arkio’s very soul.

CHAPTER TEN

Darkness coiled from the evening sky and crossed the horizon with deep, inky shadows. Some of the Warriors of the Reborn shifted nervously and muttered, weapons rattling as they gripped them harder, afraid of what was to come next. Rafen moved forward through the ranks of men, better to observe the confrontation between Arkio’s and Mephiston’s titanic wills. He tasted the thick, greasy texture on the chill air, the same oily aroma that he had encountered before when Stele had brought his psychic powers to bear – but this time the magnitude was a hundred times greater, and the thickness of the atmosphere about him made Rafen feel like he was wading through a marshy bog. He could see the hellfire glow from beneath the Lord of Death’s brow, his eyes twin embers of controlled menace like distant beacons.

The stink of mind-magick was all about him, and Rafen felt bile rise in his gorge. To be so near to such a naked show of psyker force made him feel soiled and unclean.

He was closer now; he could see Stele’s bald head, the glint of the silver purity stud in his ear. The inquisitor appeared to be in distress, as if the effort of standing in Mephiston’s aura was almost too much for him. At his side, Stele’s woman trembled beneath her hood. Rafen swore he could see thin wisps of smoke issuing from her nostrils. The Space Marine kneaded the grip of the bolt pistol and forced himself to move nearer still.

The Gaze was a lens that opened up the hidden world to Mephiston’s perception. The power burning inside him shone through the gates of his vision like the beam of a devout searchlight, pinning the weak and the unhallowed as it fell upon them. His sight-beyond-sight stripped away the illusions of reality and bared souls so that the Lord of Death could examine their pale, naked truths. He saw Arkio as if he were an anatomical sketch drawn from some textbook of the magus biologis, layers of skin, bone, muscle and nerve visible to him. The boy was glass, and Mephiston’s gaze shone into him, illuminating every corner of his spirit as searing sunlight falling through a prism.

There. It was concealed well, buried beneath levels of wards and mind-baffles, the matter of it worked into the bone and meat of the Space Marine’s body, but the taint could not hide from the unblinking eye of Mephiston’s powers. The black ellipse floated among the perfection of Arkio’s Astartes physiology, ruining the sacred organic design of the Blood Angel. The seed of Chaos glittered and pulsed.

In a faint way, he was slightly disappointed. Perhaps there was a part of him, however tiny, that had hoped Arkio’s story might be true; but instead Mephiston found himself confronted by a dupe, a mutant ignorant of his own poisoned nature. Other men might have felt pity then; but not he.

The Lord of Death marvelled at the perfection and ingenuity of the taint – it was truly a work of psionic art, the construct of a maker both genius and madman. It bore the unmistakable fingerprints of the Changer of Ways across every aspect of its form. He traced thin thought-filaments from the infection, tracking the lines of their mutations, the reordering of fleshy matter that had altered the boy from a Marine to the simulacra he was now. Faint glints of contact danced in Arkio’s aura, bending like flowers seeking the sun, all of them turning toward one man.

Stele. Mephiston could smell his emotions like spilled blood, a cocktail of arrogance warring with controlled fear, desire and avarice raging beneath the thin veneer of his icy civility. But the inquisitor was not the puppet master here; like a mirror within a mirror, Stele in turn was being directed by some other intelligence. He let his vision slip over the woman. She was like oil on water, repelling it instantly. Mephiston’s sight could not hold purchase on her.

‘Tell me, lord,’ said Arkio. ‘Now you have looked into my soul, what do you see?’ The tension in the square came to a knife-edge on his words. ‘Will you deny the work of the Great Angel upon me? Or will you accept that I am the incarnation of the Deus Sanguinius?’

Mephiston drew back with a grim sneer on his lips. ‘If only your divinity matched the scope of your arrogance, lad, you might be what you appear.’

‘How dare you!’ blurted Sachiel, stepping forward. ‘He is the Reborn Angel, the light of–’

‘Silence, priest.’ The psyker stilled him with a single glance, and Sachiel clasped at his throat, coughing.

The gracious expression on Arkio’s face faded into a blank mask of neutrality. ‘Mephiston, tread carefully. I offer you the chance to join my Blood Crusade. Do not be so quick to judge me. Come to my side, and I will welcome you as my battle-brother.’

He arched an eyebrow, gauging the moment. ‘And if I do not?’

‘It would go poorly for you, Lord of Death. The sands of your life have already run thin on borrowed time. If you test them again, you will not be so blessed as you were on Armageddon.’

A soft laugh escaped the psyker’s lips; he decided to allow the boy to talk. ‘Your presumption amuses me, Arkio. Tell me, this “crusade” of yours, what gives you the right to dictate such a thing? You speak as if it is your voice that leads our Chapter.’

‘And so it will be,’ Arkio replied. ‘Your master Dante has lingered too long in command of the Blood Angels. He will step aside for me.’

The cold humour vanished from Mephiston’s face in an instant. ‘He will do no such thing for a pretender whelp like you.’ The Librarian’s voice was iron-hard and full of threat.

Arkio watched him carefully. ‘Perhaps not. If he cannot release his petty fear of me then we will absolve him of his office. With all the due effort that may be required to do so.’ The golden-armoured figure summoned a trio of Sachiel’s honour guards and the men arrived with a titanium cylinder between them. Arkio opened the case and let the radiance of the Holy Lance light the darkening landscape. With a single swift motion, Arkio drew the ancient weapon and swept it up in a brilliant arc of light.

‘The… the Spear of Telesto…’ The words fell from the lips of the Techmarine in a humbled gasp.

Arkio pointed the spear at Mephiston, sighting down the length of the haft at him. ‘I swear this by the blood of the primarch in my veins. Know me, Librarian. I am the Blood Angels incarnate. I am Sanguinius Reborn.’ Gold lightning arced around the teardrop blade at the tip of the spear. ‘Give me your fealty or perish. The choice is yours.’

For one dizzying, horrible moment, Mephiston felt his world lurch around him as the lance hove into view. How can this be? He wields the sacred weapon! A storm of chattering doubts engulfed the Lord of Death; it was impossible to think that some debased impostor would ever be able to lay hands on the spear, and yet Arkio held the Holy Lance like he was born to it. Have I been mistaken? Could he really be the Reborn Angel? Who else could know the might of the Telesto artefact? Mephiston shook the churn of thought away with a shake of his head, tiny darts of blue fire crackling along his crystalline psi-hood. ‘No,’ he growled. There was some magick at work here, a bewitchery so subtle and insidious that even a weapon forged by Holy Terra could be deceived by it. ‘I am not cozened, pretender. Your parlour tricks mean nothing against my faith.’ The Blood Angel’s hand dropped to the hilt of his arcane force sword, the ancient mind-blade Vitarus. ‘No true Son of Sanguinius will ever bend his knee to you, charlatan. You are false.’

A surge of anger thundered through the Warriors of the Reborn and cries of violence burst forth from Arkio’s loyalists. Rafen let them jostle him forward.

Arkio shook his head in annoyance. ‘Poor, old fool. You are infected with Dante’s fear, just as Vode and Gallio before you, just as every misguided man who sits under Baal’s sun and believes himself a true Blood Angel. I am the way.’ He shouted, brandishing the spear, ‘I am the truth reborn. Your blindness sickens me, mind-witch. I pity you.’

Mephiston’s troops knotted together, breeches clattering on their bolters in a rush of noise. The Librarian drew himself to his full height, towering over Arkio’s golden form and brilliant white wings. ‘Save it for yourself, fool. You and your ordos accomplice, all of you are black with the stain of Chaos! It reeks from you…’ He stabbed a copper-gloved finger at the inquisitor, who met his accusation with a sneer. ‘This weakling is a lackey of the Ruinous Powers, and those who heed his words are equally disgraced with the stigma of heresy!’ The psyker’s words drew a chorus of denials and vicious retorts. ‘Ramius Stele, I name you traitor. You conspire with dark powers and revel in corruption. You are the architect of this apostasy!’

‘No!’ roared the inquisitor, the shout slamming into the distant ruins like a thunderclap. ‘The Blessed is right. You decry all that you fear! Your words are lies, Mephiston, lies. Arkio is Sanguinius.’

‘Then he shall prove it,’ the Lord of Death spat back. ‘In the Book of the Lords, the Pure One was said to be the match of any warrior that lived. If this is so, then perhaps your so-called “Blessed” would be willing to face a true Blood Angel in single combat…’ Mephiston bared his fangs. ‘If he is the vessel for the will of the Angelic Sovereign, he will be victorious. If he is a mere pretender, he will die.’

He watched the consequence of his dare as it spread out among Arkio’s loyalists, sensing the merge of anger and fear it engendered. He nodded to himself; exactly the reaction he had wanted. Playing the young fool into his hands, Mephiston had brought him to this moment, and now he would butcher the impostor like a prey beast. Such a brutal and very visible destruction of this golden figurehead was necessary – when Arkio died on the tip of Mephiston’s force sword, his disciples and helots would break. Their confusion would make it easier for the Lord of Death to execute them. This insurrection had to be smashed in the most public and bloody way possible.

Men on both sides began to draw back, granting room for the coming duel, and Sachiel had found his voice once more. ‘It’s a trick,’ he sputtered, the veins on his neck corded and tight with anger bordering on madness. ‘You cannot accept, Blessed. The psyker is goading you.’

Arkio gave the priest a brief, beneficent smile. ‘Sachiel, my friend. Your concern for my wellbeing is touching, but misplaced. I will not dismiss this challenge. If Mephiston wishes to see the might of the Red Angel enraged, then by the grail, I shall show it to him!’ He stepped forward in a grim-faced swagger, the Holy Lance at rest beneath the curl of his wing. ‘I will face any man here,’ Arkio told the Librarian, ‘and I will send him to the Emperor’s grace knowing the truth of my divinity!’ He made a show of opening his arms wide to the assembled men, Blood Angels, loyalists, slave-soldiers alike. ‘Who here would take up arms to fight me? Which of you will shed your blood to prove the rightness of my decree?’

The sword Vitarus whispered as it drew free of its scabbard. ‘Arkio,’ growled Mephiston. ‘It will be my–’

‘I will face him!’ The cry cut through the air and set heads turning, hands frozen on weapons.

‘Who?’ said the sergeant at Mephiston’s flank. ‘It came from over there.’ The veteran indicated the mob of Arkio’s men with the barrel of his bolter.

The psyker’s perplexity increased as the crowd of ragged slave-troops parted to allow a single Blood Angel to come forward. His armour was discoloured by bloodstains and there was a gouge in his chest plate. As Mephiston watched, the Space Marine stepped past Arkio’s retinue and removed his helmet. For the first time, he saw an expression on the pretender’s face that wasn’t anger or arrogance, but pure, raw shock.

‘Rafen!’ Arkio choked out the name. ‘You survived…’

‘Impossible,’ Sachiel shrieked, grabbing at his gun. ‘The factory was obliterated, he was inside, he could not have–’

‘Quiet, you fool,’ growled Stele, forcing the priest to lower his weapon. ‘It appears that your news of his death was premature.’

Rafen and Arkio held each other’s gaze for a long moment. ‘Brother,’ said the figure in gold, ‘I did not think to lay eyes on you again.’

‘I am a survivor,’ Rafen replied, the weariness of all that had happened before in his voice, ‘and now it has come to this.’

‘You tried to destroy me, Rafen. You turned your back on me.’ Arkio’s words were thick with emotion, pain and fury.

He shook his head. ‘I have not betrayed you, kindred. You have betrayed yourself. I warned you. I begged you to step back from the abyss.’ Rafen looked away. ‘You did not heed me.’

‘And now it has come to this,’ Arkio repeated. ‘Very well, brother. If a son of Axan must die today, then die he will.’

The Lord of Death slammed his force weapon back into its sheath and beckoned Rafen closer. ‘Come to me, brother. If you wish this, then let me know you.’

Rafen knelt before Mephiston and raised his head. ‘Aye, I wish it.’ The light behind the psyker’s eyes glowed and burnt a path into Rafen’s mind. He felt his body tense and Mephiston’s hand shot out, cupping his chin so he could not turn away.

The Librarian’s powerful inner sight tore apart any defence of will that Rafen might have thought he had, slipping into the corridors of his psyche in a flood of power. His brain felt like hot magma, churning and boiling as storms of long-forgotten memory were dredged up and examined. Nothing that was Rafen escaped the gaze of Mephiston.

For a brief moment, their mentalities were unified as the Lord of Death sifted through the Space Marine’s consciousness. Mephiston tasted Rafen’s heart, the colours and shades of his soul – he saw pieces of the man that even Rafen himself could not comprehend. Duty and honour marbled his spirit, they were cut into Rafen like the age rings of a nyawood tree. Once, there had been a time when this man was wilful and arrogant, when it was only his own glory that had occupied his mind; that Rafen was gone, a child grown into an adult with all the knowledge of life’s hardest lessons. The Space Marine embodied the ideal of the Blood Angels. He was noble but humble, a warrior but not belligerent. Among all these brothers who have lost their way, this one alone still walks the path of the Blood. There can be no better champion.

Mephiston sensed something else, remaining only in fragments and splinters throughout Rafen’s spirit. The touch of something higher, the marks where a force of being with powers far beyond the Lord of Death’s had briefly influenced Rafen.

A vision…

The Librarian released him and withdrew, the fire in his eyes retreating. An unspoken moment of communication passed between the two men, a sadness at what Rafen had foreseen and what he knew had to be done. ‘He is your blood kin,’ said Mephiston.

‘Aye, lord.’

He nodded. ‘Rafen, you are true to our code. I stand aside to let you take my place in this challenge.’ Mephiston gestured to the veteran nearby. ‘Sergeant, give this man your power sword.’

The Space Marine drew the weapon and presented it to Rafen, who accepted it with a shallow bow. He turned the blade over in his hands, his fingers falling easily behind the spiked guard and into the knurled grip. The sword resonated with dormant threat, the polished silver blade catching the colour of the orange sky in its surface. Rafen traced the shape of a half-eagle cut into the hilt. ‘A fine weapon,’ he noted.

Mephiston stepped back to give him room. ‘This matter will be decided,’ he intoned. ‘Brother against brother, with victory for the faithful.’

Perfect.

Stele almost laughed out loud when Rafen took up the sword. This was ideal, he could have done no better himself at producing so exquisite a finale. Brother facing brother, with death alone the reward for Rafen’s foolhardy presumption. Such a conflict would be a fitting end for that turbulent Space Marine, and at long last Stele would be rid of the irritant that had plagued him since they had first arrived among Cybele’s war graves. It was regretful that Arkio’s brother had proven so resistant to the cult that Stele had created among the Blood Angels – such a warrior with so defiant and unyielding a soul would have made a fine addition to the Reborn Angel’s retinue. If only he had followed the route of his battle-brothers and truly accepted Arkio’s new-found divinity, Rafen would be here now as a lord commander among the forces of the Blood Crusade; instead, he would be its first victim, and his vitae would be the wine of its consecration.

But no, Stele told himself, better that he dies. While he lived, Rafen was random chance, a wild card among the inquisitor’s games of engineered plot and counterplot. It had been pure fluke that the Space Marine had been on Cybele when Garand sent the Word Bearers to attack it, but his presence had quickly grown from a minor diversion to the most serious nuisance. Rafen would never truly give his heart to his changed sibling – Stele had known that even when Arkio took his oath in the Ikari fortress’s chapel – and so he had to be destroyed.

Rafen would die at his brother’s own hand, and with that Arkio would be inexorably committed to a path from the Emperor’s light for all time. Once the blood of his closest kinsman spattered that golden armour, once it hissed into steam from the burning blade of the Holy Lance, Arkio would have severed the last connection that still made him human. Once Rafen perished, Arkio would move ever further toward the eightfold way with nothing to hold him back. He would murder his conscience along with his brother.

Stele sensed Mephiston’s attention upon him, and saw the Librarian from the corner of his sight, unwilling to meet his gaze directly. Perhaps the psyker sensed some measure of his thoughts, perhaps not. It mattered little, he would wait for the moment when the light died in Rafen’s eyes, and then let loose a call for carnage. With Ulan’s smothering mind-cloak to protect them, the loyalists would be upon the Lord of Death and his men in numbers so large that none of Dante’s Space Marines would survive.

And if not, there was still one more card Stele could deal, one more player he could deliver to the field.

Rafen brought the power sword to arms and held it at his chest, the blade pointing at the sky. He gave his brother a grim salute.

In return, Arkio’s eyes drew into narrow slits as he let the Spear of Telesto slide along his fingers to its full length. Sullen flickers of yellow-amber lightning crackled around the blade and the golden icon of Sanguinius carved in the hilt.

Both men stood for a moment; the battle balanced on a breath of silence as they watched for the sudden flood of muscle movement, the smallest telltale that would signify their opponent’s actions. Warrior-to-warrior battles like this were commonplace in the wars of the Imperium, where conflicts were often fought with champions on either side engaging in single combat. Like every Adeptus Astartes, Rafen and Arkio were trained to fight alone, as an army of one; in years past, as initiates, the siblings had sparred on many occasions. Then, they had known each other well enough to counter every attack, neutralise every defence – but time had altered both of them.

Rafen surrendered himself to the moment, allowing his mind and spirit to flow together, merging into a single engine of action and movement. Arkio watched him, impassive and unmoving, a gold statue among the colourless debris of the city square. Rafen’s focus narrowed until it was only his brother he saw before him, only the shape of a man. An enemy.

And suddenly he was in motion, a snarl ripping from his lips, fangs baring in fight rage. The power sword sizzled around him in a punishing arc of liquid silver. Arkio reacted, sweeping the spear down in a sharp gesture of defence, falling for Rafen’s feint. With his other arm, Rafen brought up the blunt, brutish ingot of his bolt pistol and followed through with a three-round burst of shell fire.

Arkio recovered with frightening speed and turned the glowing lance like a propeller, the humming shaft making a gleaming disc in the air. The bolt rounds whined and screamed as they were shredded by the flickering shield. Rafen extended through his initial attack and spun on his boot, slashing down with a low cut of the sword. The blade sliced through air as Arkio slid away over loose-packed dirt. In a blur, he turned the spear back at Rafen.

His brother spied the infinitesimal loss of balance off Arkio’s back foot and advanced, cutting a web of figure-eight lines toward him. The spear tip met the power sword and spat violently, bursts of fat, angry sparks hissing like fireworks as the weapons met and parted, met and parted, met again.

Arkio fell back step after step, unhurried and emotionless. The fan of light from the spinning lance was everywhere that Rafen’s sword blade fell, halting its savage attacks, blunting each stab and cut with a flashing parry. To the untrained eye, it seemed as if the figure in the golden armour was on the defensive, fighting off an endless salvo of strikes. Some of the Warriors of the Reborn made harsh catcalls until the loyalist Space Marines commanding them gave out violent censures. Arkio let Rafen spend the energy of his assault in a flurry of blows, at the same time using the minimum amount of effort to counter. He had expected better from his brother.

Rafen was no fool. If he extended the attack a second longer, Arkio would turn it on him and strike back. He lunged forward, an easy move calculated to look like the action of a fighter frustrated and desperate. Arkio took it at face value and blocked the strike, opening a window of opportunity along his left side for an eye-blink. The winged Space Marine was powerful, undoubtedly, but he lacked the experience of his older brother. Rafen would never have fallen for the feint – but Arkio did.

The bolt gun came from nowhere, suddenly there in front of Arkio’s face, the barrel still warm and hot with the stink of ozone discharge. Rafen’s finger tightened on the trigger.

Arkio reacted with preternatural speed. His folded wings exploded open in a flare of brilliant white and he shot into the air, flashing out of Rafen’s line of fire. The golden figure described a swift, graceful arc up and over his brother’s head, spinning and turning toward the ground seven metres distant. Rafen rotated in place, tracking Arkio with the gun. He fired a quartet of shots at the swooping shape, leading the target but missing with each bolt by the merest fraction.

The ground rumbled and rippled as Arkio touched down, the impact causing a shock wave in the centuries-old detritus around them. A grimace marred his perfect features as he whirled the spear to present the glowing teardrop blade to Rafen. Golden effulgence and sparkling particles gathered into a humming sphere of energy at the weapon’s tip. Unable to dodge, Rafen saw it coming and raised his hands, gun and sword crossed over his face like some desperate invocation of the Imperial aquila.

The jet of unearthly power detached from the Holy Lance and ripped across the distance between the two men, splitting open and turning into a dancing fence of yellow flame. As it engulfed Rafen, he felt his skin searing; he remembered the Word Bearers, their bodies reduced to ash in the depths of the Shenlong manufactory. For one heart-stopping moment, Rafen thought his world was at an end, but then the flames flicked away, leaving him injured but still alive. He pawed at his face, shaking off a fine layer of ash where his epidermis had been flash-burnt.

‘Sanguinius be praised,’ he heard Mephiston’s voice. ‘The Spear of Telesto knows the soul of his Sons! He turns his holy fire from Rafen!’

The Space Marine nodded to himself – of course, the weapon was gene-coded. It could only be used by men who carried the genetic template of the primogenitor within them, and it would not harm those who bore the same mark in their blood. Rafen saw a brief glint of annoyance in Arkio’s eyes – he would not be able to do away with him in such a showy display of power as he had the cursed Traitor Marines. It was fitting – the fight would be won or lost on martial prowess, not strength of arms. Snarling, Rafen threw himself at Arkio once more, leading into him with the hissing edge of the power sword’s blade.

Arkio bit back an angry curse, rebuking himself for forgetting the weapon’s gene-code failsafe. Instead, he dropped the haft of the spear into a two-handed grip, holding it like a quarterstaff. He blocked Rafen’s attack, the sword blade bouncing as it struck off the unbreakable shaft of the weapon. He forced Rafen off-balance and shoved him back, reversing the ploy his brother had used only moments earlier.

Broken drifts of ferrocrete fragments and stone shifted beneath Rafen’s feet and he dug in, refusing to let Arkio knock him back. Blade and spear came together, each weapon pressing back to the fighter’s breastplates, hot flashes of light flickering over them. The brothers were toe-to-toe, pushing into one another with all the force they could muster.

‘Yield, Rafen,’ snarled Arkio. ‘Yield to me and I will end it cleanly.’

‘I will not yield to corruption,’ he gasped. ‘Brother, there must be something of the man I knew still in you, some piece of your soul that still remains pure?’

‘I am purity itself.’ Arkio’s skin was taut across his face with anger, his fangs bared. ‘Ignorant fool, you oppose your very lord. I am the Deus Sanguinius–’

‘You are a dupe!’ Rafen bellowed, howling the words, ‘You’re nothing but a clockwork toy for that ordos whoreson. He did this, warped you into this mutant obscenity.’

Arkio’s threw back his head and roared. ‘Liar. Traitor. Coward.’ With a massive, vicious surge of motion, the winged Space Marine brought the spear about and slammed the blunt end into the centre of Rafen’s torso with a thunderclap of force.

The impact struck the Blood Angel like a cannon shell and Rafen was blown backwards off his feet. He flew through the air, releasing snap-fire shots from his bolter that went wild, deflecting off broken rock and keening away from indirect hits on Arkio’s armour. Rafen landed with a crash of rubble, sending a roil of brick dust up into the air. He struggled, his feet slipping below him.

Arkio became aware of his name on the wind, a heartbeat pulse of chanting from the Warriors of the Reborn as they sensed the end was near for his opponent. Blood as hot as molten iron engorged his body with murderous power, the unchained potential of the black rage unfolding to envelop him. Arkio let out a wordless scream of absolute and utter fury, throwing himself into the air on the great curves of his wings. The spear buzzed and hummed in his hands, twitching like a distressed mount, but he forced it to turn toward Rafen. The lance tried to face itself away from his target but in his ire Arkio would not allow it.

At the top of his arc of flight, Arkio spun about and raced back down into the arms of gravity, wings cupping the wind, diving like a hawk upon prey. The teardrop blade flashed in the dimness.

His bones still ringing with the impact, Rafen forced himself off the ground to confront the attack; the glittering gold shape blurred at him, the lance aimed at his heart. Rafen’s eyes met Arkio’s and the Space Marine leapt into the air to meet him early.

The instant stretched like melting tallow. Turning, spinning, the lance struck poorly and deflected off Rafen’s shoulder in a sizzle of sparks. The Space Marine moved, slipping under Arkio’s guard, the two of them passing in mid-air less than a hand-span apart. Rafen’s sword led the way, and the crackling power blade found brief purchase. The weapon cut a wound in Arkio’s wing, red blood exploding in a crimson blossom, stark white feathers raining about him like falling petals.

Both men landed hard, but only one bled. Rafen turned the sword so that he could see the fluid that kissed the blade. It was wine-dark and sluggish like tar, it was polluted.

‘First blood!’ shouted one of Mephiston’s men, but the cry was lost in snarls and roars of Arkio’s loyalists.

‘No…’ The word was small and plaintive, a childlike denial of something the eye saw but refused to believe. Sachiel’s hands came to his face and it was only then that he realised the voice had been his. A great splash of crimson disfigured Arkio’s immaculate golden wargear and the sight of this offence burned into the priest’s vision like a brand.

The sharp, tearing agony of the wound seemed to be instantly translated to every member of Arkio’s retinue – the sheer shock of seeing their liege lord injured by a mere Space Marine hit them with a physical force. For a long second all of them were stuck dumb by the enormity of it.

Sachiel could smell the blood. As a Sanguinary High Priest, the scent of living vitae was as distinct as the bouquet of a fine wine or the aroma of a delicate flower. Sachiel had known blood all through his service as an Apothecary to the Chapter, and he had tasted a thousand strains and touched a thousand more in his duties. On battlefields he had seen great lakes of it shed by enemy and ally alike, he had witnessed it gushing in red fountains from the arteries of men screaming for the Emperor’s peace. Sachiel knew the scent of his own blood, and that of Sanguinius himself as it lay captured and preserved in the Red Grail on Baal. The stench of what leaked from Arkio struck his senses like a mailed fist. He sensed corruption, black and ruinous, some foul seed of pollution swarming and writhing inside the Blessed’s veins.

Sachiel’s stomachs threatened to rebel and throw their contents on the ground. It was impossible. The priest scrambled inside himself for some explanation and found none – his senses had never betrayed him before and they did not betray him now. Sachiel turned away, blocking out the sight even though the smell was wrapped around him in invisible wreathes. His gaze fell on Stele; the inquisitor was growling some order at his hooded psy-witch. Stele caught his sight for a fractional instant and Sachiel saw him start.

‘You,’ Sachiel managed, the word bubbling up from a deep, hidden place. ‘You…’ Like glass breaking, the compulsions Stele had placed in Sachiel’s psyche aboard the Bellus suddenly shattered. Perhaps it was the shock of Arkio’s injury, perhaps some last fragment of Sachiel’s honourable self rising to the surface, but in that instant the priest was freed of the psyker’s hold on his will.

Sachiel’s world, so perfect and so rationalised, so carefully assembled to serve his ego, came crashing down about him. Floodgates of denied, forgotten memories disintegrated and the priest was knocked to his knees by the force of them, wailing. Every line he had crossed, every choice he had made in order to aggrandise himself, and Stele had been there to help him do it. Sachiel’s gorge rose as the stink of mutation filled every pore of his skin, contaminating him and choking the air. ‘Oh lord,’ he wept, bitter tears falling from his face. ‘What have I done?’ He looked up at Stele and saw the inquisitor staring down at him, an expression of utter contempt on his cruel lips. ‘What have you done to me?’

Stele knelt and whispered in his ear. ‘I gave you the tools to destroy yourself.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The rains came from the darkening sky, a whisper of falling droplets spattering across the grey landscape of the dead city-shrine. It hissed over the forms of the rag-tag warriors as they surged forward, rushing to Arkio’s flanks.

Amid their lines, the priest and the inquisitor faced each other. Sachiel’s tears were lost in the rush of the downpour, his fingers clenching clods of mud where he crouched on hands and knees. The chill, dirty rainwater washed over him and with it, it carried away the scales of willing blindness from the priest’s eyes. Sachiel’s perfidy was revealed to him with sudden, shattering clarity. No denials could assuage it, no words were strong enough to halt the tide of utter self-loathing that engulfed him. ‘I… am… corrupted…’ he breathed, damning himself with his own words.

Stele looked at him with complete disregard. Any familiarity or comradeship the inquisitor had shown to Sachiel now fell from his expression, and he understood that Stele had never, ever considered the priest as anything more than a tool. He was something to be used and discarded.

‘I had intended to retain you for a while longer,’ Stele’s voice was low and only Sachiel could hear it, ‘but it appears you have outlived your usefulness to me.’

The priest struggled to get to his feet, but his body felt like it weighed hundreds of tonnes. The burden of the sins he had committed were pressing him into the rubble. ‘Does Arkio know? I would never have followed you…’

Stele laughed. ‘How typical, priest. You think of your own reputation before the fate of your Chapter!’

‘You did this to me!’

‘You allowed me to. You secretly welcomed it, Sachiel, coveting the Red Grail, nurturing your resentments… You were ideal, your obsession with yourself blinding you to all the pacts you made!’ He let out a harsh laugh. ‘Fallen Angel, look how far you have tumbled from your perch.’ Hellish light glinted in Stele’s vision and the priest felt the sickening caress of his mind-touch. You were not the first, said the voice in his head, the hiss of snakeskin on bone, and you will not be the last.

The awful magnitude of the grand scheme of Chaos became clear in Sachiel’s mind, and it turned his hearts to ice. ‘No…’

‘Oh, yes,’ replied Stele, and through the open, bleeding wound self-inflicted on the priest’s psyche, he sent a quicksilver hammer of mind-force.

Sachiel’s scream merged into a howl of thunder and blood gushed from his nostrils, and wept in runnels from his eyes. Die! Stele ripped him apart within, breaking his mind like matchwood. Perish, Sachiel. I compel you, die for me.

The body in red and white ceramite collapsed in a puddle of thin pink fluids, death tearing away his last breath on the wind.

Stele masked his smile and fixed a disguise of righteous anger in its place. ‘Murderer,’ he bellowed, stabbing an accusing finger at Mephiston. ‘See, the Librarian has killed our brother Sachiel. He burnt the will from him with his witch-sight.’

The fierce mood of the mob army and the loyalist Space Marines took voice and weapons were turned on Mephiston and his Blood Angels. They were on the verge of an adrenaline-fuelled frenzy, and all it would take would be one word from Stele to tip them over the edge.

He gave it. ‘Attack. Destroy them all, in Arkio’s name!’

The rabble was a living, breathing entity, a war engine made from flesh and bone and ceramite and steel. It moved so fast that Rafen was caught off-guard, the figures in their red cloaks emblazoned with the spear and halo flooding around Arkio’s imperious form in a headlong rush. There were loyalist Space Marines in the mass as well, bolters spitting hot fire.

Mephiston’s men opened up into the Warriors of the Reborn, scything them down in gouts of crimson. Gunfire and screams merged into a symphony of destruction, raised high to the rattling fall of the rain. Rafen swung and parried with his sword as the mob reached him, cutting him off from his target. He lost sight of Arkio as the golden figure leapt into the sky and cut back toward the edge of the square, then he was fighting hard, his attention on the myriad adversaries upon him. His bolter pistol ran dry and he used it like a club, too far into the thick of the melee to spare the time to reload it. The power sword rose and fell, cutting a path through chattering men who died with the name of his sibling on their lips.

For the first time in what seemed like an age, Rafen felt the familiar tingle of battle lust inside him, the shadow of the black rage. He culled the zealots, losing count of the dead, but Arkio’s thousand still had the weight of numbers on their side. Nearby, he caught the crackling hum of a force weapon. Blue lightning licked at the low clouds as the Lord of Death joined the fray.

All about him combat seethed and boiled, yet Stele stayed untouched, his lexmechanic whimpering in a cowering heap at Ulan’s feet while the mutant psyker draped her nullifying power about them. The inquisitor examined the chalice in his hand; he had ripped it from Sachiel’s belt as the light faded from the priest’s eyes, flinging away the velvet bag to reveal the replica of the sacred Blood Angels artefact. He smiled. This simple trinket was the seed of Sachiel’s undoing. The Apothecary had always dreamed of becoming the Keeper of the Red Grail, ascending to the highest office in the sanguinary clergy. He had nurtured bitterness toward Corbulo, the battle-brother that held the posting on Baal, and that had been Stele’s gateway into manipulating him. With a shrug, he tossed the copper cup away. It was worthless litter now, with as little value to the inquisitor as Sachiel’s cooling corpse. He nudged the dead priest with his boot-tip. Stele was glad to be rid of the self-important dullard, one less loose end to dispose of.

Ulan grunted in pain. ‘Uh… difficult…’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘Mephiston’s sight… stronger…’ A line of purplish blood ran from her nostrils.

Stele made a dismissive gesture. ‘In a moment. Where is Arkio?’

‘Conflicted…’ Ulan managed, nerves in her face jerking. ‘He seeks… reassurance…’

‘We cannot lose the momentum of the attack,’ he growled. Already, things had deviated from Stele’s carefully engineered plans with the sudden revelation of Rafen and Arkio’s wound through a foolish moment of inattention. ‘Attend me,’ he demanded.

The thin, pale girl stumbled toward him, the lexmechanic mumbling fearfully in dozens of different tongues. ‘Lord…’ she said thickly. ‘I… am at my limits…’

‘Yes, yes,’ he retorted, ignoring the agony that radiated off her aura. ‘Here.’ He grasped her face and let his fingers find the ghost-metal contacts under the polyflesh scabs on her skin. Ulan tensed as Stele corralled and used her haphazard power to augment his own warp-sight. At once he detected the hidden clusters of wild minds on the edges of his sensorium, visible only to him because he knew where to seek them. ‘Garand,’ he intoned, his voice slicing through the warp. ‘It is time.’ Stele released the woman with a jerk and her head lolled backward. Ulan’s blind eyes showed only the bloodshot whites.

The inquisitor turned in place as he heard the first screams of rocket motors. From concealed hides scattered throughout the ruins, spat from beneath rubble and the protective sheathes of camo-cloaks, salvos of missiles looped in over the edges of the debris-choked square and fell on rods of orange smoke.

Every Blood Angel knew the sound, and they took cover – but the pressing knots of Arkio’s zealots made rapid movement impossible. The warheads streaked into the square and struck a dozen points at once, throwing up red-black fireballs. Three of Mephiston’s Thunderhawks were instantly crippled or destroyed, and a handful of men were blown apart when the rockets fell short and landed in the melee.

The Lord of Death raised his free hand to shield his eyes from the glare. Hot flame crackled as the rain sizzled into steam, the sudden glow underlighting the grey clouds. ‘And so they spring their trap at last. I wondered how long we would have to wait.’

‘Indirect fire from the south, west and east quadrants!’ the Techmarine reported, fending off a zealot with a punch from his servo-arm. ‘Weapon signature does not match Blood Angel munitions.’

‘Of course,’ Mephiston snapped, bringing up the sword Vitarus. ‘And what new player has joined this sorry performance?’

The veteran sergeant nodded to the west as he slammed a fresh clip of ammunition into his bolter. ‘I can smell them from here, lord. Horned braggarts by the cartload.’

Mephiston saw figures dropping from the upper tiers of ruined buildings or emerging from concealed trapdoors over rubble-filled basements. They wore armour in a stringent shade of ruby, bedecked with chains and smoking lanterns. Horns sprouted in riots from their helms and heads, and as they came on their voices were raised in blasphemous hymns. ‘Word Bearers. The design of this infamy becomes clearer…’

‘But the scouts,’ said the Techmarine. ‘The scouts reported no contacts.’

The Librarian threw the sergeant a grave look, and a grim understanding passed between them. ‘Our scouts are all dead,’ said the veteran.

From the instant he had spoken of traps and double-crosses to Commander Dante in the monastery’s arboretum, Mephiston knew this moment would come; yet as it happened, his ire was not lessened. A guttural snarl bared his canines. ‘Blood Angels!’ he shouted. ‘To arms!’

Vitarus sang high and drank deep from the enemy about the psyker.

‘Confirmed,’ droned the servitor. ‘Multiple discharges on the planetary surface, evidence of small-arms fire and medium-yield tactical detonations. Vox traffic intercepts concur.’

Captain Ideon released a slow, metallic growl from his mechanical throat. ‘More betrayal,’ he snarled. ‘Great Arkio was right to suspect the Lord of Death. He has eschewed the hand of peace in favour of attack.’ Ideon made a grunt that was his immobile form’s equivalent of a nod. ‘So be it, then.’

Solus frowned. ‘We cannot be sure who fired the first shot. It may have been a mistake...’ The words seemed weak as they fell from his lips.

‘Mistake?’ Ideon rattled, his synthetic voice buzzing like hornets in a tin can. ‘Mephiston does not make mistakes, Solus. This is a declaration of war!’ The captain’s stoic face twitched and the mechadendrites protruding from his skull whispered against one another. ‘Prepare to engage the Europae.’

‘Europae is turning,’ called the sense-servitor, ‘adopting battle stance. Detection transients indicate multiple weapon bay activations.’

‘You see?’ Ideon husked.

Solus found his words dying in his throat and he turned away. At the same moment, his eyes fell on the hololithic chart in the tacticarium. Warning glyphs were streaming through the ghostly green light. ‘There’s someone else out there,’ he said aloud.

Sabien’s debris ring was a mixture of broken stones as tall as mountains and great drifting lakes of frozen ice. Dense with heavy ores, to the eyes of a starship’s machine-spirit the belt of asteroids was a confused swathe of garbled, reflected sensor returns. On the surface it seemed like the ideal place to hide a vessel, but no captain would ever have been so foolhardy to attempt such a thing. The blanket of confusion that seeded the ring also made navigation inside its confines virtually impossible. Both the Bellus and the Europae saw the belt as a natural hazard, just another element of the orbital environment. Neither vessel expected the chilling sight of a starship emerging from the shaggy morass of tumbling stones.

Under power from a hard thruster burn, the Desolator-class battleship extended out of the Sabien Belt like a red blade punched through a torso. The jagged prow dipped like the snout of a hunting predator, moving inexorably to bear on the Europae. Asteroids battered into the craft as it moved from the debris ring, punching rents in the hull; the captain of the vessel was willing to allow men on his outer decks to die so that the ship could complete its manoeuvre, weathering the damage. The crewmen aboard Mephiston’s flagship sounded alerts and charged their torpedo tubes, gangs of Chapter serfs hoisting warheads as big as watchtowers into the open maws of launchers. The monstrous Chaos craft continued to turn, the target scanners of the bow guns briefly crossing the shape of the Bellus. Not one of the weapons released its warshot toward Arkio’s battle barge; the battleship crew had their orders, on pain of lengthy and horrific torture, to concentrate all their initial attack on the Europae.

Solus saw the lance batteries wink at him like blinded eyes as the ship turned onward, coming to bear on Mephiston’s vessel. ‘They… they did not fire on us…’ he breathed, hardly able to believe what he had seen.

‘Aggressor identity confirmed,’ the mechanical chatter of the servitor in the detection pit clattered forth. ‘Vessel is the battlecruiser Misericorde, line warcraft in service to the Word Bearers Legion and the Ruinous Powers.’

‘Vandire’s oath!’ spat Solus. ‘What is this madness?’ The Blood Angel’s mind raced through the possibilities – could the Chaos ship be some sort of ally to the Lord of Death? Dare he believe that Mephiston, or even Dante himself was consorting with the scum of the Maelstrom?

‘Status of Misericorde,’ Ideon demanded. ‘Are we their target?’

‘Negative,’ came the reply. ‘All guns on the ship are coming to bear on the Europae.’

‘A third force?’

There was a smile in Ideon’s artificial voice as his eyes flicked at Solus. ‘An unexpected piece of good fortune! The hand of Sanguinius protects us…’

‘But we cannot simply ignore a Chaos capital ship!’ Solus blurted out. ‘It is our duty to–’

‘You dare speak to me of duty?’ Ideon snapped, his voice cracking about the bridge cloisters like thunder. ‘I, who have served our Chapter for two hundred years from this very throne?’ The captain’s words dropped to a low rumble. ‘Know this, my errant battle-brother, when fate’s tarot deals a hand of swords, use them. You know the oath we take.’

Solus repeated the litany by automatic rote. ‘To the ship, the Chapter, the primarch and the Emperor.’

‘Yes, and while the Misericorde is the enemy of the Emperor, the Europae is the enemy of our primarch and our Chapter. Mephiston’s extermination takes precedence.’ In response to a mental command, pict-screens at Solus’s station flickered to display long range images of the fighting on Sabien. ‘You only have to view the battle unfolding below us to know the truth of that.’

‘Misericorde is firing,’ said the sense-servitor. ‘Europae’s void shields are holding.’

‘Let’s show those corrupted fools how it is done, eh?’ said Ideon. ‘The order is, target the Europae and fire.’

Solus hesitated.

‘Did you not understand the command, Solus?’ There was a razor-keen warning in the captain’s manner.

‘Open fire,’ said Solus, in a dead, toneless voice.

The square was a cauldron of inferno as figures in shades of red clashed across the rubble and the stones. Arkio’s thousand-strong helot army in their terracotta robes and the loyalist Space Marines who fought with them clashed with Mephiston’s Blood Angels, and they drew fire and laid weapons to bear upon the Word Bearers swarming into the broken arena. There was no plan of battle here, no careful tactics to rout and defeat the enemy – instead each side engaged in the grisly attrition of hand-to-hand fighting. The square became a mass of fire and screams as men and traitors came together to kill or be killed.

In the thick of it, Rafen was a whirlwind of destruction, the power sword running hot in his hand as he tore apart zealots and ripped open Chaos Space Marines. In equal measure the dark glamour of the battle repelled and excited him, the burning flood of adrenaline coming upon him like some ghostly caress. The raging fight was already spilling over the cracked and fallen walls of the plaza, into the surrounding streets. Some of Mephiston’s men – veteran assault troops with their characteristic helmets of sunburst yellow – bobbed up on jump packs. They carried plasma weapons and heavy flamers, seeking out the missile shooters still hiding in the ruins and dousing them in liquid fire. On the winds came the smell of cooked meat and the bone-snap of superheated ceramite.

Daggers and work implements turned into clubs rang noisily against Rafen’s power armour as a cluster of Arkio’s warriors tried to surround him and beat the Space Marine to the ground. Rafen let out a cruel laugh at their idiocy; he pitied these fools, willingly blinded by the dogma spouted by Sachiel. In quick and economical moves, he used every part of the sword to dispatch them, breaking skulls with the flat of the blade and the pommel, cleaving torsos with the keen edge, smashing ribcages with the spiked guard about his fingers. If these imbeciles wanted to die in the name of their false messiah, then Rafen would be more than willing to accommodate them.

The fight ebbed and flowed, moving like an ocean swell. Figures were caught up in the morass, the press of flesh and steel sending Rafen staggering. Somewhere along the line he had lost his helmet. Several times he was forced to halt and seek his direction, and more than once he barely pulled a killing blow before a Space Marine from Mephiston’s contingent. Rafen had already ensured that he would not suffer a similar error by burning off the spear and halo design on his shoulder pad with a discarded hand flamer. The dirty black scar on the side of his wargear paradoxically made him feel cleaner, as if the kiss of the burning promethium had purged the taint of Stele and his corruption.

Rafen’s boot rang against a hollow shape and it caught his attention. There at his feet, where the spilled blood and grey rain had turned drifts of dry brick dust into tar-like slurry, a body in white and red ceramite had been abandoned. The corpse was pressed into the mud, twisted and broken by a stampede of helots, but Rafen knew it instantly.

‘Sachiel…’ While the fight had drifted back and forth, the dead priest had remained where he fell, the spotless and immaculate armour he once wore now ruined with bloody footprints and smeared with gore. The Apothecary’s eyes were open, blankly staring up into the hissing torrents of rain. Rafen had never had anything other than antipathy for his arrogant rival, but now as he looked upon the expression of horror and despondency frozen on the dead man’s face, he felt only pity for the priest. However unwittingly, Sachiel had placed his own quest for glory beyond his loyalty to the Chapter, and here in the dark mire he lay fully paid for that mendacity.

Rafen smacked away another attacker with the butt of his bolter and took a moment to reload. He glanced around as he did, finding his bearings by the actinic glow of blue mind-fire that blazed about the Lord of Death. Steam wreathed the Librarian in white streams where the rainwater flashed to vapour around him. As Rafen watched, the ethereal lightning that haloed Mephiston congealed around the upright spars of his psychic hood, coiling into rods of energy that seared his eyes to look at. Twin horned skulls at the tips of the ghost-metal psy-wave conductors flashed with barely controlled power, and the Librarian swelled beneath his blood red armour, drawing the lethal potential into himself.

Colours and shades that had no place on the plane of the living came into being, the air itself shimmering and bending like a phantom lens. Rafen saw Mephiston’s target – a squad of Word Bearers Havoc Space Marines, bristling with heavy weapons. The Lord of Death turned his face to them and his eyes flashed. On the battlefield, Rafen had seen other Blood Angels psykers use the skill they called the Quickening, a blanket of power that could turn the user into a tornado of destruction, but Mephiston was the master of another psionic force, one that dwarfed the talents of the Librarians and codicers who served beneath him. The power of the Smite was unleashed, a blaze of insane geometry cut from liquid light fanning out into a teardrop of pure and undiluted annihilation. The witch-fire engulfed the Havocs and set them alight; ammunition packs detonated and armour split. Rafen instinctively joined in on the great cheer of approval that came from Mephiston’s Blood Angels.

He waded forward to meet the psyker commander, saluting with the power sword as the Chief Librarian caught sight of him. ‘My lord!’

‘Rafen,’ Mephiston growled, ‘You live still, yet so does your errant sibling.’

‘The zealots cut me off from him before I could–’ Rafen began, but the rest of his words were drowned out by a roar from Arkio’s ragged warriors. The slave army, driven on by some shouted command from the back of their lines, rushed forward. Rafen thought he heard Stele’s voice on the wind, but then his attention was on the men tearing at him. At point-blank range he unleashed the bolt pistol, popping heads like overripe fruits, punching holes as big as his mailed fist in cloaked bodies. ‘They fight like they are possessed!’ he grated, the press of the charge forcing him to Mephiston’s flank.

‘Indeed,’ replied the Librarian, his force weapon slashing a wide arc of blood and entrails. ‘They rally to their “Blessed One”.’

Rafen ran through a Word Bearer as it emerged from the pack, taking him from jowl to bowel, emptying a nest of blackened, stinking organs on the dirt. ‘Lord, my task lies undone. Give me permission to disengage and seek out my brother.’

Mephiston eyed him. ‘You wounded him and he fled. What kind of messiah is that?’

‘He will return, my lord. I know the conflict inside him, but if I do not strike now, Arkio will return and lay waste to this place. I must find him, while his guard is down!’

‘You understand what will occur if you fail, Rafen?’ The Librarian’s voice was low and hard. ‘Even as we speak, my battle barge is engaged in a fight for its survival in orbit. I have left orders with the brother-captain commanding her that if Arkio’s loyalists tip the balance, then Sabien is to be targeted with cyclonic torpedoes. Better this shrine world become ashes then this schism be allowed to spread further.’

‘I can stop him,’ Rafen insisted. ‘It is what I came here to do.’

Mephiston gave him a nod. ‘So be it, then.’ He turned aside and called out. ‘Techmarine. Bring Brother Rafen a jump pack, quickly.’

‘A jump pack, lord?’

‘Arkio has wings. We must give you wings of your own, lad.’

‘Stele! What abortion have you created now?’

The inquisitor whirled, Ulan clinging to his arm, as a knot of Word Bearers punched their way through the helot lines, with Garand at their head. A loyalist Space Marine foolishly turned his gun on the Warmaster, stepping forward to protect Stele and his retinue from the threat. Garand angrily spat acidic venom and decapitated the Blood Angel with a single sweep of his bane-axe.

‘Lord Garand,’ Stele said, deciding not to bow. ‘Welcome.’

‘My patience with this ridiculous scheme of yours is at an end, human.’ Garand menaced him with the humming axe. ‘You know the bargain! Bring these mewling Blood Whelps to the Banner of Change or forfeit your life.’

‘Don’t push me, Word Bearer,’ Stele shouted, emboldened by the heat of the battle raging around them. ‘My orders come from Malfallax, not you! It will be done, but by my design, not yours.’

‘Your design!’ Garand spat again. ‘Pathetic weakling, with your schemes and your little performances, none of that matters now. In Lorgar’s name, the battle is joined. These men-prey will stand with the eight or they will perish.’

‘No!’ Stele roared, and Garand blinked in surprise at the vehemence of the human’s denial. ‘I have come too far, paid too much for this moment. It is mine, and you will not usurp it, creature.’

‘You dare.’ Garand’s eyes narrowed and he marshalled his psyker potency to chastise the ranting inquisitor – but there was a null void surrounding him, a thick weave of poisonous non-space issuing from the mind of the female trailing at the inquisitor’s heels. ‘Bah,’ snorted the Warmaster, recoiling. ‘Have your petty game, then.’ The Word Bearers lord brandished his axe and called to his men. ‘Pick your targets and cull the Blood Angels. Collateral kills…’ and he smiled, ‘…at your discretion.’

Out of Stele’s earshot, a tech-priest slunk forward from Garand’s unit to bow at the Warmaster’s feet. ‘Great Witch Prince, a vox from the Misericorde. They have engaged Mephiston’s warship, but the presence of the Bellus vexes the ship’s machine-spirit. The crew is discontent to let a second Astartes craft go unpunished. What should I tell them?’

‘Tell them…’ A slow and hateful smile crossed Garand’s pallid lips and he glanced at Stele. He would castigate the conceited braggart for daring to raise his voice to him. ‘Tell them the Bellus is to be considered expendable.’

The battle in the skies of Sabien changed from a delicate joust to a brutal, punishing fight as the three ships closed the distance between one another. In terms of tonnage the combatants were evenly matched: the Bellus and the Europae were sister ships, their keels laid down in the midst of the Heresy era, both of them cut from steel forged in the furnaces of Enigma VI, both created according to the sacred tenets of a standard template construct programme from the Mechanicus librariums on Mars. Misericorde was longer in the beam but slender where the battle barges were blunt axe-heads in form. Once, the battleship had been a human vessel, but that identity had long been subsumed beneath centuries of creeping mutation, the old self lost and forgotten in the warp. Garand’s vessel bristled with hateful power. It was predator-fast compared with the slow, heavy hunters of the barges, but speed and firepower cancelled each other out. Had any two of the ships faced off, the battle’s end would not have been easy to predict – but in a three-way engagement, all bets were off.

Misericorde powered forward, the screaming mouths of its drive bells vomiting flame. Lance fire connected the ship with Europae, green and red threads of coherent particles stringing between them, then gone. Spherical explosions opened like puffballs into the vacuum, spilling iced gases and spent men into the dark. As the Chaos and Blood Angels ships crossed the distance toward one another, Ideon brought Arkio’s flagship up in Misericorde’s shadow, allowing the powerful bow guns to rip past the ruby-coloured cruiser and strike Europae’s glittering void shields. The barge’s ephemeral energy screens flickered and deformed under the onslaught, shedding the might of her attackers like rain, but already the enigmatic field generators in the barge’s heart were reacting to the pressure, sending waves of sympathetic panic into the tech-priests that ministered to them. Europae was strong, to be sure, but she would not resist so barbaric an assault for long.

In the depths of space, such fights took place at ranges that would swallow a star system, ships hitting ships beyond each other’s visual ranges. The close-in fighting of near-orbit engagements was an entirely different game. If one was a fencing match, full of elegant moves and pinpoint strikes, then the other was a dirty street brawl, punches being traded with ferocity and killer intent. Europae leapt forward without warning, a plume of fusion fire nova-bright and blinding erupting from her stern. She veered to port in a savage turn that stressed the hull beyond its tolerances, popping out thousands of ancient, giant rivets. The brutal manoeuvre bled speed and gravity away, pushing Europae on to a different tack and ending the lives of dozens of luckless crew caught in the wrong sections of the hull spaces.

The turn came out of nowhere and it was near suicidal. Ideon’s surprise was enough that he hesitated a second too long as Mephiston’s ship presented itself in passing. By the time the command to fire the bow guns had been relayed, Bellus was carving at empty air like an addled punch-drunk. Europae’s crew was prepared, however.

Secondary batteries, laser cannons with great quartz lenses broad as the eye of a kraken, spat a killing glare over Bellus’s starboard flank. The battle barge moaned under the impact, and Ideon felt the screech as the machine-spirit’s pain analogue ripped into him. The simple, animal mind of Bellus hissed and spat; it lacked the intellect to understand why another Blood Angels ship would attack it.

Europae extended her turn, coming about on a course that would allow the ship to enter Bellus’s rearward arc. Even with the acres of armour and double-projected void shielding that protected it, a captain would be courting suicide to allow an attacking vessel the freedom to throw shells and las-fire into his drive nozzles. Ideon spat curses and bellowed out orders, his hands twitching into angry claws in a rare moment of physical reaction. The two barges turned into one another, matching speed for speed as they became caught in a deadly waltz. They continued to trade fire as Misericorde came about, sighting the bores of her lethal hellguns over Bellus. A human captain might have waited; a human captain might have evaluated the consequences and held his fire until Europae became the clearer target. But, like his ship, Misericorde’s captain had long forgotten his human origins and any form of fealty to weak abstracts like fidelity or compassion.

The red dagger freed its weapons to do their worst, and Misericorde’s starboard armaments blazed in one cascade of hot murder. Many of the shots found their true target, striking vitals all across Europae’s hull, but just as many punctured Bellus, firing through the loyalist ship as if it were some cursory piece of cover to be disintegrated.

Ideon’s primary heart stammered with shock as laser fire tore turrets and minarets from the deck of Bellus. His head jerked on old, unused muscles in his neck, the tiny motion the first he had made with it in decades. The captain made eye-contact with Solus and saw the mute accusation in his second’s gaze, then a plasma conduit burst behind him and Ideon watched Solus become a shrieking human torch.

‘Return fire,’ he roared above the din, the shout running into distorted crackle through his implanted voxcoder.

‘Which target?’ asked the gun-servitor, the dull voice at odds with the violent emotions of the battle.

‘All of them,’ Ideon demanded, and Bellus fired every gun at once, growing spines of laser light and missile fire.

Rafen’s skill with the jump pack was hardly a match for the trained battle-brothers of the assault squads, but it was enough to guide him over the dense heart of the fighting, skipping him off the ground in steep, loping arcs of orange flame. He twisted nimbly in mid-air, avoiding the bright streaks of missiles and red bolts of laser fire. At the zenith of a leap from a broken battlement, his sight captured a glint of shining gold and brilliant white.

He skipped off the ground, sparing a moment to shoot dead a helot soldier, then powered back into the air. He spun and turned, became a guided missile himself. Rafen let the thruster pack spew flame and aim him at the cored remains of a cathedral. Only the stone walls remained, the places where great arcs of stained glass once stood now open, wailing mouths. The roof was gone, swept away by some long-faded detonation shock wave, and the endless rush of the rain cascaded over broken teeth of stone. Statues headless, bisected and shattered lined the aisles and transepts. In places, the mosaic floor had collapsed into the crypts below.

Rafen landed in a hiss of sparks from his boots and there, half-cloaked in the shadows of a huge granite altar, he saw a white spread of wings.

‘Arkio.’ His voice carried the length of the ruined hall. ‘This must end now.’

With deliberation, his brother turned to face him, the golden armour emerging from the darkness. Where he had been wounded, a creeping purple-black bloodstain flowed like living oil across his torso. There were tiny pearls of dark matter disfiguring Arkio’s face and neck. ‘Yes,’ he intoned. ‘It must.’

And suddenly the dark was banished by a violent surge of yellow lightning as the Spear of Telesto shook into life.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Bile rose in Rafen’s throat as he laid eyes on his brother. The alabaster skin of his face, the noble patrician lines were distorted in subtle and cruel ways. ‘What have you become?’ he asked his sibling.

Arkio eyed him coldly. ‘Your better, Rafen. The superior to all living things.’ The rain spattered around him as he walked out of the shadows and across the church’s ruined nave. ‘I have banished all doubts.’ He threw a cursory gesture at the altar behind him.

Sheet lightning flashed and illuminated the transept. Rafen gasped as he saw the remains of a statue of the Emperor, beheaded by a single stroke of the Holy Lance. ‘Does your blasphemy know no bounds?’ he said, shaking with anger, ‘It is not enough that you go against your kin and your Chapter, but now you turn your back on the God-Emperor himself?’

Arkio made a lazy gesture with the humming spear. ‘What need have I for gods when I am one myself?’

‘You are deluded.’ Rafen stabbed a finger at Arkio’s side, where the sword cut he had inflicted still festered. ‘If you are a god, then why do you bleed like a man? Or perhaps, not a man… Perhaps a warp-touched thing, a pawn of Chaos.’

Arkio threw back his head and laughed. The bitter humour echoed off the broken walls. ‘Chaos?’ He threw the word aside. ‘A childish label for something you could never understand.’

‘I understand enough,’ Rafen shouted back at him. ‘My brother, my blood kinsman has been poisoned by the warp. Stele led you to this.’ He brandished his sword. ‘Recant, Arkio. While there is still time.’

The golden figure spread his arms wide and the wings on his back flowed open in a rush of wind. ‘This is not heresy, and I will not recant,’ he snarled. ‘My eyes are open, brother. I know it all now… Men and monsters, order and Chaos…’ He pointed the spear at the sky. ‘Just words. There is no right and wrong, no black and white. Only the strong… and the weak.’

‘And what am I?’

Arkio ignored him. ‘I will not bend my knee to the Golden Throne or the Dark Gods. I pay fealty to no one!’ He cocked his head, the metallic sun-shaped halo behind his head glittering in the spear’s glow. ‘This galaxy will fall to me… I will be the master.’

‘It will not,’ Rafen grated. His fingers tightened around the hilt of his sword.

Arkio’s eyes flashed. ‘Then I will burn it to ashes, blind every star, cull every life that defies me.’

There was no hesitation in his brother’s face, not an iota of doubt within him. The ironclad certainty of Arkio’s words took Rafen’s breath away. ‘You are mad.’

‘Am I?’ He drew the words out into a sigh. ‘We’ll see.’

Red flame exploded from Rafen’s jump pack, blasting him forward, fire licking at the walls of the shattered chancel. Arkio moved so fast he faded into a yellow-white blur, both of them closing the distance down the aisle in heartbeats.

They collided with such force that the impact blew down an ornate colonnade, both of them spinning away from the point of impact on headlong trajectories. Arkio’s wings unfurled and he skipped off a broken column, thundering back at Rafen. His brother clipped a wall, and used a hissing jet of thrust to mimic his opponent’s manoeuvre. They met again in mid-air over the nave and flashed past each other, blades glittering.

Rafen let out a roar of pain as the hot apex of the lance ran a slice through his thigh, drawing a fan of blood. Arkio wobbled and broke through an obelisk as Rafen’s power sword severed the linkage cables on his right shoulder pad, but missed his flesh. The gold hemisphere of metal and ceramite armour spun away and clattered into the shadows. Thin processor fluids leaked down his arm and the cut plastiform musculature twitched.

Rafen landed hard and opened fire with his bolt pistol, thumbing the selector to full automatic fire. Shells crashed from the muzzle of the gun, shedding spent casings in a fountain of gleaming brass. The hot casings clattered to the stone floor, buzzing as they struck the gathering puddles of rainwater. Arkio swooped and looped between the remnants of columns and arcing roof supports, Rafen’s shots chewing chunks of ancient masonry from the frame of the church. He bracketed his brother with a hail of bullets, a few lucky rounds kissing his armour and keening away in orange gouts of sparks.

Arkio closed the distance, swinging the spear in a figure of eight that left bright after-images on Rafen’s retina. The Blood Angel deftly changed tack, dropping back the pistol to present the power sword. He stood his ground as Arkio dove down at him, waiting for the moment of change when the winged figure would telegraph his attack.

Arkio’s face opened in a snarl and he rode the lance like a jousting knight, aiming it directly at the centre of his brother’s torso. Rafen bit back a grim sneer and faded into the move, turning, spinning, clashing the sword’s bright blade against the adamantium tip of the spear. The blow pushed him back, striking grit and sparks from the stones under his feet, darts of bright light blazing where blade kissed blade. Arkio followed through on the strike with a reversal, sweeping the blunt end of the spear around to catch his legs and trip him. Rafen squeezed the thruster pack control in the palm of his glove for a fraction of a second and let a spurt of flame throw him clear. He flipped in a somersault and landed on a ledge, presenting the bolt pistol again. Rafen emptied the rest of the ammunition clip toward his brother, and Arkio skipped to the side, dodging between the low bulks of burial crypts and monuments.

The golden figure let out braying, harsh laughter as the rounds harmlessly spent themselves on stonework and pavement. Arkio turned on his heel and thrust the Holy Lance at Rafen, willing the weapon to release the powerful energies humming inside it. For the briefest second, the spear seemed to obey him, glowing brightly as a ball of honeyed lightning gathered at the end of the teardrop blade. Rafen sprang from his ledge, skipping off a fallen granite eagle to another naked support beam. Arkio followed him and goaded his weapon to unleash its killing force, but once more the Spear of Telesto shifted in his grip, rolling about its length. It jerked through his fingers as if it were trying to escape him.

‘No!’ Arkio spat, and in his anger he swung the errant weapon around him in an arc of light, slashing through two support columns and a broken statue. The spear moaned and shuddered. ‘You cannot deny me,’ Arkio thundered. ‘I am your master!’ Thick, poisoned spittle flew from his lips in his fury, and his regal face contorted. Scars emerged from his cheeks and forehead, weeping thick oil, bringing with them the hard pearls of black mutation. Arkio seemed unaware of them as they wriggled and moved beneath the surface of his skin, shifting like burrowing beetles.

His instant of rage brought distraction with it, and Rafen exploited the error to the fullest. Slamming home a fresh sickle magazine of bolt-rounds, Arkio’s brother threw himself off the stone stanchion and dropped, unloading the gun in a roaring blaze of gunfire. The reports of the bolt-shells came so close together they merged into a ripping snarl of noise. Arkio brought up the spear to deflect them a heartbeat too late, and the discharge struck him in the chest. The white-hot impacts staggered him backward in jerks of motion, the thick bolts ripping long shreds of golden armour from him. Ceramite fragmented and plasteel broke away, crazing the coating of precious yellow metal.

Arkio reacted with a growling shout of annoyance and shook himself, discarding bits of spent armour clinging to his arms and his chest. Through holes cored in the plates, dusky liquids bubbled and flowed. The mark of Stele’s taint was no longer concealed within the prison of his flesh. Released by the wanton hate that churned in Arkio’s mind, the changed aspect of the Space Marine was revealed.

Rafen felt physically sick at the sight of his brother. The foetor of him strangled the Blood Angel’s senses, and the revelation of a body irredeemably tainted by Chaos was an affront to everything he stood for. Rafen willed himself to forget that some last piece of his blood brother’s soul might still survive behind that warped face, and attacked again.

Arkio was ready for him. The winged figure spun the lance and met Rafen’s sword with a thunderous strike, shattering the blade of the power weapon. Rafen snarled as he felt his wrist dislocate in the impact. The shock threw him back against a fragmented piece of stained glass as Arkio reared up before him.

The flash of lightning reflected Arkio’s twisted face in the age-worn glass. ‘Look at yourself!’ Rafen shouted. ‘Look at what you have become!’

Arkio swung the spear and shattered the glass forever. ‘Fool.’ he bellowed. ‘I know what I am! I AM SANGUINIUS!’

Rafen tried to dodge the blow he knew was coming, but it hit him like a falling meteor. One cut slashed across his chest, striking his armour; the second came from the blunt pommel and it sent him crashing to the ground. The Blood Angel struck the mosaic floor with a crash of sound and the stonework gave way beneath him.

He tumbled into a black void and landed hard, the breath singing out of his lungs. Air wheezed through his chest accompanied by rips of pain and his vision fogged. Is this death, he wondered, at last? His fingers traced the shapes of something familiar, and in the dimness he glimpsed the forms of skeletons. Hundreds of them – but not human ones. These were larger, stockier. With a start he understood: Arkio’s blow had thrown him into a crypt for Sabien’s war dead, where the Blood Angels who died defending the planet had been interred. About the walls of the sepulchre were stone carvings of Space Marines. In the shadows they towered over him like a granite honour guard, mute and strong.

Rafen scrambled to his feet, ignoring the pain. All about him were his brethren, dead for centuries in this desolate, lonely place. A single thought burned in his brain: I will not join them! The fury of it raced through him, igniting an inferno in his veins. The broken sword dropped from his fingers and he clenched his fist, feeling hot anger pour into him. From the edges of his vision came something bright and powerful, a glow of infinite perfection. For one moment, he thought Arkio had followed him into the crypt, but the light of it outshone even his brother in his most omnipotent moment. Rafen looked up and saw the true face of his liege lord filling the air before him, the gene-kindred in his blood manifesting itself to him. The vision overwhelmed him, blocking out all pain, all hesitation. Sanguinius!

A rage so pure it burnt white-hot swelled in Rafen’s heart, and the red thirst overtook him.

A fresh wave of hooting, horned monstrosities joined the mad throng of the ground battle, blades and guns shouting in the clash. The square was a seething ocean of red shades, crimson fighting against ruby, incarnadine versus scarlet, moving and shifting in bloody tides. Mephiston and his troops ranged in a tight crescent about the remains of their Thunderhawks, pressing forward their attacks with grim determination and cold, cold rage. They faced the wild zealots of Arkio’s slave army, and although the Shenlongi helots carried weapons that were mere toys in comparison to the arms of the Adeptus Astartes, the sheer weight of their numbers and the mad passion of their fervour were staggering. The warriors would not surrender or retreat. Only attrition would thin their thousand-strong horde into defeat.

The adherents of Arkio’s church stood by Space Marines loyal to the Reborn Angel, but in this small number of red-armoured men the seeds of doubt and misgiving grew large. Many of them found themselves hesitant to fire on their own kind, and they became lost in the sea of conflict. Worse still, the men who had bent their knee to take Arkio’s oath were shocked by the arrival of a new force of allies upon the battlefield, ruby-coloured figures who seemed to be fighting not against them, but with them. Word Bearers.

Delos saw the dark shapes of the Chaos Space Marines and felt his gut churn with revulsion. The optics of his death’s-head helmet streamed with rainwater and spatters of mud as he fought to clear them. For a moment, he thought he had seen Inquisitor Stele actually standing toe to toe with a monstrous Word Bearer, then the raging mob had obscured his view and the Chaplain found himself pressed against a fallen wall. The weight of his ceremonial crozius arcanium was dead in his hand, desultory glimmers of energy fizzing around the device’s ornate skeletal carvings. The weapon mirrored his mood sullen and uncertain. The Chaplain grasped it in his mailed fist and spoke a silent prayer to his God-Emperor. If what Delos had seen was correct, then the man who had been the architect of the Reborn Angel’s Ascension was consorting with humanity’s vilest enemy. He had to be mistaken. He had to be. The alternative explanation made him feel dizzy with dread and horror.

Pieces of gold and tatters of blackened purity parchments fell away from Arkio’s wargear, leaving scored metal below. The artificer armour, once unsullied and flawless, was now webbed with scratches and scars. Yellow flecks streamed into the wind like a dust storm, and the crazed blemishes seemed to shift and move in the half-light, tricks of the eye making them into vicious maws and screaming faces. New, inhuman muscles bulged beneath Arkio’s chest, and his wings beat hard to hold him in a hover. The inky stain of his wound was grey and pallid, lines of toxin threading into the pinions and feathers, mottling them.

The very smallest glimmer of regret formed in Arkio’s mind as he stared down at the yawning crater in the crypt, and he stamped on it mercilessly. No, Rafen would not be graced with a moment more of his attention. His troublesome brother was ended, and at last Arkio had the freedom he had coveted in the dark corners of his soul since childhood.

A low moan, a raw and feral sound, issued up from the void in the stone floor. It sent the Spear of Telesto twitching in his hands once more, as the weapon writhed and shuddered. The sky whitened as lightning flashed daybreak-bright around him, and the dazzle picked out a man-shape in glistening crimson below. On wings of jet fire, Rafen punched into the air and struck Arkio with all his might.

He caught his brother by surprise, and the Blood Angel felt his bones ring with the impact as they hit. Arkio spat out a strangled yell of anger as they flew up into the thick grey clouds. Rain and wind lashed at their faces from the oily banks of vapour, buffeting them. They exchanged blows, Arkio struggling to regain the advantage, unable to bring out the spear to strike back at so close an aggressor. Lightning shrieked close to them, the hot ozone of tormented air searing Rafen’s lungs. In the flash of illumination, he saw new lines of the black seed-boils emerging along Arkio’s cheekbones, arranged there like ritual scarifications. His eyes were shaded with the purest, darkest hate.

Rafen fought to bring his bolt pistol to bear, squeezing off a salvo of shots. Shells sizzled off Arkio in mad ricochets, some cutting out divots of necrotic flesh, others deflecting from the pieces of armour that still clung to his brother’s changed torso. Arkio made a wordless sound of raw rage and snatched at the handgun, his fingers forming a fist around the blocky metal shape. He grabbed the weapon and crushed it to powder in a bony grip. Rafen cried out as his fingers snapped.

Arkio batted him away with a languid backhand, sending Rafen on a wild course as the rockets in his jump pack spat and laboured to keep him aloft. The winged figure turned after his target, in the clouded shadows, his aspect like an angel of death. He tried to aim the Holy Lance after Rafen, but the weapon resisted him. It bent and bowed as he pulled on it, as if the spear was frozen in the air. ‘Obey me!’ he shouted, yanking ferociously at the haft. ‘I am your master!’

In his rage, the darkness hidden inside Arkio came flooding to the surface, the sullen beauty of his countenance shifting into an aspect as thunderous as the clouds about him. The change raced through him, down to the molecular level, the cells of the blood hammering in his veins blackening. Cradled in his grip, the potent technologies of the Spear of Telesto tasted Arkio, sampled him through the genome sensors threaded into the weapon’s ornate haft. Ancient science awoke in the lance, so far removed from the advancements of the Imperium as to border on magic. It knew Arkio then, as it had known him in the first moment he laid hands on it – and this time the spear found him wanting.

It rebelled. The scent of Chaos was black and thick in the Reborn Angel, and the Telesto weapon went white-hot in his grip, melting the mastercrafted gauntlets to muddy gold slag. The pain was instant and heartstopping, and by sheer animal reaction Arkio released the burning lance, superheated steam hissing from the burning tissues of his hands. Tumbling end over end, the Spear of Telesto fell toward the ground, lightning catching the teardrop blade, wind whipping the purity seals.

The weapon landed like a thrown javelin, the blunt pommel at the shaft’s end cracking the stones of the church floor as it struck them. Whirring with power, the spear came to rest upright, a naked standard in defiance of the forces that had tried to abuse it.

Overhead, Arkio swept toward his brother with his ruined hands opening into claws, the madness of kill-lust in his gaze. His rage was titanic now, and with it he would rip his sibling to shreds, spear or no spear.

Rafen shook off the dizziness threatening to wrap him in its coils and brought up his fists in a fighting stance. He bobbed as his thruster pack choked and coughed. The Blood Angel dared not chance a look at the repeater gauge about his wrist cuff for fear it would confirm what he suspected already – the jet pack was starving of fuel and damaged, and he had only moments of flight left before he fell back into the embrace of Sabien’s gravity.

He blinked rainwater from his lashes as Arkio fell upon him, and then once more the two siblings were locked in a tumbling embrace, wrestling amid the storm with nothing but footless halls of air surrounding them. Arkio viciously kicked Rafen where the spear had cut a line through the flesh of his thigh, cracking open the wound again where Rafen’s Astartes blood had already begun to clot. He howled and butted his brother in the face, gaining the reward of a fan of oily vitae gushing from Arkio’s flaring nostrils. A flurry of punches danced across Rafen’s ribcage as impacts dented his ceramite chest guard. He tasted the hot copper of his own blood as the blows rattled his teeth in his head.

Rafen clutched at his brother, raking his fingers down the thick skin over his hairless chest. The mailed red fingers of his battle gloves drew scars across the pallid and gaunt tissue; runnels of tainted blood gathered at wounds where hard marbles the shade of space protruded. He flailed as Arkio crushed him to his breast in a crippling bear hug. Rafen heard his bones breaking with the pressure. His Space Marine physiology made him and his kind uniquely aware of their own bodies, so it was with certainty that Rafen sensed the biscopea organ in his chest burst as his ribs pressed in on it. He was bleeding internally in a number of places.

A blink of white sheet lightning turned his world into a washed-out sketch, just lines and impressions dazzling his enhanced vision. Leering out of the blindness came Arkio’s twisted face, framed by the halo about his neck and the beating tides of his mottled grey wings. The sound and the fury of the thunderstorm swept away his younger brother’s words, but Rafen could still read the declaration of hate on his lips:

You will die.

There was a word that no Blood Angel would ever choose to speak. It was a cognomen that their enemies and detractors had used since the day Sanguinius took up the Emperor’s cause. The name was as old as Terra herself, born from times before men strode the stars, forged in the fears of superstitious hearts. It conjured all the deepest terrors of beasts that feasted upon life and bore the fangs of a bloodletter.

Vampire.

Arkio’s mouth split into a smile as wide as his face, a forest of needle-sharp canine teeth blooming from his jaws. He became the avatar of the Blood Angels darkest and most horrific aspect, a monstrous parody of the predator legend. Rafen’s brother was crushing the life from him, his last breaths of air escaping in choking, wheezing gasps. As the wind and rain lashed about the tumbling pair, Rafen felt his fury rise as Arkio’s hot breath tickled his skin. The winged Angel pressed into him, his red maw of a mouth hungry to tear the meat from Rafen’s neck and feast on the hot gush of pulsing life within.

‘No!’ he roared in defiance. Vision fogging, grey tunnels coiling around his sight, Rafen once again teetered on the abyss of death; and once more, he refused to yield to it.

His hands moved though motions drilled into the marrow of his bones by countless turns of muscle-memory, fingers finding and clasping the hilt of his fractal-bladed close combat weapon. The Space Marine knife had not differed appreciably in its design since the earliest days of the Imperium, the monomolecular edges of the Sol-pattern weapon as familiar to Rafen as they would have been to the first Adeptus Astartes ten thousand years earlier. Yet for all its age, the knife was no less lethal.

Rafen struck violently, bringing the weapon about and thrusting upward into the spaces between his brother’s ribs. The knife slid on slick, matted skin and fell into the mouldering wound he had given Arkio in the square. He pressed the blade into the writhing, maggot-infested cut, all the way to the steel hilt.

From Arkio’s empurpled lips came a scream of inchoate pain that parted the clouds around them with its force. Suddenly, it was no longer Arkio’s beating wings that kept the locked pair in the air, but the chattering, dying thrust from Rafen’s assault pack. The grey-white sails fluttered and curled as Arkio’s fingers dug into Rafen’s wargear, slipping over rain-slick ceramite.

Lightning blazed a strobe image on to Rafen’s retina, freezing the instant there in shades of white, orange and purple. He saw agony on Arkio’s face the like of which he had never encountered upon any battlefield, and a word, a single word, on his sibling’s lips.

Brother.

Arkio’s hands skidded away from purchase and his weight detached itself from Rafen in a whirl of streaming rain and falling feathers. He snapped out his arm, fingers reaching to scrape the gold sheaths on his shoulders, missing as Arkio drew away, sinking through the low blanket of boiling grey cloud. Rafen’s brother, the Blessed, the Reborn Angel, the Deus Sanguinius, tumbled away like a downed prey bird, falling to earth.

Below, amid the shining wet cobbles and glistening mosaics of the ruined church’s nave, the Spear of Telesto sensed him coming. The upright weapon twitched and jerked of its own accord, shifting and turning about its axis to bring the teardrop blade to welcome him. Arkio plunged from the thunderheads and his spine found the head of the lance where his shoulder blades met, at the centre of his outstretched wings. His impact sent the fatal spear through the dense altered bones of his skeleton, bisecting his primary heart and exploding out again though his sternum. A perfectly circular hollow formed in the stonework from the force of the fall, and Arkio lay in it, his corrupted blood thinning in the deluge, casting all about him with a rich pool of purple fluids.

The tear-shaped leaf glowed with golden flickers of colour, evaporating every last drop of his vitae from its immaculate, polished surface.

The sky turned to hell.

Misericorde brought her fanged flanks to bear upon the two Blood Angels warships, unleashing salvo after salvo of heavy rockets, hull-burners and laser fire into the zone of space about them. Mephiston’s flagship Europae had speed and motion on her side, using generous bursts of vectored thrust from her tertiary drives to turn and move beneath the sister ship Bellus. Spinning about its axis, Europae weathered the onslaught, distributing the strikes that reached the battle barge across the ship’s glittering void shields.

Bellus, damaged and wounded, reacted more slowly. To the untrained eye, the two Blood Angels barges seemed identical, but at close hand the injuries and scars Bellus carried were raw and obvious. Europae was fresh from Baal’s orbital docks, fully crewed, perfectly maintained and at the peak of her performance; by contrast Bellus was tired and worn. The engagement over Sabien was just one more battle in a string of conflicts that the old warship had weathered – the wounds from the fight against the cruiser Dirge Eterna at Shenlong, the battleship Ogre Lord at Cybele and even the lasting lacerations from the mission into ork space, all of them took their toll on the Bellus. She was strung out and hobbled in comparison to her adversaries.

From his command throne, Captain Ideon opened up his ship like a shattered hive of hornets, releasing every weapon and warshot at once. About the barge, space became a clogged web of fire and destruction, heat haze and spheres of detonation falling off Bellus in radiant waves. ‘Report,’ he demanded, automatically turning his attention to Brother Solus’s station, but Solus was dead, heaped there in a mess of plasma-seared meat and ceramite. The stink of human flesh came to the captain in a dozen different ways through the senses of the ship’s machine-spirit.

Over the crashing din of secondary explosions, a sense-servitor babbled out a reply. ‘Multiple critical hits along starboard hull. Breaches on fifty-two per cent of decks. Enginseers report imminent collapse of the fusion core’s spirit-monitor.’

‘Bow guns,’ he roared, thrusting his consciousness through the cybernetic links in his skull to touch the powerful ship-killer cannons in Bellus’s prow.

The servitor answered even as the question formed in Ideon’s thoughts. ‘Inoperative. Crew loss due to atmospheric venting.’ The mind-wiped slave chattered in a flat monotone, as if it were discussing something no more vexing than a change in weather.

Ideon glimpsed the ragged metal where the bow of Bellus used to be, the tide of fragments and vacuum-bloated corpses streaming out into the black. Hate building inside him, the captain drew every last piece of the ship’s offensive capability together and held it in his mind. His normally immobile form on the control throne was rocking back and forth, twitching like a palsy victim from the force of his anger. A strange, inhuman noise threaded out of his voxcoder, the peculiar ululation crossing the din of the bridge. Ideon willingly let himself fall into the screaming embrace of the black rage, his mind disintegrating into the madness of race memories from thousands of years past.

‘Kill them all!’ crackled the metallic voice.

Europae’s patience was at an end, and with unrestrained force she opened fire with every weapon at her disposal, crossing the orbital range to punish Bellus for the perfidy of its crew and Misericorde for the crime of daring to sully the Emperor’s space. In turn, the Chaos warship spat hate back at the Blood Angels, pouring it into the darkness until the emptiness was thick with radiation.

Bellus lay between them, striking out at everything and nothing around it, a mad wounded beast alive with pain and the smell of death. Arkio’s flagship was caught in the crossfire of the battle and fell into the hellstorm. In the absolute silence of the void, Bellus detonated, breaking into huge splinters of steel, her fusion reactor giving birth to an instant new sun.

On the planet below, the light of her death was lost in the thick clouds.

Rafen’s thruster pack ran dry when he was still a thirty metres from the ground, and he tumbled and dropped as if he were made of lead. Slamming his balled fist into the release switch on his belt, he felt the dead weight of the pack detach, and freed of the burden he turned into a spin, crashing through age-rotted beams to land with a bone-jarring crack of sound. A ring of water scattered away from him in a ripple. From his kneeling stance, Rafen rose, his eyes narrowed against the biting winds. He scanned the interior of the church, afraid of what he would see.

And there he saw it.

Pinned to the stone as a gigantic collector might exhibit some rare moth or butterfly, Arkio lay with the Spear of Telesto run through him. All about his sibling was a spreading aurora the colour of autumn, a most unearthly golden light. Favouring his injured leg, Rafen jogged across the transept and came to Arkio’s side.

‘Brother…’

Rafen gasped in amazement; despite so brutal an injury, Arkio still clung to life with fierce tenacity. His sibling’s hands were clasped the haft of the spear, the burning glow crisping away the flesh. Arkio seemed not to notice the pain.

‘Brother,’ Rafen repeated, searching his sibling’s face for the shroud of contamination. Arkio seemed as ruined as the shattered landscape of the city-shrine about them, hollow inside. The black trains of poison boils still seethed beneath his marbled skin, but his eyes… his eyes belonged to the Arkio that Rafen remembered from their youth, the naïve and bold soul that had given him strength and loyalty.

There was pain there, of a kind Rafen had only ever seen in the eyes of sinners and turncoats fallen to the law of the Inquisition. Before, he had never questioned it, but now he saw it for what it was. Regret, so powerful and so heartbreaking that the emotion could barely be contained by a human will.

‘What have I done?’ Arkio rasped, holding his brother’s gaze. ‘I have broken every compact and promise… I have turned my back on what I am and embraced the void…’ He shuddered and wailed. ‘Oh, Lord Emperor, I have betrayed all I hold dear.’

His hate-rage ebbing, Rafen found only one answer in the echoing chasms of his heart. ‘Yes.’

The humming of the spear gently rose and fell in the fading rhythm of Arkio’s secondary heart. Each peak and trough grew longer as life ebbed from him into the stones and the rain. ‘I was weak…’ he managed. ‘I thought I could protect myself from this–’ he gestured feebly and his wings jerked in response, ‘–from falling from the path. My arrogance… I… I believed I was… believed it…’

‘I am sorry, Arkio,’ Rafen said, silent tears falling from his eyes, drawing lines in dark smears of blood and soot on his cheeks. ‘I am sorry I was not there to stand with you, turn you from this corruption.’

‘No,’ Arkio whispered. ‘You share no burden with me, kinsman. I will bear this stigma…’ He shivered, a drool of blood escaping from his lips. ‘My error. I was weak…’

‘Arkio, no… You were… human.’

He forced a wan smile. ‘Fear not, Rafen. This is our fate. Both of us saw it.’

Rafen gasped. ‘You knew this would be by my hand?’

‘Yes. And so it was.’ His ruined fingers crossed Rafen’s chest plate and touched his brother’s cheek. ‘You weep for me? That is all I ask, kinsman. The Emperor will damn me for my folly, and I accept that without question… But you… I ask you to forgive me. I recant, Rafen. Please forgive me, my brother.’

‘I forgive you, Arkio. On our father’s grave, I swear it.’

Arkio gave a shallow, final nod of thanks. ‘That is mercy enough.’ His eyes fluttered closed, and the spear fell silent.

Rafen knelt there for an age, no sound in his ears but the rush and thunder of the rainstorm, no feeling inside him except the raw despair of loss. Finally, his heart brimming with its grievous remorse, Rafen came to his feet with his brother’s body in his arms, the Holy Lance excised from the dead man and there at Rafen’s shoulder. The warm, mellifluent light of the spear illuminated the ruins about him, and he held Arkio high. He seemed to weigh so little now, as if the burden of his tainted change had run away with his shed blood.

In the near distance, Rafen saw the firefly sparkles of bolter discharges, and on the wind came gunshots, screams and the chants of the Word Bearers. The Blood Angel’s face set in grim determination and he advanced toward the fighting. He left nothing behind him but his doubts.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Curious, thought Mephiston, how the passage of time became elastic in the throes of conflict. He skewered a Word Bearer and the helot soldier behind him with one swift thrust of the mindblade Vitarus, the force sword immolating them both in gusts of blue flame. Flicking the remains away, he frowned. How long had he been fighting? Crashing thunder bellowed overhead, announcing the flashes of sheet lighting that illuminated the writhing fighters in the square. Rain pelted everything, sluicing off the blood of enemy and ally alike, churning the brick dust and dirt on the ground into a muddy brown quagmire. It was difficult for the Librarian to know exactly how long the battle had been raging; every sword blow and bolt shell seemed to pass in its own small bubble of time, one single instant in the huge cacophony of wanton slaughter. Minutes, hours… it could have been days for all the Lord of Death cared. He was in his element here, an engine of destruction fuelled by the holiest of causes.

He caught the sound of a man’s scream, suddenly truncated by the ripping of flesh and sinew. Mephiston whirled to see the golden helmet of a Blood Angels honour guard – one of Arkio’s loyalists – sent flying by the blow of the veteran sergeant who had accompanied the pskyer from Europae. The Space Marine staggered back, shaking gore from the clogged blades of his chainsword. He caught Mephiston’s eye and spared him a grim nod.

The Librarian did not need to employ his psychic skills to read the Blood Angel’s mind. This was a sorry, dismal business, being forced to take up arms against men who were battle-brothers. The Lord of Death was sickened by what he and the others had been forced into, and he cursed Arkio and Stele for bringing it to pass. It was enough to purge the galaxy of turncoats and traitors, but to face men who had willingly forsaken their oath to Dante and Baal in favour of some pretender child made Mephiston weary and hateful. For each errant Blood Angel he slew, the psyker spoke a short prayer to the Golden Throne. He did not forgive these men their misjudgements, instead he tallied them as crimes to lay at the feet of Ramius Stele, the architect of this madness. However fate unfolded on this day, Mephiston vowed that the accursed Hereticus fool would not leave Sabien alive.

The sergeant fell back a dozen steps as he reloaded his bolter, before firing again into the mass of raging zealots. ‘Bah!’ he spat, taking three men with pinpoint head shots. ‘These fools don’t know the meaning of the word “retreat”. We cut them down like wheat and still they come.’

Mephiston strode forward, Vitarus ending lives in sweeps of bright power. ‘The wheat dares not oppose the scythe.’ For every one of the Warriors of the Reborn trampled into the mud and earth, there were two more behind him, desperate for the glory of death in their messiah’s name – or just loathsome enough not to care. Here and there he saw Word Bearers in tightly drilled units, and those he could not see he heard, their foul demagogues spouting dirges and songs of unhallowed praise to the Maelstrom. The Chaos Space Marines took their fury to the Blood Angels, attacking Mephiston’s men and Arkio’s loyalists alike, ignoring the helots unless the humans were foolish enough to block their lines of fire.

‘Red foes, red friends,’ snapped the veteran. ‘Who is the enemy here, lord?’

‘Everyone,’ the psyker replied, burning down a dozen more wayward souls with his screeching plasma pistol. ‘This is not battle, this is chaos.’

Mephiston’s Techmarine thrust his way through the morass of dead and dying, stumbling into ankle-deep pools of fluid. He killed a helot armed only with a sharpened spanner, punching through his ribcage, and threw the dead body aside. ‘Lord!’ he called as he approached. ‘Lord Mephiston.’

Bolter fire in careful, targeted ranks ranged down on them from the middle of the enemy throng, where Word Bearers were marshalling a concerted effort. The Librarian threw back the power of the Smite, a psychic tornado ripping across the square to dismember them.

The Techmarine blinked away the after-glare of the blast and gave a jerky bow. ‘My lord, we have but two Thunderhawks remaining and neither can make lift-off. The Word Bearers have six squads pinning them down. I spotted Havoc troopers in their number, although they have not attempted to destroy the transports yet.’

‘They want the ships for themselves. What news from orbit?’

Gunfire drew their attention and all three of them fired back at a group of helots armed with civilian hunting lasers. ‘Communication is intermittent at best,’ continued the Blood Angel. ‘High levels of radiation in the ionosphere prevent clear vox transmissions.’

‘Radiation?’ growled the sergeant. ‘From what?’

‘Bellus has been destroyed, lord,’ the Techmarine said dispassionately. ‘A fragmentary vox from Europae appears to confirm that the loyalist’s ship was obliterated in the crossfire between our barge and the Misericorde.’

Mephiston shook his head angrily. ‘Such waste. Such foolish, pointless waste.’

The Space Marine gestured with a signum, complex lines of data glyphs and warning runes marching across the device’s rain-slick screen. ‘We are outnumbered on the ground. Force disposition of the loyalists is weak but they overmatch us with the reinforcements of the Word Bearers.’ To his surprise, the Lord of Death accepted this dire information with a clinical smile; he was unfazed by the sensor’s divination. On the contrary, he seemed to expect it.

‘With Bellus out of the picture, we can forget calling reserves from Europae,’ grated the sergeant, shaking rain off his visor. ‘They’ll have their hands full with the Chaos ship, won’t even be able to risk ’porting us more men. We’re on our own down here.’

‘As it ever was,’ Mephiston added. ‘So be it.’ The psyker toggled a control in the collar of his arching hood and spoke into one of the bone-white skulls that decorated the throat of his armour, where a vox-unit was concealed. ‘Blood Angels, rally!’ he snapped, the command filtering out to the ear-beads of every man from the Europae. ‘Your previous orders to contain this rabble no longer apply. Join the fray and leave no foe standing.’

‘Aye. Aye!’ came the replies over the channel.

Mephiston threw himself into the throng, leaving behind the hillock of rubble and stone he had defended to wade deep in the gore of his adversaries. He showed sharp fangs and eyes of fire as death rained down around him, red floods of it flashing in the air.

‘Terra and God-Emperor,’ breathed the veteran, as he watched the Librarian shred the unwary foes. ‘He’s not a man, he’s a storm with a sword.’

Elsewhere in the morass, the pell-mell melee moved and shifted like a viral organism, swallowing up those that did not go with the army’s flow, killing those that defied it. Delos waded through a sea of angry faces and weeping wounded, all of them merging into one pale orchestra of ghosts, eyes upturned to the grey raging sky, crying to their Blessed. The Chaplain moved among them, a black shining shadow with a grinning skull head. They flinched and recoiled from his crozius as he waved it before him, some of them automatically genuflecting toward an icon of Sanguinius, others hissing in pain as if the sight of it hurt their eyes.

A tinny rattle about his head announced the passage of a metallic servo-skull and Delos knew he was close. There, just a few lengths away, Inquisitor Stele stood in on the crest of a subsided stone dais. At his feet, shivering under a wet, matted cloak, his lexmechanic rocked back and forth, constantly babbling a endless string of words in thousands of Imperial dialects. Delos caught something of his speech when the wind changed for a moment, bringing it to his ears.

‘–demnos, dannavik, dorius, delenz, dorcon, daemon, dethenex, dynikas–’

The inquisitor’s servo-skulls continually described a lazy orbit around him, occasionally pausing to lance a laser bolt into a target they deemed a threat to Stele. The woman was there as well, never more than a hand’s length from him, the lines of her face hiding beneath a voluminous hood. The habit she wore was cut like an astropath’s, but she was anything but one of those. Delos was not cursed with the warp eye of psykers but he didn’t need to be to smell the stink of the empyrean on the girl. He shook the nauseating perfume of it from his head. Odd how he had never noticed that about her before.

Gripping his crozius arcanum firmly, Delos forced himself up to the dais, his skull-helmet’s sneer matching Stele’s. ‘Inquisitor,’ he demanded. ‘By the Blessed, I demand you account for yourself.’

Stele arched an eyebrow. ‘Chaplain… Delos, isn’t it?’ He wiped a patina of rain from his bald skull. ‘Leave me. I must prepare–’

‘For what?’ Delos shouted, startling himself with his own forcefulness. ‘Tell me my eyes deceived me, Stele! Tell me it was but a mind-trick of Mephiston’s!’

‘What trivia are you chattering about?’ Stele retorted, his attention elsewhere. He glanced at Ulan. ‘The boy, the boy! Where is he?’

The psy-witch shook her head, her mind full of razors. ‘Difficult….’

‘I saw you and the Word Bearer.’ In a blink of lightning, Delos saw something shadowing Stele’s face; not a wraith or a spirit, but a haze of lines crossing and re-crossing. Eight arrows arranged in a ring. ‘It is true,’ Delos said, ‘you consort with the corrupted!’

Stele grimaced and fixed him with a glare. ‘First Sachiel and now you? This conflict is taxing me too much. Things are slipping through the gaps–’

‘Traitor!’ Delos roared, bringing up the crozius to strike the inquisitor.

‘Better that than a fool.’ Stele raised a hand and a column of pressure shoved Delos in the chest, pushing him back, knocking the power weapon from his grip. The air around him became dry and greasy, the rain fizzing away. Invisible tendrils of psychic force coiled about the Chaplain and slipped through molecule-thin gaps in his armour to touch his bare skin.

‘The twisting path,’ Stele said, leering at the kneeling Blood Angel. ‘Take the path, Delos. Take it.’

His mind flayed open and Delos screamed, clawing at his helmet, tearing it from his head. The Chaplain saw his world fall apart around him; he watched a mirror of his life to come as he tore off his allegiance to the Emperor (I would never do such a thing!) as he slaughtered Dante and burned Baal’s cities (No! No! This is not true!) as he fell, laughing with cruel abandon, into the embrace of Chaos (No!).

Stele broke off the mental assault and spat on his twitching victim. ‘Never question me,’ he growled. The inquisitor grabbed at Ulan’s arm, pulling her to him. ‘I won’t ask again! Where is Arkio?’

‘Dead.’ She drew the word out into a howl.

The inquisitor’s face went purple with rage. His jaw worked but no words came to him. Anger robbed him of a voice, and instead he struck out with a balled fist, backhanding the psyker-slave. Ulan stumbled and dropped to her knees, the hood about her head falling to her shoulders. Her pale and hairless pate with its tarnished brass sockets glittered dully. Overhead, the silver skull drones popped in tiny explosions.

Stele gave an incoherent roar of annoyance, the muscles in his neck bunching in tense ropes. ‘That worthless, stupid fool. It wasn’t enough that he could accept the gifts I gave him, he had to bury himself in the part.’ He pulled at the skin of his face, barely able to contain the quaking rage inside him. ‘All of it ruined by that pathetic whelp. My plans are ashes now, my greatest performance destroyed by his arrogance!’

‘But… but that was why you chose him…’ Ulan spat out blood and a broken piece of tooth. ‘You wanted a man who could be Sanguinius–’

‘I wanted a figurehead,’ snarled Stele, ‘A gaudy token messiah, not a corpse.’

Ulan shakily got to her feet. ‘Perhaps he gave you a martyr instead…’

‘Martyr…’ The word whispered through the inquisitor’s lips, a benediction, cooling his burning ire. ‘I will not fail now, understand me?’ he growled. ‘Not now, not in the moment of my greatest triumph. I have made it my design to turn these Astartes freaks to the Banner of Change and I will not be denied!’ Stele stripped the grox-hide battle coat from his shoulders and dashed the garment on the ground, dragging his ornate laspistol from its concealed holster. ‘Plans must be accelerated,’ he said. ‘The turning cannot wait! It must be here and now!’

‘But we are not ready…’

He ignored Ulan’s warning and pressed the muzzle of his gun to the palm of his other hand. ‘Open your mind to the Spite Lord, witch. Bring him. Bring him now!’

Stele jerked the trigger and the pistol blew a burning hole through his flesh, vaporising three of his fingers and setting his cuff aflame. The inquisitor screamed and clutched at his ruined hand, forcing the jetting blood from his severed veins to spatter about him in the sacred pattern he knew by heart. The geometry of the unhallowed circle came together even as he drew it.

Ulan hesitated. Stele had instructed her on the rituals that would open the conduit to the Malfallax’s realm, but now the moment came to do it she found herself afraid. The psy-witch had been a slave since birth, a laboratory experiment before that, and disobedience was not part of her makeup, yet still she balked at this most dangerous command. Stele turned on her and saw the indecision in her eyes. The inquisitor snarled and grabbed her robes, dragging her close to him. The bloody meat of his hand clutched at her neck. She felt warm fluids pulsing over her skin.

‘Lord, no…’ She managed a weak denial.

‘Open the way,’ Stele shouted, and with a thrust of his arm, the lacerated fingers sank into the flesh at Ulan’s collar. The pallid skin rippled like water and Stele merged his barbed digits into her bone and cartilage. The woman resisted, for what would be the first and last time in her life. It made little difference, as the inquisitor brought his undamaged fingers to her cheeks, the tips scraping away the false scars that hid the blemishes of psy-tuned metal contacts. Ulan could not scream; she could not breathe; she could only hold on and try not to die as Stele used her as a lens for his own psyker talent, magnifying his black will to cut a way into the writhing core of the Eye of Terror.

Inside the no-space of the immaterium, the creature Malfallax had been waiting, floating and circling the man-filth Stele in the manner of a sea predator scenting prey in distress. Unseen by the denizens of the material world, the realm of the warp was constantly surrounding them, a layer of unreality laid across the sordid, crude matter of their wastrel worlds. The forms the live-things called Chaos, in their limited little ways of perceiving the omniverse, swarmed and thrived in this infinite ocean of mind and emotion. The daemon moved with Stele. Waiting, waiting and watching for the moment when the thrashing and chattering of the quarry was at its peak. Only then would it strike, lapping up the absolute perfection of its fear, sinking in rending teeth, tearing it to soul-shreds.

Now the prey called to him, through the conduit of the mutant abortion created by the corpse-god’s science. His instrument Stele cried out for the poisoned hand of Malfallax. The warp daemon teased itself with the anticipation of the shift; it was so infrequent that the beast could find itself a vessel strong enough to contain its essence for more than a few hours. Most flesh-things in the other reality were gossamer constructs of wet, weak meats. They would burn or inflate or explode if the Malfallax issued even an iota of itself into them – but it had worked hard to prepare for this day. Malfallax, Monarch of Spite, Heirophant of Vicissitude, was weary of partial manifestations, of animating the inert or the mindless to hold a ghost of his full and awful potential. It wanted to step freely into the plane of men and run it red with their bloody terror. Malfallax missed the feel of it over there beyond the veil; it was time to return.

The scream that Ulan released was a sound that no human throat had ever made before. It rang from side to side of the city square, souring the deadened sky of Sabien as it passed, hammering a chill spike of terror into every life that caught the echo of it. Stele withdrew from the shaking body of the psy-witch, the oozing blood from his shattered hand wrapped about his forearm like a red glove. Mad laughter bubbled up from inside him. ‘He comes!’ shouted the inquisitor, the insane mix of elation and utter dread merging in his chest. Stele spread his arms in welcome as the spilt blood and mud inside the ceremonial circle bubbled and churned. ‘Come to me, Void-born! Take form and heed me.’

The black-brown sludge at his feet rippled and built up upon itself, assembling the shape of a hulking figure. It grew something resembling a face and pointed it a Stele, hot coppery breath issuing from the steaming orifices. ‘Ssssssssservant.’

Ulan could not see for the blood streaming from the brass plugs in her skull or weeping in tears from ears, nose and eyes, but she knew where the creature was. The blazing power of its nova heart burned into her mind-senses. Ulan struggled to stumble away, what rationality she still had lost in a primitive desire to flee.

‘Come, daemon,’ Stele cried out to the mud-form. ‘Bear witness with me to this victory. Take shape and release the Way of Change. The Blood Angels will turn to the glory of Tzeentch, they will know and revere him as I have always done.’ He stabbed his ruined hand at the shaking woman. ‘Fill this vessel and come forth!’

Ulan tripped and fell, the mud sucking at her, holding her down. She shook her head in some feeble gesture of refusal.

‘No.’ The voice was slime on cold rock. The slurry of living mire flashed forward in a wet surge, but not toward Ulan. It rose up around Stele’s legs and rooted him to the spot, coiling about him like liquid snakes, filling his clothing.

The inquisitor tried to scream, but as he opened his mouth the blood-mass poured in over his lips and drowned him in thick ooze. Your reward comes now, said the Malfallax, each word a psionic hammer blow, not lordship of these men-prey, not riches and powers as you were promised. You will know the glory of me. You shall carry my essence, become my mount and flesh-proxy…

Ulan felt Stele’s terrible, silent screams as the daemon forced itself into the inquisitor, turning the man into the unwilling vessel for its bloated psychic substance. As much as she hated the malignant blackguard, she found a spark of pity for the man as he was subsumed inside his daemon lord’s self. Betrayal and anger, fear and terror so sweet that they clogged her throat with the backwash of their taste; the emotions flooded out of the twisting bag of skin. The creature denied his puppet the chance to frame his feelings as he died, tearing understanding from Stele’s mind. He was nothing but carrion for it now: his plans were Malfallax’s plans, his grand schemes tiny puzzles in the SpiteLord’s rounds of parlour amusement.

And so only Ulan truly witnessed the death of Inquisitor Ramius Stele, of his flesh and his sinew, of his mind and his soul. She heard it rip through the ether and catch her in its razored wake. The psy-witch gibbered and wept, ruined by her proximity to it.

The daemon stretched at the meat surrounding it, and with slow and purposeful motion it unleashed the way of mutation upon its new organic shell. Spewing out the dead mud that had briefly contained it, Malfallax adopted the unhallowed aspect that all his kindred wore as the mark of their fealty to the eightfold way. Stele’s bones shifted like putty, hollowing and distending. The pallid human flesh glittered and took on a multihued riot of colours, flashing rainbows as sunlight caught through a prism. The face pressed forward against itself, becoming a hooked beak with deep-sunk eye pits burning with ruin. Gossamer feathers burst from the remnants of the Hereticus uniform, and great scarred wings shook loose from the prison of the skin. Hooks and talons dressed the creature and it gave a long, languid yawn.

Staring out at the human world from inside its new sheath of matter, the Lord of Change glanced at the cowering Ulan and decided it was hungry. Black-barbed claws caught the psyker woman in a pincer grip and brought her to the wicked beak, as a warped voice bayed for fresh, new blood.

Malfallax ate this meal and studied the mad war ranged about it, considering where it would begin.

Delos looked on, appalled. At first, the cleric had thought it was more of the mind-trick that Stele had turned upon him, but the stink of the shifting, sinuous beast told his senses that this monstrosity was as real as the hammering rain and the cold mud. His crozius was gone, lost and broken, but he still had his bolter and his blade. Delos drew both, running his fingers over the litany inscribed on the frame of his weapon. He came to the last etching where he had transcribed his oath to Arkio. ‘All lies now?’ he asked the rushing skies above. ‘Have I damned myself?’

There would be no more for Delos to inscribe after today. The Chaplain blinked rainwater from his eyes and leapt at the daemon, calling out the name of his primarch.

Malfallax cocked its head in a quizzical gesture and turned to present itself to the figure in black. It stood on something wet and breakable, hot liquid spurting about its clawed feet. The daemon glanced down, shaking off the blood and organ-matter. Stele’s lexmechanic had been too slow to get out of the way, and now the speaker-slave was a paste of bones and metals in the mud.

Delos’s shots found purchase in the beast’s hide and Malfallax swallowed the pain of them like rare sweetmeats. The daemon curled a taloned finger at the Chaplain and spoke a word of blasphemous power. A rift opened like a bloody wound before his hand and a streak of rose-coloured fire jetted forth, engulfing Delos.

The cleric wailed as the pink flames surrounded and clung to him, burning through his sable power armour. The Lord of Change left him screaming and dying there in the mud and strode away, looking for more prey. Malfallax reached into a sucking void in its chest, its hand disappearing to the wrist. It returned with a hilt in its grasp, and with slow and careful motions the daemon withdrew an edged weapon made from dead men’s bones and solid delusion.

The humans had a name for such a sword – they called them warp blades, semi-real constructs existing half-in and half-out of the empyrean, raw funnels of mindform woven into killing blades. Malfallax tested the Chaos weapon in its grip, feeling the weight of it, judging the reach. Satisfied, it drew up the sword and plunged it into a mass of fleeing slave troopers, liquefying their bodies with the speed of its passage. The blade rippled and gasped in pleasure.

‘Emperor preserve us,’ hissed the sergeant. ‘It makes me retch just to lay eyes upon it…’

‘What manner of thing is it?’ added the Techmarine.

‘Tzeentch-spawn,’ Mephiston replied. The psyker felt the edges of the agony-sphere cast by the warp blade, and his eyes could not focus on the blurring shape of the sword, his vision slipping off the unholy geometry of it. ‘A Lord of Change.’ He tapped the skull medallion at his throat and spat out an order. ‘Regroup. Concentrate fire on the creature–’

The Blood Angels commands were silenced by a screaming crash of sound from the mass of the enemy force. The daemon lord drew arcane runes in the air and unleashed a flood of cold fire across the square. Men caught in the white core of the flames were instantly turned to vapour, disappearing into ash. Those on the edges of the blast caught fire and stumbled about, blind and mad with pain; the ones on the periphery became cursed with the fallout of mutation, spontaneously growing new limbs, bursting out of their wargear or imploding. Mephiston saw several men turn their own weapons on themselves rather than accede to the revision of their throbbing flesh.

Space Marines died on the tip of the monster’s ten-metre sword, adding their crimson to the ankle-deep blood swamp. The warp blade left brief tears in the fabric of space where it passed, and things emerged from the hole, chattering with hunger. Saucer-shaped and dripping with toxic cilia, the disc-like warp freaks fell on the injured and the dying like vultures.

Emboldened by their new ally, the Word Bearers flooded forward, shoving aside or killing the hesitant loyalist Space Marines. Mephiston met them with Vitarus singing death, beheading and bifurcating, his plasma pistol hissing hot with discharge. The traitors met steel and died, but for the first time since he had arrived on Sabien, the Lord of Death took a step back as the press of the enemy turned tight like a ruby vice.

‘The eye of a hurricane,’ murmured Turcio, ‘we are caught in a storm.’ He fired again at the gaggle of Word Bearers that sniped at them from the remains of a smouldering Thunderhawk, firing past helot soldiers who seemed oblivious to the crossfire passing through their numbers. He ducked to reload and Brother Corvus took his place, pacing his shots. ‘By my life… The confusion… What are we doing here?’

‘Surviving,’ Corvus retorted, killing a Word Bearer with a headshot. ‘We are worth nothing if we die.’

‘But the Blessed… where is he? Has Arkio deserted us?’

‘No!’ Corvus snapped back at his battle-brother, but in truth the same fear filled his mind as well. ‘He… he must be fighting elsewhere…’

‘Where?’ Turcio demanded, coming up to join the conflict once more. ‘This day had turned to madness. Our hated enemies arise from nowhere, daemons take shape from nothing… Arkio is gone and we are fighting everything that moves.’ He grabbed Corvus’s arm and looked him the face. ‘I don’t know what I am any more! Blood Angel? Warrior of the Blessed? Traitor or loyalist? There’s nothing but death here, no answers–’

Bolt-fire from the Chaos lines chewed off a chunk of their cover and both Space Marines threw themselves aside as lascannon shots followed through. Turcio rolled over in the mud and found himself staring up at the sky, the endless curtain of grey rain pelting them. Misgivings clouded his mind. Suddenly it seemed like everything that had happened since Cybele was being called in question. ‘Sanguinius preserve me, what is our fate to be?’

‘Look.’ Corvus pointed toward the gutted tower of a long-fallen cathedral, one of only a few structures that still stood above ground level. There was a human figure up there on the stone canopy, atop a broken gargoyle. Lighting gave him form and colour – a Blood Angel, and in his arms a mess of golden shapes, pale flesh and white feathers.

Rafen looked down on the battlefield and filled his lungs with breaths of wet, metallic air. When he spoke, his voice carried on the wind, echoing through the vox channels of every Astartes on the ground.

‘Blood Angels!’ he cried. ‘Sons of Baal, hear me. The lie has been dispelled, our twisted fate undone. Know this, brothers. We have been betrayed!’

The conflict raged on, but Rafen’s voice still reached every corner of the fight, even the helots and the enemy turning to cast an ear toward him. ‘All of us hold the blood of Sanguinius inside our hearts,’ Rafen called. ‘Every man of us is the Pure One in some small corner of his soul… But our primogenitor, our lord and founder… He lies dead.’ The word thundered across the sky. ‘Sanguinius is ashes, millennia gone, no bones, no heart, only blood! Sanguinius died at the hands of hated Horus, he perished at the blade of Chaos.’

Angry howls bubbled up from the throats of all the Blood Angels, to a man all of them stirred to violence by the stark truth of Rafen’s statement.

‘And now the archfoe seeks to turn us all, to drag us to their blasphemy by a false idol…’ He held up Arkio’s body, high above the throng. ‘See. Look at what has been done! My blood kinsman, mutated and warped by the hand of a traitor…’ Rafen’s voice was choked with emotion. ‘They made him think he was the Pure One Reborn… They made us believe. But he was corrupted, poisoned by the pawn Stele! The daemon that walks among you did this, so we would follow blindly, blindly into the abyss.’

A chorus of denials came up to Rafen on the wind, anguished refusals from men who now saw the lie they had granted their fealty to.

‘See the truth!’ Rafen screamed. ‘See my brother fall.’ He tipped Arkio’s corpse over the edge and let gravity take the winged body from him. In a moment of terrible silence, only the rain spoke as the dead man tumbled end over end, ruined wings flapping, to land in a broken heap on the cathedral steps.

Turcio scrambled to the body and turned Arkio’s face to his. He recoiled with horror and stumbled away.

‘What do you see?’ Corvus asked, his hearts tight in his chest.

‘Ruin,’ Turcio said in a dead voice. ‘Ruin and damnation. Our messiah is black with untruth, brother… Rafen does not lie.’

‘Arkio is dead!’ came the cry from the tower. ‘My brother perished for this mendacity and it dies with him!’ Rafen drew up the Spear of Telesto and let the weapon’s golden light haze the sky around him. ‘By the Holy Lance, reject your flawed allegiance to Arkio and remember the true lord, Sanguinius.’ He pointed the weapon into the melee and felt it turn hot with willing power. ‘See the foe among you and destroy them.’

On the steps, Turcio stood back and called to the sky. ‘Aye. Aye. I renounce the Reborn. I am a Blood Angel!’ The battle-brother leapt off the cracked stones and threw himself into the helots and traitors. ‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’

Corvus yelled the same oath and followed him and across the square, Arkio’s loyalists threw off their misguided devotion, the burning power of the spear tearing the shroud of Chaos’s confusion from their minds.

Malfallax’s anger pierced the Warmaster’s mind like a white-hot arrow, the thread of psychic communion between them so strong it killed two lesser Word Bearers beside the Witch Prince.

‘Garand! The man-filth’s ridiculous catspaw is cold meat! You promised me this elaborate charade would be a success!’

The Word Bearers commander glanced in the direction of the shambling Lord of Change, far across the battle, and bowed. ‘The fool Stele, great heirophant. I tried to control his scheming, but his vanity was his undoing.’

‘I have consumed his flesh,’ said Malfallax. ‘I know his goals. This day may still be won by us, and we may still turn the Blood Angels for our master’s pleasure.’

‘Forgive me, excellence, but how? With the boy dead, these Blood Whelps will not follow us into darkness.’

Psychic laughter battered at his senses. ‘You see only the battle to hand, Garand. There is another way.’

Realisation flooded into the Warmaster. ‘The Flaw. The gene-curse of the Baalites.’

‘Yessss,’ murmured the daemon. ‘I tasted it on Cybele through my bound psy-slaves. We will conjure it from these fools and let it consume them – and when they are deep within the black rage, I will lead them to a well of blood the likes of which they will never escape, to the very heart of the Maelstrom itself.’

Garand nodded, awed by the daring of it. ‘Your glory, Lord Malfallax.’

They made way as Rafen walked from the cathedral’s interior to the place where Arkio’s body lay. In his mailed fist, the spear glowed as it had that day on the Bellus, when the light of the primogenitor had touched every soul aboard. Gently, he curled the broken wings around his sibling’s corpse in a death shroud, while Mephiston’s men looked on in silence.

Rafen rose to find the Chief Librarian at his side. The Lord of Death proffered a thick glass injector in his hand. ‘Your wounds are severe, brother,’ said Mephiston. ‘Take this. Corbulo himself gave it to me. It will lend you the strength of the lords.’

He gathered up the exsanguinator and turned it in his fingers. Thick, heavy blood glistened inside it, drawn from the highest Sanguinary Priest of the Blood Angels Chapter. Once this blood mixed with Rafen’s own, the essence of Sanguinius would flow even stronger in his veins.

Mephiston nodded at the dead man. ‘The time has come to avenge him.’

‘It has,’ agreed Rafen, and with one single sweeping motion, he plunged the needle into his chest and emptied its contents into his heart.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

For hundreds of years the landscape of the shrine world Sabien had been silent of human voices, the desolate ruins speaking only with the mournful winds that chased dust and rain through the streets and open spaces. In its own way, Sabien was a mournful twin to the planet Cybele, a sister sphere light years distant toward the coreward marches of the galaxy. Both worlds were markers for the dead, and both had run crimson with the life of both Astartes and traitors. Fate, if such a thing existed, had cast a circular path for Rafen and his brethren to follow. Their journey into darkness had begun among tombstones and memorials, and here and now it would end among the same.

Sabien had known the unbridled passion and fury of the Sons of Sanguinius all those centuries ago, when the long-since dead had fought and perished in order to hold this planet against the legion enemies of the God-Emperor. That power had come again to the silent world, raising up against the thunder of the storm clouds in a brilliant tide of virtuous malevolence.

The Blood Angels did not simply attack, they detonated across the war zone in a wave of unfettered rage, a red tide of men plunging into the lines of the Word Bearers and the maddened helot soldiers. They rushed to the fight, rejecting the relative safety of a stand-off battle, throwing caution to the wind in shattering chants and war cries. The unholy hymns of the Chaos Space Marines were drowned out by the lusty roars of their opponents, and then by the massive crash of the two forces meeting like a hammer on an anvil. Metal on metal, chainsword against ceramite, bolter striking flesh, the hissing snap of laser fire – and the screaming. The horrible, heart-chilling screaming. All of it came together in an orchestra of unchained war. The earth quaked beneath the awesome release of mayhem and destruction.

The Blood Angels had returned to Sabien, and a crimson hell came striding with them.

Only in the crucible of close combat could a man truly understand the measure of himself. It was nothing to stand aside, in the cockpit of a fighter or behind the barrel of a ranged cannon, to press a button and watch a distant foe vanish in a puff of smoke. How could a Space Marine ever know the colour of his heart unless he stood toe to toe with his most hated enemy and took their life as they looked him in the eyes? What truth was stronger than the final moment of reckoning, when weapon matched weapon and the pulse of shed blood sang its symphony?

Mephiston knew this; it was the greatest glory of the Lord of Death’s existence to cast the aberrant and the reviled into shreds. He was at the very tip of the arrow of red ceramite that marked the Blood Angels advance, slashing through the lines of Word Bearers and the helots who dared to assault the Space Marines that towered over them. The psyker killed a man, a commoner whose mind had been addled by the Chaos demagogues, killed him with a look from his flinty, iron-hard eyes. The over-spill of Mephiston’s Quickening brushed the errant fool and stopped his heart, bursting blood vessels all over the slave trooper’s rough-hewn robes. The hot fluid spattered the psyker’s muscular body armour and droplets found their way to his cheeks. Mephiston wiped them from his pale, sallow face and licked the blood from his fingers. It was the most perfect wine, a lustrous red vintage filled with heady adrenaline. The Blood Angel’s fangs drew out over his thin lips. He was suddenly filled with the anticipation of more, more, more!

He threw aside the dead man and cut wet streaks through a Word Bearers Havoc trooper, bisecting the barrel of the lascannon he held and cutting into the pallid white meat of the enemy Space Marine’s neck. The force sword’s downward fall did not end there, blue lightning clashing and spitting into the body, severing it into unequal chunks. Black liquids issued up from the gaping voids he cut in thick, oily fountains. This was an altogether different draught, raw with the pollution of a thousand years, stinking and putrid. To let such a libation touch his lips… The very idea made Mephiston ill.

Across the falling corpse of the ruby-armoured traitor came more of the Warriors of the Reborn. All of them were throwing off their loyalty to Arkio now that the winged golden figure had been shown dead, their weak little minds turning to the eightfold way as their new saviour. So pathetic and desperate, they were.

Mephiston shouted a hate cry at them and struck out with Vitarus. He held a special place in the rage he carried for the feeble of devotion and the cowardly; these wretched mundanes were thrice damned in the eyes of the Lord of Death. They had allowed their world to be soured by a Word Bearers invasion, they had lacked even the strength of character to stay true to the Emperor’s light when Stele had brought Arkio forth as an erstwhile messiah, and now they ran gladly into the embrace of Chaos when that lie was shown to them. These Shenlongi rabble were like broken children, beaten so often by vicious parents that they had come to believe that it was a sign of love. Another man might have found pity for them in his heart, but both of Mephiston’s were filled to the brim with only vehemence. He killed them all, cutting and slashing with the sword, taking up those that did not run from him with his free hand to rip their throats from their necks. He drank from their veins to feed the predator-self inside him.

In his frenzy, the psyker glimpsed his brother Space Marines doing the same, rending and tearing, burning down the soldiers of Chaos where they stood and taking the hot, frothing blood from their screaming lackeys. A dark and potent miasma enveloped Mephiston, clouding his reason even as it thickened his wrath. He felt the red thirst beckoning him, opening up to flood the battle with its crimson mist. The black rage was welling up within him, boiling and furious, and the Blood Angels warlord tipped back his head and roared with laughter. Mephiston embraced it.

The remains of the half-eaten corpse twisted through the air and landed in a heavy heap near the base of the bomb crater where Turcio and Corvus were bogged down. Corvus shrank back, pacing shots from his bolter, barely glancing at the body. Turcio’s gut knotted as he examined the dead man. Like the carapace of some exotic shellfish, the Blood Angel’s armour had been cracked open and peeled back to reveal the meaty innards it protected. A slurry of molten bone and liquefied organ meat oozed from the holes where arms and a head would have been. There were licks of glutinous spittle and teeth marks from where the body had been turned into a food morsel.

A wet belch of blood turned Turcio’s attention up to the lip of the crater and there he saw the bloated shape of the Malfallax. It eyed him, spitting out an intact human femur from the side of its wide mouth with callous disdain. The newly assimilated flesh of the dead Space Marine bubbled to the surface of the creature’s body, merging into the panoply of glittering skins. The Lord of Change moved like oil over water, stagnant rainbow hues shimmering hypnotically. Turcio blinked furiously to shake off the mesmeric allure.

Malfallax picked at the grove of sickle teeth in its mutant mouth. ‘Stringy,’ it said, sniffing at the discarded corpse. ‘Old and tasteless.’ The beast winked at Turcio. ‘You’ll be a better catch.’

The Blood Angel refused to grace the hellspawn with even the most insulting of ripostes and shot at it instead, his bolter hammering in his hands. Malfallax growled and spat as a couple of lucky shots hit home. It moved with unnatural grace, flowing through the air rather than simply stepping through it, glittering through the constant rods of rain in a weaving dance.

‘Stele!’ spat Corvus, suddenly recognising some vague aspect of the inquisitor still apparent in the corpse-skin worn by the daemon. ‘You took him.’

‘He wanted it,’ retorted the creature, slapping aside a fallen metal stanchion. ‘The imbecile desired to know the warp… and my kin are the warp made flesh.’ It plucked at the stretched skin about its face, flapping like grotesque wattles.

Turcio and Corvus reacted without thinking, laying down corridors of concentrated fire to pin the monstrous beast between them, but the daemon whooped with wry amusement and let the bat wings at its back lift it clear. They bracketed it with shots, but again Malfallax shifted and merged into the rain, always appearing at exactly the point where the bolt-rounds were not. There in its breast glowed a green oval with a yellow disc in its centre; a boon from its god, the Eye of Tzeentch grew like a living electro-tattoo, and through it the creature glimpsed a measure of the skein of time. Malfallax saw enough of fate’s complex weave to know where the Space Marines would shoot, veering here and there to avoid the burning bullets. It was like firing at smoke.

Turcio’s gun ran dry and he twisted towards cover, but the beast was already there with unfolding talons as big as the claws of a fire scorpion. It batted him with the blunt of the nails, knocking Turcio into his battle-brother and throwing them both down into ankle-deep mire. Malfallax hooted with delight and clapped its hands together, a disturbingly human gesture for something so alien. The daemon could have easily struck with a killing blow, tearing Turcio open and eating him, but that would have been too quick, it would have lacked finesse. Malfallax loved the sensuous feeling of its new flesh husk and it wanted to revel in its play as long as it could. It opened a number of mouths across the scarred face and torso, and all of them spoke with the same arrogant and chilling voice. ‘Where is your angel now, man-prey?’ it mocked.

‘Here!’ shouted Rafen, lightning framing him in a flood of blue-white at the crater’s edge. The Space Marine pointed the Holy Lance with one outstretched hand. From the tip ran thick streams of Word Bearers blood, and the haft was steaming as it burnt out the taint of the dozens of Chaos dead it had already claimed. Malfallax spied the Spear of Telesto and let free an atonal shriek. Even the proximity of the hallowed archeotech device was enough to enrage the daemon.

‘You denied me the chance to bring my revenge to your lackey, warp scum,’ he hissed, ‘so I will grant it to you in kind.’ Rafen twirled the spear above his head and leapt into the air, turning himself into an arrow aimed at the archfiend’s beating black heart.

Malfallax’s clawed talon came up to protect itself with the speed of a striking shellsnake, catching the haft of the lance as it fell toward his chest. The carvings of Sanguinius cut into its fingers, but Rafen’s headlong flight ended with an abrupt jerk, shaking his bones. The spear pressed forward against the daemon’s grip, ready to penetrate the mutant skin; the creature held on. Rafen twisted the weapon and the tip of the teardrop blade scarred the sacred eye branded on Malfallax’s chest.

The Eye of Tzeentch wept pink liquid and popped like a burst blister, drawing a murderous howl from the daemon. Ignoring the burning agony from its own flesh, Malfallax gripped the lance hard and shook the golden rod. Before Rafen could even let go of his grip, the Lord of Change had used it to slam him into the mud. The Spear of Telesto stung him with gold fire for his viciousness and the daemon screeched again, tossing the holy weapon away into the quagmire. Rafen scrambled after it as the beast mewed, licking pitifully at the crisped ruin where its hand had been.

Turcio fumbled his last clip of ammunition into his bolter’s gaping slot and turned the muzzle on the monster. Its attention distracted by Rafen, it presented an unprotected flank to the Space Marine, and the blinded brand robbed the creature of its second sight. Hot bolts stitched blossoms of brackish blood where the hits found their marks. Necrotic skin peeled from yellowed bones, embrittled by the rapid mutation forced on them, and loops of grey intestine emerged from what had once been Ramius Stele’s abdomen.

Malfallax twitched and flashed forward, instinctively homing in on the source of the new pain. Pink fire looped about its scarred claw, and the other limb brought up the shrieking bone sword, the warp blade falling in an iridescent arc. The prismatic shimmer was a thing of beauty in its own ever-changing way, and it rooted Turcio to the spot with its majesty until the keening weapon slashed through the breech of his gun and his right forearm.

The Blood Angel was thrown back by the shock of the pain, the consecrated and hallowed icon of his bolter instantly destroyed and his severed limb spewing jets of incarnadine fluids. The reflex reaction saved him from being shredded as Malfallax followed the strike with a downward sweep of his claw. The talons tore through the pauldrons of Turcio’s armour and opened his wargear to the navel. A strong grip yanked him back. Corvus dragged Turcio by the neck ring of his torso plate, firing over his battle-brother’s stumbling form into the advancing daemon. Malfallax chewed on the bolt shells that struck it, picking the flattened humps of tungsten rounds from the holes in its chest.

There was a flurry of wet motion behind it and the beast craned its elongated neck over a crooked shoulder. Rafen rose from the mud with the spear in a two-handed grip and stabbed forward into the meat of the daemon’s exposed thigh. The sparking blade buried itself in the flesh and opened it to the air. Maggots and writhing alien parasites spilled from the cut.

Malfallax spat and turned its attention to Rafen once again. ‘Still alive?’

‘Still,’ Rafen grinned and slashed again, cutting at the creature’s hide. The daemon parried the lunges with a swipe of its freakish sword and came forward, heavy hooves punching into the churning puddles gathering in the crater. Rafen saw Corvus dragging the injured Turcio from the pit and threw them a nod.

The beast saw him do it and cackled. ‘You are persistent, human, I will grant you that, but then dogged obstinacy is a trait of the corpse-god’s kind.’ Hot breath coiled in clouds from its mouths. ‘You resist the changing way and that is why you perish.’

Rafen replied with a swooping attack, dancing the tip of the spear about the questing warp blade, slamming it in savage stabs at the daemon’s legs. It blocked every strike, trying each time to trap the Telesto weapon in the barbs that lined the edges of the sword. The Space Marine channelled his effort into the spear, letting the lance become an extension of his arms, looking beyond the apex of the glittering teardrop blade, seeing only the points where the daemon bled and wept ichor; but still it fanned the warp blade, the mesmerising arc of colour becoming a dome of mad light. He worked the spear just as he had been taught on the courtyards of the fortress-monastery, blocking, parrying, advancing, thrusting, sweeping, but never gaining more than a cursory bite from the monster’s flesh. In his mailed grip, the raw energy of the spear hummed and pulsed inside the ornate shaft and golden crossguard, throbbing with power every time it cut into Malfallax – but still it would not respond to him as it had to his brother Arkio.

There had been a moment there on the rooftop of the ruined cathedral, after he threw Arkio’s body to the throng below, when Rafen had thought the Holy Lance was about to open its secrets to him. It glowed in his hands, lighting the world around him. For a fleeting instant, Rafen had known the thrill of connection with the Spear of Telesto, just as Arkio must have, just as the lord Sanguinius himself did in the ancient conflict with Morroga. But it fled as quickly as the flashes of lightning in the steel-grey sky overhead. The lance was a superlative weapon, perfectly balanced and keen enough to slice a hair down its centre; but unless he could unlock its inner power, it was only a relic.

How? he demanded of himself. How can I open the spear to my will? Arkio had been changed beyond all normality and the Pure One himself… There was no way that Rafen could compare himself to the Angelic Sovereign. He parried another flurry of violent strikes by the daemon, and one too quick to dodge severed a nest of power conduits on his trunk. He felt the icy cold as super-cooled liquid spurted from his damaged backpack. Patches of frost formed on Rafen’s backside and thigh, turning the ceramite and plasteel brittle. The daemon slashed through a toppled stone column to snap at the Blood Angel and he avoided the blow with only a hand’s span to spare.

Rafen swore angrily, half in frustration at himself, half in adrenaline-fuelled hate for the Malfallax, and took off a strip of skin from the beast’s shoulder, forcing it to stagger backward. It released a gush of cerise flame from its hand, the roseate fire turning broken stone to slag, crawling over the tilled earth like a live thing. A spark of hard rage stiffened Rafen’s heart as he attacked again – and the spear responded with him, suddenly melting into his assault, flowing with the press of his muscles. Brief, tiny flares of gold sparks chased each other down the length of the haft. Sudden realisation shook him: the rage! The gene-curse was the key!

Malfallax’s eyes for the future were blinded but the beast still knew how to play the harp of the fates. All things were under the motion of invisible strings that ranged from birth to death, past to present; they pulled all life and matter like wayward marionettes. This man-thing, this Blood Angel, was as much at the mercy of clockwork destiny as were the stars in the sky, the falling rains, the rising and setting of Sabien’s sun. With the paingift of its master denied, the Malfallax’s sight of the human whelp’s fate was cloudy, but it knew there were many outcomes where Rafen lay dead and ruined, far more of those than the ones where he stood in victory or where he turned to worship of Chaos Undivided. The daemon knew how the Space Marine fought, it had toyed with him and watched his motions. It saw the hesitation telegraphed in his moves, the resistance of the lance in his hands. Rafen was ill at ease with the deadly, pestilent, hateful spear – so Malfallax would use that against him.

In Rafen’s split-second instant of indecision, the creature caught the weapon in a toothed niche in the warp blade and twisted. The alien sword sang and left nicks in space-time as it drew back and up, dragging the Spear of Telesto from Rafen’s shocked grip before he could react to halt it. Malfallax thrust him back with a pulse of pink fire and tossed the Holy Lance away. It spun into the wet ooze and started to sink.

The Blood Angel beat at the writhing hellfire and stumbled, aware of the chorus of noises around him. Sounds coiled over the arena of the bomb crater in waves, the shrieking of dying men mingled with shot and shell, harsh thunder and sacrilegious war prayers.

‘A poor adversary,’ rumbled the daemon. ‘Such limited sport. Perhaps the mind-witch Mephiston will provide a better challenge, or even your wastrel Lord Dante…’

Rafen’s anger flooded out of him like a torrent from a broken dam. ‘Chaos bastard! I’ll choke you on those words.’

‘With what?’ it demanded. ‘Come, little man-prey, attack me with tooth and claw, if you believe that will make your death have more meaning.’

With a rush of speed, the Malfallax shimmered toward him, fast as mercury. The warp blade spun about in its grip and the calcite stone of the heavy pommel whacked him in the face, splitting his skin and lighting fireworks of pain inside his skull. Rafen staggered backwards and fell. The beast-thing advanced. It towered over him, blocking out the light from the myriad battle fires and the sheets of white in the tortured sky. The burnt, meat-stinking claw pressed Rafen into the cold mud, holding him there so the daemon could finish him with one last slash of the bony sword.

‘The spear rejects you,’ it chuckled, jerking its head at the bubbling mud pool. ‘You are a failure to your Chapter, Blood Angel, just like your craven brother.’

The pressure pulled all the air from Rafen’s chest and with it a final, heartfelt denial. ‘No,’ he hissed, pulling together the burning embers of his blood-tinged fury. ‘No! No!’ Throughout his service to the Adeptus Astartes, Rafen had restrained the black rage within him, holding the reins of the red thirst, never once allowing it to overwhelm his rigid, unbending self-control; now he gave it the freedom it wanted so badly, unleashing the bestial frenzy that was the darkest secret of the Blood Angels.

The red thirst unfurled about him in a storm of seething crimson, a fog of bloodlust madness descending on the Space Marine. The raw energy of his primarch set a flash-fire in his veins, the traces of Sanguinius’s genetic code engorged with preternatural power. The heady cocktail of Astartes blood and the potent flood of vigour from the Lord of Death’s blood-gift merged into Rafen, filling him with a fury that blazed with unbound, inchoate hate.

The ropes of fate unwound before Malfallax, spinning and snapping in his blinded mind’s eye. Impossible!

Rafen roared and broke free of the beast’s grip, shattering claws as big as scimitars and ripping scabbed skin into rags. He moved at the speed of wrath, an unstoppable bullet of red. The Space Marine’s spirit plunged into the rage-sea about him, and there he found the glittering beacon of the Holy Lance. From the slime of the mud swamp, the weapon flew to him, crossing the distance to his waiting grip in an eye-blink. Golden fire, shards of lightning dazzling like fragments of suns, ripped from the air and collected at the hollow heart of the teardrop blade. The weapon was awake, the beating pulse of the sacred spear tasting Rafen’s holy anger and knowing it as true.

Malfallax launched itself at him, leading with warp blade, opening rents in reality with cerise darts of fire; it threw the veil of the Twisting Path at the Blood Angel, but every attack fluttered and died against the glory of the Telesto lance. The daemon saw its fate-path curl into black formlessness and cried out in despair.

A wash of mellifluent light flared, and for a brief moment Rafen’s battle-ravaged crimson wargear was replaced with golden armour, crested with wings made of white steel. The righteous vengeance of his primogenitor stared out from Rafen’s ice-blue eyes and carried retribution into the Chaos spawn’s heart.

The Spear of Telesto entered the Malfallax’s chest and sank into the writhing morass of corruption inside. Rafen pressed forward, forcing the blade through the beast’s gut, up through the decayed lungs and organ matter, piercing the withered black meat of its heart. The creature screamed to the clouds, and still the Blood Angel advanced, pressing the haft of the weapon into the dying enemy until the teardrop burst from Malfallax’s back, between his drooping, bloodless wings.

‘I… am… undeath!’ it sputtered. ‘You cannot kill a child of the warp.’

‘Begone!’ Rafen bellowed, his fangs flashing. ‘Your cursed realm awaits!’

‘Aaaaaaaaa–’ Malfallax’s death rattle was deafening from its dozen mouths. ‘You have not won,’ spat some of them. ‘Your rage will be your ending–’

‘Die!’ Rafen shouted, one final shove of the spear cutting the daemon’s link to its fleshy vessel. Streaks of sizzling ectoplasm burst out of Stele’s carcass, ripping away through the blood-misted air and flashing into nothing; glistening jags of ethereal warp matter, unable to sustain permanence for even a second on the human plane of reality, banged and vanished, taking the weave of the creature’s wrecked self screaming back into the madness of the immaterium.

The mutant body turned to powdery black stone, trapping the lance inside a deformed statue. Rafen tore at the spear and it went hot in his grip, giving out a shock wave of heat that obliterated the ashen form.

‘Wait,’ he cried, a sudden shadow of fear passing through him; but his call came too late. Like a tornado made of nails, the black ash exploded outward in a perfect concentric ring, each tiny particle of the contaminated matter impregnated with the void-born antipathy of the Ruinous Powers. A surge of mad hate passed through Rafen and threw him into the air. The tide of rancour moved over the square, touching every single Blood Angel on the surface of Sabien, tearing the veneer of humanity from each of them, debasing the Space Marines. The noble character and high honour of the Sons of Sanguinius fled before a madness that made them all animals. Malfallax’s laughter echoed as his death curse exposed the insanity of the Flaw in his enemies, and to a man they fell into the horrific grip of the red thirst.

It was not battle; it was butchery.

Among the gales of driving rain and cracks of thunder, men fell in their dozens under the frenzy of the Blood Angels. Still-beating hearts were torn from the chests of helot troopers and crushed like ripe fruits, the nectar of heavy arterial blood drained into gaping, hungry mouths. Blood Angels nuzzled at the throats of corpses, fans of crimson covering their chins and necks, barking and growling at one another like jackals fighting over fresh carrion. Lakes of vitae poured into the square, turning the damp air sharp with the rusty, metallic tang of its scent. Blood, blood and blood; there was no end to it, torrents of the rich red fluid slicking the mud around the feet of the combatants.

The errant slave warriors were not the only ones to come to murder by the rage of the maddened Astartes; Word Bearers found themselves shocked silent from their impious revels as the Sons of Sanguinius threw all caution to the wind and fell on them in waves. The Blessed of Lorgar faced foes that were little more than a force of nature now, a living, breathing, killing storm of men without fear or compunction. The Blood Angels were berserkers, spirits of scarlet destruction that gave no quarter and asked none in return.

Warmaster Garand shot hellbolts into the bodies of the red-armoured Astartes that came in range, but the death’s head shells did little to stop the crazed tide. Blood Angels with limbs missing and great fists of meat torn from them still roared on in battle frenzy, the light of humanity inside them extinguished by the Malfallax’s parting gift, its ruinous hate wave. The Witch Prince of Helica had seen this sort of behaviour on the battlefield before, but never from a human opponent. In his forays into the Eye of Terror and sorties where the Word Bearers found themselves matched with other followers of the eightfold way, Garand had been cursed with the misfortune to fight alongside the World Eaters. Madmen among a culture of psychotics, the berzerker bands killed ally and foe alike in their unending lust to claim skulls for the Skull Throne of the Blood God. The Warmaster saw the same stripe of insanity here and now among the Astartes legion, a revelry in the slaughter for slaughter’s sake.

‘They fight like Khorne himself,’ grated one of Garand’s lieutenants. ‘I have never seen the like…’

‘I have,’ spat Garand, and he snarled with anger. ‘The warp take this blighted scheme. That daemon wretch has fled the field.’

Hymnals from the Unhallowed Books were turned into gurgling screams as the wild Blood Angels assault touched the Word Bearers line and necks were torn open. Garand watched in fury as a squad of his handpicked aspirants vanished under a surge of red armour, falling like cut timbers.

‘Lord. Lord!’ cried a voice, and he glanced down from his vantage point as a war-priest crashed toward him through the melee. ‘Lord, the veil has closed to us!’

In his anger, Garand grabbed the Word Bearer and dragged him to his eye level. ‘Speak plainly, fool.’

The Space Marine writhed in his grip. ‘Our summonings have been ended, Lord. Every daemonform we called to be for the battle has fallen dead and inert!’

‘Malfallax.’ Garand released the war-priest, cursing the Lord of Change’s name over and over. ‘That pestilent wraith. This is his doing!’

‘But how?’ demanded the lieutenant.

Garand swept his hand about. ‘It drew back its essence when the host-body perished, and with it all the warp-matter from the field of battle. Nothing remains. We are becalmed, lost to the empyrean here.’ He shoved the war-priest aside and snatched at his lieutenant. ‘Our battle here is ended. Rally. Rally!’

‘Lord, you cannot mean to–’

‘Retreat?’ The word thundered from his lips. ‘The mad ones cannot be stopped by our numbers, fool.’ He tore a rod-shaped teleport beacon from the Space Marine’s belt. ‘We go.’

‘No,’ sputtered the war-priest, his ardour overwhelming his better reason. ‘Ever forward, never back! That is the Word Bearers code. We do not retreat.’

Garand struck him with a brutal punch and threw him aside. ‘Imbecile! Leave these freaks to themselves and what will they kill? Each other.’

‘No…’

The Warmaster pressed the activation glyph and felt the warm tingle of the Misericorde’s teleporters reaching for him. His last action on Sabien was to shoot the war-priest in the leg and leave him there for the madmen; punishment enough for daring to speak against the Witch Prince.

Mephiston did not notice the departure of the Word Bearers. Some, those who were injured or none too quick to run for the glowing bubbles of the teleport fields, died the moment they turned their backs on the Blood Angels, their meat and their armour joining the endless slurry of corpses littering the ruined landscape. Perhaps, in some far distant corner of his night-black soul, the part of Mephiston that was still the man who had been Brother Calistarius existed. That tiny fragment of lucidity cried and screamed for the red thirst to abate, desperately trying and failing to halt Mephiston’s headlong rush into the bosom of the black rage.

On Armageddon, the Lord of Death had been transformed after seven days and seven nights of wrestling the gene-curse, but now even his iron will had snapped, caught in the maelstrom of bloodlust that filled his soul. He was not conscious of the hot weapons in his hands, only that he could kill and kill and kill with them, unstoppable and furious in the glory of it.

‘Mephiston!’

The name meant nothing to him; he had no identity now, only an all-consuming hate.

‘Mephiston, heed me. Reject the darkness.’ A red shape moved into his blurred vision. ‘Reject it!’

With an incoherent howl, Mephiston dropped his force sword on the man-form, seeing only the pulsing flesh and hearing the beat of a warm heart inside. The mindblade Vitarus met a rod of golden light and stopped dead, the power of the impact rocking the Lord of Death back on his heels. Fangs flared, Mephiston pressed against the glittering haft and for the first time, he saw who dared to defy him.

Rafen crossed the Holy Lance, blinking away the sparks that emerged where Mephiston’s sword scraped back and forth. The barbed tip of the blade was at Rafen’s neck and he felt the icy cold of the crystalline blade touch his skin and open it. The Space Marine’s blood pooled in the lee of his clavicle and glistened on the sword tip.

‘Raaaaaaa!’ There was no humanity in the Lord of Death’s gaze.

‘Mephiston!’ It was the Spear of Telesto that had protected him, Rafen was sure of it. When Malfallax’s hate had consumed all his battle-brothers, he alone kept his mind intact, the warm touch of the lance clearing his vision of the suffocating rage. It was he alone who could stem the tide of the madness, before his comrades tore each other apart. ‘Step back from the abyss. In the name of Sanguinius, release your rage!’

Golden light gushed from the spear and struck Mephiston like a physical blow. He staggered backward, his sword falling away, the dull glitter of insanity cast from his sight. All around them, the roars of frenzy and murder subsided into the rushing murmur of the rains. The water sluiced spilt blood from the Librarian’s face and chest as he looked up from his hands and into Rafen’s eyes.

‘You…’ It was difficult for Mephiston to speak at first, the words hard and heavy in his fogged mind. ‘You reclaimed me from the brink… How?’

The spear’s bright colours began to fade, growing quiescent. ‘I do not know,’ Rafen admitted. ‘I was only the instrument. My hand was guided…’

The warrior-psyker shook off the lingering taint of the thirst and shuttered it away deep within. He watched Rafen examine the silent lance, his mailed fingers tracing the shape of the carving of their primarch. The lad had, for one moment, touched the soul of the most holy weapon, and with it he had drawn his kinsmen back from the edge of a soul-killing void. Although his expression betrayed nothing, inwardly Mephiston marvelled at the potential of one who was so blessed with the touch of the Pure One.

EPILOGUE

The sky had begun to rain ruby tears when the rescue ships blasted down through the cloud cover. The grim faces of the Space Marines from the Europae told the tale of their inner thoughts. They saw the carnage that lay about in the city streets and did not speak of it. None of them would shame their brothers by asking after what had taken place there beneath the curtain of grey clouds, while the battle barge and the Chaos warship went back and forth with salvos of laser fire and missiles.

Rafen watched as Mephiston accepted the report of a veteran sergeant with a solemn, serious mien. A lucky hit from the Europae’s main guns had torn open a wound in the Misericorde that vented directly into her weapon store, and the red-hued battleship had been hobbled. There had come a moment, the sergeant said, when something peculiar happened to the Word Bearers ship; the codicers and Librarians aboard Europae had cried out as one when the shock of something horrible resonated out from the shrine world below, a spillage of a black and potent evil. Misericorde had felt the undertow from the warp schism as well and things had died aboard the enemy ship from the pain of the passing. It was all the barge’s captain had needed to press the advantage, and soon after the Word Bearers, the proud and arrogant demagogues who swore they would never fall back, disengaged from the fight and made best speed to the outer face of the debris ring. Her engines damaged, Europae was unfit to catch the Chaos craft and so the crew watched Misericorde reach free space and fall into the phantasm of a skull-formed warpgate. The snarling face hung in the dark for long seconds and then faded.

Rafen glanced at the dull sky and then to the Librarian. ‘Is this victory, Lord Mephiston?’

The Lord of Death walked away toward the waiting Thunderhawks. ‘For now,’ he said quietly.

They stayed in orbit for another solar week while the Chapter serfs and indentured crew expedited Europae’s repairs. Task forces of Space Marines expert in vacuum environments were sent out into the disc of fragments that marked the site of Bellus’s infernal death, charged with searching the wreckage for any survivors or materials of interest to the Chapter. Those few sealed escape pods that were found contained panicked groups of Shenlongi citizens, members of Arkio’s thousand who had broken when the fighting had started.

The Blood Angels treated them in the manner of all enemies of the Imperium, offering them the choice of bolter or airlock. Most chose the former, weeping on their knees in the name of Rafen’s brother as they died from point-blank headshots. One of the teams located the hardened steel module from the interior of Bellus that housed the ship’s progenoid capsules. Many of the clerics aboard Europae were of the opinion that the gene-seeds were tainted and fit only for the fires of the fusion furnace, but Mephiston spoke otherwise. The vital organs were placed in secure holding for the journey back to Baal; it would be Lord Commander Dante alone who would decide the fate of the pods of genetic matter.

Rafen thought on this and wondered. Did his old mentor Koris’s soul still hide somewhere in his progenoid gland? And what of Bennek, Simeon and the others? Would they live again one day, or be cursed by proximity to Arkio’s insurrection?

The Blood Angel knelt in a small sub-chancel off the central transept of the Europae’s main chapel. The vast chamber mirrored the one aboard the Bellus in line and form, although the decoration, the stained glass and the scripture across the walls and mosaic floor were different. Being there made Rafen feel strangely displaced: it was almost as if he were in some parallel world, an alternate version of the now where paths had been different and outcomes altered. He heard footsteps approaching behind him and raised his head, for one giddy moment expecting to see Arkio coming toward him – not the golden, winged avatar, but the strong, proud Space Marine he had met on Cybele.

Mephiston slowed to a halt and nodded to Rafen. The psyker’s battle armour was absent now, and instead he wore the sacred robes of his high order. ‘Brother,’ he said, by way of greeting.

Rafen returned a slow nod. ‘My lord.’ He went to stand, but Mephiston shook his head, and bade him remain where he was. ‘What do you wish of me?’

For a moment, the psyker was silent. ‘We lick our wounds, Rafen, in our own ways we heal and move on. The Chaplains tell me you have not left the chapel in days.’

‘No,’ Rafen admitted. ‘I felt it… necessary.’

‘Many would agree. After the ceremonies for the fallen and the rituals of purgation, your battle-brothers have spoken to me of the need to expunge this sorry incident from our chronicles.’

‘That would be a mistake,’ Rafen said quietly. ‘To do that would mean we have learned nothing.’

Mephiston continued. ‘The ship is ready to depart, and I have ordered the astropaths to make space for Shenlong. It will be… necessary to expunge any lasting traces of the heretic Stele’s plans.’

‘You will destroy the forge-world.’ It was not a question.

‘Exterminatus,’ breathed the Librarian. ‘A sad but inevitable conclusion.’ He glanced up at the altar in the main section of the chapel. Held in a magnetic field bottle was the Spear of Telesto, quiet now but still dazzling as it slowly turned about its own axis.

‘Am I to share that fate as well?’ Rafen asked in a level voice. ‘I am no more or less tainted than the people of that wretched sphere.’

‘Some would argue thus,’ Mephiston admitted. ‘There are voices from Baal that counsel your execution along with the loyalist survivors gathered from Sabien. They are afraid that you may take the same path as Arkio. The knowledge that you were able to wield the Holy Lance…’

‘Briefly, lord. Only briefly.’

The psyker eyed him. ‘Indeed. But cooler heads have prevailed. Your dedication and honour to our Chapter, however unorthodox, was unparalleled. Commander Dante will give you an audience when we make home port, but rather than hold until that day, he has given me leave to grant you a field promotion in respect of your selflessness. The leadership of a full company of men is yours. The late Captain Simeon’s command, the Sixth.’

Rafen let out a breath. ‘With your permission, lord, I must respectfully decline Commander Dante’s great accolade.’

‘You refuse?’

He nodded. ‘If I am to earn captaincy, it will be on my terms. I do not feel I deserve such rank… not yet.’

‘Then what am I to do with you, lad? This will not sit well.’

The Space Marine looked up at the Librarian. ‘May I ask a favour instead, then?’

‘Name it.’

‘I ask for mercy, lord. Grant clemency and compassion to my battle-brothers who strayed, those who followed my sibling unwittingly.’ He thought of Turcio and Corvus as they had been brought aboard Europae stripped of their wargear and in manacles. ‘Their only error was to be blinded by their belief in Sanguinius. Their faith was turned against them and misused. They are not to blame.’

Mephiston considered his request. ‘There are rites of cleansing and purification that might be employed… They are quite arduous. Many would not survive.’

‘They will,’ said Rafen, ‘and their faith will be twice as strong for it.’ He got to his feet and approached the altar. As Mephiston watched, the Space Marine reached into the mag-field and ran his bare hand over the haft of the spear. He gripped the lance and for a moment, Rafen felt the weight of it in his hands once again. He peered at the teardrop blade – the metal seemed to run and shift in the light, glistening with the blood of the dead upon it.

‘What do you see?’ asked the Lord of Death.

Rafen saw dark red there, and he knew that it was his brother’s blood upon the blade, glittering and then gone. ‘Great Angel, hear me,’ he whispered. ‘Take my brother Arkio to your side, bring him to the Emperor’s right hand. Forgive his folly and forgive mine. This I beseech you.’ He bowed his head. ‘My life and my soul for the God-Emperor, for Sanguinius… For the Blood Angels.’

He closed his eyes, and there in the depths of his soul, he felt the mark of his liege lord, indelible and bright as a golden sun.

In the blackness, Misericorde limped onward, gushing gas and vital fluids into the vacuum of space, slowly bleeding to death as it crawled ever closer to the Maelstrom and the lair of the Word Bearers. Garand smacked at the chirurgeon-servitor attending to the damage on his arm and stood up. The writhing energies of the ship’s teleporter had turned the Warmaster’s limb into a distorted mess of bone and muscle. He had already killed the serf responsible for the error by feeding it to the two-headed monstrosity that had been three of his best Space Marines… At least, before the botched beam-out from Sabien.

At his feet, Garand’s personal vox-servitor cowered. He had allowed the slave to keep some measure of its personality when he had taken it for his retinue. It made little sense to the Warmaster to have servants that could not be afraid of him. ‘What?’ he demanded of it.

‘A signal from the Eye, your darkness,’ it chattered. ‘The burning psy-mark upon the message bears the loathsome sigil of his most foul and hateful self, the Despoiler of Worlds.’

‘Abaddon,’ Garand said, suddenly weary. He ignored the squealing of the servitor as he openly uttered the High Warmaster’s name. ‘Of course.’ The Word Bearer laughed with harsh, brittle humour. ‘And what am I to say to him? Tell me, little man-slave, how I shall phrase my words to inform the Despoiler that the allies promised him for the Thirteenth Black Crusade have been denied? With what sweet lies do I conceal the failure of the Malfallax and Stele… and myself?’

‘I… I do not–’

‘Silence!’ roared Garand. ‘I alone survive. I alone must take the blame!’ As quickly as it had arisen, the Warmaster’s anger subsided. ‘Bring my death-shroud. I will have need of it.’

The formless realm of warp space could turn a man insane at the sight of it. The frothing mass of alien energies defied the minds of organic lifeforms. It was a raw landscape of twisted emotion, peaks and troughs cut from the stuff of nightmares. In this small pocket of the immaterium, in the churning and unknowable hell that was the nest of the dread Malfallax, screams and shrieks of anger built cages of hate from the psychoactive matter. The disembodied consciousness of the daemon, wounded by the brutal severing of its link to Stele’s host-corpse, hooted and howled its pain to the endless mad vista. Its towering fury would last for uncountable ages – but then in the warp, time had no meaning and correlation to other realities.

There would come a moment when the Malfallax would calm enough to begin conceiving of revenges both subtle and gross, nursing an anger that only the most inhuman could contain. An anger directed at one man, at the single being who brought its complex schemes to ruin.

One day, there would be a reckoning for the costs of the Malfallax, and every Blood Angel would pay a thousand times over for the daemon’s defeat at Rafen’s hand.

REDEEMED

A fall of night, red as rust and blood, followed the transporter.

It ranged up high over the scoured, mirror-bright line of the main rail, casting a wall of shadow out beyond the prow of the train as the line of five carriages snaked across the desert. A tokamak reactor in the heart of the engine car at the rear of the coaches propelled them at breakneck speeds, surging down the straightaways, wheels skirling and gushing sparks on the curves as it raced to stay ahead of the storm front.

The razorwinds had come in fast, gathering up sharp dust and stones as large as a man’s fist from the plains of the Oxide Desert. Turbulent and deadly, the sandstorms could flense the flesh from an unprotected body in moments, turning dust into blades and flecks of gravel into bullets. They were a fact of life on the planet Baal, drawn into existence by the complex tidal pulls of its two large moons and their intertwined orbits. Even now, Baal Secundus lurked low in the late day sky, reflecting the ruddy light of the far sun, watching the train run like the eye of a patient hunter.

The rails spread like web threads across Baal’s surface, radiating out from the starport at Arch Rock, connecting to the great Fortress Monastery of the Blood Angels at Mount Seraph, the relical donjons at Sangre, and elsewhere to all the satellite compounds and facilities the Chapter maintained on their homeworld. It was a system borne out of necessity; the cruel weather patterns of the desert planet often grounded atmospheric craft and the sands slowed ground vehicles, while the trains could forge their way through all but the harshest of hurricanes. Still, it did not do to tempt fate, and the Chapter serf driving the engine opened the throttle a little more as the leading edge of the winds buffeted the trailing coach.

Inside the sun-seared bare metal of the carriages, there was little but freight, rows of storage pods and supply modules bound for the terminal at the end of the line. There were just three passengers on this run, and they had been granted an entire car to themselves. For them, and their singular cargo.

They were Adeptus Astartes, all three brothers of the Blood Angels Chapter. The elder two were Sternguard veterans, men of taciturn character who took their duties seriously. Neither had shown their faces since they boarded the train at the Fortress, their crowskull helmets perpetually scanning the interior of the carriage and the item they were watching over.

The third passenger wondered if they had been communicating on a private vox channel that he had not been invited to join. He went unhooded, his helm maglocked to the thigh plate of his armour, just below his bolt pistol’s battered holster. His attempts to engage them in conversation had been met with terse, single-word utterances, and finally he had given up. They had continued on for hours with only the rattle and grind of the wheels beneath them as accompaniment.

Brother Rafen let his attention drift to the scratched glassaic port and the view of the deep desert flashing past beyond it, and he wondered: what did they think of me?

The hard and damning truth about what had transpired on the planet Sabien, the confrontation that almost became a civil war among the Blood Angels, the deaths from Space Marine fighting Space Marine: these things were still ghostly and yet to be fully revealed to the rank and file of the Chapter. And yet, some element of the truth found its way out in barrack-room word and suspicion. Many had seen the Europae return wounded from the engagement against the traitorous Word Bearers, and battle-brothers in similar condition. Men talked – it was inevitable. Rafen had been told that Chapter Master Dante would issue a formal statement within a few days, but in the meantime men talked, and they wondered.

If they knew the truth, would they speak to me then? He asked himself. Or would they distrust me even more than they do now? Rafen pushed the questions away. It served nothing to dwell on such thoughts. He was here because there was one final duty he needed to perform. A ritual, of sorts, although not one that would be found in any books of catechism or battle rites.

His gaze was drawn back, inexorably, to the load that shared the carriage. A steel-grey titanium tube some three metres in length, hinged along its long axis and lined with warding runes, the container was suspended in the air by flexing cables strung from the walls, ceiling and floor of the rail car. It swayed gently with the motion of the train, the lines chiming as they alternately pulled taut and relaxed.

There were three personal seals next to the bloodlock that held the container closed, parchment tapes dangling from them. He could see the golden mark of Dante’s signet next to that of the High Librarian, Mephiston, and Brother Corbulo of the priesthood. There should have been a fourth, the mark of Sepharan of the Sanguinary Guard, but the praetorians had not been present on Baal when Rafen had come home with this prize. He heard tell that Sepharan and his men had been deployed into the Eye of Terror on a mission of great and secret import, but it was only a rumour.

More rumour, he mused. The enemy of fact. Rafen felt the sudden need to be sure of something, and he rose quickly, drawing the sharp attention of the veterans. Without pause, he advanced to the container.

The other warriors exchanged a silent glance, and their hands went to their bolters. They did not raise them; it was not yet a challenge. But when he reached for the burnished steel surface, from the corner of his eye he saw a gun muzzle shift slightly.

‘Step away, brother,’ said a grim voice.

‘You do not give me orders,’ Rafen replied, without looking up. On the forearm of his power armour he bore a recently applied chevron of yellow, designating the rank of brother-sergeant that had been newly awarded to him on the voyage back from Sabien. Despite the seniority of the Sternguard and their laurels, by technicality he outranked them both. He pulled off his gauntlet and laid his bare hand on the container.

Nothing. He wasn’t sure what he had expected to feel – some answering pulse of warmth, perhaps? Some echo of the magnificent power he had briefly experienced on the battlefield? Rafen wanted to open the container, but the veterans would never permit that, even if he could defeat the bloodlock.

Rafen felt conflicted. He was here on Master Dante’s sufferance, and likely then only because Lord Mephiston had spoken in support of his request. That last fact troubled him in a way he found it hard to articulate. The Lord of Death saw things with his witchsight that no man or transhuman could know, and it made Rafen uneasy to think that the Librarian had seen something in him.

But this… this strange, almost funereal obligation that Rafen had imposed upon himself, was the last line of connection between him and his sibling, Arkio.

Poor Arkio, dead upon the steps of a ruined shrine-world cathedral. Poor Arkio, unknowingly corrupted by the forces of Chaos. Rafen’s brother in blood, not just in battle-name, dead at his hand for the price of his Chapter’s deliverance. The promise to their long-perished father to protect his kindred had been broken, while his oath to the Emperor of Mankind remained whole.

Rafen drew back his hand and looked at the scarred, calloused skin of his fingers. For a moment, the red sunlight reflecting off the desert through the window made it appear as if his hand had been dipped in blood. Then the instant passed as he sensed the train making a wide turn, its forward velocity slowing.

‘We are approaching the Regio,’ said the other veteran.

‘Aye,’ Rafen relented, and turned away.

Baal was a world of extremes, from its frozen polar regions, heavy with dense metallic snows, to the searing radioactive belt of the equator, and much of its surface could barely be considered habitable by human standards. It was a landscape of sparse, desolate places, the legacy of a long-ago atomic war only remembered by the stubs of obliterated cities, lying like broken memorial stones in the places where the rust-sands had not engulfed them.

Thousands of years ago, in the deep erg where not even the hardiest of native tribal nomads would dare to venture, the first Techmarines of the Blood Angels had built the complex known as Regio Quinquaginta-Unus. Its High Gothic name drawn from an ancient Terran legend, the Regio was their holdfast outside the great Fortress Monastery. From orbit, it could be seen at the heart of a skein of lines cut into the desert, which traced the twenty-kilometre long design of a droplet of blood. The facility’s uppermost level was a ferrocrete disc dotted with landing bays and portals, ringed with stark battlements and bristling with guns. This was only the face it showed the world, however. The bones of the Regio extended far down and out into the crust of Baal, sprawling into a network beneath the burning wilderness like the taproots of cacti. There were hundreds of sublevels and countless kilometres of tunnels, cavernous chambers and blocks of habitat and research units. Many of the deepest tiers had not felt the tread of human feet for hundreds of years.

Here, the Blood Angels of the Armoury, under the command of Brother Incarael, the Master of the Blade, kept their machine-works where the weapons and vehicles of the Chapter were maintained and sanctified for their eternal service in the Emperor’s name. An army of Techmarines, Chapter serfs and indentured artificers preserved the legacy of the Chapter’s precious wargear. It was the minds of the Regio’s genii who had crafted weapons such as the Angelus boltgun. They sustained the slumber of the Chapter’s Dreadnoughts between wars and preserved the treasured Standard Template Construct device that allowed the Blood Angels to build the unique mark of Baal-pattern Predator tanks. More than once, the rare STC had been the target of avarice from within and without the Imperium, and the Techmarines of the Regio guarded it aggressively.

The complex performed one other function. It was also a trophy house for weapons and technology deemed too important, or too dangerous, to be displayed openly in the reliquaries of the Fortress Monastery; it was said that between fighting alongside their battle brothers and engaging in their sacred duties, the Techmarines of the Armoury conducted works into the study of enemy armaments and archeotech so as to sharpen the combat edge of their kinsmen.

Rafen watched the crenels and watchtowers of the Regio rise from the sands as the transporter drew closer, following the silver rail toward the yawning mouth of an entrance tunnel. Watery shimmers of heat rose off the desert all around, giving the complex a ghostly cast despite the oncoming glower of the razorwind.

A flicker of movement caught his eye. Up on a raised landing disc, a workgang of helots were drawing a segmented dome over a winged vessel parked there, as protection from the approaching storm. It wasn’t a standard craft like the Thunderhawks or Stormravens in use by the Chapter, more like the guncutters favoured by fringer crews and privateers. Rafen was struck by the livery of the ship as it vanished from his sight. The hull had been painted a red so dark it was almost black.

Then the train passed out of the waning day and into the unlit depths of the entrance tunnel. He felt the occulobe implants in his eyes tense as they immediately adjusted for the sharp drop in ambient light. The carriages rattled and growled as speed bled away to nothing. With a final hissing of brakes, the transporter rolled to a halt and great hatches in the walls of the rail cars fell open like ramps to allow servitors to begin the unloading cycle.

The Space Marine took a step toward the platform, looking around, taking it in. Rafen had never visited the Regio before, and it seemed a stark contrast to the ornate interiors of the Fortress Monastery. The complex had a heavy, brutalist ethic to its design, every surface sharply-cut from dense stone, blocky in form and function. There was no lack of regalia, but it was more martial, more practical than the elaborate ornaments of Chapter and honour in the Grand Annex, the great audience hall and the Silent Cloister. The first thing he saw were the twinned insignia of the Blood Angels and the Adeptus Mechanicus; the winged blood droplet of the Chapter was several scales bigger than the cyborg skull-and-cogwheel, and stood placed above it in symbolic recognition of who held superiority over this world.

‘Like battle-forged steel, our loyalty endures,’ said a voice, gruff with the effect of a vox-coder implant.

Rafen turned to see the approach of an Adeptus Astartes in red armour; not the vitae incarnadine of the Blood Angels, but something harsher, like the warning crimson of an alert sigil. Only one part of his wargear, his left shoulder pauldron, was the correct colour. It sported the Chapter’s insignia, but trimmed with a cog-tooth edging that repeated in other places over the other warrior’s armour.

The Techmarine made no move to doff his helmet, but he gave a small bow to the sergeant. The motion seemed strangely elaborate. The other Blood Angel’s power armour was equipped with a heavy, complex array of servo-arms emerging from his backpack, and they moved slightly as he did. Two of them ended in large manipulator claws, while a third sported the thick drum of a tool module. He carried no visible weapons.

‘I am Brother Krixos, warsmith of the Chapter arsenal,’ he intoned. ‘Welcome to the Regio, Sergeant Rafen. The Master of the Blade sends his regards, but I regret that issues of duty compel him to be elsewhere. I will be standing in his stead for the completion of this… this obligation.’

Rafen frowned at that but said nothing. The intentions of the Techmarine cadre were sometimes difficult to fathom. It was not a question of distrust – these warriors were Adeptus Astartes and Blood Angels to their marrow – but more one of dissimilarity. Every battle brother who set foot on the road to the rank of warsmith was first sent to the dominions of Mars, where he was trained by the priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus in the arcane lore of machine-spirits and technologia. They were as much servants of the Emperor upon the Golden Throne as they were adherents to the Cult of the Machine God; the Mechanicus cog-and-skull device on Krixos’s armour signified as such, showing the Techmarine’s dual fealty to his birth Chapter and his teachers. It was true to say that the kindred who called the Regio home stood aside from other Blood Angels because of who they were.

The emerald lenses of Krixos’s helmet stared impassively back at Rafen. His headgear was an unusually modified piece, thick with armour plates and additional sensor pits, lacking the fierce breath grille of Rafen’s Mark VII Aquila-pattern helm. Krixos turned slightly to beckon a heavy-set servitor with lifter blades instead of arms, and the helot ambled past Rafen, up into the carriage where it set to work taking on the weight of the container. The two Sternguard stood warily aside, maintaining their silence. Their job is done, Rafen reflected.

Krixos seemed to sense his line of thought. ‘I take stewardship of the weapon,’ he announced, in a formal, final tone. ‘You may return to the Fortress and rest assured that–’

‘I will see this to its ending,’ Rafen spoke over him. A jag of sudden, sharp emotion lanced through him. A reluctance. Fear, even?

The Techmarine hesitated before finally giving a careful nod. ‘As you wish.’ The hissing, plodding servitor emerged from the open rail carriage with the container suspended between its lifters, and walked away on its pre-programmed course. Krixos fell into step behind it and Rafen followed.

They made the descent into the lower levels of the facility aboard a wide inclinator platform the size of a duelling arena. The slab of steel decking creaked with the resonance of massive wheels turning beneath their feet, falling slowly down the angled shaft on heavy rollers in guide channels cut from the stone.

Standing in the middle of the inclinator, the blank-eyed servitor had the mesomorphic build of one from a heavy-gravity world, densely muscled and stocky with it. The slave stared unseeing into nothing, a punch-card command unit implanted in his chest ticking with clockwork. Rafen watched it for a moment. It seemed wrong that this servile, this commonplace mind-wiped thing, was carrying the weapon to its repose – there should have been ritual and ceremony, great circumstance and chronicles being written of the moment. This was a homecoming, after all.

Instead, the duty was being undertaken almost without note, in the shadows, and that sat poorly with Rafen. So many men had died to bring them to this point, not to celebrate their sacrifice with parades and hymnals seemed like a cheapening of their honour.

But that choice was not his to make. The Council of Angels, Commander Dante’s personal assemblage of advisors and confidantes drawn from the ranks of the Chapter at large, had ordered it so. The Blood Angels had been gravely wounded; this was not the first time such a thing had happened, nor even the worst occurrence, but the circumstances of it were troubling. The shadow of civil war had loomed briefly over the Chapter, a horror not seen since the terrible days of the Horus Heresy ten thousand years earlier. Although the threat to unity had ultimately been exorcised, the shock of the possibility of such an event still resonated, and many of the senior officers among Rafen’s battle brothers wanted all mention of this incident burned away and cast from their history, cut out like a cancer.

Imprudent to deny it, he thought. The battle may have been won but the echoes of the aftermath are yet to fade.

‘Brother-Sergeant?’ He became aware of Krixos at his side. ‘As you are here, there is a question that occupies me.’

Rafen’s lips thinned. ‘I will answer if I can.’

‘What happened out there? At Sabien? We have been told very little. Many of my brother Techmarines did not return with you.’

He immediately thought of Brother Lucion, the eager and dedicated Techmarine he had counted as a kinsman. Dead now, dead because of an allegiance Lucion chose to a falsehood, never knowing it to be so. He banished the man’s face from his mind. ‘We were tested,’ replied the sergeant, ‘and we have endured.’

‘Indeed?’ He could tell that his answer was not enough for Krixos, not nearly enough – but the warsmith did not press him any further.

The platform descended for another kilometre before it ground to a juddering halt, and thick steel doors drew back to give them passage through the twenty-seventh sub-level of the Regio. The servitor ambled on, and Rafen felt his pulse quicken as he took in the sights around him.

They had emerged in one of the great arsenal chambers, where the armourers, swordmakers and gunforgers of the Chapter maintained the weapons of the Blood Angels. Below, though a gridded walkway, he could see workstations where robed figures bent over boltguns and missile launchers, tending to them with the care of a parent nursing a child. On the upper level, displays of venerable armaments lined the passage, many of them sealed away behind panes of bullet-proof ironglass or the shimmer of protective energy fields.

In this age of heretics and mutants, witchkin and aliens, every Adeptus Astartes was, in his own way, a living expression of the Emperor’s wrath. They were Angels of Death, one and all, figures that strode like legends across every battleground to oppose all who would threaten the safety of the Imperium. And where they walked, they were venerated. Rafen remembered worlds where the populace went to their knees to worship them as the Blood Angels passed by. He and his kind were avatars of the God-Emperor of Mankind, and their aspect, their armour, the very guns in their hands, these things were all sacred and holy icons.

He saw weaponry that gave the truth to that ideal. A bolter from the Alchonis conflict, heavily detailed with brass filigree and platinum scrollwork, gold-wired blood drops carved out of red jade dangling on votive chains from the pistol grip and the muzzle. A chainsword with a handle wrapped in tanned orkskin leather, each individual tooth on the blade laser-etched with a single word from the Litany Vermillion. And there, so close that it caught his breath in his throat to be near to them, twinned combat daggers that had been owned by great Raldoron himself, and the thunder hammer that had been in the hands of the battle-martyr Zorael at the moment of his death. He looked about him and saw the tools heroes had used to forge their legends over ten millennia of ceaseless war.

These were not just devices for killing, but works of devotional artistry. In their own way, they were just as virtuous as the bones of a dead saint or a sanctified book of prayer. Everything around him was a museum piece, the least ancient of them dating back to the time of the Scouring, some so old that they might have been from before the Age of Unification. And yet, there were no relics here, not in the true sense of the word. These were not fragile things suspended in time, to be gawked at from a distance and mused upon by the unworthy. Every single martial device here was battle ready, should the need be there to call it to duty. Each gun was loaded and primed to fire, each sword’s edge keen. This was an armoury, a gallery of lethal art – and there could be no more fitting place for the burden he had brought with him.

‘Here,’ said Krixos, halting before an empty alcove. This section of the corridor was deeper in shadow, lit only by a line of lumen strips in the ceiling. Something about the depth and the shade of the gloom troubled Rafen. It was so stygian that even his occulobe implants could not peer all the way into it. Krixos seemed not to notice and Rafen dismissed the thought, listening as the Techmarine transmitted a brief pulse of binaric linguacode in the clear. In response to the sound, a hidden seam in the alcove wall creaked and gave way, shedding drifts of accumulated dust. Beyond was a small, crypt-like space, dressed with a low altar that sported a series of stays clearly designed to fit the titanium container.

‘Brother-Sergeant Rafen,’ said Krixos, beginning the final formal declaration. ‘Your stewardship of this weapon is at an end. In the name of the Regio and by the authority of the Master of the Blade, I stand ready to accept it. Will you yield it to me, in perpetuity for the Emperor’s eternal reign, in honour of Sanguinius?’

‘I…’ Now at last it came time to say the words, Rafen felt the same knot of hard emotion in his chest. Once he had turned his back on the weapon, the last thread of connection between Rafen and Arkio would be cut. It was almost as if to give it up would be to give up his blood-brother’s memory. He frowned; he would never allow that to happen. Let it go, Rafen told himself. You have done your duty. ‘I will yield,’ said the Blood Angel at last, and his hands came up to his chest to form the salute of the aquila.

‘So declared,’ said Krixos, without comment on his momentary pause. He gestured to the servitor, and the helot advanced toward the crypt-chamber.

‘It comes home,’ Rafen gave voice to his thoughts. ‘After so long.’

‘Yes.’ The voice came out of the darkness behind them like an unsheathed blade. ‘The weapon is brought home by the last to draw blood with it.’

Rafen and Krixos both reacted with shock, the sergeant’s hand snapping at his holstered bolt pistol, the Techmarine’s servo-harness turning a lasgun muzzle to point at the source of the sound.

‘Fitting,’ continued the voice, as its owner grew out of the shadows, approaching them with a steady, measured pace, ignoring their unease. Rafen’s eyes met a sullen gaze framed by an ashen face. Black hair fell to the warrior’s broad shoulders and the hint of something – an air of forbidding threat – played around his lips.

‘My lord…’ Krixos’s tone shifted, and Rafen could almost imagine the expression of confusion on the Techmarine’s face.

‘I came to bear witness,’ came the reply to the unasked question. The new arrival halted before Rafen, and the Blood Angel refused to turn away as the other Space Marine’s unflinching gaze bored into his. He found himself looking into the eyes of a legend; or as some of his brethren would have it, a nightmare.

The gene-curse of the Blood Angels, the fatal flaw that was the legacy of their long-dead primarch, manifested in them as the Red Thirst and the Black Rage. Two sides of the same sorrowful coin, both combined to push sane battle brothers into a berserker madness from which no-one could return should their iron self control ever slip. Rafen had touched the edges of the great fury himself back on Sabien, and the recollection of that moment still froze his heart when he returned to it. He had looked into that abyss, deep in his soul, and pulled back from the brink before it was too late – but many were not so lucky. The curse lay in the hearts of every Son of Sanguinius, Blood Angel and successor alike… and some fell far into that madness. Too far even for a last chance at redemption in the Death Company. When that horror claimed the mind and the soul of a battle brother, only the blade of the Executioner’s Axe was enough.

That blade lay at rest upon the shoulder of the warrior standing before Rafen, upon the one they called the Redeemer of the Lost, the High Chaplain.

‘I am Astorath,’ he intoned, and this time he showed his teeth. ‘Your name is known to me, Brother Rafen.’

Astorath the Grim. The name was a death-knell tolling in Rafen’s thoughts. Like the reaper-wraith myth from Old Night, Astorath was the Chooser of the Slain, forever voyaging the galaxy in search of those Sanguinius’s bloodline who had become lost to the Rage. He wore a suit of master-crafted artificer armour in blood-crimson, copper and gold. The plates resembled bunches of muscle, flayed of skin and shorn bare – Rafen had seen a similar design upon the armour of the psyker-lord Mephiston, but there the similarity between the two great Blood Angels ended. Where the Librarian was lit from within by an invisible sense of force, an ethereal aura that spoke of preternatural power, Astorath was bleak and shadowed. It was hard to quantify it, almost impossible to put into words… but it seemed as if there was a darkness clouding the air wherever the High Chaplain stood, a bitter and solemn ambience that stirred sinister memories in Rafen.

Strangely, a bolt of sudden anger raced through him and it took a near-physical effort for the sergeant not to snarl a question at Astorath. How many of my kinsmen have died by your hand?

The High Chaplain gave an almost imperceptible nod, as if something had been confirmed for him, and he turned to Krixos. ‘You wonder why I am here?’ He gestured in the air. ‘My wings. They were badly damaged during a clash on Kascol Trinus. I came to Baal to have Icarael’s Techmarines restore them to full working order.’

Rafen realized that the guncutter he had seen on his arrival could only have been The Fate, Astorath’s personal vessel. Yet it seemed so mundane to believe that the High Chaplain had arrived on the planet for something as minor as repairs to the black-winged flight pack he usually wore. Still, even without the dark arcs hanging over his shoulders, he still cut a formidable and daunting figure. The Blood Angel considered him. In many ways, Astorath was a harsh mirror-image of the ideal of their primarch, the antithesis of the exultant winged glory of Sanguinius. A balance of dark against the light, a living manifestation of the rage he was doomed forever to follow.

‘This matter is not of your concern, High Chaplain,’ the Techmarine was saying.

‘I want something,’ Astorath told them, ignoring Krixos’s words. ‘Before this rite is concluded.’ He nodded toward the container. ‘I want to see it.’

‘The weapon was sealed on the order of Lord Dante himself,’ Rafen insisted. ‘Your authority does not exceed his!’

‘Here and now it does, brother. And who are you to stop me?’ Before either of them could halt him, the High Chaplain pushed Krixos aside and stopped the servitor. Removing his gauntlet, Astorath tore off the seals and submitted himself to the bloodlock. To Rafen’s surprise, the container did not deny him, and slowly it arched open.

Wan, honeyed light spilled from the interior, banishing the shadows and the gloom. Every muscle in Rafen’s body tensed as the warm radiance touched him, gentle like sunlight on his face. The dark memories of Sabien stirred in him as Krixos remained rooted to the spot, still as a statue.

Inside the container was the weapon.

A spear made of golden metal, the haft was sculpted into a winged figure in a sanguinary high priest’s vestments, embossed with an ornate purity seal marked with the Emperor’s personal lightning-bolt sigil. It grew into a hollow-cored blade, shaped like a teardrop, and the metal seemed to emit a steady glow.

Lost in the chaos that followed the sundering of the Imperium during the Horus Heresy, passed into myth and legend for millennia until an expedition set off to recover it once and for all, the spear had finally completed its great journey across light-years, time and war. This was the weapon of a primarch, a weapon that, in defiance of all possibility, Rafen had wielded against the forces of the Ruinous Powers and used to dispatch a daemonic creature. This was the spear that had killed his sibling, a blade that long ago the Emperor himself had forged as a gift to his angelic son.

‘The Hasta Fatalis,’ whispered Astorath, a note of awe in his voice. ‘The Spear of Telesto. By the Throne, what a thing of beauty…’ He reached a hand into the container.

‘No–’ The word escaped from Rafen’s lips before he could stop it. ‘You cannot.’

‘You do not give me orders,’ Astorath replied, echoing Rafen’s earlier words back to him. The High Chaplain gently placed his palm on the haft of the weapon and Rafen saw him tremble slightly at the instant of contact. Astorath did not possess the preternatural insight of a psyker, but some said he had a peculiar gift of his own, an instinct that drew him to places where the curse of the rage and the thirst ran strong. Rafen wondered what Astorath experienced in that brief moment, coming so close to an artefact that had been made for the hands of their primarch and gene-father. Did he feel the same connection that Rafen had? The sound of blood roaring in his ears, like calling out to like? His memory of those feelings was transcendent and terrible, and not something he would dare to repeat.

Astorath’s hand moved to the teardrop blade and found something there, a faint patch of discolouration deposited on the golden metal. But how could that be possible? Rafen wondered. The blade burned off all stain of spilled blood, I saw it happen…

The High Chaplain brushed his fingers over the tiny specks of dried vitae and brought them to his nostrils. He tested the scent, licked at the dry powder; then he turned his gaze on Rafen again, measuring him. Somehow, he knows.

After a long moment, Astorath spoke again. ‘I have what I came for.’ He bowed reverently to the spear and made the sign of the aquila. His hand snapped up and slammed the container closed, the noise echoing like a gunshot. ‘Proceed,’ he said, turning his back on them to retreat into the long shadows.

Rafen watched him go, more uncertain than ever as to where his fate was leading him.

‘The High Chaplain’s presence here bodes ill,’ said Krixos quietly.

‘His curiosity seems to have been sated,’ Rafen offered, but without conviction.

‘Wherever he walks, the Black Rage is close at hand.’

Rafen eyed the Techmarine. ‘It is his duty to seek it out.’

‘His presence brings it to the surface,’ Krixos countered. ‘Astorath causes good warriors to question their own truth wherever he goes. He brings doubt and mistrust in his wake.’ The Techmarine paused, cocking his head; Rafen knew he was listening to a vox channel relayed through his helmet. ‘Even now, word spreads of his arrival here. Every brother in the Regio cannot help but wonder who the executioner has come for.’

‘He said he was here for your skills, not for your heads.’

Krixos made a noise in his throat, a grunt of dry amusement. ‘He need not have come home to Baal for those repairs to be done. Any forge world of sufficient expertise would have sufficed. It is a pretext.’

‘For what?’

‘I dread to consider.’ Krixos looked away.

The servitor placed the container on the rack and backed out of the alcove. Automatically, the thick stone walls ground together. Rafen watched it happen, schooling his aspect to remain impassive. ‘It is done,’ he said aloud. ‘And so am I.’ The sergeant nodded to the Techmarine. ‘Warsmith, my thanks. I will return to the railhead and–’

Krixos held up a hand. ‘I have been informed that the razorwinds have struck the complex with deadly force. All transports have been locked down for the duration of the storm.’

‘How long will that be?’

‘Several hours at the least. A day at most.’ Krixos paused. ‘The Regio can offer you some sustenance while you wait…’

Rafen gave the sealed alcove one last look. ‘A dormitory room, then. Somewhere I can have some peace to rest and meditate.’

‘This way,’ said the Techmarine, leading him back to the inclinator.

The chamber they gave him was a sparsely-furnished cell on one of the habitat levels, little more than a stone box with a lumen globe in the ceiling, a bed and an icon of the Golden Throne impact-welded to the wall. Like everything else inside the Regio, the air within was dry in a way that seemed to deaden all ambient sound.

Rafen placed his helmet, weapon-belt and holster on the pallet, and took to one knee on the floor. There was a chapel a few levels above, as Krixos has informed him, and the offer had been made for him to remain there in prayer if he so wished it. Rafen did wish to pray to his Emperor and his primarch, but not in the sight of others. He wanted some privacy in which to consider the questions that plagued him.

There was nothing in the cell to mark the passage of time, only the Blood Angel’s internal reckoning, and he did not glance at the chronometer embedded in his helmet display. Instead, Rafen let himself come adrift from the moment. Minutes or hours passed as he tried to find a point of tranquillity from which to observe himself and weigh his own concerns. He had limited success.

His thoughts continued to return to Sabien, and before that the war-grave world of Cybele and the Forge at Shenlong. The blood that had been shed by him on those three planets seemed distant, the idea of it like a story that had been told to Rafen by someone else, by some other Space Marine who was him, who had experienced these things.

He reached for the memories, drilling down into his own recollection, but he was reticent. Did he really want to relive those moments, now that the threat to his Chapter was ended? Would it not simply be better to just… move on?

‘No.’ The word was raspy, and it sounded as if he had not spoken in days. ‘No,’ he repeated, with force, saying it aloud again for any ethereal beings who might be turning their eyes toward him. ‘I will not forget.’ Rafen would make sure that the brethren who would rather ignore the hard lessons he had bled through would not be given the chance.

It is not over. The shadow of blighted Chaos that dared to try and corrupt the Chapter had been purged by the light of righteous souls, but the wounds left behind had yet to heal. Many battle brothers had perished in the insanity of it all, lives snuffed out and glorious futures cut short – but the Chapter would ever endure, just as Rafen had told Krixos. In thousands of years of war and history, there had never come a time when the Blood Angels had been cut so deeply that they had faltered. Not at Signus Prime, when the treachery of the primarch’s errant brother Horus Lupercal had thrown the entire Legion into a meat grinder; not at Holy Terra during the final siege of the Heresy when Sanguinius himself had died and left his sons without their father; not in the wars at Al-Khadir and the Kursa Ranges, or even in the aftermath of the Secoris Tragedy centuries past, when the Chapter had been reduced in number to less than a hundred warriors after a catastrophic space hulk intervention.

The Blood Angels would never be allowed to die, and while Rafen’s existence and that of his brothers in arms would come and go across the march of time, the essence of the Sons of Sanguinius would endure until the day the final victory came. He nodded to himself, holding on to the insight, taking comfort from it.

‘Blood endures,’ he told the dry, silent air.

As he bowed his head, the sirens began to wail. Rafen reacted instantly, shaking off the drag of his inaction and springing to his feet. The weapon belt was first, secured and then checked, his bolt pistol cocked and loaded. He grabbed his helmet and wrenched open the cell’s steel hatch.

Out in the narrow corridor, chaser lights strobed red and white, extending away in to the distance. He saw figures moving along a junction to the right, Chapter serfs by the look of them, sprinting away.

‘You!’ he called. ‘Heed me!’

None of them stopped, and he wondered if they had heard him over the sirens. Frowning, Rafen donned his helmet and activated the power armour’s internal vox unit. The monitor glyphs returned a steady No Signal display, and the Blood Angel felt the first real inkling of genuine concern. The heavy rock and ferrocrete of the Regio was what made it virtually impregnable, but it also had the effect of making vox communications difficult. Still, even with the attenuation caused by the strata all around, Rafen should have been able to pick up another Adeptus Astartes nearby. He gave up the attempt and went to the closest intercom unit. Wired into the Regio’s grid, it should have been able to connect him immediately to the command centre. Nothing but dead static answered him.

He drew the bolt pistol and thumbed off the safety catch, and for the second time that day he heard the voice from the shadows.

‘Rafen.’ From ahead, a broad-shouldered figure was framed against the glow of the alert lights. Astorath advanced with urgency, and he had the Executioner’s Axe in his hand.

‘My lord.’ The Blood Angel’s hand tightened on the pistol grip. If the High Chaplain had come to take his head, Rafen would not go easily.

Astorath did not seem to notice the gun. ‘My vox is nulled. Yours?’

‘The same.’

He nodded gravely. ‘They must have done something. Blanketed the zone with a jamming field.’ He looked back the way he had come. ‘I did not think there were any of us on this level. Follow me.’

But Rafen did not take a step. ‘They?’ he repeated.

‘You have been here all along.’ Astorath sounded it out. ‘Of course. Word did not reach you.’

‘I do not understand.’

The High Chaplain’s cold eyes studied him. ‘We are under attack, brother. I suspect that they came in under the cover of the razorwind storm.’ He looked away. ‘Raptors, brother-sergeant, by the hundredfold. Sent by the traitor Sons of Lorgar.’

‘The Word Bearers?’ It seemed like blasphemy to say the name of the Chaos warband aloud. ‘Here, on Baal? They would not dare to strike at our homeworld!’

And yet, even as he said it, Rafen knew that such a deed was not beyond them. He had fought the Word Bearers and seen the fury and insanity that drove their freakish, corrupted zealotry. But such an attack would be suicidal, and any gains they made would be wiped out once the shock of the surprise assault was dispelled.

‘I have heard no gunfire… and how could they reach our soil? Our battle barges are in orbit, our defence platforms fully manned…’

‘There is more than one way to thread the labyrinth,’ said the High Chaplain darkly. ‘Extreme-range teleportation from a stealth vessel in far orbit, a warp gate conjuring… an entire planet can never be completely secure.’

Rafen thought it through. Attacking the Regio from without was madness. The Raptors would dash themselves against the battlements and perish under hails of gunfire from the weapons at the walls…

Unless…

Astorath nodded again, pre-empting his train of thought. ‘They may already be inside. The doors may have been opened by treachery.’

A cold rush spread through Rafen’s blood. ‘Then the Word Bearers have come to loot this place, not to hold it. They must want–’

‘The spear, aye. No doubt to assuage the hurt that was done to them.’

Rafen’s heart was hammering in his chest. That could not be allowed to happen. ‘We have to protect the weapon. We have to get to the reliquary.’

Astorath beckoned him. ‘The inclinator is this way.’

The platform was in place in the throat of the shaft, and Rafen cast around as they crossed to it, looking for signs of life. Despite glimpsing the Chapter serfs moments earlier, there seemed now to be no sign of them. Perhaps they had gone to ground in one of the other chambers. He wanted to be sure, but the High Chaplain urged him on.

Astorath moved swiftly to the control podium on the far side of the platform, and Rafen looked up. The inclinator shaft stretched away above, rings of warning lights growing progressively smaller as they receded. He set his helmet’s audial sensors to maximum perceptive range, trying to filter out the sirens. Rafen listened for the sounds of combat, for gunfire or detonations, but he detected nothing.

‘We should try to find Brother Krixos,’ he said, turning back to the other Blood Angel. ‘If he-’

The rest of his words were lost in the flat report of an explosion, as a blast of smoke, fire and noise erupted out of the inclinator’s controls. Astorath caught the discharge at point-blank range and it blew him back across the wide elevator deck, ceramite screeching on metal as the High Chaplain skidded and tumbled.

Rafen ran toward him, just as the platform gave off a howl of tortured metal. One of the roller guides stuttered and slipped, and suddenly the deck was canted at a steep angle. Untethered cargo modules spilled across the inclinator, and Rafen threw himself aside, narrowly avoiding a collision with a hulking steel crate the size of a Dreadnought. Grabbing at a guide rail for purchase, Rafen moved as quickly as could toward Astorath’s prone form. He saw the High Chaplain move, heard him groan. The chestplate of his armour was smoking but the damage seemed minimal.

Then all at once, the guide rollers holding the platform in place slipped their moorings, and the inclinator shuddered and fell. Rafen lost his grip and rolled out across the decking, slamming into a quad of heavy storage tanks. The decking vibrated like a drum skin and Rafen could not regain his balance or his footing. He experienced the giddy, vertiginous rush of the headlong fall, strings of warning lights flashing past, racing away as they plummeted into the deeps of the Regio. He saw the tier counter rotating wildly, wooden ticker slats turning inside a brass cage, moving so fast he couldn’t read them.

The autonomic brakes finally snapped on, but it seemed to do little to slow them. Instead, great fountains of yellow sparks gushed from the smouldering rollers and the hot stink of burning metal filled Rafen’s nostrils. The platform crashed through ancient barrier plates erected to seal off lower levels, obliterating them in its headlong plunge. Some part of the Blood Angel’s mind was marvelling – how deep could this complex go? The indicator lights ceased, the last ring of them pulling away, and the inclinator dropped into a black chasm.

Then the impact. Rafen was thrown into the air, spinning through the darkness in the midst of the crash of splintering metal. His head smacked against the inside of his helmet and, mercifully, he fell again, this time into a different kind of void.

He dreamed of rain on his face.

Rafen dreamed of a ruined cathedral on a mausoleum planet, under weeping skies slashed by stark lances of lightning. He dreamed of falling without motion, of shadows and pain.

The scent of blood brought him slowly back to wakefulness. His cheek was wet, and he could feel fluid pooling. Rafen blinked, scanning the visible glyphs across the line of his field of vision. His helmet had been damaged, along with some of the actuators in his legs, but the cowl of ceramite and steel that surrounded him had taken the brunt of the crash.

He took stock of himself, feeling for injuries. Some minor breaks in his bones, contusions and the like, things that would have been deadly to a common human but little more than an irritant to a Space Marine. Rafen sat up and cast around. The preysight setting of his helm was non-functional, so with an exasperated grunt he removed it and secured it at his waist. The wetness on his face was blood from a wound across his temple that even now was staunching itself as the gene-engineered cells from his Larraman implant scabbed over the injury. He wiped the excess fluid away and peered into the gloom, shifting spars of twisted metal that had fallen across him. ‘Chaplain?’ he called into the shadows.

‘Here,’ said a voice close by.

Rafen rose to find Astorath standing behind him, his pale face corpselike in the dimness. ‘How long…?’ He winced at a jolt of pain from his scalp.

‘You can walk,’ said the High Chaplain. ‘So we walk.’ Astorath removed a chemical lumen stick from a pouch on his belt and waved it before them. ‘Look, there.’ He indicated a tunnel mouth not far from the wreckage of the inclinator platform.

Rafen took a step and then halted, looking up. Wreaths of smoke and wedges of debris made it hard to see far up the ascent shaft, but he estimated that they must have fallen several kilometres before colliding with the end of the passage. ‘What happened to the controls? The explosion?’

‘My armour protected me,’ said Astorath. ‘It was a small charge, less powerful than a frag grenade. Concealed inside the podium.’

‘Sabotage?’ Rafen scowled at the word.

‘It would seem so.’ The High Chaplain pushed past him. ‘Come. This way.’

The command came with such force of authority behind it that Rafen almost obeyed immediately and without question, years of ingrained training leading him to default to the orders of a senior officer. Almost.

He halted. ‘We should hold here. This is where our brothers will search for us.’

Astorath did not turn back to look at him. ‘This is where the Word Bearers will come looking when they learn their trap was sprung.’

The mention of the traitors made Rafen reach for his bolt pistol. By the Emperor’s grace, the gun was there and still intact. ‘Where are we?’ he wondered.

‘The deeps,’ Astorath replied. ‘The lowest levels of the Regio, isolated and left derelict.’

‘How do we get back?’ He looked up again.

‘As I told you,’ said the other warrior. ‘This way.’

Reluctantly, Rafen fell in step behind the High Chaplain, following him into the tunnel as his unease grew.

The warrens were cut from the living rock of Baal itself, reinforced by pillars of ancient ferrocrete that had become cracked and shot through with rust over countless centuries. The air was full of agitated dust particles, kicked up by the concussive arrival of the inclinator, and they filled Rafen’s mouth with a taste like bonemeal, sapping the moisture from his lips. Astorath deigned to give him one of his lumen sticks, and together the two of them navigated the aged corridors by the weak greenish light of the chemical lamps.

The walls were thick with oily lichen that seeped out of every crack, and in the midst of the fungal masses he saw tiny grubs writhing. There were shapes that fled before the edges of the lumen-glows, into boltholes and broken pipeways, and here and there thick curtains of web dangling from the ceiling, woven by fat, pale arachnids. An entire food chain of scavengers existed down here, living in the gloom.

The tunnel emptied out on to a rusted metal gantry and Astorath halted, sniffing at the air like a hunter canine.

Rafen eyed him. ‘You know where you are going. How is that so?’

The High Chaplain spared him a glance. ‘The accessways are all linked, Rafen. There are exhaust shafts sunk into the desert that reach down this far. All we need do is find the closest one and ascend… If we do not tarry, we could make the surface by daylight.’ He moved to walk on.

‘You are well informed, my lord,’ Rafen added.

Astorath made a noise in his throat that might have been a growl of irritation. ‘I was not always Astorath the Grim, brother-sergeant. There was a time, before my calling took me to other duties, that I served the Chapter as a line warrior in a tactical squad.’ He gestured at the walls, the lumen stick in his hand casting warped shadows. ‘I stood upon the battlements of the Regio as a sentry many times. I learned of its lore and history from men like Krixos.’ He gave Rafen a hard look. ‘By all means, if you wish to question everything I say, continue to do so. But you may find my answers become sparse as I direct my attention towards our egress.’ He strode away and did not wait for Rafen to go after him.

The Blood Angel grimaced and fell in step again. The shock of the alarms, the fall, all that was fading away now, and in its place remained Rafen’s growing disquiet. He could not shake a sense of wrongness about everything that was happening around him.

They navigated fallen sections of the rusting gantry, collapsed by the weight of time and neglect. In places where the path was broken, Rafen was forced to leap into the dark, praying to his Emperor for the certainty of a platform on the other side. Astorath navigated the hazards in silence, with only grunts of effort as he helped Rafen shoulder aside rubble or slice away debris with a swing of his axehead.

But for all his indifference, the High Chaplain was not ignoring Rafen. In fact, the reverse was true. Rafen slowly realized that the other warrior was scrutinising him at every turn, but taking great pains not to be seen to do so.

When a moment of pause came, as they stood at the bottom of a catchshaft damp with brackish moisture, Rafen’s patience reached its limit. ‘What do you wish to say to me?’ he demanded, squaring off before the High Chaplain. ‘I grow tired of your pretence.’

‘Do you?’ The reply was hard and brittle. ‘Perhaps I should ask if that blow you took to the head knocked the respect out of you, sergeant. Remember who it is you address.’

‘I know who you are,’ Rafen shot back. ‘There is no Blood Angel, no Son of Sanguinius that draws breath who does not know the face of the executioner!’

Astorath’s eyes narrowed. ‘That is my burden. And if you dare to think you could judge me for it, I will bleed you for your audacity.’ He pushed past and kept moving, stepping up on to a walkway that circled the inside of the vertical shaft like the thread of a screw.

Rafen’s temper flared. ‘Answer me! It was not fate that brought us together in this! Why else would you have been down on the habitat levels? Were you there for me? Or for some other reason?’

‘Do not ask questions you do not wish to have answered.’

The catchshaft joined an angled tunnel that rose up at a steep slant, and they began to ascend. Rafen advanced after the High Chaplain. ‘This is about the weapon. The spear.’

It was a long moment before Astorath replied. ‘It is so much more than that.’

‘I have nothing to hide,’ said Rafen.

When the High Chaplain spoke again, there was a challenge in it, his words severe. ‘You took the Spear of Telesto. You, a common Adeptus Astartes. You took up a weapon forged for a primarch’s hands and made it live. Such a thing should not have happened.’

‘It did,’ Rafen admitted. ‘I do not know how.’

‘A lie,’ snapped Astorath. ‘Who held the weapon before you, Rafen? What was his name?’

‘Arkio.’ He let out a sigh. ‘My blood-sibling.’

Astorath snorted, throwing a look over his shoulder. ‘Arkio the traitor. Arkio the corrupted. A puppet of the Ruinous Powers, created to cause a fatal schism in our Chapter!’

Rafen’s hands contracted into fists and his anger smouldered, but the High Chaplain was right. Arkio had betrayed his Chapter, he had been tainted by Chaos. ‘True enough. But I forgave him.’

This time Astorath gave a mocking laugh. It was an ugly, chilling sound. ‘You did? How generous of you. Was that before or after you ended his life?’

‘He knew of it,’ Rafen bit out the words. ‘I sent him to the Emperor with that.’

‘If there is justice in this universe, then He Upon The Throne sent your errant kindred’s soul into the hells.’

Rafen’s jaw stiffened but he refused to rise to the bait. They walked in silence for a few moments before Astorath spoke again.

‘Very well. Here is what I wish to say to you. It is a question, and if you do not answer, what I suspect will be proven true.’

‘I am not afraid of your words, executioner!’ Rafen snarled.

The High Chaplain looked back at him. In the lumen-glow, he resembled a monstrous apparition from some ancient fable, come to claim the Blood Angel’s immortal soul. ‘What happened when you wielded the spear, Rafen? What did you feel?’

Powerful, heady memories flashed in his thoughts. He felt the divine radiance of the spear on his face again, the light shining off the blade. ‘I…’

‘I know,’ Astorath growled. ‘The spear can only speak to the Black Rage and the Red Thirst. You touched that darkness within, didn’t you? That primal force Sanguinius left behind in all of us. You cannot deny it was so! It was the only way to activate the weapon!’

Rafen lost himself in the moment and he saw–

–the scarlet path unfurling about him in a storm of seething crimson, a fog of bloodlust madness descending upon him. The raw energy of his primarch a flash-fire in his veins, the traces of Sanguinius’s genetic code engorging with preternatural power–

Astorath nodded coldly. ‘I have seen hundreds of my battle brothers hollow of eye and fallen within. Are you any different from them?’

Rafen’s hands curled as if the Spear of Telesto lay across them, and he saw–

–golden fire, shards of lightning dazzling like fragments of suns, ripped from the air, collecting at the hollow heart of the teardrop blade–

He closed his eyes, and in the depths of his soul, he felt the mark of his eternal liege lord, indelible and bright as a star. ‘My life and my soul for the God-Emperor, for Sanguinius,’ he whispered. ‘For the Blood Angels.’

‘Your life and your soul,’ repeated the High Chaplain. ‘Are you ready to pay that price, Brother-Sergeant Rafen?’ Astorath rounded on him, and prodded him in the chest with an armour-clad finger. ‘Tell me, does the echo of that fury still resonate in you, even now? The gene-flaw overwhelmed you when you fought Arkio on Sabien, for how else could you have defeated him? My duty is clear, if any brother should fall to the Rage, then I–’

Rafen’s shout thundered down the tunnel. ‘I did not fall to the Rage!’ He shook his head. ‘You do not understand! The spear… it protected me.’

Astorath’s expression made it clear he thought little of that explanation, and he turned away, continuing along the tunnel. ‘How convenient.’

‘There have been those who looked into that abyss and did not end their days in madness,’ Rafen insisted. ‘Lemartes, who you yourself gave authority to live on and fight for the Chapter! And Mephiston, the Lord of Death!’

‘You compare yourself to them?’ grated High Chaplain. ‘Such arrogance. You are a pale shadow of the Guardian of the Lost, boy. And as for the Librarian… Mephiston may have spoken for you at Master Dante’s side, but I am not swayed by the words of a witchkin, even one as great as he!’

Rafen’s expression soured. ‘I speak only the truth.’

‘As you see it,’ Astorath shot back. ‘I know what you think of me. You see this–’ he brandished his axe and spun it in his grip ‘–and nothing else! I do not want the blood of my brothers on my hands, but I accept it.’ For a moment, there was sorrow in the other warrior’s voice; then it was gone. ‘I know my duty and I will never shrink from it. I have my curse and I keep it.’ He pointed at Rafen once again. ‘You have spoken of responsibility, of obligations. What if yours is to die?’

Rafen’s blood ran cold. ‘Only in death does duty end, and my duty has not yet ended. I am certain of that.’

‘Indeed?’ growled Astorath, cutting through a heap of fallen masonry with his blade. ‘And who are you to make that choice? Other Sons of Sanguinius, veterans all and learned warriors with centuries of experience upon their shoulders, see things differently. There are those voices on the Council of Angels that would see the duty of Brother Rafen to come to an end. Your blood kinship with the corrupted one is reason enough.’

‘I…’ The words came hard to him, but Rafen persisted. ‘I will not walk the same path as my sibling. Arkio was flawed, he was led astray. If I had been there before it happened…’ He trailed off and took a breath. The air was different here. He tasted changes in pressure and temperature that indicated they were nearing the desert surface. ‘I am not him,’ Rafen said firmly.

‘Your word is not sufficient,’ Astorath told him. ‘And now the Chapter finds itself rising from the aftermath of what your sibling wrought upon it. We are wounded, and hard choices must be made if we are to go forward. Secrets kept… and truths expunged for the good of the Blood Angels.’

‘The Sons of Sanguinius have endured far worse,’ Rafen persisted. ‘This… this trial will not break us.’

‘We have endured, aye,’ Astorath admitted. ‘But how? Through insight and pragmatism, by strength of our blood and the willingness to do what we must. The primarch taught us that when he left us.’

Rafen shook his head. ‘And so, what is to be done? Shall we excise my sibling’s insurrection from our chronicles as if it never took place, wipe the minds of the men who witnessed it? You would have the Blood Angels strike this incident from history?’ His lips twisted in disgust. ‘We do not hold our honour so cheap!’

‘Our numbers are depleted, our forces scattered to maintain the illusion of strength. Worlds have been burned in the wake of this. Tell me, Brother Rafen. What would you have us do?’

‘I would not embrace silence instead of truth!’ he spat. ‘That is not what the Great Angel would wish! He knew the truth better than any living being!’

‘What truth?’ demanded Astorath.

‘That we are imperfect!’ Rafen dared the High Chaplain to deny him. ‘We are not like the whelps of Fulgrim, professing that we are faultless and infallible! To pretend we are incapable of error is a weakling’s way, it is foolhardy and arrogant.’ He nodded fiercely, his temper rising. ‘The insurrection must not be forgotten, the lesson of it must live with us forever so that it will never come to pass again. We are our history, the best and the worst of it. That is what Sanguinius knew!’

Astorath paused and gave him a long look. The High Chaplain’s dark axe glittered in the gloom, the wicked edge of the weapon still sharp despite the many rocks it had cut aside during their ascent. ‘You are exactly what I thought you were, Rafen,’ said the High Chaplain, at length. He turned away. ‘Now, come. We are close to the surface.’

Until that moment, there had been doubt in Rafen’s mind. The possibilities existed in a kind of half-state, a chance that his future would unfold in one way or another, the path of his life crossing here with that of Astorath the Grim. Until that moment, he had not been certain.

But no doubts shrouded the understanding now. The look in those fathomless, bleak eyes, the iron in the words. Whatever he may have said or done, Rafen knew in his blood and bones that the Redeemer of the Lost had come back to Baal and to the Regio for him.

Astorath was here to judge him.

It took both of the Blood Angels to shoulder the hexagonal grille up from the stays that held it in place. Rafen spent a bolt shell on the lock, the mechanism coughing out sparks. With a skirl of rusted, elderly hinges, the hatch came open and they finally emerged in the desert.

The High Chaplain’s estimate had been correct. The cold night sky was changing colour toward the distant Chalice Mountains, shading away from deep black toward purple hues. Eventually it would push toward orange-red as the Baalite sun made its slow advance, but that was hours away yet. Baal’s night was long and slow.

Seamless drifts of rusty sand ranged off in every direction, settled in dunes and wavelike patterns by the passage of the razorwinds. Like the night, the storm had passed and only the faint breath of its trailing edge could be felt. Rafen turned in place and found a smudge of grey on the opposite horizon. The storm cell was advancing toward the westerly canyons, where its lethal energy would be expended in the endless, echoing arroyos.

Still turning, he got his bearings and found the distant lights of the Regio. They had emerged several kilometres from the outer keep walls, at the very edge of the perimeter zone. He squinted, cursing the damage to his helmet’s optics. He wanted a closer look.

The sight seemed wrong – or more accurately, the sight seemed right, as if nothing were amiss at the Regio. Even at this distance, he expected to have seen plumes of smoke, weapon flashes. Rafen strained into the wind to listen, trying to pluck out the sounds of combat from the susurrus of desert noises.

He heard nothing, and went tense with concern. Had the enemy assault been so lethal, so swift that it had passed like the razorwind and left no survivors? Rafen took a step toward the distant complex. ‘The attack… The Word Bearers…’

‘Even they are not overconfident enough to attempt so gaudy a suicide,’ rumbled Astorath. ‘The Sons of Lorgar, spite curse them, are not here. They never were.’

Rafen rounded on him, all his suspicions ringing in his mind like a clarion. ‘You.’ He pointed at the High Chaplain. ‘You lied. There was no assault on the Regio.’

‘A ruse on my part,’ admitted the other warrior, watching him steadily. ‘A small piece of theatre so that I might have what I needed.’

‘The explosive, the inclinator… you did that yourself. The charge was enough to damage the platform but not enough to penetrate your armour…’ He shook his head. ‘Why would you do such a thing, executioner? You could have killed us both in the fall!’

Astorath’s dead eyes locked with his. ‘That was not your time to die, Rafen. I did what I did to isolate you. I wanted to learn your character… and it is easier to divine the nature of a warrior’s soul if his attention is elsewhere.’

Rafen’s expression soured, annoyance rising in him. ‘Is your little game concluded, then? Have you got what you wanted from me?’

‘I have made my decision,’ said Astorath, as his axe dropped into his waiting hands.

In the next second he was charging, a feral snarl splitting his lips.

Combat reflexes took over and Rafen drew his bolt pistol in a fraction of a second, his other hand snatching at the hilt of the battle knife resting in a sheath along the line of his spine. He fired a single shot at the High Chaplain, aiming low, aiming to wound, to slow him down.

But he might well have called out his intentions in a shout. Astorath swept his blade aside and intercepted the bolt mid-flight with a crack of sound, the round blasting harmlessly into the dirt. Rafen dodged to one side as the weapon’s fast, fluid arc bisected the space where he had been standing, and he rolled, tumbling over red dirt and half-buried rocks.

The High Chaplain lost no momentum at all, pushing off a broken boulder into a shallow leap, leading with the Executioner’s Axe. Rafen knew he couldn’t deflect the blow, and feinted away, desperately trying to extend his distance. Astorath’s axe split the rock where he had been standing in two – and still the other warrior came, without missing a beat.

Rafen managed to cross the axis of his opponent’s blade with the battle knife and there was a grating screech of metal on metal as their fractal-edges met violently. The impact was so great it resonated up the bones of the Blood Angel’s arms and lit lines of pain through every joint.

He had the bolt pistol, and he had a shot to take. At close range, if he was clever and if he was lucky, Rafen might have been able to put a kill-shot into Astorath’s face – but he could not bring himself to do so.

‘Cease this!’ he spat.

The other warrior grunted and shoved the axe forward. The sickle-blade head smacked Rafen across the jaw and staggered him. He felt blood froth in his mouth and fragments of teeth in his throat.

Astorath finally paused, shifting his grip in an almost leisurely fashion. Preparing to strike the death-blow. ‘In a moment,’ he replied.

‘You have no right to do this,’ said Rafen, spitting out gobs of bloody spittle into the dust.

‘I have the right,’ Astorath replied coldly.

‘I will not die for the sake of those who doubt me!’ Rafen roared his defiance. ‘You may not share the weakness that tainted your sibling,’ said the High Chaplain, ‘but the rage lurks in you, as much as you deny it. I see it. I can smell it on you.’ He swung at the air, the axe humming. ‘Do not fear. I will make it swift. You will end with honour.’

‘You’re wrong.’ Rafen shook his head. ‘I am the master of my own will! The rage and the thirst do not command me!’

Astorath attacked again, cutting at him, a tornado of axe blows falling across him. Once again, Rafen could only react to the assault and try to stay alive for a few more seconds. His anger built inside him like a floodhead.

‘I see it,’ Astorath growled. ‘You cannot hide it from me, brother. Stop pretending you are in control and submit to the fury!’

And for a moment, that was all he wanted to do. It would have been so simple to release, to open the gates to the anger. To let the fire build and build until it consumed him. He wanted to fall into the fight.

But I have looked into that abyss and my future does not lie there.

Rafen raised his head and, very deliberately, he tossed the bolt pistol away. Then, with a flick of the wrist, he threw his combat blade into the sand, where it buried itself up to the pommel.

‘You want my anger, my rage?’ Rafen shook his head. ‘I will not give it to you, Astorath. I will not let you comfort yourself with the lie that you ended my life to save me from the gene-curse. If you want to end me, you will do it in cold blood.’ He dropped to one knee and adopted the position of a penitent at prayer, head bowed, hands crossed in the sign of the aquila. Rafen looked at the ground, losing himself in the myriad grains of red sand. Sanguinius, I put my trust in you as ever I have. My fate is yours to choose.

At first, silence, then the rush of the air as the axe fell towards the bare flesh of the back of his neck. Rafen did not close his eyes. He wanted to see, right to the very end.

The axe blade fell slowly, and by the prickling of his skin, Rafen felt the impossibly sharp edge touch his flesh, resting there. A line of icy cold as nerves were severed, then the hot pain of spilling blood – all this from just the merest touch of the Executioner’s Axe upon him.

A shadow moved across the red sand, and after a long moment Rafen dared to look up.

He was alone.

It took an hour or so for Rafen to walk the distance back to the walls of the Regio, and not once along that path did he see another soul. The wound on the back of his neck began to heal as the Larraman cells did their work, but the sting of it told him that from this day forward he would forever have a scar there, a perfect line of damaged flesh below his skull.

Dawn had come as the sentries saw him emerge from the desert, and it was Brother Krixos who met him at the Wanderer’s Gate.

‘Rafen!’ The expressionless eyes of the Techmarine’s helm studied him. ‘We feared you had perished in the accident in the inclinator shaft!’

‘The accident,’ Rafen repeated. ‘Yes.’

‘How did you survive?’

‘The old tunnel network, the catchshafts…’ He paused, thinking through what he would say next. ‘I was guided.’

‘Praise the God-Emperor and Sanguinius,’ said Krixos.

‘The primarch watches over me.’ He paused, glancing around. ‘The High Chaplain’s ship, the guncutter… Is it still here?’

‘The Fate?’ Krixos gave a nod. ‘The hangar dome was being opened as I left to come to the gate.’ He looked up. ‘It was about to lift–’

Rafen was already running for the iron spiral stairs that would take him up to the landing platforms.

He sprinted on to the elevated disc as the guncutter’s thrusters gave off a low thrum of power. Exhaust vents along the ventral fuselage chugged fire and a hot wash of spent promethium stink washed over him. The Fate rocked as the engine note shifted, rising as the motors gained power with each passing second.

Rafen raised a hand to shield his eyes, searching the portals along the sides of the ship, the cockpit canopy for signs of life but, like the dark-toned hull, all the windows of the guncutter were tinted black-red.

‘Astorath!’ he said, but his cry was snatched away by the noise.

Then the wound on the back of his neck prickled, and he spun around. The Redeemer of the Lost stood before Rafen, night-black wings rising up from behind him. His blade was still lined with crimson. ‘There are few who have felt the kiss of this weapon and lived to speak of it.’ The High Chaplain regarded him gravely, raising his voice so he might be heard. ‘But I have never once come to regret the moments when I pulled my terminal blow.’

‘I know the Black Rage and the Red Thirst lie within me.’ The words spilled out of Rafen’s mouth. ‘They are part of all of us. When and if that fury will return to me, I cannot know.’

‘It will,’ Astorath told him, and once again there was a moment of regret in his voice. ‘It always does.’

‘But I will not yield to it. This I swear, on our primarch’s name.’

The High Chaplain walked silently past him toward the guncutter, and from beneath the ship a ramp dropped down to accept him. Astorath paused at the foot of the gangway, and he pointed his axehead at Rafen. ‘You are not what I expected, brother. And so you live. For now.’ He sheathed the weapon. ‘But know this. After what happened on Sabien, you are being watched. And if you should give me cause, when we meet again I will not stay my hand.’

The Fate’s engines howled, and Rafen backed away as the guncutter’s hatch sealed shut. With a roar, the winged craft powered away into Baal’s sky, leaving the Blood Angel to watch it recede to a dark, distant speck.

He sensed Krixos approaching. ‘If you are ready, I have been informed that the rail transporter is cleared to depart the Regio for the return journey.’ The Techmarine looked up, studying the sky. ‘Now that the storm has passed.’

‘Has it?’ asked Rafen, staring into the distance.

RED FURY

CHAPTER ONE

Some things do not die all at once.

Men. Daemons. Whole worlds. Sometimes, the fight bleeds them white and still they will not perish, moving as if they are alive, going through the motions of it, unaware that they are already ended. Such things are corpses, after a fashion, ashen and pallid, heavy with the musk of decay.

Eritaen was such a thing. An urbanised sprawl-planet, too far off the axis of the Imperium’s prime trade routes to be thought of as a hive-world, it had at one time thrived in its own, limited manner. But the rebellion had made all of that go away.

The people had been weak; it was a lament repeated across the galaxy. They had been weak and allowed the taint into their society. And this was the reward they reaped, to die slowly in the ruins of the cities that had birthed them, dying but already dead.

Rafen dallied beneath the arching hood of an ornate atrium, the entrance to a public kinema. Shattered glass lay in drifts around the ticket vendor kiosk and the flame-blackened stanchions. Broken displays advertising pict-dramas and out-of-date newsreels glittered in the dimness. Like everything he had seen in the city, the debris had a fine layer of powdery, dun-coloured dust across it. The sandy fines were everywhere, billowing through the streets, hanging in great cloudy knots in the sky making the blue daylight muddy and bland. The dust left an unpleasant taste at the back of his throat, like bonemeal.

A flickering dash of fire danced in the depths of the open doors leading into the picture palace, and presently Turcio emerged from the darkness with his flamer at a casual ready in his augmetic fist, the pilot light in the muzzle hissing quietly to itself. The Space Marine went unhooded, his clenched fist of a face tight and severe. Absently, Rafen’s eyes went to the penitent brand, laser-burned into Turcio’s brow above his right eye, and the scars where his service studs had been removed. Other men might have gone about with their helmets locked tight and faces hidden, the better to conceal their shame, but not Brother Turcio. He wore the marks boldly, like a badge of honour.

‘Anything?’ Rafen asked.

The Astartes nodded to his commander. ‘Brother-sergeant,’ he began. ‘The same as before. The structure is empty. I found signs of our kinsmen’s presence, but they are long gone. I’d estimate a day, perhaps two.’

Rafen’s lip curled in disappointment. ‘This data they gave us is worthless.’ He allowed himself to look up, along the long boulevard that stretched away to the north. The street was choked with rubble from fallen tower blocks and stalled vehicles abandoned in the madness of the rebellion. Like most of Eritaen’s municipalities, this conurbation was built on a grid of kilometre-long roads that crosshatched the landscape of the planet. The buildings that sprouted from each city block were sheer-sided and narrow, rising fifty to seventy levels high. All that differentiated them were the colours of the stone and the odd architectural flourish; by and large, they had the uniform cast of buildings thrown up by the dogged and uninspired colonial administrators of the Munitorum. Rafen imagined that it would be easy to become lost in such a place, if one did not possess the perfect sense of direction granted to an Adeptus Astartes.

Still, the city made him uncomfortable. Acres of blast-blown windows gaped toward him, each one a dark pit that even his helmet optics struggled to penetrate. Any one of them could conceal a sniper behind a lascannon or a missile launcher. He would have preferred to range above the city in a shuttle, find their objective and proceed directly to it; but the rules of engagement for Eritaen had been impressed on the sergeant with no small amount of emphasis. This battle zone did not belong to him, and as such it was not his place to question how war was fought here. Rafen turned to find the rest of his squad waiting in half-cover behind an overturned omnibus, their crimson armour glittering dully in the afternoon haze. The Blood Angels were in this place as invited guests. This conflict was not theirs to prosecute nor comment upon.

He switched his vox to the general frequency and cut through the air with the blade of his hand. ‘We move on,’ he told them. ‘They’re not here.’

He heard the sneer in Ajir’s words as the tactical trooper emerged from behind the burnt-out vehicle. ‘Throne’s sake! Are they playing some kind of game with us?’ As always, the cocksure Space Marine was the first into the open, as if he were daring the city to take a shot at him.

Rafen’s frown deepened. Ajir seemed to assume he was somehow indestructible, as if his bolter and a swagger in his step were all he needed to defend against the arch-enemy.

‘It wouldn’t surprise me,’ offered Turcio. ‘Our erstwhile cousins have never been ones to–’

‘Enough,’ Rafen silenced the other warrior with a shake of his head. ‘We have our mission and our message. That will be our focus.’

‘Aye, lord.’ Turcio’s head bobbed. ‘Of course.’

He strode away, beckoning the largest of the squad toward him. The unit’s designated heavy weapons operator, the Space Marine differed from his brethren by his blue-coloured helmet and the massive, slab-sided shape of a belt-fed heavy bolter in his grip. Brother Puluo stepped up and nodded. The thickset, broad warrior didn’t seem to think that speaking was an important part of communication with his comrades, and for the most part that had proven to be true. Puluo brought new definition to the word ‘taciturn’, but Rafen had warmed to the silent man after he had been assigned to his squad. What he lacked in vocality he more than made up with martial prowess. ‘Watch the windows,’ he told him, in a low voice. ‘I have an inkling...’

Puluo nodded again and thumbed off the bolter’s safety, stepping past to find a better vantage point.

Behind them, young Kayne was hesitating, scrutinising the auspex in his gloved hand. ‘No change in readings, sir. There’s more cloud across this screen than a Secundus dust storm.’ Kayne was the tallest of them, rail-thin and whipcord-strong in comparison to Puluo’s densely muscled form. He also went bareheaded.

‘Atomics.’ Brother Corvus was the last to emerge, panning his bolter back and forth in a wary arc. ‘Residual radiation from airburst detonations. It’ll fog everything out beyond a half-kilometre.’

‘Aye,’ Kayne agreed, a sour tone in his voice, and he holstered the device, somewhat awkwardly. Rafen saw that Corvus noted the motion too, but neither said anything. The young Astartes was still finding his feet; only a scant few weeks ago, Kayne had been a Scout in the tenth company, and his promotion to the rank of full battle-brother was still fresh in his manner. The Mark VIII Imperator power armour he wore was new to him, and to the trained eye of a line warrior, it showed.

Rafen looked away. He had chosen the youth for the squad for several reasons, but largely because of his superlative marksmanship skills; however, in all truth the sergeant would have preferred to spend more time drilling and training his unit so that they meshed like finely-machined gears before they embarked on this sortie. Small things like Kayne’s unease should have been smoothed out by now, along with the other, less obvious rough edges – he glanced at Turcio and Corvus, thinking again of the penitent marks that both men shared.

But the Will of the Emperor and the Chapter did not move to the clock of a mere brother-sergeant. Commander Dante had given him his orders, and he had left the home world the very same day, his small concerns paying no coin against the word of his sworn lord, the master of the Blood Angels. There had been time aboard the frigate that brought them to Eritaen, but not enough. Never enough. His gaze found Turcio once again; of all of them, only he had served with Rafen for any length of time, before the incident on Cybele and the madness that had followed afterward…

Rafen shook off the moment; that path of reverie would serve only to dilute his focus. Although the rebellion on Eritaen had been crushed, it would not do for the sergeant to have his thoughts elsewhere. The city-sprawls still contained pockets of resistance that might be foolish enough to prey upon a squad of Adeptus Astartes, alone and unsupported. On some level, he hoped they might try; battle practice in the fortress monastery and aboard the frigate was fine as far as it went, but there was no substitute for the real thing.

The mission, though. The mission and the message came first.

They moved on, shifting into and out of the long, angular pools of shadow cast by the tower blocks. The glass, the dust-dulled shards of colour and light, lay everywhere. It was impossible to move without grinding them beneath their ceramite boots. At the base of some buildings, the glittering debris lay in mantles that were knee-deep even for the tall forms of the Space Marines. Once or twice, they caught the distant snarl of bolter fire, echoing and distorted down the concrete canyons of the city.

Rafen paused at an intersection, scanning the paths open to them. A hard, heavy breeze was moving east-to-west. It carried light debris in the air over their heads, scraps of paper, bits of torn cloth and the like; closer to the ground, it pushed the thick dust in sluggish waves that curled around their ankles. The sergeant dialled the filters on his breath grille to maximum and peered into the distance, watching for any sign of movement.

He found it.

‘There,’ said Rafen, pointing with a gauntleted finger. ‘Do you see?’

Ajir nodded. ‘Aye. Someone inside the groundcar?’ The Blood Angel frowned inside his helmet. ‘I think… I think he’s waving to us.’

At his side, Puluo made a grunting sound that was his equivalent of amusement. Kayne was sighting down the scope atop his bolter. ‘I can’t get a good angle from here. Brother-sergeant, perhaps I should find another vantage point?’

‘No,’ Rafen replied. ‘It could be a ploy to draw us out.’

Ajir studied the intersection. Beneath the dust were the remains of what must have been a horrific road accident. Several groundcars, a cargo hauler and two rail-trams were snarled together in a mess of metal and plastic. The Space Marine imagined the component parts of the collision separating, mentally tracking them backward to their points of origin.

‘The highway governance system’s machine-spirit died,’ said Corvus, clearly thinking along the same lines. ‘The vehicles collided at high speed.’

‘They were trying to flee the city,’ offered Turcio. ‘You agree?’

Ajir didn’t meet the other warrior’s gaze. ‘I suppose so.’ He found it difficult to converse with Turcio or Corvus and not see their penitent brands, not dwell on what they signified. For what must have been the hundredth time, Ajir found himself wondering what had possessed Brother-Sergeant Rafen to have the two men in his squad. They had proven themselves flawed, had they not? The very idea that the Blood Angels were in the business of giving those who failed the Emperor second chances was hard for him to swallow.

‘Teardrop formation.’ Rafen gave the order quickly and firmly. ‘Watch your sightlines and be ready.’

‘We approach?’ said Kayne.

‘We do,’ said the sergeant. ‘If it’s a trap, then we’ll trip it.’

But in the end, it was only the wind they found ranged against them. In the lee of the largest groundcar was the waving figure; the corpse of a man perhaps three or four days dead, fallen at an odd angle that let the hard gusts move him to and fro. The breeze gave the illusion of movement, of life.

‘He’s wearing remnants of a uniform,’ noted Kayne, nudging the body with the toe of his boot. ‘A local branch of enforcers, I’d warrant.’

‘More here,’ called Turcio, shifting a stalled vehicle with a shove of his shoulder. ‘Civilians?’

Rafen’s eyes narrowed behind his visor. ‘Difficult to tell.’ He came closer. The lay of the dead seemed incorrect. Bodies had a way about them when they fell in battle or from injury. He didn’t see it with these. ‘They weren’t killed here.’

‘Not in the accident, lord, no.’ Turcio gestured to the vehicles. ‘I would say they were executed elsewhere and then dumped here.’

‘In the middle of a debris pile?’ Ajir sniffed. ‘To what end?’

Kayne spat on the highway. ‘Who can fathom the purpose of anything the arch-enemy does?’

‘True enough,’ admitted Corvus.

Rafen’s paid little heed to the words of his men. He knelt by the body of the enforcer and cradled the dead man’s head in his palm. The corpse-flesh was so very white, almost a translucent colour against the bright crimson of his gauntlet. Eyes, sightless and cloudy, stared back up at him. The body felt strangely light.

With care, Rafen pinched a piece of flesh between the fingers of his glove.

Turcio followed his commander’s scrutiny. ‘What is it, brother-sergeant?’

Rafen let the dead man fall away. ‘There’s no blood. Look around, do you see any? Not a trace of it.’

Kayne sniffed the air. ‘No… No, that’s right. I didn’t even notice…’

Corvus drew his auspex and spoke a quick invocation, setting it to a biological scan mode. He waved it over the body of another civilian, this one a woman. ‘They have been exsanguinated,’ he reported. ‘All vitae taken from their bodies.’

Rafen pulled at the collar of the dead enforcer and found a large puncture mark just above his clavicle. ‘Here. I imagine we’ll find the same wound on all of them.’

Kayne spat again and made the sign of the aquila. ‘Emperor protect their souls. It’s not enough they were killed, but something did that to them.’

‘The Emperor has no mercy for these fools,’ said Corvus. He turned the dead woman’s face so that they could all see the line of rings and arcs tattooed along her jaw line. ‘Companitas. The mark of the rebellion.’

The dissenter movement on Eritaen was not a product of that world alone. If anything, the Companitas were one of many minor factions that crawled and hid in the cracks of the Imperium’s monolithic culture. Rafen knew only the surface details about them, only the information that was of tactical value. Outwardly the Companitas preached unity, freedom and comradeship between all men; behind closed doors they were said to engage in acts of wantonness that most decent folk would think shameful, if not utterly repugnant. The hand of Chaos was at their backs; Rafen did not doubt it. Perhaps not in the rank and file of misguided fools like these, but certainly elsewhere, in their upper echelons.

‘Perhaps they did this to themselves,’ offered Turcio. ‘The Corrupted have been known to do the like.’

Kayne shifted. ‘There may be other cause,’ he said darkly. ‘The taking of the blood… Perhaps it was a prize.’ The young Astartes gestured toward the wreckage and the corpses. ‘Perhaps we have come upon some sort of… warning. A message left here for the rebels.’

‘Why take the blood, then?’ demanded Ajir.

The younger warrior shot his commander a wary look, uncertain if he should speak further. ‘You know where we are, on whose battleground we walk. We’ve all heard the stories,’ he said, after a moment.

Rafen’s men exchanged loaded glances, and he did not need the preternatural insight of a psyker to know the thoughts they were sharing at that moment. He drew himself up to his full height and spoke firmly, breaking the sudden, new tension. ‘Whoever was the architect of this grisly scene, it matters nothing to us. They are long gone by now and lay outside our concerns.’ He stepped away from the wreckage. ‘We tarry too long in this place. Gather yourselves, we have a–’

His words trailed off, and the other men came instantly to alert. Rafen froze, staring down the roadway. Something was amiss.

‘Sir?’ said Turcio.

Puluo had seen it too. The heavy bolter’s feed belt creaked as he turned the gun toward a building at the south-western point of the intersection.

‘Auspex,’ ordered Rafen.

Corvus still had the unit in his hand and studied it, tapping at the large keys on the surface, conjuring information from the device’s machine-spirit. ‘Motion detection read is inconclusive. You saw something?’

Puluo nodded gently toward the tower block. ‘Movement,’ he said.

‘Rebels?’ asked Ajir.

Rafen hefted his bolter. ‘Likely.’ From the corner of his eye, he had glimpsed the very smallest flicker of colour at one of the windows; the watery-blue daylight cast across something shiny and green, like an insect carapace. A man in combat armour. He had only the very quickest impression of shape and form, but hard-won experience had taught the sergeant to trust his instincts, to let the enhanced elements of his Astartes physiology bring the sense of his world to him, raw and unfiltered.

He raised the blade of his hand, opened the fingers; the battle sign command for spread out. The six Space Marines shifted away from the cover of the wrecks and moved swiftly toward the building, opening up into a fan, covering every possible angle of attack.

They came in, loping like hunter canines on the prowl, boots crunching softly on dull dust and chips of glass. Rafen saw that the building was a service tower, a layered structure of offices and Adminstratum facilities. Renditions of the noble Imperial eagle jutted from every corner, and across the main entrance a pair of towering figures in the robes of the Adeptus Terra flanked the space where the doors would have been. Some of the upper tiers had collapsed down into those below them, giving the building a stooped aspect. The sergeant noted this; the structure was probably unstable, which meant restricting the men to non-explosive weapons. The ill-considered use of a krak grenade here could conceivably bring the roof down upon them.

Kayne signalled to him, and pointed. Off to the side, the dusty road dropped into a shallow ramp leading toward the underlevels of the tower. An underground vehicle park, he realised. Rafen considered it for a moment. A good, defensible position, as tough as any fallout shelter or army bunker, concealed to the eyes of anything but a close-range inspection. A fair choice for a rebel seeking a bolt hole.

He hesitated. Once he gave the order to step inside, he would be venturing beyond the mission orders granted to him. Rafen’s squad were to seek their objective, nothing more, nothing less. If he turned them all away and led them back down the highway, it would not be wrong to do so – but in all truth, the matter of the dead bodies had concerned him. He felt a building need to know more about what was going on here on Eritaen.

Rafen’s brow furrowed. He decided to consider it an exercise. They had been prowling the streets of this maze for days. Some action would be a blessing.

He nodded to Kayne and gestured for him to take the point, all the better to give him something to focus on. The young warrior smiled thinly, pausing to replace his helmet before moving on.

The underlevel parking structure descended for several tiers beneath the service tower, dropping into sub-basements that ranged away into the dimness. The floor was canted downwards, each level a shallow ramp leading to the next. With the city’s power grid long since smashed, the only light came from the sickly yellow-green glow of biolume pods along the rough ferrocrete walls. Rafen felt the familiar tensing sensation at the back of his eyes as his occulobe implant stirred to life, stimulating the cells of his optic nerves. The deeper they ventured inside, the more the chambers took on a flat, washed-out cast, his vision adjusting to the low levels of illumination.

He glanced at the sensor glyphs in the corner of his visor. The armour’s integral atmosphere sensors were registering a slight build-up of monoxides in the atmosphere, but so little as to be beneath the notice of an Astartes. The ever-present powdery dust had not reached this far; only small curls of it lurked here and there, drooling from the grilles of ventilation shafts. Down here, the air tasted of stale hydrocarbons and spent batteries.

Turcio tap-tapped the side of his helmet, attracting the attention of the whole squad. ‘More bodies.’ There were perhaps fifty or sixty of them, piled in a long, low heap against a wall. ‘These ones haven’t been blooded.’

‘Saved for later, maybe,’ Kayne noted quietly.

Ajir bent closer. ‘What are those?’ He pointed to a strange contraption about the torso of the nearest figure. From Rafen’s viewpoint, it resembled a metallic vest with racks of glassy tubes ranged down it, each one dark with some sort of oily liquid inside. His hearing detected a faint clicking sound. Every one of the bodies wore the same item; every one of them bore the Companitas insignia on their face.

‘Touch nothing,’ said Rafen. ‘The corpses are likely to be booby-trapped.’

‘We leave them here?’ Ajir pressed.

‘Aye,’ he returned. ‘Turcio will torch them when we’ve completed our sweep.’

They moved on. There were a few vehicles, mostly of the boxy, utilitarian kind pressed from the same Standard Template Construct pattern used on thousands of human worlds. Rafen imagined they had likely been abandoned in the rush to escape the city when the fighting finally spilled into the open.

‘Still nothing,’ offered Corvus, scrutinising the auspex.

‘Not quite,’ said Kayne, halting with his bolter at his shoulder.

Ahead of them, sitting cross-legged atop the bonnet of a low-slung cargo flatbed, was a figure partially clad in what appeared to be scraps of Imperial Guard-issue armour. It was a male, dirty and matted, hunched slightly forward. His shoulders were twitching and he paid the approach of the Space Marines no heed. Rafen’s immediate impression was of someone silently weeping.

‘He does not register…’ said Corvus. ‘I read no organic traces from him.’

Kayne had already drawn a bead, and the rest of the unit reacted as they were supposed to, spying to the corners of the parking space, looking for other threats.

Rafen took a step forward. ‘Identify yourself,’ he demanded. The Blood Angel was not in the business of being ignored.

The man looked up briefly, and it became clear he was not weeping, but laughing. He did it without uttering a sound, rocking back and forth as if the greatest comedy of all the universe had been revealed to him.

‘I asked you a question, citizen.’ Rafen’s free hand drifted to the hilt of his power sword. ‘Speak!’

Abruptly, the man slid off the vehicle and stumbled drunkenly toward them. ‘The dust,’ he gulped, gasping in air between quiet jags of hysteria. ‘The dust is why it’s… It’s all that’s left of them!’

‘Stand back,’ ordered Kayne, all hesitation gone from his voice.

‘See,’ said the man, offering something to them in his cupped hands. ‘See.’ It was a glass cylinder filled with thick fluid, identical to those mounted upon the metal vests. Closer now, and Rafen could see the laughing man was also wearing one beneath his dirt-slick jacket. ‘Come to the dust,’ he choked, and with a sudden motion, the ragged figure jammed the tube into his thigh.

A clicking noise sounded from the cylinder, and with a glugging cough the fluid inside discharged into the man’s leg. He shuddered like a palsy victim and leapt at them, whooping.

Kayne’s gun discharged and the flat bang of the shot echoed around them. The laughing man was slammed backward, his neck ending in a haze of pink mist.

‘He tried to attack you.’ Corvus was almost incredulous. ‘Was he out of his mind?’

‘Apparently,’ opined Puluo.

Then from behind them, back up along the shallow rise of the slanting floor, a rattling chorus of clicking and hissing and chugging echoed off the walls. The pile of bodies writhed and slipped, figures falling off one another, dropping to the floor and rolling away. Others were stiff-legged, climbing slowly to their feet. Giggling. Mumbling. Empty glass ampoules fell from the ports in their vests and rolled down toward the Astartes.

‘They were dead…’ Corvus blinked.

‘Yes,’ noted Turcio. ‘They were.’

‘Remind them, then,’ said Rafen, bringing up his gun as the figures swarmed toward them, each one injecting draughts of fluid into their twitching bodies.

Puluo unleashed the heavy bolter, and inside the confines of the vehicle park the noise of the weapon’s discharge was a metallic bellow. A crucifix of muzzle flare split from the barrel as bullets the size of candlepins ripped into the advancing horde. Some of them were killed instantly as shots punched through the middle of their torsos, shattering them through hydrostatic shock; others lost limbs or hanks of flesh, spinning about as if they were taking part in some idiot dance.

The ones that did not die immediately showed no signs of fear, not the slightest jot of concern for their lives. They simply laughed and screamed, the meat of their faces bulging, puffed up with the surge of the dark fluid from the injectors.

They had poor weapons, but many of them. Stubber rifles, mostly, along with clubs of all kinds and countless blades. Ballistic rounds rattled off Rafen’s chest plate, chipping at the red ceramite but gaining no purchase. He used his bolter to place single, pinpoint rounds into the head of any target that came his way.

The ones that had limbs blown out from under them did not appear to care. Rafen witnessed them reach for the ampules on their vests and fire fresh doses into their stomachs or necks. The Blood Angel was no stranger to combat drugs, although for the most part, his Chapter eschewed the used of chemical alterants to enhance battlefield ability, preferring to rely on the raw power of the bloodline of their primarch. But whatever it was that these rebels were using on themselves, it went beyond the scope of such things. The fluid was some kind of mutagen; he could actually see it altering the density of flesh or staunching the torrents of blood.

At the feet of the Astartes, the ferrocrete was quickly becoming damp and sticky with the vitae of their attackers. Through his breath grille, Rafen’s nostrils twitched at the scent of the blood. It had a peculiar bouquet, the familiar coppery tang mingled with an almost sugary sweetness, like some succulent confection. He licked his lips automatically.

The attackers hurled themselves over the bodies of their fallen brethren with mad abandon, and abruptly the skirmish became a close quarter battle. Rafen’s squad met the challenge with casual force. Such close-in fights were the very meat and drink of the Blood Angels. The sergeant let his bolter fall away on its sling and drew his power sword backhanded, bringing it about in a quick turn that beheaded a Companitas brandishing a drum-fed shotgun. The weapon discharged once, twice, as the headless corpse continued a little longer in the mad capering dance. Irritated, Rafen cut again, this time parting the abdomen. There was a slight resistance as the glowing blade sliced through the spinal column; he made a mental note to have the armoury serfs sharpen the edge and tune the sword’s energy field when the squad had quit Eritaen.

Around him, the fight had contracted to a series of one-on-one combats. Puluo killed a man with the weight of his bolter, using the gun as a blunt instrument to crush his skull against the floor. Kayne buried his bayonet in the chest of a chattering swordsman. Turcio’s flamer coughed out puffballs of yellow-orange promethium flame, turning his foes into screaming torches.

‘Let’s finish this and be gone,’ said Corvus.

Ajir grunted with grim gallows humour. ‘With all due respect, I think these fools may have other ideas. Do you not hear them?’

Rafen turned as the sound of clattering boots and chattering laughter reached his ears. There were more of the Companitas emerging from beneath them, hundreds more, the bubbling rush of their hysteria echoing up from the sub-levels. He had wondered earlier where the enemy was hiding; it seemed that they had been hiding here.

‘We’ve happened on a rat’s nest.’ Turcio’s face was set. ‘How many?’

‘More than we have shells for,’ Rafen replied. ‘Draw back. If they bottle us up in here, we’ll not see daylight again–’

Then without preamble, a new voice issued out over the general vox frequency, a gruff and resonant growl. ‘Blood Angels. Exfiltrate now. You are in a fire zone.’

‘Who speaks?’ he demanded. ‘Give your name and rank!’

‘I will not warn you again, cousin,’ came the terse reply, and the signal cut out.

Puluo turned to fire into ranks of the rebel reinforcements as the last of the first wave were dispatched. Kayne shot Rafen a look. ‘Orders, lord?’

Rafen’s expression soured. ‘We go. Disengage and fall back!’

The squad reacted as one, Puluo and Corvus laying down cover fire as the Space Marines retreated back the way they had come. Rafen’s grimace set hard; he knew full well who had spoken, and the arrogance of the words filled him with irritation; but to ignore what was said would be foolish.

Weak daylight glowed before them as they reached the uppermost level of the parking structure, and a faint sound reached his enhanced hearing; the shriek of multiple missile fire.

His rational mind barely had time to register the thought, questions springing to his lips; but instead he shouted out a warning. ‘Incoming!’

They burst from the structure in rush. Somewhere above them, a barrage of rockets slammed into the flanks of the service tower and sent a shockwave hammering down through the sub-levels. Aged ferrocrete splintered, cracked, shattered, and down came the building around them in a torrent of stone.

Turcio felt the rain of rock rather than saw it. Dust blinded him and he cursed himself for going about without his helmet. Blinking, he glimpsed another figure in battle armour struggling to wade through the melee and instinctively reached out, tugging on an arm to help his comrade move through the landslide.

The arm was rudely snatched away. ‘Look to your own welfare, penitent!’ snarled Ajir, forcing his way through the choking clouds of powder.

Turcio scowled and said nothing, charging onward. He was aware of other men around him, the shifting, blurry shapes of red in amongst the falling rocks. Tiny stones clattered into his neck ring and ones the size of fists bounced across his skull, lighting sparks of pain. He almost stumbled, but a force propelled him forward. Puluo.

‘Move,’ snapped the Space Marine.

The blue sunshine turned grey as a haze of dust enveloped them.

CHAPTER TWO

The final, dying fall of the stubby tower sent a ring of air rippling out around it, churning the ever-present dust and the smaller shards of broken glass. Rolling cords of bone-coloured powder rose in a wave, slowly to drift and settle anew across the wreckage of the intersection. The dust fell upon the armour of the warriors who stood ranged around the squat shape of the Whirlwind missile tank. Their wargear, usually a heavy, wine-dark crimson with black trim, was sullied from weeks of battle in among the cloying dust. The colours were dull and washed-out, as if sun-bleached. Only the sigil on their shoulder pads remained bright and starkly visible; a razor-toothed circular blade crested with a single droplet of blood in deep, arterial red.

Smoke curled from the mouth of the Whirlwind’s rocket tubes as the commander of the unit glanced up at it. ‘You didn’t give them much warning,’ noted one of his men.

‘I gave them enough,’ said the squad leader. ‘Perhaps this experience will encourage them not to interfere where they are uninvited.’

‘If any one of them is dead… There could be repercussions.’

‘They’ll live, if they’re worth the name Astartes.’ The squad leader pointed. Rubble was shifting and figures emerged from the debris, shaking off the effects of the concussion. ‘You see? No harm done.’ There was an edge of cruel amusement in his voice.

‘Just to their pride,’ added the other.

His commander smiled thinly. ‘They can stand a wound or two to that.’

Rafen kicked free of the ruin and stepped out from the tangle of rebar and wreckage, casting one quick look over his shoulder to be sure that his men were all unhurt. He didn’t wait for them to follow. He stormed out across the windblown intersection toward the tank, his fury building behind his chest. Rafen removed his helmet with an angry twist of his hands.

‘Cousin,’ said the voice from the vox. ‘Well met.’ Two figures in Mark VII Aquila armour advanced out to meet him. They wore the insignia of a trooper and a veteran sergeant, and as he watched the senior warrior mirrored his action, doffing his headgear.

Rafen saw a craggy face beneath, with close-cut dark hair and cold, lifeless eyes; and at that moment, more than anything, he wanted to backhand him for his recklessness.

But there was the mission. The mission and the message. Rafen bit down on the impulse and ignored the ritual greeting. ‘I have often heard it said that the brothers of the Flesh Tearers Chapter are a savage and impulsive lot,’ he said stiffly. ‘And to think, I thought better of you.’

Rafen was rewarded by a small tic of annoyance in the other warrior’s eye. ‘We have a reputation to live down to,’ said the Space Marine. ‘The primarch, in his wisdom, did not see fit to bless us with the same gifts as our parent legion.’ He nodded at Rafen’s armour, at the winged blood droplet insignia upon its chest. ‘But we have learned to play to the strengths we have.’ The Astartes gave the slightest of bows. ‘I am Brother-Sergeant Noxx. This is Battle-Brother Roan, my second-in-command.’

‘Rafen,’ he replied, his ill mood clipping his words. ‘I await your apology, cousin.’ He put a hard emphasis on the word.

Noxx returned a steady gaze. ‘For what? For prosecuting a sortie in the battle that we have been ordered to win? If you have an issue, Blood Angel, I would suggest you take it up with my commander. It was on his orders we destroyed the target.’ He gestured at the shattered building. ‘Had it not been for him, we might not have known you were inside.’

‘Orbital observation drones spotted your men entering the tower,’ added Roan.

‘Why were you in there?’ said Noxx. ‘Has there been a change of protocol that I was not aware of? Are the Blood Angels joining us at Eritaen to fight against the rebels? It was my understanding that you are here only as messengers.’

Rafen’s jaw hardened. He refused to allow the Flesh Tearer to bait him. ‘A target presented itself. I assumed you would appreciate our assistance in neutralising it.’

Noxx nodded once. ‘Indeed. But as you can see, we have the matter well in hand.’ He indicated the Whirlwind, and for the first time Rafen noticed that there were a group of civilians cowering in the shadow of the armoured vehicle.

‘Collaborators,’ explained Roan, sensing Rafen’s question. ‘One of them was supplying water to the Companitas. When properly compelled, he revealed knowledge of this nest.’

‘One?’ Rafen repeated. ‘You have a dozen people there. What are the others guilty of?’

‘They lived in the same refuge. They sheltered the traitor.’

‘You’re certain of that?’ he demanded.

Noxx turned away, signalling to another of his men. ‘Can we really take the risk?’

Two Flesh Tearers turned toward the civilians and opened fire. In a brisk rattle of bolt shells, the group were gunned down.

Noxx looked back at Rafen, daring him to comment. ‘Forgive me, cousin, if our methods are less refined than you might be used to. I’m sure they lack the elegance and purity of the Blood Angels.’

He matched the other man’s challenging glare, unwilling to give an inch. ‘You ought to drill your men more closely, Noxx. A Blood Angel would not have wasted so much ammunition on a dispatch.’

‘Perhaps,’ Noxx allowed. ‘Next time, I’ll have Roan here demonstrate the use of a flaying blade for you.’ He tapped the wickedly barbed longknife at his waist.

‘I imagine that would be very educational,’ replied Rafen. Barely a minute in his presence, and the sergeant’s patience with his opposite number was already running shallow; the days of aimless wandering in search of the Flesh Tearer forward command post, and then this blatant display of one-upmanship were grating on him. He glanced in the direction of his men and found them approaching warily. They walked in a combat profile, despite the fact that they were in the presence of what should have been considered their allies.

But then the Flesh Tearers were allies to no one, not the other Chapters of the Astartes, not even to those who shared a kinship to the primarch who gave them life and purpose, the Great Angel Sanguinius.

‘Movement!’ Turcio’s shout cut through Rafen’s musings and he spun around as sounds reached his ears; the rumble of shifting rock and a chorus of wailing voices, growing louder by the second.

The wreckage of the smoking tower trembled and moved, abruptly bursting open in a cloud of dust and fumes. A massive, headless humanoid form pressed itself out of the ruins. The wailing became screaming, the screaming became the maddened laughter they had heard inside the parking structure.

Rafen blinked through the smoke and saw the monstrosity clearly for the first time. It was no one being, but a mass of them. The form was an amalgam of the Companitas, hundreds of bodies all collected together, held in place by some arcane power; and all of them were hooting and chattering with their madness.

‘Fire!’ he shouted, and his squad opened up with their weapons. Noxx followed suit, bolt shells hazing the air around the collective creature.

Bodies were ripped apart and blown off in spiralling darts of blood, but the mass did not slow down. It seethed over the fractured stonework, one huge fist of flesh coming down like a hammer to crush a Flesh Tearer into a mess of ceramite and meat. When the fist came back up, the remains of the Space Marine were absorbed into the accumulation.

‘This is the true face of the Companitas!’ snarled Roan. ‘This is the warp-cursed unity they promise! Chaos whelps!’

Noxx shouted orders to the Whirlwind crew, commanding them to reload; but the speed of the thing was too great. It would be upon them before they could retaliate.

‘Blood Angels,’ Rafen called into his vox. ‘Grenades! Impact set!’ He grabbed at the drum-shaped krak grenades clipped to his waist and thumbed the trigger from safe to armed, dialling the munitions to detonate when they struck their target. Around him, he saw Turcio, Puluo and the others doing the same. ‘Ready! Loose!’

A rain of the small bombs arced through the air and struck the Companitas amalgam in the centre of its mass, a chain-fire of explosions rippling through it. The fusion-body screamed louder and tore itself apart, falling into smaller pieces, corpses tumbling away.

‘Flamers!’ Noxx bellowed. ‘Forward and sweep! Nothing lives!’

A squad of Flesh Tearers advanced, casting whips of burning promethium over the writhing bodies. In moments, the intersection was a funeral pyre, tides of grey smoke billowing up between the towers.

Rafen shot a glare at the other sergeant.

Noxx ignored it. ‘We require no assistance from any other Astartes,’ he sniffed, in complete disregard to what had just occurred. ‘My Chapter was ordered here to bring the Emperor’s bloody retribution to Eritaen. That mission need not be diluted by the addition of any more forces.’

Rafen felt a slow rise of understanding. Noxx was labouring under a misapprehension. The sergeant’s resentment for the most part stemmed from the age-old rivalry between the Blood Angels and their kindred, from the clash of methods between the blunt and brutal Flesh Tearers and the more studied way of Rafen’s Chapter; but his anger was also at the threat of diminishment. The Tearers were one of the smallest Chapters in the Adeptus Astartes, and their harsh reactions to any perceived slight upon them – real or imagined – were well documented. They more than made up in ferocity what they lacked in numbers.

‘We are not here to take this fight from you,’ Rafen told him. ‘The Blood Angels have no interest in the punishment of Eritaen.’

For the first time since laying eyes on him, Rafen saw something close to doubt in Noxx’s expression. ‘Then why in the Throne’s name are you here?’ All pretence at chill politeness dropped away and Noxx let his resentment show its colours. ‘Come to remind your poor kinsmen of their betters?’

‘I don’t answer to you,’ he replied. ‘I carry a message for Seth, your Chapter Master. You will take me to him.’ Rafen beckoned Kayne closer, and the youth produced a sealed metal scroll-tube, locked with sigil of Lord Dante himself. ‘And by this authority, you will do it now.’

Noxx glared at the tube. The weight of a Chapter Master’s word was an inviolate command for a line Astartes, and not even a Space Marine with the ingrained arrogance of the Flesh Tearers would dare to deny it.

After a moment, the veteran sergeant gave a slow, sullen nod. Without looking at the Blood Angels, he walked back toward the Whirlwind. ‘This way, then. And try to keep up.’

Through the dust, they followed behind the Whirlwind in silence for another hour before they arrived at the Flesh Tearers’ field command post. At the point of the squad’s teardrop formation, Brother Kayne studied the gutted structure they had taken as their temporary base.

It was a thing of steel buttresses and stone walls, missing a glass roof that had doubtless been obliterated in the early days of the Eritaen rebellion. A squat colonnade at one end of the old building ended in a tall, spindly antenna tower that reached into the sky; it was wilting, as if the metal had been twisted in some fearsome wind. The structure stood atop a shallow hill, giving it good lines of sight down all the highways around it. Kayne glanced at a fallen sign as they entered the courtyard, seeing a name, a designation. Situa Alexandus Regina – Adeptus Telepathica. Of course; the meaning of the strangely-barbed antenna became clear; this had been a communications temple, the nexus for planetbound signalling via machine-call vox and astropathic transfer.

He caught a familiar, stale scent on the wind – old blood. On the walls of the building he spotted dark brown spatter-patterns and metal impact rivets driven into splintered brick. Bodies had been crucified up there, at some point. He wondered if they might have been the staff of the complex; and then he wondered what had become of their corpses.

The Whirlwind peeled away from the group and grumbled to a halt near a knot of Chapter serfs, under the watchful eye of a Flesh Tearer Techmarine. There were only a handful of vehicles in the parking quadrant, and Kayne frowned at the condition of them. A Rhino, a Baal-pattern Predator tank, a pair of land speeders, all of them had a grubby and ill-maintained look to them, as if they were held together by little more than steel hull patches and prayers to their machine-spirits. But then Kayne considered for a moment; the Whirlwind they had followed also bore the same scars and rough aspect, and yet it had moved with swiftness and ready purpose. Perhaps it was not that the Flesh Tearers cared poorly for their machines, but simply that they cared little for their surface appearance.

The youth turned that thought over in his mind, his gaze moving across the other Astartes who paused in their devotions or tasks at hand to stop and watch the arrival of the Blood Angels. Their scrutiny was not kind, not indifferent, but wary, distrustful. He speculated on what they might think of Brother-Sergeant Rafen and his squad. Like their vehicles, the Flesh Tearers themselves did not display much in the way of ornamentation; the deep red of their armour, so dense that it strayed toward the purple, covered all except the helmet, backpack and shoulder pads. These were a hard, matt black that reflected no light. Kayne saw rank sigils, company badges and the like, but no decals or decoration beyond what was needed on the battlefield. In contrast, the red wargear of the Blood Angels sported fine filigree in gold across the wings on their chests, shimmering drops of ruby, elaborate votive chains and other symbology. The Space Marine felt overdressed alongside the successors. Some of the Tearers, the bolder ones, the veterans, arched an eyebrow and looked away. Perhaps they thought the Blood Angels to be peacocks; even Puluo, the least fetching of their squad, would have been considered handsome when placed alongside these scarred and hatchet-faced men.

It was hard to believe these Astartes stemmed from the same noble gene-seed that gave rise to the Blood Angels, and yet the Flesh Tearers were as much a legacy of the primarch Sanguinius as Kayne and his battle-brothers. In the aftermath of the Horus Heresy ten millennia past, when the Emperor of Man ascended to the Golden Throne and the galaxy reeled from the newborn war with Chaos, the great Legions of the Adeptus Astartes had been split off into smaller successor Chapters, and the Blood Angels had been no exception. Among others, the Flesh Tearers were spawned from that great Second Founding, set loose to range to the edges of human space in order to punish worlds who had given loyalty to the Arch-traitor Horus; but it was said that they had taken something dark with them, some black and vicious skein previously buried deep in the Great Sanguinius’s spirit. Their manners in battle were spoken of in the halls of Baal’s fortress-monastery with censure and cold reproach.

Kayne wondered how much of the rumours about their cousins were true, and how much were myth and obfuscation. He knew full well that other Chapters, like the stoic Ultramarines or the Iron Hands, said similar things of the Blood Angels; but meeting the hard eyes of the Space Marines who watched them walk by, he found it difficult to be generous with this understanding.

Every Son of Sanguinius, no matter if his Chapter was from the First or the last of the Foundings, shared the same gene-taint, the twin maladies of the Black Rage and the Red Thirst. The psychic echo of the death of their liege-lord, the dark potential to lose one’s mind to the berserker rage of bloodlust lurked in all of them. It was a curse the Blood Angels fought against each day of their lives; but so it was said, the blight of the Rage and the Thirst was something the Flesh Tearers embraced. Such a thought sickened Kayne. To tap into that wild fury during the melee of battle was one thing, but to surrender to it? That was to willingly allow oneself to become nothing more than an animal.

‘Kayne,’ Ajir said quietly, so his voice did not carry beyond them. ‘I’d advise you not to stare at them so much. They may take it as prelude to a martial challenge.’

He bristled. ‘Then let them. I am confident in my skills.’

He heard the grim amusement in his comrade’s tone. ‘That much is certain. But remember, this is not a combat mission. Mind yourself. There’s no need to start fires where there are none.’

‘I bow to your superior knowledge, brother.’ Kayne nodded reluctantly. ‘But I find it is best to treat every mission as a combat mission. It lessens the opportunity for unpleasant surprises.’

‘Less talk,’ snapped Puluo, as the group came to a halt before the building proper.

The Tearer sergeant was speaking to Rafen. ‘Your men will remain here.’

Rafen nodded and glanced at Turcio. ‘Stand down. I’ll proceed alone.’

‘Aye, lord.’

Without waiting to be asked, Kayne recovered his burden from the pouch on his belt and once more gave his commander the sealed scroll-tube. As the two Blood Angels moved closer, Kayne lowered his voice, the question that had been pressing upon him since the day they left Baal finally falling from his lips. ‘Will that be enough, brother-sergeant?’

Rafen took the tube and the youth saw the shadow of a deep hurt pass over his squad leader’s face. ‘For Baal’s sake, I hope so.’ His fingers closed around the golden rod. ‘Or else our Chapter may be lost.’

Noxx continued as he had before. He did not wait to see if the Blood Angel was following him, he simply walked away and expected Rafen to keep pace.

Inside the walls of the building there were no interior partitions, nothing but stanchions spaced at regular intervals holding up the broken frame of the roof. The wide, echoing space resembled an aircraft hangar, but for the stubs of felled walls and the sprawl of temporary tent habitats dotted around. Chapter serfs, servitors and the occasional Space Marine moved between them, intent on their duties. Rafen glanced up and saw adaptive camouflage netting ranged over everything. The watery blue sunlight was attenuated even more by the nets, casting hazy shadows everywhere. The dust was in here with them as well, gritty across the cracked marble flooring.

‘Inside,’ said Noxx, indicating a circular enclosure.

Rafen eyed the vac-slit door warily and pushed his way through, the tough cloth tugging at his wargear as he did so. Within, the tent had a lamp casting a warm yellow glow about the temporary shelter. A ragged battle standard sat furled in one corner, fixed in a stand next to a mobile shrine. By reflex, Rafen bowed slightly to the small brass idol of the Emperor within it and made the sign of the aquila over his chest. Behind him, Noxx did the same.

There was one other Astartes in the tent, his face lit from below by the colours of a hololithic chart table. Rafen glimpsed a tactical plot of the city, with shifting arrows floating in the air above it. The live feed from the orbital scrying drones mentioned by Noxx’s second.

The Space Marine – a captain, by the rank tabs on his armour – sub-vocalised a command word and the battle data on the map dissolved, leaving only the bare framework of buildings and streets.

‘Ave Imperator,’ said the Blood Angel. ‘I am Brother-Sergeant Rafen. I have come with a message for his Lordship Seth.’

‘I know who you are. And why you are here.’ The Flesh Tearer officer stepped around the table. ‘I am Brother-Captain Gorn, adjutant to the Chapter Master.’ He nodded to the scroll-tube. ‘You will disclose your message to me and in due time I will present it to my Master for his consideration.’

Rafen stiffened. ‘With respect, brother-captain, I will do no such thing. And this is not a matter to be dealt with “in due time”. It comes directly from my Chapter Master.’

Gorn seemed unconcerned by Rafen’s retort. He moved into the light and the Blood Angel got a better look at him. Like Noxx, he had a hard face and an aquiline jaw that betrayed the passage of a hundred battles.

‘What is it?’ he asked casually, moving to a cabinet in the corner. ‘The message, the contents therein. What does it say?’

‘I… I do not know.’ Rafen held up the cylinder. ‘These words are for the eyes of our Masters alone, lord. It is not my place, nor yours, to read them.’

‘Of course,’ Gorn allowed, removing a seal-bottle and a goblet. ‘But I suspect you already know the scope of what the message will say, if not the letter of it. Perhaps you could illuminate me?’ He opened the bottle and poured himself a half-glass.

Rafen’s nostrils twitched as the scent of the liquid reached him. Coppery, with a sickly-sweet thickness. He swallowed, banishing the aroma of it.

Gorn went on. ‘I find it hard to believe that Dante would–’

‘Lord Dante,’ Rafen corrected firmly.

‘Of course, pardon my error. I find it hard to believe that Lord Dante would send a warrior out here, all the way from Baal to the edge of nowhere, and have him be little more than an ignorant errand boy.’ He took a sip of the fluid, savoured it. ‘Is that all you are, brother-sergeant?’

And once more, the voice at the back of Rafen’s thoughts spoke the mantra that had kept him in line these past few weeks.

The mission. The mission first and foremost, Rafen. Mephiston had said those words to him, the hard and unyielding gaze of the Lord of Death burning into him. There has never been a moment more deadly to our brotherhood than this one.

‘I will speak to Seth, Chapter Master of the Flesh Tearers, or I will not speak at all,’ he told them, iron in his tone. ‘Take me to the presence of your lord, or else I will find him myself.’

Gorn put down the goblet. ‘How predictable of you, Blood Angel. How predictable of your master, to simply drop in upon us without invite or regard and expect your cousins to bend the knee and show obeisance.’

Rafen felt his temper rising again. ‘We have done nothing of the sort. We only require the respect that one Chapter of the Astartes ought to show another, and as the Emperor is my witness–’ He nodded toward the shrine, ‘–your men have given precious little of it, brother-captain!’

A feral smile split Gorn’s face. ‘Ah. Some fire in your blood. Perhaps you don’t all have adamantium rods up your backsides, then.’ The officer threw Noxx an amused look.

Belatedly, Rafen realised that he was being deliberately provoked. He ground out his next words between gritted teeth. ‘Where is Lord Seth?’

‘I am here,’ said a careful voice from behind Gorn, as a new figure emerged from a concealed slit in the far side of the tent. Rafen caught the glitter of muted steel plate across a shorn scalp and a face tracked by great claw-scars. Stern, deep-set eyes fixed him with an unwavering stare, and at the corners of his sight he saw Noxx and Gorn instantly change in manner, heads bowed and all trace of cold humour gone. ‘I am Seth,’ said the Chapter Master, extending a hand. ‘You have something for me.’

Rafen nodded, and bowed his head as well. ‘Aye, lord.’

Seth took the rod and with a twist of his wrist, snapped it in two, discarding the casing on the floor and plucking the curl of photic parchment from inside. ‘Shall we see what my cousin Dante has to say?’

Turcio bent and gathered a thickness of the strange, ever-present dust between the thumb and forefinger of his glove. He rolled the granules back and forth; they crumbled still more, became a thin paste. A dry smell, the air of ancient museums and long-sealed tombs, came from his fingers. ‘This sand is everywhere. Where does it come from? There are no deserts for hundreds of kilometres in any direction.’

A shadow fell across him and he looked up. ‘Bones,’ said the Flesh Tearer. ‘This is all that’s left of them.’

‘This is… human remains?’

A nod. ‘The Companitas led the populace who were foolish enough to defy them into rendering plants. Then they did the same with those who complied. The grindings of the bones, they set them into airburst warheads and exploded them over the cities. And so, the dust.’ The one who had identified himself as Roan leaned closer, gesturing at the brand on Turcio’s face; an Imperial aquila with its wings furled and downward-pointing. ‘Why do you wear that?’ The Flesh Tearer was standing deliberately close to the Blood Angel, invading his personal space.

Seated on a fallen stone buttress, Turcio displayed not the slightest hint of annoyance at the blunt question. ‘It is mark of penitence, cousin,’ he explained.

‘Penitence?’ Roan repeated. ‘What failure did you commit to require such atonement? Were you a coward upon the field of battle?’

The words had barely left Roan’s mouth before Corvus and Puluo were on their feet, the insult burning hard in their eyes. Kayne and Ajir warily moved to follow them, but Turcio waved them back. Still he did not seem angered; only weary. ‘I made… an error of judgement. I believed in something that was revealed to be a lie.’

‘Among my brethren, errors of judgement result in death.’

Turcio nodded. ‘And in mine as well.’ He glanced at Corvus and the other Space Marine gave an imperceptible nod. ‘But by the Emperor’s Grace, we have been granted forgiveness. Now I live my life in the will to be seen worthy of it.’

Something in Turcio’s careful manner tempered the Flesh Tearer’s aspect; a moment ago, he had been spoiling to goad them. Turcio’s steady honesty made that will vanish. ‘What… What did you believe?’ Roan asked.

‘Does it matter?’ A lifetime of fatigue filled his reply.

After a moment, Roan gave a grudging smile. ‘Huh. Despite your finery and airs, the Blood Angels are not so faultless after all. Who could have thought it?’

‘No man is,’ said Turcio. ‘But in the striving, we seek the Emperor’s path.’

‘Then in that, cousin, we are not dissimilar.’ Roan twisted the cuff of his right gauntlet and removed it. There, on the skin of his forearm, was a brand of similar dimension to Turcio’s.

The Flesh Tearer threw him a nod and walked away.

‘You should have struck the braggart to the ground for what he said,’ Ajir fumed, his dusky skin darkening.

‘And what would that have proven, brother?’ Turcio turned to face the other Blood Angel. ‘That the men of our Chapter have no more self-control than a Space Wolf?’

‘Better that than to trumpet our failures before our successors.’ Ajir shot a look at Corvus. ‘At least have the decency to hide your shame.’

Corvus removed his helmet; his brow bore the same mark as Turcio’s. ‘I am not ashamed,’ he retorted. Corvus’s narrow, canine face was set hard. ‘We have proven our fealty, twice over. The rites of penitence made our contrition plain.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Ajir. ‘But I have yet to be convinced.’

‘Ajir.’ Puluo spoke his name and all of them turned to face him. ‘What you think doesn’t matter. Sergeant chose them. End of story.’

‘I suppose it is.’ But Ajir’s tone did not match his words.

Seth read through the first few paragraphs of the parchment before he released a thin sigh through his teeth and bunched it in his hands. ‘My honoured cousin has lost none of his verbosity, it would seem.’ The Chapter Master of the Flesh Tearers came forward, and Rafen found he could not look away. Seth’s face was a chronicle of injuries so fearsome that it seemed a wonder he could still speak. The scars Rafen had observed before raked across him, right to left, doubtless where the claw of some primordial creature had struck. The Blood Angel had seen picts of the Flesh Tearer home world, a feral sphere called Cretacia that teemed with violent saurian wildlife; the Tearers were said to hunt the beasts there, unarmoured and weaponless, as some kind of sport. Seth sported a disc-shaped implant that covered a good quarter of his skull, some arcane form of augmetic fused to the naked bone. Here was a man who showed all he was upon the surface, with no artifice possible. The Chapter Master’s presence was at once as dominating as Rafen’s Lord Dante, but with an entirely different energy of self behind it.

‘Rafen,’ he said, ‘We shall cut to the meat of this, you and I. Tell me what it is that Dante demands, in direct and simple terms. I do not wish to wade through a page of florid text to find it.’

‘As you wish, Lord Seth,’ said the sergeant. He took a breath. ‘Commander Dante, Lord of the Blood Angels and Inheritor of the IX Legion Astartes, calls you to a conclave of the greatest and utmost moment.’

‘A meeting?’ Gorn frowned. ‘He summons the Flesh Tearers? To what end?’ New suspicion flashed behind his eyes. ‘We are not at the beck and call of–’

Seth silenced him with a look. Rafen went on. ‘To be clear, brother-captain, this is not a meeting but an assembly of the Sons of Sanguinius. A gathering of all, sir.’

The Chapter Master of the Flesh Tearers raised an eyebrow. ‘Every successor?’

‘As many as possible, lord. Even now as we speak, battle-brothers of my Chapter range to the points of the etheric compass, carrying the same message to the Masters of the Angels Encarmine, the Blood Drinkers… To each Chapter that holds a lineage to the Great Angel.’ He paused, dry-throated. The scope of Dante’s intent still struck him as audacious as it had when he first learned of it.

Seth glanced at the parchment again. ‘A representative contingent,’ he read aloud, ‘of men so empowered to make policy that will be followed to the letter by their Chapter’s brethren.’ He smiled thinly. ‘In other words, the Chapter Masters or as near as damn it.’

‘Aye,’ repeated Rafen. ‘As you know, we have a ship in deep orbit, the Tycho. It is ready to accept you, lord, and your party for our return voyage to Baal.’

‘You’ll take that voyage alone, brother-sergeant,’ said Seth, offering him the parchment. ‘I have no intention of answering to this summons. Dante ought to know better.’ He took in the hololithic screen and the charts scattered over nearby tables. ‘I am in the middle of prosecuting a war here. Eritaen may be at the arse-end of the Emperor’s Sight, but it is still an Imperial world and still subject to Imperial law!’ The Chapter Master’s voice rose into a growl. ‘I won’t disengage from a campaign simply because my cousin wishes to hold a… A family reunion.’

‘The conclave is much more than that,’ Rafen replied. ‘Forgive me, lord, but I fear you do not grasp the gravity of the situation. A gathering of this nature has not been called in my master’s lifetime, not since the thirty-seventh millennia and the Pact of Kursa.’

‘I know my history,’ Seth replied, dismissing him, ‘just as Dante knows his battle doctrine. Go now. Perhaps I may be able to spare a party of men as a token representation.’

‘It must be you,’ insisted the Blood Angel. ‘Those were my orders and I will not return to Baal with them unfulfilled!’

‘Is that so?’ Gorn took a warning step toward him.

Seth waved Gorn away. ‘Tell me, then, Brother Rafen. What is so damned important that Dante would send you to clutter my day, and have me drop all that I am doing?’

Rafen’s throat went dry as he said the next words. ‘The conclave will decide the future of the Blood Angels. What is spoken of there will determine if my Chapter survives to see the dawn of the next millennium.’

CHAPTER THREE

Through the glass eye of the frigate Tycho’s observatorium, Rafen watched as Eritaen turned and fell away to port as the ship broke orbit. Above and to starboard, the dark dagger of the strike cruiser Brutus watched them leave, the saw-tooth disc of silver across her flank catching the blue of the local star. Laser pennants on the other vessel flared briefly in salute; a marked contrast to the sullen disinterest the vessel’s crew had shown on Tycho’s arrival a few days earlier.

Rafen heard Turcio enter the chamber behind him, but did not turn to greet his comrade. The Space Marine cleared his throat. ‘Reporting,’ he began.

‘Go on,’ Rafen prompted.

‘Lord Seth and his delegation are secure on the accommodation deck. His officer, Gorn, has made some demands…’

‘See to them all,’ said the sergeant. ‘They are our honoured guests now. They will be treated as such.’

‘Aye, sir, as you command.’ Turcio paused a moment. ‘I also have word from the bridge. The shipmaster informs me our Navigators are in harness and preparing to make space for Baal. Much of what he said to me is beyond my ken, I will admit, but the gist is that the etheric currents this far out along the galactic plane are less cluttered than in toward the coreward planets. Once we enter the warp, we should make swift time to the home world.’

Rafen nodded. ‘Good. The quicker we discharge our orders, the more comfortable I will be.’ He took a long breath. The confrontation with Seth had troubled him more than he was willing to admit.

‘Not a man among us would disagree,’ noted Turcio. Once more, he paused, and Rafen could sense he was framing a question.

‘You have something to ask?’

Turcio gestured with his augmetic limb. ‘The matter of Lord Seth and the Flesh Tearers… In all honesty, brother-sergeant, I had believed that this entire mission was nought but a hiding to nothing, that we would meet him and return home without him. I assumed that Seth would deny Commander Dante’s summons.’

‘He did,’ said Rafen. ‘You were not wrong.’

‘But yet he is here aboard this ship and we travel for Baal. How was he convinced otherwise?’ Turcio’s brow furrowed. ‘If I may know it, what did you say to Seth that so swayed him?’

‘I did as I was ordered,’ Rafen replied, turning away from the window. ‘I told him the full and complete truth.’

‘Everything?’

Rafen nodded. ‘Aye, brother. Every bloody moment.’

‘Was he… angry?’

‘No. If anything, I think Seth may have been saddened.’ He shook his head. ‘The man is of such dour character, I find it hard to read him.’ After a moment, the sergeant looked up and met Turcio’s gaze. ‘Tell me, how is the character of my men at this moment?’

‘At the ready, lord,’ said the other Space Marine. ‘As always.’

‘Indeed? After we left the Flesh Tearer forward base, I thought I detected a… a tension in the air.’

Turcio took his time over the answer. ‘I saw nothing of remark, sir.’

Rafen sensed there was more, but left it at that. ‘Very well. You are dismissed.’ The other warrior bowed slightly and exited, leaving the Blood Angel alone in the chamber once again. Rafen drifted back to the window and placed his hand upon the armourglass, losing himself in contemplation of the void beyond.

Soon they would be in the skies over Baal, and then walking the hallowed corridors of the fortress-monastery once again.

His thoughts darkened, and in his reverie Rafen remembered the arching walls of the monastery’s audience chamber reaching up around him; and fresh in his thoughts was his name at Dante’s command.

‘Brother-Sergeant Rafen, you may enter,’ said the Chapter Master, beckoning the Space Marine from the tall copper doors. Rafen gave a deep bow before he did so, his robes pooling on the stone floor beneath him. Aside from the men of the honour guard – and of these there were only a pair, to satisfy protocol but little else – every Blood Angel in the chamber was without his armour, dressed instead in the Chapter’s devotional robes of red and black.

He had been here once before, soon after the wounded battle-barge Europae had made orbit, returning to lick her wounds at the orbital dock in the aftermath of the battle at the shrineworld, Sabien. On that day, he had felt a conflicted mix of emotion; anger and sadness, fear and elation, a torrent of senses that still echoed in his heart all these months later. This place, this chamber was not the most ornate or expansive of those in the halls of the monastery, and yet it had seen much history throughout the years of the Chapter’s life. The death of Dante’s predecessor, Chapter Master Kadeus; the breaking of the starbow; the exile of Leonatos; all these dramas and more had been played out in this room.

The far side of the hall was dominated by a raised stage carved out of ebon basaltic stone from the mines on Baal IX. Great golden chalices that mimicked the form of the sacred Red Grail, as tall as a Terminator, stood to either side, blood-red flames rumbling quietly in the cups. There was little other illumination, save for the sullen glow of a few biolume floaterglobes. The fires threw jumping shadows across the walls; outside it was night, but the two moons had yet to rise and cast their umber light through the stained glass windows in the walls.

Banners of varying antiquity hung from the rafters. Many of them were old war pennants from campaigns long since ended, others devotional in nature bearing script from the Imperial Credo or the Book of the Lords. Rafen resisted the temptation to look up and examine them in detail. He had duty here, and it was expected that he would be circumspect. That he was even allowed to be in the room to observe this meeting was a rarity. He did not wish to do anything that might throw doubt on his presence here, not even the tiniest breach in protocol.

A cluster of men stood in a loose semi-circle before the black stone stage. Above them, upon a tall-backed throne made from laser-cut rock of similar hue, sat the Chapter Master himself. He was leaning forward, one hand beneath his patrician chin, his flawless face set in deep thought. Dante’s robes collected about him, and by way of adornment he had only a thick golden collar that fell to his sternum. A rendering of the Blood Angel sigil was picked out in platinum and red jade. For a brief moment, Dante’s gaze met Rafen’s and the Astartes found himself nodding to his lord, trying not to misstep. Eleven hundred years of experience lay behind those dark, lidded eyes. His cool wisdom seemed almost a palpable thing, as if it radiated off Dante. Rafen’s mouth went dry; once again, here he was, a line warrior in the presence of some of the greatest of Sanguinius’s sons. Dante was unquestionably the ultimate among them, but many of the men in this room were legends in their own right.

He glanced around. Upon the stage, at Dante’s sides, sat Mephiston and Corbulo. The two of them were studies in opposites. Mephiston, the man they called the Lord of Death, Chief Librarian of the Chapter and a psyker of near-matchless power, was a tall and imposing figure. In this light, he appeared wraith-like, his angular face set in an inward focus. Mephiston sensed Rafen’s scrutiny and gave him a slight nod, placing only a fraction of his diamond-hard gaze upon the Space Marine. Rafen returned the gesture, fighting down a sense of ill-ease. He had shared a battlefield with the Lord of Death on Sabien, and then as now, he could not escape the sense that Mephiston saw into him as easily as if he were spun from glass.

Rafen broke eye-contact first and glanced at Dante’s other advisor; Corbulo of the Grail. The Apothecary’s robes were a splash of stark contrast, the spotless white lined with trim of red. The highest of the Chapter’s sanguinary priests, Corbulo presented a grim and lined aspect beneath a shock of straw-coloured hair. Rafen had never met him, but he knew him; every Blood Angel knew Corbulo, the bearer of the Red Grail. He alone had the honour of stewardship over that most sacred of relics, carrying it into battle on Dante’s commands. The Red Grail carried in it a measure of the blood of the primarch himself, so the Chapter’s mythos went, and in echo of Corbulo’s charge every sanguinary priest of lower rank carried a simulacrum of the great cup, a symbol with which to rally troops upon the field of conflict.

These three were all aspects of the Blood Angels made flesh and bone. Wisdom and nobility, ferocity and strength, fealty and majesty. They were the spectrum of the blood that sang in Rafen’s veins, and once again he was struck by the great privilege he had been done by the grant of access to their presence.

He found himself a place at the foot of a tattered banner praising the Liberation of the Nine Sisters and surveyed the other men in the gathering: the Chaplain Argastes; First Captain Lothan; Caecus, the Apothecae Majoris, and all the others. He was indeed in esteemed company here. Hidden in the sleeves of his robes, Rafen’s hands bunched into fists. He felt as if he did not deserve to breathe the same air as such noble heroes and learned men.

Argastes led them all in a brief prayer to the Great Angel and the Emperor, asking both of them for clarity and fortitude in the days to come. Then Dante rose and every other warrior bowed. The assembly came to the ready as the Chapter Master bid them to their feet.

He glanced at Mephiston, and the psyker nodded back to his liege-lord. ‘The psi-wards are in place, my lord. What we say and do in the room will not be sensed by any agent of the warp.’

‘Just so,’ said the Chapter Master. ‘For what we speak of now may well be a matter of the greatest crisis to befall our legion since the murder of our primarch, the Emperor protect his soul.’

A mutter of concern crossed the chamber. Lothan’s open, pale face registered uncertainty. ‘The matter of the…’ He shot a look at Rafen. ‘The insurrection was dealt with, was it not? I had thought that threat passed.’

‘We have only exchanged one threat for another,’ noted Corbulo.

Dante gave a solemn nod. ‘Aye. It is not the incident that we deal with now, kinsmen, but the shockwave from its passing. Like the wake of a razor-wind, the damage that lingers behind may kill us by inches where the maelstrom failed.’

Rafen felt ice in the pit of his gut. He wanted to speak, to offer up some sort of explanation or apology, but he found no words. Insurrection. The word tumbled about within his thoughts, hard-edged and leaden.

It was a damnation, a bladed curse, and Rafen felt shame to think he had been there to watch it unfurl. Not since the grim times of the Horus Heresy had brother turned against brother, and yet in recent months the Blood Angels had been pushed to the very brink of a civil war within their Chapter. It began on the cemetery world of Cybele, when the Blood Angels battle-barge Bellus had arrived to rescue Rafen and his company from an attack by the Traitor Marines of the Word Bearers Legion. Bellus had brought salvation and among the crew, Rafen’s younger sibling Arkio; but the reunion hid a darker purpose. An inquisitor, the deceiver Ramius Stele, had engineered the whole matter in league with a daemon of the warp. He conceived a complex plan to split the Blood Angels asunder, and Rafen’s sibling was his cat’s-paw.

Even to think of it now, he shuddered at the horrible daring of the scheme. Stele twisted Arkio into a mirror’s twin of the primarch Sanguinius and pressed the Astartes around him to believe the boy was the Great Angel’s reincarnation; but all of it was a gambit to break the Chapter in two, to lead them down the bloody path towards Chaos and the Ruinous Powers that Stele called master.

Rafen found himself looking down at his hands. The hands that had briefly wielded the mighty archeotech weapon known as the Spear of Telesto, the hands that had taken the life of his fallen sibling in order to save Arkio’s soul.

So much blood upon them, he told himself. Yet none of it visible to the eye. Rafen took a shuddering breath, fighting down the moment of powerful recall.

Arkio was dead, his body become ash upon the pyre Rafen built for his blood kin. The Spear that Stele had hoped to claim for himself was safe within the reclusia of the fortress-monastery, deep beneath the chamber where he now stood. And many, many brothers lay fallen in the fury that had spread from the schism Stele created. Righteous men, fine warriors. Rafen’s mentor Koris, taken too soon by the madness of the Black Rage. Delos and Lucion, Sachiel and Alactus…

Alactus; an Astartes who had fought alongside Rafen for decades, who died at his hands when they had been forced into conflict. His bloodless hands.

So many dead. The cold irony of it was pitiable, that in ten thousand years, the greatest destruction wrought upon the Blood Angels could come not from an enemy, but from the battle they fought amongst themselves.

Doubt, recrimination and dark, potent regret threatened to well up and fill him, but Rafen forced himself to shake it off, pushing the black emotions away, returning to the moment.

Dante was speaking. ‘What each of you knows is that our Chapter was wounded by the machinations of Ramius Stele and his daemonic masters. But what we have not disclosed to you is how deep that wound goes.’

‘Lord,’ said Argastes, ‘I beg you, speak plainly.’

The Chapter Master frowned, and for a moment he seemed to show his great and venerable age in a single breath. ‘My brothers, I have grave concerns about the future of our Chapter. The decimation stirred by Stele’s perfidy and the false angel Arkio claimed the lives of many of our kinsmen.’

‘How many?’ demanded Lothan.

‘Too many,’ Corbulo grated. ‘Dead, or lost to the Rage. Far too many.’

‘These events have depleted our numbers beyond anything we have previously faced.’ Dante stepped off the stage and came toward Lothan. ‘Did you not sense it, brother-captain? On your return from campaign, on your arrival this day?’ He gestured at the walls. ‘The empty corridors. The silent arena.’

‘I… I did,’ Lothan admitted, ‘but I did not suspect…’

‘To maintain the illusion of normality, we have sent senior battle-brothers to wargrounds all across the galaxy,’ explained Mephiston. ‘The Imperium at large will see nothing unusual. For the moment, we may show the outside world a face that seems unchanged. But that mask will decay in time.’

‘Unless a solution can be found, the IX Legion Astartes may find itself unable to recover. We may be forced to recluse ourselves. We will not be equal to the tasks the Emperor expects of us.’ The Chapter Master’s pronouncement was grim. ‘New inductions of aspirants have been taken from Baal Secundus and Baal Primus, earlier than the tithe suggests, but it will not be enough.’

‘And numbers alone are not the greatest threat,’ added Mephiston. ‘We have enemies both within the Imperium and without. Should they learn we are…’ He paused, framing his thoughts. ‘Diminished… they may be emboldened to move against us and take advantage of any vulnerability.’

‘We are spread thin,’ said Dante. ‘And the fiction I have set in place will, as Brother Mephiston says, only last so long.’

Chaplain Argastes nodded. ‘Aye. Agents of the Ordo Hereticus have already made overtures to Baal, asking questions about the death of that bastard Stele.’

‘If they are asking overtly, we may be certain they are doing much more in clandestine realms,’ noted Caecus, speaking for the first time. His hairless head was dull in the lamplight.

‘Measures must be taken, and swiftly,’ said Corbulo. ‘May Sanguinius give us insight.’

Caecus drew himself up and licked his lips. ‘If it pleases the High Priest, I believe he may have done so already.’

Dante turned to study the Apothecary. ‘Speak,’ he ordered. ‘You have known the dimensions of this concern for some time, brother.’

He nodded. ‘I have, lord. And in my works and research, I have uncovered a thread of hope, if you will indulge me.’

Rafen studied the Apothecary. Caecus was one of many of the sanguinary priests of the Blood Angels whose mission was less of the martial and more toward the ephemeral. Since the rise of the gene-curse in the Sons of Sanguinius, there had always been priests whose sole purpose had been to study the complex skeins of genetic material that made the Astartes who they were. Men whose battle was not against the enemies of the Emperor, but against the dormant bane of the Red Thirst and the Black Rage. Caecus worked at the Vitalis Citadel, a medicae complex hundreds of kilometres away, in the stark and icebound wilderness of Baal’s polar region. Isolated there with a staff of brethren and serfs, the priest was over two hundred years into his service toward finding a cure.

‘I have a solution to this circumstance, a radical one. I admit, it may not sit well with many of you. But I could not in good conscience let it go unremarked. We are in an extreme circumstance, are we not? And that calls for an extreme solution.’

‘Explain, then,’ said Corbulo, with clear and steady doubt upon his expression.

‘There is a method, a technology that will allow us to recoup the losses to our Chapter in less than a solar year, if enough effort can be applied to it.’ The Apothecary nodded to himself. ‘My kinsmen, consider for a moment a point in history, when a similar fate to that which now faces the Blood Angels threatened another of the Legion Astartes. Ten millennia ago, after Horus’s butchery on Istvaan V obliterated all but a small handful of the XIX Legion.’

‘The Raven Guard,’ Rafen found his voice. ‘The Sons of Corax.’

‘Aye. The very same. After the treachery of the Arch-traitor, the Emperor’s light forsake him, the primarch Corax needed to swiftly rebuild his legion. I believe that the manner in which he did it can be opened to us.’

‘Caecus,’ said Argastes, the Chaplain’s expression growing cold. ‘I have heard the stories of the Raven Guard. I warn you to consider what you are about to utter in this esteemed company.’

The Apothecae Majoris seemed unconcerned by his battle-brother’s caution. ‘I have considered, kinsmen. I have considered it in great depth.’

‘I would hear more,’ offered Lothan, ‘if it pleases the Master?’

Dante nodded. ‘Continue, then.’

Caecus nodded. ‘The Sons of Corax guard their secrets well, brothers, but some of their history has become known to me through my researches. It is said that the Lord of the Ravenspire went to books of ancient knowledge from the Age of Strife, intent on gleaning wisdom from the Emperor’s own hand on the matter of the creation of Space Marines.’

Rafen listened intently. Every Astartes knew of the legacy they shared, from the very first of their kind created by the Emperor’s gene-smiths to forge the army that united Terra and led it out of Old Night. Those warriors were the precursors to the Astartes of the Great Crusade and every generation that had followed.

‘Corax saw a way to repopulate his forces in these tomes,’ Caecus went on. ‘Not through the process of induction, training and elevation that we practise in these times, but through a mastery of genetic duplication.’

‘You speak of the old art of replicae,’ said Corbulo. ‘The science that man called cloning.’

‘I do, priest, I do indeed.’

A sense of dismay shifted through the room, and Rafen’s mouth went dry. The ways of the magos biologis were beyond him, but even he knew that the creation of a life from a synthetic mass of genetic matter seemed… somehow improper. It was said by some that beings spawned in such manner could not be considered human at all, that they were born without souls.

‘I believe these methods could be called upon to forge new additions to our ranks, my lord.’ Caecus addressed Dante directly, a thread of passion building beneath his words. ‘Blood Angels, cut from the whole cloth of our legion, brought to maturity in a cycle of months instead of years.’ He smiled slightly. ‘A pure expression of the Adeptus Astartes Sanguinia.’

‘Pure?’ Chaplain Argastes echoed the word with grim severity. ‘And tell us, brother, what of the rest of Corax’s story? What of the dark tales spoken of in hushed whispers by the Sons of Russ?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Lothan.

‘Corax did indeed use the way of replicae to bring his legion back from the brink of dissolution,’ said Argastes, ‘but the road to it was not a smooth one. The Space Wolves speak of… of creatures that fought amid the Raven Guard’s numbers. Things more beast than man. Throwbacks. Monstrous aberrations spawned in error by the very process you suggest we now employ.’

‘Mutants?’ One of Lothan’s subordinates said the word with barely disguised repugnance, earning him a hard look from his commander.

Caecus coloured slightly. ‘This is true. But that was ten millennia ago. The Imperium’s grasp upon such sciences is stronger, now. And I would warrant that no Chapter beneath the Emperor’s eternal gaze knows the nature of its own blood better than ours, Argastes! Corax was too hasty. He was unprepared. We are not. We can learn from the mistakes of the Raven Guard!’ He glanced back at Dante.

‘Your plan…’ The Chapter Master dwelled on his thoughts for a moment. ‘You did not exaggerate when you said it was radical, kinsman. To call it bold is an understatement.’

Rafen saw the Apothecary’s hope soar. ‘Then… You will grant me your approval, lord?’

‘I will not.’ Dante shook his head. ‘I too know these stories of which Brother Argastes speaks. If mighty Corax, a primarch, a sibling of our liege-lord and a son of the Emperor, could not undertake this arcane art without error, then I ask you this, Caecus. What makes you think that you can succeed where he failed?’

The Chapter Master’s steady, careful words made the Apothecary hesitate. ‘I only wish to make the attempt. For our Chapter’s sake.’

‘I do not doubt your dedication to the Blood Angels and your great work, kinsman. Never think that. But this plan, the risk of it… I am not sure I can give my blessing to such an undertaking.’

Caecus glanced around the room, looking for support, but he did not find it.

Mephiston brought the matter to a close with a single question. ‘Apothecary,’ he began, ‘you would not have brought this to us unless you had already made some attempt to echo Corax’s work. What have you accomplished?’

With the searching eyes of the Lord of Death upon him, Caecus could hide nothing from the assembled Blood Angels. ‘I have had only limited success to date.’ The admission weighed down upon him.

‘If not this route, then what others are open to us?’ said Lothan. ‘We have spoken already of the increase in tithes, and I will assume that many of the men in our Scout company may be advanced to the status of full battle-brother into the bargain?’

‘Correct,’ noted Corbulo, ‘but still it will not be enough.’

Dante nodded once more. ‘It will not. And to that end, I have made a decision. The issue we face at this moment cannot find its answers within the walls of this fortress,’ he said, glancing up at the ceiling, ‘indeed, not even within the boundaries of the worlds that orbit our red sun. We must go further, across the galaxy if need be, to find the solution elsewhere.’

Argastes frowned. ‘Are you suggesting that we take secondary tithes from other planets, lord?’

‘No, my friend.’ The Chapter Master shook his head. ‘I believe there is only one way in which we can find a healing to the wounds of the Arkio Insurrection. We will call together all our kindred and seek the answer among the many Sons of Sanguinius.’

‘A conclave,’ breathed Rafen. ‘A gathering of the entire successor Chapters of the Blood Angels.’

‘Aye,’ Dante shot him a look of agreement. ‘I will call my cousins to this place and in unity, find a path.’

Caecus’s lips thinned. ‘Unity has never been at the forefront of the character of our successors, lord. We are not the Ultramarines. There are those who will simply ignore such a summons. Others lost to distance that we may never reach in time.’

Lothan rubbed his chin, thinking. ‘We’ll gather all that we can.’

‘Then it is so ordered,’ said Mephiston, rising to his feet. ‘First Captain? You will liaise with the shipmasters at the orbit dock and the astropaths. Have a deployment plan prepared for the Chapter Master by morning.’ He bowed to Dante. ‘Lord, with your permission, I will choose the cadres of men to serve as messengers for your summons.’

‘Do so,’ came the reply.

In short order, the meeting broke apart and the men left in groups, many of them quiet and introspective, musing on the great weight of what had been revealed. Rafen, alone as he was and of lower rank than all of them, stood back and allowed his seniors to leave first, out of respect.

Caecus caught his eye, as the Apothecae Majoris crossed the chamber, deep in his thoughts. He hid it well, but Rafen could see the stiffness in his gait, the narrowing of his eyes. Caecus was silently fuming at the Chapter Master’s censure; to be put in one’s place by Dante, no matter that it was with consideration and not from off-hand whim, clearly did not sit well with Caecus. Rafen imagined how he might have felt in the same place; but then he, like Caecus, was a Space Marine, a Blood Angel. Dante was their Lord Commander, and his word was second only to the edicts of the Emperor himself. If it was spoken by Dante, then it was to be done. There was no other condition. Caecus’s pride was wounded, but he understood. The veteran Apothecary would not have lived this long or been granted the responsibility he had if he did not accept that.

‘Rafen,’ Mephiston said his name, catching his attention immediately. From the foot of the black stone stage, the Librarian beckoned him with a long finger. He approached, bowing slightly. Behind Mephiston, Dante was in quiet conversation with Corbulo.

‘Sir,’ Rafen began. ‘If you will forgive me, but I have a question.’

‘Why was I summoned to this meeting?’ He smiled thinly. ‘I need not exercise my abilities to see that concern written across your face, brother-sergeant. You are here because I believed it necessary. Leave it at that, eh?’

‘As you wish.’ Rafen decided not to press the issue.

‘In point of fact, I have already decided to deploy you and your tactical squad as one of the messenger cadres we will send to our cousin Chapters.’

‘May I ask which?’

Behind him, Lord Dante broke off from his conversation as Corbulo walked away. ‘That choice is mine to make,’ he said, stepping down to Rafen’s level.

The Blood Angel bowed again. ‘Lord, I am at your service. Task me.’

‘There is a world called Eritaen, in the Tiber Marches. It has fallen from the light of the Emperor and a punishment in keeping with that crime has been delivered to its people. Our cousins are the hand that wields that punishment.’ Dante eyed him. ‘Tell me, Brother Rafen. What do you know of the Flesh Tearers?’

He smothered his immediate reaction of dismay within a heartbeat; Rafen had no doubt that Dante saw it, but the Chapter Master said nothing. He picked his words with care. ‘They are of the Second Founding, a small Chapter of only four battle companies. The Tearers have a reputation for ferocity. They are… Proud and aggressive, my lord. As much an embodiment of the Great Angel’s darker nature as we are of his nobility and bearing.’

To his surprise, the Lord Commander’s face split in wry smile. ‘A very politic answer, sergeant. Mephiston was correct when he suggested you for this mission.’

Rafen nodded. ‘I will do my best to be worthy of his faith.’

Dante’s smile vanished. ‘You’ll have to. Chapter Master Seth and his men will not brook an intrusion from one of us, know that. Your welcome will be icy at the very best. Mephiston suggested I give you this task because you will rise to the occasion, because of your potential. But I give it to you because of who you are. Who you were.’

Rafen tasted ashes in his mouth. ‘The blood-brother of Arkio.’

A nod. ‘Just so.’ Dante considered him for a moment. ‘Seth will be the most difficult of my cousins to persuade. More than any of our other successors, the Flesh Tearers have always walked their own path. They resent anything that seems like the hand of control upon their necks. He will deny my summons. There is no question he will deny it.’

‘Then, my lord, how should I convince him to return with me?’

Dante turned away. ‘Tell him the truth, Rafen. Every bloody moment.’ The Lord of the Blood Angels walked away, leaving the Astartes and the psyker alone.

Rafen found Mephiston studying him with a cool, measuring stare. ‘Seth’s men will goad you. They will attempt to draw you into challenge. As much as they might deserve a beating, you will not engage them, do you understand?’

He nodded. ‘As you command.’

‘The mission,’ intoned the psyker. ‘The mission first and foremost, Rafen. There has never been a moment more deadly to our brotherhood than this one. You are granted a singular trust this day. I know you will prove worthy of it.’

Mephiston left then, and it was a long moment before Rafen looked up to find he was the only soul in the chamber.

Above him, carved from the walls, figures of the Emperor and Sanguinius looked down upon him and his duty yet to be fulfilled.

CHAPTER FOUR

The skies over Baal were filled with crimson.

Dozens of warships ranging in size from small corvettes to massive grand cruisers lay in lines of stately repose, at high anchor over the desert world’s equator. Each craft had its own packet of space to surround it, each ship positioned in the same orbital plane so that no one vessel was seen to be above or below the others, in order to satisfy protocol. Only one group of craft drifted higher, near the dry docks at cislunar positions; the warcraft of the Blood Angels themselves. This was only right and proper; Baal was the home world of the Chapter and they were its masters. Every other Astartes gathered here was an honoured guest – to be respected, indeed, but still a guest.

Rafen imagined that some of his cousins would chafe before such a display, and he understood the feeling. The role had been reversed only a short time before on Eritaen. But now the Flesh Tearers were the invited of his Chapter, and it was upon them to tread carefully. Not that they will. It isn’t their way.

He considered Seth once again, wondering if the Chapter Master was watching the same display from the Tycho’s staterooms three decks down. He was a curious one; Seth confounded Rafen’s expectation of what he thought a Flesh Tearer would be. He had no outward show of the bloodthirsty arrogance that Gorn and Noxx displayed. Their Chapter Master was eternally dour, distant in thought, as if he were still fighting a battle in some far off place that only his sight could reach. Seth was the polar opposite to the charismatic Dante.

The Tycho moved with care into a pre-determined block of sky and came to a steady stop on spears of thrust, anchoring in a geostationary position. To the starboard floated a red frigate with yellow trim, with a plunging solar sail emerging from the ventral hull. Upon the shimmering panel, there was the silhouette of a great black grail and above it a dark falling droplet.

‘Blood Drinkers,’ said Kayne, half to himself, the young Space Marine approaching the viewing window where his commander stood. ‘They came all the way from the Lethe Front, so I heard.’

Rafen nodded but said nothing. Beyond the Blood Drinker ship lay a battle cruiser whose prow was a gigantic bone-white skull. Ruby-coloured wings reached back from it down the length of the bow. He saw the maws of torpedo bays inside the huge, sightless eye sockets. The rest of the craft was rendered in only two colours; the starboard side from stem to stern all in rich red, the port a nightfall black. ‘The Angels Sanguine,’ he noted, breaking his silence to point out the vessel to the youth. ‘And beyond them the ships of the Angels Vermillion.’

‘I feel blessed to see this day,’ Kayne was humbled by the sight. ‘How many of our battle-brothers can say they witnessed such an august gathering as this one, sir?’ He smiled slightly. ‘I would give much to be in the chamber when all the elite of these Chapters meet. I imagine it would be… interesting to observe.’

Rafen’s eyes narrowed and he shot the other Space Marine a hard look. ‘This is not a game, Kayne. This conclave has been called to discuss matters of the utmost gravity. Remember that.’

The youth bowed his head, chastened. ‘Of course, brother-sergeant. I meant no disrespect.’ After a moment, he spoke again. ‘Are we the last to arrive?’

‘The shipmaster informs me that two more craft are behind us, to arrive within the hour, the White of Eye and the Rapier. Once they have taken their positions, it is my understanding the conclave will commence in earnest.’

Rafen’s discussion with Tycho’s shipmaster had tested his patience somewhat; not with the man himself, but with the orders the officer had been forced to relay to the Blood Angel. A complicated web of flight corridors had been set up so that Thunderhawks and Aquila shuttles from each of the assembled craft would not cross over one another in transit, and a rotation of landing patterns was in place so that each contingent would set foot upon Baal’s surface in order of seniority and Founding. It ground on his mood to consider that some of his cousins would insist on such posturing and open display of rank; given the importance of the meeting, could they not dispense with it all and meet as equals?

Before he left Baal to find Seth, Rafen had asked that question of Corbulo. The steady-eyed sanguinary high priest had allowed a rare laugh to escape his careful demeanour. Brother, he had said, for all the greatness the Emperor granted us, he also made us rivals to one another. Sigils, flags and honours are at the core of what we are. If we ignore our heraldry, we deny part of our natures.

All too true. And yet, still Rafen’s impatience wound tight.

‘It’s strange,’ Kayne was speaking again. ‘I look down there, lord, to the surface of Baal and I see the scope of the land.’ He pointed toward geographical features visible through the thin clouds. ‘The Chalice Mountains. The Great Chasm Rift and the Ruby Sea… I know this place as I would a brother.’ The youth nodded at the other ships in orbit. ‘But to them… What is Baal? A vague, abstract thing? A place they only know of from doctrine and myth?’

The planet turned slowly beneath their feet. The desolate rust-red sphere had a stark kind of beauty to it, the layers of radioactive dust in the upper atmosphere haloed by the glow of Baal’s red giant star. Such a harsh and unforgiving world, and yet the sight of it moved both men in a manner that neither would have found easy to articulate.

Rafen glanced at his subordinate. ‘You wonder if our cousins are as awed to be here as you are by their presence, perhaps?’

To his surprise, Kayne shook his head. ‘No, sir. I wonder if they will revere Baal as much as I do.’

Rafen sensed the unspoken thought in the other man’s mind. ‘The Flesh Tearers are only one successor among many, Kayne. The character of the Sons of Sanguinius differs greatly from one to another.’

He got a slow nod in return. ‘It will be an education to see those differences in the flesh.’

Rafen found himself returning the gesture, once more feeling the press of the days to come. ‘Yes. That it will.’

‘It’s not what I expected,’ said Noxx. He stood at the stateroom’s window, his helmet in the crook of his arm, staring down at the planet. ‘I thought it would be more…’

‘Impressive?’ offered his commander. Captain Gorn’s attention was elsewhere, as he used a small monocular to peer into the darkness, studying the other ships that surrounded them. ‘When held in comparison to Cretacia, it does seem a sparse vista. No jungle-sprawls and swamplands, no wreathes of storm clouds.’

‘I suppose, lord. Perhaps I was foolish to imagine that birthplace of the Great Angel, may the light find him, would be a glittering sphere made of gold and ruby.’

From behind them, their Chapter Master spoke without looking up from the business of polishing his armour. ‘Remember your doctrine, Noxx. Do not be obtuse. You know as well as any of us, Baal is not his birthplace. Sanguinius rose on the second moon, Baal Secundus.’

‘The moons cannot be seen from this orbital position,’ noted Gorn, with a frown. ‘We are over the dayside, our angle is too low.’

Noxx was quiet for a moment, framing a question. ‘Do you think… Would we perhaps be allowed to go there? To Secundus and the Angel’s Fall? The place where he lived as an infant…’ As much as he might have wanted to disguise it, there was a strong reverence in the veteran sergeant’s gruff voice.

Seth went on with his work. ‘I would think not. The Blood Angels are very protective of their exalted First Founding status, brother-sergeant. I imagine they would not take kindly to the heavy boots of an Astartes of the Second Founding upon their hallowed ground.’

‘Lord Dante would not dare to deny such a request,’ said Gorn, ‘not if you made it, master.’

‘My cousin Dante dares to do many things, so it would seem,’ Seth mused. ‘That we are here is evidence of it.’ He flicked the cloth in his hand with an irritated snap, signalling a change in the direction of the conversation. ‘The ships, Gorn. Tell me what you see out there.’

‘The Blood Angel Rafen spoke the truth. Many vessels are gathered here, from nearly every Founding of our kindred, so it would seem. I spy the Angels Encarmine. The Flesh Eaters.’

A slow smile formed on Seth’s lips. ‘Well, now. The Flesh Eaters. Still alive, are they? They have the warp’s luck.’

‘I imagine they say the same of us, lord,’ noted Noxx.

In an eye’s blink, Seth’s cold humour vanished. ‘You imagine, do you? And what else do you imagine our cousins say of us?’ He was on his feet, the cloth fluttering to the deck, his mood darkening by the moment. ‘We, whose small fleet is so mired in conflict that we could not even come to Baal aboard one of our own vessels?’

Both Noxx and Gorn fell silent. Seth’s temper had been mercurial all through the journey from Eritaen; flashes of annoyance that grew more frequent the closer they got to their destination. Neither spoke, instead allowing their leader to vent the frustration that had been slowly building in him. He gestured sharply at the craft out beyond the armourglass window. ‘Such pride they must have, our cousins, with their pretty ships. Such pity for us.’ He stalked toward Noxx. ‘I ask you, brother-sergeant, what kind of blood-cursed luck do we have?’

‘I… have no answer for you, lord.’

Seth held his gaze for a long moment, then turned away. ‘I shall tell you, then. We are cursed, brothers. Caught on the claws of our own savagery, ravaged by the thirst and the rage, the least numbered of the successors of Sanguinius.’ He held up a spread hand, the thumb tucked away. ‘Four. Four companies is all we number, and yet we instil such fear in our enemies that Chapters of twice our size cannot! But for all that, are we respected? Are we not judged by every Astartes who lays his eyes upon us?’

‘It is so,’ agreed Noxx.

‘Dante brings us here to bemoan the wounds suffered by his legion, but never once have our cousins considered our wounds! Our pain!’

Captain Gorn swallowed hard and shifted his weight. ‘Then… If I would be allowed to ask this… Why did you go against your first answer to the Blood Angel, Rafen? In Amit’s name, my lord, why are we here?’

And at that, Seth’s smile began a slow return. ‘What Rafen spoke of gave me renewed faith, brother-captain. It reminded me that Emperor is good and just, that he places the reward for hubris upon those who deserve it. The Blood Angels are so very proud, Gorn. And that conceit rose up and bit them, down to the marrow! After ten thousand years, they are suddenly wanting. The threat of dissolution shrouds them. Now Dante and his kindred understand how we feel, do you see? They are learning the lesson that the Flesh Tearers have known for millennia.’ His eyes glittered. ‘That when one is clinging to the ragged edge…’ He made claws of his hands. ‘You will do everything you must not to fall into the abyss.’

‘They want our help,’ said Noxx.

‘Yes,’ said Seth, ‘more than that, they need it like air to breathe. And when a warrior finds himself upon such a balance of need, he can… He must take advantage of it.’

Noxx folded his arms across his chest plate. ‘So the question is no longer why, but how. How can the troubles of the Blood Angels be to the benefit of our Chapter?’

‘Such talk might be seen by some as seditious,’ noted Gorn.

Seth gave a humourless snort. ‘We are Astartes. It is our nature to seek the tactical advantage in all situations, in war or elsewhere. Everything we do is in the Emperor’s name. He has never been one to accept weakness, and neither shall we.’

‘Have the Blood Angels become weak, my lord?’

‘That is what we will learn, brother-captain.’

The Arvus-class lighter dropped quickly from the sky, the hard gusts of wind buffeting the boxy fuselage as it spiralled in toward the cracked, arctic escarpments below. The bleak wilderness of Baal’s polar zone went to the horizon, the frozen ridges of snow and ice like motionless waves caught on a pict screen. The white vista was tinged with the slightest aura of pink, where rock dust from the planet’s iron-rich mantle was infused with the glaciers.

The lighter pressed through a screeching windstorm and continued downward, the stabilator wings vibrating. Caecus glanced through the viewing slit next to his acceleration couch. He had made similar journeys more times than he could recall, back and forth across Baal, to every part of the home world, and to worlds beyond in service to his research. The hard flight of the trip’s last leg was of no concern to him; it served to remind him that he would soon be back where he should be, with the work. This trip, out across to Baal Primus, had been of little value, as he had suspected it would be. A thin sigh escaped the Apothecae Majoris and his hand tapped absently on the case by his side; the genetic material he had sampled from the tribals on the first moon would doubtless prove as useless as all the others. The impurities, they were the problem. If only it were possible to find a sample uncontaminated by radiation, by biological drift…

The ground was rising up to meet them, and across the shield plains to the south-west Caecus made out a string of red dots, bright against the ice field like droplets of blood on a sheet of vellum.

Battle-brothers. The tiny points of vivid colour were Astartes undergoing a trial, men dropped in with no weapons, no supplies, nothing but an order to make their way to some nondescript frozen crag and survive there for a span of days. They were Scouts from the tenth company, some of them advanced to full rank out of schedule because of the current crisis in numbers. Caecus wondered if they would be ready. Deaths were not uncommon during such exercises, stemming from mishaps upon the punishing ice or attacks by the feral packbears that prowled through the snows.

‘We cannot brook more losses.’ It was a moment before the Apothecary realised he had spoken aloud; but alone in the lighter’s cargo bay, there was no one to remark upon it. He shook his head as the Arvus began to turn to the east.

‘Lord.’ The flat, rote diction of the lighter’s pilot-servitor issued out from a speaker grille on the bulkhead. ‘We are about to land at the citadel. Prepare for touchdown.’

The craft swooped around a high ridge and Caecus saw the tower. A pillar of frost-rimed red stone, it was a rusty spike hammered into the white crest of ice and rock. The lines of the Vitalis Citadel were smooth and sheer, marred only by the shape of a bartizan emerging from the apex. The battlemented structure protruded from the side of the tower, the flat circular roof providing a landing stage for service craft. Forty levels high, the tower was only the visible marker for the compound that ranged beneath it. Many such satellite facilities were scattered across Baal’s surface; as well as the citadel’s medicae complex, there were the reliquaries at Sangre in the south and the great labworks of the Chapter’s Techmarines in the Regio Quinquaginta-Unus. These places were spread far apart so that any potential enemy attack could not strike them all at once – and also to minimize any fallout damage in the event of an emergency within their walls.

The circular section of the roof of the bartizan drew back in an iris and the Arvus settled into it, rocking as the winds nudged the craft. The lighter eased into a cradle with a jerk, and Caecus was out of his restraints before the hatchway was half-open, ducking low to avoid the rising panel of hull metal. Overhead, the iris was closing, but a few flakes of thick snow had followed them in, drifting in the steady, cool air of the citadel.

Fenn stood waiting for him at the foot of the landing cradle, with a servitor at his flank. The Chapter serf bowed. ‘Majoris,’ he began. ‘Welcome back.’

Caecus handed the sample case to the servitor and the machine-helot clacked a binary-code reply, before limping away on piston-driven legs across the exhaust-stained decking. ‘A wasted journey,’ he told his subordinate.

Fenn frowned; that was to say, he frowned more than usual. Rail-thin and somewhat unkempt in aspect, the serf always exhibited an outward appearance of fretful worry, his hands finding each other to wring as he addressed problems or points of concern. His outward appearance belied a keen mind, though. Like most of the Chapter serfs in service to the Blood Angels, Fenn had been recruited from the tribes of the Blood on Baal Secundus. Judged too weak to endure the punishing rituals that would transform a normal man into a Space Marine, as Caecus’s assistant, his intelligence still served the Chapter.

‘I should have gone in your stead,’ Fenn noted. ‘The possibility of harvesting new data from Primus was always a marginal one, at the very best.’

Caecus nodded. ‘True. But I needed an excuse to leave the laboratorium for a time. To remind myself that a galaxy still exists outside these walls.’ He gestured at the citadel around them.

Fenn’s fingers knotted. ‘There has been no improvement in the latest test series,’ he said, answering Caecus’s question before he asked it. Fenn’s ability to anticipate his master’s thoughts was one of the reasons that Caecus had kept him in his service for so long, even to the point of granting the man juvenat treatments so that the serf might share in some small measure of a Blood Angel’s longevity.

The Apothecary nodded, taking in his comments, as they walked to the heavy elevator car that would carry them to the lower levels. ‘Did we receive any… visitors while I was off-world?’

‘No one came, my lord.’

‘As I expected.’ For all the great gnashing of teeth and stern, earnest words about the great import of the work taking place in the citadel, their labours were largely ignored, the plaudits going instead to those who engaged in the many battles under the Blood Angels banner. There would never be honours given and portraits painted of the Apothecaries who toiled in this place. There were no decorations for discovering a new thread of research that might cure the Rage, no award for breaking ground on a theory that could one day stem the Thirst.

Fenn continued. ‘With all the ships in orbit and the comings and goings at the fortress, I imagine the citadel could take off and fly away without being noticed.’

Caecus had seen the great fleet massing over Baal as he returned from the first moon; the berthing of the various warships had forced his pilot to make a wide detour and approach the polar zone from the night side. Part of him wondered how interesting it would be to have a conclave of his own, to draw in Apothecaries and sanguinary priests from all the successor Chapters and pool their knowledge. What secrets could he learn from his cousins, if only they would be open to share them? But that was not the way of the Adeptus Astartes. For a moment, his mind drifted; he recalled the stories he had heard of a successor Chapter from the Twenty-first Founding, the Lamenters. It was said that they had found a way to expunge the gene-flaws from their shared bloodline. If it were true… Caecus would have given much to meet such men and glean wisdom from them; but the Lamenters had not been heard of in decades, not since a tyranid force had decimated their numbers, and every messenger sent to find them returned empty-handed. He had little doubt they would not be represented at Dante’s grand conclave. A great pity, he mused, but not the matter at hand. There are other concerns to be addressed.

The ornate brass elevator car accepted them and began a swift descent into the heart of the complex. Tier upon tier of the Vitalis Citadel flashed past them, endless levels of experimental facilities, gene-labs and workstations. The quest to understand the labyrinthine nature of the Blood Angels gene-seed was an ongoing work, and this was only one of several sites engaged in it. The mission to find the causes of and cures for the twin curses of the Black Rage and the Red Thirst were ceaseless. But there were other efforts under way here, experiments that were hidden in vaults that only Caecus and his staff were granted access to. It was toward one such compound that they travelled now, a wordless understanding between them.

The Apothecae Majoris sensed something else unspoken, however. After a moment, he gave the serf a measuring look. ‘What is it that concerns you, Fenn?’

His assistant’s fingers knotted. ‘It… is of no consequence, lord.’

‘Tell me,’ he insisted. ‘All matters that occur under this roof are of my concern.’

Fenn puffed. ‘It is the woman, sir. Her manner continues to vex me. I believe she does it to amuse herself at my expense.’

Caecus frowned. ‘I have told you before, on more than one occasion, to make your peace with her. Do not be in error, serf. Those words were not a request.’

‘I have tried, my lord.’ Fenn bowed his head slightly. ‘But she diminishes me at every opportunity. Mocking my skills.’ He paused. ‘I do not like her.’

‘Like? You are not required to like her. You are required to work with her. If you cannot do so–’

‘No, no!’ Fenn shook his head. ‘Lord Caecus, you know my dedication to the Chapter and our endeavours is true! But the air of ill-feeling she brings to the place–’

‘I will speak with her.’ Caecus ended the discussion firmly. ‘We are on the cusp of something magnificent, Fenn. I will not allow such trivial minutiae to cloud the issue.’

The serf said nothing, staring at the hex-grid deck as the lift continued to descend. Through the metal flooring, the chasm of the elevator shaft extended away into the depths of the mountainside.

The great brass gates opened and a stubby iron drawbridge dropped into place, allowing them to exit the elevator car. Fenn followed, as years of drilled-in discipline suggested, a step behind and to the right of his master. Lord Caecus walked past the gun-servitors caged upon the stone walls, letting their canine snouts take his scent. Satisfied, the guardians gave a hollow yowl of assent and their stubber cannons drooped. Steam hissing in hot gushes, the pistons holding the pressure doors shut over the laboratorium ratcheted out and the steel plates were pulled up and away. The motion reminded Fenn of a curtain drawing back from a theatre stage.

Venturing through the blue-lit tunnel where the machine-spirit sensors watched, the two of them allowed a fine mist of counter-infectives to haze the air about them; then the inner doors opened and they were in the chamber proper.

The colours of white and red dominated everything. Hard illumination from glowstrips in the walls threw stark, pitiless light on the benches where chemical rendering was underway. Centrifuges whirred and fractionating columns bubbled in a slow rhythm, giving the chamber an austere but somehow animate sense to it. Medicae servitors moved to and fro, working at repetitive tasks programmed into their brains by decks of golden punch cards.

The red was here and there in patches; on the smocks of the servitors, pooling in the blood gutters of the dissection tables, thick in vials that ranged in racks about the walls.

At one such rack, the woman stood, using a lenticular viewer made of pewter and crystal to conduct a deep examination of a particular blood sample. She looked up, the sharp lines of her face accented by the night-black hair bunched in a tight fist upon her head. Discreet mechadendrite cords trailed from a line of brass sockets that began at her temple and ended at the nape of her neck. Like Fenn, she wore a simple duty robe of bleached cloth; unlike him, however, on her it miraculously accented the firm and well-muscled shape of her body.

‘Nyniq,’ said Caecus, and she bowed to the Blood Angel by way of returning his greeting.

‘You’ve returned at a timely moment, majoris.’ Nyniq’s voice had a quality to it that some ordinary men might have found charming, sultry even. Fenn considered it neither; her manner seemed oily and insincere to him. He had objected to the involvement of the tech-priestess from the very beginning, but Lord Caecus had dismissed his concerns. The matter of the woman’s motives was secondary to the work at hand, so the Astartes had said. The work, the work, always the work. That is what is most important. His master’s words rang hollow in his ears.

Certainly, it was undeniable that Nyniq brought a great intellect to the project, and indeed, Fenn found himself reluctantly admitting that her solutions to some problems had allowed them to advance their research by leaps and bounds. But that didn’t make him dislike her any less. This work was a matter for Blood Angels and their Baalite kindred, not for some itinerant member of the magos biologis to simply drop into and begin interfering.

She had been here for months now. She never seemed to leave the laboratorium, always there when Fenn arrived after a rest period, always there when he left again to take sleep or sustenance. And then there was that habit she had, of cooing some peculiar wordless melody to herself whenever she worked. Fenn found it irritating.

He comforted himself with a thought; if she did turn out to have another agenda other than the course of pure research she claimed, her life would be forfeit in moments. Caecus had been direct in his words with her; while she toiled within the walls of the Vitalis Citadel, her life belonged to the Blood Angels. If she did anything to damage that trust, it would be her blood spilled upon the floors here.

Fenn followed his master after Nyniq, through the crossway door at the far end of the chamber and into the tank crèche beyond.

In there, the colour was the sea-green of the oceans that had once shone across Baal before the fall of Old Night. Liquid shimmers of reflected light cast patterns over the walls. Boots rang across the service gantry between the two long ranks of fogged, glassy capsules. Nyniq took them to a tank resting up on its armature, turned so that it stood upright next to the gantry. Built into the glass wall of the tank was a metal bulb festooned with indicator lights. The air in here was heavy with stringent chemicals.

‘Series eight, iteration twelve,’ noted the woman. ‘If you will observe?’

Fenn immediately frowned. ‘That one is still immature.’

‘Quite so,’ Nyniq allowed, ‘but it is far enough along to illustrate my point.’ She tapped out a sequence on a keypad and muttered a brief incantation.

Inside the tank, the milky fluid cleared to reveal a naked male, of similar proportion to a young Baalite tribal but lacking the pallid flesh and wiry build. The figure in the tank had skin toned a tanned red, with planes of hard muscle beneath. He would not have looked out of place in the armour of a Scout.

Caecus studied the youth, who drifted as if in a slumber, a line of thin bubbles trailing from his lips. ‘Outward aspect is promising.’ He said it warily.

Nyniq nodded. ‘But as we have become aware over the last series of iterations, that is not a guarantee.’ She tapped another control and the figure in the tank jerked, limbs going rigid.

His eyes snapped open and Fenn gasped as he looked directly at the serf. There was no pupil, iris or white of the eye; only a hard, baleful orb of dark ruby. Hands that bent into claws came up and scraped at the inside of the tank, scoring lines in the reinforced armourglass. And then the mouth opened. Within, there was an orchard of daggered fangs, row upon row.

Caecus’s expression remained cold and aloof as the figure gurgled and frothed, beating at its confinement. ‘Another failure, then.’

‘Aye,’ said Nyniq grimly. ‘Despite our every effort, my lord, errors continue to creep into the structure of the gene-matrix. With each iteration they become more pronounced. The replication protocols are flawed at a level so primal, so inherent, that nothing we do can correct them.’

Caecus turned away. He waved a hand at the tank. ‘Dispose of it.’

‘As you wish.’ The tech-priestess pressed another control and a boxy device dropped into the top of the tank on a frame: a modified boltgun. Fenn saw a moment of almost human emotion on the face of the specimen before the gun discharged with a muffled concussion. The milky fluid swirled with red.

Nyniq stepped back, and the base of the tank opened into a sluice, liquid, flesh and dead matter alike dropping away into a yawning vent beneath the companionway.

Fenn went after his master. ‘My lord, there are no failures. There is only more data. We shall learn from this iteration and attempt again.’

‘Is that wise?’ asked Nyniq.

Both of them stopped and turned to face her. ‘I will decide what is and is not wise,’ Caecus said, a warning beneath his words.

She touched the platinum pendant around her neck. The shape of a repeating strand of DNA, it mirrored the red helix sigil that crested the shoulder pad of every Blood Angel apothecarion. ‘Majoris, I offered my services to you after our first meeting because I was captured by the purity of your dedication. I did so because I believed that what you attempted here will be to the benefit of the Adeptus Astartes and the glory of the Emperor of Mankind. But now I must speak honestly to you. We have reached the limits of our skills. We can do no better.’ Her head bowed. ‘I thank you for this opportunity to be part of your work. But we must accept failure and move on.’

A nerve jerked in Caecus’s jaw. ‘I will do no such thing! I am a Blood Angel! We do not give up the cause at the first impediment we encounter! We carry our mission to the bitter end!’

‘But this is not the first impediment, lord. Not the second, not the tenth or the fiftieth.’ Nyniq’s words became quiet, conspiratorial. ‘My lord, I know that you have kept certain things from us. I know that the Chapter Master has not given his blessing for this research to proceed, and yet you have continued it.’

‘Lord Dante did not order us to stop,’ Fenn broke in. ‘He… He did not use those words!’

‘Semantics,’ said Nyniq. ‘I doubt he will be pleased to learn we went on regardless for all these months.’

‘She is correct.’ Caecus moved to another of the tanks, and studied his own reflection in the glass, his manner cooling. ‘But I made the decision. Lord Dante is a great man, but he believes in that which he can hold in his hand. It is only the Emperor and the strength of his brethren he takes on faith. I am convinced… I am certain Dante will see the value of this work, if only I could show him proof instead of words.’

‘The only proof we have are unfinished clones. Bestial mutants and freaks masquerading as Space Marines, no better than the spawn of the Corrupted.’ Nyniq shook her head. ‘We know that Corax of the Raven Guard took decades over this process, and even then his yield was one success for every hundred stillborn failures!’

‘Perhaps… Perhaps you are right.’

Fenn’s lip trembled as he saw a change come over his master. The certainty in Caecus’s manner slipped away. It was as if a great weight had come upon him. The serf had the sudden, terrible awareness that he was seeing behind the mask of determination his lord usually wore, that this weary aspect was his true face. The face of someone worn down by years of dogged, fruitless toil toward a goal he might never reach. ‘Master, no. there must be another way! Some avenue yet untried, some approach we have not seen.’ He reached out and touched Caecus upon the gauntlet.

‘And who would know it, old friend?’ The Apothecary favoured Fenn with a look. ‘You? Speak, if you have a solution. I would hear it.’

Nyniq made a noise in her throat, drawing their attention. She was still toying with the pendant. ‘There is… Someone. A man of great knowledge. I know him, Lord Caecus. He was my patron at the magos biologis during my time as an initiate. He spoke of interest in Great Corax’s research on more than one occasion.’

Fenn’s brows knitted. ‘You wish us to bring in another outsider?’ He shot a look at his master. ‘My lord, is not one enough?’

‘We are all servants of the Emperor!’ snapped Nyniq. ‘And this man may represent the last hope for your plans to rebuild the Blood Angels!’

‘His name, then,’ said Caecus. ‘Tell me his name.’

‘The Tech-Lord Haran Serpens, majoris.’

The Apothecary nodded. ‘His work is known to me. He forged a cure for the Haze Plagues on Farrakin.’

‘The very same.’

After a moment, Fenn’s master gave a nod. ‘Summon him, then. Do it with care and stealth. I have no wish to make issue with Dante until I have something to show him.’ He stalked away toward the doors.

Fenn ran to catch up with him. ‘Lord! Are you certain this is the right course of action? Can we trust the magos?’

Caecus didn’t look at him. ‘We are all servants of the Emperor,’ he repeated. ‘And sometimes we must dally with those we do not wish to in order to bring about a greater victory.’

‘I don’t trust her!’ he hissed.

‘Trust is not required,’ said Caecus, ‘only obedience.’

CHAPTER FIVE

Set into the grey marble floor of the Grand Annex, directly beneath the Solar Dome, there was a four-pointed star made of rust-coloured stone mined from the foot of the Chalice Mountains. Flecked with tiny chips of garnet, at high sun the red light that fell through the dome’s glass apex made it glow. At the centre of the star, an oval of mosaic formed the shape of the Blood Angels sigil, the wings pointing to the east and west, the tip of the bloody teardrop between them to the north, the jewelled bead falling southwards.

The building had stood for millennia. Even to an Adeptus Astartes, a warrior who might live to go beyond the eleven hundred years of Lord Dante, such a span of time was barely conceivable. How many Blood Angels, in all those generations, might have walked upon these stones? How many men? How many lives, ended now, gone in service to the same ideals that Brother Rafen stood for? The thought of it was history, solid and stone.

He stood at the southern arm of the star, his right hand firmly coiled around the mast of the Standard of Signus. At the other three points, battle-brothers dressed as he was, in full power armour and dress honours, stood holding other banners symbolising the greatest of victories in their Chapter’s history. The vast circular chamber was one of the largest open interior spaces in the fortress-monastery, with the exception of some of the training arenas. The scale of the annexe was made grander still by the fact that there were no supporting stanchions or crossbeams holding up the curving roof above them. The chamber could have accommodated a Titan at full height and still given the war machine room to move. Long, thin pennants, each detailed with the symbol of a successor Chapter, hung around the lip of the dome at equidistant points.

About him, rings of Adeptus Astartes stood in four broken semi-circles around the compass star, equal numbers of men shoulder to shoulder, facing inward. Their battle armours were a mixture of variants and subclasses, with even a lone Dreadnought standing amid them, and together they were a spectrum of red. Crimson through to ruby, scarlet to claret, colours deep as blood and bright as flame. Unlike the fellow Blood Angels who stood beneath the venerable standards, these were Rafen’s distant kindred, the brotherhoods of the successor Chapters; his cousins.

The quiet murmur of conversation moved among them, some battle-brothers reaffirming old friendships, others making wary gestures of respect between them, some as silent as statues. As much as their colours differed, so then did their characters and manners. Rafen did not turn his head too much, but he knew that to his immediate right stood the contingent of the Angels Sanguine, resplendent in their half-red, half-black wargear and gleaming, polished helms. To his left stood Gorn and Seth of the Flesh Tearers, and following the circuit around, the smoky crimson of the Angels Vermillion, the gold-trimmed armour of the Blood Drinkers, and others beyond them… He let his eyes sweep over the figures assembled there before him, marvelling at the moment. Servo-skulls hummed overhead on impellors, recording every second for posterity on pict tapes and data spools; but Rafen was actually here, experiencing the moment, being a part of it.

The legacy of Sanguinius was laid out in this room, with representatives of nigh on every Chapter that paid fealty to the Great Angel’s bloodline gathered under one roof. Rafen’s gaze moved from one to another, seeing Astartes from Chapters that, until now, had been to him only names upon the pages of warbooks. There, the Blood Legion, in diagonal tiger-stripes of red and lightning blue; the Angels Encarmine, mirrors of Rafen’s own colours except for a blunt trim of cold black; the Red Wings in their panels of pale snow and ruby; the Blood Swords ashine in glossy crimson, the sigil of a weeping blade stark upon their shoulders. These and more, united in a unique kind of kinship.

And yet, as with the families of common men, the fraternity of the Sons of Sanguinius was not without its bad blood.

Rafen became aware of Brother-Captain Gorn watching the party of Angels Sanguine with undisguised interest. Most of the warriors in the contingents went unhooded, but only the Angels Sanguine were, to a man, hidden behind their bi-coloured helmets. It was a quirk of their Chapter, known to most, although the reason was shrouded in rumour and supposition. The brothers of the Angels Sanguine habitually went masked upon the battlefield and all places where they might catch the eyes of others. Only among themselves, where those of their kindred walked, would they remove their headgear, and even then they retreated into the depths of heavy hooded robes. As an initiate, Rafen had heard many lurid and fanciful tales of what the Angels Sanguine hid from the world, and dismissed them as idle chatter; but now he stood close to them, he could not help but recall those tales and silently wonder, just a little.

Gorn, however, had no such desire to keep his own counsel. ‘Rydae?’ he said, in a low voice that did not carry, looking steadily at an Angel Sanguine officer. ‘Is that you under there?’

Rafen watched the other Astartes from the corner of his eye. The Angels Sanguine ignored the Flesh Tearer.

‘It’s hard to be sure,’ Gorn continued. ‘Hard to tell one of you from another.’ A tension built in the air between them. ‘Will you not acknowledge me, cousin? No?’ The Flesh Tearer chuckled quietly; at his side, Gorn’s Chapter Master paid no heed to the hushed conversation, as if Seth thought it beneath his interest. ‘Ah, I see. You still bear me ill-will after our meeting on Zofor’s World? Because of the defeat?’

For the first time, the Angels Sanguine captain’s helmet turned slightly so that his emerald eye slits could sight directly at Gorn. ‘There was no defeat,’ The reply was loaded with ready menace. ‘Only… interference on your part.’

Gorn gave a tight, false smile. ‘It aggrieves me that you see it that way.’

The helmet turned away with mechanical precision. ‘I care not for your delicate sensibilities,’ Rydae husked. ‘Nor your conversation.’

Rafen saw Gorn’s hand tighten into a fist, and he knew that this had been allowed to go on too long. With a slight motion of his wrist, Rafen tapped the base of the standard’s mast upon the marble floor and a sharp clack drew the attention of both Astartes. ‘Esteemed brother-captains,’ he said firmly. ‘With all due respect, perhaps this is a matter better pursued in other circumstances.’

Rydae did not speak, but Gorn shot Rafen a brief, poisonous look. ‘Of course,’ he said quietly, after a moment. ‘It is always the privilege of a Blood Angel to be correct.’

Any reply he might have given to that was forgotten as a voice, clear and powerful, sounded out across the Grand Annex.

‘Kinsmen,’ called Mephiston, ‘be gathered.’

The chamber instantly fell silent. Footsteps echoed as men approached along the four directions of the compass star, two figures coming from each direction. From east and west came the sanguinary priest Corbulo and the psyker Mephiston, each accompanied by a veteran warrior cradling the gold helmet of an honour guard in the crook of his arm. From behind Rafen, two more Blood Angels, sharing between them another standard – this one showing Sanguinius himself in his oft-depicted pose, wings spread and head turned to the heavens, presenting his shroud and grail. And from the north, followed by the captain of his honour guard, came Dante.

The red rays of the sun caught him and bathed the Chapter Master in a halo of light. Lord Dante wore his ceremonial artificer armour, the golden sheathes of ceramite polished to a lustrous sheen. Inlaid wings of pearl, ruby and jade glittered and shone. His helmet was a static facade in the reflection of Sanguinius’s death mask. Like each warrior here, he carried no weapons but a combat blade sheathed at his boot. For a brief instant, Rafen lost himself in the sight of the armoured figure, his memory caught on another moment, months before in a basement on the forge-world of Shenlong, a moment when the image of another golden warrior had stood before him. He blinked and shook his head slightly, pushing the reverie away. Rafen focused and found Mephiston looking at him, a hint of curiosity on his face. It was on the Chief Librarian’s insistence that he had been granted the privilege of bearing one of the sacred Chapter banners. Some part of him wondered why the Lord of Death had done so; the other men carrying the standards this day were all of captain’s rank, and Mephiston was not known to grant favours without good cause. But Rafen was only a sergeant and it was not his place to question the will of so senior a brother.

The new arrivals came together upon the oval of mosaic tiles. Corbulo nodded to the standard bearers and the honour guard, and they went down upon one knee, Rafen following the motion with immediate precision. Then Dante bowed to the Chapter banner and the representation of their primarch, every other Astartes in the great chamber doing the same.

‘Frater Sanguinius,’ said the Chapter Master, his voice carrying through the stillness of the chamber, amplified by the vox-caster in his helmet. ‘Brothers of Blood. In the name of the Emperor of Mankind and the Great Angel, it is my honour and my pride to welcome you all to Baal, the cradle from which our Chapters draw their shared lineages.’

‘For the Glory of Sanguinius and the Imperium of Man,’ intoned Mephiston.

‘For the Glory of Sanguinius and the Imperium of Man.’ Every warrior in the chamber repeated the invocation, the dome casting the words into echoes.

Dante rose and the assemblage followed suit. Rafen chanced a sideways look at Rydae and Gorn; the attention of both men was now firmly set on the Chapter Master of the Blood Angels.

Dante reached up and removed the death-mask helmet, handing it to Corbulo. His steady, fatherly expression crossed the room, deliberately making eye contact with everyone there. ‘Cousins and kinsmen. Blood of my blood. It swells my heart to see such a monumental gathering as this one, and I am humbled by the faces I see here before me this day. That you would come here at my request, answering a call knowing only that it came from Baal, fills me with such respect. No matter what world you now call home, no matter how many suns span the void between there and here, this is our spiritual birthplace.’ He pointed a gold-sheathed hand into the air. ‘And in this place, we will discuss a matter of the greatest import to the legacy of Sanguinius. To do so without you here would be wrong, and my only regret is that we could not assemble a voice from every cousin Chapter for this singular assembly.’ He nodded at a cluster of pennants hanging alone, among them a chequered banner bearing the symbol of a bleeding heart.

Dante brought his hands to his chest and made the sign of the aquila over the ruby droplet upon his breast plate. ‘Let us offer an invocation to the Emperor, may His gaze be eternal and unswerving, and the spirit of our liege-lord. Let us ask them to watch over us in the days ahead, to grant us their blessing and a measure of their great wisdom.’

Rafen did as all the other Astartes, bringing his hands to his chest across the standard. His gaze passed over Mephiston and held upon him. He saw the psyker’s gaze turn inward, his nostrils tense as if a foul scent had reached his senses. Then in the next instant the Lord of Death blinked and the moment passed, leaving the shadow of a troubled expression on his face.

Movement caught Rafen’s eye and he saw up above, in the watcher’s gallery, the robed figures of many more senior Astartes. The magnification optics in his helmet lenses picked out First Captain Lothan, the great Chaplain Lemartes and the acerbic Argastes at his side. But as each warrior bowed his head to make entreaty, Rafen found himself troubled by a sudden question as he searched the faces and found one conspicuous by his absence.

Where is the Apothecae Majoris? Where is Brother Caecus?

The great slabs of the laboratorium door folded away and the stranger was suddenly there, white gusts of steam falling from the piston-locks to pool around his ankles. Fenn was startled, and he flinched, putting down the rack of test vials he was carrying before he dropped them. The man surveyed the chamber with an air of quiet interest, in the manner of someone viewing a piece of art in a gallery. Fenn caught his eye and the new arrival offered him a small smile from a face lined and tanned, like aged, careworn leather. Behind him, a dark, square-sided shape shifted, indistinct in the dim glow of the biolumes.

The serf turned at the sound of his master’s booted feet, seeing Caecus approach with Nyniq at his side. The woman’s expression changed to something Fenn had never seen before; happiness. ‘My tech-lord,’ she breathed, ‘the Omnissiah protect you.’

‘And you, my pupil.’ The man’s voice was metered and calm.

Nyniq bowed slightly and the stranger bent to place a chaste kiss upon the top of her head. He was far taller than a normal man.

‘Haran Serpens, I presume?’ said Caecus.

He got a shallow bow in return. ‘Indeed, majoris. I thank you for your gracious invitation.’

‘How did you get here with such speed?’ Fenn said the words before he’d even thought about them, earning himself a sideways look from his master.

Serpens seemed unconcerned. ‘We have our ways, Omnissiah be praised.’ He tapped the Adeptus Mechanicus symbol of cogwheel and skull that fastened his cloak across his broad shoulders. ‘Fortune allowed that I was close by when Nyniq’s machine-call reached me. I found the content of her code-summons to be most interesting.’ He glanced at the doorway. ‘If it pleases you, majoris, may I enter?’

Caecus beckoned him in. ‘Come, then, tech-lord. But understand, once you do so, there are certain stipulations to be adhered to.’

Serpens shared a look with the woman. ‘Whatever directives you have, Blood Angel, I will submit to them. I am interested only in the work. Nyniq told me it is in my interest to be here, so here I am.’ They shared a familial smile. ‘I trust her implicitly.’ He cocked his head. ‘How would you have me help you serve our Emperor?’

Caecus ignored the question and posed one of his own. ‘Where is your ship? It is important that your presence here be kept clandestine, for the interim. It would not do to have one of the other successor Chapter craft in orbit make issue with your vessel.’

‘There is no need to be concerned,’ Serpens noted, studying a vial of blood. ‘My transportation has made itself scarce. No one but those in this chamber knows of my arrival here on Baal.’ The magos scientist walked slowly about the perimeter of the room, taking it all in. With slow and steady steps came the thing that had waited behind him: a tall metal box of black steel on a jointed cluster of spidery legs. Upon one face of the container was a porcelain mask with green-lit sensors in the eye sockets and mouth. The machine-thing moved delicately, never straying more than a short span from Serpens’s side.

‘You must understand that the nature of our research here is of the utmost secrecy,’ noted Caecus. ‘Nyniq vouches for you as both a man of great learning and great discretion.’

‘I endeavour to be so.’ The tech-lord was nodding approvingly. ‘Ah. I see you are using the Ylesia Protocols as an operating source for your bio-cultures. A fine, fine choice. I have worked with a modified version of that medium myself.’ He smiled again. ‘I think I begin to see some of the work you are about.’

As much as he wanted to, Fenn could not look away from the tech-lord. Beneath a thick winter coat of dun-coloured animal hide, Serpens wore a peculiar over-suit that seemed somewhere between the design of Adeptus Arbites combat armour and the restraining straps of a straightjacket. He was bedecked with overlapping waistcoats of varying cuts, each alike only in the numerous sealpockets across them. The magos scientist had a mane of straw-coloured hair that sat over his skull in tightly braided rows, extending away down his back in a snaking coil. But it was the size of the man that held his attention; Fenn had met members of the magos biologis and others of the Adeptus Mechanicus on several occasions, and never in all those times come across someone with this man’s stature.

‘I am not what you expected, am I?’ He studied Fenn.

‘You are not,’ admitted the serf. ‘You’re the size of an Astartes.’ He nodded toward Caecus, and saw that his master was dwelling on the same thought.

‘Indeed,’ Serpens agreed. ‘Throughout my life I have attempted to model myself in small ways upon the Emperor’s most perfect children, the Space Marines.’ He glanced down at his own hands, gloved in black leather. ‘I hope the majoris will forgive a mortal’s hubris, but I have modified my flesh in many ways to share a fraction of the greatness you were gifted with.’ Serpens bowed. ‘You should consider it the sincerest form of flattery, sir.’

‘I see,’ Caecus said, with wary detachment.

Fenn imagined his master was thinking the same as he, however. What could Serpens mean? Has he taken it upon himself to have his body implanted with artificial organs such as those of a Space Marine? It would certainly go a long way toward explaining how a magos could be so changed from the form of a normal man. The thought made Fenn feel uncomfortable – as if he needed more to do so – but his master’s expression shifted. Caecus had decided not to pursue the line of conversation any further, for the moment.

‘And that?’ The Blood Angel gestured at the metal box. ‘Your servitor?’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ allowed Serpens. ‘It is merely an autonomous conveyance for my most vital equipment. Chirurgery tools and the like.’ He snapped his fingers in a quick code, so swiftly that Fenn couldn’t register it, and the machine-thing wandered away to the corner of the room, the mechanical legs sighing and clattering.

Serpens halted and brought his hands together in a gesture of fealty. ‘My esteemed Astartes, Lord Caecus. If I may be so bold, let me say the word. Replicae, yes?’ He didn’t wait for a reply. ‘That is my speciality and these mechanisms hereabout are turned toward work upon that science. I will warrant that you require skills such as mine for a thorny problem the wild mix of biology has thrown to you.’ He touched Nyniq’s face gently. ‘My pupil, as skilled as she is, would not have called to me otherwise. And I tell you here and now, if I am right, I would be honoured to join you in solving it.’ His voice fell to a whisper. ‘Will you let me? It has been my dream to work in lockstep with the master biologians of the Adeptus Astartes.’

‘And what if this work requires you to place your loyalty to the magos biologis second to the needs of my Chapter?’ Caecus stood eye to eye with him. ‘What then?’

Serpens broke away first. ‘Lord… May I confide a truth to you?’

‘Go on.’

‘The works under the name of Haran Serpens have become less and less a challenge in the years gone by. My last great victory was over the Haze Plague… And I have done nothing of note since. I am out to pasture, majoris. Marking time. I would relish the chance to do something of worth once more. I can see no better a service than to collaborate with the Sons of Sanguinius. My loyalty… is to Terra and the Emperor alone.’ Fenn sensed the faint air of desperation in the tech-lord’s voice.

‘Nyniq has proven herself a valuable asset,’ Caecus began. ‘I do not doubt you would be any less. But I must be clear, Serpens. Once you agree to join us here in the citadel, you will not be allowed to communicate with the outside world. The secrets that will be confided to you must be kept upon pain of death. To speak of any of this before we have fruition would not be tolerated.’

Serpens nodded. ‘Lord Caecus, already I have courted the displeasure of my masters by stealing away to come to Baal on my own. I will not turn back now.’ He offered the Blood Angel his hand. ‘I say this to you. Task me. Task me, and together we shall surmount all obstacles. We will show the Emperor such majesty.’

Fenn stiffened at the tech-lord’s words. He had heard them once before, only a few months ago, in a meeting that progressed in much the same way that this one had.

We will show the Emperor such majesty. He stared at Nyniq. Those words had come from her lips, the dull echo of them now sounding once more in the serf’s memories. Fenn watched her bow and follow Serpens in servile fashion and his thoughts fell back to the first time he had laid eyes upon her.

The libraria of LXD-9768 were so vast that they covered three-fifths of the nondescript planet’s surface. The dull stone world with its nitrogen-heavy atmosphere had been polished smooth by the actions of heavy surface storms and hurricanes induced by the complex motion of three captured asteroid moons. Those satellites were gone now, mined to fragments by the Adeptus Mechanicus, used to build the endless lines of blockhouses that went from horizon to horizon; chamber after chamber, annexe after annexe, each storage facility housing millions of books, scrolls, picts and other forms of data storage. Whole island continents were given over to certain kinds of media, even down to millennia-old devices of magnetic tape, encoded discs and solid-state memory rods.

Worlds like LXD-9768 were dotted across the breadth of the galactic disc, planets chosen for their sheer inertness, locations far distant from any suns approaching their death cycle, alien borders or other sources of potential harm. Many of them duplicated each other’s records, with multiple redundant copies scattered a thousand fold over the light years; but they were not all the same. Since Old Night and the loss of Mankind’s great technologies, the millennia that followed had seen in part a series of struggles to recover what was once known by all. The Adeptus Terra, in its infinite wisdom and incalculable patience, had decreed that such a fall to darkness was never to be permitted again.

Thus, the libraria. Planets given over to file stores as big as cities, duplicating and protecting information so that the loss of any one of them would not mean the destruction of humanity’s knowledge base. Every fact recovered from the past, and every piece of data generated since, had a place here. Nothing was to be lost again.

But the reality did not marry with the vision. In the 41st millennium, true information retained the same power it had in earlier ages, and those who had it hoarded it like precious gems. Instead of the libraria becoming the home of all learning, they had turned into great dusty canyons of worthless data, collected by a bureaucracy that collated everything as if it were of the greatest import, no matter how trivial, how pointless. LXD-9768’s stacks could not tell a man what words the Emperor said upon his assent to the Golden Throne; but it could give chapter and verse about the migratory patterns of extinct breeds of rodents in the underlevels of hive cities, from worlds that had not existed for centuries.

The libraria cranked on, gathering and assembling information as a cetacean might strain ocean waters for krill through its baleen. And sometimes, by pure chance, they took in data that actually had value.

It had taken Fenn six days to locate the correct annexe, in endless rounds of quibbling and arguments with the quillans and savants who stood as gatekeepers to the great oceans of data locked up in the libraria’s stores. Finally, the correct permissions had been provided, on a fanfold of greasy cardboard stamped with a dozen signets and consent indents. The books were close by, in a sub-basement.

While Fenn worked, Lord Caecus had remained aboard their Aquila shuttle, meditating in the spartan cargo bay. He had not taken food nor sleep since they departed Baal, he had said little to the serf during the voyage aboard the transport ship and the shuttle flight to the surface of LXD-9768.

It was an understatement to say his master was troubled. Ever since he had returned to the Vitalis Citadel from his meeting with Lord Dante, he had been withdrawn. Caecus has taken such high hopes with him, fully believing that the Chapter Master would accept his option for rebuilding their forces. He, and Fenn with him, had not expected such a negative response. Perhaps they had been too close to the idea, too enamoured of the work to consider that others might find it objectionable.

Fenn waited for Caecus to order the laboratorium closed, the work halted. When the Apothecae Majoris did none of those things, the serf did not question it. He understood his lordship’s thinking; Dante’s criticism could be overturned, if the right combination of results could be created. It was Fenn’s duty to aid his master in bringing that to pass; and so they were here, to follow upon a thin lead. Certain tomes had been tracked to this place. Allegedly copied by the monks of Ionai from records laid down by Brother Monedus, a senior Raven Guard apothecarion, the papers were said to carry much knowledge of the primarch Corax’s experiments in accelerated zygote harvesting techniques. The tomes had eventually come to LXD-9768, rescued from the obliteration of a valetudinarium station somewhere in the Ultima Segmentum.

Caecus showed the first signs of interest in weeks; but when they reached the annexe, that swiftly turned to grim annoyance. The quillan at the bookgate seemed startled to see them; you are not the first visitors this day, said the scribe-priest. Such arrivals, it appeared, were unusual.

Nyniq was there, reading the Monedus papers with a repellor-field tool that let her turn the pages without actually touching them.

At first Fenn thought it was some cruel twist of fate, that this magos had arrived at the same prize his master sought on the same day; he learned that this was not true. Nyniq weathered veiled threats from Lord Caecus and by turns revealed she was here because she had learned of the Apothecae’s search for tracts on the subject of cloning. It was, she explained, a line of research that she too was following. We could make such leaps if we pooled our works, she offered.

Fenn hated her on sight, of course. As arrogant as she was beautiful, twisting her words to dance upon the edge of his master’s fury, piquing Caceus’s interest with her considerable knowledge and then backing away, as another woman might tease a normal man with the promise of physical congress. And she was shrewd with it. Nyniq made airy suggestions that she might simply bring news of this meeting to Lord Dante and approach the Blood Angels directly, doubtless knowing all along of Caecus’s desire for secrecy. The Apothecae later admitted to Fenn that he had even considered ending the troublesome woman’s life to be done with her. But what consequences could such a deed have?

The serf watched her win the Blood Angel’s trust little by little, feathering his curiosity, enticing him. Fenn knew the moment had come when Nyniq presented a complex skein of biologian formulae to his master, a paper of such intricacies which the Astartes could only begin to encompass in his thoughts.

The woman understood it all, though. The Monedus papers were missing pieces of a puzzle to her, and she was eager to bring them together with the works under Caecus’s dominion.

Perhaps, if the pressures of time and the censure of Lord Dante had not been upon him, Caecus might have rejected Nyniq on the spot, taken what he needed and left her broken upon the storehouse’s stone floor; but in truth, the Apothecae Majoris concealed a sullen desperation. Over Fenn’s ignored words, he accepted her offer of assistance, in exchange for some degree of the fruits of this research.

We will show the Emperor such majesty, she said, in his footsteps we will walk, and make demi-gods from the crude clay of mortal men.

‘What bargains have we made?’ Fenn said the words under his breath, his voice carrying no further than his lips. He looked at his own reflection on the glass cabinets ranged across the walls of the laboratorium.

It was a mistake. Just to form that statement in his mind, to go against his lord and master within the privacy of his own thoughts, even that tested the serf’s reason. He had lived his life in service to Brother Caecus and his great works, to the Blood Angels and Sanguinius. But Nyniq’s recruitment had been the setting in of the rot, and now this man, this Haran Serpens? His master’s rush to be proven right was pushing him to make choices that were rash. Still, Fenn could not openly speak the doubts that crowded in upon him. He had already talked of his dislike of the woman and that had brought him nothing. His concerns about the two servants of the magos biologis were real and certain, and it was his duty to act on them.

But how? To decry them both based on nothing but a personal dislike was foolish. There was no evidence that Nyniq had ever done anything less than what she promised, to assist the work and integrate the research of Monedus.

He would need something firm. Something certain, evidence that the magos were manipulating Caecus’s work to their own ends.

Fenn studied Serpens as he spoke with his master. Suspicion without proof is nothing, he told himself. I will make it my task to learn more about this tech-lord. I will find out what he and that wench really want, and then expose them both.

‘Fenn,’ snapped Caecus. ‘Come here. Bring the genetor’s report on the most recent iterations.’

The serf bowed low, hiding a narrowed gaze.

CHAPTER SIX

The party moved along the corridors of the high arcade, beneath the slanted arches of the red stone ceiling. The glow of photonic candles gave the corridor a warm, aged feel, and shadows jumped in the passageways that radiated off at every intersection.

Rafen glanced over his shoulder. ‘This is one of the earliest structures of the fortress-monastery,’ he explained to the men who walked behind him. ‘These walls were laid down under the eye of the Great Angel himself.’

‘Impressive,’ said Brother-Captain Gorn, in a tone of voice that suggested he thought the sight far from it.

At Rafen’s side, young Kayne bristled and his hands made fists in his wide sleeves. The two Blood Angels were in stark contrast, their duty robes of rust-coloured cloth against the deep burgundy worn by Gorn and his party. As with their wargear, the Flesh Tearer contingent had little in the way of adornment about their person. Gorn, the veteran sergeant Noxx and the honour guard Roan were dressed in identical habits with the simple saw-blade sigil upon their shoulders. Their Chapter Master had declined the invitation to join them, citing his desire to prepare for the forthcoming conclave.

Rafen gave Kayne a hard look, but the youth didn’t acknowledge it. He was beginning to regret bringing the younger Astartes along with him. Kayne was a good Space Marine, that was never in doubt, but he was unseasoned and quick to anger. Rafen knew that the Flesh Tearers saw that as well as he did. This duty that Mephiston had assigned him and his men, to serve as adjutants to their cousins from Cretacia, was not a task fit for a warrior; but then to give it to a Chapter serf would have been taken as a grave insult.

Gorn gestured down the long corridor. ‘Are we to walk the length of this, then?’ He glanced around. ‘When Brother Corbulo suggested we be shown some of the treasures of the monastery, I had expected to see more than just… stonework.’

‘There’s much here to be lauded, sir,’ Kayne broke in, without waiting for Rafen’s permission to speak. ‘Our Chapter’s riches are in the stone as well as the gold.’

‘Riches,’ echoed Noxx, seizing on the word. ‘How blessed the Blood Angels are to have such boons.’ There was a forced bitterness in the sergeant’s voice and Rafen frowned, unsure of where Noxx was taking the conversation.

Abruptly, Gorn shot out a hand and pointed into a branching corridor, where the lights were dimmer. ‘There. What is down there?’

‘One of the galleries.’

‘A shooting gallery?’ questioned Roan. ‘A bolter range, up here? I hear no gunfire.’

‘It is an art gallery, Brother,’ Rafen corrected.

Noxx made a derisive noise. ‘Art?’ He stepped away and walked swiftly into the corridor, the dim candles there growing brighter as they sensed his presence.

Rafen thought to call him back, but already the other Flesh Tearers were following him, peering owlishly at the works upon the walls and in the oval alcoves.

There was a thin sneer on Noxx’s face. ‘What are these?’ He gestured at the mix of displays that crowded the walls. There were paintings in various media, sculptures of stone and carved woods, tapestries and fine pieces of worked metal. Many were devotional items fashioned to show the Emperor or Sanguinius in reverent aspect, others abstract things made for the sheer pleasure of it, or representative works depicting landscapes from a dozen worlds. ‘Are they spoils from the planets your Chapter has brought into submission?’

‘These are the works of our battle-brothers,’ said Kayne. ‘Each one was crafted by the hand of a Blood Angel.’

Noxx chuckled. ‘You… paint?’ The very idea amused him. ‘You sketch and you chisel at bits of stone?’

‘Is that not work for remembrancers?’ offered Gorn.

‘It is work for men of spirit. The Great Sanguinius granted the Blood Angels many things,’ Rafen said tightly. ‘Among them was a sense of the aesthetic. These works are the expression of that gift.’

Noxx focussed on Kayne; the young Space Marine’s jaw was set hard. ‘Which of these pretty things is yours, then? Show me, artist.’

‘With respect, brother-sergeant,’ Kayne was careful to meter his speech. ‘I would ask you not to mock.’

‘You would, eh?’ Noxx shared his cold smile with Gorn. ‘But I wonder if I can accommodate you, in the face of all this?’ The sergeant gestured around. ‘Is this what the Blood Angels do when they should be engaging the enemies of mankind or kneeling in prayer to the Golden Throne? They scribble and they sew?’ He snatched up a piece of tapestry, upon which a fine golden web of threads depicted an image of Sanguinius. ‘My brethren have no time for such things. We are too busy fighting and dying!’

‘Everything here is a mark of devotion to the ideals of the Great Angel.’ Kayne matched the Flesh Tearer’s dead-eyed gaze and anger entered his tone. ‘How can an Astartes fight to preserve all that is good and beautiful in the universe, if he has no appreciation of beauty? To be blind to these things is to be blind to the glory the Emperor brings us.’

‘This boy lectures me on how to do battle, now?’ Noxx growled, addressing his kinsmen. ‘Should I dare to correct him upon his needlework?’ He shook the cloth in his fist.

Rafen saw the incident unfolding and moved to step forward. Noxx was once again goading a Blood Angel, this time seeking the weaker link of Kayne’s ill-concealed anger. Clearly, the warrior had come to understand he needed to look elsewhere to get a rise. ‘Brother-sergeant,’ he began, ready to defuse the building tension, but Gorn stepped in his path and stopped him. The Blood Angel halted, taking a breath.

‘A moment, Rafen.’ The Flesh Tearer captain retained a disinterested air, but there was a steel in his eyes that made his words an order. ‘Let the men talk.’

He hesitated. Gorn was not his commander, but he was still a ranking Astartes. To defy him… The thought caught hard in Rafen’s chest.

‘War is not all there is to life.’ Kayne was speaking, his face colouring with resentment. ‘If you cannot appreciate the majesty of a sunrise, or the power of a great hymnal, then I feel sorry for you.’

Rafen chest tightened. Wrong. The wrong words to say. And as he knew would happen, Noxx growled out a reply.

‘Do you? How high-handed, how typical of a Blood Angel whelp to scold his betters!’

‘That’s enough–’ Rafen snapped, but neither cared to hear him.

‘Don’t provoke the boy anymore, sergeant’ said Gorn mildly. ‘He may paint an unflattering portrait of you.’

Noxx turned away, shaking his head. ‘No wonder your Chapter is such a shambles if you are the best of their breed. Are you all peacocks and cloth-cutters?’

Rafen saw the flash of fury in Kayne’s eyes and he knew he would not be able to stop what was coming next.

In a blur, the youth’s combat blade swept out from its scabbard and came to a halt a hair’s breadth from Noxx’s throat. ‘I do not cut cloth,’ Kayne snarled, ‘but I would happily cut your arrogance from you, sir!’

Impulsive fool! Rafen’s teeth set in a snarl. The youth had played right into the other man’s hands, allowing his anger to bring him to draw the weapon. ‘Kayne!’ He called out, Gorn’s censure be damned. ‘You forget yourself! Sheath your blade!’

A moment of doubt was all it took. Kayne wavered and Noxx flicked his head forward, deliberately catching his cheek on the knife edge.

‘The boy cut me,’ said the Flesh Tearer.

‘Unfortunate,’ agreed Gorn, turning away. ‘That will make an issue of it. Shed blood.’

Rafen knew it would be useless to argue the point that Noxx had cut himself. It would be his word against that of a ranking warrior. He pushed past the Flesh Tearer captain and came to his warrior’s side. Kayne’s face was ashen, as too late he realised that he had been played, made a fool for the sport of the other Astartes.

‘I’ll want restitution,’ Noxx said darkly. ‘In the fighting pit.’

Rafen glared at the veteran sergeant. ‘You pushed him to this. Why?’

Noxx’s voice fell to a whisper. ‘To see what you’re made of.’

The Blood Angel hesitated, then opened his hand to Brother Kayne. ‘Give me your knife, lad. And show me your fingers.’

The youth did as he was ordered. Without pause, Rafen took Kayne’s fingers in his grip and folded them back the wrong way, snapping all four joints at once.

Kayne barked out a cry of pain. ‘What…’

Rafen silenced him with a look. ‘Go to the Apothecary. Have those re-set. They’ll heal.’ He turned about and glared at Noxx, Kayne’s knife still in his hand. ‘The boy’s fighting grip is useless. He can’t meet you in the pit. It would be unfair.’

‘I could break the brother-sergeant’s fingers,’ offered Gorn, a tic of amusement at his lips. ‘Would that make it even?’

‘No,’ replied Rafen. Mephiston’s words, the psyker’s orders not to rise to the Flesh Tearers’ bait, echoed in his thoughts. I will ask his forgiveness later; but this must be done now. The sergeant’s lips thinned. ‘Kayne is a part of my squad, and my responsibility.’ His eyes never left Noxx. ‘I will take his place.’

From the viewing balcony, the stone hemisphere of the fighting pit was an unadorned bowl of light-coloured bricks set into the floor. Black lines bisected the inverted space like the rings of latitude and longitude upon a planetary globe. A servitor replaced the polished steel grate over the blood drain in the centre, and, with care, it used long and spindly arms to pick its way back up toward the edge.

The lower balconies were filling, knots of men from every Chapter gathering here and there. The call to commencement was almost upon them. Dante watched, his eyes ranging over his kinsmen and cousins, taking the measure of the room.

‘I knew something like this would happen.’ Dante didn’t need to look over his shoulder at Corbulo, where the Apothecary stood, arms folded and face set. He didn’t need to look at him to know the expression of grim dismay the grail bearer wore. He could hear it in his words. Corbulo blew out a breath. ‘Are the Sons of Sanguinius incapable of meeting across a table without drawing each other into a pointless dispute?’

‘A matter of honour is never a pointless dispute,’ noted Dante. ‘Such things cannot go without address.’ He turned and found Corbulo looking at him, his manner shifting to something more quizzical.

‘You don’t seem concerned by this.’ The Apothecary paused, and Dante let him draw his own conclusions. ‘You knew this would come to pass. A disagreement, something that would lead to Astartes meeting Astartes in the pit…’ He gestured out at the arena.

‘I did,’ admitted the Chapter Master. ‘As you said, there is an inevitability about such things.’ He adjusted the cuff of his robes. ‘We are all Sons of Sanguinius, aye. But we are a fractious family. Friction is only to be expected.’

‘We are Space Marines,’ replied Corbulo. ‘We are meant to be above such things.’

‘Meant to,’ Dante repeated, with a cool smile. ‘But we both know the reality is not the same as the ideal. Even the primarchs, in their magnificence, could not range above the emotions of men. The Heresy is ample proof of that. We can only strive to do so… But it would be foolish to pretend we are free of such things.’

Corbulo frowned again, and Dante saw understanding in his eyes. ‘You… You let this happen.’

‘Indeed.’

‘And more than that, perhaps you even encouraged it.’ The Apothecary shook his head. ‘Lord, why?’

Dante held up his hand for silence as an Astartes from his honour guard entered the balcony and bowed low. ‘My lord? Word from the master of the arena. The duel may commence at your command.’

He nodded. ‘Thank you, Brother Garyth. Tell him they may proceed.’

‘This will be a single combat, a duel of prowess,’ said the servitor, the grating mechanical vox speaking in a flat, emotionless voice. ‘Fight to assent, show courage and honour. Edged weapons and firearms are prohibited. In the Emperor’s name.’

‘In the Emperor’s name,’ chorused Rafen and Noxx. Both men had stripped down to fighting tunics, suits of sand ox leather and cloth of the like that initiates often wore in the days of training. The servitor offered them both a wooden exercise blade; balanced to mimic the weight and heft of a light battle sword, the training weapons had no cutting edge to them.

Noxx eyed him, tracing a finger over the rapidly-healing scar across his cheek. ‘A pity. I’d prefer a proper blade to these toys.’ His voice was low.

‘A warrior fights with whatever he has to hand,’ Rafen retorted.

‘How true,’ Noxx grated, and threw him a mocking salute with the weapon.

‘Commence,’ said the servitor, and it trundled backwards into an alcove on brass wheels.

Rafen stepped up to the lip of the bowl-shaped fighting pit and sighted across at Noxx, taking a position directly opposite him. He wasted no time with showy motion or play at the Flesh Tearer’s expense; Rafen stepped off the edge and slid down the steep incline of the arena wall, riding on the heels of his sandals.

Noxx bellowed a war cry and threw himself headfirst at the Blood Angel, leading with the training blade. The shout, loud enough that it would unman an ordinary soldier, did nothing but draw a sneer from Rafen. He pivoted and met the Flesh Tearer’s weapon, batting it away.

Noxx landed hard and rolled, dodging a follow-up strike. Rafen skipped sideways across the curved stone blocks, over the black lines. He felt the vibrations of machinery through the soles of his feet, great cogs and rods at work beneath the floor of the arena.

The Flesh Tearer spun about and came at him again, fast and agile. Noxx rained blow after blow down upon Rafen, and the Blood Angel parried them all; but the attacks were so swift that he had barely a moment to consider a counter-strike of his own.

Then a lucky blow; Noxx scored a hit, the nub of the training blade’s thick edge hitting hard across the dense muscle of Rafen’s bicep. A lance of pain shot through him, startling the Blood Angel. He fell back, feeling an echo of the hurt tingle in his fingers. Strange; but the blow did not draw blood, in fact it barely even bruised me…

Noxx attacked again, and this time Rafen was slow. A second hit, and then a third, one to a spot above his clavicle and the other on his forearm. Each one made his skin twitch and tremble with a quick flash of palsy. Fighting through it, Rafen made a hard return and caught Noxx across the face with the flat of the blade, opening up the cut on his cheek again.

He moved to follow through, but the vibration in the floor became more violent. Abruptly, the stone blocks began to shift and the ground on which Rafen stood jerked and rose up. Other parts of the fighting pit pivoted or changed in height, the static surface becoming an unpredictable, disordered landscape to make the combat more challenging.

The Blood Angel caught a glimpse of the men watching the duel as the block on which he stood rose up above the lip of the arena; he spotted a grim-faced Kayne and the rest of his squad alongside a cadre of Blood Drinkers, who called out and applauded; then in the next second the block dropped away from under him and he fell into a controlled tumble. Fangs bared, Noxx dived to meet him and he pushed away – too slow to avoid another blow across his shoulder.

This time the impact bared his teeth and sent his muscles tensing all down his flank. Nerve points. He’s attacking the clusters of nerves beneath the surface of my flesh. To an observer caught up in the pitch and moment of the duel, Noxx’s blows would have seemed random, without order; but they were far from that. The correct application of force in the right places, even through the protective sub-dermal sheath of a Space Marine’s black carapace, could be enough to deaden nerves, to slow a fighting response. And if one were trained well enough, the right blow, no matter if it were struck with an edgeless training blade, would cause a seizure.

‘Noxx fights well, for a barbarian,’ noted Corbulo.

‘That is the way of Seth’s men,’ agreed Dante, glancing at the group of Flesh Tearers across the arena, in another of the viewing balconies. ‘They have always excelled in making anger their weapon.’ He looked back at the Apothecary. ‘And that, my friend, is why I allowed this to come to pass.’

‘My lord, I do not doubt your reasoning but I confess I do not see it.’ Corbulo folded his arms across his chest.

Dante opened his hands and took in the whole of the arena. ‘I knew from the moment I ordered the conclave that tension and uncertainty would fill the monastery as easily as smoke. For all the well met and noble greetings between our successors, we are all still warriors, Corbulo. It is in our nature to be guarded, to fall into patterns of rivalry and challenge toward one another. That tension had to be dissolved.’ He nodded toward Rafen and Noxx, as the Blood Angel landed a particularly savage blow upon his adversary. ‘This manner seemed the most direct.’

‘Mephiston ordered Rafen not to allow himself to be goaded. Yet you set him up for just that.’

Dante nodded. ‘I consider it a test of the lad’s character. Mephiston speaks highly of Rafen, and I wanted to see the colour of his spirit for myself. How a warrior reacts to the unexpected, the extreme… It can be most revealing.’ He stood back from the edge of the stone balcony. ‘As for the Flesh Tearers, I already know them well enough.’ He smiled thinly. ‘If the blood of our primarch could be light through a prism, then we Blood Angels range toward one end and the Flesh Tearers are at the opposite. They are everything we are not, kinsman. And they are truly fearless, for they have nothing left to lose.’

Corbulo mused on this for a moment. ‘That is why you placed Rafen with them.’

‘Just so. To draw out the true intentions of Seth and his party.’ He studied the other men in the various wargear and robes of the other successor Chapters. ‘There are those among our cousins who will follow my lead because I am Lord of the Blood Angels, because we are the first chosen of Sanguinius. But there are others who cut their own path, who will resist what I will ask of them. None more so than the Sons of Cretacia.’

‘They consider us to be decadent and irresolute. They’ve never made a secret of that.’

‘It is important to disabuse them of such thoughts,’ Dante replied, his tone hardening. ‘And so Rafen becomes the object lesson. A reminder of what a Blood Angel is.’

He’s trying to kill me. The realisation was hard in his thoughts, like diamond.

The duel was sanctioned as a fight to submission; the rules were adamant. While blood could be drawn, the battle between the two men could not go on beyond the point of a crippling injury, and certainly not to the death. But Rafen saw other intent in Noxx’s dead eyes, watching the Flesh Tearer measure every blow against his flesh with all the care of a sniper picking off targets from a rooftop hide. It would be easy to argue the point after the fact; such ‘accidents’ in training were not uncommon among the Adeptus Astartes. And if Rafen was lost in this fight, what would be said then? That the Blood Angels, so wounded by their own mistakes, could not even stand up to a brief brawl with dulled blades in a fighting pit?

The stone floor clattered and shifted again, rearranging itself and both men moved with it. Noxx extended and hit him once more, and sparks of pain glittered across Rafen’s vision. He felt his hand going slack around the grip of the training sword as the nerves in his fingers refused to answer to him. Another strike like that, perhaps two at the most, and Rafen would be slowed enough for the other sergeant to take him down at his leisure. He had to end this, and end it quickly.

The blade grip felt rubbery and limp in his hands, and with a snort he threw it aside, flexing his fingers into claws. Noxx’s eyes flashed; the Flesh Tearer had not expected that.

If he had been fighting another Blood Angel, Rafen would have expected his foe to drop his weapon as well, as a gesture of respect so that they could battle on an even footing. It did not surprise him that the Flesh Tearer did no such thing. Noxx attacked, feinting a stab with the training weapon that swung about into a descending hammer-blow strike.

The dense wooden blade came at Rafen horizontally, at throat height. The veteran sergeant was putting every iota of his strength behind the stroke. Moving as quickly as he could, ignoring the spikes of pain from the deep-tissue welts left by the Tearer’s earlier hits, Rafen dove into the attack, not away from it, cutting the distance between them. His arms shot out and he caught the edge of the heavy weapon in the open palms of his hands, the wood smacking bare skin with a hard impact. The reverberation of the blow went all the way to Rafen’s shoulder blades.

The Blood Angel’s fingers dug in, and twisted. The Flesh Tearer snarled and grimaced, jerking the weapon in a vain attempt to free it from the other warrior’s grip. Rafen had purchase, however, and would not be shifted. Turning into Noxx’s motion, he pulled the length of the blade against itself, and the dark lacquer shell protecting the weapon cracked and crazed.

Noxx suddenly understood what Rafen was doing, but he had overextended himself, and allowed his attack to be turned against him. The Blood Angel’s face took on a feral cast; Rafen felt a familiar surge of anger-fuelled heat ignite inside him. The very edge of the fury; the shadow of the Black Rage.

With a yell, Rafen turned the blade the wrong way and the tough nalwood splintered and snapped. The weapon came apart with a snapping report of sound, the torsion of the sudden release knocking Noxx back a step.

The broken pieces of the blade still in his clawed hands, Rafen went after him and threw blows against the Flesh Tearer’s forearms as they came up to guard his face. Then, with a grunt, he tossed the fragments away and attacked with bare hands tracked with deep, fresh scratches.

Rafen’s fist struck Noxx’s face and he felt the satisfying pressure of the blow landing. His knuckles came back filmed with blood – some of it belonging to his opponent, some of it belonging to him – and his nostrils twitched with the sudden immediacy of the scent. The sharp, acrid tang was welcoming.

Noxx staggered back, trying to shake off the violence of the punch. Rafen came on, and did not allow him to do so.

Corbulo’s eyes narrowed as the watchers below applauded the display. ‘How far shall we let this go, lord? They may end one another.’

Dante watched the fight carefully. ‘It will not come to that.’

‘Are you certain?’

The Chapter Master did not look up. ‘All I am certain of is that any intervention on my part will do more harm than good. This must play out as it does.’

‘You’re putting your trust in someone whose sibling was a traitor,’ the Apothecary retorted.

‘I am putting my trust in a Blood Angel,’ Dante replied firmly. ‘Brother Rafen is that before all else.’

‘I have my doubts,’ Corbulo said, in a low voice.

‘Of course you do,’ said his master. ‘That is why you are at my left hand – to keep me from becoming complacent.’

The Apothecary took a long, slow breath. ‘Then, in that capacity, let me be candid, my lord.’

‘I expect nothing less.’

Corbulo was silent for a long moment. ‘This gathering… I fear it will not serve the purpose you wish it to. I look about the fortress-monastery and see all these unfamiliar faces, I see the absence of men dead and men sent afar to maintain the fiction we have spun. I am surrounded by strangers, lord, and I feel as if I am a ghost at my own wake.’

Dante nodded slowly. ‘It is quite a thing to consider one’s own mortality, is it not, my friend?’

Corbulo opened his mouth to answer, but his words were silenced by a sudden rumble of noise from the Astartes crowded beneath them.

The cogwheels beneath the fighting pit clattered and spun, the flagstones moving once more, drawing space between the two combatants. Rafen found himself dropped downward while Noxx was elevated over him. The Flesh Tearer saw the opportunity and launched himself at the younger warrior, falling the distance with his teeth bared. Rafen accepted him and struck out with a double-handed sweep, knocking Noxx aside so the veteran’s head bounced off one of the hissing piston rods supporting the raised blocks.

Rafen’s teeth were grinding against one another, and suddenly all he wanted was the taste of blood in his mouth, the hot gush of vitae torn from this arrogant, contemptuous fool.

How dare these barbarians consider themselves the equal of the Blood Angels? The fury rumbled in his ears, his blood thudding through his veins. How dare they sully this place with their presence?

Every spiteful look, every arch word and conceit that the Flesh Tearers had turned toward Rafen and his men on Eritaen came back to him in that moment, and all he could feel was dark and potent anger at the slights of Noxx’s brethren. Mephiston’s words of censure were lost in amongst the growling wrath that tightened in his muscles. Rafen wanted only to strike the veteran sergeant again and again, to beat the arrogance out of him, to make him understand his place against a true Son of the Great Angel.

Noxx hit back, but the building Rage made each blow seem a distant, unimportant thing. Rafen landed another crippling punch, this time sensing the snap of a rib beneath the tanned-dark hide of the other man’s torso. Noxx coughed and Rafen saw the glitter of emotion for the quickest of instants, a flash of surprise inside those dead eyes.

He moved without a conscious thought, sweeping his leg back beneath Noxx to knock the Flesh Tearer’s feet out from under him. Rafen’s hand shot forward and snared the front of the other warrior’s leather jerkin, pressing him down, slamming him hard against the stone floor of the fighting pit.

Noxx let out a bark of pain as he hit. Rafen ignored the other man’s sharp blows to his torso and forced the veteran’s head back until it hung over the edge of a broad flagstone, into a cavity made by the action of the shifting pistons. Overhead, a suspended block reached its apex and the risers spat out a belch of steam. Without pause, it began a descent back into its place, falling down on the collapsing piston rod toward the empty space currently occupied by Noxx’s skull.

The Flesh Tearer saw the dark shape dropping and thrashed against the Blood Angel’s iron grip; unless Rafen released him, it would sever Noxx’s head from his shoulders and mash it into a mess of bloody pulp.

Perhaps Rafen knew that on some level; but he was focused only on pressing the life out of his opponent, his fangs bared, the stink of spilled blood thick in his nostrils. Noxx tried to speak but his throat was choked with fluid that drooled from his lips. And still the stone fell, growing larger and larger in his vision.

‘Rafen.’ The name was a command, clear and unequivocal; but the Blood Angel did not seem to hear it, did not loosen his grip. Noxx’s life would be spent in seconds, the falling guillotine of rock coming to end him.

‘Rafen, release him!’ Mephiston’s words cut through the miasma of the great rage and with a jerk of motion the Blood Angel did as he was ordered to.

Noxx rolled away an instant before the stone slammed back into place and lay there, panting. Rafen glanced up at the rim of the pit and saw the Lord of Death watching him with a forbidding air.

‘Fight to assent,’ he told him, rebuke beneath his words, ‘not to kill.’ Mephiston looked up and took in the balconies arranged around him. ‘This bout is concluded. The matter is settled and honour has been served. Let us hear no more about it.’

With a grinding hiss, the stone floor returned to its original configuration, settling the bowl back into shape. Above, the Space Marines in the observation galleries began to drift away in groups.

Rafen stood, saying nothing, the anger inside him ebbing but not vanishing. It drew back like a retreating tide, but remained on the edge of his thoughts, still churning.

The Flesh Tearer got to his feet with difficulty, and then spat out a fat gobbet of bloody spittle. He drew his hand over his torn cheek, wiping away a sheen of dark fluid. ‘Pity,’ he ventured, after a while. ‘I’d have liked to take this as far as it could have gone. Don’t you agree?’

Rafen shot him a baleful look. ‘Then you would be corpse flesh now, cousin.’

With difficulty, Noxx chuckled. ‘My death will be a long way from this place.’

The arrogance was unbelievable; only a moment ago Noxx had been moments from fatality at Rafen’s hands, and now he behaved as if it were of no more concern than inclement weather. The fury briefly surged again, and for a moment Rafen wished he hadn’t answered Mephiston’s command to desist.

Noxx turned and walked up the incline of the pit’s walls. Rafen watched, his hands balling into fists once again. He called out Noxx’s name, unwilling to let that be an end to it. ‘I beat you. I believe that means you owe me a spoil.’

The veteran turned and glared at him. ‘I have little to give to one so rich as you,’ he retorted.

‘An answer to a question, then.’ Rafen stepped after him. ‘Why? Why did you force this duel? There was no point to it, nothing to be gained!’

Noxx hesitated, and glanced up toward where Gorn and the other Flesh Tearers waited. ‘I did only what I was ordered to do.’

‘Seth demanded it?’ Rafen shook his head. ‘To what end?’

The veteran nodded at him. ‘Your Chapter has fallen from grace, lad. That begs the question that must be asked. How weak have the Blood Angels become?’ Before Rafen could frame a reply, Noxx turned away once more and left him there in the pit.

He stood and looked down at his hands, still slick with Noxx’s blood, and wondered. What kind of answer could he have given to that question?

CHAPTER SEVEN

The pageantry and ceremony of the last gathering inside the Grand Annex was gone now, along with all but the most senior Astartes from the various successor Chapters. Only two from each cadre of the Sons of Sanguinius had entered, with the towering doors to be sealed shut behind them. The chamber was unadorned, no pennants, no standards, only a ring of simple wooden benches set out across the open space. The absence of the mass of Space Marines made the vast hall seem even larger. Slanted rays of red sunlight pooled against one of the walls, beginning an inexorable journey across the grey marble floor.

Barring the single Dreadnought that stood among them like a silent ruby statue, none of the assembled warriors wore battle armour, only hooded robes or duty tunics. The austerity of their dress reflected the mood. The prayers and entreaty to their liege-lords now spoken and the matters of tradition satisfied, it was time to take the import of this conclave in hand.

With a leaden finality, the magnetic locks on the doors boomed as they set in place, and the footsteps died away as the last of the assembled Astartes approached the circle of men.

Dante greeted the arrival of the final representative with a nod of his head; the gesture was returned as Armis, First Lord of the Blood Legion, advanced into the circle. The Chapter Master ran a long-fingered hand through the silver-grey hair that ranged down to his shoulders. The question in the Space Marine’s eyes was repeated on every face around him.

Correction. Almost every one.

Dante found Seth, hunched forward on one of the benches, watching him with those hooded, blank eyes. As if he took that glance for a permission, the Master of the Flesh Tearers got to his feet and sucked in a breath. ‘And so finally, we are all gathered,’ he said. ‘Or at least as many as could be found.’

Armis nodded, a deceptive half-smile on his pale face. ‘Aye. I’m glad I’m here. I imagine that whatever Dante has to speak of, it will be interesting.’

The Master of the Blood Angels threw a look at Mephiston. The psyker was staring into the middle distance, eyes down, intent on realms that only someone with his preternatural senses could see; but still he sensed his lord’s attention and gave a slight nod. The psychic wards were still firmly in place; it was safe to speak.

‘You have many questions,’ Dante began. ‘I will answer all of them as best I can.’

‘Only one answer is needed, cousin,’ said Master Orloc, the Commander of the Blood Drinkers. ‘Your summons brought me across the warp from my temples on San Guisuga, without explanation, without account, with only decree. And I came, out of respect to you, Great Dante.’ Orloc licked his lips; the Blood Drinker had the same perpetual air of aridity that characterised all in his Chapter. ‘But I did not come to take part in pomp and spectacle, nor to be given a tour of this great edifice.’

‘Indeed.’ The synthetic voice issued from the vox-coder of a motionless crimson Dreadnought. Inside the towering armoured sarcophagus, the flesh and brain of an Astartes warrior lay preserved and forever wired into his machine-hulk body. ‘The Blood Swords have battles to be fought. My brethren will brook no distraction from the Emperor’s purposes without good cause.’

‘As Lord Daggan speaks, so I agree,’ Orloc continued. ‘The question, then. Why am I here? Why are any of us here?’

Dante exhaled. ‘You have come here to take part in a rescue, cousins. To save the lives of hundreds of your fellow Astartes, whose future hangs in the balance.’ The Chapter Master felt as if a great weight was being laid across his shoulders, and for a moment, it was as if he could truly sense the measure of every day of his eleven hundred years of life; but he did not hesitate to speak his piece. ‘I have brought you here to save the Blood Angels from dissolution and oblivion.’

Armis broke the silence that followed. ‘The empty halls. The silent barracks.’ He cast around, voicing thoughts that the other Chapter Masters had until now kept to themselves. ‘You have tried to conceal it from us, but your brethren are thin upon the ground, Dante. At first I thought you might have over-committed your forces to some military adventure, but that is not the case, is it?’

‘Your men are dead,’ intoned Daggan.

‘Some,’ Dante replied. He sighed.

His face hidden deep in the shadows of his hood, Sentikan of the Angels Sanguine spoke for the first time. ‘The cost of your insurrection must have been grave for you to seek our aid in this manner.’

Dante concealed a flash of shock; Sentikan and his men had not been given any prior knowledge of the Arkio incident, and yet the Angels Sanguine Lord was clearly aware of it. He glanced at Seth, wondering; but no, the Angels Sanguine and the Flesh Tearers did not speak on good terms. It was highly unlikely they had communicated with one another. The matter of what Sentikan knew would need to be addressed later, however; for now, the disclosure of the full facts was required.

Orloc folded his arms across his chest. ‘What in Blood’s Name are you talking about? What insurrection?’

‘My Chapter has learned of certain truths,’ Sentikan said quietly. ‘I imagine not the complete dimensions of the events, but the core of them. There was a great battle on the shrineworld Sabien.’ He glanced at Brother-Captain Rydae, who sat at his side. ‘Many Blood Angels were committed to the field. Many of them were lost there.’

‘Who was the foe?’ demanded Armis.

‘The Word Bearers,’ offered Mephiston.

‘Chaos,’ snarled Orloc, his lip curling. ‘And how was it the Cursed Sons of Lorgar, the Emperor blight his name, wounded you so deeply?’

Dante stiffened and felt Seth’s eyes upon him. ‘It was not the Word Bearers who wounded us, cousin. We did this to ourselves. In the name of Sanguinius Reborn.’

‘There is news,’ said Serpens, ‘and it is good and bad in equal measure.’ He had a pict slate in his hand and he gestured with it in a casual manner.

Caecus studied him over the top of the fractionator module. The glow of the device threw flickering light across the laboratorium, and cast peculiar shadows over the tech-lord’s face. ‘I have had little in the way of good news in recent days,’ admitted the Apothecary. ‘Tell me the best first, then.’

Serpens gave him an indulgent smile and handed the slate to Nyniq. He didn’t seem to be aware of Fenn at a nearby console, making a poor attempt at pretending he wasn’t listening to every word they said. ‘It is my firm and honest belief that I can solve the errors creeping into your replication matrix.’ He knitted his fingers together. ‘It will not be a simple matter, by no means, but the way of it is well known to me. My own experiments have progressed along similar lines to yours, but further toward fruition. I can, as my pupil did, help you move more swiftly down that road. With our collective knowledge, we can avoid making the same mistakes.’

‘And make new ones?’ Fenn shot the comment across the room.

Caecus gave him a censorious look in return, and the serf turned back to his work.

Serpens spoke as if he had never heard Fenn speak. ‘The mutations are the result of tainted genetic code in the base samples. If those errors can be reduced, the end result…’ He nodded toward the zygote tanks. ‘Well, shall I say, it would be a wine of a better vintage?’

‘This I know,’ said Caecus. ‘But the way to fix the errors eludes me.’

‘And Nyniq too,’ agreed Serpens. ‘But it does not elude me, my friend.’ He tapped the loose fleshy wattles along his face. ‘I have a methodology we can employ.’

‘This is the good news. What is the bad?’

The magos allowed himself a sigh. ‘Great science requires great sacrifice, Brother Caecus. I have made such forfeit to come here to Baal against the wishes of my masters and–’

The Blood Angel’s retort was fiery. ‘And you think I have not?’ He shook his head, frowning. ‘Already I have stepped across lines of ethics and honour in the pursuit of something I cannot even be sure is achievable!’

‘But it is!’ insisted Nyniq. ‘We can rediscover the art of the replicae and make the Great Corax’s dream a reality.’

‘She is not wrong,’ said Serpens. ‘It can be done. But to progress beyond this point will require the most singular mind. I tell you this in candour as a colleague. We must be willing to take what some…’ He shot a look at Fenn. ‘Will consider to be extreme measures.’

Caecus lost himself in the shimmer and motion of the milky fluid of the zygote tanks. He could see the fluttering motion of an immature clone inside, the irregular jerk of a hand drifting against the inside of the armourglass. Would it be another disappointment, another mutant freak? How many more mistakes could there be before he admitted failure?

‘We will do what must be done,’ he said.

Serpens nodded eagerly, and beckoned Nyniq to them. The woman had a sanguinator gun in her hand. ‘Then, if you please, I would take a measure of your vitae.’

‘I was there,’ said Mephiston, ‘and I will tell you what happened on Sabien.’ With a nod from his master, the Lord of Death walked to the centre of the chamber and unfolded the tragedy of Arkio and the Spear of Telesto, speaking without pause as the rays of light from Baal’s sun marched across the marble floor. At times, the assembled warriors reacted to things he said, their emotions running the scale from cold deliberation on the part of Master Seth to barely-silenced anger from Master Armis; but none of them interrupted.

When he spoke at last about the battle on Sabien, of the psychic explosion of red fury that turned Blood Angel against Blood Angel, not an Astartes among them moved, all of them barely breathing, silently listening to his words. Each marked in the very blood that raced through their veins with the gene-curse of the Great Angel, they had only respect for the horrific power of the Black Rage and the Red Thirst. Each of them knew only too well the dark power of the twin banes every Blood Angel and successor Astartes were forced to share. Each of them had seen kinsmen fall to the madness, the blood-hungry berserker frenzy that was the echo of their liege-lord’s violent killing. Their shared primarch was ten millennia dead, and yet still the psychic shock of his death at the hands of the Arch-traitor Horus burned hard in all of them, the madness it conjured forever lurking beneath the veneer of civility in every Son of Sanguinius. Not a one thought to disturb him as Mephiston brought his report to a conclusion.

As he finished, he found Dante watching him, and his Chapter Master nodded, one comrade to another. It was a difficult thing for the psyker to address, the dark moments there on the shrineworld, as the Rage came to consume him. He had ventured down the Scarlet Path to madness once before, in the experience that made him the man he now was, trapped beneath the rubble of Hades Hive for days and nights, wrestling with his bestial id; ventured down it and returned reborn. But on Sabien… There had been a different colour to the darkness, and a part of him would forever wonder if he would have drowned in it, if not for Rafen’s intervention.

He pushed the thought away. That was past; what mattered now was how the aftermath was dealt with.

Daggan was first to speak in reply, his flat, mechanical voice hissing with piques of annoyance. ‘How was this allowed to happen? An ordos lackey, commanding an Astartes warship and a cohort of battle-brothers?’

‘Stele assumed command when the Bellus was beyond our astropathic contact,’ Dante noted. ‘It is believed he engineered the death of my chosen agent, the Sanguinary High Priest Hekares, and then consolidated his influence over the crew.’

Orloc was ashen. ‘That these corrupted bastards would dare to taint the memory of Sanguinius by making a cheap simulacra… It fills me with a revulsion I cannot find the words to express!’

‘I concur,’ offered Seth, ‘but we should be thankful. Despite the errors of judgment made, the matter has been dealt with. Lord Dante’s warriors have cleaned up the mess they made. And the Blood Angels paid the price for their laxity and hubris into the bargain.’

Mephiston’s eyes narrowed at the open insult in the Flesh Tearer’s words, but he saw that his commander did not react at all to them.

‘It is right that you have granted us full disclosure of this, Dante,’ said Armis. ‘While some may consider it a matter for Blood Angels alone, it is far more than that. Sanguinius is father to us all, not just to the First Founding of Baal. An attack upon his glory is an attack upon his sons.’

‘But that is not why we are gathered here,’ said Sentikan. ‘Our cousin Dante did not bring us to Baal so that he might speak of this, as some hive citizen would atone to a street-preacher.’

The other Chapter Master nodded. ‘That is so.’ Dante spread his hands, taking in all the Chapter Masters and representatives, those who had spoken and those who had not. ‘The Blood Angels are the first among the Astartes. We carry a position of honour, we lead the way where all others follow. Each of you shares in that. We have a lineage that can be traced back beyond the Heresy and the Great Crusade, before even the birth of our primarch, to the beginning of the Age of the Imperium. That great legacy cannot be allowed to falter. The Blood Angels must survive. They must live on to be present when the day of mankind’s ultimate victory dawns, so that the Emperor can lay his eyes upon us when he rises from the Golden Throne.’

‘But your folly has left you open to attack, to diminishment,’ said Daggan. ‘If what you say is so, then the Blood Angels teeter on the brink–’

‘And one swift push could be enough to make them extinct,’ Seth broke in. The ghost of a cold smile crossed his lips. ‘How does it taste, Dante? How does it feel for the inheritors of the great and noble IX Legion to be that close to annihilation?’ He snorted. ‘I’ll warrant I am the only one here who knows.’

‘The Blood Angels must survive,’ repeated Dante. ‘And that, cousins, is why you are here. I have an audacious request to make of you, in the name of our liege-lord and the bloodline of Baal.’

Sentikan’s shadowed face was taut. ‘Speak it.’

Dante drew himself up to his full height, and Mephiston watched him sweep his patrician gaze across every warrior in the chamber, making eye contact with each of them in turn. ‘In order to return the Blood Angels to strength and stability, I have brought on new inductions of initiates and battle-brothers ahead of schedule, but I need more. And so, to that end, I ask this of you. The Blood Angels require a tithe of men from each successor Chapter, of your newest initiate warriors to swell our depleted ranks.’ He opened his hands and offered them palm-up, in echo of the carvings of the Great Angel upon the annexe’s walls. ‘This I do in the name of Sanguinius.’

The Chapter Master’s words faded away into silence; and then the room exploded with voices as every Astartes spoke at once.

Nyniq carried the vial of Caecus’s blood to the tech-lord’s boxy servitor and fed it into the open lips of the mask upon its forward surface. The machine suckled greedily at the tube, quickly draining it. Fenn made a sour face, but the Blood Angel ignored him.

He glanced at Serpens. ‘I have used my own vitae as a base pattern in previous iterations. The improvement it gave was only minor. Not enough to overcome the replication failure.’

‘Perhaps so,’ said the magos, ‘but that was without the aid of the filtration and enhancement process I had developed.’ He preened. ‘I have formulated a counter-mutagen that blocks the degradation of cellular parity and recursive malformation. We will blend the two.’

Caecus accepted this with a nod. He knew such things were theoretically possible, but until now the science of it had been out of his reach. If Serpens was as good as his word… The Blood Angel frowned. What happened in the next few moments would be the acid test. He shot Fenn a look. They would soon know if his agreement to allow the magos into their circle was a mistake, or not.

The servitor-box gurgled and a melodic chime sounded from the lips of the mask. Nyniq placed her hand before the machine and it disgorged another vial. The fluid within it had a thick, syrupy flow to it, dark in colour. Serpens took it from her with some eagerness, holding it up to the light to examine its consistency. The scientist licked his lips, apparently unaware of the gesture. There was an expression on his face that Caecus had never seen before, at odds with the perpetually earnest air Serpens usually wore. Need.

‘The blood, the blood is the key to it all,’ said Serpens, half to himself. ‘I have heard it said that in the rituals of consecration practised by your Chapter, each Baalite son is imbued with a tiny measure of blood from Sanguinius himself, is that not so?’ He shook the vial, watching the motion of the liquid inside. ‘This blood, your blood, Lord Caecus, has within it an iota of the primarch’s. And the primarch is the gene-spawn son of the Emperor, so his blood contains an iota of the Lord of Mankind’s.’ He let out a breath between his teeth. ‘This is the distillate of greatness, my friend. The essence of perfection, if only one could unlock it.’ Serpens blinked, as if he suddenly remembered where he was, his manner shifting back to his usual easy smile. ‘Shall we begin?’

Caecus gestured toward the zygote tanks. ‘At your discretion.’

‘My lord, we should go no further!’ Fenn blurted out the words. ‘We do not know what will happen!’

‘Quite so,’ noted Nyniq. ‘But science is quest for knowledge, serf. If we allow ignorance to blind us, we willingly set ourselves toward a return to the Age of Strife and the darkness of Old Night!’

The serf’s lips trembled and Caecus gave him a level stare. ‘This is right, Fenn. It must be done.’ He let out a breath and felt a conviction take hold in him. ‘We cannot sway from this course of action. I hold it in my grasp to be the saviour of the Blood Angels. I cannot refuse that call.’ He turned and nodded toward the magos. ‘Proceed.’

‘Emperor watch over this endeavour and grant it success,’ said Serpens. The tech-lord inserted the vial into the complex snarl of machinery ringing one of the glass cylinders. ‘Moment of truth, then,’ he said lightly.

The fluid discharged into the festoon of tubules snaking away into the milky processor medium and with a sudden shock of movement, the clone inside began to thrash and hammer against the glass. Caecus heard a peculiar bubbling wail issue out from the tank.

A scream.

‘I knew the Blood Angels were conceited, but never had I dreamed that their master could show such towering arrogance as this!’ Seth’s voice was loudest, and it cut through the chorus of dissent in the chamber. ‘You have excelled yourself, Dante! You lay down an edict as if you are the Emperor himself!’

Mephiston snarled at the Flesh Tearer’s words, but his commander placed a warning hand on his arm. ‘I would never dare to do such a thing. I have told you what is needed, nothing more.’

‘It did not sound like a request to me,’ Daggan grated. ‘Your statement had the colour of a command, Lord Dante. Is that what it was?’

Armis shook his head. ‘Is it necessary to make it so? I see only a brother Chapter in need and the opportunity among us to meet it.’

Seth gave Armis an arch look. ‘It does not surprise me that the Master of the Blood Legion takes the side of a First Founding Chapter.’

‘What are you implying?’ demanded Armis. ‘Are you questioning my loyalty, Flesh Tearer?’

Orloc raised his hands. ‘Hold! This is a serious matter, and I will not see it descend into small matters of rivalry!’ The Lord of the Blood Drinkers shook his head. ‘This is not about “taking sides”! We are all kindred beneath the armour… A family, in as much as that term can be applied to the Adeptus Astartes.’

‘Then you agree to this?’ asked the Blood Swords Dreadnought.

‘I did not say that,’ Orloc replied. ‘I say only that now is not the time for divisiveness! Clear heads and rational thoughts must carry the day.’

Seth walked forward, and his second, Brother-Captain Gorn, came with him. ‘Forgive me, cousin, but I find it hard to remain rational in the face of this… this decree.’ He swept his glare toward Dante. ‘You want my men? The Blood Angels wish to gut my Chapter to patch up the wounds in their own. And then it will be the Flesh Tearers left with diminished numbers, our best and brightest taken away…’ He bared his teeth. ‘As if my Chapter is not lessened enough!’

‘The tithe will be proportional,’ said Dante. ‘The numbers requested from each successor will reflect the size and disposition of that Chapter.’

Seth turned away. ‘How magnanimous. You’ve thought of everything.’

‘And what will happen to the men you take?’ asked Sentikan. ‘The recruits?’

‘We will uplift them as Blood Angels,’ explained the Chapter Master. ‘They will be granted the implants and rituals in keeping with that status.’

‘They will lose the identities they had,’ Daggan grated.

Dante shook his head. ‘As Lord Orloc said, we are all kindred beneath the armour.’

The room fell silent for a long moment; then Sentikan spoke again, in a quiet rasp. ‘We are to take a vote upon this, then.’

Seth turned about and uttered a single world. ‘No.’

‘You refuse to assist our parent Chapter?’ said Armis.

‘More than that,’ Seth barked. ‘I question the right of the Blood Angels to demand anything from us!’

‘We are the First Founding,’ said Dante, steel entering his voice. At last, the hidden challenge boiling away beneath Seth’s manner was rising to the fore.

‘I know what you are!’ snapped the Flesh Tearer lord. ‘I cannot be allowed to forget what you are, even if I wished it!’ He shot a look at the other Chapter Masters and representatives. ‘Are we to agree to this without even raising the question as to why?’ Seth stabbed out a finger toward Dante. ‘He allowed this to happen. Under his stewardship the Blood Angels were taken to the very edge of the abyss, a fall that would have led to the gates of Chaos itself! If not for the Emperor’s grace, we might have called this conclave to discuss the extermination of his Chapter, not the salvaging of it!’

Dante’s words were stony. ‘I know the full measure of my responsibility, Seth. I bear the shame of this without shirking from it. But I have led the Blood Angels to glory in the name of Terra for centuries. I fought against the black armies of the Ruinous Powers before you were born, cousin.’

Seth’s fury ebbed and became cold. ‘True enough. I do not dispute your elder status or the record of your victories. But I question your future, Dante. You are indeed among the longest-lived of the Astartes. And perhaps, with that in mind, you should consider your responsibility. Consider stepping down from your position in light of what you allowed to transpire.’

The Flesh Tearer’s words brought a sharp intake of breath from the other Astartes; for Mephiston, it was one insult too many.

‘You dare–’ he began, stepping forward.

The Dreadnought Daggan moved swiftly to block the Librarian’s path with a heavy steel footfall that echoed through the hall, turning with a speed unexpected for a form of such mass. ‘He dares,’ said the venerable warrior. ‘He must. In this most grave of circumstances we cannot shy from even the hardest of questions.’

Dante kept his annoyance in check. ‘All too true.’ He took a breath. ‘Seth. Do you challenge my judgement?’

‘Do I need to?’ returned the other Master, his tone mild. ‘What has taken place speaks louder than any voice could.’

Armis shook his head. ‘You go too far, Flesh Tearer.’

‘That is my way,’ he replied. Seth paused, taking the measure of the men around him. ‘I make a counter to Lord Dante’s demand with one of my own. If his judgement is indeed brought into question – and it must be so in the eyes of any sane man – then perhaps it is the Blood Angels themselves who must be called to account!’ He smiled coldly. ‘I advocate the reverse of my honoured cousin’s demands. I suggest that we should not tithe our men to Dante, but that he should tithe his to us!’

‘We cannot disband a First Founding Chapter!’ Orloc was aghast.

‘We know the history of the Astartes. It has happened before,’ insisted Seth, ‘we can take the men among the successors, spread equally. As you said, Lord Orloc, we are all kindred beneath the armour…’

Dante looked around him and saw the spread of emotion, clear on the faces of Seth and Armis, hidden under Sentikan’s hood and behind the immobile mask of Daggan’s sculpted facia; and a dozen other points across the spectrum in the manners of the men of the Angels Encarmine, the Red Wings, the Flesh Eaters and all the others assembled. He felt the moment slipping away from him. Seth’s words were fragmenting his kindred, and to venture further along this path might force them to divide into lines both for and against. ‘We must take pause,’ he said quietly, almost to himself.

‘Aye, lord,’ Mephiston was at his side. ‘If we force the hand of anyone here, it will mean discord.’

Dante gave a solemn nod. ‘I must rely on their loyalty and honour. Seth plays only to their doubts.’ He spoke again, louder this time, so all could hear him. ‘We have much to think on. I call a recess so that we may all reflect on what has been said here.’

‘My answer will not change,’ said Seth.

Dante nodded again, keeping his voice even. ‘And that, cousin, is your right.’

The noise and the disturbance inside the tank died away within moments, but Fenn could not take his eyes off the cylinder. He could make out the murky shadow of a man-shape inside the liquid, but he dared not wonder what it might look like if revealed in the hard, cold light of the laboratorium. The panoply of mutations he had seen throughout the many iterations of the replicae process – things without skins, mewling forms with multiple mouths, limbs twisted into tentacles, and worse – these were horrors that haunted his dreams. And yet he could not look away. He had to know what Serpens had wrought.

Nyniq was reading from a medicae auspex. ‘The amalgam has taken, tech-lord. We have stability.’

‘You’re certain?’ There was concern in Caceus’s voice.

Serpens placed a hand upon the shoulder of Fenn’s master. ‘There is only one way to be certain.’ He turned to the serf. ‘Open it.’

Fenn shot his master a look. ‘My lord?’

‘Do as he says,’ said Caecus. ‘Decant the Bloodchild.’

‘Bloodchild,’ repeated Serpens, with an admiring nod. ‘A fitting name.’

With shaking hands, the Chapter serf worked the controls and the milky fluid spiralled away as the tank split open, one half drawing up, the other falling away. A mass of flesh tipped forward and crashed to the gridded flooring; a man, his skin a smooth russet as if tanned by a hundred days beneath the sun.

Fenn backed away, his hands in front of him in a subconscious gesture of self-protection. The clone was shivering as he got to his feet. Wet and naked, the figure was carved as if from planes of nalwood, dense packs of muscle shifting beneath the surface of his flesh. A fine mane of blond hair coloured his scalp, and the flawless planes of his face were the ideal of a patrician Blood Angel countenance. Fenn saw the smallest reflection of his master’s face in the duplicate’s aspect, no doubt some artefact of the amalgam process.

Only the eyes seemed strange; they were blank and doll-like. No intelligence glittered behind them, only emptiness.

‘Behold the future of the Blood Angels,’ said Nyniq, with reverence.

Fenn took a wary step closer, and the clone watched him blankly, like a docile animal. ‘Can… Can it understand us?’

‘He has the mind of a newborn, in many respects,’ said Serpens, smiling like a proud parent. ‘Much of what he is remains locked in his brain through chains of genetic-memory. With the right stimuli, he will re-learn what he already knows.’ He glanced away. ‘Give me a month of indoctrination and hypnocordia, and you’ll have a Space Marine fit for line duty.’

Caecus came closer, his face rapt with wonder. ‘A success, after so long. I hardly dare to believe it is true.’ He swung about in a flash of motion. ‘I must bring this to Lord Dante immediately! One look at this creation and he will know that I was not wrong! He will acknowledge the rightness in my plan!’

‘With respect, Lord Caecus, this is only an archetype,’ said Nyniq. ‘Perhaps we should run some more tests before we–’

‘No,’ snapped the Apothecae Majoris. ‘I understand your intent, but you must know, time is of the essence! Even as we speak, Dante is in conclave with his fellow Chapter Masters… I must bring this to him before he makes a choice that he will later regret!’

Fenn blinked. His head was swimming; he couldn’t find the words to express his swirling thoughts.

The serf watched Serpens nod thoughtfully. ‘Lord Caecus is correct, Nyniq. This success must not be concealed. Go with him to the fortress-monastery, take the Bloodchild. Show the master of the Blood Angels the fruits of his kinsman’s great work.’

The woman bowed low and Fenn’s voice caught up to his thoughts. ‘Lord, I will attend you–’

But Caecus shook his head. ‘No, Fenn. I want you to remain at the citadel. Start the test series as Nyniq suggested, and prepare more iterations for infusion with the amalgam compound.’ The Apothecary was already walking away, lost in thought.

Fenn felt his blood chill as he turned and found Serpens watching him intently. ‘It will be a fine opportunity for us to work together,’ said the magos.

Brother-Captain Gorn followed his master into the grounds beyond the Grand Annex, moving swiftly to keep pace with him over the ochre flagstones of the wide drilling quadrangle. He ignored the sideways looks from the Blood Angel guards who patrolled the edges of the open space.

Seth slowed as he crossed toward the towering statue of Sanguinius that stood in the centre of the quad, its presence dividing the space into four smaller areas. The Great Angel was depicted with his wings furled and his head turned down to those walking beneath him. Beneath his hands he held a great sword, the point toward the earth. ‘He’s watching us, Gorn,’ said the Chapter Master. ‘Do you see?’

The captain looked up; true enough, the eyes of the great carving seemed to follow him as he moved.

‘He watches us and we must not be shown vulnerable in his sight.’ Seth shook his head. ‘Sanguinius wants strength, brother-captain. He would not have given us the gene-curse if he did not. He did that to test us. So he could be sure that his sons would be forever strong after his death.’

‘It is so, lord,’ Gorn offered. ‘We will do whatever he asks of us.’

Seth stopped abruptly in the shadow of the statue. ‘Will you? Here, beneath his gaze, can you swear to that?’

‘I can,’ Gorn spoke without hesitation. ‘In the name of the Great Angel, you have my pledge, as you always have. My men and I will do whatever is needed of us to bring this matter to a close, even if that comes to measures of…’ He faltered, unable to find the right words.

‘Measures of an extreme nature?’ suggested Seth.

‘Aye. I heard the merit in your words today, lord, as did many others. Perhaps the sun has set on the supremacy of the Blood Angels.’ He felt a thrill of excitement at speaking such a rebellious thing aloud. ‘Perhaps a stronger, more vital Chapter would be better suited to be masters of Baal.’

‘A Chapter like ours?’ said Seth, without weight. He looked up once more at the statue; behind it, the sun turned the clouded sky a dark crimson the shade of a Flesh Tearer’s armour. ‘Wait, Gorn,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Be ready. But for now, just wait.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

The data-slate was exactly where it was supposed to be, concealed beneath a careworn copy of the Litergus Integritas, under the fourth pew from the right.

Fenn threw a wary glance over his shoulder, and then bent to recover it. At this time of day, there would be no one else inside the devotional chapel; in fact, this small sub-chancel rarely saw more than one or two worshippers at a time. The majority of the staff in the Vitalis Citadel preferred to make the trip up to the larger temple on the upper tiers of the tower for vespers, where true daylight was cast through the windows. This minor chamber, beneath the surface of the frozen polar landscape, had only biolume simulators to match the passage of Baal’s day-night cycle. The place had a perpetually musty, undisturbed air to it; precisely the reason that the serf had chosen it as a dead-drop.

A thin hum of antigravs momentarily drew his eye to the roof. In the dimness, he could just about make out the shape of a servo-skull making lazy circles in the air, a smoking censer rocking beneath it on a chain. Fenn made the sign of the aquila and pretended to pray, nodding towards the basalt statues at the altar. Sanguinius knelt before the Emperor, his father’s hand upon his shoulder. Forgive my subterfuge, my Lords, he mouthed, but what I do here is in service to the Imperium.

When he was sure the servo-skull was far enough away not to surveillance him, Fenn raised the slate to his ear and ran his finger over the activation rune. He listened to the scratchy recording of the voice encoded there, the words of the contact he had cultivated in the citadel’s communicant staff. When the serf’s suspicions of Nyniq and Serpens had finally crystallised, it was to that man that Fenn went, bribing him with minor drugs from the medicae stores to see that an extra query was included in the machine-call message stack sent out toward the sector capital.

He had not expected to get a reply so soon; the signal had just been a shot in the dark, some vain attempt to feel as if he were doing something instead of sitting back and allowing the magos biologis to ride rough-shod over his master’s work.

But here it was. Proof. With shaking hands, he wound the vox-spool back and played it again, to be certain he had not misheard.

‘The message from the astropath is garbled, as they always are,’ said the recording. ‘but the meat of it is apparent. Quite why you require this datum is beyond me, but I will state it for the record.’ Fenn felt sweat prickling on his arms as he waited to hear the words for a second time. ‘The Tech-Lord Haran Serpens is listed in the rolls of the Adeptus Terra as missing presumed dead. His craft was reported lost in the deeps of the Segmentum Pacificus, beyond the Thoth system.’

Fenn stopped the playback and rocked on the pew. By the Emperor’s sight, Thoth was clear across the galactic plane from Baal, hundreds of light-years distant. ‘He’s not the same man,’ the words tumbled from the serf’s lips and he looked up at the statue. ‘In Terra’s name, he cannot be the same man!’

He scrambled to his feet in a rush, dithering as he stepped into the aisle. What could he do? If he returned to the laboratorium, the impostor would be waiting there for him. Fenn gripped the data-slate hard. How could he face the magos – or whoever he was – like this? The serf had never had the skill to conceal his emotions; the pretender would see the knowledge on Fenn’s face as plain as nightfall. He forced himself to remain calm. Think, think, you fool! Lord Caecus must be told!

‘Yes,’ he said aloud. There were transports in the flight bay atop the tower far above, lighters and shuttles that travelled across Baal on regular sorties. All he needed to do was find one destined for the fortress-monastery, and–

‘Fenn?’ The shock of the voice made his gut twist. ‘Don’t be shy, serf, I know you’re in here.’

He pressed himself into the pew, not daring to breathe. He made out the shape of the figure drifting in from the shadowed doorway; a broad man the size of an Astartes.

‘I think we should talk, you and I,’ said the impostor mildly. ‘I think we got off on the wrong foot. After all, we both share a passion for the same thing, don’t we?’ The voice became silky. ‘The dazzling infinity of the human machine, yes? The quest for perfection of the flesh?’

Fenn watched the figure move slowly toward the altar. With the biolumes at such low levels, it was possible that he would never see the cowering serf. He bent lower, his rational mind warring with the animal need to run. He just had to wait, just a little more. Let him get to the altar, and then he won’t be able to catch me before I reach the chapel doors.

‘Not talking? That’s a pity.’ There was a sigh. ‘You are a poor sample, Fenn. An intelligent man, oh yes, but a poor sample. It is no wonder that the Blood Angels rejected you as too weak to embrace the power of an Adeptus Astartes. You lack something.’ The footsteps stopped.

The sudden silence was too much to bear. With a frantic burst of motion, Fenn exploded from his hiding place and hurtled across the darkened chapel as fast as he could go. He pounded towards the doors, dimly alarmed by the fact that the ersatz tech-lord had not even moved to follow him.

Too late, Fenn realised something was amiss. The thought was still forming in his mind as he collided with a tall, slab-sided shape hidden in the shadows and crashed back on to his haunches, into a heap on the floor. The box-like servitor loomed out of the darkness on its iron claws, stalking toward him.

‘Your associate among the communicant,’ came the voice. The warmth, the silk of Haran Serpens faded away, replaced by something calculating and impossibly old. ‘Such a terrible accident. A freak gust of wind. He fell from the top of the citadel.’

Fenn was shaking, the fear engulfing him in suffocating waves. ‘Who?’ He pushed the sounds from his mouth. ‘Why?’

‘You will never know, little man.’

Before him, the sides of the box began to slide open, like some complex puzzle. Fenn saw movement inside, rods and pincers shifting and turning.

‘It’s better this way,’ said the impostor, all trace of the false voice gone now. ‘You would only weep when you learned of how I have tampered with your great work. Better you don’t live to see it.’

The serf held up a hand in silent entreaty. Inside the open box, a huge arachnid shape of brass legs and glugging pipes coiled and then leapt toward him, metal talons whipping through the air.

Rafen nodded to Ajir as he approached the doors to the Grand Annex. ‘Report,’ he commanded.

The other Blood Angel inclined his head. ‘Little of import, sir. The conclave has reconvened after a short recess.’ He leaned closer, lowering his voice. ‘I think Mephiston called the pause for good reason. Angered words have reached us here from within.’

‘That is to be expected,’ Rafen scanned the wide anteroom. As within the Grand Annex, out here every successor Chapter was represented by one or two armoured line troopers – escorts or honour guards for the ranking officers taking part. His eyes met those of Sergeant Noxx, who stood watching him from across the chamber with steady, blank menace.

‘The Flesh Tearer has been doing that all day,’ said Ajir, with a grimace. ‘If he could cut me with that glare, I would be dead and bleeding upon the ground.’

‘Don’t allow him to irk you.’

Ajir smiled without humour. ‘Of course not. I’m not Kayne. I have a better rein on my impulses.’

Rafen let the comment pass. ‘Just stay alert.’

‘Always,’ came the reply. The other Space Marine’s dark face shifted, becoming stiff. ‘Although I will confess it sits poorly with me to be on a battle footing in the halls of our own stronghold.’

‘We are Astartes,’ said Rafen. ‘We are always on a battle footing.’

A commotion drew the attention of the Blood Angels and as one they turned to witness the arrival of Brother Caecus, a woman and a hooded Space Marine in lockstep with him. ‘Stand aside,’ the Apothecae was saying, ‘I must enter the Grand Annex.’

An Angel Vermillion blocked his path. ‘The doors are sealed. Our Chapter Masters have ordered it so.’

‘This transcends those orders!’ Caecus barked.

Rafen stepped up, waving the other Space Marine aside. ‘Majoris? Is something wrong?’

He noted at once that Caecus seemed very agitated, his face flushed with colour, his brow knit. ‘Open the doors,’ he replied. ‘Do it now, brother-sergeant.’

Ajir was at Rafen’s side. ‘Who is this?’ The Astartes indicated the woman. ‘A servant of the magos biologis, here? Who granted her admittance?’

‘I did,’ Caecus retorted. ‘Nyniq is here on my request. Now open the door! In Blood’s name, must I do it myself?’

The Apothecary reached for the control mechanism that would retract the massive iron locking bar, but Rafen caught his wrist in the fingers of his armoured gauntlet. ‘You–’

The Space Marine beneath the nondescript robes broke his silence, emitting a low growl, and with preternatural speed his hand snapped out to mirror Rafen’s gesture, grabbing the brother-sergeant’s arm before he could push Caecus away.

Rafen shot the hooded figure a look; he saw a dark face with a feral cast to it.

‘No,’ said Caecus, with the force of command behind the word. ‘Release him!’

‘Brother?’ Rafen studied the other man; he did not know him, could not place his strangely-familiar appearance.

‘Brother.’ The hooded figure repeated the word thickly, as if he were unfamiliar with the process of speaking it. The hand around Rafen’s wrist dropped away.

‘For the last time,’ Caecus said, his voice rising, ‘open the doors! I will take all responsibility for any censure that results!’

Noxx had moved closer. ‘You had better do as he says,’ noted the Flesh Tearer.

Rafen turned to Ajir and nodded once. ‘Open it.’

Unsure of the protocol for an interruption of this nature, Rafen followed Caecus’s group inside, belatedly noting that Noxx was at his heels. He frowned, and walked on. The air inside the annexe was thick with tension; they had intruded into the midst of a forceful argument, of that he had no doubt.

‘What is the meaning of this disturbance?’ The amplified vox of the Blood Sword Dreadnought Daggan was harsh and grating. ‘This is a closed session!’

Caecus spoke before Rafen could frame an explanation. ‘Forgive me, lords, but what I have to impart to you could not be delayed. I must speak now, this very moment.’

Mephiston shot Rafen an irritated glare and intercepted Caecus before he reached the circle of leaders. ‘Majoris, whatever you have to say, it must wait until the conclusion of this conclave.’

‘What I have to say may well change that conclusion!’ he shot back. ‘I have an answer to the great dilemma!’

‘Caecus,’ said Dante, a warning clear in his intonation.

‘Hold, cousin,’ said Sentikan. ‘This is your Apothecae Majoris, is it not? Why not let him speak? What harm can one more voice do?’

Dante bristled at the Angel Sanguine’s words. ‘My Brother Caecus is a learned man. But I fear his reach may exceed his grasp.’

‘Not so!’ Caecus retorted. ‘Not any more! I have mastered the skill of the replicae… I have a success!’

‘What does he say?’ Seth cocked his head. ‘Cloning? It cannot be done!’ He bared his teeth. ‘If such a thing were possible, the Flesh Tearers would have used it to bolster the numbers of our own Chapter, centuries ago!’

‘You tried to use replicae to recover your losses?’ asked Orloc.

‘No.’ The Lord of the Blood Angels became still. His face became granite-hard. ‘Caecus. You were ordered to desist in pursuit of this. Did you defy me?’

The Apothecary’s bluster faltered in the face of his master’s icy manner. ‘I… You said only that I did not have your blessing, lord. You did not order me to stop.’

‘You dare to play with semantics like some Ministorum lackey?’ snarled Mephiston. ‘You knew the intent behind the master’s words!’

Dante shook his head. ‘I am disappointed, brother. I expected better from you.’

‘You should only be disappointed if he failed,’ said Seth, coming forward with a sudden, new intensity in his eyes. ‘What of it then, Caecus? Where is this success you talk of?’

‘Here, lords,’ Nyniq dared to speak as she reached up and drew back the hood of the silent figure in the robes. ‘See the first of them. The first Bloodchild.’ The warrior stood unmoving.

An odd silence fell across the room for a few moments as the assembled Chapter Masters studied the clone, each one of them weighing the grave import of its presence. Their reactions ranged from sneers of derision to cold, measuring stares.

‘This is a genetic duplicate?’ said Armis, clearly unconvinced. ‘He appears… a commonplace Astartes, nothing more.’

‘This is the first Sapiens Sanguina!’ Caecus snapped. ‘A fully mature Blood Angel Space Marine force-grown from a nascent zygote sample, made manifest by my will!’

Seth turned toward Dante. ‘Why did you keep this from us, cousin?’

‘I saw no merit in this work,’ came the reply. ‘By his own admission, Caecus had nothing to show for his research.’

‘That was before,’ said the Apothecae Majoris. ‘I have…’ He glanced at Nyniq. ‘Made a breakthrough.’

‘Every clone you have created thus far has been unstable,’ Mephiston growled. ‘All your attempts to duplicate the work of Corax have come to nought. Yet now you enter this chamber uninvited to parade one chance success and call it an achievement?’

‘I ask only for what I spoke of before!’ Caecus retorted. ‘To be allowed to do my part to draw my Chapter back from the brink of dissolution!’

Daggan’s torso turned to present his steel face to the assembled masters. ‘If this can be done… If this “Bloodchild” is no fluke, then it will mean much for all our Chapters, not just for the Blood Angels.’

‘The ability to recoup losses in months instead of years,’ mused Orloc. ‘It would be a tactical advantage worth having.’

Dante’s eyes narrowed. ‘Cousins, in this matter I would counsel restraint.’

‘That is of no surprise,’ said Seth. ‘But this is not a time for conservative thought, Lord Dante. If Caecus is as skilled as he appears, then this Bloodchild will solve all your problems, without the need of a tithe.’

‘And it will be to the interest of the Flesh Tearers as well,’ added Armis.

‘Of course,’ Seth agreed. ‘I make no secret of that.’ He walked over to the clone-Marine, studying its face intently. ‘The verification of this will be found only in one place.’

‘In battle,’ said Daggan.

‘Aye.’ Seth nodded. He snapped his fingers. ‘Brother-Sergeant Rafen?’ He glanced at the Blood Angel. ‘Since you showed such prowess before in single combat, I would ask that you test this Bloodchild for us, in the arena.’

Dante gave Rafen the smallest of nods and Rafen bowed slightly. ‘Very well, Lord Seth.’

‘Brother-Sergeant Noxx will join him,’ said Dante.

Seth turned back to study the Blood Angel master. ‘Two against one? That’s hardly sporting.’

Dante’s reply was cold. ‘No confrontation between our kind ever is.’

Rafen pulled the leather strap tight around his arm and secured it. He looked up and saw his face reflected in the triangular eye-slits of his helmet; the Blood Angel’s wargear rested upon an arming rack, a hollow man-shape like a red statue. The training tunic was tight around his chest, and the straps pressed into the places where the bruises and contusions from the last combat had still not fully healed.

He sensed a presence behind him but did not turn.

‘I admit, I expected to meet you again in the arena,’ said Noxx dryly, ‘but not so quickly. Or under such circumstances.’

‘I’ll try not to win so easily this time,’ Rafen offered. ‘I would hate to shame you twice before all our kinsmen.’

Noxx’s insouciant manner cracked. ‘You were lucky before.’

‘I’m certain you believe that.’

The veteran sergeant grabbed him and spun him about, so that they were face to face. ‘I misjudged you, peacock, that’s all. It won’t happen again.’

Rafen shrugged off his arm and walked to the weapons racks; sickle-sharp glaives and hook-ended short swords hung on belt straps. He drew the sword and tapped a thumb over the keen edge. ‘No training blades this time,’ he said quietly.

Noxx donned his weapons. ‘Of course not. It goes without saying; this will be a fight to the death.’

‘How so?’ Rafen demanded.

‘It’s a clone,’ Noxx snorted and walked away. ‘When it is dead your Brother Caecus can simply hatch out another.’

The arena’s configuration had been changed from the previous bout. The mechanisms operating the moveable blocks had been retarded, allowing the combatant the opportunity to fight in an open area, with only the steep inclines of the walls to act as barriers. Rafen reached the edge of the stone bowl and saw the Bloodchild already waiting for them in the centre of the arena. As he watched, a servitor approached and deposited an identical hook sword to the one he carried upon the ground before the clone-Marine. For a long second, the duplicate studied the weapon, staring at it without apparent recognition.

Rafen’s lip curled. Is it even aware of where it is, or what it is? The idea of replicae, of the test-tube growth of a man from a knot of cells to a full adult, conflicted him. It was a radical concept, and Caecus did not lie when he said the arcane process had the power to heal the Chapter’s losses; but Rafen could not help but wonder what kind of men it would create. What is a warrior if he does not have a past to draw from? A soul to pledge in the Emperor’s service? Little more than an organic machine?

Then, with a quick flash of insight, the Bloodchild flicked the sword off the floor with a jerk of its foot, and caught the weapon by the hilt. It raced through a rapid series of practice moves with seamless ease, as if the clone had been fighting with the blade for decades. But still, in those strangely vacant eyes, there was nothing. Not the dead cold of a warrior hardened by death and killing, not the insane emptiness of a madman; a different kind of nothingness, a void like the absence of something within.

The arming servitor climbed out and clattered to a halt. ‘This will be a trial combat. Fight to the shedding of blood, show courage and honour.’ The machine-helot bowed its head. ‘In the name of Sanguinius and the Emperor.’

‘In the name of Sanguinius and the Emperor,’ repeated Rafen and Noxx. The words had barely left the Flesh Tearer’s throat before he dropped into the fighting pit. Rafen gripped his hook sword and followed suit.

There was no hesitation on the Bloodchild’s face; the clone-Marine understood what was to transpire in the arena. It pivoted off the back foot and turned into Noxx’s approach, the sword coming up to a guard position. The Flesh Tearer’s downward blow, augmented by the force of his dive into the pit, hit hard with a resonant clash of steel on steel. The clone dodged backward, drawing sparks off his opponent’s blade as he whipped his own sword away.

Rafen ventured closer, out of fighting range for the moment, gauging the Bloodchild, watching him carefully for signs of hesitation, of unwariness.

It was peculiar; by turns the clone-Marine behaved as if it were new to the business of fighting, and then in the next breath it moved like a seasoned veteran. He became aware that the clone’s lips were moving, talking to itself in low, hushed tones.

Noxx attacked again, shouting a furious war cry. The clone bellowed back, imitating the other Astartes in pitch and tone with uncanny clarity. Noxx threw out a strike that was a clear feint and the Bloodchild fell for it, overextending. The Flesh Tearer reversed his blow and scored a hit, ripping through the clone’s robes and making a shallow cut across his chest. Without losing momentum, Noxx duplicated a mirror of the move, but this time the Bloodchild parried and slammed him away with a glancing blow from his fist.

Noxx’s sandals scraped across the stone floor. ‘He catches on quickly,’ said the other Astartes.

The Bloodchild came about, suddenly coming for Rafen with the weapon in his hand held high; he was copying what he had seen Noxx do, but with twice the speed and ferocity behind it. The Blood Angel ducked low to avoid the feint; it was an easy move, now he saw what it was.

Or so Rafen thought. At the apex of the attack, the clone abruptly reversed and drew down in a falling strike, bright silver lashing at the Blood Angel’s neck. Rafen barely managed to turn his hook sword to deflect a blow that surely would have been mortal.

Fool! He chided himself. Don’t underestimate this thing. Noxx is not wrong; he is quick, and he’s learning, adapting.

Rafen flicked the sword and the hooks on each blade came together. With a clash of metal, the curved ends locked, Space Marine and clone thrown into a tug-of-war for control. Noxx saw the opportunity and came in to attack again. The Bloodchild pivoted, sacrificing his hold over Rafen to make a spinning kick at the advancing Flesh Tearer. Noxx was caught off-balance as a heavy foot slammed into his chest and knocked him to the ground.

The clone extended his spin back toward Rafen, slashing the air with his hooked blade. The Blood Angel met the strike with equal force, parrying up as he brought a hard fist into his opponent’s sternum. Rafen felt something fracture where he landed the blow, but the Bloodchild did nothing but grunt.

He forced forward, the blades going across one another in a screeching cross of razor on razor. For a moment, his face was a hand’s span from the clone’s, his gaze locked on those dead, dead eyes.

‘Brother,’ repeated the duplicate, the word strange and alien upon his lips.

The blades moved and Rafen took the pommel on the chin, but he shook it off. In return, the Blood Angel bucked forward, bending at the waist to drop a headbutt on the bridge of the clone’s nose. This time he was rewarded by a cry of pain.

The Bloodchild snarled in anger and punched him back, in time to meet a fresh assault by Noxx. The Flesh Tearer’s blade cut again, this time across the clone’s seamless abdomen. It fought back, swinging its own sword in a fast arc that tore cuts through both its opponents.

Rafen fell away, a hiss escaping his teeth. There was blood oozing from a wound on Noxx’s brow as he shot the other Astartes a look. ‘He fights one at a time well enough. Let’s see how he does with two at once.’

‘Impressive,’ allowed Daggan. ‘For something less than a day old, I’ve barely seen the like outside the ranks of the tyranids.’ The Chapter Masters stood in a line, watching the duel from the viewing balconies. ‘But can it do more than just fight with blank instinct?’

‘He is far more than a xenos insect driven by impulse, lord,’ said Caecus, ‘the Bloodchild is a pure expression of the genetic ideal of the Astartes. More than a hundred Blood Angels, alive and dead, have their DNA expressed within his physiology. I believe that with the correct stimuli, the clone will be able to assimilate the muscle-recall and genetic memory of each one of them!’

‘And what of the implanted organs we share?’ demanded Armis. ‘Without them, this creation is nothing more than a servitor of better design and breeding.’

‘The replicae process duplicates many of the implants within the first budding of the modified zygote,’ insisted the Apothecae. ‘Oolitic kidney, occulobe, multi-lung, bicopea, the secondary heart organ, all of these are naturally occurring structures within the body of the Bloodchild.’ He nodded to himself. ‘In that fashion, the clone is superior to a human-source Astartes. He need not undertake the full and lengthy process of adaptation that a normal man must endure.’ Caecus dared to throw a sideways glance at his master. Dante did not meet his gaze, his attention fully concentrated on the fight unfolding below them.

‘There is a question that no one here has yet asked,’ said Sentikan, his eyes glittering deep beneath his cowl. ‘If this patchwork being is indeed a distillation of all the potential of the Sons of Sanguinius, then what of the Rage and the Thirst?’ The hooded warrior turned slightly towards the Blood Angel Apothecary. ‘Have you spliced that out of his genetic code, majoris? Or will your creation still be subject to the curse that touches every one of us?’

Caecus swallowed hard, lost for an answer.

Blood Angel and Flesh Tearer came at the clone-Marine from the right and the left, hook swords held chest high, fast and deadly.

The Bloodchild did not waver; something in its eyes, perhaps some hunter’s intuition saw that Noxx moved a fraction slower than Rafen, an artefact of the earlier duel in this arena. It employed the feint move again, but this time the clone shifted and left Rafen slashing at open air as it met Noxx’s upward-swinging cut. Once again, the curved tips of the swords met, but the Flesh Tearer was unready for it. The Bloodchild executed a perfect disarming move, twisting and dragging the Space Marine’s weapon out of his grip before the veteran sergeant could stop him. The force of the motion made the Flesh Tearer’s sword describe a loop about the hook of the clone’s weapon and down toward the Bloodchild’s other hand. The grip slapped into the clone’s palm and it snarled, looping both blades about in a lethal arc.

The reticence Rafen had shown toward the Bloodchild evaporated with that masterful display; the clone was indeed every bit the warrior that Caecus claimed it was. Even as he advanced on it, he found himself wondering what kind of heights such a Blood Angel might reach if properly trained and disciplined.

One moment it was forcing Noxx into the wall; the next it turned to attack Rafen with the twin streaks of silver swords. The ferocity of the assault was staggering, and he caught the rush of anger darkening the Bloodchild’s face as it came at him. With a colossal impact, the blades scissored across his hook sword and broke it along the length with a screech of rendered metal. The torsion of the blow twisted through Rafen’s arm and shocked him backward; for a moment he almost lost his footing.

As fast as it came at him, the clone was roaring into Noxx’s face again. The swords fell flat upon the Flesh Tearer’s shoulders in a V and closed, shifting to sever his head at the neck with a single motion. Noxx’s hands, bloodied and raw, came up to fight against the killing strike. He cried out in pain, his shout warring with the Bloodchild’s snarls and growls.

Rafen reacted without thinking, and hurled the broken sword like a throwing knife. His aim was true; the bifurcated blade impacted and set deep into the flesh of the Bloodchild’s back, a couple of centimetres beneath his shoulder blade.

The reaction was instant. The clone brayed and spun about, Noxx suddenly knocked aside, the two hook swords falling from its nerveless fingers as it scrambled to reach for the broken weapon, desperate to pull it free.

Bloodchild and Blood Angel locked eyes, clone and Astartes linked by a chain of raging battle-hate. Rafen felt the ebb and flow of the combat rage inside him, metering it by the second as he had been trained to his entire life; but the clone had no such preparation. He saw the shadow of the fury erupt in those lifeless eyes, saw the turn-key of the Red Thirst rising.

With a screech, the clone gripped the broken blade and ripped it from its own flesh, bright vitae cascading off the edge. As Noxx struggled to his feet, the Bloodchild opened its mouth and ran Rafen’s makeshift weapon over its tongue, sucking the fluid from its surface. Red stained the white fangs behind its lips.

The clone pivoted and mirrored Rafen’s earlier attack, throwing the blade at Noxx. The Flesh Tearer went down again, the broken sword burying itself in the veteran sergeant’s thigh.

Rafen gasped as the Bloodchild’s torso rippled, the muscles moving and shifting beneath the russet surface of his flesh in abhuman coils. The clone threw itself at Noxx, colliding with him as he tried to rise once again.

Noxx screamed as the clone’s mouth opened wide and an arc of teeth clamped into the meat of his shoulder, new blood spitting in rich gushes across the stone floor. A grotesque sucking sounded as the clone-Marine drank deep.

The Blood Angel ran, in a rolling motion ducking low to snatch up one of the discarded hook swords. He leapt into the air and came down sharply; leading with the weapon’s curved point. It found purchase in the clone’s torso, in the same oozing wound where he had struck moments before.

The clone’s back arched and it hooted with agony. Noxx was left to bleed upon the floor of the pit as it swept up clawed hands and gurgled through a mouthful of Astartes vitae. A hammer blow from an off-hand strike knocked Rafen off his feet and sent him sliding backward, his skull resonating with the impact. The strike was made with twice the power of every previous attack; it seemed as if the Bloodchild was energised by the power of the Black Rage, the boiling energy barely contained inside the clone’s body.

He was dimly aware of shouting coming from the balconies above, but Rafen could not look away as the Bloodchild came stalking toward him in swift, loping steps. With each footfall, the clone’s tanned skin seemed to bunch and tighten. Fingers curved into claws, growing extra knuckles and longer nails. The clone’s mouth opened... and it opened and opened. The jaw distended, new rows of fangs emerging from the gums. It was mutating before his eyes, twisted by the force of the gene-curse forged into its very flesh.

It bellowed a word, forcing a single sound through a throat choked with thick liquid. ‘Blood!’

‘Rafen!’ A cry reached him from the galleries overhead and he spied Ajir up there, gesturing wildly. The Space Marine threw something toward him, a slab-sided shape spiralling down toward the pit. Rafen sprang to his feet and leapt, snatching the bolter out of the air. He landed, his finger tight on the trigger.

Without hesitation, Rafen marched the contents of the gun’s sickle magazine up the Bloodchild’s body, ripping it into pieces in a welter of crimson. The remains of the clone sagged to the stones, twitching and dying.

He could hear his heart pounding in his ears. ‘Terra protect us,’ he breathed, releasing the weapon to make the sign of the aquila with his blooded hands.

CHAPTER NINE

Caecus stood rigid as Dante turned away from the edge of the balcony to look directly at him. His legs were leaden, rooted to the spot. The elation he had tasted only moments ago was now ashes in his mouth, the perfect ideal of his Bloodchild warped and destroyed. Failure. Another failure.

‘I was so close!’ he whispered. ‘I…’

When Dante spoke, it was a blade twisting in Caecus’s heart. ‘Apothecae Majoris, I have indulged this fantasy of yours beyond the point of rationality. You have shamed yourself, and shamed your Chapter with this monstrosity.’ He pointed at the remains down in the fighting pit.

‘I only wished to…’ He gulped down air, finding it hard to speak. ‘I was so certain…’ Caecus cast around, looking for support and saw only measuring stares from the other Chapter Masters. He groped for an explanation, for any vague thread of justification. ‘Perhaps I was too hasty. The woman Nyniq was correct, we should have run more trials before–’

‘Enough,’ said Dante. The Lord of the Blood Angels was furious, but it was a cold, cold fury tainted with disappointment and weariness. As he spoke, the full and complete scope of Caecus’s error became clear to the Apothecae. ‘You will remove yourself from this place and return to the Vitalis Citadel. The method of your censure will be decided on another day, but for now you will do as I say.’ Dante’s face darkened. ‘Make no mistake, Caecus, for this is not open to interpretation. This is my command to you. End your pursuit of the replicae project and terminate all works connected to it with immediate effect.’

‘I have several nascent Bloodchild clones still in situ,’ he breathed, the admission forced from him by his master’s steady, hard gaze.

‘Destroy them all. No trace of these abominations are to remain.’

Caecus fell to one knee, desperate to find some words he could say to show contrition, to make Dante understand of the pure motives behind his vision. ‘Lord, please…’

‘No trace,’ repeated the Chapter Master, with finality.

Bowing his head, Caecus found the energy to nod but do little else. His mind churned as he caught sight of the mess of flesh and bone that was all that remained of the first Bloodchild. It hardly seemed human now, just a smear of crimson and offal; the traces of a hideous, malformed freak. Dante was correct; he had shamed himself, with his hubris and his folly, and worse still he had tainted the sacred ground of the fortress-monastery by daring to bring the flawed clone into its hallowed halls. All this he was guilty of, made worse by the fact that the successor Chapter Masters had been there to witness it. I have not only made myself a fool, but my master as well.

Sentikan was speaking. ‘Lord Dante. I think we understand now why you chose not to disclose this line of research. None of us wish to follow the path of the Raven Guard or the Space Wolves toward taking beasts into our ranks.’

‘Perhaps more research is needed,’ suggested Daggan.

‘Perhaps,’ continued Sentikan, ‘but not here. And not today.’ The Master of the Angels Sanguine turned his hooded face toward Dante. ‘I submit that this matter must be, as you ordered, brought to a close.’

‘Someone should be sent, to verify the conclusion of the experiments,’ said Orloc.

Sentikan nodded toward his escort. ‘I offer First Captain Rydae for this task.’

‘Agreed,’ said Dante. ‘We have much to think on, cousins. I bid you return to your chambers and consider what you have seen and heard today. Tomorrow we will reconvene in the Grand Annex and bring the matter of this conclave to an end.’

‘One way or another,’ intoned Daggan, pivoting to study the Apothecae.

Caecus kept his eyes upon the marble floor, not daring to utter another word.

In his chambers, Dante poured a measure of nightwine into a crystal goblet. Normally, the subtle aroma of the fine vintage would grant him a moment of focus, as his enhanced Astartes senses drew measures and depths from the liquor that ranged far beyond those of mortals; but today it was heavy and cloying. His ill mood robbed him of the manner to appreciate the drink; anger tainted it like oil.

There was a rap at the door and he snapped out a terse command. ‘Enter.’

Mephiston hove into the room; even without the flayed-muscle pattern of his armour and the crystalline psyker hood about his neck, the Lord of Death still cut an impressive figure. He had come without being summoned; Mephiston knew his master’s manner so well the words had not needed to be spoken. ‘We have had better days than this one, my lord.’

‘Indeed.’ Dante’s annoyance flared for an instant and the goblet let out a hiss of glass on glass as it cracked in his tightening grip. He slammed it down and grimaced. ‘Tell me, my brother, is there any way in which we could have tainted the conclave more than we have?’ Mephiston wisely elected not to answer, and his master went on. ‘Curse Caecus for his thoughtlessness!’

‘He will be punished for his disobedience.’

‘Too late,’ Dante growled. ‘I should have seen it coming. The majoris has always been a stubborn one, and I, a fool to indulge him!’ He shook his head. ‘His imprudent display of that creature has done nothing but weaken us still further in the eyes of our successors!’

‘Word will not spread of this,’ said Mephiston. ‘Brother Rydae knows what is expected. The magos woman, she will be silenced.’

‘I am not concerned with the magos biologis.’ Dante’s brow furrowed. ‘I am concerned with the disposition of our cousins.’

‘Lord Seth,’ said Mephiston, with ill-concealed scorn.

‘And others,’ noted his commander. He sighed. ‘Perhaps I should not judge Caecus too harshly. I too am guilty of folly, for believing that our kindred would accede to the tithe.’

‘What you ask is not unreasonable.’

Dante gave a hollow chuckle. ‘Seth would certainly take issue with that statement, brother.’ He became solemn again. ‘I spent so much time in rumination, careful to hide our state from the galaxy at large, it never occurred to me that the blood of our blood would seek to turn it to their advantage.’

Mephiston took a moment before he answered. ‘The Flesh Tearers are insubordinate, it is ever their way. It has been since the time of their first master, Amit. They will push to the very limit of censure and beyond if they believe they can do so. But my lord, do you truly believe that they will defy you when the moment of choice comes?’

Dante’s answer was forestalled by another knock upon the door. He called out and Brother-Sergeant Rafen stood in the entranceway.

‘Master,’ he said with a bow, ‘Lord Seth wishes to speak with you. Alone.’

Dante glanced at Mephiston and nodded. ‘Perhaps I will have the answer to that question sooner than expected.’

Mephiston did not meet Seth’s eyes as they crossed paths. The psyker Librarian stepped past him and closed the doors to the chamber. The Flesh Tearer stood for a moment, taking in the scope of the room.

Dante was at the slatted window. The Baal sunset was rich with umber and orange tones. ‘How is your sergeant, Noxx?’ he asked, without preamble.

‘It will take more that that to kill one of my men.’

Dante accepted this without comment. ‘Would you care for something, cousin?’ The Blood Angel indicated a tall flask of murky wine.

‘Only a moment of your time, Dante,’ he replied. ‘And the opportunity to address you as an equal.’

‘You have always been so, Seth,’ said the other master.

‘That is not true, and you know it.’ He crossed the room, examining the elaborate rug beneath his feet; it was a rendition of the Ultima Segmentum, woven in millions of coloured threads. ‘First Founding. My kinsmen cannot compare to that.’

‘That has meaning, yes. But it does not diminish you.’ Dante studied him. ‘But I think you have never believed that, no matter how many times I have said it.’

Seth waved the comment away as if it meant nothing, but inwardly he was quietly seething. ‘The subject of diminishment is a sensitive one for both of us, yes? Only I have lived with it for far longer than you. I’ve come to understand it, like one might come to know a constant enemy.’

Dante let out a slow breath. ‘I am tiring of this circumlocution. You think I do not respect you. You are wrong.’

Beneath the silver implant, a nerve jerked in the Flesh Tearer’s face. ‘What I respect is the will of Terra. All the Flesh Tearers are is in the name of the spirit of Sanguinius and the Emperor of Mankind, for their glory. Can the Blood Angels say the same?’

‘Of course,’ Dante snapped. ‘I would strike down a lesser man for daring to suggest otherwise!’

‘And yet circumstances might be seen in certain lights to suggest exactly that. The glorification of a false Sanguinius by your men? A schism that nearly destroyed your Chapter? And now, this pitiful exhibition by your senior Apothecae? How are any of these things in service to the will of Terra, cousin?’

‘I have given my explanations,’ Dante folded his arms, growing colder in tone as he spoke. ‘I have explained my reasoning.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Do the same, Seth. Why are you here? What do you want of me?’

‘I came at your summons, Lord of the Blood Angels.’

‘After you first refused it. I say again; what do you want?’

Seth allowed a thin smile to emerge on his lips. ‘I am here because I see a chance to serve the Golden Throne, by stemming the rot that threatens to eat out the heart of the Blood Angels. I wish to offer you an honourable solution, Dante.’ He shook his head. ‘Look at yourself, cousin. Look at where your hubris has led your Chapter. You are the great and mighty Blood Angels, First Founding, feared by many, revered by more… But you have allowed yourselves to grow lax upon that reputation. This business with the whelp Arkio and the Ruinous Powers… You should never have let it go so far! But you were too fixated on your own glory or on some other matter to see it until it was too late.’ He saw a momentary flash of something like doubt on Dante’s face and seized upon it. ‘I know you. I know these are all questions you have already asked yourself.’ Seth nodded. ‘We are Adeptus Astartes. And our greatest fear is not death, but to be found wanting.’

Dante shot him a razored glare. ‘You have questioned my leadership once today,’ he replied. ‘Do it again at your peril.’

Seth stiffened. ‘I only give a voice to that which is obvious to all. And I say this to you now, master to master, one Son of the Great Angel to another… Do the honourable thing, Dante. Accept responsibility for what has happened and step down from the stewardship of Baal. Allow another Chapter to take the place of yours.’

A bark of humourless laughter broke from Dante’s lips. ‘You dare talk to me of hubris and then this is what you demand?’

‘There are many who feel as I do,’ Seth retorted. ‘And more who will be swayed to that same thinking at the conclave tomorrow.’

Dante turned away, toward the window, and Seth sensed the anger rekindling in him. ‘Despite what you may think of me, my age does not make me a senile, coddled old fool, and I will meet in the arena any warrior and ten of his brothers who argues that! Leave now, Flesh Tearer, and I will overlook this brazen attempt to wrest control from me as over-eagerness on your part!’

‘Do you think I do this for myself?’ Seth grated. ‘This is not personal, Dante! I want only what is best for the Imperium!’

‘Aye,’ came the reply. ‘I believe that you do. And for that reason alone, I will not have you and your delegation put aboard a ship and thrown back toward Cretacia.’ The Master of the Blood Angels faced him once more; Dante’s eyes were daggers. ‘But if you remain in my chambers a moment longer, I fear you will test my patience beyond the limit.’

Seth hesitated, and then bowed low. ‘We will speak tomorrow, then.’

Dante gave a slow nod. ‘I do not doubt it.’

Caecus walked as a man would toward the gallows, lost inside himself, his thoughts in a ceaseless turmoil. Ahead of him, Brother-Captain Rydae strode with ready purpose, the Angel Sanguine with a bolt pistol holstered at his hip and a communicant helot trailing along behind. The Apothecary was aware of the woman Nyniq walking at his side; on his exit from the arena, a single look from him had been enough to silence her. He had no need to explain what had taken place in the fighting pit. His ashen expression spoke volumes.

The wide corridor rose slowly toward the upper tiers of the monastery, toward the southward-facing protected dome where the fortress’s compliment of shuttles and atmosphere craft were garrisoned. Caecus imagined those walls closing in around him, the pressure in his thoughts betrayed by his morose mien and the clenching and unclenching of his long surgeon’s fingers into tight fists.

Everything was slipping away from him. He admitted a truth to himself. For all the great efforts he had put into the exploration of the gene-flaw, nothing he had ever done toward eradicating the Black Rage and the Red Thirst had so filled him with the sense of achievement he had in the work of the replicae. The researches of the sanguinary priesthood had been going on for millennia and achieved only little. For a questing mind like Caecus’s, to be engaged in a work of that dimension ate at his resolve, knowing full well that he would never live to see a cure for the flaw even if he mirrored the age of Dante himself.

But the cloning… The quest to learn the art of replicae had been different, something that fired his imagination. The discoveries he made had grown and changed by the day, energising him with their tantalising potential. He was so close! Caecus could taste it on his lips like cool water. If he could only follow the process through to its logical conclusion, the fate of the Blood Angels would be secure. They would be able to recover from the grave losses incurred at Sabien, and every other battle to come. The replicae was something he could bring about, if only he had the time, the facilities, and the trust of his brethren.

A flash of resentment burned hard in him for a brief moment, the force of it directed at Dante; but then just as swiftly it ebbed, overwhelmed by the bleak certainty of his failure. I was too hasty, and now I have paid for it with my reputation, my work, my future…

The great burden of his fault weighed him down. He wondered what Fenn would say when he heard of the Chapter Master’s orders; Caecus had no doubt his loyal serf would be distraught.

‘Wait here,’ said Rydae, leaving them at the edge of the hangar bay. He crossed quickly toward a rank of parked shuttlecraft, each of them in the varicoloured reds of the successor Chapters. A pilot-servitor bowed low and began a conversation with the First Captain, discussing the flight plan that would take them back to the Vitalis Citadel. Close by, an Arvus-class ship ran its engines at idle, hot exhaust gasses rippling the air.

Caecus railed at himself. I cannot go back in failure! Had it all been for nought? Every hour of work, every distant place scoured for scraps of information on the process of replicae?

‘Wasted,’ he whispered. ‘All of it, wasted.’

‘Not so,’ said Nyniq, placing a gentle hand upon his forearm. ‘Lord Caecus, you have done incredible things. You have come so far in so short a time! You should be proud of what you have achieved.’

He rounded on her. ‘How can I have pride in the birth of abominations? I have done nothing but create monsters, horrible things forsaken by the light of the Emperor!’

‘The Emperor… Emperor…’ Nerves in Nyniq’s face twitched in strange ways and her mouth moved in breathy gasps. She seemed to be having some peculiar form of seizure. ‘For… Sake…’ Her voice deepened, becoming basso and husky.

‘What is this?’ Caecus asked, frowning. He pulled her hand away from his arm, and the thin, pale wrist throbbed in his grip. The Apothecae tasted a strange, greasy tang in the air, mingling with the spent-fuel scent of the hangar bay.

Nyniq’s eyes rolled up, showing whites, a light flecking of foam collecting at the corners of the woman’s lips. Trembling, her face moved towards his. The blank orbs shimmered and moved, turning again to reveal new silver-black pupils lined with threads of gold.

Her lips pulled up in a parody of a smile, an odd mimicry of an expression Caecus had seen upon the face of her master, the tech-lord. ‘My… friend,’ she gurgled in a low whisper. ‘Listen… to me.’

‘Serpens?’ Caecus could not have explained how he knew that the mind animating the woman was no longer her own, just that he was certain of it. Something about the change of the motion of the flesh upon the bones of her face, as if it were a thin mask of skin stretched over her master’s features.

‘Forgive me if you find this method of communication alarming, but it is the only way open to us at the moment.’ It was Nyniq’s tortured vocal chords forming the words, but the manner, the pace and meter of them, they were all those of Haran Serpens. ‘The girl has been altered by me. She can function in this manner for a short time, although it is harmful to her.’

Caecus nodded, grotesquely fascinated. Blood was trickling from Nyniq’s eyes in pink tears. The analytical part of his thought process wondered after how such a thing was possible. A vox device implanted in her brainstem, perhaps? Or some form of psyker conditioning?

‘I know what has transpired…’ continued the breathy echo-voice. ‘I am truly sorry, Lord Caecus. I see now that your blood, while potent and strong indeed, was not enough to stabilise the genetic structure of the Bloodchild. The amalgam compound degrades before it can bind with the clone’s cellular matrix.’ Nyniq shook her head in exaggerated, puppeted motions.

‘Then… we will never be able to overcome the replication errors.’ Caecus said mournfully. ‘My blood is pure, it is…’ He broke off, suddenly silenced by a thought so shocking it struck the breath from him.

‘Yes?’ prompted the puppet-voice.

‘If we could craft a solution of the amalgam based upon a sample of blood utterly untainted by genetic drift… It would be strong enough to resist the impression of any mutagenic factors…’ He felt his heart pounding in a thunderous rhythm.

The reply was disordered and hissy. ‘Such a thing does not exist.’

Dare I say it? Caecus looked down at his hands and saw they were trembling. ‘It does,’ he countered. ‘Here, in this very fortress. The purest of blood, free of contamination, protected and unsullied. The preserved essence of Sanguinius himself, drawn from his body and guarded by Corbulo and the ranks of the sanguinary high priests…’

‘They would not allow you to take it,’

The Apothecae’s flesh chilled. ‘I would only need the smallest amount… Only a drop…’ He shook his head wildly. ‘Impossible! I cannot! It would be a crime, a desecration!’ Caecus shot a look toward Rydae; the Angel Sanguine officer was still in conversation with the pilot.

‘A crime, a greater crime than allowing the Blood Angels to die out?’ Nyniq’s twisted voice came out in quiet sobs. ‘Do you have a choice? This is your last chance, Caecus! You must, you must you must you must…’ The woman stumbled away and broke into a sudden run. ‘You must!’ she bellowed, and ran screaming from him, toward the resting lighter.

He watched with horror as Nyniq beat her hands against herself as if she were trying to resist the sudden impulses that controlled her body. The girl stumbled into the wake of the lighter’s rumbling exhaust nozzles and her flesh blackened; in a moment, she was a shrieking torch, staggering back and forth across the landing platform.

The attention of Rydae, the servitor and every other helot in the bay was instantly on the flaming figure.

The opportunity upon him, Caecus moved to the shadows, slipped away, back into the corridors of the fortress-monastery. He knew where he was heading, even as he tried to pretend he was as much a puppet of fate as the girl had been.

Rafen bowed his head slightly as Mephiston approached him in the hallway beyond the Silent Cloister. ‘Lord,’ he said.

The psyker’s taut, hawkish face studied him; and as before, as always, the Librarian’s penetrating gaze swept through him, searching him, measuring him. ‘Where is your charge, lad?’

‘Lord Seth and his delegation have retired the chambers granted to the Flesh Tearers in the northern tower,’ he explained. ‘Brother Puluo and Brother Corvus are attending them.’

‘Acting as watchmen would be a more accurate description.’ Mephiston’s lip twisted and he was silent. Rafen found it hard to articulate, but ever since that moment in the Grand Annex, the psyker had seemed…distracted. ‘Brother-sergeant, you will be honest with me.’

‘My lord, such is your insight I doubt I could be otherwise.’

That drew the smallest of smiles, but then it faded again. ‘Tell me the disposition of the brethren. You walk among them while I have been forced to remain with the other Chapter Masters. How does the business of this conclave sit with the men of the line?’

Rafen paused, formulating an answer. ‘Each Blood Angel understands the seriousness of the situation.’ And none more than I, he added silently. ‘We will place ourselves wholly at our master’s command, to follow whatever orders he deems fit.’

‘What do you think of this… replicae?’

He suppressed a grimace. ‘I do not know what that thing was in the fighting pit, lord. I know only that it was not an Astartes.’

‘It was hard to kill?’ Mephiston asked.

‘I have faced worse.’ He hesitated, a troubling fragment of recall rising to the surface. ‘It…spoke to me, lord.’

The Lord of Death was listening intently. ‘Indeed? What did it say?’

Rafen shook his head, dismissing the moment. ‘Nothing of consequence. It matters little.’

Mephiston’s gaze was steady. ‘You would not have mentioned it if you believed that. Tell me, what words did the beast utter?’

‘It called me brother. I felt for a moment as if… as if it knew me.’

‘That is not possible. It was a tabula rasa, Rafen. An empty vessel awaiting commands, not like you or I.’

The Space Marine hesitated. ‘I wish I could be certain of that, lord.’ Rafen’s mood grew dark. The shadows playing at the edges of his thoughts threatened to encroach once again. ‘After what I witnessed today, after the fight and the conduct of our cousins, a foreboding fills me.’ The words spilled out; he had kept the bleak musings to himself since Eritaen, but now he felt a compulsion to voice them, to confess in some fashion to Mephiston. ‘After Arkio’s death and the repatriation of the Spear of Telesto, I had hoped the wounds of the Chapter would heal.’

‘And yours as well,’ added the psyker, reading the thought in his eyes.

He nodded. ‘The traitor Stele tried to sunder us, and almost succeeded. Now the unity of our bloodline is under threat from within as well as without, and we approach the abyss once again. The brink of conflict, of open dissent. What will be next, lord? Civil war?’

Mephiston shook his head. ‘On the grail, I swear to you that will not come to pass, brother-sergeant. Master Dante will not allow it.’

‘But if that is the destiny that the Emperor has for us…’

The Lord of Death turned away, gazing out through one of the windows. ‘Only He knows the answer to that question, lad. And He will make Himself clear with the turning of the worlds.’

Among the crenulated battlements of the fortress-monastery, a single cylindrical minaret stood out among the sharp faces of the towers of rusty stone that reached toward the night sky. Shorter than the rest, the upper tiers were no less impressive. Inlaid with mosaics of ruby and white gold, the decoration was protected from the abrasive storms of Baal by a molecule-thin layer of synthetic diamond. At dawn, the detail would catch the light of the rising red sun, but in the darkness, all that could be seen of them were glitters, fractions of reflection from the lamp-glow of the other towers that clustered about it like a cohort of bodyguards.

The minaret lacked the knife-like tip of its neighbours; instead, it ended in a sphere made of gently curved hex-cut blocks. Around the equator of the vast orb, a ring of oval stained-glass windows looked out in every direction. The dim haze of photonic candles flickered behind them.

The Chapel of the Red Grail was silent within, the brothers who attended it at the evening prayer in the chambers far below. Only the guardians remained, the two machine helots-at-arms in the alcoves at the northern and southern ends of the chamber. Each of them rested down upon one knee, bowing toward the centre of the open space. They were fabricated from metal and ceramite, a thickset approximation of a man-shape cut to resemble an angel at rest. Steel wings of razored feathers were eternally folded at their backs. Their heads were the hollowed-out stone faces of old statues, within them remnants of brain meat and delicate mechanics programmed to ceaselessly watch over the chapel environs. Where men would have had arms, these cyborg slaves had drum-fed bolters, with ornate muzzles and flash guards fashioned in the shape of hands. They were at rest, palms together, as if in prayer.

The mid-level of the chapel was without walls, only a forest of mica-laced granite pillars arranged in arrows to support the upper levels of the spherical construction. Both guardians inclined their heads toward the shallow dais that was the room’s only other feature. Cut from a huge slab of cultured ruby the size of a Rhino troop transporter, the disc-shaped podium glittered with the light spill from the candle rigs. A pillar of faint, blue-white radiance reached down from a concealed null-field emitter hidden in the ceiling; and resting in the grip of that envelope of energy, floating without apparent means of support, was the Red Grail.

In the western alcove, the place of arrival, part of the tessellated floor retreated into itself to allow a rising wave of steps to emerge. Brother Caecus climbed to the top and tasted the blood in the air immediately. He halted and savoured it.

The texture, the invisible aurora of the vitae was rich and heady. A deep, burned copper, it filled his Astartes-strong senses and threatened to make his head swim. His eyes went to the gleaming chalice; there was the cup that had held the blood of his primarch, the contents kept potent by a process of constant exsanguination and exchange. Upon the death of their liege-lord, the sanguinary high priests of the Blood Angels had taken on the holy duty of ensuring that his vitae would never be allowed to perish along with him. His blood kept safe in their very flesh, for ten thousand years the priests had ritually injected and returned the blood of Sanguinius in an endless cycle, bolstering it, never letting it fade.

The Red Grail was the very chalice that had captured the first drops of the primarch’s spilled blood, and it was said that it still retained some untouched elements of that first spilling by some arcane manner of technology lost to the ages. It was no lie to say that a measure of Sanguinius would remain captured in that sacred cup for all eternity.

His hands were trembling as Caecus walked across the chapel. The guardians rose smoothly upon their mechanical legs and turned to face him, opening their hands in a gesture that seemed to offer him greeting; but the black maws in their palms betrayed the truth. Inset about the edge of the chamber were a line of glassy tiles. Anyone who crossed that border without due sanction forfeited their life. The machine-helots would kill him where he stood if he was a transgressor.

But he was Caecus, brother of the priesthood, the great and respected Apothecae Majoris, and in the dim recesses of their conditioned organic brains the guardians recognised him as one whose presence here was not prohibited… only uncommon. A mechanical analogue of mild confusion was shared by the twin angels and they hesitated, exchanging clock cycles to co-process this information, unsure of how to proceed. By the letter of Chapter law, in this place Caecus held rank only second to Brother Corbulo; and yet in decades he had not set foot here, not engaged in any of the blood-transfer rituals. In addition, no such rites were scheduled to take place at this time. The helots chattered at each other in machine code, unable to decide what action to take.

Caecus reached the ruby dais and drew the sampler vial from a pocket in the cuff of his robes. He took a wary step up on to the flat stage and found himself staring into the Red Grail, into the crimson fluid there trembling in rippling rings. This close to the ancient artefact, the dampening effect of the null-field was negligible. The radiant power of the chalice crept over Caecus and made his muscles tighten. In combat, when the Red Grail was brought in Corbulo’s hands to the warriors upon the battlefield, the mere presence of the cup caused men to redouble their efforts. The sheer force of history within this great object touched the threads of the primarch’s legacy in every Blood Angel who gazed upon it. It strengthened them, reminded them of who and what they were.

This enrapture came upon Caecus now, as he gingerly reached out with the vial and siphoned a tiny measure from the contents of the cup. His hands were shaking so much he feared he might drop the glass capsule; but at the same moment he was seized by a powerful will to finish the deed. In a rush, the certainty he had felt at the beginning of his odyssey returned to him, banishing his black and damning mood. I am doing the right thing, he told himself, his teeth baring. Dante will see that. I will show him, I will show them all.

He rocked back and stepped down, basking in the glow of the Red Grail, letting it wash over him. Caecus gripped the vial in his hands, his doubts and fears held at bay. He felt as if he could fight a thousand foes, defeat any challenge–

‘Majoris!’

The voice was strident and harsh. Caecus blinked in the lamplight and saw a figure in half-crimson, half-ebon power armour. Rydae.

The Angel Sanguine took a step from the entrance alcove, drawing the attention of the guardians. ‘I followed you,’ he explained. ‘Your attempt to slip away unseen failed, Caecus.’ Rydae shook his head. ‘Your behaviour is inexcusable. Lord Dante will hear of this.’

Caecus advanced toward the other Space Marine, driven by a sudden anger. ‘You dare to judge me, whelp? You know nothing of my struggles or the calling the primarch granted me!’

‘Nevertheless, you have your orders…’ Rydae broke off, noticing the vial for the first time. ‘What is that?’ Shock entered his voice. ‘In the Angel’s name, what have you taken?’ The Sanguine came forward and grabbed at Caecus’s arm. ‘You cannot–’

The anger churning inside him found sudden release and Caecus backhanded Rydae, slamming his fist into the Space Marine’s helmet. Caught off-guard, the Astartes shifted with the blow toward the ruby dais. ‘You have no right to judge me!’ Caecus bellowed. ‘None of you have the right!’ He struck out again and again, scarring his knuckles on the other warrior’s armour, his blows ringing against the ceramite. Each impact felt stronger, better, more satisfying than the last.

‘Majoris, do not force me to injure you!’ The Angel Sanguine weathered the impacts without fighting back. ‘Stop this at once.’

‘Stop? Stop?’ Caecus’s voice climbed in pitch. He drew strength from the presence of the grail and spat out a laugh. ‘I have come too far to stop now, don’t you understand? I am beyond the point of no return! Nothing must halt me!’

Rydae made an inelegant motion, a broad blow that would have knocked the Apothecary to the floor, but Caecus pivoted and gave the Space Marine a vicious shove, taking the other man’s balance. The captain’s boot scraped backward across the line of glass tiles, bringing the watchful machine-helots to face him. Before he could cry out, the guardians performed their programmed duty. As one, they opened their hands and struck down Rydae with a ripping cascade of bolt fire.

Caecus stumbled away from the discharge, reeling with the stink of new, hot blood amid the chamber’s air of ancient vitae.

CHAPTER TEN

The tolling of the warning bell drew Rafen to the valetudinarium on the atrium tier. He was close, intent on returning to the barracks for the day’s late meal when the sound reached him. It was no battle drill, no surprise practice. No one would dare to do such a thing while the conclave was in residence at the fortress.

He entered and found Brother Corbulo, his white duty robes flecked with a different kind of red than the crimson bands about his shoulders. The fresh stink of Astartes blood set off a tumble of sense-memory, of battles and brethren lost. Rafen dismissed the thoughts and strode forward. ‘Are you injured, lord?’

Corbulo turned his severe countenance toward him. ‘Not this day, Rafen.’ He gave a nod toward a windowed medicae cell. Inside, Apothecaries and serfs worked carefully to remove planes of red and black armour from a torso that lay twisted upon a support frame.

Rafen recognised the armour and the combat honours affixed to it from the first assemblage of the gathering. ‘Rydae?’ The Astartes had been mortally wounded; the cratered impact locations of multiple point-blank bolt shots marred every surface of the wargear. Corbulo gave a grave nod.

The question of how and why was caught in his throat for long seconds, before the tramp of boots announced the arrival of more men drawn by the lowing bell. At their head, the hooded Lord Sentikan came silently into the room and halted with a jerk. Rafen could not see his face, but he heard the thin intake of breath through the Chapter Master’s lips.

‘Explain this to me,’ said the Angel Sanguine. The cold control of his utterance gave Rafen pause.

Corbulo exhaled. ‘An alarm from the Chapel of the Red Grail drew me to investigate, lord. When I arrived, I found Brother-Captain Rydae upon the floor. He had apparently crossed the line of censure and walked directly into the weapons of the gun-servitors protecting the sacred relic.’

‘He would do no such thing,’ Sentikan replied icily. ‘We respect the prohibitions of the Blood Angels! He would not enter the chapel without permission!’

‘To do such a thing without the company of a sanctioned priest is death,’ said Rafen. ‘He would have known that.’

Sentikan shot a look at one of his escorts as the other Space Marine approached. ‘Master, Lord Dante and his Librarian are here. Others are on their way.’ He gestured at the ceiling and the vox-relays in the walls. ‘The bell, sir. They have all heard the bell.’

Belatedly, Corbulo spoke a command phrase into a vox device about his wrist and the tolling ceased. Sentikan pushed past him to glare through the windowed wall of the medicae cell. ‘What are they doing?’ he demanded. For the first time, Rafen heard open anger from the Sanguine Lord.

‘Sentikan,’ Dante entered, his face set in a scowl. ‘I–’

The Angel Sanguine turned about and glared at his fellow master. ‘You will have your Apothecaries cease their work immediately, cousin, or I will tear them limb from limb!’

Dante did not hesitate, and nodded to Corbulo. ‘Do as he says.’

‘Aye, lord.’ The Blood Angel slipped through the iris door and into the chamber.

‘He might still be alive, perhaps in a healing trance,’ began Rafen. ‘They could save his life.’

‘No,’ Mephiston shook his head, his gaze distant. ‘Brother Rydae is gone. His spirit has left his body to join the Great Angel.’

Sentikan took a warning step toward the psyker. ‘If I suspect you are using your witchsight to peer into the flesh of my kinsman, your eyes will be cut from your head, Librarian!’

The snarling rebuke gave Mephiston a moment’s pause. ‘I thought only to see the mirror of his final thoughts. Perhaps, to learn what befell him.’

Dante shook his head and placed a hand on his comrade’s arm. ‘It is not our place to disturb the Sanguine’s dead.’

‘No one touches the flesh of our fallen,’ growled Sentikan. ‘Unless he wishes to join them.’

Rafen glanced back at the body. The hooded faces, the helmets they never removed. For a brief moment, he wondered again what it was that the Angels Sanguine did not want the rest of the galaxy to see of them.

Sentikan spoke once more. ‘I will retire to the battle cruiser Unseen with Rydae’s body. When I return tomorrow, you will have an explanation for my loss, Dante.’

The Master of the Blood Angels nodded. ‘Of course. Cousin, know that I am as shocked by this incident as you are.’

The Angel Sanguine watched him for a moment. ‘But now you will ask me not to speak of this, yes? For fear that it will widen the cracks of dissent among the successors?’

‘Too late for that.’ Dante’s answer never came; another voice offered a scowl in reply instead, as more Astartes forced their way into the atrium tier. The Flesh Tearers had arrived, and any chance of silence on this matter fled before them.

Caecus sensed it the moment the drop-ramp opened, the very instant the frosted air drifted into the cabin of the flyer. The keening engines echoed inside the bartizan, but there was no other sound. No voices, no footsteps.

No Fenn, waiting as he always did, at the foot of the landing pad. Caecus drew his robes in tightly around him and ventured out into the hangar, one hand a tight fist around the precious, precious vial. The Apothecae sniffed at the cold, his breath steaming into a haze of vapour. He paused, rocking on his heels. A mixture of scents sent warning signals through his brain; Caecus detected faint traces of chemical preservatives, of fractionating fluid and battery acids. There were other smells as well. Perhaps cordite. Spent cordite and fresh blood. It was difficult to sift though the jumble of them all.

He walked on, into the corridors of the Vitalis Citadel, wary of every shadowed corner, of the silence that fell each time he stopped and held his breath. The complex had a beat of life to it, the motion and sound of the works taking place within its walls familiar – and in its own way, oddly comforting. There was none of that now, though. The strange, ominous quiet was invasive. Caecus listened to his own shallow breathing to be sure that he hadn’t simply been struck deaf.

At a lectern in the main atrium he tried the machine-call vox, paging Fenn, then the laboratorium, then the general control chambers on the levels above. He waited a quarter hour there, but no one answered him.

A hundred different scenarios for what could have happened reeled through his thoughts. Had Dante activated some sort of failsafe plan after the business in the fighting pit, eradicating everything inside the building in a fit of fury? Was there a containment breach in one of the other laboratoria, something that had caused an immediate lockdown?

The flyer was still out on the pad; he had the opportunity, if he wished to take it. He could leave, return to the fortress-monastery. Admit to what had happened. Take responsibility for it. Caecus glanced at the vial in his hand. ‘But that would be to accept failure.’ He thought of the woman Nyniq. She had said those words to him, and he had reacted with ferocity. Where was that zeal now? He could feel the twin draws upon his will, one toward the dark and melancholy path, the other toward shrill and angry certainty. He knew without doubt that to turn back now would mean death. He had not lied to Rydae when he told him he had gone beyond the point of no return. Caecus held up the capsule and the light of the biolumes shimmered through the fluid within. There. There is my zeal, made manifest.

He threw a last glance over his shoulder. Dante would send men after him, if he had not already. His only hope of redemption lay below his feet, in the heart of the replicae laboratorium.

The bank of brass elevators in the atrium ignored his summons. With care, Caecus took to the spiralling double staircase that ran down the length of the tower, twisting over itself in mimicry of a human genetic helix.

He had only descended a dozen tiers when he heard the noise filter up from below; the clatter of a bolter on full automatic fire, suddenly cut short by a piercing scream.

Lord Seth barged past Mephiston, but the psyker blocked the passage of Brother-Captain Gorn. The lord of the Flesh Tearers walked to the medicae cell and gave it a long look.

Rafen saw Puluo at the entrance and moved to his side. ‘You were supposed to keep him in his quarters.’

The Space Marine hung his head. ‘He is a Chapter Master, lord. Short of putting a gun to him, how could I stop him from exercising his will?’

The sergeant gave a weary nod; Puluo was not to blame, but Seth’s intervention here and now would only make this situation worse.

‘You would have kept this from us?’ Seth demanded of Dante. ‘A Space Marine murdered in this very fortress?’

‘No one has spoken of murder,’ retorted Mephiston. ‘This may be a tragic accident, and no more.’

Seth ignored the interruption and concentrated on the Chapter Master. ‘You would have concealed it, just as you tried to hide the replicae?’ He shook his head. ‘I am disappointed in you more and more, Blood Angel.’

‘I hide nothing,’ Dante retorted. ‘I only seek calm in the face of this terrible incident, so that we can learn the full scope of it.’ He glared at Seth. ‘There are others who will try to turn it to their own ends.’

‘You accuse me?’ said the Flesh Tearer. ‘I see no need to cast blame about! This atrocity took place on your world, Dante. You hold responsibility for it!’

‘You tell me nothing I do not already know,’ came the reply. ‘This will be resolved, have no doubt of it.’ The Chapter Master’s eyes narrowed. ‘But I say that any who seize upon this misfortune to aggrandize themselves cheapen the honour of every Astartes here!’ Sentikan said nothing, watching the two men face off against one another.

Rafen felt a presence at his shoulder and turned to face Mephiston. The psyker spoke in low tones. ‘The magos woman, Nyniq. She killed herself on the hangar deck. The serfs there report that Caecus and Rydae both disappeared in the confusion.’

He frowned. ‘Then Caecus never left for the citadel?’

Mephiston shook his head. ‘A flyer departed the tertiary hanger port in eastern shield wall. Caecus’s signet was given as authority for the launch.’

He killed Rydae and fled? The conclusion leapt to the front of his mind, hard and damning. But to do such a thing would be madness!

The psyker nodded, and Rafen wondered if he was tracing the pattern of his surface thoughts. ‘It is imperative the Apothecae Majoris follows the orders of Commander Dante to the letter, brother-sergeant, and imperative we learn if he had a part in this… Take your squad and go to the Vitalis Citadel. See to it.’

‘As you command,’

‘Wait,’ snapped Seth, stepping closer, catching the end of their conversation. ‘Don’t think you can cloud this, Mephiston! If there is investigation to be done, then it must be known to all of us! It must be transparent.’

‘This is our world, as you pointed out, lord,’ Mephiston noted. ‘As such, it is the responsibility of the Blood Angels to keep watch over it.’

‘That will not be enough,’ Seth insisted, glancing at Sentikan. ‘Don’t you agree?’ The Angel Sanguine did not speak, only nodded once.

‘My men will deal with this,’ insisted Dante.

‘Of course,’ Seth snapped, ‘but they will do it alongside mine.’ He smiled coldly, and threw a gesture toward Captain Gorn. ‘Consider it an offer to share the load.’

He had no weapon but himself. He was a scientist, a combatant in battles of different scope than the brutal cut and thrust of fighting; but Caecus had once been a battle-brother as well. He had fought and shed blood in the name of Sanguinius and the Emperor, on warzone worlds in ork space and a dozen Chaos-blighted hells all across the Ultima Segmentum. He could summon the will to do killing, if it was required of him, but in truth he had not walked a battlefield in many decades.

Still; he was Adeptus Astartes. It was in his meat and marrow to be a warrior, no matter how dulled by inaction the blade of his skills might be.

The sounds drew him in, curiosity taking the lead. Caecus had yet to see a single other inhabitant of the citadel. He had come across strange debris on the stairs and the landings of some of the tiers. A scattering of pict slates, fallen as if dropped in haste; torn pieces of a Chapter serf’s robes; and here, on this level, strewn casings from bolter rounds, the tarnished electrum glittering dully.

He bent and chose one of them at random, sniffing at it. The cordite stink was still strong. This shot had been discharged recently. He rolled it between his fingers. It was a pistol-gauge round, not the kind of shell a gun-servitor would have carried in its ammunition hoppers. Caecus searched a while for bullet impacts or marks from ricochets upon the stone walls, but found none.

He moved gingerly into the tier, edging around the first open door he found. The room was a minor research chamber, dedicated to the classification and fractionation of blood samples. It was one of many set to such a task in the citadel, one more small cog in the turning labour of the Chapter’s study of the gene-flaw. Shattered cubes of armourglass, tiny as pebbles, were gathered at the feet of broken centrifuges. Storage jars and spinner tubes lay open and empty, some with streaks of red within, but most of them drained of their contents.

The blood; all the blood was gone.

Caecus then saw a shape in an untidy heap before a smashed cogitator console. A body. The first sign of life – of death – he had encountered since he returned. Stepping over the tiled flooring, taking care not to place his footing in among the broken glass fragments, the Apothecary sank low, to his haunches. Closer now, and he could see that the corpse was in the robes of a mid-ranking Chapter serf.

Old proficiency came back to him with automatic action. He studied the body, checking for anything that could be a booby trap, perhaps an explosive device with a contact trigger beneath the corpse, or a tripwire. In the course of this he got a good look at the dead man. The epidermis of his face was gone, ripped clean away, and the flesh beneath was pallid like meat boiled too long in the pot. More details became clear. There were what had to be claw marks upon the arms and torso, rents in the cloth of the robes that could only have come from slashing wounds.

But little blood. Very little blood at all, and then only in the lines of drag marks where the corpse had been pulled from the doorway to here, into the centre of the room.

Caecus froze. The centre of the room. What point was there to make a kill, be done with it, and then move it to here, in plain sight?

Trap.

From the deep shadows behind the fractionator columns came a thin thread of red, the targeting laser dancing as it settled upon a point between Caecus’s eyes.

‘Righteousness is our shield,’ intoned a voice. ‘Faith our armour…’ He heard the snap of a safety catch as it released. ‘And what else? Say the words.’

The Apothecae was very careful not to move. ‘Hatred. Hatred is our weapon,’ he said, completing the fragment of the Alchonis Axiom.

At once the targeting beam dropped away. ‘Terra’s bane. I thought you were one of them.’ A figure emerged from the darkness clutching a gun, and Caecus recognised the man, one of the lower-ranked Apothecae Minoris.

‘Brother Leonon?’

The Blood Angel hesitated. ‘Majoris? Majoris, is that you? Forgive me, I did not recognise you…’ He trailed off and gestured to a roughly-applied bandage across his face. ‘My sight was impaired. The glass…’ He indicated the floor. ‘I have not been able to remove all of the fragments from my eyes.’

‘Leonon, what has happened here?’ Caecus straightened, slipping into the mode of seniority he habitually wore in the halls of the citadel. ‘What was that business with the axiom?’

‘They don’t seem to have the intelligence for anything more than a few words,’ he husked. ‘They can look like us from a distance. I had to be certain.’ Leonon shook his head. ‘I saw men kill one another because they were unsure.’

A horrifying awareness was forming in Caecus’s mind, his gut tightening with a sense of revulsion, of self-loathing; and perhaps, of fear. ‘Where are the staff?’

‘All dead, or if not they are isolated and waiting for rescue as I was.’ Leonon blinked owlishly at him with his one good eye. ‘How many men did you bring with you? How did you get past them?’

Caecus ignored the questions and nodded at the dead serf. ‘Who did this?’

The next word from the Blood Angel’s lips made his heart tighten in his chest. ‘Mutants.’ Leonon shook his head. ‘I saw only the one, but there must be several of them. How else could the citadel be silenced so quickly?’

In his mind’s eye, Caecus relived that horrific moment in the arena, when the Bloodchild’s perfectly sculpted form went into flux. He remembered the festoons of teeth, the warped limbs and other aberrations in the failed clones that he had terminated throughout the length of his work. This was far worse than one freak gunned down in front of the Chapter Master. If the iterations in the embryo chambers had suffered some kind of spontaneous mass metamorphosis, there might be dozens of deviant creatures running loose in the complex.

He thought of Fenn and Serpens. Were they already dead, torn apart by maddened clones with no control over their baser natures? He struggled to keep himself in check, fighting the urge to curse in front of the Space Marine. ‘I must continue onward,’ he told Leonon. ‘To the secure tiers. The source of this… concern is there.’

The other Apothecary’s face set grimly. ‘It is a charnel house down there, majoris. Those things are feasting. I heard them.’

‘This is an order!’ he snapped, his temper rising. ‘You will come with me!’ From the corner of his eye, Caecus saw a shadow move slightly, against the glow of the chamber’s biolumes.

Leonon had seen it too, and was turning, bringing up the bolt pistol. The shadow disconnected from the rest of the dimness and crossed the chamber in one quick, loping surge. It moved so fast that Caecus was left with only impressions of it, a sheet of talons and a mouth like a lamprey, eyes red as ruby. Leonon’s gun was cut from him and Caecus saw only the red beam of the laser streaking around and about as it spun away, out into the darkened corridor. The attacker ignored him and ripped across the room, dragging the Apothecae Minoris with it, spinning Leonon about and savagely ripping into the Blood Angel’s flesh. The creature struck in the manner of a sand shark, biting down with its distended jaw and shaking furiously, tearing the flesh to ribbons.

Caecus stumbled after the lost pistol, sickened by the gargling scream of the Space Marine as the mutant crushed his throat and choked him on his own blood. Falling to his knees, he found the weapon on the stone floor. A length of Leonon’s forearm and hand were still connected to the grip, the severed end a stream of red rags. He ripped the detached limb away and took the bolt pistol, taking aim back through the open door. The mutant looked up from the twitching body of the Minoris, face painted crimson with viscera.

Caecus fired, the first round sparking off the tiles, the next shots impacting hard in the torso and abdomen. The creature howled, and it sounded almost like a man.

The pistol made a hollow snapping sound and the mechanism stalled in his grip. The Blood Angel cursed and grabbed the slide with his other hand, working at the breech; the gun was fouled, a bolt cartridge caught upright in the ejector port like a stove pipe.

The blood-rimed fiend did not come for him. It watched, cocking its head. Then, with a sickening lurch, it began to retch, shoulders twitching and rocking. After a moment the creature spat a thick bolus of oily vomit on to the tiles and gave a wheeze.

Caecus heard the jammed shell ring as it flew free and the gun snapped back to the ready. The mutant did not wait. With one hand of grotesquely misshapen talon-fingers, it pierced the chest of Brother Leonon and grabbed him by the cage of his ribs. On coiled, rippling muscles it leapt at the ceiling, clawing open a ventilation duct set into the stone roof. It flowed into the space, compacting itself to fit into the narrow space, dragging Leonon as it went. Caecus heard the Space Marine’s bones fracture and snap, as it pulled the Apothecae Minoris into the vent with such force that his robes were torn away.

Rattling echoes grew fainter and fainter as the thing fled from the room along the shaft, finally becoming silence once again. In the pool of liquid ejecta, objects glittered and Caecus ventured closer, daring to take a look. Amid the glutinous blood-laced bile there were two distorted discs of metal, resembling the caps of fungal growths. The Apothecae nudged one with his finger. It steamed slightly, still warm with the heat of passage through the mutant’s flesh. Caecus had a flash of memory from his service as a battlefield medicae. He had seen the same thing many times when called upon to extract spent rounds from his injured brethren, the distended heads of bullets flattened by impact with dense flesh.

He got back to his feet, checked the pistol once again, and then resumed his passage along the downward spiral.

The thrusters flaring at maximum output, the Thunderhawk plunged toward the ice fields at near-hypersonic velocity, speed bleeding off in a cherry glow about the wings as the transport aircraft entered the terminal phase of its suborbital flight from the fortress-monastery. Through the viewing slits in the hull, the polar zone was a ghost-grey in the washed-out light reflected from Baal Prime. The first moon was high in the sky, its larger sister still low to the horizon, hidden behind the thick bands of dust clouds.

Rafen looked away. He felt more at ease now he was back in his wargear. After everything that had transpired since the return from Eritaen, some part of him had longed for the cool familiarity of his battle armour about his body. Now so sheathed, he felt his confidence strengthen. All the politicking and talk of the conclave was anathema to him; he longed for the simple equations of battle. His armour was an old friend, a comrade. Encased within it, Rafen once more became the red blade of the Emperor, ready to do His bidding.

The vox-bead in his ear chimed and he inclined his head. ‘Speak.’

‘Corvus, lord,’ said the other Space Marine, transmitting from the Thunderhawk’s flight deck. ‘No reply to the cogitator’s interrogation signal. The citadel’s communicants do not answer. Something is amiss.’

Rafen accepted this, musing. When they were closer, they might be able to pick up signals from hand-held short-range vox-units; but then again the Vitalis Citadel was built into a cairn of dense rock, which meant that anyone attempting to communicate from the lower tiers would not be heard at all. ‘Place the summons on auto-repeat, brother. Then return to the drop bay and be ready for deployment.’

‘Should we inform the fortress?’

‘Not yet. Not until we have something definite to report. Lord Dante has enough to occupy him.’

‘Aye, brother-sergeant.’ Corvus’s voice faded away and Rafen became aware of someone standing in the gangway down the middle of the transport’s troop compartment. He shifted in his acceleration couch.

‘Rafen,’ began Captain Gorn, ‘a moment of your time before we arrive at the target.’ The officer had his helmet in the crook of his arm and showed the Blood Angel a mirthless smile. ‘Deploy your men in a staggered twin-tear formation after touchdown, and I will move with Brother-Sergeant Noxx–’

He held up an armoured hand to halt the Flesh Tearer’s speech. ‘Your pardon, lord, but there appears to have been some miscommunication. This sortie is under my command. Lord Dante himself authorised it.’

Gorn bristled. ‘Does a captain’s rank mean nothing to you?’

‘Your rank has no bearing upon this, sir.’ He put a hard emphasis on the honorific. ‘This is Baal. And no mission progresses upon her surface that is not led by a Blood Angel.’ He made a show of glancing around. ‘I appear to be the ranking Astartes of that Chapter here present.’

Irritation tugged at the corner of the captain’s lip, but then he smothered it with another false smile. ‘As you wish. We are your guests, after all. However, perhaps you will accept my tactical counsel, should the situation require it?’

‘Perhaps,’ allowed Rafen. ‘But this is not Eritaen. This is not a combat zone.’ The Thunderhawk shuddered through a thermal and the deck tilted. Gorn was about to offer some rejoinder, but Rafen beat him to the punch. ‘We have entered the landing phase, brother-captain. You should return to your acceleration couch. The air over the pole can be quite changeable.’ As if to underline his point for him, the transport dropped sharply through a pocket of turbulence.

Gorn walked away, back to where Sergeant Noxx and his squad were already strapped in. He leaned close to his men to exchange sullen words with them.

Rafen’s vox chimed once more, this time with a rune on his helmet display indicating a signal on discreet channel. ‘He does not look happy,’ said Turcio. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if Gorn’s men cut from us the moment our boots touch rock.’

‘Respect the rank, if not the warrior, brother,’ he replied. ‘As for the good captain’s happiness, that is an issue I don’t consider to be important.’

Turcio was two racks behind him, likewise sealed into his armour so that no other man would hear their conversation. ‘Why did the master even agree to let them accompany us? They have no business in the citadel.’

Rafen frowned behind his breather grille. ‘Lord Dante has his own troubles to address. We are merely his instruments.’

‘Ave Imperator, then,’ said Turcio.

‘Indeed,’ nodded the sergeant, drawing into his own thoughts as the Thunderhawk drew nearer to their destination.

The closer Caecus came to the replicae laboratorium, the worse it became. At first he found the odd body part, or severed limb whitened through blood loss; pieces of people discarded by their killers, lying on the broad bands of the stone staircase. The debris left behind by a pack of predators.

Then there were the levels he passed without daring to investigate them further. Through the doors that led into their depths there were the occasional sounds of motion, and once a faint, peculiar mewling. At the forty-seventh tier he was forced to constrict nerves in his nostrils because of the death-stink that wafted over him. He paused to listen and heard a lapping sound, removed some distance down a radial corridor. There were no lights down there, but the floor glistened in the spill from the stairwell as if it were slick with wetness.

The bolt pistol only had three more rounds remaining in the magazine. He moved, spiralling, descending.

The heavy pressure doors were open, and beyond the actinic blue lights of the purification antechamber were flickering and buzzing. The guard cages on the walls were open pits in the carved rock, the bands of metal across them twisted away. Pieces of iron and stained brass littered the floor; of the gun-servitors there was nothing else. The floor was sticky and it dragged at Caecus’s sandals as he walked slowly from the stairwell, the bolt pistol in a two-handed grip. The crimson thread of the targeting beam reached out in front of him, fingering the walls.

He hesitated on the threshold, kneading the gun. There could be no turning back now.

Inside, the laboratorium was red. Blood covered every surface. It dripped in places from the ceiling and collected in shallow pools. Caecus felt the odour of it penetrating his flesh, tasted the metallic flavour on his tongue with every breath he took. He was at once sickened by the sight; but there was a fraction of him, a piece of the primal Blood Angel soul that savoured the sinister fragrance that lay thick in the air. The Apothecae recalled the sensation that the Red Grail had briefly instilled in him; this was a sense of the same thing, but less marshalled, more feral.

He blinked, forcing away the dark thoughts, and took stock of the devastation. Everything was wrecked. Every device, every storage cylinder, every servitor and cogitator, all of them torn to pieces as if a hurricane had been contained within the chamber and allowed to expend its fury upon them. Across the length of the laboratorium, he saw that the door to the replicae chamber was hanging open at an angle, the upper hinge torn off by some incredible force. He approached, stepping into the compartment. It was gloomy with inky shadows and Caecus forced his occulobe implant to adjust his vision spectrum. His eyes prickled and a shape became clear: a man of his size and stature.

The tech-lord stood at a console examining a piece of torn meat with casual indifference. He discarded it and turned as Caecus approached, with no more concern than a host welcoming a visitor into his parlour. He inclined his head. ‘Ah, majoris. I’m pleased you came. I confess, I suspected you would falter before this point.’ A smile drew across those misshapen lips. ‘It pleases me I was mistaken.’ His gait seemed different, hunched somehow, as if a great weight were upon his back.

Caecus saw the gestation capsules for the clones, every one of them shattered from the inside, every one of them empty. ‘You did this,’ he husked, the words that had been pressing at his lips emerging in a dry rush.

‘I merely helped the process down a road it was already upon.’ The smile grew a little more. ‘I am sorry to tell you that for all your hard work, you were doomed to fail just as Corax did.’ He chuckled, as if at a private joke. ‘But then Corax was always a fool.’

‘Serpens!’ Caecus snarled his name in accusation, as the other man shrugged off the coat over his shoulders, letting it drop into a heap. ‘I trusted you! What purpose was there to this?’ He blinked. ‘My staff… Leonon… Fenn?’

‘I would be surprised if they were not all dead by now. The Bloodfiends are such brutal and efficient killers, don’t you agree?’ Something moved at his back, clicking and unfolding.

‘Bloodfiend?’

He got an indulgent nod in return. ‘I like that name better.’

Caecus twitched, his self-control cracking beneath the strain. He glanced at the gun, still gripped in his hand, as if he had forgotten it was there. The Apothecae took aim. ‘I will kill you for this!’

‘Don’t you want to know why?’ The man reached his long, bony fingers up to his face and played with the skin there, pulling at it, pinching at the cheekbones and the line of the jaw. ‘You are a scientist, Caecus. Cause and effect, reason and process, these are all things at the cornerstone of your self. Can you really kill me without understanding why this happened?’ There came a tearing noise and parts of the magos’s face peeled away in fatty strips, dropping to the floor where they began to deliquesce. Caecus saw other flesh beneath, tight upon a hard-lined and ancient skull.

‘Speak, then, Serpens!’ he shouted. ‘Confess if you must!’

Another laugh escaped him, the register shifting to a deep, bone-crack dry tonality. ‘I have been Haran Serpens for a time. But he is ill-fitting, tight about my breeches. I tire of him.’ The ripping went on, and the skin flayed itself. A white gale of stringy hair emerged and fell about the man’s shoulders. He took a step closer, so that the flickering lights of the chamber could better illuminate him. ‘Do you know me, Brother Caecus? Think now. I imagine you recall my name.’ Brass splines sighed and extended from behind him, and with a start the Apothecae Majoris realised that what he had thought to be the play of shadows was actually a spidery contraption upon the impostor’s shoulders. ‘I know you and all your kin,’ he continued. ‘I walked the same earth as your primarch. I once looked him in the face.’ He laughed openly. ‘What a poor distillate of his grandeur you are these days. He would be ashamed.’

‘Do not speak of Sanguinius, pretender!’ Caecus gasped. ‘Do not utter his… his name…’ The heat in his blood instantly flashed to ice as recognition crept upon his thoughts. ‘You!’ He felt his gut twist. ‘It cannot be!’

‘Your primarch was always an arrogant one, Blood Angel. You are no different, ten thousand years after Great Horus struck him down like the fool he was.’ The impostor opened his arms wide and a festoon of brass limbs exploded from the monstrous thing upon his back. ‘Do you still not know me?’

The Apothecae fired blind, but the rounds screeched as the spider-legs spun out to deflect the shots. A black, cold pall filled the chamber.

‘Then, please allow me to introduce myself.’ The impostor bowed low, revealing the chattering machine upon him in all its grotesque glory. ‘I am the primogenitor of Chaos Undivided, Master of Pain, Lord of the New Men.’ His voice was thick with mockery and venom. ‘I am Fabius Bile. And you have something that I want.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Astartes disembarked from the troop bay of the Thunderhawk even as the transport was lowering itself to the deck on its landing gear. Blood Angels and Flesh Tearers streamed out of the craft and formed a perimeter. The men with search lamps on their shoulders shone the bright sodium-white beams about the interior of the bartizan, picking out the hard-edged shadows of parked fuel bowsers, cargo crates and resting flyers.

At Rafen’s side, Puluo inclined his head slightly and gave his commander a meaningful look, flaring his nostrils. Behind his helmet, the sergeant caught the scent as well; spilled blood, underscoring everything.

‘I have something here,’ Roan, Sergeant Noxx’s second, called out from the starboard side of the Thunderhawk. Rafen ducked under the wing of the transport, ignoring the ticking and clicking of the cooling fuselage, coming to the Flesh Tearer’s side.

Noxx was already there. ‘What is it?’

Roan turned his shoulder lamp upon the prow of a parked Arvus lighter. The slope-faced cockpit of the craft was wide open, the angular metal frame peeled back where it had been torn open. Jagged pieces of green armourglass lay about it on the decking. In the dimness, the craft’s running lights were soft yellow dots, blinking every few seconds. The glow of the cockpit instruments was also visible.

Rafen led with his bolter, peering down the length of the gun into the ragged hole where the windscreen had been. Inside, there was a mess of shorn mechadendrites lying like slaughtered snakes across the active control console. Oily residue and processor fluids speckled the cockpit walls. Where another craft might have had a command couch, there was nothing but a stubby metal podium ending in pipes that gave off the smell of ozone and human effluent.

‘There should be a pilot-servitor in there,’ said Roan.

‘Yes,’ noted Noxx. ‘There should be.’

Rafen studied the twisted metal frame and ran his gauntlet along it. He found a set of curious indentations that seemed to have no pattern, until he realised they matched the spread of fingers on a human hand. ‘Someone removed the pilot and killed it.’

‘Caecus, perhaps,’ offered Captain Gorn as he approached them. ‘He wanted to ensure no one left after he landed.’

Puluo indicated the ranks of other shuttles. ‘This is not the only aircraft in the hangar.’

‘I imagine we will find them similarly gutted, then.’

Rafen was half-listening, peering hard into the dark corners of the landing bay. His helmet’s optical array set to preysight mode, he searched and found no heat sources save for the thermal exchanger pipes across the walls and ceiling. He returned his vision to normal, noticing from the corner of his eye that Sergeant Noxx had been doing the same.

‘Why would the majoris do such a thing?’ said Puluo. ‘Would he even have the strength?’

Gorn shrugged. ‘He killed an Angel Sanguine. He fled like a coward. He is one of your kindred. Tell me, in your opinion, are those the actions of a brother still rational in mind?’

Across the hangar, in a pool of dull biolume light, a hatch ground open and a figure in hooded Apothecary’s robes entered the chamber. The new arrival approached with steady, careful steps, apparently undeterred by the array of guns that were immediately trained upon him.

The captain of the Flesh Tearers did not wait for Rafen to speak. He rocked off his stance and strode forward, through the line of his men around the Thunderhawk. ‘You,’ he demanded. ‘Halt and be recognised.’ Gorn placed one hand on the hilt of the falchion at his waist, drawing a length of the barbed short sword in order to indicate his willingness to use it.

The figure slowed to a halt and then bowed low.

‘Speak up,’ Gorn demanded. ‘That’s an order.’

‘Brother-Captain!’ warned Rafen.

The Flesh Tearer glared at him across the glossy black ceramite of his shoulder plates. ‘Sergeant–’

In the instant his eyes left the hooded figure, the attack came. It was a blur of action, almost too swift for the Astartes to catch the full motion of it. The robes burst open and a taloned hand of deep red-purple flesh shot forth. Palm flat and fingers in a blade, it extended beyond normal reach and caressed the skin of Gorn’s neck where the Flesh Tearer’s throat was bare.

A gout of crimson fluid arced into the air, steaming in the cold. The captain’s hand’s swept up to clutch at the wound, a strangled cry escaping him; but only for a moment. On the back-stroke the talons twisted and tore into the cut they had just made and opened it wider. Gorn stumbled toward the hooded figure and it leapt upon him, the two of them crashing to the deck.

A ripple of hesitation shot through the men, none of them willing to fire the first shot for fear of hitting Captain Gorn. Noxx bounded forward, his flaying knife hissing from its scabbard.

There was a grinding, crunching noise and Gorn’s head separated from his body, rolling away across the blast plating. Blood spat in pulsing fountains as the hooded killer nuzzled into the stump of the captain’s neck.

Puluo’s heavy bolter sang, the cruciform muzzle flare backlighting the Space Marine. Gorn’s slaughterer was blown backward, the dense rounds ripping cloth and ruddy flesh alike. Incredibly, it skidded about and tried to stand up once more. Skin, talons and bony arches flexed beneath the shredding robes.

‘Movement!’ called Ajir, shouting to be heard over the roar of the support weapon. ‘Above!’

Rafen looked up, to the spaces overhead he had scrutinised only moments ago. Pieces of the roof detached and fell toward them, air snapping through cloaks as they dropped. But there was nothing up there… The preysight showed no heat sources…

He pushed the thought away and bellowed a command. ‘Weapons free!’

Lightning-flash discharges of yellow cordite exhaust flared all about him as a dozen bolters released their force all at once. He heard Corvus and Kayne shouting the Emperor’s reproach at their enemies, adding to the cacophony of the clash.

Ajir fired a three-round burst into something fast and howling. He couldn’t be certain if the bolts found purchase; his attacker did not seem to slow. The mutant ploughed into him with a bone-shaking impact that threw them both against one of the Thunderhawk’s support legs. It pressed into him, shoving Ajir back so he could not bring his bolter to bear, scraping and clawing at his armour as if it wanted to climb inside with him. Eyes red as madness glared from a knotted and deformed head, and a hot slaughterhouse stink of foul breath washed over Ajir, disgusting him. He punched and butted the creature, but it was like striking a piece of leathery meat. No blow he landed seemed to make any difference to the hooting, spitting freak. Ajir tried to twist away as its neck extended grotesquely, jaws running wide to display the barbs of curved canine teeth. It went for the jugular vein on his neck, but Ajir struggled and instead the lamprey mouth bit a twist of skin and meat off his cheek.

Holding him locked in its obscene embrace, the mutant probed into the wound it had just made, sucking at the rush of blood. The Space Marine kicked out and felt a bone break beneath the heel of his armoured boot. The creature spat and drew him tighter, the sinuous limbs distending into forms closer to tentacles than arms.

The rattling snarl of a chainsword came closer and Ajir saw another armoured figure at the edge of his vision. The unmistakable sound of spinning blades meeting bare flesh reached his ears and the mutant howled, suddenly releasing him.

Ajir’s rescuer pressed the weapon into his attacker’s spine and let the weight of his blow do the rest. The matrix of adamantium teeth churned the ruddy flesh into ragged gobbets and pierced the beast’s abdomen, opening it to the air. It fell away with a gargling screech, only hanks of sinew and bared white bone keeping the two halves of the torso together. It shuddered and bled out in surges, still clinging to life.

Swearing, Ajir fumbled for his helmet where it hung upon his belt, cursing himself for being foolish enough to go without it. His comrade came closer, offering him a hand to steady himself. ‘That’ll scar well,’ said Turcio.

Ajir ignored the hand and got up, burning with annoyance.

‘Not even a thank you?’ said the other Blood Angel. ‘Or is it beneath you to show gratitude to a penitent?’

He said nothing and took a step toward the gasping mutant as it tried to drag itself away. Ajir touched his gun barrel to its head and pulled the trigger.

Their attackers moved with a speed that seemed impossible for things of such density and bulk, propelling themselves with the sheer force of oversized bunches of muscles, or clawing from point to point, scrambling over gantries and across the fuselage of parked ships.

Rafen heard a deep wail and spun in place as Noxx came closer, irritably reloading his weapon. The death-cry was from another of the Flesh Tearers; three mutants fell upon him and tore his limbs from his body, retreating into the shadows with their grisly prizes as bolt rounds snapped after them.

‘Warp-cursed things,’ spat the veteran sergeant, ‘they soak up shots like they were rainfall!’

Rafen fired into the dark at a hazy shape, and heard the thud of impacts. The creatures were retreating now, and silence descended, broken only by the moan of injured men and the rattle of spent shells rolling at their feet. With Noxx a step behind, he crossed the deck to where a mess of meat lay strewn over a metre’s length of flooring. The creatures had left little of Captain Gorn behind in their frenzied assault.

He hesitated, a piece of clawed, fractured armour plate at his feet, the saw-tooth sigil of the Flesh Tearers staring up at him. ‘This is no way for an Astartes to perish,’ he said quietly.

‘The Emperor knows his name,’ Noxx offered. ‘I always believed Captain Gorn’s overconfidence would be the death of him.’

The two sergeants exchanged glances, in a rare moment of shared understanding. ‘The beast in the pit. The clone,’ said Rafen. ‘These are the same.’

Noxx shook his head. ‘Not the same. Stronger.’

‘Aye.’ He paused, thinking. ‘They shirked the preysight. They were of a larger mass, but faster with it. How is that possible?’

‘The one we fought, it only mutated at the very end. Perhaps these…’ He gestured at the wet streaks across the decking. ‘Perhaps they have evolved.’

‘It’s the blood,’ Rafen grated, remembering the desperate hunger in the eyes of the creature in the arena. He saw Noxx’s hand drift to his shoulder, where the beast had bitten into him. ‘The more they ingest, the stronger they become.’ He shook his head. ‘The one that killed Gorn… Nothing should be able to withstand the barrage from a heavy bolter.’

‘Like the old legends,’ Noxx’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘The blood-letters, the man-predators. The vampire.’

The ancient curse-word drew a sharp look from the sergeant. ‘These things are malforms. Twisted mutations bred in some vial.’ He looked up as the rest of the men approached, Blood Angel and Flesh Tearer alike. ‘Our mission remains the same. Execute them all.’

‘What about Brother Caecus?’ asked Kayne, absently nursing his bandaged hand. ‘And the rest of the brethren in this place?’

‘The majoris is beyond our reach now.’ Rafen’s face set in a grim mask. ‘Survivors are of a secondary consideration. We all saw what those things can do.’ He cast around. ‘How many of us were there? And how many of them did we kill?’

‘We barely marked them,’ said Turcio.

Puluo nodded. ‘They cannot be allowed to leave the citadel.’

Ajir was fuming. ‘Aye. Those creatures are an offence against our bloodline!’

‘This facility is as broad as it is deep,’ said Roan, turning to Noxx. ‘It will take us days to sweep every tier.’

‘And we have no idea how many of those beasts await us down there, or how quickly they are changing. They fight with tooth and claw now, but how long until they take up guns and flamers?’ Noxx watched Rafen steadily. ‘I believe a more immediate solution is required.’

‘We agree on something at last, then.’ Rafen nodded and beckoned Corvus to him. ‘Brother. You studied the design of this place during the flight here. Where is the citadel’s terminatus chamber?’

‘You intend to obliterate the entire complex?’ asked Turcio. ‘Lord, is that wise?’

‘The Vitalis Citadel is built upon a geothermal vent,’ explained Corvus. ‘A mineral aquifer heated by a magma chamber kilometres below the surface.’ He pointed at the exchanger pipes across the walls. ‘Channelled by the works of the Mechanicus, it provides warmth and power for the whole facility. The terminatus chamber contains a governance system that will disengage the vent’s regulator.’

‘Anything the Mechanicus create, an Astartes can destroy,’ said Rafen. ‘And we are beyond the point of a surgical strike now.’ He looked up. ‘We kill this place, and we kill those monstrous freaks with it.’

None of the assembled men questioned the severe logic of the statement.

Corvus produced his auspex and held it up. On the screen, a wire-frame map showed a skeletal model of the complex’s layout. ‘The terminatus chamber is below us, Lord. Ten tiers down.’

Rafen nodded. ‘Kayne, Turcio. Remain here and guard the Thunderhawk. If you are overrun, get into the sky and stand off. Wait for my recall signal.’

The two Blood Angels saluted. Noxx nodded at a pair of his men. ‘You and you, assist them.’

There was a flurry of activity as the Space Marines took a moment to prepare themselves, reloading their weapons and checking the integrity of their armour. Rafen allowed a long, slow breath to escape his lips.

‘Into the arena once again,’ said Noxx. ‘But a different one this time.’

‘Aye,’ agreed the Blood Angel. ‘There’ll be no reprieves here.’

Caecus had lost sensation in his right arm after he had fended off the fourth – or perhaps it was the fifth? – of the attacks. The useless limb dangled at his side, all purpled meat and white bone protruding from torn and sodden remains of his sleeve. A steady drip of blood fell from his nerveless fingers, dotting the floor as a measure of his passing. He was drawing a line across the heart of the madness, up along the spiralling stairs, down the corridors. He wondered what he would find at the end of it.

Pain made it hard for him to think clearly. Claw wounds covered his body, the cuts both shallow and deep, singing with new jolts of agony each time he took a step. He could feel the fevered work of his Larraman implant as it struggled against the blood loss; it was a battle the Space Marine’s body would eventually lose.

At first, Caecus could not understand why the bastard Fabius had not simply murdered him as he had Fenn, the other Apothecaries, even his servant Nyniq. It came to him in fits and starts as the mutant clone-Marines attacked, drove him out of the laboratorium and back through the reeking halls of the citadel. The Chaos renegade was amused by it. He was watching in some fashion, perhaps through the scrying monitors in the corridors, perhaps through the eyes of the mutants themselves. The creatures did not come at him all at once, and if they had he would have been dead in moments. No, they had chosen to end him slowly, through attrition. At intervals, the Bloodfiends dropped from the dark or thundered into him, cutting and beating, then fleeing into the shadows once again. Without a weapon, he was reduced to fighting barehanded, but they were so very fast and he was slowing with each step, bleeding out, struggling to place one foot in front of the other.

He was dying by inches, and he had nothing to show for it.

‘No!’ The shout escaped him with sudden vehemence. Caecus spat bloody spittle from his bruised lips. ‘I am not done, not as long as I have… I have it…’ His good hand fumbled at the pockets of the matted, sodden robes, looking for the vial that he had carried back from the Chapel of the Red Grail. Dread rising in his gullet, Caecus pulled at the pocket and his hand emerged through a claw-rent torn in the material. ‘Empty…?’ He felt as hollow as the word he spoke. ‘No…’

The glass tube was gone. He turned in place, stumbling backward, searching the floor for it. The pain of the numberless cuts made him list on his thickset feet. The blood. The mingled blood of a hundred centuries of priests and the primarch himself, the raw vitae of his Chapter, lost. Caecus let out a moan, voicing an agony deeper than any other. ‘What have I done?’

He thought he could hear mocking laughter in the distance, faint and scornful. Not lost, then. Taken. Taken by Fabius. Caecus’s good hand reached up to his face and he felt hot tears streaking his bruised cheeks. He stumbled and collapsed.

He awoke with a start, an icy-cold sensation at his throat. Caecus blinked and found himself surrounded by towering shapes in red and black ceramite. There was the hiss of a narthecium injector. The cold rushed into him and some clarity returned to his thoughts. The pain seemed distant and trivial.

‘It’s him,’ said a low voice, close to his ear. ‘The majoris.’

One of the giants bent low. Caecus saw a blurry face. Anger radiated from the dark-haired warrior like heat. ‘Is he alive?’

‘Barely.’ The low voice came again, with hesitation. ‘If we get him back to the Thunderhawk, there’s a chance he might survive. The medicae-servitor on board can induce a sleep of stasis.’

‘Caecus,’ said the angry one. ‘It’s Brother-Sergeant Rafen.’

‘Lord, did you–’

Rafen looked in a direction where Caecus’s head could not turn. ‘I heard what you said. Now step away, Corvus.’

He tried to speak. The first attempt was a thin wheeze. ‘It is much worse than you think,’ he managed, at last. ‘They are loose. The Bloodfiends… The hand of Chaos is behind it.’ Caecus’s breath caught in the words and he coughed up black blood. Something inside him was broken, he could feel it with every laboured breath he took. ‘Fabius Bile. He is here.’

The Blood Angel snatched at his robes and pulled him up. ‘Here?’ he snarled. ‘On the home world?’ Some of the other Space Marines spat reflexively at the mention of the renegade’s name. Rafen’s face darkened as he struggled to control his anger. ‘This is your mistake, you self-absorbed fool! You opened the door to this.’

‘I gave him what he wanted…’ He managed a nod. ‘I will be damned for my hubris. I will be damned…’

Rafen released his grip and the Apothecae fell back against the wall. ‘So you will,’ came the reply. The black maw of a bolter rose to fill his vision. ‘Caecus. In the Chapter’s name, I judge you and find you wanting. You will find no forgiveness in the Emperor’s light.’

‘So be it.’ He managed another breath, a strange kind of calm coming over him as at last he embraced the truth of his failings. ‘I deserve nothing less.’

The gunshot echoed down the corridor, and each battle-brother there turned his face away from the act of justice.

Rafen stood to find Puluo watching him. The Space Marine tapped his chest, over the spot where his progenoid glands were implanted. The tiny knots of flesh contained the complex DNA required for each generation of Blood Angels, and their recovery from the bodies of the fallen ensured new life in the shadow of death.

‘No,’ said Rafen. ‘No harvest for him. Caecus’s crime has tainted him beyond the point of exculpation. No trace shall remain.’ The sergeant gestured to Roan, pointing at the Flesh Tearer’s hand flamer. ‘You. Burn him.’

The gush of ignited promethium billowed and engulfed the corpse. None of them spoke as the majoris’s body was turned into ashes.

Noxx’s dead eyes were hooded, and finally he broke the silence. ‘If an agent of the Ruinous Powers is within these walls, how did our psykers not detect him?’

‘Does that matter now?’ asked Ajir. ‘Every Astartes knows the traitor Fabius Bile. He is ten millennia old. To survive that long, he must have tricks we can only guess at.’

Rafen gave a slow nod of agreement. Once an Adeptus Astartes himself, the warrior who had been Brother Fabius of the Emperor’s Children Legion gave himself to the Chaos Gods during Horus’s insurrection against Terra in the 31st millennium; he turned, along with his primarch Fulgrim and the rest of the III Legion, and embraced the way of the traitor. There were many tales of the man who renamed himself Fabius Bile, self-styled ‘primogenitor’ of the Chaos hordes, all of them sickening and hateful. No longer allied to his former band of corrupted turncoats, he was known to act as a free agent among the arch-enemy, a mercenary offering his knowledge of twisted science to any he chose. Fabius Bile had crossed paths with the Blood Angels on many occasions, but never before had he dared to venture this close to the heart of their Chapter. ‘Nothing has changed,’ said the sergeant. ‘If anything, we now have greater cause to obliterate this place if Bile’s corruption has touched it.’

‘Excise it like a cancer, and kill him into the bargain,’ said Corvus. ‘He must be the cause of the mutants.’ The Space Marine dared to glance at the smouldering corpse. ‘He used Caecus to strike at the Chapter.’

Noxx snorted. ‘And you believe this blackguard will simply stand still and allow us to drown him in boiling floodwaters? If he has not already escaped?’

Kayne shook his head. ‘No ships have left the citadel in days, none save the flyer used by the majoris. There are no other ways out of the complex.’

Corvus held up the auspex. ‘That is not true, brother.’

He showed the display to Rafen, and the sergeant’s eyes widened. ‘A teleportarium?’

‘On this very tier, lord, used for the transit of delicate genetic samples,’ said the Space Marine. He frowned. ‘There are dozens of starships in orbit–’

‘If that traitor whoreson reaches any one of them, his escape is virtually certain!’ Roan shook his head.

‘We need to split the unit,’ said Noxx, his thoughts following the same pattern as those of his Blood Angel counterpart.

‘Agreed,’ Rafen nodded. ‘Corvus, you will join Sergeant Noxx and the Flesh Tearer squad. Guide them to the terminatus chamber and enact the rites of obliteration. The rest of us will locate the teleportarium and render it inoperable.’

Noxx gestured at Roan. ‘Take him with you. I won’t have Mephiston say I left my cousins a man down.’

‘For Sanguinius, then.’

Noxx nodded. ‘In the primarch’s name, aye.’

The mutants walked in a wary train behind him, heads turning in jerks of motion like birds of prey seeking food animals. Some of them lowed and snapped at each other with angry ill-temper. They had fed so much and yet they were still hungry. The primogenitor wondered what it would take to sate that unending appetite. How much blood? How many kills? Part of him was sorrowful he would not be able to stay behind and observe. It was of interest to him, but truth be told, only in a tangential way. He had much more important things to do. Much more important experiments to enact.

Fabius’s long fingers tapped out a rhythm upon the flesh-pouch on his belt, the draw-string bag made from the flayed head-skin of a small girl he had caught, on some hive-world whose name escaped him. Behind the sewn-shut eyes and mouth slit, resting there was the vial that foolish Caecus had delivered to him. The largest of the Bloodfiends, the one that walked at the front of the line, had brought it to him. That one was the farthest along, the most developed. Bile could see the glint of emerging intelligence in its eyes. It was carrying a stolen bolter and bundles of ammunition plundered from the citadel’s weapons store. The clone cradled the weapon in a way that was both unfamiliar and commonplace.

He allowed himself a smile. They were exceptional things, these replicae, almost the equal to the New Men of the primogenitor’s own creation. Such a shame, such a pity that genetic material of rich potential would be wasted. But then, it was in the service of a better cause. The precious vial made all sacrifices worthwhile. The geneforms locked within that undying fluid would advance his great work by decades.

The renegade left the teleportarium’s doors wide open and moved to the command console, pausing only to snap the neck of the servitor waiting there. As an afterthought, he tossed the corpse toward the clones and let them harry it for a while. He worked quickly at the rune-dotted panel, his hands and the brass limbs sprouting from his back at a blur; during this he became aware that the large Bloodfiend, the pack’s ‘alpha’, was sniffing the air and shooting him wary glances. The mutants had shown Fabius an almost instinctual deference, as if they understood on a cellular level that he was in some way their creator. But now they were becoming agitated.

He pressed on; other matters were more crucial, and the time was drawing near. He could sense the slow build of pressure in the back of his skull. The Gate would open soon, and then he would flee this place. The last of his pretence at being Haran Serpens would be removed, and he would truly be himself once more. He longed for the feel of his trusty tools in his hands, his rod and the needler. They were his orb and sceptre, the implements that crowned him Gene-master of the Eye of Terror.

But before he could return, he had to ensure he would not be followed. The first step in that had already been set in motion. He could feel it in the slow chilling of the air. The second step… He was almost done.

Fabius eschewed the rituals of activation and the tiresome litanies of thanks to the Machine-God that the teleporter’s drone-mind demanded. Instead, the chirurgeon upon his back extended a needle-arm and injected a euphoric poison into the mechanism’s braincase, letting it drown in pleasure. So released, he was free to impose a new set of target coordinates and set the matter-energy conversion process to begin accumulating power for a transit.

The humming chains of energy were nearing their peak when the howls of the Bloodfiends turned clamorous and shrill. Through the open doors came a squad of Space Marines, and the renegade laughed at them. ‘What kept you?’ he snorted.

Noxx’s men moved with a swift and predatory competence that was at odds with the manners they had displayed on Eritaen. Corvus kept pace with them, the auspex in his hand, his bolter at the ready.

The Flesh Tearer sergeant disarmed a laser trip-mine array hastily erected about the door to the terminatus chamber and opened the thick hatch.

‘Shouldn’t that doorway have been locked?’ said one of the Flesh Tearers.

Corvus didn’t register the man’s words, his thoughts on the task ahead. He had already drawn the deactivation scripts for the geothermal regulator device, and he strode in beside Noxx, ready to offer them to the citadel’s machine-spirit.

What he saw made him stop dead. The glyphs on the control consoles were shining a hard, uniform crimson. Corvus had barely registered the fact when he sensed a faint tremor through the soles of his boots.

Noxx swore. ‘This is bad.’

Corvus shook his head, his mouth going dry. ‘No, sergeant. This is worse.’

‘Fabius Bile, I name you traitor!’ Rafen spat out the malediction and opened fire, shooting from the hip. Bolt-fire cascaded into the command pulpit and the renegade dived away, through the mass of cables strung from the power vanes that circled the teleport pad like a giant’s coronet.

The Bloodchild clones – no, the Bloodfiends – went wild and attacked, but this time the Astartes were ready for them. With pinpoint barrages of fire, they corralled them, forced them across the humming hex-grid of the chamber floor. Energy crackled all about them.

‘Back!’ shouted Puluo to the men. ‘Stay back!’

Roan was at the front of the group and faltered. Rafen’s eyes widened with shock as he saw a clone, this one larger than the rest, bring up a bolter and return fire. The Flesh Tearer dodged away, skidding across the grid as emerald motes of light began to form in the air. Noxx had been correct; the creatures were evolving. He remembered the Bloodchild they had fought in the arena, the way it had drawn from their fighting styles and learned in seconds. These things were doing the same, quicker and quicker with each confrontation.

‘Where is that traitorous snake?’ demanded Ajir.

Rafen spotted movement across the far side of the teleportarium. He had expected the renegade to be standing among the clones but the opposite was true. Bile was making for another doorway, the claws of his spinal mechanism flailing, ducking low to avoid the rounds that snapped at his heels.

The clones howled and battered at the decking, a lanky and stringy one striking out and snaring Roan about the ankle. Rafen burst from cover, meaning to dive headlong after him, but Puluo swung his heavy bolter and batted the Space Marine back on his haunches. ‘Sir, no!’

The Blood Angel sergeant realised too late what was about to happen. With a crackling, buzzing hum that reached into his marrow, Rafen let out a gasp as viridian light blazed through the chamber. There came a sharp thunderclap of displaced air and suddenly the teleport platform was empty; only wisps of ozone drifted where moments before a host of screeching clones and one Flesh Tearer had stood.

Rafen snarled and bolted across the still-sizzling transport stage. He was halfway across when the renegade threw a cluster of metal eggs toward the workings of the teleporter’s power train. ‘Consider them a gift!’ shouted Fabius, pulling the far hatch shut behind him.

The krak grenades detonated on impact and a flat disc of force flashed out across the chamber. Rafen felt the deck leave him as he was picked up and tossed into the air. The Blood Angel was hurled into a crystalline regulator column that shattered into jagged fragments around him.

The tremors were coming every few seconds now, and at the edge of his hearing Corvus caught the rolling rumble of the boiling floodwaters churning their way through the levels beneath them. At a run, the Astartes vaulted the broad stone steps three at a time, spiralling upwards. The Blood Angel’s world narrowed to the back of Noxx in front of him, the sergeant’s fusion-pack bobbing as they ran to reach the upper levels.

‘Brother-Sergeant Rafen, the destruct process has already begun!’ he called into his vox, his breath coming in chugs of air. ‘Bile got there before us! You must retreat to the Thunderhawk!’

He heard only static over the open channel.

Ignoring the darts of agony that rippled down his body, Rafen dragged himself from the wreckage of the burning teleporter stage and dove through the growing flames. He shouldered open the hatch and pushed inside. Beyond, there was an access gantry that ranged over a forest of power conduits. The companionway travelled for several metres and ended in a sheer ferrocrete wall.

His senses sifted the sensations in the air about him. There was a thickness to the atmosphere here, a sickly tang that felt greasy upon his tongue even through the filters of his helmet. A slime pattern lay about the sheer wall. Rafen pressed his palm to the hard sheet of artificial rock, searching for a hidden door, some sort of concealed exit, but there was nothing, no means of physical escape from the dead-end chamber. He frowned, for the first time sensing the shallow trembling in the walls around him.

In quick succession he ran through the different modes of vision open to an Astartes in power armour – electrochemical, ultraviolet, and infrared. Only when he turned to preysight mode did he catch it, and by reflex the Blood Angel batted at the shape that suddenly appeared in the air. It began to disperse, moving like slow smoke.

Rafen bit back a surge of disgust in his throat. The shape of the ghostly vapour was falling apart, but for a single moment he had seen it intact. It was an image, a crude sketch hovering in the air.

A howling skull-shaped gateway as big as a Space Marine, and between the teeth of its open mouth, a star with eight points.

Mephiston stopped abruptly in the light of the tall window and hissed as a line of pain crossed his face.

‘Kinsman?’ said Dante. ‘What is it?’

The psyker shook his head. ‘Something… I felt it before, but I could not be certain. This time, though… The touch of darkness…’ He swallowed, tasting metal in his mouth.

And then the green flash erupted in the sky high above the central courtyard of the fortress-monastery.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The air was damp, acrid with the smell of metallic salts and sulphur. Ahead of the churning floodwater, gusts of furious steam were being pushed down the corridors of the Vitalis Citadel. The searing, superheated vapour reverted back to droplets where it touched the chilled outer walls of the tower, turning into rains that sluiced over brick and steel. The rumble of the deluge was constant now, the tremors rippling through the decks.

On the Thunderhawk’s drop-ramp, Turcio threw a quick glance down the length of the ship’s troop bay. At the far end, he saw Kayne in stern discussion with the pilot-serf. The transport’s engines were revving, the winglets shuddering as if the craft was desperate to take air and leave the citadel to destroy itself. ‘How much longer can we wait?’ demanded the Astartes.

Kayne looked his way and spoke over the vox. ‘The pilot tells me we may have already tarried too long.’

Turcio grinned wolfishly. ‘I’d prefer a more optimistic estimate.’ He went to say more, but movement at the doors to the landing bay brought him to a ready stance with his bolter at his shoulder. He relaxed an iota when he recognised the figures of Space Marines streaming across the deck. ‘Brother-sergeant?’ he called.

Rafen was at the rear of the pack of men, urging them on. He threw a look over his shoulder and cursed. Turcio spied the first shallow drools of yellowed water sloshing over the threshold and knew that their time was up.

‘Get the men aboard!’ Rafen roared. ‘Forget the ramp, get them in and lift the ship!’ Turcio stood back as a mass of mingled Blood Angel and Flesh Tearer warriors scrambled into the Thunderhawk’s open troop bay. Some of them bore injuries, but not a one of them allowed such trivialities to slow them. The Flesh Tearer sergeant, the veteran Noxx, propelled Brother Corvus ahead of him, and then turned on the lip of the ramp to extend a hand to Rafen. The Blood Angel accepted, and no sooner had Rafen’s boot touched the aircraft than the Thunderhawk’s engines shrieked with the application of new thrust. The floor of the landing bay fell away as the gunship lifted vertically through the bartizan and out into the polar air. Boiling floodstreams laden with debris came up after them, churning in coiled waves at the rising craft’s wings.

Turcio saw it happen through the open hatch. As the pilot-serf pulled them away, the deluge exploded out of the citadel’s flanks and for one brief instant the red tower became a fountainhead; then the frothing, streaming geyser overwhelmed the building’s structure. Beneath a plume of dirty, magma-fuelled water, the Vitalis Citadel was crushed back into the ice-covered mountainside. Hot and cold met in a scream of reaction, sending up a wall of steam and billowing snow.

The concussion rocked the Thunderhawk and sent it tottering toward the spikes of the ice ridges, the pilot-serf making frantic corrections to keep them airborne. The Astartes who had not secured themselves were tossed about the cabin like toys. Turcio hung on grimly, and saw Rafen lend his strength to Noxx to keep him upright. A marked change from their behaviour in the fighting pit, he mused, keeping the observation to himself.

The turbulence eased and the flight became more stable as they accelerated away. The Blood Angel caught a few words from Noxx. ‘We’re short a body. Where is Roan?’

As the hatch finally closed, Rafen detached his helmet and ran a hand through his unkempt hair. ‘He was upon the teleportarium’s stage when it activated. The traitor Fabius used the device to spirit the mutants away before he fled the tower, and Roan was caught among the Bloodfiends.’ He frowned. ‘I regret his loss.’

‘Where did Bile send them?’ demanded Noxx.

‘I have an inkling,’ Rafen returned, his expression grim. He looked at Turcio. ‘Brother. Tell the pilot to push this ship to the very limits, to fly it apart if he has to. No time can be spared. We must get back to the fortress-monastery.’

The teleportation flux tore the air from his lungs in the shattering moment of transition. The Flesh Tearer felt every atom of his body become fluid and ghostly, for one horrible millisecond existing as nothing but a mass of free particles in a sea of seething non-matter; and then suddenly Brother Roan was whole once again, the equilibrium of being restored as quickly as it had been taken.

The shocking transition was not new to him. Roan had taken part in teleport assaults on more than one occasion, but it was not something that he relished. He had seen brothers twisted inside by perturbations in the flux, and worse still the warpings of flesh and ceramite that resulted from an incorrect reintegration, that had to be put down like diseased animals.

His was not to share that fate, however. Fabius Bile was too accomplished a scientist to make an error of that stripe. No, the twisted genetor had led the Astartes to a wholly different manner of perishing.

Roan was barely aware of himself before he realised he was falling. Dark sky and black earth tumbled around him, exchanging places as he fell into the grip of gravity. The citadel’s teleport had sent them to the fortress-monastery, clear across the hemisphere, but not to a point within its walls. Roan, along with the snarling, roaring Bloodfiends, had rematerialised a half-kilometre above the central courtyard. The ground rushed up toward him and the Space Marine picked out the towers of the central block, the dome of the Grand Annex growing closer by the second. Death was spreading its arms wide to welcome him.

About him the mutant clones shuddered and wailed; for a moment Roan grinned, believing that perhaps Bile had made an error, positioning the re-mat point in the wrong place, condemning the Bloodfiends to share his demise. I will die, but so will they.

But that too was snatched away from him when the flesh across the backs of the freaks rippled and split, issuing out great sails of veined skin that caught the air and buoyed them like raptors.

Roan shouted out a curse in the old tribal tongue of his clan, damning the renegade Fabius to suffer death at the teeth of the terrasaurs that roamed the jungles of Cretacia.

He hit the ground and punched a shallow crater into the flagstones with his passing. The clone-beasts, unsteady but swift on their new mutations, dropped down around his corpse, some bending to lap at the puddle of blood and meat Roan had made.

The shuttle bearing Master Sentikan and the body of Brother Rydae back to the Unseen had barely become a glitter in the sky before Lord Seth rounded on Mephiston’s commander once again and reiterated his demands.

‘This conclave of yours is fast becoming a disaster, Dante. You should have come to me first, alone. We could have discussed these matters, found a solution that we could impose together.’

‘I will impose nothing,’ Dante replied firmly. ‘I will ask my kindred to aid me, and trust in them that they will do as the Emperor wills.’

‘And if the Emperor wills that you do not prosper, what then?’

Mephiston fought back the urge to speak; this conversation was not for men of his rank, but only between the masters.

And then came the pain. The touch of darkness. The silent knife of psychic shock being drawn across the surface of his soul. He faltered and heard his lord speak out to him. The Librarian hissed through clenched teeth. Before, in the annex, there had been the smallest of moments when he thought he sensed something, but it had vanished so swiftly that he could not capture it. This time was different. He tasted the brief musk of psi-spoor, sensed the impression of a roaring skull opening its mouth to swallow a man draped in an aura of death, then slamming shut.

Mephiston gathered himself to sift the moment for meaning, just as an emerald glow burst in the sky high overhead. A teleport discharge? He sensed the sudden emergence of new minds, feral and rage-driven.

‘An attack!’ he shouted, with abrupt force. ‘They’re here!’

First Captain Lothan died when the mutants came up from the service ducts beneath his boots.

Argastes looked up to see Mephiston and Dante racing along the corridor toward them, with Seth at their side. Lothan had thrust a bolt pistol into his hand and bid the Chaplain to follow him, to find the Chapter Master and ensure his security. One of Lothan’s men, the honour guard Garyth, told Argastes of the energy-seers that had screamed as they detected the formation of a teleport bubble above the monastery. The elaborate sense-servitors were the fortress’s early warning system, but even their panicked reactions were not fast enough. There were creatures, the battle-brother told him. Creatures like the one from the arena, but dozens of them, and faster with it. Guard posts and serf barracks across the gothic complex had gone silent or reported glimpses of things that moved like Astartes but stank of mad blood-hunger.

But it didn’t seem possible. These things, like the one that Rafen had terminated in the pit, they were mindless flesh-proxies, little more than organic automata. Lethal, aye, but surely without true intellect…

Why then, could they not be caught? Where were they hiding? Argastes could see that Lothan had already asked himself the same questions and drawn the same answers. The beasts moved in hit-and-fade attacks, in battle-rote straight from the Chapter’s indoctrination tapes and the pages of the Codex Astartes. Striking and fleeing, taking kills and, if Garyth was to be believed, feeding upon them. Moments ago, Argastes had spied an eviscerated scroll-servitor heaped in an alcove off the sunward prayer halls. The stark, bloodless pallor of the dead drone’s flesh was not lost on him, and beneath his breath he spoke a verse of warding from the Litany Vermillion.

Ahead of him, Lothan was reaching out to beckon Dante toward him when it happened. The steel gutters over the ducts exploded and beasts that massed too much to fit inside so small a space extruded out and tore into him. The first captain spun about in a welter of blood, and he came apart.

Mephiston felt Brother-Captain Lothan’s mind die along with his body, the impact of it a discordant string amid a chorus of thought. The mutants spilled into the corridor, assaulting the men in Lothan’s squad, clawing and biting and slashing. Gunfire barked loudly inside the echoing companionway as the Lord of Death released a snarl and fell into the melee. He cursed himself for not having his force sword to hand – the Mindblade Vitarus was in his chambers, left behind at Dante’s behest for the duration of the conclave – but still the psyker had weapons in his employ no mere freak of nature could hope to resist. Mephiston released the psionic reservoir of his inner quickening, tasting the might of heroes as it lashed though him. He became fluid, faster than light, striking and tearing at the beasts.

He gathered up Lothan’s fallen chainblade and cut at a mutant with barbed fangs sprouting from all over its flesh. He slashed it down and ended it with cruel, unyielding blows, then went on to another, ripping a sinewy thing with rope-like arms off the Space Marine it was attempting to strangle, killing by cutting it in two.

Mephiston had flashes of the other men in the fight; there, his lord Dante with a rescued bolter in either hand, coldly blasting mutants into wet slurry; Argastes, beating an eyeless, entaloned man-beast with the crest of his crozius arcanum; Seth, choking another clone in the crook of his arm; and others, fighting and dying.

It was over swiftly. The mutants scored their kills and then fled, spattering blood from their wounds and their kills, fleeing in every direction, dragging torn meat behind them. Each moved like it had a purpose – as if, Throne take it, they knew the fortress. Knew it as well as Argastes and his brothers did, where every alcove and place of retreat might be among the kilometres of stone and steel and glass.

More than a hundred Blood Angels, alive and dead, have their DNA expressed within his physiology. Caecus’s pronouncement upon the first replicae returned to him. The clone will be able to assimilate the muscle-recall and genetic memory of each one of them. Argastes shared a look with Mephiston and knew the Lord of Death thought the same thing. The Apothecae Majoris had not lied. These things are more than animals. It is as with the forsaken of the Raven Guard, but now within our Chapter.

He took a moment to moderate his breathing. The attack had been so quick, with such unbridled savagery that it left them reeling.

Dante was speaking into a vox-unit about his wrist. ‘This is the commander, to all posts and barricades. Sound the cloister bell and seal the fortress,’ he ordered. ‘All gates barred, all barriers lowered. Nothing is to be allowed to exit the structure without my mandate.’

Seth had made a kill of his own, and paused in the business of clearing blood and particles of flesh from his tunic. ‘We should be driving those things out, not bottling them up.’

‘I disagree,’ came the growled reply. ‘These creatures cannot be allowed to roam unchecked. They will be corralled and then exterminated.’ Dante’s eyes flashed. ‘I will see to it.’

The Flesh Tearer dropped into a crouch, staring at the corpse of one of the mutants with open fascination. ‘Curious. Such a blood-thirst and precision of brutality. These things are quite the monsters, aren’t they? I would not have thought someone like Brother Caecus capable of creating something like this.’

‘Nor I,’ agreed Dante.

Against his better judgement, Argastes too was drawn to one of the dead beast-men. ‘Only in the hosts of the Death Company have I witnessed such lust for blood, and even then only for the spilling.’

Mephiston nodded slowly. ‘They are driven by the Rage and the Thirst to a degree absolute, Chaplain,’ he said. ‘It is to them what air to breathe is for you and I. These vat-grown freaks are us, stripped bare to the animal beneath the man.’ The psyker spoke with the bleak candour of one who had seen such darkness in himself. ‘We have no choice. We must kill every last one of them.’

‘If blood is what the seek,’ said Seth, ‘then they may strike again to find it. Perhaps in the medicae complex, or elsewhere.’

A cold disquiet crossed Dante’s face. ‘Where is Brother Corbulo?’

There came a lowing toll at that moment, as the great cloister bell began a mournful peal through the halls and corridors of the fortress-monastery.

For the second time in the span of a single day, the sanguinary high priest followed a summons to the Chapel of the Red Grail. Corbulo’s stewardship of the holy artefact demanded that he dedicate his full attention to ensuring its safety; as such, when the cries of the servitors called warning of an imminent attack upon the fortress, the chapel was his first destination. He did not waste time upon thoughts of who or what the attackers could be; Corbulo did not allow himself to dwell on the fact that, in thousands of years, Baal had never been victim to such an invasion. He only turned himself to the defence of the Red Grail.

Gripping his chainsword in his hand, Corbulo took the steps to the chapel. Laser sensors hidden in the eyes of death masks upon the walls fanned him with red light and took his measure, opening the tiled floor above so he might enter.

He emerged and took stock; as always, his eyes were drawn at once to the copper chalice above the ruby dais, hovering in silence. A spark of irrational fear, that he might arrive and find it gone, faded – but only for a moment. Corbulo passed through the stone pillars toward the altar, and it was then he realised that the darkness outside the windows about him was wrong; not the depths of a Baalite night, but black as ink, and shifting. He heard the scrape of claws and drew the chainblade to him, his thumb resting against the activator rune.

There were forms outside, clinging to the marble and stone of the minaret, massing against the glass. With sudden violence, great cracks lanced from floor to ceiling and the ornate panes shattered with a thunderous report. Corbulo’s weapon came up to battle-ready as the mutants, all of them the duplicate of the Bloodchild in its last monstrous moments of life, forced their way inside, yowling and sniffing at the air.

The sanguinary priest felt his gut tighten; all at once, he knew exactly what it was the beasts wanted, and he bellowed out a denial, breaking into a run.

There were only a handful of them; one mutant, the largest of the group, grunted out something – a command, perhaps? – and made for the ruby dais. The others swarmed toward Corbulo, fangs out and talons wide. He met them with the chattering teeth of the chainsword, carving into them, but they were hard to hit, harder to kill.

Ahead, he saw the guardians rising from their rest and opening their hands to the large beast-clone. It was easily the mass of a Space Marine in Terminator armour, perhaps more so. He saw light from the photonic candles blink off a looted ceramite shoulder plate about the monster’s body, a black curve of wargear spattered with colour. The brute threw itself over the line of glass tiles and the guardian fired. Bolt shells thudded home into the dense flesh, but to no apparent effect. The creature reached the gun-servitor and uprooted it from the tiled floor. Metal wings tearing, rounds still discharging, the mutant Bloodchild used the machine-helot like a massive club to knock down its twin.

Corbulo shook off his attackers and raced to the dais, anger fuelling his speed. The mutant’s crooked face showed red-stained teeth and it mounted the platform ahead of him, clawed fingers reaching into the glow of the suspensor field to grab at the relic.

‘No!’ he shouted. ‘Damn you, no!’ The priest lashed out just as the creature’s hand caught the chalice, his hand swiping through empty air.

The mutant swung the Red Grail at Corbulo and struck him across the face with it. Hot blood splashed from the cup across his eyes and nostrils, searing his skin, and the priest was thrown backwards, off the ruby podium, landing hard to skid back across the polished tiles.

Corbulo’s hand crossed his face and came away stained with the potent vitae, the mingled lifeblood of his fellow priests, of him even, in blend with the still-living essence of Sanguinius. The fluid was fiery upon his skin, and the power of it made his head swim.

But the warrior’s reaction became revulsion when the mutant tipped the contents of the cup into its open mouth and drained it to the dregs. Corbulo felt his gut rebel and he retched at the sight of such barbaric desecration.

The creature howled and laughed, laughed just as a man would. With a sudden shock of motion, the figure thickened and grew, muscles bunching and expanding, that ragged slit of a mouth widening to show new buds of teeth. The mutant’s mass increased by half again just from the draught it had taken. It threw back its head and roared, the cry a very definite, very clear word. ‘More!’

With a savage jerk of the wrist, the beast threw the grail away and Corbulo dived after it, scrambling to snatch the empty cup from the air. The Blood Angel caught the holy chalice before it could strike the ground. His hands trembled with fury at bearing witness to such an act in so holy a place as this.

Corbulo whirled about, his chainsword ripping at the air, ready to kill every mutant he could lay his hands upon in answer for their sacrilege; but they were already retreating, fleeing back through the broken window and dropping into the night winds.

Dante strode into the hall and Mephiston walked at his master’s side, entering a room filled with warriors in disagreement and ill humour. Seth came with them, and the Lord of Death noted that for once, the commander of the Flesh Tearers had left some of his usual swagger behind. The lowing of the cloister bell underscored everything; it seemed like only days since Mephiston had been in this chamber, listening to Dante eschew Caecus’s experiments and charging his men to seek out the successors for the conclave. Matters are not unfolding as my lord had wished, that much is certain.

Armis of the Blood Legion was the first to speak. ‘At last! What is the meaning of this? We are roused from the guest chambers and brought here under armed guard… Do you mean to compel us to your side at gunpoint, Dante?’

‘Don’t be so melodramatic, cousin,’ Seth grunted, before the other Chapter Master could answer.

‘Kindred,’ Dante said firmly, ‘the fortress-monastery is under assault by malforms of as-yet unknown number and disposition. You have been brought here for your own protection.’

‘The teleport flash,’ said Orloc. ‘I saw it from the residence tower.’

Daggan’s metal fists rose. ‘What is the nature of the enemy?’

‘It shames me to say, but they are of our creation.’ Dante bit out the words. ‘The clone-Marine that Brother Caecus brought to us… These are more of the same.’

‘They are better,’ Seth broke in. ‘Faster and more lethal than the one culled by Noxx and Rafen.’

‘How did this happen?’ Armis demanded.

‘It appears that Caecus was more industrious than he admitted,’ Seth replied. ‘The Apothecae has broken with his brethren, quite possibly turned from the face of the Emperor into the bargain–’

‘There is no evidence of that!’ Mephiston said hotly, although with less conviction than he would have liked.

Seth went on. ‘These freaks are skulking in ever chamber of this building. They are feeding, cousins. Nourishing themselves on the very blood in our veins.’

‘This is Baal. This is a matter for the Blood Angels to deal with.’ Dante’s cold anger churned behind his flinty eyes, so strong that Mephiston could almost see it spilling into the psychic realm in a hazy red cloud. ‘You will be taken under escort to the flight bay and thence to your shuttles. I will ask all of you to return to your starships in orbit and allow my men to deal with this…infestation.’

Daggan gave a metallic grunt. ‘Is this an insult? You ask us, a gathering of the heroes of Sanguinius, to flee in the face of some mutants?’

‘This is my fault,’ Dante admitted. ‘It is not upon any of you to shoulder that burden, nor shed blood for it.’

‘Agreed,’ said Orloc. ‘But we shall stay and do so anyway, yes?’ He glanced around at the other Masters and gathered nods of the head in return. ‘Baal is yours, Blood Angel, that is without question. But it is the home of our shared liege-lord, and that makes it our heritage as well. As the Venerable Lord Daggan says, to be kept from this might be thought a slur toward us on your part.’

‘We stay,’ repeated Armis.

Mephiston watched the hint of a smile touch his master’s lips. ‘Then you do my Chapter an honour. We will fight side by side, as our primarch would wish.’ Dante turned to his trusted lieutenant. ‘Have a detail of battle-brothers bring armaments for every warrior here, and loads for the Lord Daggan’s cannons.’

‘As you command,’ said the psyker, bowing.

The next words came with casual menace. ‘And summon my armourer. I want my wargear and my weapons.’ Dante’s smile went away. ‘This folly has gone on long enough. We will make an end to it, before the dawn rises.’

The Thunderhawk was on fire as it fell from the sky. The thrusters, pushed to a point beyond their safe limits, began to consume themselves. Sun-hot fusion flame distorted and buckled the engine manifolds, and great black trains of smoke marked the gunship’s downward passage. White sparks of broken metal fell in their wake, like spent tracer.

Within, a hell-light bathed everything. Crimson warning strobes blinked incessantly, although Rafen had swiftly silenced the braying of the alert klaxon in the troop bay. ‘How much longer?’ he shouted.

‘We are on final approach,’ replied Kayne. In order to convince the pilot-serf to take the Thunderhawk on a suicidal suborbital dive, the sergeant had dispatched the youth to the cockpit to provide some encouragement with his bolter. The plan had worked, and their return flight had taken a fraction of the time of their outward sortie; the only problem was the cost. This ship would never fly again; at best, the Techmarines would use it for scrap.

And that is if we can make it the last few kilometres without coming apart in mid-air, Rafen thought grimly. But the Emperor had taken them this far without calling them to His side, and He would not take His favour from them now, not with Mount Seraph and the fortress-monastery in sight.

Noxx had his head bowed and his lips were moving. He was leading his battle-brothers in a prayer, amid the juddering, plummeting flight. Rafen saw the words he spoke and echoed them. ‘We are the Emperor’s Chosen. Hear His great anger in the roar of the bolt pistol. See His almighty fury in the blades of the chainsword. Feel His undying strength in the protection of your armour.’

The simple litany brought him focus. Each word seemed right and true. Back there, in the citadel, Rafen had felt a small sting of doubt in the moments before he passed judgement upon Caecus. The poor fool; the Apothecae’s intent had been pure, even if his methods had not. He shook his head. There could be no forgiveness, now. Caecus had opened the door to corruption though his arrogance and brought disgrace to his Chapter.

Rafen’s gaze went to Noxx once more and he wondered: do all the successors see us as men of that stripe? Superior and wilful, convinced of our rightness even to the point of irresponsibility?

‘Stand by for egress!’ Kayne’s shout was loud.

Rafen bowed his head once more and whispered a final invocation. ‘Lord of Terra, Lord of Baal. Grant me safe landing. Let me take my fury to those who should know it.’

The words had barely left his lips when the Thunderhawk shuddered as if it had been hit by a gigantic hammer, and crashed into the monastery’s great courtyard.

The ship bounced off the flagstones, snapping a trio of pennant masts before landing again, this time so hard that the undercarriage crumpled, the metal skis snapping from the wing roots. Churning out coils of heavy smoke, the craft skidded and lost first one wing, then the other. Reaction fuel gushed out in spurts as the armoured fuselage was punctured. The Thunderhawk shed pieces of itself and flipped on to its port side, slowing as it carved a black streak toward the great statue on the central podium in the middle of the quad. Velocity bled away and it creaked to a halt, sparking, aerofoils twitching in machine-death.

The drop-ramp blew out on explosive bolts and the Space Marines disembarked in a flood of armour. Rafen and Kayne were the last to exit, dropping to the stones. ‘The pilot?’ said the sergeant.

‘Expired,’ said the youth. ‘The strain of the flight was too much for his heart. He died as the aircraft did.’

‘His duty was done. That’s all that matters.’ Rafen looked up at the statue of the primarch Sanguinius towering over their heads, and he gave it a silent nod of thanks.

On the thin, cold desert winds came the mournful sound of a hollow tolling and every warrior stiffened. ‘Cloister bell,’ hissed Corvus. ‘We were right to hasten back.’

‘Those creatures are here,’ said Ajir. ‘I can smell them.’

Rafen looked and found Noxx a short distance away, crouching at the edge of an impact crater. As he watched, he saw the Flesh Tearer spit and then made the sign of the aquila, his men following suit.

‘Roan,’ said Puluo, his face unreadable.

‘Aye,’ nodded Rafen.

Beside him, Kayne’s attention was still on the statue. ‘Lord, do you see that? Something up there… But nothing visible on preysight…’

Rafen spun around, bringing up his bolter, in time to see a flurry of muscled shapes throw themselves from the shoulders of the great stone angel, webs of skin flapping open beneath their arms to slow their fall.

Gunfire erupted around the wreck of the Thunderhawk as a pack of the Bloodfiends attacked. The largest of them, still drunk upon the rich cocktail of vitae it had swallowed in the chapel, hung back and let its smaller brethren take first cut.

Within the collection of animal drives and base impulses that were its mind, the mutant clone was torn by a kind of madness. Chattering meme-voices, fragments of self and old, dead personalities warred with each other. They could only be stopped by the drowning of them in the deluge of stolen lifeblood.

The creature was, like every one of its kind, a shattered mirror reformed in the image of a Blood Angel, but lacking in any of the qualities that could be thought of as human. If it had a soul, a spirit, then that too was a broken and distorted thing. Given hundreds of years of test and study, of careful experimentation and practice, the replicae might have become something akin to a man; instead, the mutations that cursed them had been accelerated by the machinations of Fabius Bile, and with each drop of bright blood they consumed, the thirst that dominated the Bloodfiends grew stronger. The pack alpha perched upon a piece of wreckage and sniffed at the air. It could smell the coppery scent on the wind. Not the commonplace blood that spilled now about its feet, torn from the veins of the Space Marines, but something more, like the fluid from the grail but much, much more potent.

It would seek it out. Consume it; and perhaps, in the taking, finally silence the madness.

‘They will seek it out…’ Mephiston froze, his armour suddenly tight around him, his crystalline sword in his hands.

‘Lord?’ At his side, the honour guard shot him a questioning look.

The psyker hesitated in the corridor beyond the great hall, the faint light of the burning Thunderhawk catching his dark eyes through the arched windows. The strength of the feral animal-thought was so sudden, so strong that it caught him unawares. It was there and then gone, a flash of lightning on a stygian night. He blinked and refocused, seeing Corbulo racing toward him. The sanguinary priest had a drawstring bag of heavy leather clutched to him and his chainsword in the other hand. Blood stained the edge of the blade and Corbulo’s robes. Mephiston’s battle-brother was marked with contusions across his face, but he didn’t seem aware of them. Instead, he bore an expression of mingled distaste and horror.

‘Librarian!’ Corbulo gasped, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I have… What I have just seen sickens me! Those beasts, they invaded the chapel!’

‘Yes,’ Mephiston tried to hold on to the fleeting though-pattern of the Bloodfiend, but it was like mercury, breaking apart, slipping away. He saw images; the chapel, the Red Grail. He sensed the echo of sensation; the deep taste of old, old blood, blunt iron upon torn flesh. ‘It took the draught. All of it…’

Corbulo nodded, shamefaced. ‘I could not stop them.’

‘It won’t be enough,’ said the psyker, as the brief spark of contact finally guttered out and died. ‘They want more. By the Throne, brother, they want it all.’

‘They can’t bleed every one of us!’ snarled the priest.

Mephiston’s face became stony as an understanding came upon him. He whirled about, his crimson cloak flaring open, and raced back into the chamber.

Lord Dante turned at the sound of his name. His eyes narrowed. He had seen the Lord of Death in many aspects, from warrior to scholar, but never with the face he saw now. Revulsion, pure and unadulterated, was etched upon him. ‘Brother, what is it?’ He halted in mid-dress, the golden vambrace on his armour still hanging open.

‘Infamy!’ shouted the psyker. ‘Atrocity and desecration, master! They must be stopped!’

‘It is the witchsight,’ said Orloc, nodding grimly. ‘What have you seen?’

Mephiston halted, all eyes upon him, and made a visible effort to control himself. ‘The creatures… The Bloodfiends… They penetrated the Chapel of the Red Grail, took the vitae of the chalice!’

A surge of shock went through everyone in the room. Dante heard Daggan crackle out a curse.

‘The blood,’ said Seth, the colour draining from his face. ‘Throne and damnation… They went for the blood of the grail!’

‘And they want more,’ husked Corbulo. ‘They are feeding off it, enhancing themselves with every mouthful. I saw it with my own eyes.’

The psyker nodded. ‘The Red Grail won’t be enough. Now they have the taste of it.’

Seth’s eyes searched Mephiston’s, then turned to meet Dante’s gaze. ‘If this is so… Then there can be only one place to which they will be drawn.’

‘The Sarcophagus,’ Dante’s voice was a whisper in the sudden stillness of the hall. ‘The flesh of the primarch himself. If they absorb that, they will be unstoppable.’

To consider such a thing was a horror, an offence of such dimension that not one of the Astartes spoke; it fell to the Master of the Blood Angels to break the silence.

He turned to Corbulo. ‘Brother,’ he began, ‘contact Lord Sentikan aboard the battle cruiser Unseen. Disclose to him the scope of this… outrage. Relay this request.’ Dante sighed. ‘Tell Sentikan that he has authority to stand as acting commander of all warships in Baal orbit.’ None of the other Chapter Masters showed any signs of disagreement, all of them certain of the seriousness of this moment, and of what Dante was about to say next. ‘Tell him to have lance cannons trained upon the planet, to this location. If we fail to stop these creatures, Mount Seraph is to be destroyed. We will not suffer abominations to live.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Light came upon the silent cadre of warriors in a slow wave as they entered the ossuary antechamber, biolume floaterglobes rising from their cradles to cast colour and shadow about the hall. A pathway made of iron crossed from one side to another, narrowing as it did to the width of two battle-brothers shoulder to shoulder. Every other surface was dull white with bone. Hundreds of skulls stared sightlessly out from the walls and the ceiling, some of them unadorned, others whorled with etchings of devotional script or illuminated pictographs. The bones of the chosen few were of men whose deeds were of such magnitude they were allowed to be interred so close to the body of their primarch. These dead had not just been heroes, for all Astartes were heroes; they were men of singular courage, soldier-saints of vision and utmost purity.

Dante, the light glittering off the polished gold of his wargear, was at the head of the group, and for an instant his gaze dropped to one single skull, low down among the others. He knew where it lay, because it was his hands that had put it there. Kadeus, the Chapter Master who had ruled before Dante, a mentor and a friend, long dead now but still watching over him. He wondered what advice the old warrior would have had to offer him if he were alive at this moment. Every Master was here in this room, from the brothers who had been granted the fortune of walking in Sanguinius’s shadow, to the men who had led his Legion through ten millennia of ceaseless galactic war. Dante hoped that he too might one day be laid to rest among them, but for the first time he wondered if that fate might not be open to him.

If we fail, Sentikan will follow his orders to the letter. He looked around. All of this… It will become vapour and ashes.

Dante stiffened as he approached the massive circular door at the far end of the antechamber, dismissing the thought with action. He twisted the wrist of his golden gauntlet and removed the glove. In the middle of the door was a fist-sized hole, and the Blood Angel thrust his hand into it. With a sharp clank, metal pins stabbed out from the door’s inner mechanism and clamped his forearm tightly in place.

‘I am Dante,’ he said to the air. ‘In Sanguinius’s name, know me.’

A cowl of thick needles coiled around his bared flesh and sank to the hilt, penetrating his veins and deep to the marrow in his bones. Arcane gene-sense technologies tasted him and considered for long moments, before snapping away, releasing the master’s arm. He wiped away a stray droplet of blood and replaced his gauntlet. ‘Open the doors,’ he commanded, and so they did.

Mephiston followed his master into the sepulchre with a reticence he had thought himself incapable of. At the edges of his thoughts, the psyker felt a distant pressure upon his telepathic sense, like a faraway storm. As the antechamber’s cogwheel gate rolled away into the walls, so did two others at equidistant points around the circular shrine, the priest’s door and the penitent’s door. Overhead, the walls vanished toward a curved roof covered with elaborate frescoes that showed spacescapes and the arc of the galactic arm. Picked out in clusters of gemstones and precious metals were the locations of Terra, Ophelia, Sabien, Signus and dozens other significant systems from the Chapter’s history, arranged as if glimpsed from the surface of Baal on a clear night. But there had not been a clear night on Baal since the War of the Burning that scourged the planet with nuclear fire; and the surface was high above them, through layers of rock and countless tiers of the fortress-monastery.

Free-standing ramparts taller than a Dreadnought ringed the centre of the space, set out at regular distances. The middle of the chamber was an open pit, in cross-section an inverted cone. From where he stood. Mephiston could see the ramp that dropped away, following the walls downward in a spiral walkway leading to the very bottom, and to the great and holy resting place.

The other Astartes filed in around him, sharing his silence, his reverence for this place. All of them looked to the dark pool of shadow that was the vast opening, all of them knowing what lay down there, untouched and forever preserved. As one, without command or gesture, each warrior bowed their heads and sank to one knee, making the sign of the aquila across their chests.

When they rose again, Mephiston found Dante looking at him. ‘Speak, my friend,’ said the Chapter Master. His words were quiet, in respect for the place in which they stood. ‘Say what is on your mind.’

Mephiston glanced down at the force sword sheathed at his belt, his hand suspended over the weapon’s hilt. ‘This is a place of veneration, lord. Yet we cheapen it by bringing blades and guns into its environs. What does that say of us?’

Dante placed a hand on his comrade’s shoulder. ‘Battle is our church as much as any stone-built cathedral, kinsman. Our faith is dust unless we are willing to kill for it. And die for it.’ The Chapter Master nodded toward the pit. ‘He knew that. And he will forgive us this trespass.’

Brother Corbulo led them down through the corridors, along the great tunnels and passageways with the screams and hoots of the Bloodfiends as their constant companions. The beasts were following them, of that Rafen was certain.

The sanguinary high priest had gathered them from the courtyard as the mutants fell back to regroup, explaining on the way what had transpired in the fortress. Rafen listened, aghast, as Corbulo told him of the confrontation in the Chapel of the Red Grail, of Lord Dante’s orders to Sentikan and the massing of the men inside the holy walls of the great sepulchre.

At that, the muscles in Rafen’s legs stiffened and he halted clumsily. ‘I… We cannot enter that place, priest.’ He cast around at his own men, at Noxx and the squad of Flesh Tearers. ‘We are unworthy.’

Corbulo fixed him with a hard glare. ‘Don’t be a fool, lad. Have you learned nothing in recent days? We face a threat unlike any other, and if to fight it we must bend rules and ancient doctrine, then that we will do.’ He gave a grim smile. ‘Once it is done and all is well once again, we shall ask the Emperor’s forgiveness. He will grant it if we do not fail him, I have no doubt.’ Corbulo turned to Turcio, looking at his penitent brand. ‘Dogma cannot oppose the realities of battle, it can only form a framework for the fight.’

‘Unusual to hear a blood priest say such a thing,’ said Noxx.

Corbulo gave a weary nod. ‘We are all of us learning many lessons this day.’

As difficult as it was to put the greater meaning of the place behind him, Rafen and the other line Astartes did so, following Corbulo through the antechamber and, at last, into the sepulchre. They paused to kneel and show deference before stepping forward once more. The sergeant saw the mix of men from every successor at the conclave, all of them handling their guns and swords with care, as if they feared to make too much sound and disturb the worshipful air about them. Noxx gathered the survivors from his squad and marched to his master’s side, and for a moment Rafen thought he saw a flash of genuine empathy on Lord Seth’s face at the return of his warrior and the absence of Brother-Captain Gorn. Scattered around, the men of the other Chapters were in similarly close-knit groups, speaking quietly of what was to come.

A figure in hard planes of gold emerged and came to them. Rafen bowed his head to his Chapter Master; even in the dim light of the sepulchre, Dante cut an impressive figure in the shining artificer armour. In respect for where they stood, the commander went without his combat helmet; fashioned in the image of the primarch’s death mask, to wear it in this place seemed unmannerly. He rested one hand upon the butt of his Inferno pistol, casting a measuring gaze over the Space Marines. ‘Was your mission a success, brother-sergeant?’ Argastes and Mephiston approached in his wake, watching for Rafen’s answer.

Rafen met his master’s eyes. ‘The Vitalis Citadel is no more, lord. In its destruction, all trace of the replicae laboratorium was obliterated.’

‘A high cost. And what of Brother Caecus?’

‘Dead by my hand.’

Dante’s eyes narrowed. ‘Why?’

Rafen frowned, framing his reply. ‘Chaos, lord. The hand of the Ruinous Powers was corrupting his work, although it was only in the end he saw it. He accepted my judgement without question.’

At the Chapter Master’s side, Mephiston’s lip curled. ‘I knew it! The moment in the annex, and again in the halls… I sensed something unhallowed, too fast to be seen in the light of reason.’ He showed his teeth. ‘These clones, these Bloodfiends. They are tainted by the touch of the warp.’

‘Aye,’ agreed Rafen. ‘Caecus’s works were fouled by an agent of the arch-enemy. The renegade Fabius Bile. It disgraces me that I could not kill him before he vanished.’

‘Fabius dared to set foot on our soil?’ For an instant, Rafen sensed that Dante was on the verge of open fury, the same heartsick anger that he had felt on confronting the twisted primogenitor; then the warlord’s expression became icy. ‘He sent the Bloodfiends here. To sow anarchy and disorder throughout the fortress. To divide us at the very moment when unity is needed.’

‘A gate to the Eye of Terror opened, a warp tunnel forced through our spirit-wards and defences.’ hissed Mephiston. ‘Yes, it is clear to me now. He fled Baal and left this disorder in his wake.’

Dante nodded once, and again turned his iron-hard gaze on Rafen. ‘I will have a full accounting of things from you in due time, brother-sergeant. But for the moment, other issues press us to their resolution.’

‘What would you have us do, master?’ Rafen said stiffly.

‘Fight,’ Dante growled. ‘Fight until the Emperor claims you. The mutants are coming here, drawn to the scent of the greatest blood as moths to a flame. We know this. We set the line here, and kill them as they come.’

‘Lord,’ ventured Argastes, musing. ‘If we could obliterate these aberrants swiftly… Perhaps, we should employ one of the archeotech weapons in the armourarium–’

‘The Spear of Telesto?’ The name escaped Rafen’s lips and he glanced at Mephiston.

The psyker shook his head. ‘The Spear would not end these brutes, brother. Its brilliant fires are gene-locked by some manner of science from the Dark Age of Technology. Any Blood Angel who falls beneath it emerges untouched.’

‘And the Bloodfiends are alike to us on a genetic level,’ Argastes frowned, understanding. ‘The flames would be turned from them.’

Dante nodded again. ‘It will be force of arms, the will of the Sons of Sanguinius that turn this battle, not other powers. The fortress is sealed, brothers. There will be no reinforcements, no more men for these creatures to prey upon and bolster themselves. We alone will break them. We must.’ He glanced around at the mix of crimson armours. ‘This is something only we can do. To prove the truth.’

‘What truth?’ said Corbulo tersely, forgetting himself for a moment as dejection clouded his face. ‘That we are being driven to the brink of extinction?’

The Chapter Master turned on him, his eyes flashing. ‘That we are worthy, brother! That is what we must affirm! To ourselves, as well as our successors, even to Sanguinius and the Emperor!’ He drew in a breath, raising his chin. ‘In this place and this time, this ordeal, my brothers, it is the price that we are paying for our arrogance.’ He glared at Rafen and the Blood Angel felt a moment of connection to his commander. ‘Look at what has befallen us. The machinations of Chaos, first through the ordos traitor Stele and his puppetry of good, loyal men; men whose failing was to be prideful to the point of blindness. The deaths at Sabien and the diminishment of our numbers. And now this, these twisted, freakish mirrors of our baser natures, given flesh and let loose in our most sacred places. What is the root, kinsmen? What sin opened the doorway to these attacks upon the very soul of our Chapter?’ Dante’s temper was rising, his face darkening. ‘Conceit! And we can lay the blame nowhere but at our own feet!’ He shook his head. ‘My cousin Seth did not lie. We have allowed ourselves to become arrogant. To rest upon our laurels as the First Founding, to believe that the name Blood Angel is protection enough!’ Dante’s voice fell. ‘We reflect our liege-lord in so many ways, but we have allowed one of his greatest traits to run thin in us.’

‘Humility,’ whispered Rafen.

‘Just so,’ said his commander. ‘And perhaps this is the way the Emperor seeks to remind us. By pitting us against the beasts cut from the cloth of our own folly.’ He turned and stalked away toward the great pit, drawing his Inferno pistol.

Dante drew himself up to his full height and held his gun in the air, a sullen glow playing around the barrel of the master-crafted weapon. All heads turned to give him their attention.

‘Sons of Sanguinius! Heed me. We make our stand here, on the cusp of the sepulchre, in sight of the Emperor of Mankind and in the aura of our primarch.’ He pointed down into the open chasm. ‘The Great Angel lies below us, sleeping in light, forever preserved. The beasts that come to savage his memory are as nothing we have fought before. Not daemons, not xenos, but a malform that shares our strengths, our will, and more than that, a dark and animal heart. Make no mistake; this will be a hard-fought battle. Some of us will not see daylight again; but know that if you die, it will be at Sanguinius’s side, and he will spread his wings to carry you to the Emperor’s right hand.’ Dante fell silent for a moment, and in the quiet, the sounds of the enemy reached down the stone corridors to the assembled men, growing closer by the moment.

‘These past days we have been consumed by words. Dissent and divisiveness have cast long shadows over this conclave, and to my chagrin not one moment of this has gone as I planned it.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘But then, as our staid comrades in the Ultramarines always say, no battle plan ever survives first contact.’ The smile faded. ‘The time for words is over, kindred. Now our deeds must carry the day.’

Daggan’s scratchy vox-coder crackled. ‘For Sanguinius.’

‘For the Emperor,’ added Orloc.

Armis nodded. ‘For the future.’

Dante gestured towards the three doorways. ‘The Bloodfiends are on their way. Our reports on their numbers vary, but I suspect half-company strength, perhaps more. With each door to the sepulchre open, we will force them to divide their approach.’ He glanced at the Dreadnought. ‘Lord Daggan? I ask you to take command of the men defending the penitent gate.’

‘I offer the arms of the Blood Drinkers for the priest gate,’ said Orloc.

Armis nodded again. ‘If the Lord Orloc will accept, my men will join his.’

‘Gladly. And I will offer the Angels Encarmine a place at my side, if they will take it.’ Orloc got a silent nod in return from the Master of the other Chapter.

‘Lord Seth,’ said Dante. ‘Will you stand with the Blood Angels at the great gate?’

‘Never let it be said that Cretacia’s Finest refused a fight,’ hissed the Flesh Tearer.

Rafen watched the groups of Astartes form up; the Blood Swords joined by the Angels Vermillion and the Flesh Eaters; the Red Wings, Angels Encarmine and the Blood Legion coming together in a moment of shared battle-prayer; and other squads from the rest of the successor Chapters forming into combat squads, bolters and blades at the ready. For each cousin-warrior, there were Blood Angel battle-brothers to stand with them, but once again, as he was in the Grand Annex on the first day of the gathering, Rafen was struck not by the differences in armour and livery, but by the similarity between the warriors. ‘We are all one cadre now,’ he said aloud.

Rafen’s gaze went to each of his men in turn. ‘Brothers,’ he began, ‘This one will test us hard, make no mistake about it. We are fighting ghosts in a hall of priceless mirrors.’

Puluo hefted his bolter cannon. ‘Ready,’ he said simply.

Corvus forced a smile. ‘Of course we are.’ He nodded at the youngest of their group, whose hand was still swaddled in a bioplastic bandage. ‘Look at Kayne, here. He’s fighting with his off-grip just to give the mutants a fair chance.’

The youth snorted with gallows humour. ‘I only need one hand to make a kill.’

Turcio was looking at the other Space Marines. ‘Where is Lord Sentikan?’

Ajir jerked his thumb toward the ceiling. ‘In orbit, behind the guns of his starship.’

‘He has a different task to attend to,’ said Rafen, shooting Ajir a warning look. ‘Let us pray we do ours well enough that he need not perform it. We will take to the line, and hold fast–’

‘You will not,’ said Mephiston without preamble, striding into the middle of the group with Brother Argastes at his side. The Chaplain’s black wargear shimmered in the gloom, in stark contrast to the blood-coloured armour of the psyker. Rafen caught the play of faint electric blue sparks around the Lord of Death’s towering psychic hood. ‘Our Master Dante has charged me with a singular duty and I need men of courage to assist me.’

‘We are yours to command,’ Rafen said, without hesitation.

Mephiston beckoned the Blood Angels with an armoured hand. ‘Follow me.’

As one, Rafen’s unit fell in and made formation to do as they were ordered; but they had only taken a few steps when the brother-sergeant was compelled to speak. ‘My Lord?’ Mephiston was leading them toward the pit, toward an arch of spun electrum and gold that marked the start of the spiral ramp leading down toward the heart of the sepulchre. ‘We cannot venture…’

The psyker halted and scanned the faces of the men. Rafen felt his penetrating gaze weighing each of them as if they were handfuls of sand in his grip. ‘Our orders are to stand as bulwark to the Golden Sarcophagus, brother-sergeant. If need be, to places our backs to it and defend it with tooth and nail.’ He glared at the Blood Angel. ‘You would refuse? Do you think your men unworthy, or incapable of executing that edict?’

Rafen heard the rush of blood sing in his ears. ‘It will be our singular pride to give our lives in service to this command.’

Mephiston grunted. ‘Let us hope it does not come to that.’

Dante sighted down the barrel of his pistol. The weight of the ornate weapon felt right and proper in his hands. It seemed too long since he had used it in anger. The demands of authority have kept me away from the field of battle.

Seth was watching him, a plasma gun ready at his side. The screeching of the Bloodfiends was loud now. The mutant horde could only be moments away from them. ‘Are you prepared for this, cousin?’ asked the Flesh Tearer.

‘Nothing could prepare for this,’ said Dante. ‘We can only meet the enemy as they come.’

‘I hope you’re up to it.’

Annoyance flared in the Blood Angel’s eyes. ‘And still you test me, Seth. Even now, as battle is about to break upon us, you still seek to goad me. What do you hope to achieve? Answer me that!’

Seth sniffed. ‘For all your years and wisdom, you still do not know me or my brethren…’

‘I know this! You deliberately challenge me at every turn; you oppose every word that falls from my lips as if it were your sole reason for living!’ Dante fumed. ‘You foster discord, Seth. You thrive upon it!’

The Flesh Tearer smiled. ‘I stand corrected. You do understand my kind after all. You’ve cut to the heart of me.’ His head bobbed. ‘We are disorder, that is true. But that is what we were made to be. The wild and the random.’ Seth’s voice was gravelly. ‘If each successor embodies traits of the Great Angel, then that is what the Flesh Tearers are, just as the Blood Swords are his martial prowess, the Sanguine his secrecy, the Flesh Eaters his carnivore’s fangs!’ He laughed in a short, harsh bark. ‘But the Blood Angels are the melding of all those things, and that is why I will always envy you, cousin. I challenge you because I must. How else can you be sure that you remain upon the primarch’s path?’

The Chapter Master felt a feral grin tighten his lips. ‘And so you justify yourself? You are my watchman, is that it?’

‘We are all our brother’s keepers, Dante. The Emperor created us to be so.’

A cry came up from one of the Angels Vermillion; the mutants were in the corridors, boiling toward the sepulchre in a frenzied flood.

The Master of the Blood Angels took aim. ‘When we are done here, you and I will speak more of this.’

‘I do not doubt it,’ Seth allowed, the inductor coils atop his weapon glowing blue-white with power.

The Bloodfiends descended upon the vast, circular chamber in a storm of talons and fire. The blunt jags of development coursing through them pushed the mutants toward rough cunning and base intellect; for every two that attacked with claws or teeth or club-like fist, there was one with a looted weapon and the innate skill to use it. The clones carried the formation of an omophagea organ in the structure of their flesh. Almost identical to the function of the implant in the bodies of the Space Marines, the complex knots of nerve-sheath and organic bioprocessor keyed to viable elements of genetic memory in any ingested matter. The blood they consumed, still warm and raw from men drained dry, awakened locked muscle-recall and conditioned responses. The more they fed, the more they became.

But it also opened doors to fractured pieces of self, caught by the vagaries of evolution. Fragments of memories from the hundred-fold donors whose DNA formed Caecus’s zygote code emerged, conflicting, strident and unstoppable. The thirst of the Bloodfiends drove them to consume; but in that act they only intensified the insanity that churned inside them.

The first wave of them broke through all three gates at once, each torrent of ruddy flesh meeting bolter fire and energy beams. They could smell the great bounty lying just beyond the antechambers, and it maddened them beyond the point of self-preservation.

The beast that Corbulo faced inside the chapel was the oldest of them, if such a concept applied to beings force-grown in synthetic wombs, the furthest along through the tortuous process of its awakening. The pack alpha tried to form words, but they escaped it. Frustration heaped upon the anger that burned within it. The killing rage grew ever stronger, the lust for blood and directionless hate a wave that carried them forward.

Daggan spun in place, his drum-shaped arms slamming into a Bloodfiend’s torso, the mutant’s chest distending with the impact. The Dreadnought registered the hit, the power of which would have crippled an Astartes. These things were dense, though, as large as Terminators but as fast as a fleet-footed Scout. The Master of the Blood Swords discharged the assault cannon on his right arm and blew the clone off it, the point-blank impact tearing it apart.

His sensor suite registered one of the Flesh Eaters in the heavy, slow armour of a veteran assault warrior. A guttural cry escaped the Astartes as he was torn from his wargear by a cluster of Bloodfiends. His helm in pieces, the Flesh Eater was ripped out in rags through the neck of his black torso armour. Daggan granted him the Emperor’s Peace with a sustained burst of fire, laying shells across his attackers as he did. He cursed when only one of them fell dead, the others shrugging off glancing shots.

‘Rot these freaks, but they do not perish easily!’ Charging his chainfist, the Dreadnought lumbered forward and sliced into the mass of mutants pressing against the penitent gate. A pair of Angels Vermillion in shining Terminator armour kept pace with him; he registered them beating back smaller clones – those close to the size of a line Astartes – with thunder hammer and lightning claws. Daggan aimed his cannon into the cluster and fired again, a spear of muzzle flare roaring through the air. The reverent silence of the sepulchre was a dim memory. This sacred place was now another battlefield, a crucible of death.

One of the Angel Vermillion advanced, and took his hammer to a Bloodfiend larger than the rest of them. Daggan saw the creature emerging from the spitting, growling pack and measured its mass. This new enemy was almost the size of the Dreadnought, horribly inflated to gross proportions in a parody of brawn and strength.

It landed a closed fist upon the skull of the Terminator and Daggan’s audial scanners picked up the crunch of bone beneath shattered ceramite. The Angel Vermillion fell to the marble tiles, his life extinguished with a single blow.

A hissing crackle escaped Daggan’s vox-coder and he swung his ponderous mass toward the towering Bloodfiend, blocking its path toward the great mausoleum. His palette of sensing devices cast x-ray, preysight and sonic energies over the clone’s body, instantly pouring information to the twisted clump of meat and brain tissue that was all that remained of Lord Daggan’s flesh. The seasoned warrior’s mind interfaced seamlessly with the iron musculature of his machine-body, searching for points of attack. Bolt shells fired artlessly from the beast’s gun sparked off his armour-plated facia, and through the veil of the Dreadnought’s synthetic senses, Daggan saw a very human smile spread across on the mutant’s face.

All other foes forgotten, the Bloodfiend screamed and leapt at him.

The spiral ramp fell quickly downward, describing a course around the inside of the conical chasm toward the circular stage at the heart of the great sepulchre. As was right and proper, the Chaplain Argastes led the way, intoning the ritual passages from the Book of the Lords at each arch they passed. The photonic candles flared into red flame upon the delivery of the Chaplain’s words; it was his duty to ensure that every spirit-ward and hidden trap was correctly addressed before they could proceed to the next. Rafen was behind Mephiston, who walked at Argastes’s back with his hand upon the hilt of his force sword. The pskyer’s face was set in an expressionless mask, but his eyes were stark and troubled. The sergeant wondered what ethereal energy might lurk unseen by him in such a place as this, a tomb where a demi-god lay in solemn rest.

Rafen was acutely aware of the thundering noise of his heartbeat rushing in his ears. He clenched his hands into fists to stop them from trembling and tried to keep his focus; but it was difficult to hold on to his warrior’s detachment. The Blood Angel looked straight ahead, not daring to let his gaze drop down to the resting place. His eyes found the intricate murals that followed the spiral path, the paintings and carvings in varicoloured stones, metals and gems; a mosaic that chronicled the life of Sanguinius from his creation at the Emperor’s hands to his death by the blade of the Arch-traitor Horus. Here, Rafen saw a depiction of the primarch at Signus, engaged in battle with a swarm of Furies, surrounded by battle-brothers under the command of the noble Chapter Master Raldoron.

For a moment, Rafen lost himself in the sapphire eyes of the man in the frieze. It was Brother Raldoron who had built this place beneath the fortress-monastery, and he, it was said, who alone had borne the Golden Sarcophagus down the spiral ramp on the day the primarch’s body had returned to Baal. Rafen tried to imagine the incalculable sorrow the man must have endured at that moment. To have lived when Sanguinius was alive, and then to have seen him struck down… What horror that must have been.

The Blood Angel found himself drawing strength from the image. If Raldoron had survived such grief to carry on the legacy of his Chapter, then in comparison the challenge laid before Rafen was insignificant. Fight until the Emperor claims you, Dante had ordered. So we shall.

He allowed himself to look down, and there he saw the honeyed glow of rippling gold light, thrown from the shifting, liquid heart of the primarch’s casket.

The Dreadnought was an obelisk of war, a living, moving monument to the battle prowess of the Blood Swords and the honour of Sanguinius. A leviathan of the field, Daggan had served first in flesh and bone and then encased in steel and ceramite for more than four hundred years. His was to be part of a heritage of great heroes, Astartes who fought beyond injuries that would have killed lesser men. Like the noble Furioso, first and greatest of the Sons of Sanguinius to live again within a sheath of steel, and his descendants Ignis, Dario and Moriar, Daggan was a fist of flesh encased in an iron glove. His coffin was his weapon, his injuries the spur that turned him to fight anew.

But the pack leader of the Bloodfiends saw only meat; meat shrouded in metal.

It struck Daggan with clawed hands, landing hard enough to rock the Chapter Master back on his hydraulic legs. Too close to employ his assault cannon without blinding his sensors with the muzzle flash, Daggan pressed his chainfist into the clone and spun the toothed blade.

The beast howled and tore at the Dreadnought’s ornate faceplate, gouging great scars through the armour plating, cracking the outer surface with punches that rang like a tolling bell. It brought down its bony, ridged skull and butted the narrow armourglass slit over Daggan’s casket-pod with a heavy blow. The glass webbed and shattered.

The meat-stink of the Blood Sword warrior’s corpse flesh body issued out. The monstrous clone caught the smell and it brayed; tormented rage aroused by the scent of ancient tissue kept alive by the engines and biological arcana of the Mechanicum.

Daggan’s chainblade scored through layers of skin as hard as plasteel and bony discs of natural armour. Thin fluids oozed from the wound, but the beast-warrior only attacked with greater fury, shredding the Chapter Master’s votive chains, his purity seals and the fine inlaying of ruby and white gold across his faceplate.

His battle-brothers attempted to rally to his side, but the defence of the penitent gate was shifting, pushed back by the sheer pressure of Bloodfiend numbers. Clones shot down and thought dead would recover and remount their attack, even with stumps that trailed blood or flesh in tatters; anything short of decapitation seemed to be uncertain of stopping them.

Daggan tried to snatch at his assailant, but the Dreadnought’s clumsy mass worked against him. The pack leader scrambled about, shifting out of the Chapter Master’s grip, constantly defeating any attempt to pin him.

A hand of talons raked his facia and found purchase in the broken-open eye-slit. With a monumental roar, the Bloodfiend’s distended biceps knotted and metal gave way with an agonized screech. The faceplate, decorated with bones and shards of red jade, was torn free and sent spinning back down the corridors. Revealed, the remnants of Daggan’s organic body lay in a thick soup of processor unguents, haloed by coils of mechadendrites and neural ducting.

He had taken the Path of the Steel and Eternal in the wake of a battle on a nameless planetoid, after coming a heartbeat’s count from dying in the burning acid discharge of a tyranid spore-mine swarm. From that day until this one, no breath of air had ever touched Daggan’s flesh. In the midst of all the melee, the sense of warmth across his skin sparked strange recall in the Chapter Master’s mind.

But he was granted no time to savour it. With lightning speed, the Bloodfiend alpha opened its jaws wide and bit deep, tearing Daggan into shreds, ripping him from the husk of the Dreadnought to be consumed like the sweet meat of a splintered crustacean.

The iron warrior twitched and collapsed with a crash into a kneeling stance, as if Daggan were mirroring the penitent figures carved into the stonework around the third gateway.

As one, the Blood Sword warriors let out a cry of anguish. The mutants took up the sound and made it a feral howl. The stink of blood heavy in their nostrils, the clones surged forward, shattering the lines of the Space Marines.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It was at once more beautiful and more terrifying than anything Rafen had ever encountered. In silence, for each one of them was struck mute by the sight of it, the Blood Angels stepped off the last length of the spiral ramp and gathered in a cluster at the far edge of the tomb platform.

Argastes, as was his duty, took to his knees, bowed his head and began a prayer. His words were so quiet that Rafen could barely hear him speaking; but none of them needed to. Each warrior knew the invocation as well as their own names, and they took the same stance, mouthing the verse without a sound, eyes averted.

Mephiston glanced over his shoulder and bid them to rise with a slight gesture of his hand. Rafen did so, fighting back a tremor in his legs as ingrained training told him he should still be on his knees in the face of such glory.

‘Look,’ husked the Lord of Death, pointing toward the far end of the circular stage. ‘We do not shy away like virginal pilgrims. Show your liege-lord your faces. Let him see you.’

Each of them removed their helmets and let the amber glow wash over them. It was like standing in sunlight on a perfect, cloudless day. The colour was magnetic, it was transcendent. It was this and a hundred other things, reaching deep and stirring emotions in Rafen that he could not find a voice to describe. From the corner of his eye he saw Puluo wipe a tear of joy from his scarred cheek.

It seemed like an eternity ago when Rafen had laid his hands upon the Spear of Telesto, the ancient weapon that had once been wielded by his primarch; and when his fingers had touched it, there was a moment when the Astartes believed some fragment of the Great Angel made itself known to him. A vision, perhaps. Some manner of connection awakened briefly, and then gone before the power of it could burn out his warrior flesh. The ghost of that sensation now returned to Rafen, and he felt fearful, as if he might be consumed by his proximity, charred to ash by it.

Rafen wanted so much to reach out and touch the aura of his demi-god, but he could not. There was an enchantment upon them all, a binding that held them in place before such magnificence. Awe, veneration, wonderment; each of these words were stripped of colour and made meaningless by the sheer intensity of divine radiance that moved through the Blood Angels.

The heart of the great sepulchre was a monolith at the opposite side of the platform, cut from three tall blocks of red granite. They were polished to a mirror-bright sheen; each mined from the living rock of Baal and its two moons, and crested with a single Terran ruby the size of Rafen’s fist. The granites and the gemstone signified the worlds of Sanguinius’s birth, his childhood and maturation. Emerging from the monolith were two huge extended angel’s wings, curving up and around to form a protective cowl. The individual feathers were made of steel and silver and brass, each one etched with words of remembrance. So the Chapter’s chronicles said, many of them were cut from the hull metal of loyalist starships that fought during the time of the Heresy, given in tribute by brother primarchs such as Guilliman, Dorn and Khan, by the Legio Custodes, even the admirals and generals of forces that had fought in the shadow of Sanguinius and counted themselves in his debt.

And between the wings; amid them a single giant hoop of spun copper burnished to the colour of Baal’s red giant star, suspended there upon rods of milky crystal that intersected the ring like the points of a compass, in echo of the design upon the floor of the Grand Annex.

Inside the copper halo lay the glowing heart, living and yet dead, forever in motion but always still. The Golden Sarcophagus was not a casket in any conventional sense of the word. It was a sphere of molten gold, rippling and flowing, pendant in an invisible stasis envelope generated by unknowable technologies buried beneath the stonework. In the ebb and flow of the fluid form, one might imagine they could see brief conjunctions of motion that suggested a face, a countenance of most pure and handsome aspect.

Contained within a globe of suspended time, the mantle of liquid metal had never been allowed to cool and solidify, not once in ten thousand years; for beneath it lay the flesh of the Emperor’s son, the Great Angel and Lord of the Blood, Master of the IX Legiones Astartes, primarch among primarchs, the most noble Sanguinius.

‘My life may end now, and I will be content,’ Ajir managed, forcing a faint whisper out of his dry, bloodless lips. ‘For I cannot witness a greater glory than this sight.’

‘That is not for you to choose,’ Mephiston said, making a physical effort to turn away. He pointed toward the sarcophagus once again. ‘It is for him to decide.’

‘In his name,’ intoned Rafen, without hesitating.

‘In his name,’ repeated the rest of the men, their eyes shining, each of them ready to hold back hell itself to keep this place inviolate.

High above them, a torrent of rage was breaking upon the defenders of the three gates.

Daggan’s killing drew away balance from the Space Marines and forced them to regroup, to bulwark the gap cut into the line. At the priest gate, a coalition of warriors from five different Chapters fought in serried rows, red upon red, crimson upon crimson, bolters and plasma guns answering the approach of all foes.

Lord Orloc’s gun ran dry and he used the inert firearm to club down a Bloodfiend brandishing a pair of knives; the clone’s mutation was more progressed than some of the others of its kind, limbs strangely warped into forms more tentacles than human arms. It growled through a toothed mouth and tried to bite him.

The blade of a power sword burst from its chest and tore upwards along the line of its sternum, cracking bone and spilling innards across the tiled flooring. Fluid spattered across Orloc’s face and he turned away as the blade ended its cut. In pieces, the clone fell apart revealing Lord Armis standing behind it, sneering.

‘These damnable monsters,’ began the Master of the Blood Legion, ‘they’re tenacious. They seem to know our tactics by rote!’

‘I appreciate the assist,’ Orloc allowed, quickly reloading his storm bolter. The Astartes licked the spent crimson of the creature off his lips, measuring the essence. ‘Curious…’ he allowed. ‘It has a strange musk to it.’

Armis raised an eyebrow. ‘As long as these things bleed, I care nothing else about them.’

The Bloodfiends moved like ocean waves, slamming into the lines of the defenders, retreating, returning and attacking again. They gave little time to react to each frenzied assault.

The Blood Drinker aimed on the move and the storm bolter sang; his fellow Chapter lord followed suit, lending his pistol to the fray. ‘They’re coming in again!’ Orloc shouted, as a horde of red-tanned figures forced themselves through the arch of the priest gate.

Armis spun about, opening the neck of a beast with his sword-point. ‘How many this time?’ he demanded.

‘All of them,’ growled Orloc, as the wave of killers struck.

The great gate of the sepulchre was the largest of the three, and so it was the largest of the Bloodfiend numbers that burst through it, the clone-Marines hurdling one another in mad abandon, screaming, driven by their desperate thirst.

Seth knew the thronging, wild melee of hand-to-hand battle as well as any Son of Sanguinius. In the depths of such conflict, the fight drew away from issues of tactics and forethought, gradually becoming nothing more than an exercise in steady butchery. A warrior’s war diminished to the patch of blood-slicked stone on which he stood, the victory or loss weighed in the spaces within the reach of his hand or the sweep of his sword. The Flesh Tearer gave the right to his name, with the blade in his hand cutting deep into any mutant that came too close, tearing flesh, rending it, slicing it.

He had become separated from Dante; he was dimly aware of the blink of smeared golden armour somewhere to his right, he saw the fall of a terrible swift axe blow and the spin of a head cut clean away. Seth swung his sword in a flashing arc, the plasma gun in his other grip hissing sun-white death into the attacker mob again and again. But still, despite every punishing kill, the defending line was compressed backward under the mass of the assault. Blows that would have broken ranks of ork or eldar did little to deter these bestial parodies of Space Marines. They were simply obsessed to such a degree that pain was not a barrier for them; the lust for the pure blood down in the pit was blocking out everything else. Seth thought of the men he knew who fell into the Black Rage, strong-willed warriors destroyed by the gene-curse and condemned to fight to their ending in the Death Company, under the watchful eye of his Chaplain, Carnarvon. These Bloodfiends shared a similar madness, but without the balance of duty, of ingrained obligation bred into every Adeptus Astartes. The mutants were a force of nature, feral beyond even Seth’s definition of the word.

The plasma gun was sizzling in his grip, heat hazing the air around it as overload runes blinked fiercely at him. He turned the weapon away just as a wiry Bloodfiend collided with him. Seth barely had time to react before he was shoved to the rear by the impact, his boots sparking as they skidded over the stones. A sinewy hand with too many joints grappled his wrist and held it rigid, preventing a swiping riposte from the sword. The mutant pushed and pushed, forcing Seth back toward the sharp drop at the edge of the pit. Its neck, an elongated and sinuous thing, wove back and forth like a snake, the head snapping at him.

The plasma gun stalled, the weapon’s machine-spirit refusing to release another shot until it cooled for fear of an explosive burnout. Angered, the Flesh Tearer snarled and forced the weapon’s white-hot muzzle into the meat of the clone’s bare chest and held it there.

Flesh crisped and smoked, drawing a hooting cry from the mutant. In furious agony, it pounded on Seth’s armour and threw him to the floor, pushing the Flesh Tearer over the rim, on the cusp of a sheer fall.

For one dizzying moment, Seth saw down into the depths of the chasm, catching sight of the golden sphere shimmering below; then the moment of elation at seeing the sarcophagus with his own eyes was torn away as twisted shapes rushed past him, dropping into the pit on vanes of thick, misshapen skin.

Argastes cried out, pointing upwards with the glowing rod of his crozius. ‘To arms, Blood Angels! They’ve broken the line!’

Rafen glared toward the mouth of the chasm high above them, his lips twisting in fury as dark shadows fell toward them, dropping through the glow of the photonic candles, spinning and turning to dodge the pulse-blasts of laser turrets concealed in the sepulchre’s walls. Kayne gave a cry of victory as one of the mutants exploded, the lasers converging to boil it in an explosive burst of concussion; but that was only one kill, and there were so many more of them.

‘Wings!’ snarled Ajir. ‘The damned things can fly!’

‘They glide,’ Mephiston corrected, drawing his sword. ‘The flesh between their limbs only slows their fall.’ He aimed the force blade and blue lightning crackled around his psychic hood. The sword twitched and a pulse of ethereal energy leapt from the tip, channelled from the psyker’s blazing mind. It swept up and found a mutant, smiting it from the air. ‘It makes them better targets,’ he concluded.

‘Squad!’ Rafen shouted. ‘Weapons free!’ Every gun fired, the storm of shot and shell rumbling like thunder about the walls of the pit.

The Bloodfiends fell upon them as raptors coming after prey. Puluo’s heavy cannon ate up bandoliers of ammunition in shining brass ribbons, the blazing muzzle sending rounds tearing through flesh and bone. At his side, Kayne sighted down the auto-sense targeting scope atop his bolter, carefully pacing bursts of three rounds into each mutant that came within range. He frowned behind the gun at the paucity of immediate kills – the shots were only slowing the attackers – but he did not hesitate, reloading with quick, mechanical motions.

Through the sights, he saw the clone-beasts cleaving to the walls of the chasm, some of them dropping to land on the spiral ramp, others digging their clawed hands into the ornate sculptures to gain purchase. Part of Kayne felt sickened by the idea of these polluted freaks penetrating so far into the heart of the fortress-monastery, and he lamented the damage that each errant shot or mutant talon wreaked on the perfection of the chamber’s walls. He felt the warmth of the Golden Sarcophagus upon his back, but did not turn to look at it, as hard as it was to resist the temptation. Instead, he let the glow guide his focus, he allowed it to centre him. He ignored the nagging pain from the knitting bones in his hand and fired again. This time, he marched the rounds up a creature brandishing a pair of short swords and saw it plummet into the steep walls of the ramp. To his disgust, a pair of the mutant’s comrades surrounded the fallen Bloodfiend and fed upon it.

‘Their hunger has crazed them,’ said Puluo. ‘The closer they come, the worse they will feel it.’

Kayne took aim again. ‘Then it will be a kindness to put them from their misery.’

‘Reloading!’ shouted Turcio, ejecting a spent clip.

‘I have you, brother,’ Argastes snapped, covering the Space Marine with shots from his bolt pistol.

Turcio nodded, a small part of him marvelling at the esteemed company he found himself in, at the conjunction of events that had brought him to this place. His skeletal bionic forelimb whined as he slammed a fresh magazine into the open breech of his bolter. The Chaplain Argastes was a figure from the Book of Heroes, as were Mephiston and Dante and all the men who were engaged in combat high overhead. These were brothers of note, warriors of iron will and great reach whose deeds were committed to slate and canvas by the Chapter’s chroniclers.

And I? I am only Brother Turcio, a penitent and a line Astartes. No songs written about me. No remembrancers crafting poems of my deeds.

Argastes threw him a nod and Turcio returned it, the two of them combining fire on a group of mutants storming the platform from the ramp’s edge.

Perhaps on another day, he might have been saddened to think that he would die unsung if he fell at this moment; but he was fighting in the shadow of Sanguinius, the shimmer of molten gold playing around him.

This is my duty; that is enough.

‘For the Emperor!’ cried Mephiston, his words strong and clear.

Turcio raised his voice to join him. ‘And the Great Angel!’

Ajir followed a Bloodfiend down as it leapt from the curve of the ramp over his head, describing a swoop toward the floor of the platform. It let out a very human sob of agony as the Blood Angel’s rounds hit one after the other, each bolt impact punching a red fist of discharge from the mutant’s leathery skin. It landed hard and shuddered, trying to climb back to its feet, groping for a bolt pistol tethered by a lanyard to its thickset forearm. Ajir sneered and reset his weapon to full automatic fire. ‘You will not defile this place!’ he shouted, and executed the clone with a burst-shot that churned the meat of its torso into blackened slurry.

‘Brother!’ He heard the alarm in the cry and spun in place, instinct saving him from losing his life to the sweep of a clawed limb bristling with bony spines. The new attacker had come from nowhere; it was some error of replication still walking and breathing. The humanoid’s bone structure was grotesque, an overdeveloped thing covered in barbs and skin the texture of tree bark. Ajir fired at it and chips of ossified matter splintered away without apparent affect. Faster than it had any right to be, the creature’s drum-shaped fist punched him in the chest and his lungs emptied under the force of it. The Space Marine tasted metallic bile in his mouth, trying to shake off the shock of the blow.

The mutant reeled back for another strike, and the daggers of pain across Ajir’s ribcage warned him that a second hit would break bone, likely crush vital organs. He brought up his hands to ward off the blow, but it never came.

The braying of a chainsword cut through the cacophony of the battle and the mutant howled, falling to the floor. Corvus cut the beast down with savage, precise strikes, panting with effort. ‘Are you injured?’

‘I will live.’ Ajir pushed him away, ‘I did not need your help!’

Corvus scowled. ‘Because of this?’ He pointed at the penitent brand on his cheek. ‘Can you not see beyond it? You should–’

The barbed mutant lurched suddenly, rising again in some last spasm of hate despite the damage done to it. Before he could react, a claw ripped Corvus across the side, opening his arm and tearing his throat into a second, red-lipped mouth.

Ajir’s trigger finger jerked reflexively, emptying the rest of his bolter’s magazine into the Bloodfiend, blasting it back across the flagstones.

Corvus slumped, gasping, his eyes filled with agony.

Ajir grabbed him. ‘Why?’ he demanded. ‘You repentant fool, why did you do that?’

The other Astartes looked up at him, blood forming a pink froth at his lips, clutching at his throat to hold it together. ‘You…’ he rasped, confusion at the question there in his dying gaze. ‘You are my kinsman…’

Ajir began an angry reply, but it was too late for Corvus to hear it.

The sword was gone from his grip and still Seth’s pistol refused to obey him, the warp-cursed device spitting and fizzing. The Flesh Tearer made it a club, then, slamming the gun into the Bloodfiend’s head over and over. His blows crushed in the orbit of the sinewy clone’s skull, but it seemed oblivious to the pain. Talons curved in sickle blade claws raked over his armour with ugly squeals of noise, catching his neck ring and lacerating his face.

The old scar on his cheek reopened and pooled with fresh, bright blood. The mutant chattered and pounded on him as Seth’s arm flailed, trying to find something to take hold of before he fell. Beneath his back, the Chapter Master felt the stonework around the lip of the pit fracture and give way.

Seth discarded the plasma weapon and snatched at the Bloodfiend, digging his fingers into the flesh of his attacker; the armoured digits sank into the sallow meat, which parted like the thick rind of a cheese. If he were to fall to his death, than at least he would end his life by taking this monstrous affront with him. Seth had come to this place many times in his life, to the gates of his ending, and he did not fear it; but strangely, there was a new emotion that tightened inside him, so brief and so fleeting. Regret. He would not live to see a resolution to the events set in motion by his kindred.

The clone reared back, thick spittle flying from its pallid lips, eyes rolling to show the bloodshot whites. The thing was utterly insane, broken and burned, consumed by its obscene hunger.

Gravity pulled at Seth and he lost his grip; and in that moment the light of a punishing, vengeful sun washed over him, a beam of blazing energy catching the wiry Bloodfiend in the fan of its full power. The creature twisted and became fluid, corrupt flesh sloughing from blackened bones, then the bones themselves turning molten and then to vaporous ash. Seth reached up to bat the cinders away and the rim of the pit collapsed in a snarl of broken rock, throwing him into the empty air.

‘Brother!’ With the shout came a flash of smoke-smeared golden armour, and a hand reached out to grab him. Seth caught hold and his fall was arrested. The Flesh Tearer growled and hauled himself up to safety, blinking away streams of blood from his eyes.

Dante released his grip and Seth spat out a mouthful of ruby spittle. The lord of the Blood Angels gave him a level look, the thickset shape of his Inferno pistol still smoking from the blast that had destroyed the mutant. Seth bent to recover his weapons.

‘Gratitude might be in order,’ Dante said mildly.

At last, the plasma gun had cooled enough to fire once again. ‘You called me brother,’ Seth noted. ‘Not cousin.’

‘I suppose I did.’

‘Am I worthy of such address?’

Dante smiled as the clones surged into the Space Marines lines again. ‘Am I?’ he asked, and turned his weapon on the screaming horde.

Seth let out a wolfish laugh and joined him in the battle.

The pack alpha ignored the screams of its kindred as they died beneath the guns and the swords of the Space Marines. The Bloodfiend’s addled mind barely registered the sounds of murder and destruction. All that mattered was the colour, the red, the fluid ruby tears; the sweet perfect scent of wet copper, the dense perfume of the vitae, rich and succulent. Saliva flooded the beast’s misshapen mouth, ropey strings of discharge frothing at its lips. The kill it had recently made, the dead and old flesh from inside the machine-hulk, was weak and tasteless in comparison. It wanted more. It longed to be sated, even if on some level of barely human understanding it knew it could never be.

The incredible, unstoppable need overwhelmed every other consideration, any question of the preservation of self. The mutants poured through the lines of the Astartes, killing as they went, roaring forward in a tide of ruddy flesh that flooded over the lip of the great pit, cascading through the stone funnel toward the prize at the sepulchre’s shining heart.

On muscled legs as thick as support pillars, the eldest and most evolved of the twisted clone-Marines threw itself downward, leaping across the chasm from one side of the sloping walls to another, cuffing its smaller, slower cohorts into the paths of the lasers, dodging or shrugging off the glancing sparks of bolt fire that chanced to reach it. The pack alpha would not be denied its feast; ignoring the dead of its own kind and the bleeding bodies of fallen Astartes, it came down toward the sarcophagus, embracing the call of the Blood of Sanguinius.

It would drink and drink until there was nothing left.

Rafen saw the mutant coming, and a gasp caught in his throat. He knew at once that it was the same creature that had led the horde after the Thunderhawk had crash-landed in the courtyard, the one that had fled before the Blood Angels could regroup and execute it.

It was different now. Larger, and if anything more feral in aspect than it had been before. His thoughts returned to the clone he had dispatched in the arena once again; was this thing what it might have become, if allowed to run its course? Rafen shuddered at the thought, that such twisted atrocities as these could be spun from the gene-matter of a noble Space Marine. He fired, bracketing the Bloodfiend with bolter fire, but it was swift and powerful, matching his Astartes-strong senses point for point, always a heartbeat beyond his kill shot.

The monstrous pack leader landed on the floor of the sarcophagus platform with a massive crash of displaced air, knocking the Chaplain Argastes off his feet with the shock of it. Without a second of uncertainty, the Dreadnought-tall Bloodfiend snatched at the black-clad warrior and hauled him up, a rag-doll in the hands of a hulking, brutal child. Rafen cried out as the creature threw Argastes across the span of the dais, the Chaplain pinwheeling through the air to collide with Mephiston, halting the psyker’s headlong advance, both men slamming into the walls so hard they made a shallow crater in the mosaic.

The beast bounded forward, each footfall cracking the stones beneath it, taking a direct line toward the shallow ziggurat of steps leading up to the copper halo, and the shimmering gold sphere. Rafen saw its eyes were solid panes of ruby, hazed by the full, unchained force of a red fury.

Only Puluo and he stood between the Bloodfiend and the sarcophagus, the rest of the squad pinned down by hordes of smaller mutants or hobbled by injury and circumstance. The Space Marine showed his fangs and unleashed the whirlwind of his heavy bolter, each blazing shot from the man-portable cannon finding points upon the creature’s hide to cut flesh or rip open newly-scabbed wounds.

The mutant roared and bit at itself where the searing shots fell, at one moment stumbling beneath the onslaught but never slowing. Puluo stood his ground, shouting out hate at the beast as it came upon him, still firing.

In return, it swept out a thick arm and punched the taciturn Space Marine, striking the bolter cannon with such force that the weapon broke apart. The blow did not cease there, the power of it slamming Puluo down into the marble floor. Rafen saw one of his battle-brother’s legs twist and snap back against the line of the bone and Puluo fell in a nerveless heap.

Rafen retreated, moving back toward the great glowing sphere. Steadying his hands with a grimace, the sergeant aimed down the iron sights of his bolter and began to fire, one shot at a time, directing each round toward the curdled, shifting mass of flesh that was the alpha Bloodfiend’s face. He aimed for the soft tissue of the eyes, seeking to blind the beast if his bolter could not kill it outright.

It yowled and batted at its flesh as it came closer, clawing at the bolt rounds as if they were nagging insects. Rafen could see it was covered in hundreds of wounds, sword cuts, plasma burns and bullet impacts, none of which seemed to slow it. If anything, the pain appeared to drive the Bloodfiend on.

The bolter’s breech clattered open on an empty magazine and Rafen’s ammunition was spent. He threw the gun at the mutant and it knocked it away, closing to the reach of its arms. The Blood Angel tore his combat blade from the sheath on his hip, the length of polished fractal-edge steel catching the amber luminosity dancing in the air around him.

Digging the flattened heads of bolt rounds from its undulating flesh, the creature came on undaunted. The meat of its face was a shifting, twitching mass that seemed incapable of holding a single aspect, as if the bones and musculature beneath were struggling to define what it was; who it was. Its mouth hung open, and for the first time Rafen heard the disorder of its mewling, howling voice, the gurgles and grunts, the fractured and incoherent pieces of speech that might have been words.

In the turmoil of its countenance, for one brief moment he glimpsed the pattern of a face familiar to him from years of comradeship, rising to the surface through the muddle of twisting, distorted skin. An old face, a trusted face, the aspect of a warrior who had been mentor and comrade to him, lost now as so many others had been.

‘Koris!’ he spat, unable to believe what he had seen; and yet he knew it was no illusion. Caecus had taken the genetic material of dozens of Blood Angels, living and dead, and used that to forge the synthetic pseudo-zygotes that grew into these distorted malforms. The ideal that some element of his old tutor might be part of the Bloodfiend sickened Rafen to his core.

Even as the twisted face flowed and changed, the creature swung at him – so fast, so horribly fast – and he ducked, slashing at the thick, leathery skin. It did little good, eliciting only snarls and pops of spittle as the monstrous freak tried to snare him, bite him, stamp him into the stones. The back stroke of a clubbed fist caught him off-guard and Rafen stumbled, bouncing off a wide curve of razor-edged steel.

The wings. He spun, startled, as the great sculpted pinion creaked and rattled under the force of his collision, the ancient metal feathers scraping against one another in discord. Rafen’s shock was so great that for an instant he forgot the enemy at his back; the Bloodfiend had pressed him to the very foot of the Golden Sarcophagus, into the corona of radiance that spilled across the chamber.

Rafen’s gaze crossed the glittering sphere of churning liquid colour, and he saw something within the depths of the molten metal; the hazy ghost of a figure, perhaps a man with his head raised to the sky, his arms open and palms raised, the shadow of mighty wings to his back.

Sudden tears streamed from the Blood Angel’s eyes and he shook them off, the moment of timelessness snapping like a broken thread. The beast advanced, slowing, savouring the moment. A toothsome grin, a maw crowded with fangs opened to him. Curled hands, fingers distending into needle-mouthed tentacles, reached toward the sphere. A rabid hunger leaked from every pore of the mutant.

And he was all that stood before it, the last line of defence between this abomination and the flesh of his primarch, between the vampire and the last vestiges of his Chapter’s purest blood.

Rafen raised the combat knife and grinned back, baring his own teeth. ‘This is as far as you go,’ he spat.

The Blood Angel threw himself at the mutant, leading with blade point-forward. The creature reacted, the sudden attack unexpected, but too slow to stop Rafen finding his target. He pressed the knife into a ragged chest wound already thick with clotting fluids, felt the tip slice through muscle and scrape over the dense bones of the ribcage. Ignoring the bellow of pain from his target, he turned and pushed the weapon home until it punctured the Bloodfiend’s heart, burying the blade to its hilt in the folds of fibrous skin.

The mutant stumbled back from the sarcophagus, tearing and clawing at the Astartes even as thick, oily blood pulsed from the cut. It staggered and snarled, finally knocking Rafen away to the floor.

Liquid streamed over the red flesh, pooling around the beast’s feet, and still it did not falter. It took a slow, painful step toward him, back toward the sarcophagus. A sudden flash of understanding struck the sergeant. The heart… But this is a replicae, a genetic duplicate of a Space Marine…

And in the mirror of every Adeptus Astartes, the Bloodfiend had a secondary heart, just as the Blood Angel did.

Rafen.

A guttural voice came to him, not through the chaos of the battle-thick air but hammered directly into his thoughts, bright as diamond. He turned and through the melee saw Mephiston across the chamber, his force sword in his hand. There was a firm understanding in the psyker’s eyes.

Finish it.

Mephiston’s arm came up in a sweeping motion and the Mindblade Vitarus left his hand, wheeling and spinning about, carving through the air toward Rafen. He reached for it, something preternatural guiding him. The lengthy, barbed blade turned along its own span and fell into his grip, as easily as if it had been made for him.

Without the incredible power of a psyker behind it, the crystalline metal of the weapon could not channel the ethereal forces of the warp, but even robbed of that, it was still a sword of near-matchless quality. And it was more than enough for Rafen to do what was needed.

Turning the weapon about, Rafen shouted and charged the Bloodfiend. ‘For Sanguinius!’

The mutant hesitated on the edge of the steps, angered at another interruption. It saw the sword coming and animal panic lit across its expression. It clawed at the blade, desperate to stop it. Rafen denied the creature and pressed Vitarus into the blood-flecked torso, piercing the skin above the knot of pulsing flesh that was its secondary heart. The inert force sword whispered through the dense meat as if it were vapour, slicing the organ in two, pressing onward until it erupted from the Bloodfiend’s back in a welter of black fluid. It staggered, pain squeezing the air from the beast’s lungs, and collapsed atop the steps beneath the copper ring.

But some things do not die all at once.

Life leaking from it in sluggish pulses, the clone made a last, desperate attempt to claw itself closer to the sarcophagus, reaching out, raising itself up to feel the warmth of the golden glow upon its trembling skin.

Rafen took the hilts of the sword and the knife in either hand and gave both a savage, final twist.

A last rasp of breath escaped the lips of the Bloodfiend as death finally claimed it. For a man standing close by, for a man who turned the blades that killed the accursed creature, that breath could have been a single word.

‘Brother?’

EPILOGUE

From the battlements of the fortress-monastery’s shield wall, the broad scope of the Oxide Desert could be seen stretching away into the wilderness, toward the Chalice Mountains. In the warm light of the day, the towers of black smoke from the death pyres extended upward into the clear sky, tilting to the west with the motion of the winds that carried them. Rafen could see the red slabs of Rhino transports dallying at the points of each smoke trail, and on the air he tasted the faint tang of burning flesh and spent promethium.

‘How can we be certain that we killed them all?’ said Kayne, watching the same sight from the sergeant’s shoulder.

‘The Chapter serfs will sift Caecus’s records just to be certain,’ he offered, ‘but I know there are no more. Their birthplace in the citadel was obliterated. All of the hatched came to the sepulchre. All of them perished there.’

Kayne frowned and looked away. ‘I still…’ He stopped.

‘Speak, boy,’ said Rafen. ‘If you serve in my squad, you speak your mind when I tell you to.’

‘Lord, while I honour and revere Lord Commander Dante as much as any Blood Angel, I am still…troubled by what he did.’

Rafen nodded slowly. ‘The opening of the sepulchre?’ He sniffed. ‘The mutants would have found it on their own eventually. He only made it happen sooner.’

‘But the Golden Sarcophagus…’ Kayne’s voice trembled as he said the name. ‘It has been sullied.’

‘The master let them come because he is a tactician. Because he knew that they would all be drawn to that place, that their blood-hunger would cloud them and rob them of any other focus. Imagine if we had been forced to hunt the mutants down one by one, if they had been allowed to hide in shadowed corners of the fortress. We would have lost many more men, and much more time.’ Rafen turned away from the pyres and studied the youth. ‘Blood washes away, brother. Broken stone can be mended. But faith… That is eternal. And Lord Dante knows that faith such as ours cannot be crushed.’

‘And what of broken men? What of our brothers Puluo or Corvus?’

Rafen looked away again. ‘Puluo is strong. He’ll live.’

‘And Corvus?’ Kayne pressed. ‘He gave much for his penitence.’

‘So he did.’ The sergeant nodded once. ‘The Emperor knows his name.’

They stood in silence for a time, until the youth ventured to ask another question. ‘Brother-sergeant… What is to become of the Blood Angels now?’

Rafen’s gaze fell to a pennant turning in the breeze; a banner upon which lay the sigil of a droplet of blood flanked by angel’s wings. ‘That choice is beyond our reckoning, brother.’

Dante cast about the Grand Annex, his gaze dwelling on each warrior there, on Armis and Sentikan, on Orloc and Seth and all the others. He frowned as he thought of Daggan, blunt and candid, steadfast and strong, now lost to his Chapter and his kindred alike. As with Rydae before him, and Gorn and Corvus and all the other Space Marines lost to this sorrowful business, their remains were aboard their ships and votive scrolls bearing their names hung in the Chapel of the Red Grail to honour their sacrifices. It was the first time in living memory the rites of the heroes had been spoken there for warriors who were not Blood Angels. It was only fitting, though. They had died in the name of the same primarch, and that was enough.

Dante stood in the centre of the stone star and bowed his head. ‘Kindred. Cousins.’ He looked up and caught Seth’s eye. ‘There are no words I can voice that will express my gratitude for your aid in Baal’s hour of need. We have paid for the sanctity of the Great Angel with our dearest blood. And in the aftermath of this misery I must take accountability for what has happened.’ The lord of the Blood Angels let out a slow breath. ‘I am to blame. The responsibility for this atrocity falls to me and I accept it without recoil. As my honoured cousin Lord Seth said, the state of my Chapter can only be laid at my feet. It was my hubris that brought us to this place.’

‘Fine words,’ said Orloc. ‘But what of the choice you asked us to make, Dante? What of this tithe that you request from our Chapters? What are we to do upon that matter?’

Several of the assembled warriors glanced toward Seth, expecting the outspoken Flesh Tearer to speak, but he remained silent.

‘The appeal remains,’ said Dante. ‘I can do no more than ask for your help. But I will bear no malice to any Master who decides against me. I make no motion to compel you. The choice is yours to make.’

‘And it must be unanimous,’ said Sentikan. ‘Without unity, it will be meaningless.’

Armis shifted. ‘You realise the import of this, Lord Dante? Let us be clear. If the vote is carried against your tithe, it will mean the dissolution of the Blood Angels.’

Dante gave a solemn nod. ‘I will abide by whatever choice the conclave makes.’

‘Then we shall make the ballot.’ Sentikan’s hooded head bobbed. His words hung in the air; no one was willing to speak first.

Blood Angel and Flesh Tearer, Angels Vermillion, Sanguine and Encarmine, Blood Legion and Blood Sword, Flesh Eater, Red Wing and Blood Drinker, these warrior-lords and each of the other successor Chapters gathered in the chamber, they stood in a silence that seemed to go on forever.

At last, it was Seth who stepped forward. His face was still seared with the colour of his knitting wounds, but the intensity behind his eyes was undimmed. ‘In my Chapter, there is a litany that we recite upon the final day of testing, when a warrior completes his induction into our ranks and earns the name of Adeptus Astartes.’ He walked slowly toward Dante. ‘The Invocation Initiate. Each Chapter has its own variation, but it is at the core of what we are. These words empower our bond, our strength of purpose.’ Seth paused, and when he spoke again it was with a brusque honesty that gave every warrior in the room pause. ‘For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my battle-brother eternal.’

The Flesh Tearer produced his flaying knife and drew it across his palm, a line of blood emerging behind it. Seth offered his hand and the blade to Dante. The Blood Angel copied the gesture and the two masters clasped their palms together, the crimson mingling.

‘I will give you the men,’ said Seth. ‘And so will every successor here. Your future will be secure.’

There was very little that surprised Dante, but he felt that emotion now. ‘Why?’

‘Because it is the will of the Emperor.’ Seth smiled. ‘He brought us to this place, to this condition for a reason, for a lesson. To test you. To remind us.’

‘To remind you of what?’

Seth’s grin grew to show his fangs, and Dante found himself returning it. ‘That we are not cousins, Blood Angel. We are brothers.’

With care, Turcio removed the segments of his battle-brother’s power armour from the rack in the armoury chamber, taking a moment to speak a few words of the Prayer to Weapons over each piece.

Ajir watched him, aware that the penitent was ignoring him. Finally, he spoke. ‘He gave up his life in vain,’ said the Astartes. ‘You understand that?’

Turcio hesitated, then continued in his work. ‘Is that what you believe?’ The Space Marine ran a fine cloth over the ruby sigil across the wargear’s chest plate.

‘Did Corvus think that letting himself die would somehow complete his atonement? Is that why he did it?’

‘Corvus did what he thought was right. That is why I was proud to call him my battle-brother.’

Ajir picked up the dead warrior’s helm and shook his head. ‘He died for nothing.’

Turcio put down the chest plate and turned to present Ajir with a severe stare, the brand upon his cheek livid and red with anger. ‘If you truly believe that, then you did not know him. And because of that, I feel sorry for you.’

‘I do not understand.’

The other Space Marine shook his head and turned away. ‘That is clear. If you knew Corvus, if you saw the man instead of the brand… Then perhaps you would.’

Turcio walked away, leaving Ajir to stare into the eyes of an empty helmet.

Rafen watched his battle-brother go. The wounds of the past days were still fresh, and it would take time for them to heal. The sergeant returned to his own duty, working at his bolter with the cleaning rods, the simplicity of the task helping him to maintain a focus.

A shadow fell across him and he looked up. ‘Brother-Sergeant Noxx.’

The Flesh Tearer’s head bobbed. ‘Brother-Sergeant Rafen. I have news from the conclave. I thought you would wish to know. The tithe has been approved by all the Chapter Masters.’

A sense of relief washed over the Blood Angel. ‘Thank you.’

‘My master and our delegation are to return to Eritaen to conclude the campaign there,’ he continued, ‘but before we do, there is another matter of which I would speak to you.’

‘Go on.’

Noxx’s hooded eyes bored into him. ‘We do not see eye to eye, the two of us.’

Rafen gave a humourless smile. ‘That much is certain.’

‘But I wish you to know this. In the sepulchre… I was reminded of something. Of commonality between us.’

‘I, too.’ Rafen admitted.

Noxx gave a nod. ‘And perhaps, I dislike you a little less now.’

‘I feel the same way.’ Rafen offered the Flesh Tearer his hand. ‘Until our paths cross again, then?’

Noxx shook his hand. ‘I have a feeling that will be sooner than either of us expect–’

At the chamber door, a Space Marine in the gold-trimmed robe of an honour guard entered, interrupting them. ‘Brother-Sergeant Rafen?’

‘Who asks for me?’

‘The Chapter Master,’ came the reply. ‘You are summoned to his presence.’

Dante looked up from the stained glass window as Rafen entered and bowed. The commander beckoned him forward, and the Astartes crossed the chamber.

Rafen saw Mephiston standing in the lee of the window, in the shadow cast by the red sunlight. The psyker nodded to him; he bore no outward signs of the injuries he had suffered in the previous night’s battle. Rafen’s hand twitched with a fleeting ghost-memory of the force sword in his grip. On the other side of the room, Brother Corbulo waited, watching.

‘Master, my lords. What do you wish of me?’

Dante faced him, and there was grave concern etched upon his expression. He held a data-slate in his hand. ‘This is an initial report from the Techmarine squads sent to sift the ruins of the Vitalis Citadel. Pict spools recovered from Caecus’s laboratorium have provided some very troubling information.’

‘Fabius?’ Rafen asked, his throat tightening at the renegade’s name.

Dante nodded as Corbulo spoke. ‘Before Caecus fled to the citadel, he stole a measure of the sacred vitae from the Red Grail.’ Rafen’s blood turned icy at the thought of such a thing. ‘It… appears that the vial was appropriated.’

‘The traitor has it,’ Mephiston rumbled. ‘It was doubtless upon his person when he fled through the warp-gate.’

Rafen’s heart pounded in his ears. ‘And I let him escape…’

‘The blame does not fall upon you,’ Dante replied. ‘All of us were remiss in this. We share it equally.’

‘But what does he want with the blood of the primarch?’ Rafen blurted out the question. ‘In Terra’s name, what sorcery could he do with it?’

Dante exchanged glances with his lieutenants. ‘We cannot know. All that is certain is that such a heinous transgression will not stand unchallenged. For too long, Fabius Bile has been a blight upon the galaxy. And now, he has awakened the full wrath of the Sons of Sanguinius.’

Rafen nodded, a sense of purpose coming over him. ‘I am at your command. What would you have me do?’

‘Prepare the warship Tycho,’ said Mephiston. ‘Gather your men. You will go forth and seek out this criminal.’

‘And when I find him?’

‘You will recover the sacred blood,’ Dante gave him a long, level stare, ‘and you will wipe his blighted existence from the stars.’

BLACK TIDE

CHAPTER ONE

Everything is madness.

That was the clearest explanation, the simplest, most logical answer. There could be no other truth; any alternative was impossible. The undeniable fact was that the universe turned on an axis of insanity, and any being who struggled to deny that fact was utterly doomed.

Understanding of this truth was no reward, however. Moving through the thick, sticky silt that coated the surface of the effluent channel, La’Non paused and looked down at his right hand, the spindly grey fingers caked with filth and dried bloodstains. The other arm – the alien thing – hung limply at his side, the grotesque greenish-brown bulk of it forever pulling him off balance, upsetting his gait and motion. It reached up to wipe muck from his forehead, but he slapped it away and used his good, true tau limb to do the job. La’Non didn’t like to stop too often. If he kept moving, then the voice in his head stayed away. He imagined it like a phantom, a spectral thing that moved as he moved, in perfect lockstep; but it was slow, and he could outrun it. For a time, at least.

Time enough to understand that the mad universe hated him. Hated him and wanted him to suffer, so much so that it had broken off pieces of itself and sent them here, to this place, where they might torment him to death.

He felt the voice coming, and shouted a curse at it, the snarled words echoing down the channel. With a hard effort, La’Non kicked out the service grille above him and hauled himself up, on to the work gantry. He allowed the alien limb to help; he would not have been able to make it otherwise.

From there, he moved up and up, spiralling through the turned tubes cut through the rock, passing once or twice through voids where great deposits of nickel-iron ore had nestled, back when this place had just been a vast stone adrift in the void.

La’Non stopped once more and started to weep. This he did for a few minutes. He couldn’t be certain why these intervals came and went without pattern or regularity. Instead, he sat through them, let them take their course. It had become possible, ever since the day he had awoken with the limb grafted to him, to compartmentalise himself in this way, distancing the functions of his body from his mind. Eventually, as they always did, the racking sobs went away and he moved on, towards the surface. The tracks of tears cut lines down his dirty cheeks, and he noted the pattern as he caught his own reflection in a large piece of glassaic, broken off from a window. He was a sorry sight. The robes he had once worn in his role as a minor earth caste functionary had been replaced by the ripped oversuit he had taken from a dead kroot, and it was only the broken pieces of his necklace, balled up in a pocket, that recalled his rank. His drawn face was pallid, the flesh hanging from his skull like an ill-fitting mask made from parchment. The big arm at his side swung back and forth; it was heavy with muscle, twitchy and hot to the touch. La’Non didn’t dwell on it, looking away from the shapes of alien flesh, the places where implanted things beneath the surface hissed and bubbled. He padded, feet bare, through the splinters of the rest of the glass, and felt nothing. He pressed his weight down deliberately, but felt no pain. Blood was there, pooling between his toes, but no sense of it reached him. And so he moved on. Upward. Outward.

The colony was like a kittick fruit from a tree infected by boreworms. Oblate in a rough sense, lumpen across its outer skin, inside the asteroid was all tunnels and voids, eaten through and cross-connecting. Factories and oxy-plants, arboreas and habitat pods, places of exercise and teaching and leisure, the home to a hundred thousand tau… Or at least, it had been.

La’Non had come when the colony had been opened, drifting out at the farthest edge of the Tash’var system. He’d lived a good life here, until the tempest had arrived.

He remembered little of it. He learned the story later, in fragments. A warp storm, sudden and terrible, swallowed up the colony and tore it away, spat it back out like indigestible food into some other part of space. Far from home. Far from T’au.

And there, while they were alone and lost, the strange gue’la had come, the human with his many devices of pain and his army of freaks. The madness came with the invader, the great revelation.

How long ago was that? Days? Years? La’Non had lost his sense of the passage of time, and he recalled old wisdom that said a being should recognise such a thing as the first roadstone on the path to insanity. Perhaps, if and when he reached the outer tiers, perhaps when he saw the dark sky again for the first time in… however long it was, he would know. But so many things had kept him from moving forward. The nest of crazed vespids that blocked his path down in the food stores. The crippled and near-dead kroot he had killed with a broken chair. The thing that had seemed to be a female of the air caste, but was actually a bag of meat and blood. She took the most of his time. Talking to him, being a friend to him. When the alien limb had driven her head into a stone wall and crushed it, La’Non had watched with dispassion, still reaching for an understanding at that point in his journey.

The colony was a place of death and decay now, the survivors of the strange gue’la’s horrific experiments discarded to perish, ejected into the bleak corridors to live or die at the hands of those who had escaped his knives, or the other victims. For the longest time, La’Non had lived in fear of being recaptured, submitted once more to the white-hot pain and endless agonies. His hand – his good hand – moved to his throat, as he thought of how he had screamed himself ragged. As he did this, the voice whispered in his ear. It had caught up to him.

It told him the same story again. The voice liked this story, liked it a great deal; that was the only explanation he could think of, for the repetition and the endless recurring talk of the same motifs, the same images. The voice told La’Non of another tau who was also called La’Non, who had a pair-bond and a habitat that was small but comfortable, who was respected for his work ethic even though he was not a being of outstanding nature. A tau who was a fair husband to a quiet wife and a careful father to a lone child who was troublesome as all children are. This other La’Non – which could clearly not be him, because he would have remembered if he had a wife and a son – had lost all that was important when a great storm came and split his home asunder. The voice came to the end of the story and began to tell it again. It never tired of the tale.

La’Non started shouting wordlessly and banging his head against the deck. Presently, the voice went away again. Perhaps it had other people to talk to. Others who liked the story of this different La’Non better. Dizzy, wiping away his blood, he moved on again, grateful for the silence.

He ate something that resembled vegetable matter, a hank of it he found rotting in a shadowed corner of a corridor, then supped spoiled water from an overfilled bathing sphere in a collapsed hab pod. La’Non followed the sign-lanterns up the slow, long ramps, spiralling around and around. The light tug of gravity generators, power still flowing to them from the mighty fusion reactor in the colony’s core, enabled him to walk the inner circumference of the corridor-tubes; the technology let the tau use every iota of space within the asteroid for living and working.

No life now, though. Instead the colony was a corpse, and all the things swarming inside it just pests and vermin. La’Non was like that, a maggot inside dead flesh. Not a living thing, not like he used to be. Not like the other La’Non spoken of by the voice in his head.

But he was at peace with that. Understanding had given him contentment, if that was what a being could call it. Before, La’Non had been afraid he had lost his mind, been driven into lunacy by the agony and the limb. He thought better of it now, though.

He had gone sane. Yes. Clear to him. It was just that everything else was madness. Once he faced the night beyond, he would be certain of it. The last iota of doubt would be banished. If only he could find silence, find a way to end the pain, then he would be content.

Hours or days or years later, the tau found himself at the shipgates. The alien limb was scratching at the walls as he passed along them, rapping greenish knuckles on oval portals webbed by fracture damage. Presently, La’Non found what he sought. A hatch, an iris of dense metal alloy, each oiled leaf of it tight and closed. He didn’t remember the sequence to open it, but his good hand did, and worked the hooded keypad in the wall.

Through the fractured window, past the frosting of oxygen ice, he could see the black beyond. But not really. He couldn’t really, truly see it. Not with the naked orbs of his own eyes. To really understand, to look the mad universe in the face and know it, he had to go out there. Or was he really venturing inside for the first time? La’Non wondered if the voice knew the answer. He smiled. Soon the pain would be gone and the voice would never trouble him again.

Busy with the sequence, he glimpsed but ignored the motion of a red shadow beyond the portal. It wasn’t important; like the other La’Non and the wife and the child, it was a forgettable thing. Only this action, this moment, was significant.

Sound and vibration reached him, and his grey face twisted in confusion. Beyond the iris hatch there were noises, heavy footfalls and grinding impacts. That did not seem correct. On the other side of the iris there should only have been a stark white anteroom, the decompression chamber and the racks of skintight environment suits. The space should have been empty and ready for La’Non. The last barrier between him and the mad universe, waiting out there for him to arrive. For the tau to tell it he understood.

Then the iris keened as its metal blades came open and retracted into the stone walls. La’Non felt the alien limb twitching as he turned from the panel to take the next step.

The open hatchway was blocked by a statue made of crimson. La’Non looked up at it, taking in the form in a glance. It was humanoid, all curved shapes and hard edges. A heavy thing, carved to resemble arms and legs of bloated muscle, a small and fierce head sporting eyes as sharp as gemstones, a breath-grille mouth set in permanent grimace. Across its chest, a symbol; wings made of beaten gold growing from a wet, glistening droplet of ruby. And in one hand, the largest weapon La’Non had ever seen, a great steel block of mechanism bigger than any common pulse carbine. The yawning muzzle presented a black tunnel towards him.

There were others, too, more of the same crammed into the airlock space, stooped. Barely contained by the walls, hard and menacing. They sparked memory of the gue’la who had brought all the pain and understanding to the colony – these things were the same but different. The same mass, the same form. La’Non wondered if they shared the same cruelty as well. He asked the voice in his head if it knew the answer. Had the universe sent these new monsters to follow in the tracks of the pain-bringer? Were they the next act in its insanity, a new anguish for him to endure? And in doing so, learn a new truth?

La’Non offered his good hand in a gesture of greeting, but the alien limb wanted to participate as well, and rose in a fist.

Brother Ajir’s boltgun rose, and in that moment Brother-Sergeant Rafen snarled out a command word. ‘Hold!’

Ajir gave no sign that he had heard the order, and simply extended the motion of the gun, using the butt of the weapon to strike the alien away instead of killing it outright. The dishevelled tau was projected backward into the corridor of polished rock beyond the airlock antechamber, and it clattered to the deck in a heap of spindly limbs. For a moment the only sound was the scrape of the alien’s feet as they skittered over the floor, failing to find purchase. Thin blood from a new cut oozed across the tau’s dirt-smeared aspect. A moan escaped its lips.

With careful, spare motions, Ajir flicked his weapon to discard the dash of alien blood that had marked it. Brother-Sergeant Rafen heard him give a quiet sniff of disdain. ‘It lives still,’ said the other warrior.

Rafen’s helmeted head turned and found Brother Ceris. The Codicier gave a nod, sensing his commander’s unspoken instructions before he gave voice to them. Ceris pushed forward to the front of the group; of all the Adeptus Astartes in the antechamber, he was the only one not clad head-to-foot in crimson battle armour. Ceris’s wargear was indigo, with only his right shoulder pauldron toned blood-red. The warrior removed his helmet and turned a narrow, flinty gaze on the alien. Crystalline devices surrounding the back of his head glowed gently, the contacts and mechanism of the psychic hood built into his power armour working their arcane science. The tau shrank away from him, muttering, and threw a worried glance towards Rafen.

The sergeant followed Ceris’s example and detached his own helm, dark shoulder-length hair falling free as he did so. Rafen studied the alien without pity. ‘Can you understand my words, xenos?’

The tau didn’t respond; after a moment, Ceris spoke. ‘It does.’ The crystals pulsed slightly, and Rafen sensed a faint tang of ozone in the cool air, the overspill of the Codicier’s careful psychic pressure on the alien creature.

‘La’Non speaks your tongue, gue’la,’ it said, in a papery, weak voice.

‘We seek something,’ Rafen told it. ‘Here, on your colony. You will be compelled to help us find what we are looking for.’ He inclined his head towards Ceris, the inference clear. The psyker leaned in, unblinking, glaring at the trembling tau.

‘This place has nothing but agony within it,’ rasped the alien. ‘Nothing for you. Only the agony and the voices.’

Rafen continued, ignoring the interruption. ‘We are looking for another… Another gue’la.’ He grimaced, the xenos word tasting foul upon his lips. ‘Tell us what you know.’

‘Pain-bringer!’ The name was an abrupt snarl. ‘You… You are the same!’

From behind him, Rafen heard a gruff growl of annoyance. ‘We are nothing like him,’ spat Brother Turcio.

‘Show it the image,’ continued the sergeant. He turned to Brother Kayne, who stood nearby with his rifle at the ready. ‘We must be certain.’

Kayne’s face was hidden behind his helmet, but his motions betrayed his irritation. Like the others, Kayne shared the ingrained urge to terminate any alien life he encountered, and it came hard to resist it. Rafen understood; he felt the same way, but the mission took precedence, and to prosecute that to its end he would do whatever was needed – such as allow an undeserving xenos a few more moments of life.

The younger Astartes produced a disc-shaped pict-slate from a pocket on his belt and stepped forward, offering it to the alien at arm’s length.

The tau blinked blood from its eyes and peered owlishly at the screen; and in the next second what colour there was in its corpse-grey flesh faded. Rafen recognised the expression on the creature’s face; horror, it would seem, looked the same no matter what species you belonged to. The alien brought up its hands to cover its eyes, one of them spindly and skeletal, the other thick-set and muscled.

‘The creature’s arm.’ Turcio’s voice came over the vox in his ear-bead, on a general channel that only the other Space Marines would hear. ‘It’s wrong.’

At Turcio’s side, steady as a statue, a heavy bolter in his grip, Brother Puluo offered his taciturn opinion. ‘Mutation?’

‘No,’ said Ajir, with a bored tone in his words. ‘I’ve killed enough of them to know one from another. That’s something different.’ He glanced at his commander. ‘Perhaps we ought to slit its throat and return it to the ship, give the sanguinary priests a curio to toy with.’

The tau watched them with a strange mixture of terror and compulsion, likely aware that they were talking about it, even though no sound escaped the sealed helmets and ear-beads of the hooded Space Marines. Gingerly, it got to its feet, blinking. The alien’s breathing was shallow, and it was stooped. It extended a trembling finger into the darkness. ‘Below, below,’ it muttered. ‘Pain-bringer. Below.’

‘You will show us,’ Ceris insisted, his gaze never wavering.

‘Gue’la, the word is no. No. No.’ The xenos began pulling at itself with the thick, distended limb. ‘Cannot go back. Will not.’ It pointed past the Astartes, to the outer airlock doors. ‘Outside. Yes. To see the universe, face it. Stop the voice. Voice voice voice…’

‘The creature is unhinged,’ Ajir sniffed. His bolter rose again. ‘What do we need with a guide, lord?’ He glanced at Rafen.

‘It is afraid,’ Ceris noted. ‘The torments of fear have pushed it over the bounds of sanity. The creature believes that it will be forced to live through more pain if it returns to the inner tiers of the colony.’ He grimaced, as if reading the thoughts of the tau sickened him.

The alien waved its hands. ‘Yes. Yes. No more pain.’

Rafen gave the tau a hard look. ‘La’Non. Do as I say, and I will end your agony. Forever.’

When the tau looked up at him, the beseeching look in its eyes was pathetic. ‘You swear this? On your deity?’

Ceris’s eyes narrowed, his subtle power pressing down on the creature’s weakened will.

Rafen gave a nod. ‘Show us,’ he demanded. ‘Take us to the pain-bringer.’

The muttering, stumbling tau led them on, wandering back and forth down the corridors in a meandering course that at first seemed aimless. Ceris walked behind it, the faint glow of blue about his head and the tightness of his expression signifying the constant telepathic force he was keeping on the alien.

Rafen walked a few steps behind, his boltgun cradled in a barrel-low grip across his sternum. The sergeant was still finding the measure of the Codicier; his recent assignment to Rafen’s unit had come on the orders of the Chapter’s chief Librarian himself, the psyker-master Mephiston. Ceris, so barrack-room rumour had it, was one of several psychics personally selected by Mephiston to act as his eyes and ears throughout the Chapter; and Rafen could not shake the sense that in some way, everything he said or did within sight of the olive-skinned Codicier was somehow being observed by the man the Blood Angels called the Lord of Death. The ways of the witch-kin were beyond his experience, but Rafen did not find it difficult to imagine that Mephiston’s great distance was no obstacle to the preternatural power of the mind.

Ceris cast a brief glance over his shoulder, and then away, as if giving some confirmation to Rafen’s thoughts. When he spoke, the Codicier had a soft voice that seemed oddly out of place for a man from the heavy stock of Baal Prime’s equatorial tribes; and his flat, hard gaze seemed to take in everything. Emotion, when the psyker cared to show it, was vague and undefined upon him. It was this, more than anything, that sat poorly with the sergeant. Every other man under his command, even the reserved Puluo, wore their spirit and fire openly. Ceris was an enigma, and Brother-Sergeant Rafen was ill at ease with the man.

‘Sir.’ Brother Puluo’s voice issued from Rafen’s vox bead. An indicator rune glowing on the inside of his gorget showed that the communication was coming in on a discreet channel from his second-in-command.

The sergeant knew Puluo had a question to voice. ‘Speak,’ he ordered.

The other warrior marched at his side, the blue helmet that marked him as a heavy-weapons Devastator Space Marine near-black in the shadows. ‘Ajir had a point. We can find our way through this maggot-nest without the help of a xenos.’

‘It is my prerogative,’ Rafen replied, sub-vocalising the words so that they would be picked up by the vox but not heard by anyone else. ‘It is a matter of expedience, brother. The alien will serve a purpose.’ His face tightened into a frown. ‘Too much time has been wasted on unsuccessful pursuits. If we must tolerate this creature to live a while longer in order to complete our assignment, so be it.’

‘As you wish,’ came the reply, but Rafen could tell Puluo was unsatisfied with the answer.

Truth be told, so was Rafen. But it had been several months now since he and his squad had left the Chapter’s home world Baal aboard the warship Tycho, and in those days and weeks their victories had been few. Their mission, charged to Rafen from the lips of Chapter Master Dante himself, had proven every bit as difficult as the Blood Angels had expected. Their quarry was, if anything, even more elusive than his reputation suggested. They were chasing a shadow across the deeps of interstellar space, and to date they had constantly been one step behind him.

He threw a look back down the skirmish line of his warriors. Behind Puluo, who walked steadily with his heavy bolter held at arms, Ajir strode boldly down the middle of the corridor, glaring into each branching tunnel or open doorway, looking for an opportunity to engage an enemy. Kayne, the youngest of Rafen’s squad, followed on with careful, wary footsteps and Turcio took up the rearguard, silent and watchful. In the gloom, Turcio’s extended arm was rock-steady, the dull steel and heavy carbon of his augmetic limb hidden under his armour, a bolter in his iron-fingered grip. Each man, in his own manner, kept his focus on the duty at hand; but Rafen knew them well enough to sense the tension in them all, the tension he mirrored. Something that might have been called unease by lesser men, the edges of a disquiet that had been slowly growing as each avenue of their hunt had drawn closed, one after another.

Was he here? The question was one Rafen had asked himself a dozen times over the course of the Tycho’s mission. On the surface of Seyrin Minoris; amid the ruins of a Dark Eldar slaughterdome; in the depths of Nadacar hive city; and through the rolling madness of warp space. A dozen leads, fragmentary sightings and half-truths drawn from a network of spies, scrying viewers and Imperial intelligence reports. Every one of them had proven to be a dead end, a wasted journey. Each time, the question. Each time, the search unfulfilled, the target lost.

Or was it that the subject of the hunt was just as fearsome and as clever as his enemies said he was? At Nadacar, Rafen had been certain he had seen him, glimpsed the hulking figure forcing its way through a mass of penitents. In the makeshift laboratory they had found, adorned with the wet remains of a Hereticus Inquisitor and his retinue. A goblet of wine, still warm to the touch. The smell of him lingering in the room. So close; but not close enough.

And with every disappointment, Rafen felt the blade of failure push deeper into his heart. For all the forgiving words of his master, it had been he who allowed the quarry to first make his escape from Baal. Even if no one else blamed Rafen for it, he laid the heavy responsibility upon himself. For a moment, a blink of memory clouded his thoughts, the recollection of a thing made of psy-smoke and ectoplasm hanging in the air before him. A howling skull-shaped gateway.

Rafen’s hand drew tight around the grip of his bolter, and he tried to dispel the thought. It did him no good to torture himself with recriminations. Instead, he used the anger he felt as fuel, to power him on, to sharpen his senses.

They had been reduced to sifting through a detritus of information culled from sources so widespread and unreliable, that their veracity barely rose above the level of tall tales spun by tavern drunkards; and yet, as they had crossed the span of vacuum towards the hull of the drifting tau colony, something in Rafen’s spirit had resonated like the strings of an electroharp. The renegade was close. He felt it in his bones.

Somewhere in this xenos warren, somewhere deep in the gloom, an arch-traitor, the self-styled Primogenitor of Chaos Undivided, former lieutenant of the Emperor’s Children, a twisted Apothecary, a murderer and torturer of men, was working his evil.

Rafen glanced down at the oath of moment adhered to the vambrace of his power armour. The strip of sanctified parchment bore a spot of dark colour, a droplet of blood from the veins of Corbulo himself, the Master of the Red Grail and lord of the Chapter’s sanguinary priests. The oath-paper was Rafen’s vow, committed to words and sanctified in the sight of the God-Emperor of Mankind.

A promise to find and to kill the man known as Fabius Bile.

The voice told La’Non where to take the gue’la. After hours – or was it days? – of loping along the spiralling corridors, the tau brought the armoured humans to one of the largest of the colony asteroid’s interior spaces. An elliptical cavern tapering to a point, the bulk of the open void was taken up by a faceted orb built of the same bland polymetal that so much tau construction was made from. Thick rods extending from the floor, the walls and ceiling held the bone-white sphere in place. Fixed focus gravity generators made it possible to walk up and over the surface of the orb, as if standing on the face of a tiny moonlet. Inside it, La’Non knew, there were vertical floors stacked one atop another. It had once been the colony’s infirmary, now become a place of horrors.

The gue’la who came after the storm had spat them out, the pain-bringer, he had made his home here. All the politic words and platitudes at first, all the masks he wore and the honest entreaties to help the lost colonists, his lip service about wanting to join them in the service of the Greater Good. All lies.

La’Non heard the voice urging him on and he began to tremble and shiver. He felt the mind-force of the blue-armoured human at his back, making his legs move like stuttering pistons. Between the two opposing pressures, the tau felt as if his skull was about to burst. He whimpered, remembering all the things that had spilled from the infirmary. The pain-bringer and the great metal spider emerging from his back, the devices that cut and sliced and stitched. The monstrous pleasure he took in giving La’Non the limb.

And then all the others. The hybrids he built from bits of diverse species, things that never should have shared flesh, melded together by means that were beyond the understanding of a common earth caste clerk.

Another memory pushed itself forward, presenting itself to him as some horrific gift by the chattering voice. Recalling a moment when La’Non spoke, actually managed to utter a few words to the pain-bringer as the gue’la tethered him to an operating table.

The tau had asked him why. What reason was there to come to this lonely knot of star-lost castaways, to give them false hope and then torment them so? What value could it possibly have to him?

The pain-bringer had not lied then. He told La’Non he did these things not only because he could, but because it amused him.

La’Non remembered nothing but the screaming after that. Stumbling along the curved floor, he heard the sound in his head again, the voice wailing in pain. The limb curled up and punched the tau in the face, staggering him, and the shock lit energy inside him. Without understanding, disconnected from himself, the tau began to echo the inner scream with his voice. He pulled at the skin of his face, but the sound would not cease.

‘The xenos–!’ Ceris snarled out a warning as the tau stumbled away, clattering heedlessly through piles of wreckage and alien debris. The creature was shouting into the air, babbling a tirade in its own sibilant, incoherent language.

Rafen was already bringing his bolter to bear, sighting down the scope atop the weapon’s frame. Leading the target, he thumbed the selector to single-shot and began to apply gentle pressure.

But in the next second a bolt of blue-white fire lanced through the sullen air and clipped the alien with a near-hit. The tau described a jerky pirouette and went down in a puff of thin blood. Rafen reacted as a second pulse beam went wide of him and cracked into a toppled heap of storage bins.

‘There!’ shouted Kayne, the youth’s sharp eyes catching sight of the shooter. He pointed, and Ajir released a spray of bolt rounds into the low wall the other Blood Angel had indicated. With a cry, another tau exploded from the cover, brandishing a smoking weapon. The alien was clad in pieces of the sand-coloured armour Rafen recalled from hypnogogic training tapes, but the wargear was smeared with dark fluids and in poor order. Strangest of all, the tau warrior’s face was oddly proportioned; spindles and bits of chitin festooned the right side of the alien, and when it screamed, the noise from its mouth was a rattle of bones.

Rafen put the xenos down with a single shot to the chest, and it blew backwards into wet rags. The dying alien had not finished twitching when more lines of blue fire probed out towards the Blood Angels. From heaps of wreckage and the shadowed doors of habitat pods, more of the creatures emerged. They hooted and roared, all of them bellowing a shared pain at the Space Marines. Rafen picked out one word being repeated, over and over. Gue’la. Gue’la. Gue’la.

‘The alien brought us to an ambush!’ Ajir snarled, clear reproach in his voice.

‘No,’ grunted Ceris. ‘I would have known it.’

Rafen didn’t venture an answer; he only frowned, and began to fire.

The ragged, screaming tau boiled out of the passageways and the fallen heaps of wreckage formed by broken habitat capsules. Some of them were soldiers – the so-called ‘fire warriors’ of their kind, the line infantry in their strange rectilinear armour sheaths – but more were civilians, functionaries, non-combatants. Many of them bore weapons, doubtless looted from fallen members of their kind or the armoury of whatever xenos garrison had been stationed in the colony. The strident shrieking of pulse bolts echoed around the vast oval chamber, lines of perfect lightning blazing outward, hugging the ground.

Rafen’s Blood Angels splintered, moving through cover, pacing up towards the enemy advance. They fell into battle routine with rote precision, ready and geared to give death to their attackers. The heavy crack of bolters warred with the screaming alien guns, and from the corner of his eye, the sergeant saw Puluo plant his boots, lean into his heavy bolter’s weight and unleash it. Flame gushed from the flash-hider of the weapon in cruciform flares, great brass casings launching from the ejection port in a fountain of metal, a punishing wave of rounds lashing out as the Space Marine turned slowly in place, tearing down everything in his arc of fire. Unarmoured tau caught in the midst of his kill zone lost limbs or exploded into flecks of meat, while the soldier-xenos went down, howling if they were not already dead.

Puluo’s weapon alone should have been enough to put the fear of the God-Emperor into any enemy; but still the tau came on. Rafen had never fought their kind before, and what he knew of them came only second- and third-hand from other warriors, from his late mentor Koris and the indoctrination schema of his training. All of that had told him the tau were a clever foe, wily and careful in battle. That was not what he saw here.

‘Rage…’ muttered Ceris, close at Rafen’s side. ‘Nothing but rage.’

The psyker sensed the mindset of the aliens more clearly than the sergeant ever could, and saw what Rafen did. Fury was something the Blood Angel knew well – far too well, he admitted – and it was there before him in the tau. Their tactics were blunt and hard, with only the letting of blood on their minds. This was not the combat of a foe defending a location from an invader. It was anger, pure and simple. These xenos had been wronged, and they wanted someone to pay in kind.

The leading edge of the attack wave was downed, dead or dying, and Puluo found his pause, the heavy bolter’s muzzle running cherry-red and shimmering with heat. In the moment, the tau advance surged, pulse rounds converging on the Blood Angels in threads of icy energy.

A figure mounted the curved roof of a collapsed habitat pod and flung itself at the sergeant. Rafen glimpsed dun-coloured armour and a curved helmet, featureless but for a peculiar mono-optic eye. The fire warrior led with a pulse carbine and the Blood Angel rocked off a fallen stone roundel to meet the alien in mid-leap. With one arm, Rafen forced the carbine away, shots screaming from it over his shoulder. In the heartbeat-fast pace, he was aware of a particle stream creasing the upper surface of his pauldron. The tau was smaller, lighter than the Space Marine, but its momentum was toppling Rafen backward.

The world tipping about him, he jammed the muzzle of his bolter into the gap between the plates of the alien’s articulated armour and pulled the trigger. At point blank range, the tau was bifurcated, its legs and abdomen spinning away in one direction, the remains of the torso falling free, dragging wet ropes of intestine with it.

Rafen landed hard and rolled, coming up in time to see Ceris deploy his force mace in a glittering arc. The blunt-headed weapon grew spikes made of psionic energy, and the Codicier used it in an upward swing that batted another half-armoured fire warrior into a fallen wall. Wreathed in crackling energy, the tau vomited blood and perished.

Nearby, on a low mound of debris, Kayne and Turcio engaged a group of frenzied xenos at close range. The youth brought forward the crest of his helmet and put down a bulky male with a strike against its skull. Rafen’s eyes narrowed as he watched the alien fall; like the one he had seen moments before, this tau’s body seemed deformed, strange spines sprouting from its back, one arm folded up in a withered curl of bone and talon.

Turcio made a kill with his boot, grinding an armed creature in torn robes into the rock, dodging as its hands flailed at him. In a fluid motion, the Blood Angel followed through and put two more tau to death as they came at Kayne.

On the vox channel, Rafen heard a concussive grunt of anger and moderated pain, and immediately knew it was Ajir. Swinging about, he found the other Space Marine where he had fallen to one knee, the black streaks of pulse hits marring the crimson perfection of his battle armour. The sergeant thumbed his bolter’s fire-select to fully automatic and lent his battle-brother support, blazing back towards the trio of fire warriors moving and shooting as they closed in. One went down, then another, bolts slamming through polymer and into meat and bone.

The last round belonged to Ajir, who made the engagement’s final kill from where he crouched, taking off the top of the last fire warrior’s skull in a low-deflection shot. The alien staggered closer before gravity finally captured it and dragged the corpse to the bloody ground.

Rafen extended a hand to Ajir, but the other Space Marine did not acknowledge it. Instead, he righted himself without assistance and got to his feet. The Blood Angel removed his helmet and spat into the dust. Rafen saw red in the spittle but did not remark upon it.

‘Lord,’ called Turcio, who stooped to poke one of the corpses with his gun barrel. ‘You should see this, I think.’ The penitent brand on his cheek was livid with his exertions.

Rafen left the glowering Ajir to his own devices and crossed to where Turcio’s kill lay in a crumpled heap. Another anomaly, he noted. This tau bore odd fleshy wattles that spilled out of places beneath its clothing, as if they had burst through like tumours. In patches, the characteristic grey-toned skin veered towards pink. The dead alien had a piecemeal look to it, as if swatches of flesh had been cut from a human and merged with the tau’s own skin. But there were no sutures, no marks where differing organic matter had been conjoined. There were simply spaces of meat where tau ended and human began. The sergeant felt his lip curl in disgust as the scope of the discovery became clear to him.

He nodded to himself. The other fire warrior, the one Kayne had killed… The spines upon it could so easily have been from a kroot organism, or perhaps even a tyranid. Here then was the signature of Fabius Bile, the callous experimentation on these pitiful xenos the detritus he had left behind him.

‘This is the renegade’s work,’ he told his squad. ‘These are the spoil.’

‘Brother-Sergeant!’ Kayne called out across the killing field. ‘The xenos… The prisoner? It’s gone!’

‘Must have slipped away during the engagement.’ muttered Turcio.

All eyes turned to Ceris, who accepted the unspoken question with a nod. He hesitated, his hooded gaze turning inward for a moment. The force mace, the tip still shimmering with tics of ethereal energy, rose to point towards the sphere-construct. ‘In there.’

The tau, the one that called itself La’Non, was not difficult to find. At first, they followed the regular spatters of thin blood that the xenos had left behind it, as it staggered its way up into the construct; but once inside the building proper, the trail of fluid became lost in the layers of older and darker vitae, dried out in a cracked layer over the floor like a coat of ancient varnish. The xenos blood left splash patterns up against the walls that became more pronounced the deeper the Astartes ventured, high-water marks that showed where some vast reservoir of the fluid had been emptied heedlessly into the corridors and left to find its own level.

There were, of course, bodies. Scattered remains of tau and some of their servitor races – the feral kroot and the insectoid vespid – some of them in states of death that defied explanation, others killed in more commonplace ways by shot or blade, or each other. A cloying stink that recalled rotting flowers permeated everything, and presently Rafen replaced his helmet and let the breathing filters do their work. They forded an inner barrier of tightly knit binder fungus, cutting through with swords and knives, boots sinking into the mushy flooring where accursed symbols had grown out of the damp mould. Ajir murmured a litany of protection beneath his breath, and Ceris echoed him on each word; the other Blood Angels kept their own prayers mute.

Kayne pointed out strange capsules lined up on stands through the next ward they entered, their skirmish line moving with steady care. Rafen examined one and found soft cloth bundled within; it was a natal clinic, he realised, and the pods were support units for tau newborns. All were empty, and he did not dwell on what the layer of white ash that lay at the bottom of the pods might have been.

When La’Non’s blood trail ran out, they sought him in another fashion. They followed the sound of his lament.

The iris doors were open and sagging, bent outward as if by a powerful pair of hands. The keening of the sorrowful tau echoed out to them, and Kayne led the way in, taking point. The pin-lamp atop his bolter searched the damp, close gloom, picking out stone tables coated in cracked enamel, angled to allow fluids to gather in clogged blood drains beneath. Pieces of corpses dangled from makeshift meat hooks on the ceiling – objects Rafen identified as parts of an ork, a human female, tau and orubon and xexet and other species he could not place. Kayne’s torch found the corner of a strange design upon the wall and it was only when the youth recognised the sigil of the Eightfold Path of Chaos that he let out a curse and turned away.

The place had the sense of a work interrupted, and Rafen’s heart sank. It was Nadacar Hive all over again. Fabius had been here, in this very room, conjuring his horrors, and then fled them.

This thought foremost in his mind, he found himself at one of the tables. Upon it, the tau called La’Non sat, legs dangling like those of a child in an adult’s chair. Its shoulders were stooped and it moaned. He saw it had a heavy blade in one hand, almost a cleaver of the kind a butcher might use to cut a carcass. The tau was sawing back and forth at the place where the strange distorted arm had been connected to its body. Blood emerged in rivers, but the alien was making little headway in severing the alien limb. The blade was too dull, too broad, ill-suited for the task.

The xenos looked up at him, as if noticing the Astartes for the first time. ‘The voice, gue’la,’ it sobbed. ‘I can still hear it. It will not be silent.’

‘Where is the pain-bringer?’ He met the alien’s watery gaze. ‘Where is Fabius Bile?’

‘All around you!’ came the shouted reply. ‘His lies, his works, all here. All here!’ The tau showed him the distended, muscular arm, and the limb flailed weakly, as if it were trying to escape. ‘He lied, made us promises. And look what he did!’ The creature’s reedy, emotion-choked voice was rising. ‘Everything is madness, yes? That is true, but all else is lies! Lies!’ It rocked forward and tapped a thin finger on Rafen’s chest, blinking away tears. ‘You lied just as he lied!’

Rafen shook his head, a grim certainty gathering in his thoughts. ‘I did not lie to you, xenos,’ he told it. ‘I said I would end your agony. I will.’

With a swift motion, the sergeant drew his combat knife and buried it in the alien’s chest. The tau heart, as he recalled from his training, was in the centre of their torso, beneath a dense, bony plate in the middle of their ribcage. The fractal-edged blade slid easily through La’Non’s flesh and resisted a little as it bit into bone; Rafen applied even pressure and the weapon went in to the hilt, the very tip emerging from the alien’s back. The incision was clean and fast, cutting the heart in two. La’Non died silently, and Rafen allowed the body to fall off the edge of the knife.

Turcio watched him clean his weapon. ‘I didn’t know they could weep,’ he noted.

Kayne gestured at the room, and his answer was Rafen’s. ‘Look around, brother. Any creature would weep to have such horrors forced upon them–’

He never finished his words; Puluo, on guard at the door, gave a sudden shout and dragged his cannon up to firing position. ‘Movement!’

Rafen’s gun came to his hand as a shape shuffled into the chamber from the far side of the room. In the shadows, it was a hulking humanoid form the equal of a Space Marine in stature and breadth, shoulders broad and heavy, a shorn scalp with a halo of long white hair, and raising hands; hands that were fine and clever and capable of such horrors.

‘Fabius!’ The silhouette was the very profile of the man Rafen had pursued through the lower levels of the Vitalis Citadel on Baal, the renegade and traitor. At once, every Space Marine in the room opened fire, and a flashing storm of bolts ripped into the figure, tearing it apart in a razored hurricane.

Rafen was rushing forward even before the body hit the floor, the burning bite of vengeance surging through his veins.

His moment of thunderous elation died, quickly and silently. Kayne’s lamp lit the face of the figure, still discernable despite a bolt wound that had eaten away a fist-sized chunk of skull. The face was grey, pallid, a slit down its midline where a human being would have a nose. Eyes, large and wet, bulged out at him.

It was a tau, after a fashion, but monstrously bloated, bulked up by veins filled with generative compounds and muscle transplants. A xenos, made to mimic the mass of an Adeptus Astartes. Perhaps left here to be found so just such a trick could be played on whomever had come seeking the twisted Primogenitor.

Something fell from the freak’s twitching fingers and fluttered to the wet floor. A scrap of paper. Rafen knelt to recover it before the fluids scattered all about soaked into the vellum and rendered it useless.

On the paper there were words in high gothic, rendered in a careful, studied hand. Just words, just ink upon a piece of dry parchment; and yet they raised in Rafen a rage so high his vision hazed crimson.

You have failed.

CHAPTER TWO

With a fluidity and pace that belied the bulk of his armoured form, Rafen strode through the corridors of the warship Tycho, the hard glitter of chained anger in his eyes enough to ensure that no Chapter serf, machine-helot or crewman dared block his path and question his passage.

His boots ringing on the iron deck plates, the Blood Angel climbed the shallow ramp leading from the cruiser’s main spinal corridor, up towards the highest tier of the ship’s hull. He entered a cloister lit by windows of starlight and colour, the glow trailing in shafts through the smoky air of the Tycho’s chapel. Stained glass arranged in intricate designs showed the faces of warriors who had commanded the vessel in the past or commemorated great battles it had participated in. Over the entrance, a hexagonal mosaic showed a portrait of the man the cruiser drew its name from; Brother-Captain Erasmus Tycho, his face partly concealed by a golden half-mask. Rafen did not pause to meet the impassive gaze of the hero of Armageddon. The smell of incense was heavy here, reaching out from the nave, into the ship proper. Through the open doors ahead of him, the heavy copper gates lined with runes and inlaid obsidian, he glimpsed the altar and the statues beyond it.

‘Lord?’

The question stopped him dead, and he turned in place. Behind him, Brother Ceris stood, studying him. Like Rafen, he had not yet removed his wargear, and his armoured bulk filled the doorway.

Ceris approached, and the sergeant mused on the realisation that he had not heard the Codicier following him. Perhaps it was because his anger was so fulsome, his attention elsewhere, that the psyker had managed to come so close without registering on his awareness; or perhaps not. The other Blood Angel walked to a bowl protruding from a wall, and reached in. Water – purified fluid recovered from the ship’s reaction mass store, blessed daily by the Tycho’s resident sanguinary priest – flowed from a nozzle in the shape of a cherub’s mouth, and Ceris used it to dampen a cloth he recovered from a brass rack. In turn, he offered it to his commander.

Rafen took it without comment. It was protocol; on their return from the tau colony, the brother-sergeant and his squad had undertaken a brief ritual of purification to ward off the influence of the xenos and the stain of Chaos, but even so, it would have been wrong of Rafen to enter the chapel without taking a moment to pass a measure of the sanctified water over his armoured hands. He frowned inwardly; he should not have needed another man to remind him of that, even if Ceris did it without reproach. Rafen’s mind was indeed unsettled, and it stoked his ready anger still more that it was so.

Ceris watched him as he completed the brief sacrament. The white cloth in the warrior’s hands turned an ugly reddish-black as gummed oils and alien vitae, still caught in the hinges of his gauntlets, were dissolved.

‘I spoke with the shipmaster,’ began the psyker. ‘He has taken your orders, sir. Tycho is turning to bear.’

Rafen nodded once. On the floor, the discs of waxen light cast through the windows were moving slowly across the floor as the starship came about. He looked away. ‘Once it is done, tell him to prepare the vessel for the warp.’ The sergeant balled the cloth in his hand and threw it at a waiting servitor in an alcove. The machine-slave caught the cloth from the air and carried it towards a fire grate for disposal.

Rafen took two steps before he noticed that Ceris had not taken the implied dismissal in his tone. The psyker studied him, and the sergeant found a churn of resentment turning in his chest. ‘You have something else you wish to say to me?’ he demanded.

‘The blame is not yours.’

The statement was blunt and firm. The sergeant’s expression tightened. ‘You are dismissed,’ he growled, enunciating the words clearly so there would be no further misunderstanding.

Still Ceris made no move to obey the command. ‘You cloud your thoughts with recriminations, and it does you ill, sir. It takes your focus.’

‘Stay out of my mind.’ Rafen’s voice was low and menacing.

‘I need not exercise my abilities to read you, brother-sergeant. You wear your ire upon your sleeve as clearly as our Chapter sigil.’

Rafen took a step closer to the blue-armoured warrior. ‘For one they say is a chosen man of the Lord of Death, you seem to lack the sense to keep your opinions to yourself.’

‘My master Mephiston expects honesty and directness from his Librarians,’ replied Ceris. ‘He told me I was to give the same to you.’

‘So you have, then.’ Rafen gestured at the ramp leading back from the chapel. ‘Go now, and be content you have done your duty.’ Bitterness laced his words, hard and unexpected.

‘I have not,’ Ceris continued, remaining irritatingly unruffled, stock-still and fixed upon the other warrior. ‘Mephiston bid me to join your squad to aid you in our mission, and this I have not done.’

‘The mission?’ Rafen spat the reply at him. ‘The mission is a failure, Ceris! You saw it with your own eyes! Fabius has slipped out of our net at every turn, confounded us. He mocks us, and we have no choice but to countenance it!’ He turned away. ‘And you are wrong. The blame is mine.’

‘Can you be so sure?’ Ceris asked. ‘The renegade Bile has been at large for over ten thousand years, sir. He travelled the stars in the time of the high traitor Horus and the fires of the Heresy. Thousands have been killed at his hands, across countless worlds. He is a singular foe, a man who slipped even the grasp of Chapter Masters and primarchs alike–’

‘And you would have me take succour from that, would you?’ The sergeant snorted. ‘You were not there on Baal, psyker! You did not have him in your sights. You were not the one who failed to stop him!’

For the first time, Ceris broke eye contact. ‘I was not,’ he admitted. ‘I was many light years distant, at the conflicts on Beta Comea. But consider my anger, lord. Imagine my fury at learning that our home world had been attacked by the forces of Chaos. I and the battle-brothers with me were too far away to lend our arms to the defence of Baal… We could not even see the face of the enemy, let alone chance to strike at him as you did.’

‘You’re a fool, then,’ Rafen grated. ‘You ought to think yourself blessed for being spared the shame.’

The same black skein of thought that had plagued the sergeant every night since the Tycho’s mission began rose in him.

In the wake of the Chapter’s losses following the insurrection on Cybele and the dark schemes of a turncoat inquisitor named Stele, the Blood Angels had called a conclave of all successor Chapters. This historic gathering on Baal had but one aim – to bulwark the Chapter’s forces by drawing a tithe of warriors from each force of Blood Angels descendants – but the plans of the Chapter Master Dante had been set awry by the blind ambition of a single, misguided sanguinary priest. One man, convinced he could rebuild the Chapter’s losses not through a tithe, but by the use of ancient, forbidden science, had unwittingly allied himself to a biologian of the Adeptus Mechanicus; or so he had believed.

The priest opened a door to Baal, joining forces with a magos who called himself Haran Serpens. To their cost, the Blood Angels learned that this identity was merely one mask, one falsehood among hundreds spun by the arch-traitor and self-styled Primogenitor of Chaos Undivided; Fabius Bile.

In the madness that followed, great horrors were wrought. Mutant creatures that merged Astartes DNA with rapacious animal hungers were created, freakish aberrant Bloodfiends running wild, pillaging and despoiling everything the Blood Angels held sacred. In a final battle beneath the Chapter’s great fortress monastery, Rafen and his battle-brothers came together with their kinsmen to fight and vanquish the Chaos-spawned monsters. There, in sight of the tomb of their primarch, the golden Sanguinius, father of their Chapter and Lord of the Blood Angels, the invaders had at last been defeated and sanctity restored.

The future of the Chapter was secured; the Blood Angels would live on. But in the anarchy of the battle, slithering through the mayhem he had set in order to hide his crimes, under cover of lies Fabius Bile had stolen a most precious relic. A crystal vial, and in it, a measure of the purest blood plundered from the holy Red Grail. Drops of the vitae of Sanguinius himself.

Even now, after months had passed, Rafen was still sickened to his very core by the thought of this high transgression against his Chapter. His mind reeled at the horrors that a twisted genius such as Fabius might wreak with so rare and powerful an artefact in his clutches. The enormity of this monstrous theft shook him, the resonance so strong it was as if it had happened only yesterday.

To let this sin go unanswered could not stand. The renegade had committed a grave offence that could only be resolved by his execution, and by the recovery of what he had stolen.

Rafen and his squad had dedicated themselves to fulfilling this need; but all they had to show for it were empty hands, spent bullets and a string of failures. Those, and a single piece of bloodstained paper.

‘Have you learned nothing?’ The psyker’s question shattered Rafen’s moment of reverie. ‘After all that great Dante said, were you deaf to it?’

The sergeant’s anger rushed through him, and with a sudden movement, he grabbed the other Blood Angel and forced Ceris back hard against the wall of the cloister, slamming him into a stone pillar. ‘Damn you!’ he shouted. ‘What do you want from me, brother? Answer!’

For a brief instant, there was something like shock on the psyker’s face; but in the next moment it was gone, and his blank, steady aspect returned to its place. ‘Are you so arrogant, Brother-Sergeant Rafen, that you think yourself elevated above all the rest of us?’ Ceris’s voice was rough. ‘I know Lord Dante’s words and I was not even there to hear them with my own ears! Remember what he said, there in the great sepulchre before the battle with the Bloodfiends. We are being tested! Every single one of us, not just you!’ The psyker shook himself free of Rafen’s grip, and he allowed it. ‘You have no right to take this burden upon yourself. It is not yours to hold alone. We are the Sons of Sanguinius, we are Blood Angels, and we face challenge every day of our lives. This one is no different, only the scale of it changes. We find this enemy and we kill him. All of us. As one.’

Rafen turned away, the bitterness rising again in his gorge. ‘Find him? How? Tell me, Codicier, can you pluck his whereabouts from the tides of the warp with your witch-sight? Do not think to accuse me of wallowing in despair! I do nothing of the kind!’ He pressed a finger against the other man’s chest. ‘Know this. I would take this ship blindfold into the Eye of Terror. I would cut my own hearts from my flesh. I would sacrifice every one of my kinsmen here aboard, and more, if that is what it would take to find this renegade!’

Ceris nodded. ‘And no man in this crew would defy you if you did.’

‘But I cannot…’ hissed Rafen. ‘Look around you, brother. We have nothing. Our last lead, wasted on that tau madhouse. And Fabius knows it. He’s out there, laughing at us.’

‘The Chapter Master would not have charged you with this hunt if it were a simple matter.’

Rafen made a negative noise and angrily stalked away. ‘This is not some great and noble quest we can take a century to prosecute! It is an assassination! Time is ranged against us. Every moment that Chaos bastard holds a single droplet of sacred blood, he works his evil. Every hour advances his corruption. We must end this with swiftness, or we are lost!’

Ceris was silent for a moment. Then he threw a nod towards the copper doors and the chapel beyond. ‘Why are you here, sir?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The chapel, brother. The rest of the squad returned to the arming chambers to doff their wargear and undergo the rites of cleansing. But you came straight here. You did not even take your orders for the shipmaster to the bridge.’

Rafen frowned. ‘I came here… For the peace of it. I find clarity in the quiet.’ He allowed himself a sigh. ‘Perhaps I hoped to find some insight.’

Ceris looked at the statues at the far end of the chapel, the God-Emperor and his son Sanguinius standing like stone titans, offering only their steady and unswerving aspects. ‘Then you already have your answer, sir. You already know where our remedy lies. Have faith in the Emperor, brother-sergeant, and the Emperor will provide.’ The psyker began to walk away. ‘It would be an even greater crime if Fabius were allowed to take that too from us.’

‘Indeed.’ Rafen found himself nodding. Through his boots, the Blood Angel sensed a subtle vibration in the Tycho’s decking, and he moved to one of the stained glass windows in the cloister’s alcoves. Through the diamond-hard tiles of colour, he saw a flash of light from a launch tube on the warship’s flank. Sleek cylinders of metal, pressed forward on white spears of fire, looped away from the vessel, tracking, swarming together. He followed their course, looking ahead of them, and found the murky shape of the asteroid colony caught by the light of distant stars. Without another word, Rafen turned away and walked into the chapel; his anger, for the moment, held at bay.

Silent, hard flashes of refracted illumination reached out after him as the Tycho’s weapons did their work, and undid that of the traitor.

In coarse robes dyed grey and rust-red, there were rank upon rank of warrior-kin. They stood in lines across the sun-warmed flagstones of the great central courtyard, the air dry upon their upturned faces, the glow of the distant Baalite sun a red disc at their backs. Corbulo stood out from them, his robes cut in much the same fashion as theirs, but dressed with panels of white. The brash detail of his gold honour chains blinked as the sunlight crossed them. He walked the length of the warriors, his steady, clear voice carrying far, echoing off the walls formed by the surrounding buildings of the fortress monastery. His hood was rolled back, so that he could look each one of them in the eye.

‘There will come a day,’ he told them, ‘when you will ask yourself a question. Who am I? You will ask yourself where you came from, you will ponder on this and seek an answer.’ Corbulo’s craggy face pulled in a slight smile. ‘And then you will remember what I am about to tell you, and think no more of it.’

The sanguinary high priest paused in the shadow of the great statue in the middle of the courtyard, the winged shape rising high above him. He spread his hands, taking in all before him with a single gesture. ‘Where you were born. The tribes in which you grew to manhood. The worlds you called home. The leaders you once gave fealty to…’ He looked into different faces, and saw stiff attention, in some perhaps the odd hint of anticipation and awe. ‘These things are what made you who you are. But you stride beyond them now. Each of you has been tested to breaking point and emerged the stronger for it. You have fought through the trials and been judged. A great gift is now yours. You have earned the right to live and to die, not as a mere human being, but as an Adeptus Astartes. A Son of Sanguinius. A Blood Angel.’ He nodded to himself. ‘That is the only answer you will ever need. And be certain in the belief that there are many who envy you. Many who cherish and honour you. But still more, a myriad more, who hate you for what you have become. And against them, every day you still draw breath is a victory.’

Corbulo reached inside his robes, his fingers closing around a bag made of blood-crimson velvet, sewn with threads of gold and platinum, bedecked with rare gems from a hundred conquered worlds. ‘You are a victory made of meat and bone and blood. You are kings of war and the battle-lords of all you survey. You stride the stars in one unity of purpose – to fight in the honour of humankind, for the grace of Holy Terra and in veneration of the God-Emperor of Man and the Primarch Sanguinius.’ From the robes he drew forth the relic that was his sole charge, an object cleansed and sanctified and made pure as no other artefact could be.

He turned it in his hands, hearing the collective gasp from the warriors arrayed around him. It was flawless and perfect, without any outward sign of the great affront that had been perpetrated against it only months ago. Corbulo refused to allow himself to dwell on that moment of darkness; he held the Red Grail high, and let the incarnadine sun shower it with colour. The same old, giddying elation, the same undimmed sense of power surged through him and, at the sight of the relic, the robed Astartes went as one to their knees. ‘In His name, brothers,’ said the priest.

They echoed his words in a roar that raised to the sky.

‘In His name,’ whispered Dante, speaking the litany along with them. His hands rested on the balustrade of the stone balcony, the glassy black basalt there polished by his fingers, by the actions of countless such moments when he had stood here and looked down upon his warriors and his Chapter. His keen, hawkish eyes studied the faces of the warriors far below, each of them fully-fledged battle-brothers now and no longer initiates. He mused on Corbulo’s words, wondering after the origins of these new Blood Angels. The majority were the intake from the tithes of Baal’s two desert moons, but a fair proportion were assignees from the successor Chapters that had elected to bring the Chapter’s numbers up to full strength. How many of them had been recruited by the Angels Encarmine, the Flesh Tearers, the Blood Legion or any of a dozen other brother-Chapters? He pushed the question away. Corbulo had been correct. Who they had been mattered not; who they were now was all that mattered. All of them, Sons of Sanguinius.

‘New blood,’ said a familiar voice, from behind him.

Dante nodded. ‘Aye.’

Mephiston, master psyker of the Chapter and Dante’s strong right arm, joined him at the balustrade and cast his glacial gaze across the crop of recruits. The chief Librarian of the Blood Angels was clothed in a combat tunic and fighting breeches; he had come from the training halls to the presence of his master without summons, and it was a testament to their decades-long friendship that Dante did nothing more than raise an eyebrow at the other warrior’s somewhat casual attire. Few Blood Angels were granted the latitude to enter the Master’s chambers without first donning all the requisite robes and decorations of fealty; but there were times when such trappings of ceremony and ritual were important, and times when they were not. This moment was one of the latter.

Dante had not been aware of Mephiston’s approach, and to admit that was to say much. In over a millennium of service to the Golden Throne, those who could enter Dante’s presence without his knowledge could be counted on the fingers of one hand – and of those, three had been killed by the Chapter Master himself. But far from being concerned by such a thing, Dante was pleased by it. If Mephiston was still a mystery to him, after so long, then to his enemies the Lord of Death would be a ghost, unknowable and lethal.

‘I make it a rule never to miss this moment,’ Mephiston offered, jutting his sharp chin towards the recruits, as far below Corbulo bid them to rise. ‘To see our kindred and the grail together…’ He trailed off, his voice soft with reverence.

‘You may see the Red Grail whenever you wish, brother,’ noted Dante. ‘Such is your rank, no sanguinary priest would ever dare to deny you entrance to the great chapel.’ He nodded towards the spherical nave atop a distant tower.

‘It is so,’ said the psyker. ‘But this is different. When Corbulo shows them the relic, and their hearts rise in its glow…’ Mephiston sighed. ‘I feel sorrow for you, my lord, that you cannot perceive the colour and play of their emotions as I can. The sense of our battle-brothers and their auras at this moment is… almost transcendent.’

‘I feel a measure of that,’ Dante noted. ‘Perhaps not as you do with your witch-sight, but still the power of it rings in the air. It reminds me that even after eleven hundred years, I am not so jaded that I cannot still be awed.’

Mephiston nodded. ‘Just so. We live in a time of wonders, my Master. It is hard to believe that just a season has elapsed since our Chapter stared into the abyss. We faced the spectre of dissolution, but with the grace of Holy Terra, we have dispelled it.’

Dante folded his arms and drew in a slow breath. Unbidden, his mood began to shift and darken. Mephiston sensed it immediately and glanced at him, measuring him with that ever-unblinking gaze. ‘Curious,’ said the Chapter Master. ‘How strange it is that I can at once have such pride in my heart, but also the shadow of something bleak. Something closer to fury.’

And the source of that fury did not need to be given words; both of them shared the same stony ire, the same slow-burning hate at the violations done to their Chapter and their home world.

‘It is often the nature of men to be two things at once, in direct conflict with themselves,’ mused the psyker. ‘When the God-Emperor, His light unbound, first forged the Adeptus Astartes, He ensured that we would keep that duality. It is just and right we do so.’

‘Indeed,’ Dante replied. ‘Better to remind us not to stride too high above the common people we protect. What becomes of those of us who eschew their humanity?’

Mephiston’s face grew a sneer. ‘Perhaps that is a question I will put to Fabius Bile when we capture him.’

Dante’s reply was cold iron. ‘There will be no capture. Despite what the Ordo Hereticus may wish, there will be no trials and imprisonment, no process and public excoriation. Fabius will die wherever he raises his benighted head.’ He turned away from the balcony and walked back into the chamber, irritated at himself for allowing his black mood to come to the fore. The pleasure of seeing in the new tithe faded by the second, and that too built upon his hard, precise anger.

Finally, he stopped in the middle of the room and turned a hooded look on his battle-brother. ‘You have seen the most recent communiqué from the Tycho.’ It was not a question.

The other man nodded. ‘I have. It is… disappointing.’

Dante gave a gruff chug of humourless laughter. ‘A moderated way of describing the situation, if ever there was one. That xenos colony was a solid lead, but like all the others, it has turned to ashes in our hands.’

‘Our agents still seek new indications,’ said the psyker. ‘Every battle-brother listens out for any fraction of information.’

‘And what have we learned, Mephiston? What have we gathered but acres of useless data, nothing but hearsay and the ghosts of rumours?’ He gestured to an ornate desk in the corner of the room, where a gas-lens viewer scrolled through pages of data in gothic script. Parchments and pict-slates littered the surface of the console. ‘I vet this tide of noise myself and pick nothing from it. It is static, and little else. Worthless.’

‘Fabius Bile has been sighted,’ noted the psyker. ‘Those appearances are being researched by our cogitators and a contingent of my best epistolaries.’

‘If we were to believe all that we are told, then it would seem that the accursed renegade is active in dozens of places all across the galaxy, all at the same time.’ Dante’s voice rose in annoyance. ‘During the Festival of Ultimate Piety, observers place him in the Eastern Fringes, the Sabbat Worlds and the Damocles Gulf. Which of them is right? To which place do we send our warriors?’

The fact that Mephiston did not offer to supply an answer to his question made the Chapter Master’s point for him.

Dante’s lips thinned. ‘I could dedicate the whole Chapter to the chase and it would still not be enough, damn him.’

‘We knew the traitor would not be easy prey when we embarked upon this course of action,’ said the psyker. ‘He has eluded the forces of the Imperium for lifetimes. It may take that long to exact our full vengeance upon him.’

Dante gave a terse nod. ‘And that may be so, but there is the matter of… of the sacred blood.’ The warrior’s gut twisted at the thought of it. ‘And in that, we cannot tarry.’ He walked back towards the other man, and when he spoke again, his voice was low. ‘Old friend, what robs me of my peace, what keeps me awake in the dark of night, is the question. The question that torments me.’

‘What does Fabius want with the blood of our primarch?’ asked Mephiston. ‘I dread to know the answer, lord. I truly do.’

‘And more than that, I wonder if the atrocity he perpetrated against us was some part of a greater plan. Some scheme in which the Blood Angels are but a single element.’

Mephiston eyed him. ‘How so?’

‘What do we know of this bastard?’ snapped Dante, allowing himself to give full voice to his thoughts. ‘This so-called Primogenitor, who cuts and stitches the meat of life into patterns that offend all who lay eyes on them? A traitor among traitors, once a sworn Adeptus Astartes of the Emperor’s Children before they took the coin of Horus and turned heretic. A genius Apothecary, twisted by his fealty to the Eightfold Path of Chaos. A being of towering cruelty without interest in power or dominion–’

‘Only arcane, forbidden knowledge,’ said Mephiston, with a nod. ‘I have seen the horrors he has wrought and then released upon the battlefield. His freakish “New Men”, things that walk like humans, each the equal of an Astartes.’

‘Bile has no loyalty, not even to the daemon prince Fulgrim, Emperor blight him, or the rest of his turncoat kindred.’ Dante stalked away, his anger animating him. ‘He slips through the shadows, prostituting his skills to any Chaos warlord who will pay for them.’ The Chapter Master came to a halt and drew in a deep breath, forcing down his building anger. ‘This is the traitor we must find and kill.’ He looked away. ‘If only we could.’

After a long moment, Mephiston spoke again. ‘There is another reason I came to you today, lord,’ he began. ‘In the throes of my battle-meditation, a vision came to me. An inkling. A sense of import.’

Dante watched his comrade intently. The workings of the psyker-mind were a mystery, even to those who had been steeped in their ways for centuries, and yet the Chapter Master knew Mephiston well enough to recognise the import of what the Lord of Death was about to say. ‘You… saw something? In the warp?’

‘The skeins of past and future are open to some. In rare moments, I have been blessed to be one of them… Although some might think it more a curse.’

‘Tell me what you sensed.’

Mephiston hesitated, and in that instant there came a hard rapping against the chamber door. The Chapter Master gestured to one of his helots, and the servitor stepped forth from its charging alcove to answer the entreaty.

A Blood Angel in full wargear, the golden helmet of an honour guard in the crook of one arm, entered and went down on one knee. ‘My lord, forgive the intrusion.’

‘What is it, Brother Garyth?’ Dante failed to keep an edge of irritation from his voice.

‘An urgent machine-call from the dock station in high orbit. They relay a message from Brother-Sergeant Kale.’

Dante nodded; Kale was currently serving aboard the cruiser Dario, a warship assigned to the picket force that patrolled the rim of the Baal system. ‘Go on.’

‘Kale is inbound, sir. He brings with him a courier vessel that exited the warp just beyond the outer defence ring.’

‘A messenger,’ whispered Mephiston, his gaze turned inward.

‘Aye,’ said the honour guard. ‘The craft bears the pennants of the Flesh Tearers. They claim to have come bearing a message of utmost import, from Chapter Master Seth himself.’

Dante looked to the psyker. ‘This is what you saw?’

He got a nod in return. ‘A swift galleon moving through endless night. On its sails of black sackcloth, a serrated blade touched with a single drop of blood. In its hold, the sound of a voice, whispering a name. Gabriel.’

The Chapter Master walked to the doors leading to the balcony and stood on the threshold, looking up onto the rust-red sky. ‘Grant them passage,’ he told the honour guard. ‘I will hear what my honoured cousin has to say to me.’

The Aquila-class shuttle dropped like a falling hawk from the low dust clouds and made a leisurely banking turn over the tallest spires of the fortress-monastery, before angling in for a landing on the southern approach. The shuttle settled with a dull thud of compacting hydraulics, fumes and dust swirling around it before the low winds caught them and dragged the haze away.

Mephiston’s eyes narrowed to slits as he peered at the craft, pressing through the commonplace metals and plastics of the hull, reaching for a sense of the passengers inside. He found what he expected; warriors of character, intent and focused on their missions at hand.

The psyker stood at his Chapter Master’s side, the pair of them joined by a trio of honour guards; aside from the mindless machine-slaves that skittered out to connect up the refuelling conduits and stabilising tethers, the landing pad was empty. Mephiston knew that as a matter of course, scouts armed with modified Zaitsev-pattern long-bolters were ranged in the upper towers bracketing the platform, watching for any signs of trouble; it was one of many additional security measures that he himself had initiated in the wake of Fabius’s infiltration of Baal.

Presently the drop ramp along the shuttle’s ventral hull fell open and a lone Blood Angel wearing a veteran sergeant’s laurels exited the ship. The warrior came forward and knelt before Dante, removing his helmet and tucking it to his chest. ‘Master, my lord,’ he began. ‘I bring news.’

‘To your feet, Brother-Sergeant Kale,’ said Dante. ‘Speak plainly.’

Kale stood up, and Mephiston noted how the man was careful not to allow his gaze to cross that of the psyker. The sergeant was an old hand at the business of war, and not one to take to fear easily; yet, his aura glittered with trepidation at being in the chief Librarian’s presence. Mephiston saw this and accepted it. His fearsome reputation throughout the Chapter had a life of its own, and the Lord of Death saw no reason to do anything to discourage it.

‘The Dario intercepted a small warp-capable craft exiting the immaterium beyond the orbit of the twelfth planet,’ Kale explained. His voice had the sharp edges of a Secundus clan accent. ‘It answered challenge and hove to. Aboard we found a contingent of Astartes from the Flesh Tearers Chapter. They would speak only with you, Master.’

‘Their diktats and signets are in order?’ said Mephiston.

Kale nodded. ‘Aye, sir. The messenger bears the seal of Lord Seth himself.’

Dante made a beckoning gesture. ‘Bring him to me.’

As Kale returned to the shuttle, Mephiston leaned close to his commander. ‘No falsehood here,’ he reported. ‘Kale believes what he has been told, and those aboard that ship believe it too.’

‘What does Seth want?’ Dante wondered. ‘We parted on amicable terms after the conclave. Perhaps he wishes to ask a favour of me now we have strengthened the comradeship between our two Chapters.’

The sergeant returned, and with him came three Flesh Tearers. Their armour deep blood-red and trimmed with night-black, they largely abstained from the displays of honour chains and heraldry common to their parent Chapter. One of them, a veteran sergeant like Kale, sported a shield-roundel attached to his shoulder guard – on it, Mephiston spied the lizard-claw symbol that was Seth’s personal battle emblem. The gold helmet dangling at the Flesh Tearer’s belt confirmed it; this Astartes was one of Seth’s personal guard.

Kale and the two other Flesh Tearers stood to attention and the messenger followed the pattern as was expected of him, bowing low and announcing himself. ‘I am Brother Mazon,’ he said, ‘I bring word from your honoured cousin, Seth of the Flesh Tearers.’

Mazon met Mephiston’s gaze for a moment – a fractional one – and quickly looked away. It was more than enough for the psyker to gain an insight into him. No subterfuge lay in this man’s thoughts. Whatever reason his Master had sent him to Baal for, it was not for ill intent. The psyker thought of the fragmentary vision he had experienced and mused on how it would connect to this unexpected arrival.

The Space Marine drew a plain box made of red-enamelled iron from his belt and offered it to Dante. ‘This will open only to you, lord.’

The commander nodded and accepted the device. The instant his bare flesh touched the surface, Mephiston heard the quiet click of a bloodlock. With an oiled whisper of intricate workings, the box unfolded to become an oval plate crested with spines; atop the spines, a rarity glittered.

‘A hololith diamond,’ noted Dante. ‘A rare device. Great Seth has clearly spared no effort in bringing this message to me in secure order.’ The Chapter Master stroked the facets of the fist-sized gemstone, and it shone as it caught an errant ray of sunlight.

As if from a prism, the diamond’s glow grew, emerging from the stone to become a ghost of shimmering light. The ghost stuttered and flickered, becoming a crude image of Seth, armoured but unkempt, as if he had just stepped from a battle. The Flesh Tearers bowed to the hololith, showing it the same fealty they would have the Master himself. Mephiston watched as the message encoded on the crystalline matrix of the archeotech device began to play out.

Seth began with a cold, humourless grin. ‘Cousin, the Emperor’s light find you well. You’ll forgive me the cheap theatre of this message, but it seemed the most expedient means of reaching you. I have something for the Blood Angels.’

Dante and Mephiston exchanged wary glances. Of all the things the Lord of Death had expected the Master of the Flesh Tearers to say, it was not this.

‘Battle chews up all my time and energy, and if it were not so, if it were not a shirking of my sacred duty to Terra, I would follow this datum myself. But I cannot, so I pass this to you.’ Seth’s face clouded briefly with annoyance. ‘I know what you have been doing, cousin. Don’t trouble yourself by wondering how I know, just accept it.’

‘He’s talking about the hunt for the traitor,’ said the psyker. ‘How–?’

Dante silenced him with a shake of the head.

‘We have made a discovery. A member of the Adeptus Mechanicus, a tech-priest of some great self-importance by the name of Matthun Zellik, has stepped over the bounds of his oath to Mars and Holy Terra. He has been in contact with a rogue tech-lord of your acquaintance. Haran Serpens.’

‘Fabius…’ husked Dante.

‘Granted, this information is old, but the veracity of the source is assured.’ Seth gave a wicked, predatory grin that showed his fangs, his right hand straying to scratch at the old scars on his face. ‘The informant was… shall we say, drained dry of all he had to give.’

The commander of the Blood Angels glared at the hololith image, as if he could see into it and through to Seth himself. ‘And now comes the price,’ he muttered.

As if in answer, the figure in the message nodded to himself, becoming dour and serious. ‘I have said nothing of this to anyone. None of the other successors know of what has been under way, or of what has been stolen. I lay no blame upon you, Dante. I understand the import of this. I would have done the same as you do now, if I stood in your place.’ He frowned. ‘But I want in. The Flesh Tearers will be a part of this. My Chapter will share in the glory of bringing the quarry to his ruin.’

Dante nodded slowly. ‘Ah, Seth. You know I cannot refuse you. Not now.’

The hololith continued. ‘I have already sent a ship to rendezvous with your lad Rafen and his band. The Gabriel. The warriors aboard know enough.’

Mephiston’s chest tightened at the mention of the vessel’s name.

‘You need only tell Rafen to accept the help he is offered. And together, we will right this.’ Seth bowed. ‘We both know the risk of standing alone, Dante. Our unity will make us strong.’ With a final flicker of colour, the image became mist and dispersed, the glow from within the diamond fading to nothing.

The Master of the Blood Angels allowed the message box to close and weighed it silently in his hands, considering. Finally, he glanced at Brother Mazon and tossed the device to him. Mazon caught it easily, and said nothing, waiting.

Dante walked away a few steps, and Mephiston followed him. ‘The God-Emperor’s ways are sometimes opaque to us,’ offered the psyker. ‘Perhaps we should accept that this turn of events is His hand at work.’

‘Perhaps,’ echoed Dante. ‘I wonder, should I be troubled that my cousin knows so much of our endeavours? This is not the first time the Flesh Tearers have shown such… insight.’

‘Our search for Fabius cast a wide net, and quickly with it,’ noted Mephiston. ‘These things could have become known to Seth.’

Dante’s patrician face stiffened. ‘A matter to be addressed. But first this.’ He turned abruptly and crossed back towards Mazon. ‘Brother-sergeant. Consider your message delivered. You may leave.’

‘Lord,’ said the Flesh Tearer, ‘if you will. An answer will be requested.’

The commander shook his head, a grim smile playing on his lips. ‘You are mistaken, Mazon. Your Master knew my answer before he sent you to me.’

From a distance, both ships appeared almost identical. They shared the bladed prow, the orchard of crenulated minarets along the dorsal lengths of their fuselage, the hammerhead castle rising from their hull. Cannons in brassy, murderous array gave mute defiance to all enemies, engines flaring like captured suns at their backs; these were rapid strike cruisers of the Adeptus Astartes, ships of singular, swift purpose that could turn cities to slag or land armies if the needs of battle demanded it.

Their colours were all that separated them, that and the bold sigils upon their blade-sails. The Tycho, red as fury, chased with brass and gunmetal silver, adorned with a winged droplet of blood shining bright in the void. Alongside, the Gabriel, black as rage, lined with sanguine among the ebon, with a razor-toothed wheel kissed by a tear of dark blood catching the distant solar glows.

In silhouette, both the same; in light of sun, their characters revealed. The Astartes aboard them did not differ from the ships in which they travelled.

‘Cousin,’ said Rafen, ‘well met.’

Brother-Sergeant Noxx gave a terse nod. A thin smile threatened to break out across his lips. ‘I’ll wager you didn’t think we would cross paths so soon again, eh, Blood Angel?’

Rafen allowed the other man a nod. ‘Just so, Flesh Tearer. I confess, I was surprised to see your ship out here. Is not your Chapter still engaged in the punishment of Eritaen?’

Noxx shook his head, making a show of looking around the Tycho’s audience chamber. The veteran and his squad had come aboard, claiming the right granted to any Astartes, to meet and speak in confidence with members of another Chapter. The Gabriel had left the Tycho little choice but to heave to, the Flesh Tearers’ ship venturing so close that its mass shadow would make any attempt to enter warp space a dangerous prospect. ‘That conflict is ended. But the rest of my kinsmen have been given a new battle to fight, against an ork horde in the Auro Cluster.’

‘Such a fitting foe,’ sneered Ajir. ‘I wonder which side is the more savage?’

Rafen silenced his man with a look, but Noxx seemed to enjoy the barb. ‘I only wish I could be there to find out. But sadly, instead I am here to help you where you have failed.’

‘You dare–?’ Kayne rocked off his feet, and this time Rafen had to take a step up to block the young Space Marine’s path.

‘Did you learn nothing from what has gone before?’ said Rafen. ‘Stand down, boy. Keep your mouth shut.’

‘Still has some fire in him,’ Noxx nodded approvingly. ‘I’m glad to see that’s not been lost.’

Rafen’s gaze dropped to the data-slate in his hand. The device had been presented to him by the runner from the astropath sanctum mere minutes before the cruiser’s scrying monitors had picked up the approaching vessel. ‘What do you know of our mission?’

‘I know that an arch-traitor defiled Baal with his presence,’ said Noxx. ‘I know you have not yet been able to find him and take recompense for that transgression.’

‘You think you could do better?’ Ajir grated.

‘We could hardly do worse–’

‘Enough!’ snarled Rafen. ‘We are Astartes, Sons of Sanguinius all! We have not forgotten the threat we faced together and destroyed in our unity! I will not have us fall back into old rivalries like bickering children.’ He turned and shot a hard glare at his warriors, each in turn, ending with Kayne and Ajir. ‘Are we so arrogant that we cannot take an offer of help from our kinsmen? I think not.’ He was aware of Ceris watching him. Silently, the Codicier gave him a level nod.

Noxx’s expression shifted. ‘Every man under my command knows the import of this, Rafen,’ he said. ‘And together, we will take the target we seek.’ He nodded in the direction of the Tycho’s bridge. ‘Even now, the Gabriel’s navigators commune with yours, passing to them the data we have uncovered.’

‘Good,’ Rafen replied. ‘Once we set a course, we’ll convene to devise a plan for a joint sortie.’

‘Brother-sergeant!’ Ajir stepped forward and came across, shaking his head. ‘I cannot stay silent on this, even if you order me so!’ He stabbed a finger at Noxx and the other Flesh Tearers. ‘This is not a matter for others. This mission is ours alone.’

‘You’re wrong,’ Rafen told him.

‘Who decides that?’ demanded the Space Marine.

Rafen didn’t answer him; instead, he thrust the slate into Ajir’s hand and let him read it. There, on the display, was the clear and unmistakable cipher of a message from Baal, appended with the highest priority suffixes. Ajir’s eyes widened as he realised that the communication had come directly from the Lord Commander himself.

‘What does it say?’ asked Puluo, speaking for the rest of the assembled warriors.

‘Fight together,’ said Ajir.

CHAPTER THREE

Turcio stood, and he was not at his ease. The two squads faced each other across the tacticarium chamber, and it might have seemed to a passing observer that they had gathered to do battle with one another. Blood Angels ranged to the starboard, the Flesh Tearers to the port, the armoured warriors sized each other up, as was their manner. Recent events on Baal had in some ways built bonds of comradeship between the diverse Chapters that drew lineage from the Primarch Sanguinius; but still the old contentions between the first founding and its successors could not be washed away in a single night.

And never could there be more polar an opposite to the Blood Angels than the Flesh Tearers. The former proud and noble in bearing, the latter feral and coarse – yet the same blood flowed in all their veins. Outward character aside, they were all sons of the Great Angel, and beyond that they were Adeptus Astartes. Brothers in arms if not in true kinship.

None of the Astartes spoke. Both squads had been ordered to rein in any comments that did not immediately benefit the discussion at hand. Brother-Sergeant Rafen had been blunt about that, and he imagined Noxx had said the same. Rafen had tired quickly of even the smallest hint of divisive behaviour, ordering Ajir and the others in no uncertain terms to direct their energies towards the mission. Our enmity, he had told them, has only one target today.

That target turned slowly in front of them, suspended in a vapour, conjured by hidden display beams in the base of an ornate, wrought-iron chart table. Rafen circled the table, glaring at the flickering image. Turcio recognised the face of Fabius Bile. It was an artist’s impression of the fiend, dispassionately constructed by some machine-slave fed a diet of security camera footage, faded portraits and research data.

It depicted a man with the dimensions of a Space Marine, three metres high and another across the shoulders. Pallid of face, his flesh was pulled tight on his skull and around the rim of a cranial cognition accelerator implant. Strings of white hair fell down upon shoulder pauldrons of bloodstained bronze, blurred where the display engine’s self-censorship subroutines masked the eightfold stars etched there. He wore a long coat over his wargear, a patchwork thing made of human skins with screaming faces sewn into the pattern of it. A brass mechanism of limbs and manipulators – a device of mysterious origin known only as ‘the chirurgeon’ – was attached to his back; skull-topped valves and reservoirs of black fluids, oil-thick and sluggish, chugged as they worked. The functions of the chirurgeon could only be guessed at. Several learned scienticians of the Imperium had attempted to divine its capabilities, suggesting it might be some sort of life-support mechanism, or perhaps even a semi-sentient servitor device. It reminded Turcio of the servo-harnesses worn by the technical adepts of his Chapter, but in a more bloated, grotesque design.

He was considering this as his gaze found one of Noxx’s warriors, standing slightly askance from the rest of the Flesh Tearer squad. The warrior had a single servo-arm folded discreetly at his back, and upon his shoulder pad the cogwheel trim of a Mars-trained Techmarine. An angled face robbed of one human eye, sporting an augmetic replacement with a sapphire lens, met his look and gave him a respectful nod.

The fact that Noxx had been allowed to bring a Techmarine with him spoke volumes; the Flesh Tearers, a small Chapter made up of only a handful of companies, had little resources to squander idly – and that included warriors gifted with some fraction of the knowledge and training of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Techmarines were a rare breed among the Adeptus Astartes, inducted into their Chapters in the same fashion as every other initiate, but then trained on Mars to commune with machines… and so some would have it said, never again to be counted as truly trustworthy on their return.

Turcio had never held to that suspicion. He found it hard to believe that an Astartes would ever find something more divine than the God-Emperor of Mankind inside the cogs and coils of a machine, no matter what spirituality the tech-priests of the Mechanicus claimed.

He saw Rafen turn to Noxx. ‘I’m eager to see the gift you’ve brought us, brother-sergeant.’ His commander gestured at the viewing table. ‘If you will?’

Noxx glanced at the Techmarine. ‘Mohl,’ he said, ‘show them.’

Brother Mohl stepped forward and his servo-arm unfolded with a fluid, almost elegant motion, in the manner of a courtly noble offering his hand before a dance. The movement seemed strange coming from a machine-limb that could crush a man’s skull like an egg. The arm presented a mnemonic cylinder to the table and the viewer accepted it with a whine of small motors.

Lenses clicked and chattered inside the table, and the image of Fabius Bile shifted. Particles of magnetic sand inside the viewer’s core moved, clustering around the projector head to give out a new, compelling image. The form of a tech-priest shimmered into being before them. A hooded human – but only by the loosest of definitions – the figure wore the familiar robes of the Adeptus Mechanicus and a skull-and-cog sigil denoting the exalted rank of Magos. Turcio caught a glimpse of the priest’s face and realised that his head appeared to be entirely coated in chrome. Perhaps it was some sort of mask.

‘This is the Magos Minoris Matthun Zentennigan Eight-Iota Zellik,’ said Mohl. The Flesh Tearer’s voice was quiet, but it carried across the chamber. ‘A ranking tech-lord of the Magos Technicus of Mars, he is listed in the rolls as an adept-without-portfolio, with letters of marque from the Fabricator-General to conduct independent operations beyond the Segmentum Solar.’

‘In other words, he’s a law unto himself,’ muttered Kayne.

‘Zellik’s rank and position allow him a great deal of liberty,’ Mohl agreed. ‘We believe that the Ordo Xenos have been watching him for some time for overt signs of contamination, but no evidence has been forthcoming.’

‘They believe he’s treating with aliens?’ said Ceris.

‘Possible,’ came the reply. ‘Not confirmed. Zellik’s connections have so far enabled him to remain outside the grip of the ordos. But what has been determined, by agents in our employ, is that Zellik is indeed operating outside the letter of Imperial law and Mechanicus doctrine. He fancies himself as something of a collector, inclined to hoard items he considers precious rather than turn them over to his masters. Apparently, he maintains an extensive private museum… In addition, he has been trading in proscribed and rare technologies.’

‘The cog-boys would go wild if they knew that,’ said Ajir.

Noxx shook his head. ‘Don’t be so sure. The Adeptus Mechanicus are quite happy to bend the rules if it lets them gather up another dusty relic from the days before Old Night.’ He glanced at Mohl and the Techmarine’s head bobbed in agreement.

‘So, Kayne was correct, then,’ offered Rafen. ‘This Magos Zellik is operating on his own… Perhaps at the behest of Mars, perhaps only to enrich himself.’ The Blood Angel folded his arms. ‘What does that have to do with our hunt?’

‘One of the names connected to his trade will be familiar to you,’ Mohl explained. ‘A Magos Biologis by the name of Haran Serpens.’

‘Bile’s alias…’ Puluo’s craggy face hardened. ‘This wastrel cog is in league with Chaos?’ He spat on the deck.

‘We suspect he is unaware of the lie of the Serpens identity. Knowledge of what took place on Baal has yet to filter out into the greater Imperium–’

‘It filtered out to you, didn’t it?’ interrupted Kayne darkly. Turcio found himself nodding in agreement. As much as he knew he should trust the Flesh Tearers, he still found it hard to.

Mohl ignored the comment and kept talking. ‘It is likely Zellik has no idea who he was really dealing with.’

‘What was the nature of his trade with Bile?’ Turcio spoke for the first time. ‘Do we know that?’ The metallic fingers of his augmetic arm drummed on his vambrace, an unconscious tic he could not seem to excise.

‘Unclear,’ replied Mohl.

‘It is my Lord Seth’s suggestion that we approach this Zellik and ask him to tell us all he knows of the whereabouts of one “Haran Serpens”…’ Noxx made the statement sound almost playful.

Turcio considered this. ‘The Mechanicus are a rule-bound lot. I don’t doubt our errant Magos will have chapter and verse on every trade he’s ever made, from bolt-screws to battleships.’

‘He won’t just give it up for the asking,’ said Ajir. ‘And if he has indeed been dealing off-book, with xenos or any other enemies of Terra, then he knows his life is forfeit.’

Ceris peered at the image. ‘Are we to simply confront him with this? Impose the Emperor’s authority and arrest him?’

‘He’ll flee the moment he sees our ships,’ added Kayne.

‘Perhaps not,’ said Noxx. ‘Not if he only sees my ship.’

Rafen eyed his opposite number. ‘What do you mean, sergeant?’

The Flesh Tearer’s thin lips parted, revealing his teeth. ‘Brother Mohl must take credit for this idea.’ He patted the Techmarine on the shoulder. ‘We’ll bring the Gabriel in to his complex at quarter speed, contact Zellik and tell him we want to make a trade. Weapons or vehicles, or some such.’

‘You’re Space Marines. What makes you think he’d believe that you are interested in an illicit deal with him?’ Turcio frowned at the Flesh Tearer. ‘It’s a lie a child could see through.’

‘If it were you making the approach, Blood Angel, I would concur,’ Noxx replied. ‘But we are the Flesh Tearers.’ He took in his squad with a sweep of his hand and gave a chilly grin. ‘And as I am sure you know, people are always willing to think the very worst of us.’ Noxx glared at Turcio, daring him to disagree; and in all truth, he could not.

The Space Marines were silent, each of them considering Noxx’s words. Finally, Rafen spoke. ‘Brother Mohl is to be commended. This has the makings of a good plan. So good, in fact, that I find myself wondering why Lord Seth did not simply send you to prosecute it alone, without the involvement of my Chapter at all.’

‘Ah,’ said Noxx, ‘there’s more to it than that.’

‘There always is,’ Puluo said dryly.

‘Zellik’s base of operations is a mobile platform… It would be a misnomer to consider it a ship or a space station. The Archeohort is neither one nor the other.’

‘Archeohort?’ The word was unfamiliar to Turcio.

‘Show them,’ Noxx told Mohl. The Techmarine touched a luminous keypad and the lens viewer shifted again. The new shape was hard to grasp, and for long moments Turcio stared at it, trying to draw meaning from what appeared to be a collection of gigantic derricks clustered about an egg-shaped core. It reminded him a little of the fat dust spiders that lurked in the sublevels of the fortress-monastery. The scale was hard to reckon from the image, however.

‘The construct is essentially a mobile processing facility, dedicated to the recovery of lost scientific relics. It moves from star to star, sifting planets for archeotech. Zellik has a small army of skitarii and savants, and the construct is well armed. A single vessel would not pose a serious threat to it.’

‘The question answered,’ Noxx said with a nod. ‘Our Chapter’s starfleet is small. It was difficult enough to detach the Gabriel for this duty. But in order to hobble Zellik, two ships are needed. One to close to point-blank range and rake the platform with its guns–’

‘And another to sweep in and bracket the Archeohort, aye. I see.’ Rafen nodded back. ‘You have this… construct’s location?’

‘Beyond the Holda and Precipice systems, out on the lip of the void before the Ghoul Stars.’ Mohl’s answer was immediate. ‘Zellik returns there frequently to sift the corpse worlds along that axis.’

Turcio and the others listened as Noxx went on, outlining his plan to attack the Archeohort. There were a few times where Brother Rafen offered observations, largely points of finesse where the blunt, unchained approach of the Flesh Tearers could benefit from the more aloof viewpoint of Blood Angel thinking; but as the meeting drew to a close, he saw a slow hunter’s smile forming on his commander’s lips, the mirror of it on the faces of the other Astartes.

It was a good plan. It would work. And for the first time in what seemed like forever, the black mood that had gripped the Blood Angels on their return from the tau colony lifted a little. The distant call of battle was coming, and Turcio felt it in his hands as they itched to hold a weapon.

At last, Rafen stepped up to the viewer table and stared into the depths of the image turning above it. ‘Let us find this Magos Minoris Matthun Zentennigan Eight-Iota Zellik,’ he said carefully. ‘Let us find him and put him to the question.’

Inside the boarding torpedo, the only light came from the sickly yellow-green glow of biolume sticks. Tethered to the pod’s support stanchions with lines of wire, they drifted back and forth like dull leaves caught in a breeze. Rafen’s occulobe implant had tightened the orbs of his eyes to allow him to see better in the near-darkness, but even so the interior was a landscape of greys and blocky shadows. He moved with care between the Space Marines in their acceleration webs, towards the bow. His enhanced hearing caught the peculiar low yowl that echoed into the capsule’s hull from the tethers outside. Pulled like a lure on a line, the boarding torpedo moved in the shadow of the warship Gabriel, largely occluded by the vessel’s mass. The cables snaked back to the cruiser through open space, servitors working the reels at their far ends in careful coordination; the machine-helots puppeted the capsule, they shifted and tacked it as waterborne sailors might do the same to a sail, helping it to maintain all of the precious velocity it had accrued since they had entered the system.

Rafen used a series of iron handholds welded to the inner hull, moving from ring to ring, hand over hand, drifting in the null gravity. Each ring had a rime of frost on it where ambient moisture in the air had chilled far below freezing, and every exhalation that escaped the Blood Angel’s mouth emerged in a puff of vapour. The biting cold gathered on his bare face, stiffening the flesh over his cheekbones and his chin. The craft’s internal heating mechanisms – in fact, practically all of the torpedo’s energy-dependent systems – were inoperative. It was all another facet of the ruse, to cloak the capsule in the cold of space to make it appear like any one of a million other pieces of frozen, lifeless debris. It was the only way they could chance to launch a boarding operation against Zellik’s Archeohort. Teleporters would not work; the construct was possessed of some kind of arcane dispersal field generator that would scramble any incoming matter signal into something unrecognisable. An approach towards any of the heavily defended airlocks, or docking bays bristling with autonomic guns, would be suicide. A forest of sensors turned mechanical eyes to all points of the aetheric compass. The only way in was the brute-force approach, and Rafen had seen the brief flash of relish in Noxx’s dead eyes at the thought of that.

Arriving at the tapered prow of the capsule, Rafen pulled himself to one of the few windows in the torpedo’s hull, a circular porthole little bigger than his clenched fist. He brushed away a layer of ice crystals and peered out into the dark.

What he saw there gave him pause. The Archeohort was rising above the bow of the Gabriel, and at last he understood the size of it. The construct was easily the mass of a city-sprawl, and the spider-like impression presented by the image viewer was cemented as he watched kilometre-long gantries cluster from the complex’s main core around the drifting remnants of a slab-sided space hulk. They were closing the distance to the Archeohort with every passing second, and as the thing loomed, Rafen picked out bright sparkles of hard light along the places where the gantries brushed the derelict’s hull.

‘Zellik’s savants are taking the wreck apart,’ Noxx’s voice reached him. ‘Sifting it for anything of value.’

Briefly, Rafen wondered after the origin of the hulk. The diminishing shape didn’t have the look of a warship about it. The craft had probably been some ancient colonial transport, perhaps set off from Terra before the Age of Strife in search of new frontiers and a better life. But now, whatever death had befallen it, the old ship was suffering a second ignoble ending as the Archeohort picked at its bones.

He turned away from the port and found Noxx’s shadowed form in front of him. ‘This will be a challenge,’ said the Flesh Tearer. ‘Zellik’s skitarii are trained in the use of exotic weapons. I’ll warrant we’ll get some exercise over there.’

Rafen accepted this and tapped his fingers on the hilt of his sheathed power sword. ‘I imagine so.’

Noxx studied him, and finally pointed to a circular design etched into one of his armour plates. ‘The Iron Halo. I had wondered if they would give you an honour for what you did at the sepulchre.’

‘I was told I had earned it. But I was only there at the end. Others fought as hard as I, in other places, at other times.’

The other man’s flat, shallow smile flashed briefly in the gloom. ‘Such modesty. Only one as earnest as you could carry that off and not seem false with it.’

Rafen’s jaw stiffened. ‘I speak what I feel. I do not play at humility.’

‘A commander never can,’ came the reply. ‘And speaking of command. Before we are finally committed to this sortie, a point of protocol. We share the same rank, but one of us has to have the final word.’

‘And you think you should be the one?’

‘I am the senior battle-brother. It seems only proper.’

‘I may not have as many service studs in my brow as you, Noxx…’ It was the Blood Angel’s turn to show a dry smile. ‘But this is my mission. Perhaps I should best you for the privilege?’

‘Hardly the place, don’t you think? And there’s no guarantee it would go in your favour, as it did last time.’ Noxx inclined his head. ‘Very well, Rafen. I’ll defer to you. For the moment.’

Around them, the torpedo shifted as the tethers were let out. ‘Not long now.’ He looked around and found Brother Mohl, his helmet still sealed, seated at a vox console. If not for the occasional twitch of his head, or a tic of motion from his servo-arm, the Techmarine could have been an empty suit of power armour. Enclosed in there, Mohl was conversing with the Archeohort’s crew, laying the keel of the lie that would get them aboard. Rafen briefly switched to the comm-channel Mohl was using, but the strident noise in his ear bead made him wince. It was nothing but an atonal rattle of binary code.

He switched out again and sub-vocalised into the general vox. ‘Brothers, be ready. Take your breaching stations.’

Turcio bent over an inert control console and spoke a prayer of activation, his thumb resting on the activation rune. ‘On your command, sir,’ he said.

‘Moment of truth,’ rumbled Puluo.

Rafen nodded, shrugging into his own restraint harness. Without the function of the mechanisms usually employed to maintain them, the disposition of the boarding torpedo’s short-range thrusters was unknown. He glanced at the chronometer on the bulkhead, marking off the elapsed mission time. The capsule would be coming around now, the tethers playing out to turn it into a shot from a sling. The thrusters were supposed to double that speed, to bring them in too fast for the Archeohort’s gunnery cogitators to react. If they failed to fire, the capsule would move slowly and the guns would mark their range in short order.

The chronometer’s moving hand swept across the pinnacle of the clock face and Rafen dropped his hand like a blade.

Turcio stabbed the rune. A second ticked by, then another. Already, the pull of acceleration was tugging on all of them as the boarding torpedo was released. ‘Perhaps–’

The Blood Angel never finished the thought; instead a thundering roar sounded from the aft of the capsule, and every warrior aboard was forced into his harness as gravity fell hard upon them.

Rafen struggled to spy through the small porthole, glimpsing only the shimmer of starlight off hull metal, but nothing he could define; then there were stark, silent lashes of colour blazing through the windows as lances of energy lit the void with their brilliance. Outside, the Gabriel’s shipmaster had deployed his guns and fired on the Mechanicus construct at point-blank range. The boarding torpedo sailed among the unleashed maelstrom, masked once more by the salvoes as it made its terminal approach.

Mohl disconnected a mechadendrite from his helmet and spoke across the general vox channel. ‘Zellik broke contact,’ he reported. ‘When the Gabriel refused to stand to and allow him to dispatch a lighter, he grew suspicious.’

A near-hit made the torpedo rock and the hull moaned. ‘And that’s not all,’ muttered Puluo.

‘The Archeohort has engaged the cruiser,’ added the Techmarine.

‘Clearly,’ said Noxx. ‘Now, if all goes to plan, the Tycho should be making its approach from the far side.’ He glanced at Rafen. ‘If your shipmaster is as good as you say, then Zellik will be too busy dealing with a pair of Astartes cruisers to direct his attention towards us.’

‘Tycho will do its part,’ said the sergeant.

Noxx was about to add something, but then the torpedo found its mark and struck the Archeohort’s outer skin. With a resonant boom of metal on metal, the capsule made impact and began its work.

As wolves would strike a bear, the two warships came close and circled the hulking Archeohort, making sweeping turns about the mass of the huge construct. Cannon fire, laser light and clouds of missiles flashed between the three combatants. The guns of Zellik’s scavenger machine were not sluggish – they threw out hard pulses of x-ray radiation that lashed at the Tycho and the Gabriel, the backscatter of the attacks throwing sheets of colour into the void like an auroral display.

In return, the Blood Angels and Flesh Tearers cruisers gave their guns freedom to rake across the hull of the enemy. At this close a range, even a blind man could not have missed the target; but like the bear against the wolves, the Archeohort took the bites and claw-scratches, slow and heavy, returning with massive sweeps of fire that could crack hulls if they chanced a solid hit.

Now free of the derelict hulk it had been feasting upon, the construct’s gantry-limbs began to coil inward, drawing to itself in a pattern of self-preservation.

The entire forward quarter of the boarding torpedo was a massive brass drill, hardened with a molecule-thin layer of cultured diamond and a sentanium tip. Spinning at furious speed, it chewed through the outer layers of carbide plating on the Archeohort’s dorsal hull and ploughed inward. Tracks with spike-tipped teeth along the flank of the capsule pulled it through ripped splines of metal, plastic and wood, atmosphere and fluids outgassing around it into the vacuum. Great phlegmy boles of vac-sensitive gel vomited from pressurised canisters, racing to seal the breach made by the Astartes – and all too quickly the boarding torpedo’s forward momentum was arrested.

Rafen was already tearing free of his restraints, his bolter in his hand. ‘Deploy, deploy!’ he snarled. ‘Take the pace, brothers!’

Another of Noxx’s Flesh Tearers was at the prow, and with a grunt of effort, he slammed down the heavy iron lever that released the drill mechanism. The conical bow splayed open into four segments, giving the Space Marines their exit. In quick, ordered lines, the two squads exited into Zellik’s craft. Puluo, Kayne and a pair of Flesh Tearers were the last aboard, and Rafen glanced back at them in time to see the pod shake. The gelatinous matter ringing the capsule bubbled and spat, writhing as if it were alive; and then the torpedo jolted backwards.

‘Get out!’ shouted Ajir.

Puluo shoved Kayne hard in the back and the younger Astartes fell the remaining distance to the deck. The other warrior pivoted and jumped after him, one of the Flesh Tearers a heartbeat behind. The last man, slowed by the bulk of a heavy flamer, fared poorly. With a sudden belch of expelling air, the entire torpedo was ejected back the way it had come, the expanding wave of gel ballooning to form a wall before the atmosphere could go with it.

Noxx swore a gutter oath.

‘A cultured bio-form,’ said Mohl dispassionately, probing the hardening matter with a finger. ‘Programmed to act like living tissue. Sealing wounds and ousting foreign bodies.’

‘On a tyranid ship, perhaps,’ said Turcio. ‘But here?’

‘Perhaps the stories of Zellik’s contact with the xenos were not wrong after all.’ Ajir made a sour face.

They were not given time to dwell on the question, however. A shout went up from the front ranks, a Flesh Tearer crying out over the concussion of his own bolter. ‘Contact!’

‘Engage!’ replied Rafen. ‘Sweep and clear!’

A spill of tech-guard troopers surged towards them from one branch of a curving corridor, in their haste the grey cloaks they wore flapping out behind them like the wings of raptor birds. A second rank of slow-moving gun-servitors followed on, lumbering along the wide passageway, weapons clicking as self-loaders spun up to speed.

The reaction time of Zellik’s men was to be commended; on the ship of an ally, Rafen would have done just that, but here the matter became a minor impediment. A chorus of bolters crashed and met the guards with lethal force, the mass-reactive shells from the weapons opening them in red flashes. Bits of human meat and metal implants were flung about the walls. Enemy fire from the front rank came past in a wash of laser light, beams hissing across the surface of ceramite armour, cooking off layers of protective sheathing. The strangled crackle of split air molecules sounded around the Astartes, and the corridor was suddenly filled with the acrid tang of ozone.

The shambling gun-servitors, the bodies of men re-made with pistons for legs and great weapon tubes in place of arms, fired next, and Rafen ducked into the cover of a stanchion as Turcio took a glancing hit and spun to the deck. The machine-helots were all armed with close-range stubbers, fat ammo hoppers upon their bent backs feeding the weapons with frangible-tipped rounds. Close to the exterior hull of a starship, heavy bullet loads were a hazard – a single misplaced shot could breach a portal or even a wall, and cause an explosive decompression. Astartes, every one of them a marksman, did not concern themselves with such minor details.

Rafen heard the shattering of the bullet-tips as they rattled harmlessly off Space Marine armour and grinned. In their haste, Zellik’s soldiers hadn’t rearmed their guns, using the low-velocity, man-stopper shells more suited to dealing with pirates or common human foes. The candlepin-thick bolt shells of the Space Marines, on the other hand, were far more lethal, over-penetrating every target they hit. Turcio was already back up into a crouch, taking off the heads of gun-servitors with carefully aimed shots.

Noxx vaulted forward, and with a kick he put the last tech-guard down, clubbing him to the deck with his gun. The skitarii burbled something in machine-code, but the noise ceased when the Flesh Tearer stamped on its throat. ‘That will do as a down payment for the man this cost me,’ growled the veteran.

The Archeohort began to rotate.

Slowly at first, moving with the lazy, inexorable pace of a moonrise, then gaining speed as the arrays of tiny thrusters hundredfold across its surface added power to the turn. Gun pods the size of habitat blocks spun and moved on thick brass rails that ringed the outer hull, pausing to reload at the maws of static ammo hoppers before sliding back to seek the Astartes ships and barrage them.

Tycho’s shipmaster threaded his ship between a pair of towering gantries and let his forward tubes lay upon the closest of the gun-carriages. Spatial torpedoes leapt into the dark, crossing the distance on angry flares of thrust before transforming into fists of nuclear flame. Sheets of mobile armour plate raced to absorb the detonations and came too slow, some of them torn apart and tossed into the dark.

Above, the Gabriel supported its brother-ship with sheeting rains of superheavy las-bolts, burning away the brassy lustre that clad the hull of the Mechanicus construct.

Under the withering fire, the Archeohort turned, and as it did iris vents opened along its stern, disgorging engine bells woken from their dormancy.

Elsewhere, directed by cold machine anger, other hatches slid free to present new weapons to the fray.

‘We need to locate and secure the command centre,’ Rafen was saying, as the corridor opened out on to a vast open space in the middle of the Archeohort. ‘Where is it?’

Mohl shot him a look. ‘That will not be easy, lord.’

The Techmarine’s commander gave him a hard stare. ‘You told me you knew the configuration of this behemoth’s interior!’ said Noxx.

‘I do,’ Mohl continued. ‘And that is why I know it will not be easy to find a single chamber in the middle of all… of this.’

Rafen stopped, and for a moment he felt a twinge of vertigo as his mind struggled to process the sight in front of him. Beyond the railed tier where the corridor had brought them out, the inside of the Archeohort was a hollow drum, and around it ran twisting ranges of staircases and ramps that defied gravity and sense, some inverted and connecting to one another in odd profusion, others looping like Möbius strips. And in the middle of this, shifting back and forward on complex systems of rails and vast, towering pulleys, massive wedges of decking as large as city blocks were constantly in motion. The noise was constant, a screeching of metal on metal, a hissing orchestra of working mechanisms as the wedges locked together, moved, unlocked, inverted, rotated and shifted. The motion was regular and fluid, lockstep-perfect.

‘It’s reconfiguring itself all the time,’ said Ajir. ‘How could you ever find your way around this thing? Enter one room here and a moment later you exit it on the other side of the complex!’

A slab of deck ground past them as Mohl located a skinny copper podium and bent over it. Rafen saw the thin, snake-fast movements of his mechadendrites as they probed outward and found interface ports on the podium’s surface.

‘Cover him,’ he ordered, and brought his bolter to his shoulder. Aiming upward, through the weapon’s targeting scope he picked out a flight of clockwork monitor birds as they broke off from a circular flight pattern and angled towards them.

Puluo braced himself and unleashed an arc of shellfire into the air from his heavy bolter, the rounds killing most of the machine-proxies with murderous blowback.

Mohl shivered and stepped down. ‘No maps for this place,’ he coughed. ‘There are wards in place and the Archeohort’s machine-spirit is conflicted. But even as it will not show me some things, that too is a guide of sorts.’

‘We go where it doesn’t want us to go?’ said Kayne.

‘Aye,’ replied the Techmarine. He tapped his helmet. ‘I have computed a route. I have it here, but we must go now. If we tarry, the configuration will shift and it will be rendered meaningless.’

Another deck slab rotated into place, and Mohl made for it, the rest of them following him.

Rafen grimaced at the mad geometry all about him. ‘How can we hope to find a way through this giant’s puzzle?’

Noxx gestured towards his man. ‘We make sure we keep Mohl alive.’

The harpoons were taller than the statues atop Mount Seraph. Spinning, barbed things the length of a gun-cutter or system boat, they were ejected from the Archeohort’s interior and ranged up and out through the hidden ports, probing after the Gabriel and the Tycho. The weapons had crews, after a fashion, if one were willing to give that name to a handful of limbless human torsos tanked in shock-resistant canisters of support fluid.

Chains with links that could loop a hundred men, double- and triple-threaded, rippled out behind the thruster-guided lances, screaming from helix rigs in the Archeohort’s hull. The weapons spun and twirled, racing for the bodies of their enemies.

Cannons answering with death, the two warships veered from their courses, making stiff turns that sent grinding gravity shocks the length of their iron spines; but it was not enough.

‘Quickly!’ The deck parted beneath Kayne’s boots, one planted on one side, one on the other, one section rising, the other dropping away. He felt strong hands take a grip on him as he reached out to take the hand of a Flesh Tearer. His fellow Astartes grunted with effort and Kayne pulled him up just as the deck they had been upon changed from horizontal to vertical orientation.

‘This place is like the inside of an engine, all moving parts and grinding gears,’ growled the Flesh Tearer. ‘My thanks, cousin.’

‘Kayne,’ said the Blood Angel. ‘And you?’

‘Eigen,’ came the reply. ‘How these Mechanicus cogboys can live in this and not be turned insane for looking at it, I cannot know.’

‘Cogs are cogs,’ shrugged the Astartes. ‘They’re mad enough already.’

Swift and low, the warriors threaded through ranks of quartz columns that reached away to support a vaulted roof overhead. Everywhere there were panes of glass that displayed streams of flashing machine-code, some hanging on suspensors, other chained to walls or the pillars themselves. The waterfalls of symbols cascading ever downward were utterly unintelligible to Kayne, but he knew that to someone like Mohl, these screens were filled with secrets. They were windows into the raw workings of the Archeohort and its machine-spirit, the mechanical equivalent of what he might see if he peered down a kinescope and into the swarming cells of his own blood.

Up ahead of the unit, Kayne heard Mohl call out directions; the Techmarine seemed to know where he was going, but so far each chamber they had passed through was one oddity after another. A tremor reached up through the floor and the metallic tiles beneath their boots shook.

Eigen frowned. ‘Not the decking this time… That was an impact from outside.’

‘Perhaps our ships are making headway against this thing,’ Kayne replied. ‘It’ll count for little if we can’t stop Zellik running for the warp, though.’

‘Enemy!’ The cry came from the middle of the formation – from the psyker Ceris, he noted – and in the same moment a wavering blue-white cloud phased into reality over their heads. Kayne raised his gun in time to see a face gain definition and form; a giant face coated in mirror-bright silver, shrouded by a red-trimmed hood.

‘That’s him…’ said Eigen. ‘It’s some sort of hololithic image.’ The Flesh Tearer looked around, searching for anything that resembled an emitter pod.

‘Astartes!’ The air around them vibrated into the sound of the Magos’s voice. ‘You have made a great error in attacking me! I stand with all of Mars at my side! Your Chapters dare to board my vessel without my permission, kill my helots? Have you gone mad?’

Up ahead, Brother-Sergeant Rafen skidded to a halt on the polished tiles and shouted back his defiance to the floating image. ‘Surrender, Zellik. Present yourself to us now and I’ll consider lenience. Your petty infractions of Mechanicus laws are of no importance to me. But you have information we want, and we will not leave without it.’

Zellik spluttered with amazement and ire, the sound like the clicking of switches. ‘Your arrogance outstrips your idiocy, Blood Angel. Once I have left your warships behind, I will make your living bodies into cannon-bearers, and your Chapter Master will beg my forgiveness!’

‘There!’ Eigen pointed at a spherical pod floating high up in the shadows. ‘The projector device. You see it?’

Kayne aimed. ‘I see it, cousin.’ He released half a breath and fired.

The sphere exploded in a flat bang of noise, and Zellik’s face winked out.

‘Good shot,’ remarked Puluo. ‘I’m already sick of him.’

The deck trembled again, and this time Kayne released a snarl of annoyance. ‘Not a hit this time…’

‘Contact!’ Eigen called, pointed once more. The Flesh Tearer had sharp eyes, it could not be denied. More tech-guards were emerging from behind a quartz pillar across the way, charging at the Space Marines.

Kayne saw something arc through the air towards him, and recognised the shape of a grenade. ‘To cover!’ he yelled, shoving Eigen away and into the lee of another column, as gunfire erupted around them anew.

The grenade landed and detonated – but instead of an explosive discharge, a globe of emerald energy expanded out, at full size perhaps big enough to envelop a groundcar. When the glow dissipated, there was a perfect circle cut through the decking, the edges smooth and bright as if polished.

‘Baal’s blood! It must be a demat sphere!’ said Ceris, firing off a burst as he approached. ‘An archeotech weapon. Like a teleport, but everything inside the radius is disintegrated. I never thought to see such a relic in action…’

‘I though those devices were a myth!’ said Eigen.

‘So did I,’ the psyker said grimly. ‘It would appear otherwise.’

Kayne saw a flicker of movement. ‘Another one!’ A second globe looped towards the assembled Space Marines, projected by a weapons-helot with a scaled-down trebuchet instead of an arm.

Kayne watched in amazement as Ceris jumped up into the air, to meet the demat sphere as it fell towards them. The psyker plucked the globe out of its arc and threw it as he dropped; it was a clumsy interception, but still effective. The sphere landed at the feet of the helot who had thrown it, and it triggered. The dissipation effect hummed and when it faded, there were only the odd, starkly severed parts of three gun-servitors remaining.

Ceris landed heavily and stumbled, drawing gunfire. Without hesitation, Kayne and Eigen ran from cover to aid him, and the three warriors broke into a dash, racing to close up with the rest of their comrades.

‘Zellik must really want us dead,’ ventured Turcio. ‘Those spheres are worth a governor’s ransom.’

‘Then you should consider it a compliment, penitent,’ said Ajir.

Mohl gestured towards a diamond-shaped door cut into the wall. ‘We are wasting time. Zellik is trying to trap us. This way, quickly!’

Lasers snapping at their heels, the Astartes moved on, killing everything that dared to follow them.

Tycho took the spear through the plough-shaped blades of its bow plate; Gabriel fared worse, the other harpoon entering the hull of the strike cruiser along its portside axis at an oblique angle. Both weapons buried themselves in the marrow of the warships and locked fast.

And then, even as the echo of the impacts resonated and faded, the huge chains of vacuum-forged alloy flexed and pulled taut. Deep inside the mechanism of Zellik’s great construct, wheels began to turn, gears worked, and the lines drew home, reeling them in.

The shipmasters of the Tycho and the Gabriel had given their gunnery captains leave to fire with freedom, and so they did, punishing the Archeohort for such an attack, others training guns on the lines of chain, hoping to sever them.

On the other side of the construct, a hundred tiny suns flared into being, boles of fusion fire spilling out into the void. With increasing speed, the Archeohort dragged its attackers away, moving towards clear space free of the debris that clogged this zone.

Calculations were already being made, formulae computed, courses laid in. A leap to the warp would follow, and the ships now chained to the construct, like rabid dogs straining at their leashes, would be ripped apart by the flux of transition.

The melta bomb exploded and took down not only the armoured hatchway sealing off the command chamber, but also a few sections of wall to either side. The corpses of the heavy gun-servitors that had defended the entrance were ripped apart where they lay, the ammunition in their weapons cooking off in secondary blasts. Noxx led the charge with Puluo at his side, both Astartes shouldering in through the smoke-wreathed remains of the entrance with guns blazing. Skitarii went down in disarray, those that had not already been killed by the funnelled blast of the breaching charge.

Rafen followed them in, Turcio and Ajir at his flanks, delivering the Emperor’s judgement with snapshot fire to the twitching, hooded figures sitting in the control pits before their command organs. The Blood Angels sergeant was only a few paces into the room when his keen Astartes senses, honed through the action of countless battles, rang a sour note in his mind. He halted suddenly. ‘Wait…’ he began, a creeping disquiet spreading through him.

Outside, holding the corridor with the other Space Marines, Brother Ceris made a growl in his throat – a sound of warning.

Ajir was deepest into the chamber, frowning at a seated adept. For all the sudden violence of their entrance, the crew at their stations had barely reacted. The warrior pushed the barrel of his bolter into the adept’s back and gave it a hard shove. The figure rocked forward and the hood fell away.

There was no face beneath it, only an oddly featureless orb crafted to vaguely resemble a human head. It was a mannequin, little more than a body-proxy like those deployed on firing galleries. Rafen had destroyed thousands of them in target practice with his bolter and his sword.

Noxx ripped the cloak from another crew-serf, then another and another. All were identical automata, ghosting through the motions of a command crew. Only the handful of tech-guards that had been in the room appeared to be what they had seemed. ‘What is this?’ demanded the Flesh Tearer.

Mohl was behind him. ‘This is the command centre…’ he muttered. ‘I am certain…’

‘It’s a fake,’ said Turcio. ‘Like a castle made of cloth and wood to fool a distant observer!’

Rafen glared at a console before him; it was nothing but a flat panel of blinking lights. ‘Out!’ he shouted.

The order came too late. Mohl flung himself away as a sheet of metal dropped like a guillotine blade across the ruined entranceway, cutting off any means of escape. Immediately, the deck began to shift as a crack opened in the floor beneath their feet. The false consoles yawned open like mouths to accept the mannequins, folding away into hidden spaces like some clever theatre trick. Stanchions and supports contracted into themselves, every handhold slowly retracting as the angle of the floor became steeper with every passing moment.

A belch of hot, dry air vented into the chamber and Rafen caught sight of a harsh orange glow beneath them. A long tray of molten metal, perhaps a conveyer barge from the foundry modules of the Archeohort’s factorium, was sliding into place down there, ready to accept them when they lost their grip and fell.

As a trap, it was as elaborate and melodramatic as one might have expected from an arrogant Mechanicus tech-lord, and as Rafen looked up, he saw the ceiling overhead fold back to present a hanging gondola pod, and in it, behind glass and webs of brass, an adept and a bodyguard of skitarii. He saw no silver mask – it was not Zellik himself, then – but he could not miss the cluster of optical relays bristling from the bottom of the gondola. Wherever he was, the damned skulk was watching them inch towards death as if it were some kinema performance made for his amusement.

Boots scraping against the steepening floor, Rafen punched an armoured fist through the metal and made a temporary handhold for himself. He heard Puluo utter a curse as the Devastator Space Marine almost lost his grip before Noxx pulled him back.

They had moments before the strange folding room turned itself inside-out and deposited them all into the embrace of the molten iron. Even with their power armour, it would be questionable if the Space Marines could survive for more than a few seconds in such incredible temperatures.

‘If we fall, he falls with us,’ Rafen snarled, and with his free hand took aim at the gondola. His bolter crashed, and with it sounded shot and shell from his comrades as they joined in the attack. For a moment it seemed as if the defiant gesture would be in vain; but then the armoured glass webbed with fractures and splintered. Red and black fluid spurted through the shimmering air and a heavy tech-guard tumbled past them, falling soundlessly into the hot bath of liquid metal. The gondola began a desultory retreat along a dangling cable, but it was too late. By exposing themselves to watch the Space Marines die, the Mechanicus lackeys had placed themselves in the firing line.

With a stuttering wail of binary, the cloaked adept lost balance, stumbled into the air and fell, serpentine cyberlimbs whipping about, snatching at nothing.

Cursing the choice he was forced to make, Rafen let his precious bolter fall from his fingers to release his free hand. Extending as far as he dared, the Blood Angel lashed at the adept’s robes and grabbed a handful of them. He grunted as the additional weight strained his one handhold, but did not release.

Beneath him, his weapon spiralled away into the glowing, sluggish liquid, melting into a string of hard, concussive blasts as the ammunition exploded with the heat.

The adept twisted about and came to rest dangling from the Space Marine’s arm. He looked up, showing a face that was almost human; only his sapphire-blue augmetic eyes ruined the illusion. The Mechanicus tech-priest wore an expression of utter panic.

‘That gun served me well,’ Rafen snarled. ‘Give me a reason why I should not send you to fetch it back!’

The adept’s binary chatter warped and changed, becoming recognisable speech. ‘Zero zero zero no no no no,’ he rattled. ‘Please no, zero, no! My orders… I did not–’

‘Stop this death trap!’ shouted the Blood Angel. ‘Or I swear you’ll perish screaming!’

‘One one one yes yes yes!’ The tech-priest stuttered out a reply, and from beneath his cloak came a viper’s nest of mechadendrites. Manipulator tips reached for the walls, probing, flipping open seamless panels that Rafen had not even known were there. The adept gave a clicking sigh, and at once the floor reversed its motion. The contracting panels and columns were arrested, then began to telescope once more. In moments, the chamber was resetting itself, returning to its original form.

Rafen stood up, still holding the tech-priest in his grip, as the metal wall behind him rose in stutters. Heavy impact marks had distended it where Ceris and the others had tried to break through.

The psyker advanced warily into the false room. ‘Lord?’ he asked, the question in his hard eyes.

The sergeant did not answer; instead he drew his power sword from the scabbard across his backpack and pressed the glowing blade to his prisoner’s chest. ‘Where is Matthun Zellik?’ he demanded.

The adept gulped air. Blood and oil dripped from his dangling limbs, pooling on the deck. ‘Understand, Astartes, I could not stop him.’

‘I did not ask you for an excuse,’ Rafen growled. ‘You came to capture the moments of our deaths for your master’s pleasure. You have already forfeit your life to me. Answer, and it will end quickly.’

Noxx took a menacing step closer to the struggling tech-priest. ‘More than he deserves,’ snarled the Flesh Tearer. ‘Give him to me, cousin. I’ll make him speak.’ The other sergeant drew his flaying knife, the wicked barbs along one edge glinting.

‘I do not know where he is!’ shouted the terrified adept. ‘I, Logis Goel Beslian, swear on my oath to the Omnissiah that I do not know! Zellik’s sanctum cube is in constant motion throughout the mechanism of the Archeohort. You cannot find him unless he wants you to!’

Rafen’s lips thinned. ‘Then, my esteemed Logis Beslian, you have no more value to us.’ He turned the sword to present the tip to the adept’s sternum.

‘I can bring him to you!’ Beslian bellowed at the top of his voice, the grating words filtering through a collar of speaker globes at his neck. ‘Spare me and I will aid you!’ The adept cast around, perhaps hoping to find a forgiving countenance among all the Astartes. He found nothing but cold anger.

With a sneer of disgust, Rafen released his grip on the prisoner and let him drop at the feet of one of Noxx’s warriors, a sanguinary cleric named Gast. ‘Keep this wretch breathing,’ he ordered.

He stalked away, kneading the grip of his blade in annoyance at being forced to defer the kill. Noxx came to him.

‘You believe this creature’s lies?’

‘If you have a better suggestion, I would hear it, cousin.’ Rafen gave him a sideways look. ‘This construct is like some vast logic puzzle… It confounded your brother Mohl as it confounds the rest of us.’

‘I suspect a trap,’ Noxx insisted. ‘I always do. It’s how I’ve managed to live so long.’

‘And yet you entered the false chamber first.’

The Flesh Tearer gave a nod. ‘True. But the best way to break a trap is to trip it.’

Rafen returned the nod. ‘Then we shall do so. I will not waste time on this strutting Mechanicus fool Zellik when our real prey is still beyond our reach.’

CHAPTER FOUR

Clicking and gasping, Beslian led the wary Astartes to a wide conveyor module that swiftly carried them up several levels of the Archeohort’s shifting interior. Gast had bound the wounds the adept had taken from shrapnel hits, but not too well. Noxx wanted the tech-priest to suffer, and Rafen saw no reason to countermand the Flesh Tearer’s order.

Techmarine Mohl positioned himself like a watchful hawk at Beslian’s side, scrutinising the adept for any sign of obvious perfidy. Mohl’s bolter was at a constant ready; if Beslian thought to cross them, he might conceivably act before a line Space Marine could follow what he was doing – but not Mohl. The quiet, precise warrior would kill the adept where he stood, and Beslian clearly knew it.

The conveyor arrived at a domed space somewhere near the top of the construct. A host of armed gun-servitors were there to meet them, but they had barely a moment to react before Beslian sang a binary code string that put them all into a stupor. Their weapons drooped to the deck and their heads lolled; whatever the adept had done, it robbed the machine-helots of all intent and motion.

The Space Marines deployed in a combat wheel, as Rafen took stock of the antechamber they stood in. Ahead, high glass doors patterned with gold etching like the tracks of a circuit board promised more beyond. Artificial light, tuned to resemble the ruddy hue of a Martian day, flowed from hidden lume arrays past the dome proper.

Rafen gestured to Noxx, indicating the somnolent gun-servitors. ‘Brother-Sergeant, if you would?’

Noxx drew his knife once more and gave a curt nod. ‘Just so.’ He summoned a couple of kinsmen to assist him, and with quick, brutal actions, they moved among the silent helots, killing them one by one with vicious, slashing blows that tore open throats and veins. Rafen saw Kayne grimace and look away.

Beslian made a moaning sound. ‘Astartes, there is no need to do that! They are in quietus! They can do you no harm!’

‘So noted,’ said Rafen, without interrupting Noxx’s execution detail. ‘Now tell me. Have you brought us to Zellik?’

‘The next best thing,’ said the adept. ‘Behold…’

Beslian was breathless as he worked a spinning orb-lock on the end of a gimballed armature and, with the correct manipulation, the glass doors answered with a shudder of hidden workings. The entranceway slid back and the adept moved in on hissing piston-legs, his flat iron hooves clattering against a floor made of polished marble. Mohl followed, aiming his gun at Beslian’s spine.

Rafen led the rest of the unit inside, and what he saw brought a tic of frustration to his lips. He had expected some sort of inner sanctum, perhaps the kind of opulent quarters a man who fancied himself superior might have – but not this.

There were perfect lines of glass cases ordered in row after row, most of a uniform size, the odd one here or there much larger so as to accommodate… what?

He peered at the cabinet closest to him and saw on pads of velvet, a dozen golden bowls, each the width of his spread hand, each with a regular circuit-pattern etched across them. They wore the tarnish of heavy age, but he made out a shimmer as the light caught them, tiny captured rainbows crawling across their surfaces. Looking still closer, he made out the glow of a stasis field screen enveloping the objects, and there in the corner of the case was a small data-slate. He tapped it and text appeared, but the words meant nothing to him.

‘Those are precursor relics,’ Beslian hissed from across the hall. ‘Tens of thousands of years old, made on Terra before humans left their birth world.’

Understanding came to him then. He turned around and felt a kick of revulsion as he saw something he certainly did recognise; the severed skull and forearm of a necron warrior, corroded and age-worn, but still horribly distinctive. Other cases contained unintelligible bits of machinery, things that might have been human-made in eras beyond Rafen’s reckoning. Some held objects that could only be weapons, his warrior’s intuition immediately picking out shapes that suggested caged lethality.

‘A museum,’ said Puluo.

Mohl gave a slow nod. ‘Zellik is a collector. These are his prizes.’

Ajir sneered. ‘We did not come aboard this monstrosity to plunder it! These… relics are meaningless to our quest!’

Beslian gave a clicking gasp, exasperated. ‘You do not understand. This is the Magos’s relical! What you see here are artefacts beyond value, they are his greatest trophies! He values them more than a parent would their children.’

Rafen nodded, a plan forming in his thoughts. ‘Then let us get his attention.’ The Blood Angel strode back to the case containing the bowls, and with a sweep of his sword he cut the cabinet open, ripping through the stasis generator. The ancient objects were touched by the air of the outside world for what might have been the first time in recorded history; they rapidly discoloured, puckered and crumbled into particles of sparkling dust. Distantly, the Astartes registered the sound of a discordant alarm.

Beslian let out a screech and made an ill-advised motion towards the sergeant. His action was immediately arrested by the pressure of Mohl’s bolter in the back of his neck.

Rafen destroyed the necron relics next, and allowed himself a grin at that; then another case, and another, precious bits of silicon and chromium-steel dashed to fragments that he ground into powder beneath his boots. Rafen did not once look upward, to the roosts he had noted upon entering the domed chamber, where doubtless more of Zellik’s monitor birds were nesting.

Beslian was making a gibbering sound, halfway between a clock-tick and a sob. He held out his hands in entreaty.

Rafen glared back at him. ‘You brought us here, adept. What did you expect us to do?’ He glanced around at the other Space Marines. ‘All of you,’ he called, his voice rebounding from the dome. ‘Take your weapons. Destroy everything in this room. Leave nothing intact.’

‘NO!’ The cry vibrated the air around them, and Rafen could not help but smile a little at it. A hololithic mist formed before them, the chrome face and the suggestion of a rust-red hood growing more distinct by the second. ‘Savages!’ it cried, ‘Base fiends, animals! You have no understanding of the riches you trample upon! Every item in this chamber is a rarity, worth more than your lives a thousand times over!’

‘Such a pity, then,’ Rafen replied, swinging the sword again to cleave open an odd fluted thing that resembled a musical instrument.

Zellik cried out through the holo-image with such pain in his voice, that for a moment Rafen wondered if the tech-lord was somehow physically connected to the objects in the room. The Magos’s ire turned on his adept. ‘Beslian, you cur! After all that I gave you, and this is how you repay me? You betray the Omnissiah to these Astartes thugs?’

The adept shook his head. ‘I… I warned you to stop, Matthun. I told you one day the Emperor’s warriors would come looking for us. You said I was wrong, but I computed this long ago!’ Beslian stood and shook a steel fist at the hololith. ‘I will not be dragged down with you! You think you can defy Mars and Terra forever? How many logs have you falsified? How many lies have you told to our masters?’ He shivered, clearly the effort of this new defiance hard upon his bent back. ‘No longer! I will not be a party to it!’

Zellik’s metallic face was a mix of anger and dismay. ‘I trusted you!’ he snarled.

Rafen aimed his sword at the ghostly image, taking charge of the situation once more. ‘Magos Zellik. I care nothing for your toys and the falsehoods you tell your lords on Mars. But I will take this construct apart piece by piece until I find you, and I will commence by obliterating this gallery of relics… unless you are willing to submit to us.’

The Magos sneered. ‘You threaten me? I will rip your ships apart! Every gun-servitor in the Archeohort is converging on your location…’ He trailed off as Rafen walked towards a particular artefact displayed inside a cylindrical cabinet. ‘What are you doing?’ Zellik demanded, his panic rising.

There, hovering in mid air, floating on suspensors, was a nested set of turning rings, each one etched with tiny script, all of them constantly moving about one another. The device, whatever it was, gave the impression of incredible delicacy, as if it were made from spun glass. With languid care, Rafen drew back his power sword to the top of its sweep.

‘Stop!’ cried Zellik. ‘Stop! Stop! No more! I beg you, no more!’ He gasped. ‘That object is millions of years old. It is the last of its kind in existence. Please, I beseech you, do not destroy it!’

Rafen held the sword up. ‘You have only to surrender to me and I will do nothing more.’

Zellik’s face faded away, and with it his defeated words hummed in the air. ‘Very well.’

The Archeohort was theirs. As battles went, it had been a comparatively bloodless one, but then Rafen recalled the doctrines drilled into him by his late mentor, Brother Koris. The old warhound had often reminded him that the victory taken with guile and not gunfire was all the sweeter – but by the same token a warrior was right to take care that such a victory did not dull the need to remain watchful.

The sergeant stood in a cloistered corridor on the outer face of Zellik’s construct-ship; an enclosed highway for pneu-cars ranged away in both directions, lit by glow-globes and the illumination from the void, via hexagonal windows the size of a Land Raider. Grim-faced, he watched as motes of light swarmed around the massive chain tethering the Tycho to the Archeohort, a squadron of vacuum-resistant Mechanicus drone-helots burning through the links with beam-cutters. In the silence, he saw the chain shatter and fragment, the line of the lethal harpoon severed at last. Out of sight, on the other side of the Archeohort, another army of drones were doing the same to the Gabriel. The forward flight of Zellik’s ship had been arrested before a warp gate could be opened, and now adrift in open space, the tech-lord’s legions of servitors had been turned to the business of repairing the damage he had inflicted upon the Astartes cruisers.

Zellik had come to them as if he were still in command, ringed by a phalanx of his best tech-guards. Every one of the skitarii had been armed with weapons of arcane origin – laser fans, ornate bolt carbines, icefire guns capable of projecting streams of freezing flame, sonic mutes – and every one of them was killed before they could fire a shot. Noxx led his Flesh Tearers in their abrupt, fierce murders, taking the balance of the cost incurred by the earlier death of his luckless battle-brother and the Gabriel crewmen lost to the harpoon hit.

The tech-priest remained untouched by even the smallest splash of spilled blood or lubricant, standing all ashudder amid the carnage. Zellik was elsewhere now, in a bare storage chamber the Astartes had swiftly repurposed as a holding cell. Rafen ordered the Flesh Tearers Apothecary-Cleric Gast to attend to the Magos, using his tools to perform a surgery on Zellik that cut out the tech-priest’s wireless machine-vox implant. Zellik’s screams had taken on a strange tone, like the groaning of deck plates twisted out of shape by gravitic stressing. He would not speak to his ship or his minions again unless the Adeptus Astartes permitted it.

With Zellik’s command terminated, mastery of the Archeohort was now in the hands of Beslian, and Rafen suspected that the nervous, oily logician had schemed for that all along. It concerned him that this opportunist cog might think himself able to use Space Marines as tools for own aggrandisement; but for the moment it served the needs of the Blood Angels to play along. In due time, all those who considered themselves above the rules of Holy Terra would be shown the error of such assumptions.

Rafen turned at the sound of boots upon the deck to find Mohl approaching him, a wheeled servitor trundling at his heels. ‘Lord,’ began the Techmarine, ‘a moment?’

‘What is it?’

‘I took it upon myself to take a look over the catalogue of items in Zellik’s collection. There is much of value.’

‘Of value to us, or to those who would hoard such relics?’

Mohl inclined his head. ‘Largely the latter, I admit. But still, I have programmed some of the servitors to sweep and reclaim any materials that should be returned to the Adeptus Terra.’

‘Good. Whatever Zellik has kept for himself is now forfeit.’

Mohl nodded. ‘Indeed. And so, I thought you would want to see this, sir.’ He snapped his fingers and the servitor rolled forward. With spindly manipulator arms, it unfolded a stained muslin wrapping from about a blunt, heavy object.

Rafen’s eyes widened in surprise as he recognised the shape of a thickset plasma gun. The weapon’s cowling was enamelled in blood red, and dressed with a skull emblem in beaten gold.

‘A twin-core design,’ Mohl was saying, ‘Dekker-pattern. The rare Baal-variant model.’

Unbidden, Rafen ran a finger over the skull, tracing the etching beneath it. ‘Aryon.’ He spoke the hero’s name with reverence. ‘This is the sidearm of Brother-Captain Aryon. He perished in battle at the Yennor Reach more than seven centuries ago… His remains were never found.’

‘As your weapon was lost, I thought it would serve the mission to provide you with a replacement. Is this suitable?’

Rafen nodded, testing the gun’s weight in his grip. ‘It is. And now I have a fresh crime to add to those of the Magos Zellik. He was duty-bound to return this to my Chapter.’

‘It is not the only Astartes relic in the museum,’ added Mohl. ‘Also, there are items of note belonging to the Adepta Sororitas and the Imperial Guard–’

‘Continue your inventory. Take it all,’ Rafen replied. ‘In Aryon’s memory, we will see every last piece go to the fate it deserves.’

‘A fitting punishment for Zellik,’ said the Flesh Tearer.

‘And only the first,’ Rafen noted. ‘Have you been able to glean any data from the Archeohort’s cogitators as yet?’ He walked away, and the Techmarine trailed with him.

‘Beslian has been surprisingly forthcoming, lord.’

‘He knows his only chance to escape Zellik’s fate is to cooperate with us in every way.’

‘The name Haran Serpens was known to him. Beslian claims that Zellik has made several clandestine journeys into the Ghoul Stars region in order to meet with him. The most recent was only two solar months ago.’

Rafen halted. ‘After Fabius fled Baal.’

‘Aye.’

‘The Ghoul Stars…’ echoed the Blood Angel, his jaw drawing tight. ‘It would seem, Brother Mohl, that we have the scent of our prey once more.’

The Flesh Tearer nodded. ‘By the Emperor’s grace.’

‘I would like to see my relical,’ coughed the tech-priest, twitching against the manacles that trailed thick cables from his many limbs – flesh and mechanical – to the rings set in the deck. ‘If it pleases the Astartes.’

Brother-Sergeant Noxx rolled his flaying knife in his fingers, his lip curling at the barely-hidden contempt beneath the Magos’s words. Even in this state, chained and disarmed, the scrawny cyborg dared to put on airs and graces. Noxx stalked forward, fanning the blade so it caught the light from the biolume pod on the ceiling of the holding chamber. ‘Your precious collection? That is what you ask for? Perhaps your situation is unclear to you, priest. You are alive only on my sufferance. You are in no position to make demands.’ He snorted. ‘And in all honesty, you would be better served to consider your own fate than that of some stolen trinkets.’

‘Idiot!’ Zellik pulled at his bonds without success. ‘Trinkets? My collection is without parallel! If you had a brain inside that thick skull of yours, you would comprehend that! But you are a barbarian! You know nothing!’

Noxx didn’t look around as the hatch behind him opened; he knew who would be coming to join him.

‘I cannot speak for my cousin,’ said Rafen, drawing in, ‘but I am no barbarian. I understand the majesty of great art. The glory of a great symphony. The perfection of fine craftsmanship.’

Zellik glared at him. ‘Then you are worse than he,’ spat the tech-lord. ‘A Flesh Tearer, borderline feral and savage, he has an excuse! But you, Blood Angel? You should know better! And still, you were the first to raise a weapon to… to…’ The Magos’s voice became a weak moan. ‘Oh, my cherished things. The Machine-God deliver me from this nightmare…’

Rafen continued as if the tech-priest had not spoken. ‘I know the value of this, for example.’ He raised the plasma gun, working the collimator dial with his other hand. ‘Such a superior piece of work. Handcrafted by Isherite artisans. Used with honour and care by a warrior of great character and nobility.’ He took aim. ‘Stolen from a war grave by a craven coward. Turned into a toy, a trophy for an arrogant fool.’

‘I kept that weapon in trust!’ spat Zellik, trying to flinch away but unable to move more than a few inches in the heavy restraints. ‘It would have been lost or destroyed if not for me!’

‘How selfless of you,’ Rafen replied, and squeezed the trigger plate. On its finest setting, the humming accelerator coils atop the weapon glowed blue-white and discharged a thin rod of superheated plasmatic particles. The plasma bolt sliced into the top of a servo-arm waving from Zellik’s spine, and turned it into a twist of slagged iron. After hundreds of years of inaction, the gun was hungry to fire on a new target.

The tech-priest screeched in binary and crashed to his knees, piston-legs chugging with the painful feedback.

Noxx made an appreciative noise in the back of his throat. ‘Still works well, then. A fine weapon indeed.’

‘I want my relical!’ Zellik shouted. ‘It is mine! You cannot take it from me! A dozen man-lifetimes it has taken me to gather it all–’

‘But only a day to lose it,’ Rafen broke in. ‘Come now, Magos. Surely you expected this to happen? Beslian foresaw it, and he knew less than you. You know that death is the only coin paid to traitors.’

‘Traitor?’ The tech-priest shook his head. ‘Perhaps I have interpreted the laws of my order with some laxity, yes, but I am no traitor! I am a staunch servant of the Machine-God! A devoted citizen of the Imperium of Mankind!’

Noxx tapped the flaying knife on his palm. ‘Haran Serpens.’ He sounded out the syllables of the name.

The name caught Zellik off-guard. ‘What?’

‘He’s dead,’ Rafen explained, working the plasma gun again. ‘It appears he has been dead for at least three solar years, in point of fact.’

‘Impossible,’ snorted the tech-lord, but the denial seemed half-hearted. He was about to say more, but he halted, clearly fearful of incriminating himself still further.

‘His identity was appropriated,’ Rafen went on. The maw of the plasma gun was glowing white-hot, vapour seething from the emitter channels. ‘Stolen by an agent of Chaos. A most foul and hated enemy of the Imperium you say you venerate. I’m sure you know the name Fabius Bile.’

The prisoner blurted out an exaggerated splutter of scorn, his silvery flesh wrinkling in dismay. ‘Fabius Bile is a myth! A monster from the dark past created by over-zealous preachers in order to terrify the masses!’ Zellik strained at the manacles as Rafen closed the distance to him. ‘These accusations are lies. Lies spread by my enemies. Did the ordos send you, is that it? Were they so terrified to take me on themselves that they sent Space Marines to be their tools?’

‘You are the one that has been used, Zellik,’ said Noxx. ‘Tainted, even.’

With slow care, Rafen reached out and gathered up a fistful of Zellik’s robes. The tech-priest was shaking, his cyberlimbs rattling against the manacles. ‘You will tell us about your dealings with the man who pretends to be Haran Serpens. You will tell us where he lurks within the Ghoul Stars.’

Zellik’s clockwork eyes clicked and switched from Rafen to Noxx. The Flesh Tearer gave a thin smile. ‘You must be very afraid to look to one like me for support. Do you really think you’ll find it?’

Rafen held up Aryon’s weapon, streamers of incredible heat coming off it in waves. ‘I am not an inquisitor,’ he said. ‘I do not have an array of clever tools to induce you to speak truth to me. And I have neither patience, nor time. I am Astartes, and what I know best is how to kill. With speed… and without.’ Rafen held the gun muzzle close to Zellik’s flawless machine-face, and the chrome skin began to blister and darken. ‘I will burn the answers I want from you. You will give them to me.’

He leaned closer, and the lowing screams began anew.

The gas-lens viewer first sketched an orb, then filled it with lines of detail, one upon another, like the hand of a ghostly artist.

‘The fifth world of the Dynikas system,’ announced Mohl. ‘Several parsecs out along the spinward edge of the Ghoul Stars. Our target.’

Rafen stood to one side of his squad, his arms folded across his chest. From the corner of his eye he saw Kayne glance at the plasma gun on his hip, and then at his face. The unspoken question was in his gaze, but his commander did not answer it.

Across the Tycho’s tacticarium, Mohl went on, watched by Noxx and the rest of his fellow Flesh Tearers. ‘From what we have been able to determine with data drawn from the Archeohort’s cogitator arrays, Tech-Lord Zellik supplied equipment and materiel of a scientific and manufactory nature to this world.’

‘Enough for someone to build a laboratory,’ added Noxx.

Mohl nodded. ‘The extant census records on Dynikas V are poorly drawn. The most detailed is that from a passing long-range scrying, by a vessel of the Imperial Navy engaged in a fleet action against the Cythor Fiends. The planet is determined here to be an ocean world with a few small island landmasses.’ The hololith took on the blurry, lurid tones of a false-colour sensor image. ‘A high content of metals was recorded, along with an apparent abundance of aquatic life forms. Ministorium adjuncts to this report indicate that the planet was classed as suitable for agricultural exploitation. A commerce flotilla was apparently dispatched, but records past this point were lost during the 9th Black Crusade.’

‘That’s all we know?’ asked Eigen, frowning.

‘There is more,’ Mohl explained. ‘This next data set was drawn from Zellik’s personal stacks.’ The image flickered and shifted. Now the patches of colour in Dynikas V’s oceans were dead and hollow, flat expanses of white and grey instead of the riot of reds and oranges on the original scan. ‘This is a more recent long-range scan. Zellik sealed this datum and prevented its upload to the Mechanicus codex-network.’

‘It looks dead,’ said Ajir. ‘If it was teeming with enough fish for the explorators to set up a farming colony there, then what happened to it?’

‘No radiological returns, no signs of planetary bombardment,’ noted Kayne.

‘Bio-weapon,’ suggested Puluo.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ offered the Techmarine. ‘Zellik’s data also revealed this pict-relay of debris in high orbit of the planet.’

A new pane of imagery opened, dropping like a curtain. The flat display picked out a thick halo of dust and particulate matter collected into a sheer accretion disc.

‘That wasn’t there in the Navy’s scry-scan,’ said Eigen.

Mohl glanced at his battle-brother. ‘No. It’s the remains of a later destructive event. Zellik’s hypothesis is that it is the residue of a battle between the notably territorial Cythor Fiends and a tyranid hive fleet splinter.’

‘Tyranids?’ Gast spat the name like a curse. ‘But those xenos freaks are unknown in this sector.’

Turcio peered at the display. ‘The evidence would suggest otherwise.’

‘If you’re willing to trust the word of that lying cog.’

Rafen considered what he was hearing. ‘It would explain the ravaging of the planet’s ecosystem. And the silence from the explorator flotilla.’

‘Another question occurs, cousin,’ said Noxx. ‘Are the tyranids still there? Hive ships often eject spores towards the nearest planetary atmosphere at the moment of their destruction. Are we to believe that the renegade has built a bolt hole on an infested world?’

‘Even Fabius Bile would not lay his head amid a pit of Fire Scorpions,’ said Kayne. ‘It would mean death for any being to venture down there, even for a champion of the Ruinous Powers.’

‘There is only one way to be certain,’ Rafen moved from where he stood. ‘Have the navigators aboard our ships commune with those of the Archeohort. A course will be computed. Once repairs are complete, we will make space for the Dynikas system.’

‘Do you really believe that the renegade is there, sir?’ Kayne fixed him with a questioning look.

Rafen nodded once. ‘The God-Emperor shows us the way, brother. We take the fight to this monster and we make him pay for what he has stolen from us.’

In the arming chamber, the Blood Angel completed the ritual of reconsecration with a final act. He cut his palm with his combat blade, and before the Larraman cells in his bloodstream could act to clot and knit shut the shallow wound, he wiped a smear of his vitae across the golden skull on the breech of the plasma gun.

With that, the machine-spirit of Captain Aryon’s weapon was appeased, and the weapon’s stewardship was now Rafen’s. Perhaps it would be taken from him when he returned to Baal, if others judged that a more senior Space Marine was deserving of such a relic, but until that time, the sergeant would give it the liberation it deserved.

Rafen stood up in his arming chamber, the light of kolla tallow candles flickering over his power armour where it rested upon its racks. He pulled back the hood of his robes and glanced over his shoulder. ‘You’re slipping. I heard you coming this time.’

Ceris’s lip curled. ‘I beg to differ, lord. You only heard me because your thoughts were not clouded on this occasion. You have the clarity you sought.’

Did he detect some sense of accusation in the words? Rafen faced the Codicier with a level glare. ‘Once again, you come to me with something to say, Ceris. Will this be a habit? I tell you now, if so my patience will quickly grow thin. I want warriors in my squad who will follow my orders and lend me their skills, not those who lurk and second-guess me at each turn.’

‘Is that what you think I am doing?’

Rafen’s eyes narrowed in annoyance. ‘And I tolerate those who dissemble my words even less.’

‘Because of who you are and what you have done, you should not be surprised that your conduct is being watched, brother-sergeant,’ Ceris said mildly. ‘Some say my Lord Mephiston is gatekeeper for the soul of our Chapter. His interest spans all who are a part of it.’

For a moment, the warrior considered a rebuke; but then he snorted and turned away. ‘Say what you want to say and then leave me. I am in no mood for semantics and obfuscation.’

‘There is word from the prize crew aboard the Archeohort. Magos Zellik will survive. The medicae serfs managed to keep him alive after your… interview.’

‘Some might consider that a waste of effort and good narthecia.’ He ran a finger over the casing of the plasma gun.

‘Some? Like Brother-Sergeant Noxx?’

Rafen blew out an exasperated breath. ‘What are you implying, psyker? That I have adopted the ways of the Flesh Tearers in order to gather information?’

‘I did not say those words.’ Ceris inclined his head. ‘You did.’

Rafen glared at him. ‘We do not shrink from the difficult choices, brother. That is why we were made. To do the things that mortal men cannot, to transcend what others might see as the lines of morality, in the name of a larger power.’

‘Indeed? It is said we Blood Angels are the most noble of the Adeptus Astartes. But to torture a man to within an inch of his life, even a criminal… Is there nobility in that, sir?’

‘You think I could have found another way, is that it? Perhaps you feel I did not give all due respect to the esteemed Magos, despite his dalliance with Chaos!’

‘Zellik is no servant of the Dark Gods, we both know that. For all his genius, his greed and his conceit blind him to the reality of his misdemeanours. He believes he is loyal to Mars and Terra with every fibre of his being, even as he lies to them to swell his coffers.’

‘Self-deception is a common trait of the weak,’ Rafen retorted.

‘And often of the strong as well,’ Ceris countered.

‘I feel no guilt for what I did to Zellik,’ said the sergeant. ‘I would do so again a hundred times over, if my service required it. Do not presume to judge me, psyker. You do not have the right.’

‘I would never be so bold, my lord,’ came the neutral reply. ‘I only wanted to hear you say those words.’ He turned to go, then hesitated. ‘You will cross many lines, Brother Rafen, before this duty is brought to its end. These are just the first.’

The sergeant turned his back, ministering to his weapons. ‘When you have something of substance to tell me, Brother Ceris, I will hear it willingly. But until then, keep your riddles to yourself. My tolerance is finite and you would do well to remember that.’

Rafen expected an answer, and when it did not come, he glanced over his shoulder. He was alone in the chamber.

CHAPTER FIVE

The mirror moved through the darkness, bending about it the ghost-glows from far distant stars and the soft rains of radiation soaking the vacuum. A vast, curved kite shield of metals forged by long-forgotten science, the mirror told lies to the void around it, hiding its truth behind layers of energy-shunt circuitry, malleable lakes of superfluid surfactants and long, arching ribs of impossibly thin metals.

The mirror told the void that nothing was here. It lied by drawing in the wavelengths of visible and invisible energies all about, computed them and gently projected back returns that even the most advanced suites of scrying gear would read as little more than a few stray molecules of free hydrogen.

At its thickest point it was barely the width of a human hair, and yet it could withstand a lascannon hit if one were set towards it. The mirror was another of Zellik’s great and secret treasures, a device that had enabled him many times to move the Archeohort’s great mass by stealth, right under the noses of his enemies. On the far side of the curved kite, at its midpoint, the Mechanicus construct moved on inertia, thrusters silent and cowled ever since it had entered the Dynikas system. Flanking the Archeohort like pilot fish swimming with a whale, the warships Tycho and Gabriel kept in tight, exacting formation. The flight was straining their commanders to the limit, as all the crew-serfs knew that a single error of motion could send their cruisers outside the protective halo of the mirror – which would mark the end of both their clandestine approach and any chance of the mission’s success.

Power systems across all three vessels were set as low as they dared; it was the same tactic the Space Marines had used to approach the Archeohort via boarding torpedo, but writ large. It had worked then; it would work now, if the grace of the God-Emperor favoured them.

The planet had two moons, both bulbous, misshapen asteroids captured by Dynikas V’s gravity well. The far side of the larger was the flotilla’s destination, baked by the sunlight of the hard orange-white sun. The primary moon was big enough to conceal all three vessels from any observers on the planet below. Dropping out of sight behind it, the mirror shroud began to fold away in a complex dance of shifting matter and clever machinery.

The Archeohort’s actual command deck bore no resemblance to the fake that the ship’s machine-spirit had attempted to trap them in. Ajir had been aboard many naval vessels and seen their bridges – the ornate stages for officers and ranged pits below filled with junior ratings and servitors, the windows that looked out from control towers across the prows of battle-ready warcraft. This was nothing of the like. The command space was a series of square terraces, balconied and cornered rings ranged one atop another, each smaller in dimension than the last. The effect was one of a pyramid turned inside out, the steps of a ziggurat falling down to a dais several levels below. Each terrace was lined with consoles of profuse complexity, and minor enginseers and lexmechanics worked at them, heads buried under hoods or wired in via festoons of wafting mechadendrites. Some of the terraces were fitted with rails that the tech-priests rode on rollered feet, endlessly circling around and around.

The smell of ozone and electricity was sharp in the air, and a constant rattling rush of whispered machine code assailed the Blood Angel from every side. He stood behind Rafen, along with a few of his battle-brothers – as ever, the penitent Turcio among them – and the Logis Beslian, atop a hexagonal platform balanced between a pair of robot arms. The platform walked down the levels of the command pit by fixing itself with one limb, then swinging the opposite to another anchor point, then repeating the function anew. Beslian seemed to control its movements without any outward sign of direction.

‘This is, to use an organic metaphor, the beating heart of the Archeohort,’ said the tech-priest. The saggy flesh elements of his face showed slight disgust at his own terms. ‘From here we may read data from any of the construct’s systemry.’

‘Your passive auspex sensors have analysed returns from the planet,’ Noxx said curtly. ‘What do they reveal?’

Beslian rolled his hooded head on his piston neck and the platform arrested its movement, shouldering over to the corner of a nearby terrace. ‘Observe,’ he began, beckoning a pict-screen on one wall to extend out towards them on a gimbal.

The display buzzed and displayed a flickering rune-prayer before reforming into a grainy real-time image of Dynikas V. Indicator overlays projected on to lenses swung around into position. Hot lines of red appeared, dots of varying size and lividity scattering themselves over the planet’s dayside.

‘Thermal blooms, lords,’ explained Beslian. ‘Trace patterns of waste gases ejected into the air through bio-processes. Feeding, and the decay of corpses, I would warrant.’

‘I thought this planet was dead,’ growled Sove, another of Noxx’s Space Marines.

‘It is,’ said Mohl. ‘What we are seeing is evidence of xenos, brother. Tyranids, marooned on this world, living off each other after their hive was destroyed.’

Rafen was grim. ‘They must have eaten everything else.’

‘I do not understand,’ said Kayne. ‘Is it not the tyranid way to gut a living world, then build new bio-ships and move on to the next? If Dynikas V is bereft of all native life, then why are these monstrosities still here?’

Beslian inclined his head, favouring Kayne with a nod. ‘The Blood Angel is correct. But this behaviour is not uncommon. It has been seen before, when a nest is denied the governance of one of their command organisms.’

‘You speak of a hive tyrant,’ said Turcio.

Ajir’s lips thinned. That much was obvious.

‘Correct,’ said Mohl. ‘I hypothesise that there is no such beast on the planet below. As such, the extant tyranid warrior-organisms resident there revert back to their base natures. Killing and reproducing. Given a dozen generations, if this new ecosystem was not interfered with, it would probably eat itself into extinction.’

‘And we are to believe that Fabius Bile resides among that morass of fangs and claws?’ Kayne folded his arms across his chest, shaking his head. ‘It cannot be.’

‘No?’ said Rafen. ‘Explain that, then.’ He pointed at a regular cluster of heat signatures on a crescent-shaped atoll in the southern hemisphere. ‘That pattern is too coherent for an organic form.’

‘Good eye, my lord,’ said Beslian. He flipped another lens over the screen and turned it with his servo-arm. ‘You are quite correct to suspect this locale. Solar albedo returns correlate with manufactured materials down there. Ferrocrete and metal alloys.’

‘A building,’ noted Puluo.

Noxx leaned in. ‘Enlarge that image. Show us more.’

Beslian frowned. ‘Without use of active sensors, I cannot provide the best resolution…’ He worked the lenses irritably, expanding on the blurs of colour and reflection. ‘Ah…’

Ajir made out the distinctive shapes of bunkers and revetments, wards around an open landing zone and what could have been a keep. ‘He has himself a fortress, in the middle of a xenos breeding ground.’

‘How is that possible?’ said Turcio. The penitent leaned in. ‘See, the island around the buildings. Every other scrap of land has evidence of tyranid spoil pools, spore chimneys or killing grounds. But not this one. How is Fabius keeping them at bay?’

‘Sorcery,’ muttered Sove darkly.

Puluo studied the image. ‘Those look like embedded lance batteries, there and there,’ he noted. ‘Heavy gauge. Capable of reaching low orbit, I’d warrant.’

‘Correct. I have determined that those weapons were among the items my former master traded in this quadrant. They are the secondary line of defence,’ continued Beslian. ‘The primary is closer to hand. Look here, Astartes.’ The tech-priest beckoned one of his lexmechanics, and the hooded figure released another mobile screen to them. Still images captured from near-orbital space flicked past like pages from a book.

Rafen recognised them first. ‘Gunskulls.’

There were orbs floating in the dark, kilometres up over the surface of Dynikas V, each of them clustered with engine nozzles and arrow-tipped spines. Even in the indistinct imagery taken in passing by the Archeohort’s watch-scopes, the screaming mouths worked into their surfaces were clearly visible, as were the complex strings of text in forbidden tongues carved into the metal. Some of them dragged lines of chain with them, others were dressed with fans of solar panelling. No two were alike, but every one of them had a face. Ajir had once heard that the sculpted iron was modelled upon the aspects of certain champions of the Chaos Gods, as some form of veneration. He could see where superheavy laser cannons and the tips of melta torpedoes protruded from gaping, crack-toothed maws and blank eye sockets. Each one of these killer satellites had at its heart the flesh of a crippled madman, wired in and entombed in a sheath of steel, never sleeping, forever awake and desperate to unleash death upon the enemies of the Ruinous Powers. There were hundreds of them, all with their backs to the planet and cannons aimed outward, hundreds of frozen, howling faces and screaming skulls.

‘I’m no shipmaster,’ said Noxx, ‘but I’d say those things bring poor odds.’

Mohl nodded. ‘The satellites are intermediate range weapons, but more than capable of matching the guns of two strike cruisers. Anything less than a passing engagement would go in the favour of the defenders.’

‘What about this hulk?’ demanded Kayne.

Beslian took the insult with a sharp chug of air. ‘The Archeohort is not a warship! It is not built for sustained military actions.’ He looked away peevishly.

Rafen ignored the outburst. ‘Fabius has dug himself in deep, that cannot be denied. But we’ve not come this far to be dissuaded at the very gates of our foe’s redoubt.’

‘A frontal attack will be a wasteful endeavour,’ Beslian said airily. ‘At best, you might be able to close to heavy weapons range and release an orbital bombardment upon Bile’s facility. And even then, as the gunskulls swarmed your ships, you would not live to tell of it. Not to mention that it is highly likely that the traitor has hardened his base to well beyond–’

‘Your insights are appreciated,’ snapped the sergeant, iron in his tone, ‘but matters of tactics are not yours to decide.’

Beslian pressed on, clearly concerned for the fate of the Archeohort now it was his. ‘I would respectfully suggest you call in reinforcements from your Chapter starfleet, brother-sergeant. A massed force of ships could obliterate Dynikas V with a sustained cyclonic torpedo barrage and suffer only a few losses in return.’

Sove snorted, his scarred face wrinkling. ‘It could take weeks to gather more ships.’

‘The cousin is right,’ Ajir threw the Flesh Tearer a nod. ‘And even then, even if we had the time to wait, how can we be sure that Bile will not simply spirit himself away as he did when he fled from Baal?’

For a moment, Rafen was silent, perhaps recalling the memory of a dim corridor beneath the Vitalis Citadel, and the brimstone stink of a spent warp gate. ‘The kill must be made close at hand. From high orbit, hiding behind guns… That will not suffice. Our honour demands more.’

‘Logic–’ Beslian barely got the word out before Noxx was at his side, a finger pressing on his sunken chest.

‘You heard the Blood Angel,’ he said. ‘This is a matter of retribution, not your precious logic.’

The logis’s optics whined as they blinked. ‘As you wish…’ He backed away, almost to the edge of the mobile platform. ‘But… but what other means of attack is there?’

‘Thunderhawks and drop-pods will be obliterated before they even cut atmosphere,’ said Ceris. ‘Teleporters won’t work. There are wards in place to prevent their operation.’ He tapped his temple. ‘I see them.’

Ajir watched Rafen fold his arms. ‘So all we have are impossibilities. It seems that every step we have taken along this road brings us more of them.’ He glared at the image. ‘I am done. I no longer care to hear what we cannot do, and how we will not succeed.’ The sergeant turned around, his ire burning in his eyes, his gaze raking them all. ‘We were not given this mission in order to fail it! The Emperor’s hand is at our backs, and we will not disappoint Him! We have been entrusted with the honour of our Chapter…’ Rafen caught Ajir’s gaze. ‘The honour of our primarch! So we will find a way!’

In the silence that followed, Mohl slowly raised his hand. ‘If it pleases the brother-sergeant,’ said the Techmarine, ‘I have a suggestion.’

At first glance, it resembled a bomb, but larger than any Rafen had ever seen, greater even than the huge Atlas-class weapons deployed by the Imperial Navy against hardened ground targets. Suspended on chains from a gantry over the heads of the Space Marines, it projected an air of menace, its black iron flanks curving up and away.

‘It’s a ship?’ demanded Noxx.

‘Of a sort,’ Mohl replied.

Eigen bent his neck to take the whole thing in. ‘I’ve never seen the like before.’

Rafen spotted hatches along the smoothly rounded prow of the object that lay perfectly flush with the hull metal, and at the opposite end, the strange vessel tapered to a teardrop stern. An ‘X’ of stubby winglets emerged there, and in the light from the flickering welding torches of servitors, he made out the low mound of a turret on the dorsal surface.

‘My lords, allow me to present to you the Neimos. According to the dedication plaque within, it was built during the Great Crusade for the service of the Imperial Army. Zellik’s relic hunters appropriated it for him several years ago, from a space hulk in the Drache Sector.’

‘The streamlining…’ began Turcio. ‘It’s an atmosphere boat.’

‘No,’ said Rafen, understanding coming to him. ‘This craft is built for oceans, not air.’

Mohl nodded. ‘Correct, brother-sergeant. The Neimos is a combat submersible, designed for deployment on ocean worlds. I came across a mention of it in the Magos’s inventory.’

Kayne snorted. ‘And how does this relic help us get to Bile? What do you propose we do, Flesh Tearer? Drop it on him?’

‘The hull of the Neimos is constructed from a spun sentanium-ceramite mix. It is a solid piece, extremely durable and flexible. In addition, there are extra layers of ablative armour sheathing its length. While the craft was built for a crew of common sailors, I believe it can be quickly refitted to operate with a handful of Astartes and a contingent of servitors.’

‘You’re suggesting we sail this thing under the seas of Dynikas V, right up to the front door of Bile’s fortress?’ Noxx gave a chuckle that wasn’t reflected in his cold eyes. ‘Let us ignore the dangers of such a journey for a moment and concentrate on the boy’s question.’ He nodded towards Kayne. ‘Or did you forget Beslian’s little show? I ask you, what possible value is there for a boat in space?’

‘The Neimos is orbit descent-capable, lord,’ Mohl replied. ‘Shunt-field systems and armour will protect it from the trauma of atmospheric interface. Ballute arrays will slow the fall.’

‘I was right,’ Kayne said, in disbelief. ‘You do want to drop it on him.’

In spite of himself, Rafen found a sudden bark of dry laughter bubbling up inside him. ‘I confess, Brother Noxx, I am not certain if your Techmarine has lost his reason or gained genius.’

‘I feel the same way,’ said the Flesh Tearer, glaring at his warrior. ‘Is such a thing really possible?’

Mohl nodded. ‘Craft of this class have been deployed in combat many times. The survival rate is not exemplary, however.’

‘I’d ask you a number for that rate,’ said Rafen, ‘but I fear I would regret knowing the answer.’

‘I fail to see the point of this,’ said Ajir. ‘If we could close to such range as to launch this… this curiosity… then why not a storm of drop-pods instead?’

‘With the Neimos, we can deploy the craft into the ocean on the far side of Dynikas V from the target atoll, where the fortress’s emplaced guns are over the horizon and unable to reach us. In addition, the coverage of the defence satellites is thinner in that area. Once we dive beneath the surface, the gunskulls will not be able to track us.’ Mohl gestured at the submarine. ‘We will be free to proceed in stealth.’

‘But how do we get it to launch position?’ Kayne insisted.

‘It will require sacrifice,’ said the Techmarine, after a moment.

A slow smile formed on Rafen’s lips as Mohl’s meaning became clear to him. ‘Yes, I think it will.’ He paused, musing. ‘How long to ready the Neimos for the drop?’

‘I have already begun the preparations, lord. A matter of hours.’

Rafen nodded to himself, voicing his thoughts. ‘Two squads of men, infiltrated on to the planet, delivered by this vessel to the enemy’s fortress. We go in under cover of fire and stealth, and hit the target.’

‘We’re doing this, then?’ Noxx asked. ‘Well. As plans go, it has audacity…’

‘Will that count for anything if we die of it?’ grated Eigen.

Rafen glanced around. ‘Gather your wargear. Prepare yourselves for the coming battle.’

Kayne’s face was sallow. ‘And may we take the time to pray? I fear we will need all the blessings we can gather to us.’

The sergeant nodded. ‘You’re right. But know this – the God-Emperor is always watching, and He favours the bold.’

Beslian came up to meet them on his mobile platform, the mechanism clanking up the levels of the command pit. Rafen turned from the relay helot conveying his orders to the internal and external vox-channels, giving the Mechanicus priest the briefest of looks.

‘Brother Rafen!’ snapped the logis. ‘What is going on?’ He pointed a spindly servo-arm at Mohl. ‘The Archeohort’s control code protocols have been changed. This battle-brother did so, without consulting me! What is the meaning of this?’

Rafen ignored him, concentrating on his task at hand. The helot had plugged itself into the construct’s machine-call web, and now the Blood Angel’s words to it were being broadcast simultaneously to the Astartes upon the bridges of the Gabriel and the Tycho. ‘Shipmasters,’ he was saying. ‘You know your orders. You have five solar days. If we fail in our mission, or if contact is not made using the correct cipher protocols, execute a maximum strike bombardment of the fortress. By the command of our Chapter Masters, you are to do whatever is required to turn that island into slag… To the forfeiture of your vessels and crews, and beyond. Ave Imperator.’ The commanders of the two warships echoed his words and cut the channel.

‘We are ready to begin,’ said Mohl.

‘Do so,’ Rafen told him, before finally giving his attention to the adept.

‘I believed we had built up a measure of trust!’ Beslian grated. ‘Instead I find my code strings severed, and intruder data impinging on the function of my ship’s systems! This will not stand!’

‘No?’ Rafen took a heavy step towards him. ‘Is it necessary for me to remind you how it is you came to be wearing this icon?’ The Blood Angel prodded him in the chest with an armoured finger, pressing the master’s sigil around Beslian’s neck into the folds of his rust-coloured robes. ‘Know this, my esteemed logis. You command the Archeohort in name only. This vessel belonged to the Sons of Sanguinius the moment we declared it so.’

‘Mohl is a Techmarine!’ The priest blurted out the title with mild disgust. ‘And a Flesh Tearer into the bargain. You understand! He is not fit to take mastery of a fine craft like this, even in your primarch’s name… The Techmarines come to Mars to be trained, but they do not truly excel! They never know the perfection of the machine as a member of the Adeptus Mechanicus does!’

‘And yet, despite my apparent lesser status, I was able to lock you from your own codex-system,’ said Mohl, with deceptive mildness.

Beslian ignored the jibe. ‘Techmarines are brutish, crude and unsophisticated! And Mohl is all the more so for his Chapter and breeding!’

The Flesh Tearer’s plain face suddenly twisted in annoyance, but Rafen stepped up before he could move towards the adept. ‘What do you say to me?’ the Blood Angel said coldly. ‘That you are more loyal to my mission than a battle-brother from a kindred Chapter? Do you take me for a fool?’ His fist unclenched and he backhanded the adept to the deck. The blow was as light as he could make it – he did not wish to kill the man – but still Beslian went stumbling down in a clatter of metal. ‘If I learn that you again speak ill of an Astartes, of any Son of Sanguinius, I’ll have you cut up for servitor spares. You will obey Mohl as you would the word of the God-Emperor of Mankind!’

Beslian made a wounded, sobbing noise, but his head bobbed and he tried to right himself with whatever scraps of dignity he still possessed. ‘I… I only wish to know why! What have I done to displease you?’

Rafen eyed him. ‘You think yourself superior to us, and you think us so inferior that we would not know it. That is enough.’

The iris hatch to the command deck rattled open, and Beslian saw the figure framed in the open doorway. Immediately, his words with the Space Marine were forgotten and he threw up his arms, organic and mechanical alike, in a gesture of self-protection. ‘No!’ he cried, his implanted vocoder resonating with static-filled feedback. ‘Why is he here? No! Take him away!’

With Brother Sove to his right, a bolter held at his silver skull, and an ever-watchful Brother Ceris to his left, the former Magos Matthun Zellik shambled into the chamber, dripping with restraint cables and detention cuffs. The machine eyes in his scarred metal face were hard with hate as they found Beslian. ‘Turncoat!’ snarled Zellik. Immediately he began a chattering hymnal of harsh binary code, but before he could speak more than a few phrases, Ceris yanked on his tethers, and the magos was choked into silence.

‘What was that noise?’ said Rafen.

‘Meme code,’ said Mohl, with a grimace. ‘Clogs the mental functions of those who absorb it.’

‘If he does that again, kill him,’ the sergeant told the other Flesh Tearer. Sove nodded and as an afterthought, tore a length of cloth from the prisoner’s garb, quickly fashioning a gag from it.

Beslian followed Rafen, deliberately keeping the Blood Angel between him and his former master. ‘Why have you brought him here?’ he bleated. ‘He should be on the dungeon decks, or executed!’

‘Zellik will perform a final duty for the Imperium,’ said Ceris. ‘As a lesson for the weak.’ He shoved the ex-magos towards the helm podium that overlooked the command pit. A largely ceremonial construction, the podium was used by Mechanicus rune priests to awaken the engines of a vessel at the start of a voyage or before a mission of great import. There, they would appease the machine-spirit of the craft in the Emperor’s name, all the better to see it perform its function. It was the helm in ritual only; in actuality, the steering of the Archeohort was done by mindless servitor drones down in the lower levels of the pit.

Ceris took Zellik’s tethers and secured him to the podium. The cables keened as they tightened and became rigid. Zellik rebelled against this new indignity, but Sove held him down with no visible effort. The ex-magos roared behind his gag, froth escaping his bound lips to trickle off his tarnished metal chin.

Rafen studied the prisoner for a long moment. ‘All those who turn their backs upon the God-Emperor, through the embrace of the alien, the mutant or the traitor… For greed. For their own glory. In ignorance. In fear… All of them must pay for that crime.’ He shot a glare at Beslian. ‘All, adept.’

‘It’s done,’ said Sove. ‘The rest of the squads are boarding the Neimos. We’re ready, Brother-Sergeant.’

Beslian balked at the mention of the submersible’s name. ‘What… are you doing with that craft? It’s just a relic! An engineering novelty…’

Ceris turned a penetrating stare on the tech-priest. ‘For your sake, you had best be wrong about that.’

‘Take the logis below,’ said Rafen. ‘Tell Sergeant Noxx to start the count.’

Beslian went towards the hatch, his iron hooves scraping as he moved with reluctance. ‘I don’t understand…’

‘You will, soon enough,’ Ceris noted. The psyker paused and threw his commander a nod. ‘Don’t fear, sir. We won’t go without you.’ He showed something like a smile, but Rafen felt chilled at the sight of it.

He turned away and found Mohl watching him. The Techmarine had extended a length of mechadendrites into brass sockets along the command console. ‘Ready,’ said the Flesh Tearer.

‘You’re certain you have full control of the Archeohort?’

Mohl nodded jerkily, as if he was distracted. ‘Aye.’ Rafen could only imagine the torrent of machine code filtering into the warrior’s mind through the cables, the flood of binary babble from hundreds of chattering functionaries and cogitators.

Zellik howled something unintelligible behind his gag, straining at his tether. Rafen ignored the traitor’s protests, shoving him back to the deck. ‘There can be no errors. A single hesitation, any act of rebellion by one of the crew–’

‘There will be none,’ Mohl said, with finality. ‘The commands are hard-coded. It would take a millennium to unlock them. This helot crew will do as they are ordered to, and they will not be permitted to question. I will not allow it.’ With care, the Techmarine set down his bolter on the deck and dropped to one knee, as if he were about to pray.

Rafen felt a moment of confusion. ‘Mohl, what are you doing? We must away.’

The Flesh Tearer shook his head. ‘Not I,’ he replied. ‘I must remain to steward the Archeohort.’ Mohl smiled ruefully. ‘I did say this would require sacrifice.’

For a long moment, the Blood Angel weighed the words of the other Astartes, the full understanding of Mohl’s choice becoming clear. At last he spoke. ‘There is no other way?’

‘None, lord, and it is to my regret. I would like to be there when you find the renegade. To see him pay.’ He frowned in concentration. ‘Time draws short. The engines are coming to power, sir. You must go.’

Rafen nodded, and placed a hand on Mohl’s shoulder. ‘You will be remembered, cousin.’

Mohl did not look up. ‘That is all I ask.’

On rods of blazing fusion fire, the massive bulk of the Archeohort rose over the surface of the primary moon, the derrick-limbs pulled in tight. Torpedo turrets and weapon batteries spun up to full power, turning to bear on the looming disc of Dynikas V. With the mirror-shield folded away and the drives open to full, the inferno of energy returns lit the scrying sensors of the orbiting gunskulls like dawn breaking the night.

The satellites turned on manoeuvring thrusters, puffs of gas orienting them towards the intruder, even as quick sensor engines examined the silhouette of the vessel. They compared it to ships of all known types within their knowledge banks, and the answers they found brought only a mass of confusion to the chained organic minds at the heart of each orbiter. The whole process took only fractions of a second, and garbled machine speech back and forth via low-power laser beams swiftly led to a consensus. The web of gunskulls sent a vox code down through the turbulent, wind-swept atmosphere of Dynikas V – a question demanding an immediate answer, to kill or not to kill.

Any ship intending to slow into a parking orbit over the ocean world would have required a scheme of careful thrust-gravity-mass formulae to avoid overshooting or unwarranted atmospheric interface. The Archeohort reached the point of transition and did not lose pace; if anything, with the pull of Dynikas V now upon it, the massive Mechanicus construct was accelerating.

Aboard the vessel, the first querulous, frightened messages began to trickle in to the command centre’s vox buffer from the minor adepts and more sentient of the ship’s servitors. Each one was snubbed by Mohl’s firm denials and hard, uncompromising orders.

The Archeohort continued to close on the planet.

The Neimos was already moving as Rafen sprinted into the cavernous departure bay. Now upon a long, low cradle that rode on steel rails, the full shape of the craft was visible to him. A childhood spent on a world of deserts meant that oceans and the beasts that dwelled within them were alien to him, but on some level he understood the aspects of hunter cetaceans, with their fins and streamlined bodies. The Neimos resembled them, but in Rafen’s eyes it was easier for him to equate the craft with the shape of a weapon. The submersible reminded him of a cudgel, heavy and dangerous – a brute-force device ready to bludgeon an enemy into submission.

In swift, loping steps, he mounted the cradle, scattering crew-serfs too slow to get out of his way, and clambered to the hatch on the dorsal fin. Rafen’s boots clicked over a layer of curved lamellar tiles, the extra ablative armour that would be the ship’s heat shield through atmospheric interface. He glanced back down towards the stern, past the X-planes to the ring where the thrusters would be; for now, they were folded into the submarine’s hull, only to be deployed once they were in the sea.

Rafen squeezed into the open hatch and pulled it closed behind him. New weld marks and gobs of sealant marked the places where the airlock had been widened to accommodate the bulk of armoured Space Marines. As the lock cycled, he spoke the litany to weapons with brisk intention.

Inside, the dimensions of the Neimos were close and confined. Built for men of normal stature, the corridors and chambers of the vessel would have been cramped even for them; for an Adeptus Astartes, and one in full power armour at that, it made the coffin-like space of a drop-pod seem roomy by comparison.

‘Watch your head, sir,’ said Turcio, beckoning him down an accessway. ‘It’s a snug fit, that’s for certain.’

The sergeant followed, noting the places where bright metal showed, indicating the spots where panels had been cut away or decks removed to accommodate the girth of a Space Marine. They were quick and dirty fixes, but if this mission had revealed anything to Rafen, it was that the most expedient course of action was rarely the cleanest.

He entered the control room and found a crew of servitors at the stations, with the rest of the Astartes crowded around a raised island in the middle of the chamber. He spied Kayne watching the two helots at the helm station; nothing but a wall of blank screens and inert dials lay before them. The whole vessel rocked as the transport cradle shifted over points and swung wide.

‘Where’s Brother Mohl?’ said Sove, his bearded face tightening.

Noxx shared a look with Rafen. The other sergeant must have known the intentions of his squad-mate from the outset, but said nothing of it. ‘Mohl has his work to do. We have ours.’

Sove glared at Rafen, as if the Techmarine’s absence was his fault, and then looked away.

‘The ship is sealed,’ said Ajir. ‘For better or worse, this antique will be our saviour or our coffin.’

‘Status?’ Rafen put the question to Noxx.

The Flesh Tearer’s dead eyes met his. ‘We have twenty helots aboard, the best of Zellik’s bunch, at all the crew stations. I’m afraid the honourable Logis Beslian became hysterical when he figured out what our gambit was.’

Rafen looked around; there was no sign of the Mechanicus adept. ‘And how did you deal with that?’

‘He’s in one of the descent racks,’ said Noxx. ‘Gast put him out with a sedative from the Neimos’s infirmary. I thought better there than running about the boat like a panicked grox.’ Off Rafen’s nod, he gestured around. ‘The prize crew have returned to the Tycho. We’re all that’s left.’ He frowned. ‘Not counting Mohl, of course…’

The Blood Angel took in the faces of the warriors before him; there, a knot of crimson and gold, Battle-Brothers Kayne, Turcio and Ajir, and the Devastator Space Marine Puluo, the psyker Ceris standing out in his indigo wargear. To the other side, in their black-chased, wine-dark armour, Sergeant Noxx and the remainder of his squad, Brothers Eigen and Sove, and the cleric Gast. Ten warriors, ten Sons of Sanguinius ranged against a world teeming with rapacious xenos beasts and a heartless scion of Chaos Undivided.

A smile crossed his lips, and Rafen’s fangs flashed. ‘Our victory is down there, brothers. We have only to reach out and take it.’

Another shock rumbled up through the deck of the Neimos.

‘It’s starting,’ said Ceris.

Zellik was screaming behind his gag, his augmetic eyes wide and rolling. His entire body vibrated with furious shock, and he pulled at his restraints with all the strength of madness and desperation. His implanted antennae – the ones deep in his muscle tissue and bone marrow, the ones the clumsy Astartes had not discovered and excised – picked up the short-range radio wave speech bursts between the minor servitors working the closest console ranges.

What Zellik heard there he quickly pieced together with the behaviour of the Blood Angel and the blighted Flesh Tearer Techmarine; the sum of that datum was enough to cause a spike of actual, genuine emotion deep inside the tech-lord’s mind. It had been a long time since he felt true, real fear. Other emotional states, ones like greed or desire, hate and envy, those he indulged in with frequency. Matthun Zellik had never been one to eschew the whole emotive experience, unlike many of his Mars-born kindred; where they held to the belief that only in cold logic could perfection be found, Zellik believed that emotions, just like any abstract system, could be reduced to knowable equations if only one had the time and the intellect to find them. He used emotions as toys, turned them on and off to enhance his pleasure at every acquisition he made, used them to sharpen his mind when he was in conflict.

Already, he had almost been swamped in loathing after discovering that Beslian had betrayed him to the Astartes; but that had faded quickly with the realisation that, had circumstances been reversed, he would have done the same to that irritating little null unit. That had been replaced, first by hot, blazing anger. The rage at being forced to do nothing while these ham-fisted fools smashed about his precious Archeohort and laid waste to it. But he had not regretted his decision to surrender to them, at least not at first. On some level, he understood – he had always understood – that the collection down in the holds was more important than any individual life, more important than his life, even. Zellik made his peace with that; he would happily let himself perish if the collection survived. There would be others to take on his great task of gathering the tech-relics of the past. Each find had taken him closer to the Machine-God, and he regretted nothing.

But now that was taken from him, and there was such great and transcendent woe in his clockwork heart. He listened with his antennae and he heard the orders, he understood the horrible thing that the Astartes were doing. He pulled at his tethers, screaming and screaming, but the Techmarine Mohl, only a few spans away from him there on the deck, ignored him utterly.

It was then a new voice joined the others. A vox signal, filtering up from the planet below, bearing ciphers that labelled it for Zellik’s attention. Broadcast in the clear, the voice of Haran Serpens issued out from bell-mouthed speaker horns.

‘My dear Matthun,’ it boomed. ‘You’ve impressed me. How you managed to venture so close without being detected… I always knew you were a man of great cleverness.’ There came a metered sigh, and as he listened to it, Zellik was wondering after the words of the Blood Angel, the mad claim the warrior Rafen had made.

Haran Serpens could not be dead, it was impossible! And more so, that someone like Zellik could be duped by an agent of Chaos into thinking him still alive. He would have scoffed had his mouth not been stuffed with a ragged cloth. Fabius Bile, indeed! The very idea was the pinnacle of idiocy!

‘Will you not answer me, Matthun?’ asked the voice. ‘No? Your ship comes closer, and you do not announce yourself to me. What am I to think? Have we not had a mutually beneficial relationship? Or is it that the seeds of covetousness I always saw in you are now bearing fruit? Yes. I think that is what it is.’

‘No! No!’ With effort, Zellik forced the tiny manipulator arrays in his mouth cavity to finally cut through his gag and allow him to shout. He projected the bellowed cry on every frequency he could, but static jamming rebounded in on him. The tech-lord glared at Mohl, who still had not moved, not reacted one single iota as the Archeohort drove in towards the planet at greater and greater velocity. ‘Haran!’ cried Zellik. ‘This is not my doing! Hear me!’ His words went no further than the walls around him.

Then the greatest insult of all came to pass. Zellik detected machine code streaming out from the Archeohort’s transmitters, directed down at the planet. The data strings were mimics of the tech-lord’s own proprietary vox protocols, hyper-complex packets of information that flashed past in split-second bursts. They were perfect emulations of Zellik’s own coding patterns, the digital renditions of a gifted imitator. He glared at Mohl, affronted by this intrusion. Then the fear returned to him as he parsed the content of the faked signals; they were brusque, sneering strings of code, demands for surrender and declarations of combat, all directed at Haran Serpens.

A dark, throaty chuckle sounded through the ether. ‘I’m sad it has come to this,’ said the voice, and by turns it began to shift and alter. ‘I see that you are more the fool than I thought you were. A pity, Zellik. But I suppose I should have expected no better. You are like all the rest of them. Limited. Weak. Serving your Corpse-God blindly.’ Zellik’s machine heart hammered against iron ribs and he felt the fear again. ‘Such a waste. Such a terrible, foolish waste…’

New data flowed invisibly to the tech-lord; on the planet below and the gunskulls in close orbit, weapon discharges bloomed, throwing fire into the path of the Archeohort.

The Mechanicus construct cut a wide arc across the dayside of Dynikas V, retro-thrusters stabbing out tongues of nuclear flame, the cannon batteries atop its derricks and ringing its rail-nets aiming out in twenty different directions, seeking targets on the surface and amid the swarm of gunskulls.

The orbit it had entered was not a stable one; the course it projected dipped low and into the edge of the atmosphere, passing through the day-night terminator zone and into the gloom of the planet’s dark side. But before it reached that point, there was a gauntlet of lances and missiles to run, a hard rain of particle beams, radiation and guided warheads. Nothing short of a battle-barge would have been able to weather such concentrated fire and survive – but still the Archeohort came on, every intelligent system aboard it blinkered and forbidden from dwelling on the fate before them, controlled by the iron will of Techmarine Mohl.

The gunskulls were in rapture. Every shot they fired, every blazing ejection of energy, each one lit sparks of pleasure in their hobbled minds. Jars filled with cuts of human brain matter bubbled and frothed, filled with the joy of attack.

Missile hits grew into spheres of flame expanding out to consume the brass limbs of the construct, entire derricks tearing apart, some severed and set tumbling away. Ragged cuts bled electricity and streamers of gas. Cannons howled in the darkness, the shock of their release echoing through the decks of the Archeohort, their silent payloads smashing gunskulls to fragments; but there were so many more of the satellites, and now they were jetting in from other orbits like starving carrion birds drawn to a fresh corpse.

Zellik’s great ship began to shed parts of itself, cutting a line of shredded metal and spilled fluids across the sky. This was a vain, arrogant attack that only the most foolhardy, the most overconfident of commanders would ever think to undertake – that, or one with a death wish. The slow, ponderous guns down on the surface tracked and fired, fired and tracked, and each shot they released was a palpable hit. A smaller, more nimble ship might have managed to veer off; not the Archeohort. The construct’s path became confused, showing panic. The drive bells glowed bright, frantic to push the mass of the vessel away from the engagement zone; but as they worked, to the mad joy of the gunskulls, laser fire threaded across the void. Where it touched the hull of the Mechanicus construct, force field envelopes buckled and faded, allowing raking hits to cleave through armour and into the decks below. The corpses of vacuum-suffocated servitors followed the rest of the ejecta into space, bloated cyborg bodies adrift as their machine implants continued to work mindlessly at nothing.

Falling and falling, the Archeohort’s main hull split open and imploded. In moments, even as the autonomic guns about its mass continued to fire back, the great construct entered its death throes. No longer a ship, now a collection of slow-dying wreckage as large as a city, the craft tumbled deeper into the gravity well of Dynikas V, towards the oxide-thick oceans that would be its grave.

CHAPTER SIX

Across the command lectern, strings of indicator lumes snapped from red to blue, each accompanied by the hollow chime of a long bell. The heavy, grinding echo of metal sealing tight against metal worked its way through the hull plates, and glass-faced dials buried their indicator needles at the active stop.

‘All decks report ready,’ droned a servitor, oblivious to the vibrations thrumming through the plates beneath it. ‘Craft is sealed. In nomine Imperator, aegis Terra.’

Suspended from the low ceiling, masks made of cracked ceramic, fashioned after the fat faces of cherubs, piped crackling hymnals from their open mouths. The chorus from their lips was just at the edge of hearing, the moaning and creaking of the Neimos a far more strident and powerful orchestra.

Rafen’s eyes scanned the bridge of the vessel; each of the machine-slaves had dutifully wired themselves to their assigned command stations, the active webs of restraining harnesses tying them into place. The Blood Angel had briefly glimpsed a schematic of the Neimos, and knew that the bridge was one of a few compartments inside the submersible mounted on shock-resistant mechanisms, enveloped with arcane energy-shunt technology that would allow the crew to survive impacts that would otherwise turn a body into wet paste. The system was not powerful enough to encompass the whole of the craft, however.

‘Brothers, to your drop stations,’ Rafen ordered, turning to the line of Space Marines ranged close by. ‘We have only one chance at this. Make no mistake, a single error will be enough to kill us all.’

‘Our lives are in their hands?’ Sove jutted his chin at the servitors. ‘The bond-servants of a criminal conspirator?’

‘Try not to let it worry you,’ Turcio replied.

Puluo gave both Astartes a sharp look, and spoke for the rest of them. ‘We’re ready,’

Rafen accepted this with a nod. ‘This is the point of no return, brothers. This day we venture into the realm of the unknown, down to a world teeming with aliens, a world blackened by the Mark of Chaos. Look to your battle-brothers, to your wargear, and you will prevail.’

Noxx raised his helm up upon his fist. ‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius.’ The Flesh Tearer’s words were a hard bark of fury.

‘Aye!’ chorused the warriors.

Rafen closed his eyes, and formed a silent prayer in his thoughts. Let us live, Great Angel, he said silently. Let us live so we can bring our quest to the end it deserves.

The Archeohort came apart in blinding flashes of light. Severed conduits channelling rivers of electrothermal energy spat great gouts of colour as they vented. Whole decks made of stained glass, rescued from worlds razed to rock, were shattered into powder. Objects from thousands of planets and hundreds of histories were torn apart with the construct’s slow, agonising death throes. Storehouses of items never catalogued, things that were alien in origin or just alien in nature, were crushed under the weight of collapsing metal. Centuries of papers fuelled the fires that boiled bio-fluid meme-stores and cracked the delicate lattices of record crystals. Libraries of junk and bric-a-brac mixed with valuables and undocumented treasures were destroyed alongside one another. This great monument to one man’s greed and obsessive covetousness bled out into space, leaving a slick of shattered antiquities behind it. The lighter debris would slowly be gathered in by the planet’s gravitational field, drawn to a fiery death; the large fragments fell faster.

They loomed large and hot against the dark of the void, thermal signatures burning brightly before the synthetic senses of the gunskulls. The weapons satellites poured more kill power into them, smashing the remains into smaller and smaller pieces.

At the heart of this tumbling madness, the fractured core of the Archeohort, the single biggest shard of wreckage, continued its fall. At the leading edge of the jagged scrap of hull, panels blew free on explosive bolts. Behind them, a shape like a cudgel emerged, riding on a launch cradle, inching towards flight.

Matthun Zellik felt his ship dying around him, and he would have wept bitter tears for it if he could have; but the pieces of his flesh that served that purpose had been cut out of him one hundred and fifty-seven point two years earlier, during an enhancement of self at the Morite Thane conclave. Instead, he allowed small loops of emotive emulation subroutines to turn around and around within a partition of his thoughts. Isolating his grief in this fashion allowed him to concentrate the rest of his intentions on freeing himself from his confinement.

The Techmarine Mohl looked into nothingness, the manifold mechadendrites falling from the connector implants along his neck waving and writhing. His single servo-arm was twitching, stuttering.

Zellik’s metallic lip curled in disgust. In the privacy of his own thoughts, he so often ridiculed these Astartes half-breeds for their foolish behaviour. Space Marines – the whole and full variety – they were impressive tools to be sure, and to be respected in much the same way a common man would respect a vicious attack dog. But these so-called ‘Techmarines’… What were they? Abhumans playing at being adepts? Their Chapters sent them to Mars to learn the mysteries of the machine, but could they really ever hope to come anywhere near such a thing? Only the Mars-born could truly understand the scope of the Machine-God. Only the true bearers of the cog could dare to know the majesty of the Omnissiah.

Zellik bent, affronted at the indecorous nature of what he was being forced to do, and let the micro-mandibles concealed in his mouth cut at the bond tying him to the Archeohort’s helm. He blotted out the screams of tortured metal and spitting fire, afraid to listen fully for fear he would learn just how wounded his precious vessel was. Instead, he concentrated on the cutting, filling his thought buffer with his dislike of Mohl. The Techmarine was clearly no scion of the Great Binary Lord; if he had been, he would have ignored Rafen’s insane orders to place the Archeohort on a suicide course. A true child of the Mechanicus would have placed his loyalty with Zellik…

But even as that thought formed in his mind, Matthun Zellik experienced a moment of despair. Beslian was as Martian as he, and still his subordinate had put himself before the fate of the Archeohort and her precious relics. Zellik grimaced. No matter. This day’s events had revealed a truth to him. These fools thought themselves better than he, better than those whose sacred duty was to safeguard the lost technology of mankind, the mislaid future of humanity – without which they would surely perish!

As it came to Zellik that these would be his dying moments, he formed the plan for what he would do. At last the tethers were cut, and with a grind of foot-gears, the tech-priest tore free, standing splay-legged on the trembling deck plates.

For a moment, he was afraid the Astartes Mohl would turn and kill him; but Mohl’s eyes were blank and stared past, unseeing. Zellik knew that look – it was the great rapture of the network. Mohl was pushing himself to directly impose his will upon the myriad of servitors and thinking engines aboard the Archeohort, forcing them to obey his suicidal command. It was a task that even a tech-lord would have found taxing; Zellik’s nose wrinkled as his olfactory sensors picked up the rank odour of human sweat emanating from the Flesh Tearer’s exertions.

Marshalling all his pistons and aligning his rod-like limbs, Zellik coiled and then sprang at the Astartes. Close to the armoured warrior, the hulking slab of a boltgun lay on the deck. The adept’s clawed fingers grabbed at the weapon and pulled. The bolter was heavier than he expected, and the weight of it was strangely balanced. He managed to drag it up into some pretence of a firing stance, steadying it against the frame of his carbon-steel hips. Zellik could hardly hold on to it, and was already regretting his rash action, even as his spindly digits reached for the trigger.

‘What are you doing, priest?’ Amid the rumble and the madness of the destruction, Mohl’s voice was strangely loud. His words came slow and thick; the Astartes was trying to disengage from the Archeohort’s web of controls, but it was not a process one could manage swiftly. The servo-arm snapped at him.

‘You will pay for this,’ Zellik spluttered. ‘I’ll make every one of you pay!’

‘No–’ Mohl began; but then there was a massive, thunderous detonation of noise and light, and suddenly the tech-priest was on the deck several metres away, squealing with pain, a wracking ache making his limbs twitch.

Zellik’s face was wet and the sensor-tongue in his mouth cavity flicked out, sampling the warm matter dotting his face. His internal scanners told him it was blood and brain material. Wiping himself clean with an arm from his servo-harness, Zellik looked back along the quaking deck plates and found Mohl’s body lying at an angle. Where the head had been, there was now a red ruin that was part of a jawbone; nearby, the big shape of the bolter sat upended, the muzzle smoking. He heard a gurgling sound that sickened him.

Zellik looked at his clawed hands, rewinding the data-spools in his skull cavity. It had happened so fast. The weapon, the trigger… He had not been aware of placing so much pressure on it. Had his body not been so greatly improved and reinforced by the works of the Magos, he would never have been able to hold the great gun, much less actually fire it; even so, the recoil of the act had caused him great pain.

The priest expected the fear to come back to him; instead there was a peculiar sense of elation. He had killed an Adeptus Astartes! Granted, one distracted and severely hobbled by his interface to the ship, but still…

‘I said I would make you pay,’ he told Mohl’s corpse. ‘You dismissed me! But I won’t stop here!’

A strange hysteria threatened to overcome him, and Zellik damped it down once more, walling off his emotional responses behind partitions of cold logic. He made it to the corridor beyond the bridge and hesitated. Only a short distance away, to the starboard, lay a compartment where a half-dozen saviour pods were nestled. He could make it there in moments, get away from the wreck before it was lost forever…

‘But why?’ he asked the smoky air. ‘Why?’

The Archeohort was dying around him, and suddenly it seemed churlish for him to outlive it, this grand monument to Zellik’s personal quest for glory. His place was here, with the collection. He had lived for it; it was right he died for it.

‘Not yet,’ he snarled, his final scheme ringing clear and true in his thoughts. ‘Not yet!’ Zellik shouted, racing away as fast as his piston-legs would allow, towards a hidden sanctum of his private museum – and the forbidden alien devices that lay within.

The descent racks were arranged along the spinal corridor of the Neimos, resting on hydraulic rams and pressure cradles that would absorb the shock of a fall from orbit. Their usual functionality allowed them to contain three humans, but in this case each Astartes had a capsule to themselves. Two at a time, quickly and evenly, the Blood Angels and Flesh Tearers entered the pods and sealed themselves within. Rafen watched a claw-footed machine-slave connect bulbous pipes at each closed hatch, the tubes flexing and chugging as they pumped shock-absorbing bio-gels into the racks. The semi-solid matter would dampen the impact effects still further; the Space Marines, already cocooned inside the ceramite and plasteel cowls of their power armour, would know nothing until the drop cycle completed itself.

The sergeant bent to peer through a glass portal into one of the pods. He made out a shape floating in the thick murk, robes open in the gel-mass, the clasping hand of an oxy-mask over a face. Beslian, like a fly trapped in amber.

‘If we perish, he’ll never know it,’ ventured Noxx.

Rafen looked up to see that he and the other sergeant were the last two remaining. Stepping carefully over the shuddering deck, the Blood Angel reached up and secured his helmet.

‘We will make it down alive,’ he told Noxx. ‘I trust Brother Mohl’s judgement.’

‘Why?’

It seemed an odd question; but then Rafen had learned by now that Brother-Sergeant Noxx sought challenge in everything. He gestured upward, as if towards the Archeohort’s bridge. ‘I trust him, because of what he has given up to see we finish the mission.’

Noxx looked up and met Rafen’s gaze; for a moment there was a flicker of dark rage in eyes that were so often lifeless and hollow. ‘I’ll cut his name into a score of enemies and not think it too many. That will be a fitting tribute.’ He climbed into his rack and pulled on the cowling. ‘See you in hell, Blood Angel.’

Rafen stood alone on the deck and listened to the rumble all around him. Any moment now, the Neimos would break free and the fall would begin. Any moment now, and then their destiny would be in the hands of the fates. The mission at the mercy of powers greater than anything the Astartes could summon. He considered uttering another prayer, perhaps a litany of protection before entering the pod, and then dismissed the thought. No more words needed to be said. The Emperor was watching, Rafen could feel it. He closed his eyes and stepped into the rack, shutting himself inside.

As the clamshell door locked into place, he closed his eyes; and so, he did not witness the sudden, brief fit that overtook the nearby servitor. The machine-slave twitched and frothed at the mouth, manipulators clenching and unclenching, thought-pattern indicators glowing brightly.

In the next moment, the clanking spasm passed and the helot went back to its duties as if nothing had happened.

At last, the Archeohort ended.

The rain of fire from the gunskulls enveloped the spinning fragments of the construct and turned them into a storm of metal and glass, wood and meat, gas and plasma. Spread out over a thousand kilometres of stratosphere, crossing into the dark, heavy night of Dynikas V, the remains of the ship clawed into the atmosphere, pieces of the Mechanicus vessel consumed in the fires of re-entry, others surviving long enough to punch into the upper reaches of the planet’s thin cloud layers. These fists of torn iron, these jagged spears of wreckage, they were scattering themselves over the vast tracts of featureless rust-orange oceans. Some would be large enough to create tidal shockwaves that would be felt on the other side of the world. Others would sink quickly into the abyssal depths of the Dynikan seas, and some few hammered at infrequent coral islands and atoll strings, letting the leaden oceans rise up and fill the craters they left behind.

Hiding in the blaze of crashing wreckage, the shape and form of it lost in the roaring heat and fury of the fallout, the Neimos spun in towards the waiting waters.

At first, incredible heat buffeted the bullet-prow of the vessel, in seconds burning through the sheaths of lamellar armour protecting the leading edges. Beneath, energy-siphon technology invented twenty thousand years ago, its functioning and nature lost to time, worked to bleed off the intense glow. It fed on the friction, suckling on the heat to power itself, turning the energy back against its origins.

Invisible cloaks of ionised particles flared around the craft, visible only to the enhanced cyber-sense organs of the machine-slave crew. Over and over, sonic booms crackled across the night side of Dynikas V as falling debris shattered the speed of sound. In the apex of one such compression wave, the Neimos came down trailing fire, a single burning arrow amid a hundred others.

Sensor returns tripped switches in the vessel’s control systems, causing stubby dual-function winglets to emerge from the hull. At the same time, great grey-blue cones of untearable synthsilk billowed from the aft of the Neimos, filling quickly with a mix of spent gases from the engine core and the local atmosphere. The wide ballutes stiffened and gave the ship a moment’s stability. Still concealed beneath an umbrella of tumbling wreckage, the Neimos veered into a series of slow turns, the fins bending air this way and that, bleeding off the terminal velocity of descent. Without the remnants of the Archeohort to blind them, the sensors of the orbital gunskulls would have picked out the craft in moments; but for now all they could detect was a field of conflicting, corrupted returns. To discover the Neimos among such wild disorder would be akin to finding one single torch amid an inferno.

Then; the impact.

The churning ocean waters rose and fell beneath a sky cut by streaks of fire, and from that flame-lit darkness the Neimos came like the hammer of a war god. Flicker-fast gravity displacement fields, fed on the energy converted from the heat of atmospheric interface, haloed the submersible as it touched the wave tops. An invisible bowl of force ballooned outwards, displacing kinetic power, cutting a channel into the murky sea.

The vessel howled as it passed through a storm of dynamic stress more powerful than anything it had experienced so far, and the back-shock discharged a sharp thermal flashover, oily water boiling instantly into a greasy fog of superheated steam.

All this happened in seconds, before a thunderclap of displacement sounded loud as the Neimos vanished beneath the surface, the descent ballutes torn away, the guide fins crumpled and discarded.

The craft was down and sinking, as the rain of wreckage continued all around it.

In the warm silence of the liquid-filled capsule, Brother Ceris allowed himself to use the brief moments of quiet as respite. It was only a matter of fine concentration to draw in his preternatural senses, to wall off the rushing ebb and flow of psychic input pressing in from his battle-brothers. Some of them were afraid, although they would never show it; others angry, all of them tense with the sublimated urge for combat. The mingling of emotion-colours was strong to him. Warriors of the Adeptus Astartes were not known for their metered natures – they were bold and potent, and that character informed every single aspect of their beings. But what drew the psyker’s thin lips into a cool smile was the realisation of a clear truth. For all the outward dissimilarity between the noble Blood Angels and the savage Flesh Tearers, in their hearts and minds they were alike. At the core, no different.

Ceris felt a brief swell of certainty; they would win. Fabius Bile would die a death and the sacred blood would be preserved. He felt this so keenly that it almost seemed like precognition – and when a voice in the back of his thoughts suggested that he only believed what he wanted to, he silenced it. Failure would not be accommodated. They would succeed; they had to. To return to Baal with empty hands would be the greatest shame Ceris could imagine.

He drifted on the edge of dreams as the fall took its course, the shocks through the hull distant and vague. Had the Neimos been manned by a human crew, he might have felt the mists of their anxieties, but the mind-wiped servitors working the vessel’s systems had no such emotions to give. Dimly, he sensed the deaths of two of them as the force of the drop damaged minor systems in different compartments, but they perished with all the circumstance of a candle being snuffed out.

The fall passed quickly, or so it seemed, the sus-an membrane in his grey matter lulling him into a demi-sleep for a brief time. Not quite the full oblivion of suspension, but enough to rest his body for the coming fight. Then, as quickly as it had begun, it was over, and he felt the fleeting torpor bleed away.

Ceris became aware of the shock fluid draining into the rack’s exit vents, and presently the oval hatch before him rose up. Shrugging off the slicks of gel that stuck to his armour, he climbed out and allowed a servitor to blast him clean with an air jet. The rest of the squad were ministering to one another; there had been only minor injuries, contusions and bruising from the roughness of the descent. With their enhanced healing factors, the slight damages experienced by the Space Marines would be forgotten within hours.

‘Still with us then, witch-kin?’ said Eigen, clearing sluggish fluid from the vanes of his breather grille. ‘Did you enjoy the trip?’

‘I dozed through it,’ Ceris replied, in all honesty.

Turcio gave a wry chuckle. ‘I should have thought of doing that. A warrior should take his rest whenever he can.’

Ceris nodded. ‘I’ll warrant none of us will find the time for respite from hereon.’

‘Just try to stay awake when the enemy come calling,’ Eigen retorted. Irritation hazed his aura, and Ceris suspected that the Flesh Tearer had felt the sharp bite of every second of the drop from orbit.

A glimmer at the edge of his thoughts drew up his attention and the psyker glanced across the deck to where Noxx and Rafen stood in conversation. One of the bridge servitors was with them, and from its mouth drooled a spool of data-tapers. ‘That moment may be closer to hand than you might wish,’ said Ceris, seeing the tension in the gait of the two sergeants. Without waiting for Eigen to reply, he walked away, approaching his commander.

Rafen was fingering the end of the tape, studying it intently. ‘There is no margin for error?’

‘None,’ clattered the servitor.

‘So quickly?’ Noxx frowned. ‘Tell me that the element of surprise has not been lost to us already!’

‘I think not,’ said Rafen. ‘We would be under fire already if that were so.’ He looked up at Ceris. ‘Codicier. Have we been touched by witch-sight?’

The psyker shook his head. ‘No, lord. I would have felt the passage of it.’

‘There are surface vessels in the area,’ Noxx said by way of explanation, raising his voice so all the Astartes could hear him. ‘Barges and a fast cutter, if the sound of them rings true. Too close for comfort.’

With a gurgling hiss, the last of the descent racks cracked open, and a bedraggled figure stumbled out, collapsing to the deck. The Logis Beslian gave a metallic choke, and spurts of liquid escaped from gill-vents hidden beneath his sodden cloak. He emitted a low, wet moan that drew the cleric Gast to his side. The rest of the Space Marines ignored him.

‘We’ve barely made planetfall,’ Ajir grated. ‘How could these Chaos whelps know we are here?’

‘They must have already been nearby,’ offered Turcio. ‘A patrol, perhaps?’

‘On the other side of the planet from Bile’s stronghold?’ Ajir shook his head. ‘For what purpose?’

Turcio ignored the barbed tone in the other Blood Angel’s tone. ‘There is still much we do not know about the traitor’s work on this world.’

Rafen was nodding. ‘Fabius is shrewd. He sends these vessels to investigate the wreckage… Likely to recover what he can, knowing the value of Zellik’s Archeohort.’

‘Do we engage them?’ said Sove.

‘Curb your impatience, Flesh Tearer,’ Kayne folded his arms, glaring at the other Astartes. ‘We do that and we lose the only advantage we have!’

‘You would rather we hide in the shadows?’ Sove took a step towards the young Space Marine.

‘That will suffice,’ snarled Noxx. ‘There will be blood enough to sate all of us when the fight comes. But until that moment, we hold.’ He shot a hard look at Sove. ‘Clear?’

The Flesh Tearer nodded once. ‘Clear, brother-sergeant.’

Ceris watched the interchange, and then cleared his throat. ‘With all due respect, I must point out that there is a third option. Neither to attack nor to lie dormant.’

Rafen eyed him. ‘Go on.’

‘We are in the lair of the enemy, and yet as Brother Turcio noted, we move with only our wits and our courage to guide us. We should gather our strength, learn what we can about these vessels and the men Fabius crews them with.’

‘Fair point,’ said Puluo. ‘But we’re Astartes. Not spies.’

Eigen nodded in agreement. ‘We’re bred for attack, not to observe.’

‘True,’ admitted Rafen. ‘But some aboard this vessel are.’ He studied Beslian as the adept got shakily to his feet.

With a racking cough, the Mechanicus tech-priest grimaced at his own sorry state, before slowly becoming aware that every Space Marine in the room was staring at him. He flinched as if he had been struck, and backed away from Gast. ‘Oh no,’ he husked. ‘What do you want of me now? Have you not taken enough?’

‘Our duty to the Golden Throne never ends, adept,’ said Gast.

The Neimos had survived the fall from space with only minor damage, and there was a quiet exchange of amazement between some of the Space Marines. Rafen was certain that Gast and Eigen had placed a wager on some fatal occurrence taking place, and his brow furrowed at the idea of betting on something that might have killed them all. The crude humour of it escaped him.

At his command, with Beslian parsing the orders for the servitor crew, the submersible was brought up to sensor depth, hovering below the surface. The Mechanicus tech-priest was reluctant to obey at first, citing numerous reasons why raising the ship would be dangerous; but a combination of Noxx’s barely-veiled threats and a small amount of flattery on Rafen’s part brought the adept around to the idea.

Tethered by a long cable, a scrying pod sheathed in low-visibility, detection-resistant materials was released from a cowling in the dorsal tower. It rose slowly, silently breaking into the turbulent waves.

Up above, under the glowering, windswept Dynikan night, constant winds lashed across the ocean, ripping at the swell. The heavy, oxide-laden waters seethed and churned, the impacts of wreckage from the Archeohort still echoing on. Parts of the construct would continue to rain down on the planet for several hours, and the atmospheric distortions and contact shocks made it difficult to get clean scan returns. But the problem cut both ways; while the Neimos could not clearly read the distant flotilla, neither could the enemy be certain of detecting the submarine. A spread of light wreckage floated on the writhing surf, and the Neimos moved into its shadow.

In the command centre, Rafen stood with Noxx and Ceris, watching the complex play of the sensor returns. The rest of the Space Marines were elsewhere, preparing their wargear in a cargo bay the servitors had converted into an arming chamber.

Beslian leaned in to study a pict-screen. ‘I believe I have a match.’ He tapped the panel with a servo-arm. ‘See here. The Standard Template Pattern of this barge is known to me. It is a Kappa-Rho-Six ocean transit freighter, Lapidas pattern.’

Rafen saw a grainy pict overlaid by the glowing lines of a schematic stencil. The large ship lay low in the water, and the basic slab-sided shape of it was disfigured by fluted additions that resembled castle donjons.

‘Retrofitted weapon emplacements, perhaps,’ suggested Noxx, thinking along the same lines as the Blood Angel.

‘Aye. But these…’ Rafen pointed out the vanes of a peculiar crystalline antenna and a bulbous sphere riddled with holes. ‘What function do they have?’

Beslian didn’t attempt to supply an answer to that question, and continued on a different tack. ‘Records indicate that several ocean-going craft were deployed with the explorator fleet sent to set up an agri-works on this planet. That vessel would appear to be one of them.’

‘Fabius probably salvaged whatever the tyranid attack had not destroyed,’ said Noxx. ‘Efficient use of materials. This world is far off any conventional trade axis or warp route. Doubtless the traitor would have found it hard to ship in a large amount of new hardware.’

‘He uses what he has to hand,’ agreed Rafen. ‘His fortress is likely to be a repurposed facility left over from the farming colony. That could work in our favour.’ The sergeant filed that thought away for later consideration.

Noxx’s blank eyes narrowed and he gestured at a secondary scrying relay. It was a sweep display, green-on-green, and each time the hands looped around, dots of luminescence appeared and then faded. ‘This is not the flotilla,’ he stated.

Beslian shifted uncomfortably. ‘It is not. These are… biological returns.’

Rafen sucked in a breath. The ecosphere of Dynikas V was bereft of any native life, which meant any living thing they encountered that wasn’t connected with Bile’s operations could only be of one origin. ‘Tyranids? Did you not deem it important to inform us of their proximity?’

The adept flinched, as if fearful of being struck for his misdeed. ‘They are not a threat… Not yet, lord. They are too distant.’

Noxx nodded. ‘They’re closer to Bile’s ships. If they attack, they’ll attack them before us.’

‘No,’ Ceris intoned. The Codicier had not taken his gaze from the pict-screen, remaining intent on the peculiar constructs Rafen had indicated. ‘They do not see the flotilla. The xenos are blind to it.’

‘How is that possible?’ Noxx frowned, and pointed at the sweep scan. ‘Those scaly bastards are so close they could rise up and spit at those boats.’

Ceris shook his head. ‘They will pass.’

Rafen watched the progression of the scan. The staggered dots of the tyranid shoal were crossing near to the barges, which had cut their engines and started to drift. ‘How can you know that?’ he asked the psyker.

‘Because I see the ships…’ He tapped his psychic hood. ‘But I do not see them.’

‘The antenna?’

Ceris nodded. ‘Perhaps a psionic dampener. When I reach out to sense the minds of the beings aboard those craft, there is nothing but a wall of white noise.’

‘The tyranids are animals but they’re not blind,’ said Noxx. ‘That can’t be all there is to it.’

‘You are correct,’ said Beslian, turning back from a chattering cogitator. ‘The sensor pod has been sampling the atmosphere of the planet to determine hazard protocols.’ He held up a fan of printed parchment. ‘These readings suggest a large amount of a particular tyranid pheromonal deposit in the air. Several parts per million, far more than I would expect.’

‘Spores?’ Rafen’s lip curled as he said the word. He had witnessed the work of the xenos spores on the flesh of men, and been disgusted by their loathsome virulence.

‘Negative,’ replied the adept. ‘I will need to cross-check to be certain, but we appear to detect a prevalence of death-indicator pheromones.’

The tech-priest quickly elucidated; in tyranid hives, just as in those of common communal insect life, information was passed via pheromone scent-markers. Thus, something that was toxic would be marked as not-food, something to be denatured and rendered in conversion pools would be marked as consumable, and should a hive member die, their corpses would secrete a pheromone that labelled them as dead, attracting workers to recover and recycle their biomatter.

Confronted by such scent-markers, the warrior creatures would simply ignore something their primitive brains considered to be dead, as long as it remained inert and did nothing to confuse that understanding. The subterfuge would never work on higher-order tyranids, those capable of intelligent reasoning approaching that of a human being – but on Dynikas V, there was no apparent evidence of high-level clades such as norn queens or hive tyrants; only warrior forms adapted to the planet’s ocean environment.

‘The bulb array on the barge,’ concluded Beslian, nodding to himself. ‘It is a dispersal mechanism for the pheromones.’

‘Bile’s fortress must possess the same technology,’ said Rafen. ‘The tyranids do not attack him because they cannot sense him.’

Noxx jutted his chin at the screen. ‘But they do sense us. See?’

The alien shoal was changing course, veering towards the coordinates where the Neimos hid among the floating wreckage.

Rafen glanced at Beslian and saw what flesh there was on the adept’s face go pale. In the next second, Beslian moved with a jerk towards the helm console. ‘We have to flee!’ he piped. ‘Bring the drives on-line, make for maximum speed–’

‘Belay that order!’ snapped Rafen. ‘Thruster discharges will show on the scrying grids of those barges. You’ll bring them to us as surely as if you sent up a mag-flare.’

‘But the creatures…’ The adept controlled himself with a visible effort.

‘They’ll attack us if we remain close to the surface,’ said Ceris.

‘They are tyranids,’ snorted Noxx. ‘They’ll attack us wherever we are.’

‘We do not have the benefit of Bile’s protective devices! We cannot simply lie dormant and pray that they leave us be!’ Beslian’s metallic fingers knitted. ‘If the Neimos cannot run from them, neither can we stand and fight!’

Rafen glanced at Ceris. ‘There’s always a third way.’ He stepped up and addressed the crew servitors. ‘Bring back the pod and take us down. Leave the thrusters off-line. Fill the ballast tanks and let us sink into the depths.’

‘That won’t stop them coming for us,’ said Noxx.

The Blood Angel nodded. ‘I know. But the deeper we go, the lower the chance that any engagement will be detected by the enemy.’

The other sergeant shook his head. ‘You’re risking us all.’

Rafen let out a bark of laughter at that. ‘Of course I am! But risk is our meat and drink!’ He glared at Beslian. ‘Now carry out my orders.’

The adept gave a shaky nod and began to speak in machine-code. The servitors stuttered and jerked into action, working their control lecterns.

‘And what commands do you have for us?’ said Ceris, his brow furrowed.

‘Alert the squad. The order is… stand by to repel boarders.’

The hunter-predator forms had eyes, but they were poor things, vestigial orbs that could only penetrate the oily murk close at hand. Instead, they felt their way through the oceans of Dynikas V through networks of electroreceptor nerves in their bony skulls and feeler barbels that writhed about lipless mouths ringed with teeth. They tasted and smelled their way through the thick waters, riding on sonic vibrations that showed landscapes of sound and pitch.

Once, when their hive had first deposited its spoor upon this world, they had been something close to the genus of tyranid that humans called a lictor; but a rapacious evolutionary cycle and a physiology based on an infinitely malleable octo-helix DNA had tailored them to fit the new environment where they found themselves. Now the lictors bore only the most basic resemblance to their more common kindred. These creatures were sleeker, skinned with sheer microspines, sporting flat fans of talons that doubled as steering vanes. Powerful legs slick with secreted mucus thrashed hard against the ocean, propelling them forward.

Their animal minds reacted to the object they sensed before them, the metallic mass falling away into the gloom. The returns from their sonic barks were garbled and confusing; the lictors were made furious by this. There were no scent receptors in the murk, nothing to warn them off from something that might have been part of their kind. The object was alien to them; it carried the taste of other worlds with it and a warmth that was out of place in the cold seas.

Coming closer, slowing to match pace, the tyranids unfurled their claws from the flesh pockets where they lay and raked them along the hull of the Neimos. Looking for purchase, for a way in.

Kayne dipped a finger in the oil of anointing and traced it around the muzzle of his bolter as Brother-Sergeant Rafen spoke. ‘Watch your fire,’ he was saying. ‘Single shots only. Close quarter weapons. Any collateral damage could make this hulk our grave, so be circumspect.’ His commander brandished a plasma gun, the coils turned to their tightest beam setting.

Kayne looked around, still uncertain as to why Rafen had assembled them in this chamber. It was a slope-floored bay along the ventral surface of the submersible, towards the aft but clear of the steering vanes. The deck disappeared away at a steep angle, while a grid-floored balcony ringed it along the plane of the main deck. It reminded the Astartes of a Thunderhawk’s drop bay, but wider.

The deck of the Neimos trembled as something rebounded off the portside hull, drawing everyone’s attention. Kayne heard another sound seconds later – a high-pitched screeching, like blades scraping against blades.

At his side, the Flesh Tearer called Sove cocked his head and scowled. ‘Talons,’ he said sombrely, making a claw of his hand to demonstrate.

‘We’re tinned meat to them in this iron coffin,’ muttered Ajir. ‘They’ll be sick of their diet of traitors and each other… They’ll be hungry for something new.’

‘The xenos will find only death,’ retorted Eigen.

Rafen turned to Puluo, who stood near a control podium. ‘Flood it,’ he ordered.

Puluo nodded gravely and worked a dial; immediately, sluggish laps of seawater began to fill the lower level. The sloping floor vanished beneath them, and Kayne realised he had been correct; the deck beneath the gantry was a single piece, a massive hinged drop-ramp. Above him, set in secure racks, there were blocky capsules with fins and propellers – auxiliary craft of some kind, he imagined, that could be manoeuvred over the ramp and then released.

An unpleasant thought occurred to him. ‘We’re going out there?’

‘Not yet,’ said Rafen, a wolfish smile playing about his lips. ‘Remember your tactical studies, brother. Choose your battlefield, lest the enemy choose it for you.’

‘Outside, we’re at a disadvantage,’ added Puluo. ‘We’d need tethers, boot magnets…’

‘You want to bring those things in here?’ Noxx’s voice was low.

‘Aye,’ nodded Rafen. ‘We’ll take them and move on.’ He was in the process of removing his right gauntlet.

Noxx approached him. ‘Did you strike your head upon the deck during our drop from orbit, Blood Angel? That’s not a bold plan, it’s a foolish one!’

‘The tyranids will tear their way into this vessel if we do not stop them. Better we face them head on, on our terms, than let them hole the Neimos.’ Rafen stowed the armoured glove and drew his combat blade. He glanced at the others. ‘Weapons up. Prepare to meet the enemy.’

Kayne moved towards a cargo container, already figuring lines of fire from the partial cover, when the Flesh Tearer sergeant spoke again.

‘Hold!’ snapped Noxx, raising his hand to the other Astartes.

Rafen eyed him. ‘You countermand me? Did you not agree to follow my orders?’

‘I said I would obey you for now.’

‘You mean, until you took issue with one of my commands?’ Rafen closed his bare hand around the knife’s naked blade, drawing blood. ‘I’ll discuss mutiny with you if you wish, cousin. But not here.’ He stepped down the ramp until the brackish seawater was lapping over his boots. ‘First we deal with the xenos.’

Kayne watched Rafen extend his hand, curled in a fist; blood from the shallow gash pooled and dripped into the water.

‘Gather yourselves,’ said the sergeant. ‘They’ll come to us now.’

Noxx growled in the back of his throat and shot his Flesh Tearers a sharp look; in turn, the warriors in red and black went to the ready.

Close by, Ceris unsheathed his force mace. He aimed it towards the deepest part of the now-flooded bay. ‘There!’

Kayne saw movement in the murky waters, shapes that were slick and fast, shifting like smoke. He had once heard that some ocean predators were capable of scenting a single drop of human blood in the water from more than a kilometre’s distance; if that were true, then he imagined that the tyranids swarming about the Neimos could not help but be drawn in.

The pool’s surface suddenly grew turbulent, and in the next moment night-black forms exploded out from the water.

Kayne opened fire, even though he had but a vague impression of the shape of his target. He glimpsed a torso, barbed curves of claw and snapping flukes. Bolt rounds crashed from his sidearm, and a surge of harsh scents crashed over him; saline, old rust, the rot of decayed fish-meat and something foul and acidic. He grimaced; the creatures could exude a chemical trail that, left unchecked, would attract every tyranid for hundreds of kilometres.

A bright spear of plasma roared through the air and blasted one of the tyranids back into the water, bolt shells following to rip through its torso.

‘Lictors!’ snarled Sove, snapping off shots from behind a reel of cable. ‘But different… like Cretacia’s selachians…’

‘Adapted,’ said Kayne, through gritted teeth. ‘They killed the top predators on Dynikas and then became them!’

Five of the creatures had emerged from the pool; one already lay shaking and dying. The rest let out shrieks pitched so high that Kayne felt needles of pain in his skull.

‘Nothing lives!’ Rafen shouted, leading with the plasma gun in his fist. ‘Kill them quickly, before they can summon more of their kind!’

Ceris leapt boldly from behind cover to strike at one of the lictor-shark hybrids, bringing down his force mace in a humming arc of white light. Where the weapon struck the beast, the psyker projected a bolt of telepathic power through the brief instant of contact, and the tyranid screamed again – this time, in agony. Kayne turned, aiming down the iron sights of his bolter, lingering for a split-second over where to place his shot; he fired at the corpse-flesh wattles around the throat of the beast and hit his mark. The lictor’s feeder tendrils thrashed and it vomited up black blood from its lamprey mouth.

The psyker bellowed a war cry and beat the xenos again and again with the mace, the spikes of psy-force cleaving open the bony exoskeleton of the lictor’s head.

A hot wave of burned air from plasma fire gusted past Kayne as he shot twice more into Ceris’s target, all the better to be certain of the kill. More alien screams drew his attention as a second tyranid stumbled into the water, one massive scything talon melted and cracked like wax from a candle. Ejected shells clattering off the gridded deck at his feet, Brother Puluo ended the wounded, bellowing beast by marching shot after shot from his heavy bolter up the line of the alien’s torso.

Kayne felt his lips draw back from his fangs, felt the rumble of his blood in his ears. The taste of battle was in his mouth, sweet and strong.

Ajir was caught on the backswing of another lictor’s fin-tail, and he tumbled over the deck and into the water, landing in the shallows with an angry shout. As he splashed back up the ramp to rejoin the fight, Gast and Eigen harried the beast with shots to its face. Noxx had gone in close with his chainsword, carving great jagged slashes in its chest-armour. A muscle spasm racked the lictor, and it fired a fan of flesh hooks at the sergeant. Noxx parried the attack and caught the sinewy chords trailing the hooks in the teeth of his weapon, ripping them out with a growl of spinning blades. Turcio lent his weapon to the Flesh Tearers, his bionic arm absorbing every iota of recoil as he fired one-handed at the tyranid’s legs. Driven to the deck, Noxx snarled and buried his chainsword in the soft underbelly of the lictor, his weight behind it to force the chattering weapon into the vital organs within.

One more. Kayne swung about as Rafen called out his name in a warning. He ducked, and the hum of air buffeted him as a massive crescent talon tore past; a moment’s delay, and the alien’s heavy blow would have connected with his head. He released two snapshot rounds as he let himself continue the turn, the bolter tucked low. Kayne heard the distinctive crunch-crack of the mass-reactive shells as they impacted on the lictor’s chitinous torso plates. It lowed in pain, but it did not halt its attack.

A bony fin-limb, barbed at every joint, scraped across the deck at him like a trailing whip, gobs of stringy mucus looping from it. He fired at it, but there was nowhere else for him to go; caught in the rush of the battle he had let himself be forced into a corner, blocked in by cargo containers and the far wall. Splaying open with a wet hiss, the talons rose before him – and then the lictor-shark was staggering backwards, hooting in pain. A halo of smouldering plasma fire wreathed its back and it spun in a circle, wild with distress. Kayne saw Sove leap up and try for a point-blank kill, but the xenos flailed, clipping him and knocking the Flesh Tearer’s gun from his grip. Undaunted, the snarling Space Marine pressed his attack. A massive push-dagger, a long and slender triangle of polished, fractal-edged steel, flicked out from a snap-rig on Sove’s vambrace. Leaning into the blow, he put the wicked tip of the weapon into a point between two thick ribs and pushed it down to the hilt, twisting the dagger to widen the wound.

Kayne fired at the creature, and was dimly aware of other shots streaking in from other quarters, each Astartes careful to nip at the tyranid’s limbs for fear of striking their comrade.

The lictor hooted and lashed out. Kayne saw the attack in all its bloody glory. The beast ripping at itself to tear out the blade in its gut. Sove’s weapon, and his hand and right arm with it, torn away and discarded in a welter of blood. The Flesh Tearer, his shoulder jetting crimson, batted away like an afterthought by the swing of a talon-fluke.

Sove was flung into a collection of storage bins and vanished into the clutter. The last of the lictors, blood an oily black river from its torn abdomen, became the centre of a hail of bolt shells and plasma fire. The creature’s death screams beat at the walls before becoming the thin, fading hiss of flash-boiled fluids.

Rafen walked to the corpse and kicked it into the flooded section of the bay, the meat-smoke and spent cordite in the air drifting about him. His face was scratched and bleeding. ‘Vent this to the ocean. Let their kindred feast on their corpses.’

Kayne moved towards the mess of fallen containers where Sove had landed, but Noxx was already there, with the Apothecary-Cleric Gast a step behind. The sergeant tore savagely at the debris and dragged his injured man from the deck. Sove had lost his helmet in the fall, and his bearded face was pale.

Rafen began to speak. ‘Is he–’

‘Alive,’ grated Noxx. The Flesh Tearer hesitated on the verge of something unspoken, and finally added ‘for now.’ Before Kayne’s commander could say more, Noxx issued terse orders to Gast, and the cleric bore Sove away towards the Neimos’s upper decks.

After a long moment, Kayne saw Rafen secure his weapon and study the slick of dark fluids across the pool of seawater. ‘We have consecrated this world with our blood and that of the enemy,’ he said to the air, his gaze distant. ‘And if we must, we will choke these seas with their dead.’

Up above, on the surface, the world turned towards the weak glow of a distant, oncoming dawn. Light crossed the wave tops, turning them to beaten silver.

But beneath, where the sun never reached, in the endless grey gloom of the abyssal reaches, the Neimos went deep. Alien corpse-meat twisted in the vessel’s wake, mute witness to the fury of the Astartes. A ripper shoal found the remains and dwelled a few moments, considering the feast; but they stayed away, the animal sense of the tyranid forms aware of something far larger – and more lethal – drifting nearby. Something watching, measuring itself against the new intruders in its realm.

Beneath, where the sun never reached, a dark and sinuous mass followed the Neimos into the depths.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Goel Beslian walked with care, listening.

On the keel deck, in the lowermost section of the Neimos’s engine compartments, the sound of the humming drive trains was a rhapsody of machines. Finely tuned mechanisms, gears and rods and cogs married up with one another in a flawless execution of function; all of it made more incredible by the great age of the system in question. The submersible’s drives were based on a design philosophy laid down in the ages before humankind had left the cradle of Holy Terra – although like some in the service of the Adeptus Mechanicus, Beslian was one of those who secretly believed that humans had actually evolved on Mars first, and cast off to her neighbour planet before the rise of the Emperor, and not as some insisted, the other way around. Mars had always been the seat of genius, the cradle of mankind’s greatest minds.

At a different time, in a different place, Beslian might have been able to stop and enjoy the beauty of this great machine and marvel at its works; but that was denied to him. As much as he wanted the noise and power of the engines to soothe him, all it did was grind the gears of his thoughts still further. He could find no respite.

Finally, he stopped at the reactor control chamber, ignoring the trio of servitors working silently at their consoles, and stared at the fan of indicator lamps on the core monitor lectern. All was well, for the moment. His augmented eyes whined, losing focus, as his gaze turned inward.

Goel Beslian was very much afraid, and his fear was so strong that he imagined it like a stench of spent spindle oil, trailing him wherever he went. He was certain that those Astartes brutes could smell his terror on him; like animal predators, they sensed it every time he was close to them.

He looked down at the brass manipulators that were his hands. Fine pieces of work, they were, laser-cut and polished by forge-slaves. Careworn ratchets of metal, cable and ceramic, far more dextrous and faceted than any human digits could ever be… but still they trembled. He had tried many times to adjust the feedback gain and the subtle function of his limbs, but the twitches never quite went away. When the fear came, they were there. It was a horribly human, disconcertingly fleshy thing to behold. It betrayed Beslian’s imperfections, showed him how far he was from the majesty and flawlessness of the Machine-God.

Unbidden, a question formed in the logic spools of his enhanced brain. How did I get here? With the question came a stark jolt of self-knowledge.

‘Because I am afraid,’ he told the servitors. They ignored him; unless he gave them a direct command prefaced with the correct data-phrase, they would behave as if he was invisible.

Beslian watched them work, and felt a stab of anger so strong it surprised him. He hadn’t thought himself still capable of such emotional potency. He almost envied the machine-slaves; their higher brain functions lobotomised, the personas of the men and women they once had been excised, they were never afraid. Never angry. Never hobbled by the weight of their own cowardice. They moved back and forth, whispering the lines of their command strings to themselves, muttering order memes and operating codes. They were content with their lot, and unafraid.

The logis was damned by his own failings. No matter how much of him he replaced with the precision of the machine, he was still Goel Beslian at his core. Still weak.

He thought of the others, those who had come up through the training regimens of the collegia at the same time as him. They had since attained ranks far above his. He thought of his crèche-mate Lytton, who was now Lord Magos of the Mondasia Forges, of the elegant, waspish Defra who had gone on to take command of explorators, and all the others he had known. Beslian was the least of them all.

Someone with his talents and a measure of self-confidence could have risen to become the master of a tech-guard division, or even placed in charge of his own elite cadre of archeotechnologists; but instead Beslian had worked in the shadow of greater men, hanging on the tails of their robes. He had always taken the option of lowest risk, the path of least resistance.

His solid, if unremarkable career in the Adeptus Mechanicus had brought him into the orbit of Matthun Zellik. Perhaps Beslian’s character had been the very reason Zellik had recruited him – perhaps because he needed a second who would not question when his conduct veered outside the rules of the Mechanicus, someone who would never have the strength to dare challenge him.

And now, after so long, after Goel Beslian had finally drawn together the dregs of his courage, defying Zellik to side with these Astartes… After that monumental effort to show some kind of spine, what was his reward? Did the Machine-God smile on him and grant him the dream he had never been able to voice, of being master of the Archeohort?

Negative. Instead he had been damned. Each new indignity followed the last. The Archeohort had been shattered and destroyed. Beslian’s skills were mocked and denigrated; and now his life was squarely in harm’s way, dragged along on this insane, suicidal mission.

He shuddered, thinking of the images he had seen of the Space Marines on the internal monitoria, watching the Blood Angels and Flesh Tearers fighting the lictors with mad abandon. Beslian had always suspected that all Space Marines were psychotic on some level. He had seen nothing yet to dissuade him.

He took a deep breath. This was where his cowardice had brought him, to this madness where the threat of death was all around him. The adept shrank inside his robes, drawing them in as a feeble gesture of self-protection. All he could hope to do now was to survive this. To live another day, and perhaps, if the Omnissiah was willing to turn a measure of His radiance on him, not to be forsaken.

‘Traitor.’

Beslian’s head snapped up from his musings at the sound of the word. He glanced around, searching for the source of the voice. ‘Who said that?’

The three servitors ignored him. He moved towards the closest of them, a former male, now an engineering helot, third class. It was listing thrust tolerance percentages in a breathy, sub-vocal whisper. Beslian frowned at it. Perhaps it was an artefact of his reverie. His aural processing centres had been mistaken–

‘Traitor.’

A woman’s voice this time, he was certain of it. Beslian stalked across to the lone machine-slave built from a female donor; it was a reactor monitor, babbling to itself about fluid temperatures and reciting stanzas from the litany of nuclei.

This time he addressed it with the correct interrogative codes. ‘Did you speak to me?’ he demanded.

‘Negative, Logis.’ The response was cursory. He was turning away when it spoke again. ‘You traitor. Beslian.’

The adept grabbed the servitor and shook it. ‘What did you say?’ he shouted. ‘Who told you to say that? Answer me!’

‘Traitor. Traitor.’ He heard the echo of the words again, this time from all three of the machine-slaves at once. He let go of the female and backed away. The three helots began to twitch and spasm. Beslian had seen malfunctions like this before, often at the end of servitors’ life cycles when their mental functions had decayed beyond repair and they had to be put down – but this was different.

Flecks of spittle marked the lips of the helots. ‘Traitor,’ they chorused. ‘Traitor. Traitor!’ An identical cast of anger flooded faces that had been slack and inanimate. The threefold voice thickened and deepened, taking on a familiar cast and meter. ‘You loathsome, weakling turncoat, Beslian! This is how you repay me?’

‘Matthun?’ he gasped the name in shocked recognition. It was then that the adept understood; what he had considered to be fear was not in fact the deepest expression of that state, not at all. What came upon him now was a far greater, far darker measure. The adept cried out.

As one, the three servitors reached into the pockets of their gear aprons, each producing a single tool – a sanctified wrench, a cutter blade, a notation stylus – before stabbing, bludgeoning and finally beating the Logis Goel Beslian into silence, there amid the thrumming noise of the reactor control chamber.

When it was done, their faces returned to a neutral, blank cast. With care, the servitors paused to clean off their tools before returning them to their pockets. Then, once more isolated in their own small worlds of duty, task and function, the machine-slaves went back to work.

Beslian lay inert on the deck between them, sprawled and bloody. They behaved as if he were invisible.

On the second deck of the Neimos, the lights burned low. Bunk compartments lined the corridor that ran the length of the submersible’s spine, all of them locked down and unused, built for human crewmen on long-duration missions. Neither the servitors nor the Astartes aboard the vessel needed the conventions of sleep required by common crew, however. The empty spaces echoed dully with the report of ceramite boots on deck plates as a red-armoured figure walked towards the bow of the craft, lost in thought.

‘Rafen.’ The figure stopped at the sound of his name, and turned.

Behind the Blood Angel, Brother-Sergeant Noxx almost filled the breadth of the corridor, his head scarcely a hand’s span from the snarl of pipes above, his arms tense at his sides as his heavy shoulders blocked the light spilling from the gantryway beyond.

There was fresh blood on the Flesh Tearer’s battle armour; Astartes blood.

Rafen’s expression was carefully neutral. ‘Noxx. What is Brother Sove’s condition?’

Noxx’s dark eyes glittered in the dimness. ‘Gast is ministering to him. He lies in the infirmary, pumped full of anti-shock philtres and counter-venoms. He will live.’

‘Good.’

‘But he will not fight. And now I am three brothers down,’ Noxx went on, without acknowledging Rafen’s reply.

‘We are three brothers down,’ Rafen said firmly. ‘This is a joint action, cousin, do not forget. You own Chapter Master demanded it be so.’

‘He told me to hunt and kill a traitor, Blood Angel. He did not bid me to use my brothers as cannon fodder.’

‘If that is a suggestion that I have allowed your kinsmen to take the greater risks, then you would do well to reconsider it. We are all in harm’s way.’ Rafen folded his arms, a grimace forming on his lips. ‘Shall we cut to the heart of this?’ he snapped. ‘I have no time for barbs or sly criticism. Say what you think, Noxx. Let me hear you say the words.’ He glared at the Flesh Tearer. ‘You believe you could do better than I have done.’

‘You seem sure of yourself,’ said Noxx, ‘but answer me this; do you even have a plan, Rafen? Or are you just making this up as you go?’

The Blood Angel felt a surge of annoyance. ‘You’ve fought longer than I have against the Emperor’s enemies. Tell me, how many times have you been forced to go into battle with only your wits and the blessing of Holy Terra?’

‘Don’t throw dogma at me, boy,’ retorted the other warrior. ‘Those things alone are not enough! The commander who enters combat without a strategy is a dead man walking.’

‘And you would do well not to presume to teach me tactics,’ Rafen shot back. ‘How often must you test me? I bested you once in the arena on Baal… Do you wish me to fight you again, here and now? Do you want to challenge me for command of this mission?’

Noxx’s body tensed, and for a moment Rafen thought the Flesh Tearer might strike him. ‘Perhaps I should.’

‘And what a fine example that would set,’ Rafen sneered. ‘At this time, when unity of purpose is what we need the most.’

‘Aye!’ said Noxx. ‘And how can we have that if we do not have trust in our commander?’ He took two quick steps forward. ‘Make me believe, Rafen. Convince me why I should continue to follow you.’

‘We will find the renegade who came to Baal, and we will destroy him,’ said the Blood Angel. ‘Doubt me if you must, but do not doubt that. The Emperor is with us.’

Noxx arched an eyebrow. ‘Did the witch-kin tell you that? So tell me, will He step off the Golden Throne and come spear Fabius for us?’ He snorted. ‘Yes, I have fought in His name longer than you, and in that time I’ve learned He helps those who help themselves.’

‘Watch your tongue,’ snarled Rafen.

The Flesh Tearer glared back at him, paying no heed to the warning. ‘So far you have made a poor showing, cousin. You let that cloud your thoughts. You are still fighting the battles you have lost, Rafen! Dwelling on every circumstance of Bile’s escapes instead of preparing for the fight ahead! And I will not let my brothers die of it.’

Rafen turned away. ‘You do not know my thoughts. If you did, you would not question me!’

Noxx’s hand shot out and grabbed Rafen’s vambrace. ‘I know what you are thinking, Blood Angel! I know it because I think it as well!’

‘Unhand me,’ Rafen growled.

‘What is he doing with the sacred blood?’ Noxx threw the question at him.

Rafen felt ice in his veins, and he stiffened. The shadow of great horror, of a shame and repulsion as dark as old hate uncoiled in his thoughts.

That question dwelled at the back of his thoughts. It had done so since the moment Rafen had left the company of Lord Dante, after the Chapter Master gave him this mission.

‘That question…’ Noxx’s hand fell away. ‘It robs me of my sleep. Sometimes I wish I were ignorant of all this… If only for a moment’s respite…’ All the anger, the chained fury at the heart of the Flesh Tearer waned, and for a moment he seemed almost vulnerable.

Strangely, Rafen felt a sudden pang of sympathy for his comrade-in-arms. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I hear the question in my own thoughts and I dread to know the answer to it.’

‘We fear it,’ Noxx replied. ‘As well we should. This foul Chaos whoreson, his black sorcery and corrupt science have forged such grotesques. I have heard it said Bile once turned his hand to the creation of a replicae of the bastard-king Horus…’ The warrior’s face twisted in disgust, and he spat on the deck. ‘If he would dare to recreate that lowest of traitors… Then in Terra’s name, what more might he do?’

Rafen felt sickened. ‘I cannot wonder.’

‘But you must,’ Noxx told him. ‘You must dare to face that question, or else you go into this fight unready!’ He paused. ‘And if you do that, then you prove me right. No fit commander can turn his face from such dark and terrible uncertainties. It is a price for the laurel. If you want to lead us, you must be willing to lead us into a nightmare.’

‘And do it with eyes open,’ Rafen added, with a nod.

‘Just so.’ Noxx studied him. ‘I will say this to you. I am a Flesh Tearer, a Son of the Great Sanguinius, an Adeptus Astartes. Loyal servant of the Golden Throne, and so on and so on. I could stand before you and trot out list after list of my victories and my pious, zealous deeds in the name of Holy Terra. I need not prove myself to you, nor any other man under the stars.’

Rafen eyed him. ‘But yet you demand I must attest to you!’

‘That too is a burden of command. You know this. Rise to it, Rafen, or stand down.’ Noxx stood before him, waiting. ‘What is it to be?’

After a long moment, the Blood Angel released a slow breath. ‘I have no great scheme,’ he admitted. ‘Every plan we have employed against Fabius, every design to take him has turned to ashes in my hands. He is like no foe I have ever faced. Ten thousand years ago, he was a match for heroes and champions, and time has not dimmed his skills. This monster is a singular quarry, Flesh Tearer. Know that.’

‘I do. We all know.’

Rafen’s gaze fell to the deck. ‘I have nothing left now but the blade of my hate, and the fury that propels it. We will close to his island fortress by stealth, and break its walls with our bare hands if need be. Whatever we find within will perish.’

‘And the… the vial of sacred blood?’

‘It will be liberated. In one way, or another.’

Noxx was silent for a moment. ‘This mission will be the end to all of us, Blood Angel.’

‘Perhaps.’ Rafen glanced at him. ‘Do you regret joining me now, cousin?’

Noxx shook his head. ‘My only regret will be if we do not make that whoreson suffer before he dies.’

‘I need only to get close,’ Rafen went on, almost to himself. ‘Just one strike, no more. Close enough for the kill.’ He shook off the moment. ‘Sove fought well in defence of his battle-brothers and the mission. It is a great pity he was so wounded.’

‘He’s not out of the game,’ said Noxx. ‘None of us are out of it yet.’

Rafen accepted this with a nod. ‘So, brother-sergeant. Have I answered the question? Am I worthy of your loyalty? Will you follow me into the unknown, to the jaws of death?’

Noxx turned to walk away. ‘Do you recall the words I said to you in the descent bay, just before the Neimos began the drop?’

‘You said… see you in hell, Blood Angel.’

Noxx nodded grimly. ‘Then you have your answer.’

Rafen hesitated; but anything else he would have added was waylaid by the chirp of the vox bead in his ear. He toggled the general channel. ‘This is Sergeant Rafen. Report.’

He listened with growing alarm as Turcio described what he had discovered down on the engineering deck.

Astern of the submersible, a faint wake of distortion melted away into the current of the sluggish Dynikan sea. Slow and steady, with the cold, calculating intent of a true-born predator, a shadowed form followed on behind the vessel.

Faint phosphor dots, lined in trails along a body of jointed, flexible chitin, outlined the dimensions of the monstrous shape. In mass, it matched the size of the Neimos, and subtle flexions of its flukes and fins allowed it to keep pace with the human craft. The tyranid creature moved through the ocean unseen, unsensed; it instinctively understood the landscape of the waters. It shifted in and out of thermoclines, the great bands of current where waters of differing temperature lay across one another, where sound waves reflected back and away, further masking its careful approach.

It was perfectly adapted to its killing ground. Generations back down the line of its rapacious evolution, its ancestor-genotypes had torn their way through the life of Dynikas V’s seas and in the process, absorbed what they consumed to emulate and ultimately exterminate it. Trace elements of heavy metals in the waters were expressed in the dull matt sheen of the creature’s natural armour, in the tusks surrounding its oval mouth, and the rings of fangs surrounding every sucker along the manus of its tentacular clubs. It flowed more than it moved, riding the deep tides, inching closer to the intruder in its realm. Along its flanks, a plated eyelid rose to reveal a glassy lens, filled with a dark pupil. Optic matter evolved to sense thermal radiation drew upon the shape of the Neimos, tracking it. Delicate sensory palps that could detect perturbations in magnetic fields wafted on the end of wiry fronds.

In the slow, sullen pace of the creature’s thoughts, it equated its prey with all the others it had fed upon. Some were organics, of meat and cartilage and genotype of tyranid origin; and sometimes there were others, things clad in hard cases of ceramite or drifting in iron shells that appeared atop the waves. Those it would reach up to, drag down, killing with the brutal pressures of the depths and its own whipcord embrace.

It had consumed the remains of the selachian-form lictors in a single motion, extending wide to draw in the corpses and strain them through grids of metallic baleen. Brain matter was siphoned away to a secondary stomach lined with omophageacic receptor cells and denatured. Chains of ribonucleic acid broke down as memory elements were soaked into the creature’s own biosystems. The tyranid drew on the remnants of sensory input and pheromone recall from the dead, reassembling what it could. Through the eyes of corpses, it experienced their killings and some sense of the meat-life they had tried to devour. Abhumans, like the surface-things, but somehow different. The creature had briefly picked through some of the rain of strange wreckage that had entered its domain from high above; nothing it had found there had any meaning, however. But now it was gathering in an understanding.

The prey above had never dared to venture beneath the surface before. This was unknown to the tyranid; and in its ponderous mind, its constant hunger gained a new shade of emotion. Anticipation.

As the Neimos went deeper, so the creature went with it.

The smell came to Rafen even before he reached the infirmary, down the steep steel stairs that led to the tertiary deck. It was thick with the heavy, rusted tang of spilled blood, but his senses picked out other odours in the mix; lubricants and ozone.

He moved at a pace, aware that his heavy boots dented the steps as he took them hard and fast, two at a time. The deck was at a shallow tilt, the Neimos turning gently to starboard, and he hauled himself on to the upper level with the help of an iron handhold welded to the curved wall. The hatch to the ship’s sickbay was wide open, and hard yellow-white light spilled into the corridor. Turcio stood outside, his expression grave. His bolter dangled from the grip of his augmetic arm. Rafen automatically noted that the weapon’s safety catch was disengaged.

‘Lords,’ began Turcio, nodding to Rafen, and again to Noxx as the Flesh Tearer came up after him. ‘He’s in there. Brother Gast is seeing to him.’

Noxx made a negative noise deep in his throat and spoke before Rafen could frame a question. ‘You’re certain of what happened? The adept was weak of spirit… perhaps he was attempting to take his own life.’

Turcio shook his head. ‘There would be simpler ways for him to do it. Unfortunately, there is no data on the spools from the ship’s internal security scopes. It appears there was a malfunction at the time. Granted, the Neimos is an antiquated vessel and its systems are elderly, but I believe that was no coincidence. This was a deliberate attack.’

‘By whom?’ said Rafen. ‘The Adeptus Astartes may have little kinship with the Mechanicus, but Beslian has no enemies among us. We must assume we have an intruder on board.’

‘Perhaps someone slipped on to the Neimos before we left the Archeohort,’ offered Turcio. ‘Another adept. If one of them had learned what Mohl intended to do…’ He trailed off.

Noxx shook his head. ‘Mohl would have known. He would have warned us.’

‘It doesn’t matter how,’ Rafen broke in. ‘All that matters is that we deal with this quickly.’ Off Turcio’s nod, he gestured at the gangway. ‘Gather the brothers, begin a sweep of the ship from bow to stern.’

The Blood Angel nodded and moved past them to carry out the order, while Rafen entered the infirmary. Noxx hovered at the hatchway, brooding.

Inside the compartment, beneath the glow of a lume array, Brother Gast was busy inside the torso of the tech-priest. He had removed his gauntlets and vambraces, and thick, oily blood marked his hands where he worked in Beslian’s wounds. Assisting him, a wiry machine-slave wearing a leather smock deployed a small laser quill, and it buzzed and sizzled as the helot used it to seal veins, wires and conduits.

Beslian himself had all the cast of a corpse, a piece of battlefield detritus. If not for the festoons of wires connecting him to the glass-dialled monitor frame above his pallet, and the slow chime of a life sensor, Rafen would have thought him long dead. He watched the Apothecary-Cleric’s labour for a moment; on some detached, distant level, he was intrigued by the sight of the adept’s internals. The warrior had always wondered what kind of heart beat inside the shrunken chest of these cogs.

On another nearby pallet, shrouded by a support collar, the heavy form of Brother Sove lay unmoving. The injured Flesh Tearer’s breaths came in a low, rasping rhythm. Rafen spared him a brief look. The warrior was in a healing trance, the engines of his Astartes implants working to repair him. Sove seemed oddly disproportioned, however, with one entire limb missing from his body.

Gast applied a dermal stapler and a vac-tube of morphic glue to the incision in Beslian’s side, and began to close him up. Without turning, he spoke to the other Astartes. ‘The adept is lucky to be alive. Turcio found him before his bio-implants completely shut down from the physical shock. Blood loss was great. I doubt he will come to consciousness for several hours yet. There were many incisions across the torso, from more than one weapon.’ He pointed out weeping, bloody lesions and areas of heavy tissue damage. ‘Blunt trauma about the head and neck. Multiple planes of attack.’

‘You are suggesting there was more than one assailant?’ said Noxx.

Gast’s head bobbed. ‘Not a suggestion, brother-sergeant, but a statement of fact. And these were persons of reasonable strength, too. The violence behind these wounds was done in frenzy, with speed. Not, however, with much skill.’

‘If it were an Astartes who did this, Beslian would have been killed with a single blow,’ mused Rafen. ‘Quickly and economically.’ He pointed at the adept’s throat, considering how he would have done such a thing. ‘A sharp, crushing blow there. Or perhaps a blade into the braincase.’

‘As I stated, the attack was inexpert,’ continued Gast. ‘Beslian survived it, for one thing.’

‘Then we have a witness, after all,’ said Rafen. ‘Was there any neural damage to him?’

Gast moved away, letting the servitor finish the work of closing up his patient. He cleaned his hands with a sanctified cloth. ‘Difficult to be certain. My learning stretches to battlefield medicine and the calling of the sanguinary priesthood, but no further.’

Rafen leaned in, studying the ashen face of the injured adept. ‘Wake him.’

‘Sir?’ Gast stopped, and threw a questioning glance towards Noxx. ‘Perhaps I was unclear about Beslian’s physical state–’

‘You were clear enough,’ said Rafen. ‘Now wake him.’

The servitor stepped away and slouched into a standby stance, its task completed. Gast reached for a narthecia pack and hesitated. ‘If I do this, you understand it could end his life?’

‘If there are intruders aboard this craft, that could end all our lives,’ said Noxx. ‘Do as the Blood Angel says.’

‘As you wish.’ Gast adjusted an injector tubule, drawing a measure of fluid into it. He paused over a nozzle visible in the meat of Beslian’s neck. ‘I would marshal your questions now, lords,’ he told them. ‘The adept may not be coherent… or alive… for long.’

The tubule hissed; the effect was almost instant.

Beslian’s body went rigid, the mechadendrites and servo-arm sprouting from his spine flexing and whipping at the air. His back arched and he went into a harsh spasm, releasing a sound somewhere between a screech and a sob. The adept’s eyes opened and fixed on Rafen. He began to prattle in machine code, the chattering noise rising with his panic.

‘Logis!’ Rafen snapped, demanding Beslian’s attention. ‘Who attacked you? Tell me!’

The adept tried to speak and raised a hand. A whirring noise issued from his lips. The sound wavered and changed; it was like listening to a vox open to a dead channel, the winds of static slowly giving way to the certainty of a comm-broadcast. From the rambling babble, Rafen caught a single clear word and his eyes narrowed.

‘Zellik!’

Gast heard it too, and turned to the Blood Angel. ‘The Magos? He died in space. Perhaps the adept’s mind was damaged after all…’

Beslian was shaking, rocking back and forth. ‘Zellik wants to kill me!’ The words were heavy with distortion, warped and barely articulate. ‘All of him! Revenge! Revenge–’

The tech-priest’s writhing head slumped as he spoke, and for the first time it tilted towards the quiescent servitor standing by the monitor frame. Beslian’s mouth opened wide, wider than any normal jaw should have allowed, and from his lips came a siren wail.

It happened so quickly that the motion was a blur; the servitor twitched once and launched itself at the Mechanicus adept. One hand, not a thing of flesh and blood but a medicae tool with scalpel fingers and jointed probes, stabbed out and plunged into Beslian’s eyes. Steel digits buried themselves to the knuckle in his skull and tore.

Rafen reacted, lashing out with a punch at full force. The blow from his mailed fist stuck the murderous servitor in the base of the spine, where a set of iron piston-legs joined the nub of a human pelvic bone. Fluids jetted and the machine-slave fell to the deck. The shock of the impact seemed lost on it, however; it still scrambled towards the adept, fingers wet with optic jelly clawing desperately to inflict more damage.

He heard the helot mutter something as it fell. It sounded like the word ‘traitor’. With a growl, he raised his boot and stamped the servitor’s throat into the deck plate.

The attack had taken only seconds, but the sudden silence from the life sensor made it clear enough damage had been done. Rafen’s face twisted in a grimace as Beslian’s head lolled back, showing bloody, empty eye sockets.

‘It appears you were correct,’ said Gast, after a moment.

‘It appears we were both correct,’ Rafen replied.

Noxx crouched and turned over the corpse of the servitor. ‘This was our attacker? Or one of them, at least?’

Gast shook his head. ‘Not possible. That machine-slave is tether-tagged to the infirmary chamber. Its programming prevents it from leaving this compartment.’

‘He said Zellik.’ Rafen studied the dead man, thinking. ‘Zellik wanted revenge.’

‘Matthun Zellik is dead,’ insisted Noxx. ‘I am as certain of that as if I put an end to him myself.’

Rafen glared at the helot. ‘There is dead, and then there is dead.’ Inwardly, he chided himself; the warrior had not even thought to consider a machine-slave as a potential assailant.

The mindless servitors could barely be described as human. For the most part they were clone-stock, gene-formed replicae spawned in growth tanks beneath the mountains of Mars, or else the bodies of felons and heretics given over to the Cult Mechanicus for repurposing. Wired with implants, bionics, data-spools and tool pods, whatever scraps of a persona might exist in them were ruthlessly expunged by stringent rituals of conditioning. Some were programmed for combat operations, some for computing tasks in tandem with cogitators, but the helots aboard the Neimos were not nearly so advanced. They were technomats, capable of performing set regimens of duties and little else. They had no sentience, no more will of their own than a boltgun or an auspex.

At least, that was what Rafen had believed. ‘The Magos reaches out from his grave,’ said the Blood Angel. ‘He hated Beslian for his part in our capture of the Archeohort. The servitors are the tools of his vengeance.’

‘How is that possible?’ said Gast.

‘If the helots did this, then we must cull them,’ added Noxx. ‘We do not have one enemy aboard, we have a dozen!’

Rafen shot him a look. ‘And how will we pilot this vessel without the servitors, cousin? How will we run its reactors, keep its machine-spirit in check?’

Gast gathered up the dead servitor and placed it on a work table. ‘I do not understand. One helot, perhaps, prepared by Zellik for just such an occurrence, I could accept. But all of them?’

Rafen thought of something that Mohl had mentioned on the command deck of the Archeohort. ‘Or more than that. An… infection.’

‘A viral meme?’ Gast’s brow furrowed.

‘Cut that thing open and find us some answers,’ demanded Noxx.

The cleric nodded once, and reached for a bone saw.

Crossing an abyssal trench, the Neimos’s forward velocity slowed a degree as the ocean exerted tidal force across the plane of the submersible’s course. Working to return the craft to its pre-programmed heading, small thruster modules hidden beneath anti-cavitation cowls came to life, nudging the vessel through the field of cross-currents.

Hiding in the thin lines of wake bubbles, the tyranid flattened its body into a planar shape, settling into the same pattern of motion. The sensor array on the tip of the Neimos’s X-fin tail planes relayed a tiny return, twitching a needle on a gauge before the dull gaze of a tethered crew helot.

The servitor blinked and the datum did not register; behind those dead eyes, another process took place, as a very different kind of killer stalked the vessel.

‘Let me see if I can fathom this,’ said Ajir, with scorn in his voice. ‘We are hunting a killer hiding in the hollows of this hulk, sent by a man who was flashed to ashes as the Archeohort burned up on re-entry. A dead traitor whose cogs and gears are still raining down on this light-forsaken planet.’

‘You seem to have the measure of it,’ muttered Puluo.

Ceris watched Ajir rock off the curved wall of the cargo bay and stalk across the space that served as their makeshift arming chamber. ‘Does the brother-sergeant think we do not have enough impossible tasks already?’

The psyker sensed a tic of annoyance in the aura of Turcio, who stood close by, examining a fan of tools in his hand. ‘Would you rather we did nothing and risk the same fate as Beslian?’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Ajir replied. ‘I can kill any servitor who tries to end me without a moment’s thought.’

Eigen, the lone Flesh Tearer in the room, was staring at the floor, deep in thought. ‘Not if that servitor unlocks the reactor’s machine-spirit, or sends this ship past its crush depth.’

‘He’s right,’ said Turcio. ‘This isn’t a problem we can solve with a bolt round.’

Ajir’s eyes flashed, but he held his tongue. Ceris had sensed the fractious relationship between the two warriors under Rafen’s command from the moment he had joined the squad. Turcio openly wore a penitent brand on his cheek, the mark burned into his skin in recognition of the rites of purification he had endured. The warrior had been one of those who followed the false angel Arkio, only to repent at the revelation of his pretence and return to the fold. A second mark, one only visible to someone with the witch-sight, coloured Turcio’s aura – regret. The colour of the emotion marbled everything about him; even though Lord Dante himself had forgiven the transgression of the Blood Angels misled by Arkio, Turcio had not forgiven himself. Ajir, whose aura rarely strayed from the crimson tinge of fury, seemed to think it was his avowed purpose to remind Turcio of his penitent status at every juncture.

Ceris wondered why Ajir could not look past the brand. He sensed something there about the other Astartes, but far enough below the surface that he could not read it.

He put the matter aside as Kayne opened the hatch and stepped aside to allow Sergeant Rafen to enter with Noxx and Gast. The young Blood Angel stood astride the entrance, cradling his bolter. Puluo had ordered it so – it seemed prudent, given recent events aboard the Neimos.

Rafen wasted no time with preamble. ‘Logis Beslian is dead.’ He explained what had transpired in the infirmary with the medicae servitor.

Eigen frowned. ‘If the machine-slave wanted to kill him, why did it not do the deed the moment Turcio brought him to the sickbay? It must have had the opportunity.’

Gast nodded. ‘It only attacked after Beslian was awakened. After he mentioned Zellik’s name.’

‘A trigger word,’ said Puluo. ‘Hypnogoge assassins use the same technique to activate a servile.’

‘It’s more than that.’ Rafen glanced at Noxx. ‘Show them.’

The Flesh Tearer veteran had a bloodstained cloth in his hand, and with a gesture of disgust that twisted his scarred face, he unfolded it to reveal a faceted gemstone, a long emerald droplet webbed with fine golden threads. Ceris could make out a line of green glyphs along the surface of the object; something about the hue and the way it reflected light made him immediately erect his mental barriers.

‘What is it?’ said Noxx.

‘Xenos,’ added Rafen, with dour certainty.

‘This object was buried in the base of the medicae servitor’s cerebellum,’ Gast explained, ‘and the wires you see emerging from it were laced into elements of the helot’s organic brain.’

Eigen grimaced at the gemstone. ‘A control device?’

Rafen nodded. ‘Or something of the like.’

‘We know the Inquisition suspected Zellik of trading in alien materials. This, and what we saw in his museum, is confirmation.’ Noxx held the gem as if he could barely stop himself from crushing it to powder.

Ceris came closer. The bauble was drawing him to it. He had to get a better look, see it more clearly.

Behind him, Turcio showed the tools in his hand. ‘Blood traces on these implements, lord. I took them from a trio of servitors in the reactor control chamber where I found Beslian.’

‘We should open the skulls of those three,’ snapped Ajir. ‘No doubt we’ll find the same foul implant in them as well.’

‘It’s worse than that,’ said Rafen. ‘I asked Brother Gast to conduct an auspex scan of a random pick of servitors.’

‘Once I knew what I was looking for, I found them easily.’ Gast gave a heavy sigh. ‘Brothers, cousins. Every machine-slave aboard the Neimos carries one of these jewels inside their skull. I suspect that Zellik implanted his entire helot crew with them.’

‘We kill the crew – assuming one of them doesn’t scuttle the ship before we can end them all – and we’re dead in the water.’ Noxx outlined the hard reality of the situation. ‘We let them live, and there’s no way to be sure that they won’t turn on us at a moment’s notice.’

‘We can’t trust any of them,’ Turcio was saying, but Ceris’s attention was elsewhere. He was reaching for the stone. He could feel the sense of it, even through his gauntlet. A strange cold heat, like the heart of a dead star.

‘Let me see,’ he said, and before Noxx could stop him, he took the xenos gem from the other man’s palm.

It sang to him; and it was not a pleasing melody.

A shouting, atonal chorus beat at Ceris’s psionic senses. There were a hundred voices, and they were all one voice. All drowned in rage and pain and heart-stopping terror. All mad with the need for vengeance. All of them Matthun Zellik.

It was as if Ceris stood in a hall of broken mirrors, but in every shattered reflection he saw the Magos’s scowling, screaming, weeping face. He could feel a piece of the man’s soul, a shard of his mind and spirit enclosed in this tiny sliver of gemstone. The psyker steeled himself and dared to probe deeper, peeling back layers of the device.

Within its indigo depths he saw lines of quantum connectivity stabbing out in all directions, each ending in another gem buried in another mind. And dimly, he perceived the web that meshed the implants into one enclosed system. Reaching out, he felt his psy-senses rebound off walls of alien symbology, preventing him from seeing more. Ceris felt the edges of a broken, furious mind out in the web-mesh, moving from point to point, and he knew its name.

‘Zellik!’ The psyker choked out the word and recoiled from the gemstone as if it had bitten him.

‘You looked into it…’ said Noxx. ‘What did you see, witch-kin?’

Rafen came to the Codicier’s side and spared him a measuring look. ‘That was foolish, brother. That thing could have burned out your soul!’

Ceris shook his head, colour returning to his cheeks. ‘I… felt compelled. It was the right thing to do.’ He glanced around at the other warriors. ‘Zellik is dead, of that you may be certain, but he is still plaguing us.’ The psyker pointed at the implant gem. ‘This is, as Sergeant Rafen said, of alien origin. A psi device, capable of storing part of a living consciousness.’

Eigen’s expression was incredulous. ‘You’re saying that Zellik somehow… copied himself into a machine-slave?’

‘Not one,’ said Ceris, ‘all of them. He splintered his mind and spread it out among them, parsed like the chapters of a book.’ He paused, thinking. ‘Perhaps, with enough intact elements, he might have been able to reconstitute his psyche at a later time… and cheat death.’

‘If Zellik’s mind controls these servitors, then why are we still alive?’ demanded Kayne, shooting a tense glance over his shoulder into the corridor.

‘It’s not control,’ said Ceris. ‘He did this as a desperate act. There are only fragments of him left, perhaps enough to draw together briefly, but not enough to fully manifest.’

‘Not yet,’ said Puluo.

Rafen’s lips thinned. ‘If Zellik exists in these… fragments… then perhaps we can expunge him, erase him like a toxic data-meme.’

Ceris nodded. ‘There’s a core of intent, out in the web of connections between the implants. That’s the strongest aspect of his persona. If we can isolate it, kill the servitor hosting that fragment of him…’

‘Then he’ll die a second time…’ Noxx nodded to himself.

Rafen studied the psyker. ‘You can do this?’

Ceris nodded. ‘I can.’

‘Then put an end to him–’

Without warning, the deck beneath them echoed as if it had been struck by the hammer of a giant.

Loose items scattered and crashed to the floor, and the lume rods over their heads flickered and sparked. A long, lowing groan sounded, the torsion of an ancient hull tightened under sudden, lethal pressure.

Rafen staggered and grasped at a stanchion. ‘Something struck us!’

‘Zellik?’ said Kayne.

Eigen shook his head. ‘That came from outside the hull.’

Noxx reached for his gun. ‘Those lictor-hybrids, back for more!’

Another blow resonated, and the Neimos listed sharply to port, robbing them of their balance once again.

‘We’re too deep for them,’ Rafen told him. ‘It’s something else.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

A writhing, flexing impulse shocked down the length of the tyranid and it shot forward through the stygian sea, barbed tentacles exploding outward in a grasping motion.

The bony armour across its torso scraped along the starboard flank of the Neimos, and the creature’s chromatophores flashed redly, declaring its attack colours. The alien’s probing limbs looped around the hull and scraped the anechoic plating, scoring deep grooves. Chemo-sense glands in the tips of the tentacles led them towards sealed vents and hatches. The tyranid wanted to open the vessel to the ocean, rip it inside out and feed on what was hidden within.

Steely coils tightening, the predator-form cemented its embrace of the submersible, acidic venom gels secreting from its body where metallic tusks snapped at the curved hull. The Neimos rocked and twisted, the skeleton of the ship flexing against itself as the tyranid pulled and pushed.

The deck tilted wildly as Rafen raced down the narrow corridor, and he slammed into the wall, the plate of his shoulder pauldron smashing an inert screen. Sparks glittered from a damaged junction box near his head and he ignored the dazzling flares, pressing on. Through the gridded flooring beneath his boots he heard voices, angry and sharp, calling out in the guttural snarls of battle-language. The Blood Angel took another two steps and heard a creaking howl above. He threw up his arms in time to catch a broken length of pipe as it swung down, allowing a trickle of waste water to drip free. Shoving it aside, he pressed on, striding through the aft hatch of the command chamber.

A small fire had taken hold inside one of the control consoles, and a servitor was pouring retardants into the machine’s innards; elsewhere running lights flickered ominously and the chamber shook as another glancing blow caressed the Neimos. Warning clarions rang a constant underscore.

‘Report!’ he cried, drawing the attention of another helot. All of the machine-slaves seemed irritatingly unruffled by the vessel’s condition, their expressions as blank as they would be on a cruise through millpond-calm waters.

‘Working,’ said the servitor, chattering out a punch-card from a cavity in its chest. ‘Alert condition. The Neimos has made contact with a xenos biological.’

‘Is that so?’ said Noxx, arriving a few steps behind him. ‘I’d hardly noticed.’

Once more, the ship rang like a struck bell. The rest of the battle-brothers followed Noxx into the chamber, all of them chafing at this indignity.

‘Observe,’ the servitor was saying. Rafen studied it, wondering about the xenos gem buried in its grey matter. Was some fraction of Matthun Zellik’s mind in there right now, watching this interchange? He frowned and dismissed the thought. One problem at a time.

The helot worked a set of carved wooden keys and a flickering hololith sprang up over the chart table. It dropped in and out, but the ghostly image was stable enough for the Astartes to get an understanding of what they were facing. The holographic display showed a resonance-scan model of the Neimos, and wrapped around it like some obscene lover was a thing of tentacles and barbs, a bullet-shaped form covered with quills.

‘Throne and blood,’ muttered Eigen. ‘It’s a kraken.’

‘Not like those from the home world,’ said Noxx. ‘It’s tyranid. It cannot be anything else.’

Rafen nodded. ‘Another ocean-evolved form, like the lictor-sharks.’

‘Can we shake it off?’ asked Turcio. ‘Go even deeper? Perhaps it won’t follow us down.’

Kayne shook his head, and pointed to a large needle-dial on the far bulkhead. The pointer was crossing a band of yellow, making slow progress towards a red stop. ‘Depth gauge,’ he explained. ‘Much less ocean beneath our keel and we’ll be crushed like a spent shell case.’

‘Look at those bone plates,’ added Gast, nodding at the image. ‘I’ll warrant that behemoth could survive the depths far better than we could.’

‘The other way, then,’ Turcio replied. ‘Raise the ship. If it’s a deep-dweller, when we make for the surface, it might lose interest–’

Twin impacts off the port bow jerked the Neimos sideways, the torsion popping rivets from the inner hull. Puluo swore beneath his breath as a panel near to him coughed out a shower of sparks and died. ‘Beastie doesn’t seem like one to be easily discouraged.’

Rafen sniffed, and caught the smells of baking wires and stale seawater wafting in from the corridor. ‘It’ll tear us apart if we don’t stop it.’

‘The Neimos is armed with lascannon turrets,’ ventured Eigen. ‘Mohl mentioned it before…’ He swallowed and went on. ‘Blue-green frequency lasers, tuned for use underwater.’

‘No good,’ Noxx replied. ‘That thing is directly upon us, inside point-blank range.’

‘We’ll need to deal with this in a more direct manner,’ Rafen agreed. ‘Look it in the eye.’

‘Out there?’ Eigen blinked.

The Blood Angel sergeant nodded. ‘Out there.’

Noxx folded his arms. ‘A blunt way of doing it. I almost approve.’ He leaned in ‘Almost. But what about Zellik and these “fragments”? We can’t ignore what the psyker said. If some ghost of that unctuous fool is stalking this ship, we leave ourselves open to a knife in the back!’

‘Indeed,’ Rafen agreed. ‘That’s why you will take Brother Kayne and Codicier Ceris into the lower decks of the Neimos, and find the host where Zellik’s mind is hiding. Kill it and be done.’ He turned away before the Flesh Tearer could respond. ‘Gast, Turcio. You two will remain here and maintain an open vox link. Keep this chamber secure at all costs.’

The others nodded.

Rafen’s gaze swept the other Astartes; Ajir, Eigen and Puluo. ‘The rest of us are going to get our feet wet.’

Kayne took point, leading the way down the canted ladder well, past the secondary level and into the engineering spaces. Reaching the reactor level, he stepped off and braced himself as the submersible shivered again. The impacts on the hull were coming thick and fast now, and he felt a mist of fluid raining down from a pinhole rent in the ceiling. The stream had a rusted, heavy smell to it; somewhere the outer hull had been breached and the Neimos was taking on water. He moved onward; wasting concentration on a problem he could not solve would sap his focus.

The warrior glanced over his shoulder and into the hooded eyes of the psyker. Ceris seemed to look straight through him, the crystal matrix of his psionic hood glowing faintly in the wet dimness.

Behind him, the Flesh Tearer Noxx was a shadow outlined by a flickering safety lume. ‘Look sharp,’ said the sergeant. ‘This Mechanicus freak has dogged us for long enough, and I want him dead properly this time.’

‘Aye,’ said Kayne, with feeling.

Ceris spoke quietly, working the bloodstained alien jewel in his hand. ‘He’s close,’ he whispered. ‘Can’t stop me from seeing into the web of connections. He’s killed, and liked it. Not just Beslian.’

‘Mohl?’ Noxx ground out the name.

‘Yes,’ said Ceris distantly. ‘He suborned your battle-brother’s sacrifice. Took him while he could not fight back.’

Even concealed behind the solid planes of his power armour, Kayne saw Noxx go rigid as the psyker spoke. He saw cold fury on the Flesh Tearer’s face, a strange kind of rage that never reached the man’s dead eyes.

‘This way,’ added Ceris, pointing past Kayne into a shadowed corridor.

Noxx nodded once. ‘When we find the core of this man,’ he told them, ‘the killing blow is mine alone, understand?’

Neither of the Blood Angels disputed the order. Kayne stepped forward, and led the way into the gloom.

Ajir was the last of the four to reach the antechamber at the submersible’s forward lock. The kraken-creature had latched on to the stern of the Neimos and wrapped many of its feelers around the dorsal sail, making the hatch there unusable. Similarly, the bay where they had fought the lictors was a risk; opening the ramp to the sea would let the tyranid monster slip its tentacles inside and rend the craft from within.

Rafen was walking from man to man, checking the joints of their wargear. ‘Make certain the closures of your armour are locked tight,’ he said. ‘A single leak out there will be like a knifepoint to your flesh. You may lose a limb before you can stem the flow.’

Eigen was in a crouch, busying himself with his combat helmet. He ran a layer of sealant around the ring of his gorget. ‘We’ll need to stay on internal atmosphere,’ he noted. ‘The waters outside are too noxious for our multi-lung implants to draw oxygen from.’

‘Won’t be out there long enough to suffocate,’ Puluo noted, working at his heavy bolter. ‘More likely to drown.’

Ajir considered that for a moment and fought off a shudder of revulsion. He had battled in hostile environments before, on airless moons and worlds where the atmosphere was a toxic soup that even an Astartes could not endure; but never in the ocean depths. He imagined how it might feel, to have one’s armour fill with the brackish, acidic seawater, to fall into those abyssal depths trapped in a flooded ceramite coffin. He grimaced and turned his concentration to his weapons.

His bolter was a Godwyn-pattern variant, the standard iteration of the gun found in the hands of thousands of Space Marines across the galaxy. That said, each warrior’s weapon was unique in its own small ways. Many of them were centuries old, and some had been passed down from Astartes to Astartes over the life of a Chapter. Ajir’s gun was the shade of onyx, patterned with whorls of dark colour like traces of burned oil. Hundreds of names, of brothers and battles, were etched into the breech and slide mechanism, along with lines of combat prayer and holy sacrament. He checked the ammunition loads in the sickle magazine; the mass-reactive rounds were less a bullet, more a miniature rocket, and each one contained within its casing a measure of oxygenated igniter compound. Thus, even in stark vacuum or, as now, in a fluid environment, the boltgun could still deliver its lethal load. He worked quickly, adjusting the iron sights and the muzzle brake; the waters would attenuate the velocity and range of the weapon by a large degree, and he would need to compensate. The floor was constantly shaking now, like the deck of a Thunderhawk in full flight. Ajir kept his focus, ignoring the moans of the hull-metal. They were close to the exterior of the Neimos here, with only a few layers of plasteel and ceramite between them and the dense ocean.

‘As soon as we clear the outer lock, activate your magno-plates.’ Rafen tapped the knee of his boot, and it gave a dull ring. ‘They’ll keep you on the hull, but you’ll be slow with it.’ He reached into the open airlock and returned with a steel cable. ‘Tether yourselves and check all your battle-brothers. If one of us does chance to leave the deck, we’ll be able to reel you back in.’ The sergeant drew his power sword and gave it an experimental swing.

Puluo brought forward a hexagonal case and peeled back the lid, offering it to them as if the contents were some delicacy. ‘Hull-breakers. Enough here for us to make chum out of that monster.’

Ajir reached in and took one of the charges; they were a modified version of the more typical krak grenades, shaped detonators designed to be applied directly to the hull of an enemy ship. When he looked up, the other warriors were waiting, their helmets in their hands.

The hull wall vibrated again, the tremors reaching up through the base of Ajir’s boots and into his bones.

Rafen looked at each of them, one after another. ‘Keep your heads. Don’t fight the drag of the water, it will only tire you.’ He raised his helm with one hand and locked it into place. ‘Measure your shots,’ continued the sergeant, his voice reaching them through the vox. ‘Make every round count.’

Ajir and the others followed suit and stepped into the lock chamber. Eigen was the last in, and drew the heavy inner hatch closed behind him.

Rafen gave a nod to Puluo, and the Devastator Space Marine slapped at an ornate red switch. Then a deluge like a thousand hammer blows struck them as the sea thundered in to fill the chamber.

Gast looked away from the glowing red rune on the etched brass indicator board. ‘Forward lock reads open.’

Turcio blew out a breath, his fingers kneading the grip of his bolter. ‘Activate the automatic cycle. Close it as soon as they’re out of the ship.’

‘Is that wise?’ said the Flesh Tearer. ‘What if they need to fall back?’

‘Any hatch we leave open is another way in for that horror,’ replied the other warrior. ‘They know that.’

Gast frowned; the Blood Angel was right. He turned back to the panel and manually activated the remote hatch control – but he stopped short of venting the water-filled airlock.

Turcio glowered into the shimmering green frame of the hololithic display. He traced the lines of the tyranid’s probing limbs and his brow furrowed. Distant thudding impacts sounded from the aft of the vessel. ‘The kraken… it’s pushed tentacles into the thruster ring. I think it’s trying to choke the propellers.’

The cleric-warrior came to his side. ‘It must be drawn by the vibrations…’ He trailed off as an unpleasant thought occurred to him. ‘Or perhaps by deliberate intent.’

‘Tyranids are xenos animals,’ retorted Turcio. ‘Cunning, yes, but still beasts.’

Gast shook his head. ‘Can you be certain? What if the beast out there is sentient?’

‘Why would you believe such a thing?’

The Astartes watched the scans of the writhing cephalopod. ‘I cannot shake the sense that this monster is toying with us.’

Puluo strode forward from the airlock and the plane of his perception switched; he went from the level of the Neimos’s horizontal interior decks to the side-on surface of the exterior hull. The murk out here was thicker than he had expected, the soupy rust-coloured ocean reducing his visibility to close combat range. Needle-lights at the temples of his battle helmet snapped on, casting hazy cones of illumination out before him, but they did little to improve the situation.

His boots thudded dully on the black and grey hull; the surface curved away from him to the right and the left, vanishing towards a hidden horizon. Puluo could feel the motion of the vessel through the waters; he was facing aft and the pressure of the headway current was pushing insistently at his back. Without the magno-plates in the soles of his boots, he would have already been coasting sternward, his tether playing out behind him. He took another step, feeling the drag on every motion he made. The Astartes could hear the sea all around him, a slow and steady rumble like the rushing of blood in his ears. For a moment, he felt utterly isolated; then his vox bead crackled and Rafen spoke. ‘There, to the stern! Do you see it?’

The optics in Puluo’s helmet worked to enhance the view and abruptly, he did see it. Only the vague impression of the thing, a huge, hulking shadow in the middle distance. It had gathered itself along the lines of the submersible’s fins, and although he could make out no fine details of it, the Blood Angel could gauge its size. The kraken loomed like a faraway thunderhead, and Puluo dragged his heavy bolter upward. Distances were deceiving out here – the thing looked as if it could have been kilometres away. He concentrated on the tiny particles of waterborne debris drifting around him, using their passage to gauge the range.

Something glowing a dull cherry-red, like forge-fired metal, moved towards them.

‘I think it sees us,’ said Eigen.

The shape drew close, defining into a splayed cobra-head leading a serpentine coil of thick, sinewy flesh. In the light from the helmet lamps it was corpse-white and lined with sucker rings bigger than a man’s head. The red glow came from a fluorescing spot across the tip of the vast tentacle.

Puluo’s grip tightened on his trigger-bar and he fired a three-round burst from the hip. The gun’s languid recoil pressed him into the current, as lines of squealing compression fanned out behind the bolt shells. Everything seemed to move in slow motion – everything but the massive whipping limb of the kraken. Two out of three of the shots missed the mark, but the third hit hard and the tentacle shuddered with pain. Eigen and Ajir fired into it, following Puluo’s lead.

‘Advance!’ called the sergeant, his power sword’s active blade wreathed in a halo of frothing bubbles. ‘Move in and engage all targets of opportunity!’

Puluo needed no more encouragement. Quickly, taking the measure of this new, strange field of combat, he moved with steady, exact steps. He fired as he went, and first blood was earned as the flexing feeler tore apart along its length. Inky vitae billowed and twisted from the wound.

A low, hollow moan vibrated through the water, the pitch of it so deep Puluo felt it through the bones of his ribcage.

‘You have its attention, brother,’ said Ajir.

Puluo gave a slow nod, as a scattering of red discs grew brighter and more distinct in the murk. The colour strengthened as the moaning peaked, and more pieces of the larger shadow seemed to break off and move closer.

‘Here they come!’ called Eigen.

It was easy to think of the attack as many foes, not one; whip-fast cables of muscle came racing towards them, each one seemingly unconnected to the others. Lost in the shadows, the main mass of the kraken’s body seemed cut off, out of reach. It was a dangerous line of thought to take; Puluo reminded himself that each limb was only one facet of a larger foe, all of them working together at the bidding of a single predator mind.

The firing began again, bolt rounds moving with agonising slowness. The Astartes saw the glimmer of Rafen’s sword on a falling swing, cutting a glancing blow across a tentacle that left a slick of dark blood swelling out behind it.

Then for the first time, the sergeant raised his plasma gun and fired it; for a brief moment the area around the warriors was illuminated with a stark, hard glow that threw jumping shadows. A streak of burning white plasmatic matter lanced through the water, boiling a channel towards its target, and for a split-second Rafen vanished in a shroud of churning froth as the gun’s heat-displacement backwashed across him.

Another tentacle shrank away, the tip withered and molten, and the kraken let out another sub-frequency howl.

‘Press the attack!’ snarled his commander.

Other than the command centre two decks above, the enginarium was where the largest concentration of machine-slaves were located, and it was little wonder. In the middle of the Neimos, sheathed with far greater protection than any other section of the vessel, the submersible’s heart and soul lurked within a massive armoured sphere.

Ceris chanced a look up at the module, briefly entranced by the trains of light moving up and down the coolant columns that surrounded it. A fusion reactor; behind those plates of titanium and hyper-dense alloy, an ember of blazing fire churned. It was an infant star, shackled there to give power to the Neimos’s drives and internal systems. The reactor should have been tended by a drive-gang of enginseers, but the circumstance of this mission had meant that only servitors crewed this compartment.

The psyker’s hard gaze crossed the slack and vacant faces of the machine-slaves as they went about their tasks, apparently ignorant of the fact that the vessel was under attack. Now and then, a tremor through the hull sent one of the helots off-balance and sprawling to the deck in a heap of robes; but they simply righted themselves and continued on.

At his shoulder, Noxx spoke over his raised boltgun. ‘Is he here?’

Ceris glanced down at the xenos psi-gem in his hand. Was that a flicker of emerald there behind the runes, or just the play of wan light upon the object? He couldn’t be certain. But he was certain of something.

‘He is,’ nodded the psyker. ‘I smell the spoor of his mind. It leaves a trail.’ The whispers of the stone had drawn him, like towards like, to this place.

Kayne ratcheted the slide on his bolter. ‘Which one?’ He panned the weapon around, drawing beads on the mumbling servitors.

There were several of them. Ceris sensed weak glimmers of thought-energy from the machine-slaves, small flickers of mind that barely registered unless he turned his full focus on them. Zellik’s broken psyche had stained them all, the taint of the xenos implant shadowy and visible to his preternatural senses, like oil moving over water.

Before he could reply, Noxx gave an answer of his own. ‘We’ll kill them all. Take no chances.’

Ceris shook his head. ‘No, sir. You cannot shoot them all at once. Kill the wrong one and it will give Zellik’s essence the moment it needs to relocate to another host-mind.’ An alarm began to keen as a fountainhead of liquid jetted from an overloaded valve, and a handful of servitors rushed to see to the problem. ‘His psyche is barely coherent. He has lost so much of himself. All the Magos has left now is his hate and his need for revenge… but we must be certain we end the helot where his spirit is hiding. Otherwise, he flees to another servitor through the implant and our search begins again from scratch.’

‘Then find him, and be sure of it,’ Noxx grated. ‘A death is owed, and by Seth, blood payment will be taken!’

The psyker drew up the gem in front of him and stared into its depths. The cloying telepathic miasma that shrouded the xenos device made his skin crawl, and he vowed that once this matter was dealt with – if they survived the predations of the tyranid kraken, he amended – he would take a moment to conduct a ritual of purgation and cleanse his mind of exposure to the xenos stone. How a human being, even a half-cyborg Mechanicus like Matthun Zellik, could have willingly allowed his mind to become part of this alien thing was beyond him. The Magos’s fear of death had clearly overcome any piety he might once have had. For all his oaths, the fear of death had made him into a heretic. As well as damning himself for eternity in the eyes of the God-Emperor, Zellik had damned his helot legion into the bargain. Another matter to be dealt with later, he mused; all the servitors would have to be put to death once the mission was over.

For now, though, he had a coward to find. Steeling himself, Ceris pushed a blade of mental force into the psi-gem and once more he glimpsed the web of connections between the flicker-minds of the technomat slaves.

The sense of Zellik was immediate. He lingered in the air, a coil of his thought-trace hanging smoke-thick, invisible to all without the witch-sight. What remained of the Magos’s ragged psyche was made of rage and terror.

And it was stronger than Ceris had expected. Even as he realised his error, cursed his arrogance, he felt the shift in the psionic tempo of the chamber.

‘Which of them is he?’ Noxx hissed, growing impatient.

Every helot in the chamber – those at the leaking pipeway, those at the reactor consoles, the rune-watchers and the rod-runners – all at once their minds dimmed and allowed themselves to be written over by a sketch of Matthun Zellik’s thoughts.

‘Hate you,’ whispered one of them, gripping a carved iron spanner with menace. ‘Hate you.’ Lips moved, and each of them joined in a chorus of muttering, breathy loathing.

Ceris shot a look at Noxx. ‘All of them,’ he said.

A machine-slave with bulbous loading arms of fluted steel stumbled forward at Kayne, chattering louder and louder.

The Space Marine put a shot into its chest and it wavered, but did not halt; then all the helots were moving and shouting.

It was as if a switch had been thrown; one moment, Turcio and Gast stood across from one another, either side of the chart table display, the servitors busy at their stations. The next, the command deck exploded into a riot of noise and motion.

Every machine-slave, at every station and console stopped their work and turned to stare at the Space Marines – and then they were shouting, raising their hands and manipulators, crying out.

‘Hate you. Hate you hate you hate you hate you hate you–’

Their blank expressions, normally masks of bland vacancy, were twisting in inchoate rage as they crashed about, surging towards the two Astartes.

Turcio knew the look of murder-lust well. He had seen it many times on the faces of his foes. He brought up his bolter, the pistons of his bionic arm locking reflexively into a firing position – and he hesitated. Elsewhere aboard the ship, he would have discharged the shot without a moment’s thought, but here in the command chamber they were surrounded by vital systems at every turn, the cogitators and calculating engines that ran every element of the Neimos’s functions. Even if he scored a direct hit, a bolt round would over-penetrate the torso of a helot and go on to wreak further damage.

At the last second, he reversed his grip on the firearm and slammed the butt of the gun into the face of the nearest member of the maddened horde. Bone and silver cracked, blood spurting from the nostrils of the servitor in a crimson fan. It sank to the deck, killed the instant a shard of skull cut into its brain matter.

Across the table, Gast brought up his gauntlet and punched down a technomat grasping at his arms. The blade-sharp reductor protruding from the armoured glove’s underside pierced the chest of the servitor and it gave a strangled cough, choking out pink foam. Gast batted it away, drawing his serrated flaying knife with a flourish. ‘Blood’s oath!’ growled the sanguinary cleric. ‘It’s a revolt!’

Turcio let his bolter swing away on its shoulder strap and mirrored the Flesh Tearer’s actions, bringing up his own combat blade. ‘We can’t kill them… the ship…’ Mumbling its anger, another helot lashed out, and the Blood Angel knocked it away with the pommel of his weapon.

‘They may not give us the choice!’ said Gast, shouting to be heard over the choir of murderous cries.

The servitors were massing before them, forming into ordered ranks, leaving their duties behind. Turcio stepped back, unsure of how to proceed, and felt a stanchion at his back. The helots were backing them into a corner.

Gast pointed. ‘The rudder!’

With no hands on the steering yoke, the controls moved freely, and Turcio watched the tiller jerk and tilt as the Neimos was buffeted by the kraken. The deck took on an angle, growing steeper every moment. The Astartes looked up and saw the depth gauge dial twitch and shift. Ungoverned, the submersible entered a shallow, turning descent.

Eigen felt the change in aspect immediately as the current washed over him. ‘The ship… We’re changing course.’

He heard Ajir call out on the general vox channel. ‘Turcio, respond. What’s going on in there? Turcio? Gast?’

Over the open comm, the Astartes caught the clatter of steel on steel and the faint sound of sirens.

‘We can’t go back,’ Rafen’s voice cut through everything. ‘Trust your battle-brothers to keep the ship secure. We have our target. We cannot tarry!’

The Flesh Tearer looked up the line of the hull and found the silhouette of the Blood Angel sergeant beckoning him forward. The blazing arc of his power sword left a sparkling pennant of froth trailing from the blade.

‘Move!’ snapped Puluo, underscoring his commander’s orders.

Eigen gritted his teeth and did as he was told to. Each footstep was difficult, and he felt his muscles tensing against it. He had trained to fight in many conditions, sparring in the swamps of Cretacia with weights tied to his legs, engaging in close combat in spaces without air or gravity. This was no different. He remembered the words of Amit, first Master of his Chapter, drilled into him as an initiate; There is no battlefield that can defy us. We are masters of all wars. The maxim gave him focus and he pushed on.

Fighting on the hull, in the dense grip of the ocean, was like nothing he had ever done, however. Strange echoes of subsonic sound caught in the hard current of the waters came to him, and it was difficult to draw a bead. They were closing in on the main mass of the kraken now, and the large tentacle arms still lashed back and forth over their heads, beating at the hull of the Neimos.

He could see the humped body of the tyranid monster, lit in split-second flashes as Rafen fired boiling bolts of plasma at the creature, and Puluo tossed hull-breakers into the fast-moving tide, letting the ocean carry the explosives into the beast. What he had thought were deeper threads of polluted murk were actually slicks of alien blood trailing away from burn wounds in the kraken’s thick-armoured flanks.

Smaller limbs reached from the creature’s torso, and these were more akin to great bone talons. They sliced through the waters leaving lines of shimmering photoplankton in their wakes.

The crashing echo of gunfire resonated towards him, and from the corner of his visor he saw Puluo firing a burst of heavy bolts into a questing serpent-limb that flicked up behind them. The warrior’s shots were true – he was getting the range now, as were they all – and the limb blew apart in a sphere of concussion.

‘How do we kill this freak?’ Ajir was saying, breathing hard.

‘We get closer,’ Rafen told him, the fury of battle thick in the other man’s words. ‘Blind it, choke it, shoot it until it dies, whatever we must! Our mission will not end because of this xenos abortion!’

Eigen nodded. ‘Aye!’ He took heavy steps forward, his boots ringing on the hull, leading with his bolter. He aimed for the phosphor spots on the kraken’s hide, and it reacted with a shiver and a subsonic screech as he fired.

‘To your right!’ came a shout. Eigen heard Ajir call out his name in warning and he pivoted at the waist in time to see a line of barbs rip towards him over the curvature of the Neimos’s hull. The splayed talons tore a ragged channel through the grey-black sheath of anechoic tiles and Eigen reacted, dodging away; but his reflex to tuck and roll was the wrong one, and his magno-clamped boots resisted. Too late, he tried to turn, but the spinning fanged club at the end of the tentacle caught him. Barbs ripped into ceramite and punctured layers of plasteel and flexmetals. Locked in place, Eigen fell back under the force of the blow but did not fall, his arms spinning like windmills. With a shout of effort, he pushed himself back to a standing stance, but the kraken’s lethal limb was already snaking back and away.

It was then his breath was struck from him as he felt an icy fist at his gut, and with it a growing chill that spread quickly across his torso. For a moment he feared it was shock from a penetrating wound, perhaps even some kind of venom injected into him by the glancing attack – but then he saw the streamer of bubbles issuing from the rent in his chest plate. He smelled rust and stale salt; his armour was flooding with seawater.

‘They keep coming!’ shouted Kayne, blowing the head from the shoulders of a rod-runner. Gunfire echoed around the engine deck. ‘You have to stop this!’

Ceris struck out and punched a technomat with a pincer-claw arm to the deck. The blow staggered the helot and left it shaking, but it rocked back and swiped at him again. Blood and bone fragments bloomed in a lethal burst as a round cleaved into it from behind, killing it instantly.

Noxx raised his smoking bolter, holding away a wild servitor at arm’s length with his free hand. ‘You heard the boy!’ said the veteran. ‘If this is happening all over the ship–’

‘It will be done!’ retorted the psyker.

Kayne wondered exactly how it would be done; but then again, he did not want to know. The strange magicks of the warp disquieted him, and he found it hard to mind his ease with someone only steps away from a sorcerer wearing the armour of a Space Marine. Ceris’s eye-line crossed his and, for a moment, the Blood Angel wondered if the other man had read his thoughts.

Ceris’s mailed fist closed around the alien gem Gast had cut from the brain of the dead servitor, and he gasped. Immediately, eldritch viridian light spilled from the gaps between his fingers, and the crystals lining the Codicier’s psychic hood flashed blue-white with power.

‘Hate you,’ cried the marching machine-slaves. ‘Hate you. Hate you. Hate–’

Silence fell like an axe blow, sudden and without warning. For a long second, all Kayne could hear were the faint clarions of warning sirens on the upper decks and the constant rumble and moan of the tortured hull.

Ceris took a step deeper into the chamber, pushing through the statue-still helots. They stood in place, trapped and twitching as if rebelling against the paralysis forced upon them. Kayne saw sweat film the psyker’s brow, his eyes narrowing. A greasy, electric tingle filled the air, setting the warrior’s teeth on edge; the overspill of telepathic energy clouded the room.

With effort, Ceris raised the hand gripping the glowing gem and held it out, pointing with his fist. ‘I feel him. He is there.’

A lone servitor, an overseer model constructed to serve as gang-master for the rod-runner helots, stumbled and staggered. It moved as if it were wading through thick oil, unable to drag itself free. The machine-slave tottered towards Ceris with its hands curled into talons, moaning and snarling. Kayne fancied he saw a greenish glimmer deep in the sightless eyes of the helot. The meat of its face twisted and distorted, and for a moment it took on the cast of the silver mask he had seen floating in the holoprojection aboard the Archeohort.

In a stuttering, punch card chatter, the servitor’s head tilted back and it spoke. ‘You will pay for this!’ The voice was crackling and broken, like a fouled recording spool. ‘I’ll make every one of you pay!’

‘He’s trying to flee…’ Ceris bit out the words. ‘Shift to… another host…’ The glowing stone throbbed and pulsed. ‘Take him now!’

Kayne aimed his bolter, but what he saw made him pause. Wreathing the head of the howling servitor was a ghost, a faint tracery of Magos Zellik’s screaming face shimmering like an auroral discharge. As he watched, tiny fireflies of green melted out of the air and merged with the phantom; they were the fragments of Zellik’s shattered psyche coming together, perhaps in a last desperate effort to resist the psyker’s will.

‘Now!’ cried Ceris.

‘Make… You… Pay!’ cried the strangled voice; but before it could speak again, a figure stepped out of the gloom behind the helot and bright steel flashed.

A toothed knife, trimmed with wicked barbs the length of its blade, burst from the open mouth of the servitor. Brother-Sergeant Noxx leaned in, pushing his weapon in through the back of the machine-slave’s skull. Kayne heard the sickening crack of breaking bone, and then a second sharp report, like glass breaking.

The helot coughed out black blood and pieces of broken gemstone, the screaming ghost about it releasing one final howl before it discorporated and became nothing. With a savage jerk of his wrist, Noxx tore his blade from his kill and spat upon the corpse at his feet. ‘For Mohl and Sove and all the others,’ he grated. ‘This time you stay dead, you worthless maggot.’

Ceris gave a slow nod, and dropped the psi-gem to the deck. Still panting from the effort, he brought down his boot on the emerald stone and ground it into powder beneath his heel. Kayne thought he heard a distant scream, but then it was gone.

All around them, the servitors turned about and ambled back to their workstations, ignoring the Astartes as if they were not there.

Rafen saw Eigen take the hit from the kraken and cursed as the Flesh Tearer recoiled. He saw a dim red shape moving towards the other man across the hull – the murk was too thick to be sure if it was Ajir or Puluo – and the sergeant forged forward, knowing that his battle-brothers would aid the injured warrior.

He was at the twitching flanks of the tyranid monster, and the sea-beast’s thick cilia lashed out at him like a storm made of lashes. The plasma gun in its holster for the moment, he concentrated on batting the attack away with the furious blade of his power sword, parrying and slashing at the nest of probing limbs, turning them to ribbons of pasty meat. Vibrations from the kraken’s throat canal rumbled out to him, the sound of the alien’s pain drawing a wolfish grin across his lips.

A sickle-sharp talon hummed through the water, on a downward arc that would have punched through his helmet and through into his chest had he not shifted at the last moment. In the bubbling wake of the attack, he felt a hard tug on his waist that threatened to pull him off-balance, and the warrior staggered against it. Suddenly the drag vanished and he stumbled back across the hull plates, his boots clanking. Something long and ragged spun past in the corner of his vision and he snatched at it. His glove briefly closed around a frond of severed cable, the end splayed open and frayed; his tether.

‘No matter,’ he said aloud, and threw the broken cable away.

The creature moved, the length of it sliding past him. He spied a place where Puluo’s bolt salvos had carved out a divot of armoured hide, and beneath Rafen saw pallid flesh. Without a moment’s hesitation, the Blood Angel pushed in with a heavy upward slash, cutting deep into the kraken. Even as the monster bellowed in pain, Rafen tore a hull-cutter from his belt and jammed the device into the slippery open wound.

The kraken rolled and writhed, still turning. A concussion echoed, and a huge sphere of red-black foam blossomed above Rafen’s head. The hydrostatic shock buffeted him, but he weathered it, reaching to unlimber the plasma gun once again.

The monster recoiled, the upper length of its body rising off the hull, its massive tentacles starting to uncoil. For the first time, Rafen saw the mouth of the tyranid fiend, a black chasm ringed with hundreds of rapier-like tusks that flexed and clattered against one another. Streamers of blubber and meat-matter were clogged in its multiple gumlines, the remnants of its last meal. The behemoth loomed in the twin pools of light cast by his helmet lamps, and suddenly the dark death-tunnel was expanding to fill his vision. It could consume him whole in a single snap of those gargantuan jaw-parts, swallow him down into its gullet where virulent acids and grinding bone would break the Space Marine apart.

An armoured plate as large as the hatch on a Rhino slid up off the flank of the kraken as it fell at him; behind it Rafen saw a glassy lens and a single eye filled with hateful alien menace.

In the space between the beats of his hearts he understood; it wanted to see him. The xenos wanted to watch as it chewed into the man-prey that had dared to defy it.

‘Not today,’ he told the beast, raising the plasma gun.

The weapon discharged with a thundering gurgle of superheated fluids; the seawater around the muzzle was instantly turned into fat orbs of gas as the plasma stream speared out and blinded the kraken’s eye.

A hot backwash of xenos blood and boiling liquid flooded over Rafen, followed by a moaning scream so deep in the subsonic range, it made his bones vibrate and his gut twist. Mad with new agony, the tyranid reflexively released its hold upon the Neimos and became a spinning nest of flailing tentacles and talon-limbs. Angled claws and fanged feelers stabbed and lashed at nothing.

Rafen heard someone call out; it sounded like Puluo, the dour warhound’s stern, hard voice cracking in his ears, warning him.

It was not enough. A tentacle as thick as a Thunderhawk hull struck Rafen on the backswing as the kraken retreated. The impact broke ceramite, smashed seals and fractured bone.

The Blood Angel knew pain, the impact of a godhammer slamming into his spine, crushing the systems inside his backpack. Agony lit wheels of colour and flares of light behind his eyes, robbing him of the breath in his lungs.

He tasted the heavy copper of blood in his mouth, felt the blades of broken ribs clawing at his chest. Then he realised he could no longer feel the hull beneath his feet. He could not see, thick fluids gumming shut his eyes. He was falling, tumbling.

Rafen tried to summon the strength to speak, but he could utter no words. The effort was immense, and it forced him to a rumbling dark nothingness, where light could not follow.

Noxx sprinted to the corridor outside the infirmary, and he was immediately assailed by the stench of stale seawater. Washes of the tainted liquid sloshed around his boots, draining away through the gridded deck plates. He saw Puluo, the Blood Angel resting heavily against one wall with his helmet off. He was breathing hard, glaring at the floor.

‘Eigen?’ said the Flesh Tearer.

‘He lives.’ The dark-skinned Astartes called Ajir approached, his lank black curls spilling out over his neck ring. ‘Thank the Throne.’

Noxx glanced at Puluo. ‘Zellik is no more. You drove off the creature?’

The warrior gave a nod. ‘Aye. At a cost.’

The sergeant took a breath, glancing around. ‘Rafen…’

Puluo nodded grimly. ‘Beastie took him. Saw it happen. Tore the lad right off the deck, threw him into the murk. Gone.’

‘He does not answer the vox,’ said Ajir quietly. ‘Auspex read is null. In those currents out there, even if the cursed xenos didn’t devour him…’ The Blood Angel trailed off, his gaze turning inward.

They were silent for a long moment. Noxx glared at the deck, examining the sudden kernel of regret the he felt in his chest. Another brother lost… ‘Damn this duty,’ he muttered.

When he looked up, Noxx found Puluo and Ajir watching him intently. ‘Command of the mission now falls to you, lord,’ said the Devastator Space Marine. ‘What are your orders?’

Noxx told them.

CHAPTER NINE

Time was broken and bleeding; it had that in common with Rafen.

He was aware of the passage of moments, not in a linear manner, but in fits and starts that lanced into his thoughts. Each elapse was a jagged shard of pain and awareness piercing the blood-warm veil that had engulfed him.

His body was feverish with heat, the outward manifestation of his enhanced Astartes physiology as it worked to repair him. Bones were knitting, fluids clotting and wounds drawing closed all over his body, but Rafen’s mind struggled to hold on to any sense of it.

Dislocated from the real world, he bobbed upon the turbulent surface of consciousness like a cork, dropping into the troughs of towering waves and vanishing into the black depths. Now and then he would surface, become aware, only to sink back again.

He tried to draw the pieces together into some kind of cogent chain of events.

The spindrift fall through the dark abyss of the waves; yes, that had happened to him. In the moments after the pain of the kraken’s parting attack, he had been lost. The agony of the impact, so great and so breathtaking, seemed a distant thing to him now. How quickly the flesh forgets, he thought.

Breaking the surface; that too was real… wasn’t it? His helmet filmed with oily seawater, cradled in the leeward surge of a low, fast breaker. The battle armour’s simple machine-spirit reacting, trying to keep him alive. The icy cold at his back from the broken cryo-pods of the microfusion reactor. The shapes of the mud-coloured wave tops ranging away beneath a rusty, weeping sky. Something out there in the distance, regular in shape, glittering dully. Rescue? He dared not hold on to the ideal, for fear it would disintegrate in his thoughts.

The little creatures in the water; eel-like things with bony plates across their heads like arrow tips. Probing at him, looking for new wounds in his armour. Tyranid things, yes. The biomechanical striations clear as he grabbed one and crushed it in his armoured fingers. Some phylum of refuse-consuming animal, perhaps, seeing the Blood Angel as little more than organic mass in need of denaturing.

The dark waters again. Fathomless deeps, burning with blood, thundering with the sound of life. Was that real? Did that exist outside his skull, or was it a torpid fever-dream?

Fingers finding the chains around his wrists, the lanyards trailing to his weapons. The gun and the sword not lost to him. A flash of elation. Good. The looming abyss of this alien ocean was denied his weapons. To perish unarmed seemed somehow wrong, as if meeting the veil of death stripped bare and weak.

The shape again, coming closer. Shadows framed against dimming clouds. A ship? A tall, blade-sharp prow. The heavy, rotting scent of tyranid pheromones, a haze of foetid mist descending. The air greasy and acid.

Dark and light. Dark and light. Dark…

The light–

The blunt, brutish lines of the patrol craft rode high in the sluggish swell, solar vanes creaking in the constant wind. Searingly bright illumination from questing spotlamps turned the waters around the drifting body into lines of stark, jumping shadows. The crimson-armoured figure stood out like a livid brand, and in moments webber guns had been deployed, projecting nets of sticky matter out into the sea. The figure made weak attempts to push away, but to no avail. The mesh of cultured biofibres wrapped around the limbs of their target and stiffened; immediately the retractor mechanisms inside the webbers chugged into life, dragging in their catch across the lowered trawl deck at the aft of the vessel.

There were splices down there, eyes wide with interest as this strange new captive rolled out of the waves towards them. They exchanged twitchy glances, scratching at the implants protruding from the grossly inflated muscle mass of their arms. The larger of the two, a male modificate spliced with arachnoid DNA, turned its eight-eyed head towards the arrival and ventured closer to it.

This was unexpected. The ships had been diverted off their usual patrol-and-trawl missions by an urgent summons from Cheyne, the Master’s subaltern. The command had forced them to dump the entire xenos harvest from that week’s gatherings and make full speed to a region near the Oxide Banks. The splices were confused, but they knew better than to disobey Cheyne’s orders, which carried the weight of the Primogenitor himself.

Soon it became clear why they had been sent, however. The sky lit with the death of a starship, and soon a rain of wreckage came upon them. They had not stopped since, sifting the fall of debris for useful materials, throwing what they could not use over the side and packing out the hold with the choice pieces. Like their master, the splices were adept at taking whatever was at hand and turning it to new purposes. Every piece of salvage had a use.

But they had found nothing living; not until now.

The arachkin-modificate closed in on the figure in the nets and saw a man-thing in power armour, close to its own mass. Using its vestigial extra arms, it peeled away the lines of webbing, flicking its spindly fingers to dislodge the gooey adhesives that matted it. The tall, distended head nodded to itself. It recognised this. It knew a servant of the Corpse-God when it saw one.

The arachkin turned back to speak to the other modificate, a canine-splice with a glistening snout and constant snarl about its lips. ‘Astartes,’ it said, the word thick with sibilance from a mouth crowded with mandibles.

The canine barked a curse word; it became a yelp of surprise as the Space Marine abruptly jerked from where he lay upon the greasy, shifting deck, swinging a sword. The weapon seemed to have come from nowhere, doubtless lost in the folds of the thick netting, now freed by the arachkin’s thoughtless interest.

The power sword stuttered, the energy vanes within it misfiring, but still the blade was heavy and lethal. The weapon took the modificate’s head from its neck in a welter of blood, and suddenly the Astartes was coming to his feet, staggering.

The other splice smelled pain on the Space Marine, and knew instinctively that the abhuman was badly injured; yet still deadly, as the headless corpse of the arachkin demonstrated. The dead modificate’s remains slid off the deck and into the ocean as the ship rose into another swell.

Another strangled bark, this time pitched high for panic and need. In answer, the other modificates came running, and they brought more webbers and the crackling lengths of electromag halberds.

They wasted no time and set about the wounded Space Marine, all of them understanding that what little advantage they had would be lost if they dallied. In the end, it took every splice on the crew to fell the Astartes, and even then he killed two more, turning them to screaming torches before the plasma gun could be struck from his grip.

When the warrior in crimson armour stumbled and fell, all of them came in and took a turn with the halberds, beating and shocking him into pain-wracked unconsciousness.

The dark–

The kills seemed faraway, dreamy and incoherent incidents that could have been the creation of a fevered mind. Rafen felt an icy cold upon his bare skin and it was with that shock that he strained open his rheumy eyes, forced a focus upon his hands. They floated before him, indistinct and grimed with muck and caked blood. His chest shocked him with razorblade stabs each time he dared to take a breath, and he became aware of more and more sites of pain scattered across the map of him. There was wetness seeping through his garb of micropore weave, and with this understanding Rafen’s sluggish thoughts at last caught up to his predicament.

His power armour was gone; he had been stripped without care or attention, as the torsion marks and cuts on his legs and arms attested. Clad only in a rough set of threadbare prison garments, Rafen was lying in a reeking metal cell, damp with patches of grey mould and orange rust. Cables as thick as his wrist disappeared away into the gloom, extending out from heavy iron collars about his neck, his forearms and ankles. The fetters were arranged so that he could not stand, could not move more than a few steps from where his captors had left him.

His captors…

With an effort, Rafen cleared the fog in his mind and tried to think back. He gathered in the pieces of the past few hours, sifted them for meaning and nuance. It came back to him in shards of recall. The agony of the shock-staves upon him, and the blessed embrace of nothingness. The sense of losing something… yes, the moment when they sullied the holy armour of his Chapter, tearing it from him, bearing it away. His gun and sword taken, his helm ripped from his head.

‘The voice…’ He spoke without thinking as another piece of memory resurfaced. In the moments before a fall into silence and darkness, he had seen something. A shimmering ghost made of light, a towering figure in a coat of screaming faces.

‘Fabius…’

The traitor had been speaking in low tones, communicating with one of the bestial mutants that attacked him. Rafen struggled to gather back what he had heard, but his memory failed him, clouded by pain. All he remembered was the holograph of Bile, peering through the bars of his cage and smiling thinly, nodding to the mutant. Then speaking, the words lost to Rafen’s ears, but the movements of his lips clear enough to read.

‘Bring him to me.’

The Blood Angel nodded to himself, thinking back to the words that Ceris had said to him in the chapel aboard the Tycho. Was this some machination of the God-Emperor, he wondered? Did the Master of Mankind hold the skeins of Rafen’s life so tightly that He himself had brought these events to pass? Every step along this path had been to bring Rafen face to face once more with the creature that called itself Fabius Bile – but now fate had torn him from his battle-brothers, ripped apart the careful plans he had drawn against this traitor, deposited him here. Alone and unarmed.

He closed his eyes and let himself seek the edges of a healing trance, drawing into himself. Through the roll and motion of the cell floor, he was certain the ship he was aboard travelled at high speed – doubtless back to Bile and his fortress, to the very place Rafen wanted to be.

The Blood Angel sat in silence and let his body repair itself, marshalling himself, making ready. If the Emperor brought him to this, then it was right and true; and if it were nothing more than capricious fate, then fate would be damned.

He was unarmed; but no Astartes was ever truly without a weapon as long as he could draw another breath.

He was alone; but no Astartes was ever truly alone, not with his battle-brothers and warrior kindred still there in the deeps, the mission still in their hearts.

In the darkness, he prayed silently for guidance.

The desultory light of the Dynikas star cast shafts through the fast-moving tier of cloud ranging over the curved archipelago, the wind hard and constant across the waves. The sand-seared shapes of the rocky island chain rose up from the turbulent, ruddy waters. Smoothed by the action of millions of years of typhoons, the outcrops of stone – rare atolls that were the very tips of colossal undersea mountains – resembled great growths of coral or fungus, sculpted into curves and even lines that belied organic forms where none actually existed. Like all else on Dynikas V, the island chains had been scoured clean of life by the tyranid splinters marooned on the planet. In this place, that had meant human life as well as native flora and fauna. An agri-colony, built to farm the richness teeming in the Dynikan oceans, had been the first to fall to the rapacious devourers. Buildings and structures cut from the rock or assembled by Imperial hands were made into ghost sites, every man, woman and child taken and consumed by the hive.

This place, this monument to human ill-fate, was where Fabius Bile had come to craft a bolt hole for himself. Upon the empty ruins, on a world no sane being would ever dare to visit, in a region dead and forgotten to the galaxy at large, the twisted genetor had built his fortress.

The patrol craft roared into the bay along the main island’s southern coast, engines dying with a howl as the wave-surge brought the vessel in to the crumbling ferrocrete docks. Derelict pilings hung at crooked angles, the last remnants of a complex that had been built for dozens of trawlers. Only one small section of the dock was maintained; the rest had been forgotten and allowed to fall into disrepair.

Chugging greasy smoke into the air from its exhausts, a defiled Atlas recovery tank grumbled into place, the crane extending from its rear spooling out lines of heavy black chain. The vehicle had once served the Imperial Guard in the Emperor’s name; now it was despoiled with the iconography of the Eightfold Path, and stripped down to its iron frame. A snarling, hooting avian modificate capered on the prow of the vehicle as its chains dropped through a hatch in the trawler’s deck. Sounds of violence issued out from within, flashes of hard electric discharge following them. The chains went taut and the crane pulled back.

Dangling from his manacles, Rafen rose into the light. He struggled against the iron restraints, but he could find no purchase. Each move he made only sent him twisting, the chains cording around his limbs.

The mutant freaks on the boat snarled at those on the dock, the animal noises evidently some kind of language; in turn, the Atlas rolled away, and Rafen found himself dragged up over a crest of bone-white stone, swinging this way and that as the crane bounced in its mountings.

He struggled to twist into a position where he could observe, blinking away the purple after-images on his retina from the kiss of the trawler crew’s shock-staves.

They passed a steep cliff angled away from him, rising to a sharp point. Etched into the rock was a blackened design that resembled a monstrous wing and a claw – the mark of the warriors of Fulgrim and Fabius Bile’s former Legion, the Emperor’s Children.

A low, thickset tower emerged first, rising up over the line of the island. Sheer, angled sides with few portals fell away from a ziggurat roof. He spotted what might have been communicator vanes up there, flexing in the constant winds, and other antennae that seemed alien in form and function, crystals at their tips glowing a sullen blue-white.

The tank rolled around a curving roadway, on one side leading down into a wide beach of shale and algae-slicked rocks. Stubby pillars emerged from the beach at regular intervals, stretching away in a line that vanished around the arc of the atoll. To the other side of the road was what at first glance resembled a vast impact crater; but as Rafen tugged on his chains to steady himself, he took a second look. Inside the crater on the far side he could see levels cut into the walls, one atop another, extending downward out of his sight, with balconies of skeletal metal impact-bonded to the stone.

Everywhere there were metal tubes growing out of the ground, sprouting like steel trees. Each of them ended in a sphere made of iron mesh, and from them came that foul stink of tyranid pheromones. The entire island was awash with it, a pall hanging over everything.

Rafen became aware of a siren honking somewhere down in the crater. He heard the sizzle of laser fire and the tank came to an abrupt, grinding halt. Seizing the moment, the Blood Angel gathered in handfuls of chain and moved, hand over hand, up towards the spool of the crane. He was close to the top when a figure swathed in ragged, hooded robes threw itself over the lip of the crater and sprinted across the roadway, making for the beach.

Rafen hesitated, expecting the mutants inside the Atlas’s cab to take a shot at the runner; but they did nothing. He could not see any detail of the figure, only that it was humanoid and larger than a normal man. As large, he realised, as an Astartes.

The hooded escapee scrambled down the steep cliff and on to the shale. As his blackened, bare feet touched the beach, a new siren sounded. This was a four-tone clarion, a trumpet-call that brayed from the line of pillars. Rafen watched as the upper sections of the two closest columns cracked into quarters and slowly fanned open.

The runner slowed; Rafen had expected him to bolt for the water, but he did nothing of the kind. There was no fatigue about the robed man – only a strange air of resignation.

A voice crackled out from hidden vox relays. ‘Don’t be a fool.’ Rafen’s lip curled as he recognised Bile’s silken, metered tones, and for a split-second he thought the words were directed at him; but they were for the running man. ‘Turn back. Return, and this will be forgotten.’

With care, the figure dropped to his haunches and went down upon the stony beach. Rafen heard the grinding of gears, and to his dismay he watched a pair of sentry cannons extrude from the open tops of the pillars. The alarm clarion sounded again, each iteration quicker and quicker.

The man knelt on one knee, and the Blood Angel’s breath caught in his throat as the robed figure bowed his head and crossed his hands over his chest. He heard the distinct murmur of a prayer; the Litany of the Aquila, the age-old entreaty to the God-Emperor for deliverance from evil. Rafen knew what would happen next. He cried out and struggled against his bindings, snapping one of the chains. The robed man did not react.

‘So be it, then,’ said the voice from the speakers. In the next moment the cannons tracked, locked and fired. A brief storm of energy shrieked across the beach and tore the runner – the Astartes – apart. A slick of bloody mist and glass-fused sand were all that was left behind.

Cursing, thrashing in his manacles, Rafen tried to break free; but then the Atlas started up and rolled on. The mutant crew, he realised, had known all along what would happen; they had paused because they wanted to watch.

Rafen felt as if he had been plunged into ice. To see a battle-brother perish on the field of conflict was one thing – and he was certain now that the one he saw die was without doubt a Space Marine of some stripe – but to witness one perish in so ignoble a fashion made him angry and heartsick in equal measure. He tried to comprehend what he had seen and could find no reason for it.

The Atlas swerved and spun to a halt upon a wind-scoured ferrocrete apron surrounded by fortress walls on three sides. The chains unlocked and he tumbled to the ground, landing poorly. Rafen pulled himself up as the vehicle rolled away, scanning the area.

Immediately he saw more of the strange bestial mutants gathered in guard posts and cupolas behind the barrels of autocannons and flame-throwers. But what caught his attention were the others. He could only see two of them, watching indolently from an arched gallery, but they were Astartes-tall and broad with it, men seemingly cut from planes of meat like those in a butcher’s shop window. At first he wondered if they were Traitor Marines, but he dismissed the idea. They wore odd mixes of combat gear but they were not clad in the corrupted versions of power armour favoured by the legions of the archenemy. Despite the mark he had seen upon the cliff-face, he saw no recognisable turncoat sigils, only the eight-point star of the Ruinous Powers. If anything, the men reminded Rafen of Fabius himself, towering figures that radiated menace.

The sound of a rusted gate made him turn around. A saw-toothed portal opened and from it came a man in robes like those of the suicide. A hand, wiry of muscle with skin like old leather, reached up to draw back the hood. ‘If you wish to die now, cousin, the animals will accommodate you. Otherwise, I’d say best not to make any sudden moves.’

Lank hair that would have been grey-white, if not for the grime in it, framed an old, scarred face heavy with a ragged beard. The grizzled newcomer had no eyes; there was only a thickness of molten, waxy tissue over the orbits in his skull. Sable lines of ink were visible on his sunken cheeks and the cords of his neck, forming sharp-angled letters in a tongue Rafen could not read. Still, the warrior knew the pattern of them well enough to recognise the runes of the tribes of Fenris. The old man showed teeth, yellowed fangs visible against his lips. ‘Name your liege,’ he demanded.

‘You’re a Son of Russ. A Space Wolf.’ Rafen found it hard to believe. A Space Marine, even an old, blind veteran without weapons or armour, was the last thing he had expected to see here.

‘But you are not,’ said the sightless warrior, with a long sniff. ‘I’d know it if you had any ice in your veins. And you’d not have waited to try killing me. So I ask again. Name your liege.’

Rafen saw little reason to make a secret of his lineage; had the Space Wolf eyes with which to see, the winged teardrop design branded into the meat of his shoulder would have told him the answer. ‘I am a Son of Sanguinius, of the IX Chapter Astartes.’

‘Heh.’ The veteran gave a mirthless grin. ‘A Blood Angel. Of course. I can smell how pretty you are from here.’

Rafen took an angry step towards the Space Wolf. ‘Don’t mock me, old man. Perhaps I should do as you say and kill you! For I cannot think of any reason why an Astartes would be here, in this fortress of the archenemy, unless he was a traitor!’

The smile dropped off the other man’s face, and he bared his fangs. ‘Whelp! You know nothing of me or this place!’ He nodded bleakly. ‘But you will. Oh yes, you’ll know.’ He beckoned him with a brusque gesture. ‘Follow me, or don’t. The splices will use you for gunnery practice if you stand still too long.’

Grudgingly, Rafen fell into step behind the Space Wolf, trailing him in through the entranceway. ‘Splices…’ he echoed. ‘Those mutants?’

‘It’s what he calls them,’ said the veteran, pausing to cough out a gobbet of phlegm. ‘They were common men once, until Bile decided he could gain something from their torment.’

‘Fabius Bile. Where is he?’ said Rafen.

‘Pray you never have the misfortune to find out,’ came the warning. The gate closed slowly behind them until the tunnel they walked through was in pitch-blackness. Rafen’s occulobe implant contracted to give him a muddy cast of vision, but the blind Space Wolf walked with surety, as if his sight were perfect.

The Blood Angel frowned and stopped. The other warrior kept walking. ‘I am a prisoner of a Chaos renegade,’ said Rafen. ‘What does that make you?’

‘The same. But much longer in the tooth. Much, much longer.’

‘Is that why you’re his servant, then? Fetching me for him like an obedient dog? Did he break you?’

‘You know nothing, boy.’ The old man halted.

‘I know that men say the Sons of Russ are indomitable, fighters of endless courage and stone will. Yet I look at you and the lie is put to those words!’

The Space Wolf gave a savage growl and spun to face him, his hands coming up in claws; but he hesitated, and his arms fell to his sides. Even in the gloom, Rafen could see the expression on his face. Not anger, but something else… resignation. ‘There is no escape from this place,’ said the veteran. ‘No way out, save the one you witnessed.’ He nodded in the direction of the doorway. ‘Ask yourself why one of us would willingly take death instead of life in this place. Ask that and think on the answer, Blood Angel.’

‘There are more Astartes here? From other Chapters?’

‘Ja. And all of them thought as you do now.’ The old man sighed and came closer, his voice falling low. ‘I have had this conversation with new arrivals many times, and it is always the same. They ask why I am here. They ask why I do not resist.’

‘We are Astartes,’ Rafen snapped, his ire building slow and cold. ‘We never capitulate. We were made for challenge!’

‘What is your name, Blood Angel?’

‘Rafen, son of Axan. Sergeant.’

‘I am Nurhünn Vetcha, Long Fang. Do you know my name?’

He shook his head. ‘I do not.’

‘That is because I am dead, like every cousin and kinsman here. We resist, Rafen, as well as we can. We resist by staying alive as long as possible, by making every breath we take an act of defiance!’

‘How many of those mutant freaks can there be?’ Rafen demanded. ‘Are you all without hope? Has no man ever drawn enough courage to take this place and raze it?’

‘Many have tried.’

‘They tried and failed?’

‘They tried and died,’ Vetcha said firmly. He turned a stoic face to the Blood Angel. ‘I resist by believing, boy. Each day I ask Russ and the Emperor to witness what happens in this place and give me the strength to endure it. I do this because I know one day I will have my opportunity!’ A stir of fury laced the old man’s words. ‘I wait, Rafen. I wait for the day. For the moment I know is coming. Even a knife made of lead is sharp enough for a single cut.’

‘And in the meantime, Fabius Bile lives on and continues his crimes against the galaxy.’ Rafen shook his head.

The Space Wolf walked away. ‘When you have been here as long as I have, Blood Angel, you will understand. Now, come. They flush this channel with promethium to kill any rippers that may make it past the pheromone shield. You would not wish to be here when that happens.’

At the far end of the dark tunnel, another set of gates retracted into the ground and Rafen hissed as needles of pain lanced his dark-adapted eyes. Blinking quickly, he found himself standing on the lip of a spiral stone ramp that descended into the vast pit he had glimpsed from the Atlas. What he had thought were distinct levels were in fact all part of one single inclined slope that wound around and around the inside of the crater, descending towards an oval enclosure far below. Hundreds of uniform cargo containers lay in rows along the slope, the standard rectangular boxes of iron like those used on thousands of starships. They were fixed in place with fat gobs of hardened ferrocrete, reinforced with sheets of steel that looked like they had been cut from trawler hulls. Strings of lumes hung over the spaces between the walls and the containers, dark now but placed so they would throw illumination in every corner when the sun set. Abhorrent scrawls of blasphemous text decorated the stone bulwarks, and small altars protruded from the sides of the stockade at regular intervals; the little platforms were soaked in blood so thickly caked it was as black as ink, and grotesque swarms of flies hummed in the air. Rafen looked away, disgusted.

More of the mutants – the ‘splices’ – ambled back and forth over the tops of the containers, all of them armed with electromag weapons. Rafen saw beings that were closer to apes than men, others that had bovine or serpent-like attributes. It chilled him to think that these devolved horrors might once have been innocent men.

‘This way,’ said Vetcha.

Rafen followed him warily, conscious of the heavy shapes of bat-like things that circled through the air below the lip of the crater, riding on thermal updrafts. He couldn’t see them clearly enough to determine if they were mechanical constructs or more splices; but he could see the shapes of heavy lascannons dangling from their claws. He glanced up at the sheer walls of the crater, gauging distances and looking for handholds. There was no cover and the odds were poor; he had no doubt the bats were some kind of sentinel, constantly circling, waiting for someone to make an attempt to flee. Here and there he saw blackened pockmarks on the stone where rock had been turned to obsidian from a beam strike.

The Blood Angel weighed his chances for escape, considering. Was it worth it? He estimated he had a fair probability of making it to the crater lip up above, but even if he did, where could he go? The sentry guns ringed the island, and beyond them lay an ocean full of tyranid bioforms. In this place, so it seemed, freedom was a death sentence.

And then there was the mission. Fabius Bile was here, and working his horrors. The sacred blood he had stolen could not be far from the renegade’s hand. Rafen thought on Vetcha’s words in the tunnel, considering them against his own circumstances. For now, so it seemed, the Blood Angel would follow along, eyes open and ready; he had to trust that Noxx and the others aboard the Neimos were still on their way. When they came, he would need to know as much as possible about this place.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘Cheyne has summoned you,’ said the Space Wolf. ‘Bile’s second-in-command.’

Rafen gestured at a hissing snake-man that glowered down at him from an overhead gantry. ‘One of these freaks?’

Vetcha shook his head. ‘No. Cheyne is something worse.’

The Blood Angel had another question, but he forgot it as he passed in front of a heavy hatch leading into one of the cargo containers. A diamond window cut into the door showed the scene within; Rafen recognised the yellowish cast of armourglass. The material was technology from the Dark Ages, harder than steel, clear from the obverse side but opaque from the reverse. A dozen strikes from bolt shells would be needed to shatter it.

Beyond the glass, he saw an Astartes bent in prayer on the floor of a dingy cell. The warrior did not seem to be aware of him, instead lost in the depth of his meditation. The other man’s ebon skin was dull with a sheen of sweat.

Rafen took a step towards the cell and the serpent-splice skittered forward, raising its weapon. The warrior felt a tug on his arm, and turned to find Vetcha holding him back. ‘Don’t give them an excuse,’ said the Space Wolf in a low voice.

‘In there…’ he said. ‘A brother of the Salamanders Chapter?’

Vetcha nodded and pointed to another container some distance away. ‘Raven Guard.’ He pointed to another, and another. ‘Tauran. Tiger Argent. And more.’

‘How many?’ Rafen snapped.

The veteran gestured towards another hatch set in the wall, and it creaked open on automatic pistons. ‘There are deaths all the time,’ said Vetcha. ‘The count… is low.’

The Blood Angel crossed the threshold and into darkness again. Before he could adjust his vision once more, the hatch slammed shut behind him and locked, separating him from the Space Wolf.

Rafen banged on the metal. ‘Vetcha! Vetcha, what is this?’

Then he heard the sound of a breath, and a grim, humourless snort. ‘Don’t make a friend of him, cousin. He’s the worst of them all.’

At the far end of the container, he defined a figure sitting against the wall; another Astartes, stocky but slump-shouldered. ‘Rafen, of the Blood Angels,’ he offered.

The other man shot him a doleful look. He was dusky-skinned and drawn. ‘Tarikus. Doom Eagles. Not that those names have any meaning in this place.’ Misery laced every word.

‘How long have you been here?’ Rafen asked, coming closer.

‘I think three years. Perhaps five. The passage of time here is difficult to reckon.’

‘Five years?’ The Blood Angel was shocked.

Tarikus looked away. ‘Others have been here longer. Vetcha claims he has been a prisoner for more than a decade, but I give no credence to anything he says.’

Rafen shook his head. ‘Impossible. These brothers… if they were all missing, it would have been noted. Your Chapters would come looking…’

The Doom Eagle looked back, and this time with cold anger. ‘Do they remember us, cousin?’ He scrambled to his feet, suddenly animated, stabbing his finger at the ceiling, pointing towards the sky. ‘Do they remember? No! Because we are all dead!’

Rafen stood his ground. ‘I do not understand. Why would that accursed traitor do this? Why gather battle-brothers as if they were tokens in a game of regicide?’

‘Now you are dead too.’ Tarikus ignored his question, turning his back, stalking into the deep shadows. ‘You have fallen into this light-forsaken hell with the rest of us.’

Rafen frowned. Tarikus’s Chapter were known for their dour and melancholy outlook on the universe, but even that ingrained character was beyond what he showed now. The man seemed drawn and haggard in a way that no battle could have wearied him. ‘What is Bile doing here?’ Rafen insisted. ‘You, Vetcha, all the other Astartes… What does he want with you?’

‘To do what he does best,’ grated the other man, reaching up to scratch at his shoulder. ‘To bring pain.’ Rafen glimpsed a livid, deep burn on the warrior’s chest, wet with fluids. ‘We are his playthings. The raw fodder for his experiments.’ He spat the last word with venom.

‘Tarikus, I must know,’ he said. ‘Cousin, help me.’ Rafen offered his hand. ‘If we are to share this cell–’

Tarikus snorted. ‘This isn’t a cell, Blood Angel.’

There was a grinding noise from beneath their feet, and suddenly the floor fell away and they were tumbling into blackness.

He snapped back to awareness at the sound of the Doom Eagle screaming. Rafen tried to push forward, but gravity itself was turned against him. He lay sprawled against a canted platform, the humming murmur of a g-field generator whirring behind him.

The Blood Angel blinked to clear his vision. He saw a space that was half cavern, half abattoir, lines of blood-slick chains hanging from a curved ceiling, tiles across the floor slick with jets of water sluicing remains down into drain gutters. He turned his head with effort and found Tarikus on another platform, three figures crowded around him. Two of them he knew – the strange hulking men that he had spotted as he arrived. The third was of the same mass and build, but oddly proportioned. It turned to him and he felt confusion.

The face that looked at him was strangely beautiful, almost womanly, but with a cruelly masculine cast that could not be fully hidden. The androgyne moved its hand away from Tarikus’s chest, over the place where Rafen had glimpsed the bloody burn. A horrible thought occurred to him; the Doom Eagle’s wound had been self-inflicted.

He blinked, unsure of the flash of something maggot-white he saw vanishing beneath Tarikus’s flesh. The other Astartes screamed again and tried to move, but like Rafen he too was pressed fast against a gravity frame, the power of a hundred times Terra-standard g-forces holding him like a butterfly pinned to a board.

The androgyne came towards him, and it smiled. ‘I am Cheyne,’ it told him. Its voice was high and musical, incongruous from such a towering figure. ‘I welcome you.’

Another of the figures returned from a shadow cradling a squealing, doughy mass in his hands. The size of his fist, the thing resembled a mutant larva, one end a mouth of questing cilia ringed with black eye-spots, the undulating body wet with clear slime.

Cheyne flicked its wrist and a wide push-dagger emerged from a slide holster. ‘This gift,’ it said, ‘this is for all our guests.’ The androgyne glanced at Tarikus. ‘You may think you can divest yourself of it. You are mistaken.’

Rafen pressed with all of his might, struggling to push away. Cheyne seemed amused by the strain upon his face, and ripped open the Space Marine’s undershirt, enough to reveal the flesh of his breast. It drew a curved blade and spun it about playfully.

‘Welcome,’ Cheyne repeated, and slashed a deep cut down the Blood Angel’s chest. Before he could react to the shock of pain, the other hulking man rammed the maggot’s head into the new wound and let it wriggle into the incision.

Rafen felt the thing burrowing into his flesh and cried out, echoing the Doom Eagle before him.

CHAPTER TEN

Sweat drenched Rafen’s body and he reached up, pushing matted, slick threads of hair away from his face. The inside of his cell reeked with perspiration and stale seawater. Outside, night had fallen and the constant, chilling winds were howling around the prison complex, but in here, the air was thick and heavy from Rafen’s exhalations.

In the gloom, he gingerly probed the great scab across the wound on his chest where the maggot-thing had dug deep; the shock of pain that hit back at him struck the breath from his lungs and made him dizzy. It was a searing agony, but it was an improvement. After Cheyne’s thugs had thrown him into this iron box, he had tried to dig the parasite out, finding bundles of milk-white threads already worming into his chest and towards his primary heart. He pulled at them and then remembered nothing. So great was the pain that came in the wake of that action, it hammered him into a daze.

The thing moved beneath his skin and the feel of it made the Blood Angel retch. This violation sickened him beyond words, and all he wanted was a blade, even a dull sliver of metal, something, anything to cut it from him.

Panting, he took in a shuddering breath. He wanted to believe that the powerful Larraman cells coursing through his bloodstream from his bio-implants would reject the parasitic organism, but he did not expect the agents of Fabius Bile to be so easily thwarted by such a well-documented factor of Astartes physiology. Bile had been an Apothecary of high rank to the Emperor’s Children in the age of the Great Crusade, long before the heresy of the arch-traitor Horus; what he knew of the intricacies of the gene stock of Space Marines could doubtless fill libraries.

Rafen felt cold, even in this heat. His captors had given him shapeless, rough-hewn robes, and now he gathered them in. The warrior had stripped lines of cloth from them to fashion bindings for his feet and hands. The hooded mantle smelled of other men’s deaths.

A sound reached him. A tapping, metal upon metal, issuing out from the plasteel mesh bonded over the vent channel in the corner of the cell that served as a waste channel. Rafen slid closer to it, his nose wrinkling at the stink, and listened. After a few moments he recognised the pattern of the noise. A regular series of short and long reports, like the ancient Orsköde battle language. Some Chapters still used the cipher, and it was known to him. He tapped out a return, and presently a low voice threaded out to him.

‘Still alive, Blood Angel?’ Rafen had to strain his ears to capture the whispered words beneath the sombre howl of the winds outside.

‘Tarikus?’ He hadn’t seen the Doom Eagle after Cheyne’s warriors had dragged him away into the darkness. ‘Where are you?’

‘A few cells down. The waste feeds drain into a common channel. Too small for anything larger than a rodent, but enough to carry a voice.’

Rafen settled to the floor, resting against the wall. He felt as if the parasite was sapping all his energy. It seemed an effort just to stand on two feet. ‘No prison can hold an Astartes…’ he said, with more bravado than he felt.

Tarikus was silent for a moment. ‘And now you will ask me how I plan to escape, is that it?’ The Doom Eagle snorted. ‘Does Bile think that because we shared a little pain, we can now be confidantes?’

‘I do not doubt that there is a machination to every deed done by that traitor scum. Everything I have seen since I came to this island has likely been some kind of lesson for me.’ He winced as the maggot shifted in his breast.

‘I won’t trust you!’ Tarikus snapped, the sentiment coming out of nowhere. ‘Kelleth escapes and perishes on the rocks, and you arrive to take his place only moments later? Does Bile think us all fools?’

‘Kelleth…’ Rafen weighed the name. ‘He was the one who died under the sentry guns?’

‘A battle-brother of the Stone Hearts,’ came the reply. ‘Shattered now.’

‘I am no spy.’ Rafen bristled at the insult. ‘Believe me, Doom Eagle, there is no man in this blighted place who wishes that bastard Fabius dead more than I!’

The other Astartes fell silent again, and after a while Rafen began to think that Tarikus had no more to say; but then he spoke again. ‘How did they take you?’

Rafen hesitated. Fabius had to be listening to every word they said. He was a thorough and calculating man, and even though this makeshift prison was built from salvage and ruins, the Blood Angel did not question that the so-called Primogenitor would have wired it with scrying tools and monitors of every kind. Then there was the chance, a notion so loathsome that he hated to even consider it, that there was an insider secreted in the prisoner populace – and worse still, that the turncoat could be Tarikus. He sighed; he had been here less than a day and already the place was bleeding the trust from him.

He picked his next words with care. ‘I was aboard a ship of the Adeptus Mechanicus. I had infiltrated it by stealth… I knew the vessel’s master had dealings with Bile, but I did not reckon on his folly. The ship was destroyed attempting to attack the planet. I escaped in a saviour pod, and the splices dragged me from the ocean.’

‘You came here deliberately?’ Tarikus asked.

Rafen nodded. ‘For my sins. And you?’

‘I was captured in the void. A medicae cutter was taking me back to my Chapter’s throne world, Gathis… I had been injured fighting the Necrontyr. The ship was snared and obliterated.’

The Blood Angel thought about the Doom Eagle’s earlier words. ‘Your Chapter believe that you were lost with the cutter.’

‘Aye.’ Tarikus sighed. ‘Every man here has a story of a similar stripe. Bile’s agents picked us off: the injured, the lost, the isolated. Brought us here, and made certain that no one knew of it. We are the vanished, Rafen. The forgotten. The dead still awaiting death.’

The maggot moved again, and Rafen hissed in pain. ‘Rot this thing! Is it some slow murder, this parasite?’

‘No.’ Tarikus seemed weary as he explained. ‘Kelleth believed they are a kind of xenos, or perhaps even a minor phylum of warp-creature. Bile and his New Men use them to regulate us. There is no greater fetter than the one that lives within a man’s flesh.’

‘New Men…’ Rafen echoed the term. ‘I have heard that name before.’

‘Cheyne and the others,’ said the Doom Eagle. ‘The results of more of Bile’s unbound experimentation on human beings. Imagine the inverse of the noble ideals that created we Astartes. Bile’s monstrosities are psychotics with prowess and strength that rival ours. But they are our antithesis, gene-adapted killers without souls, without conscience or morality…’ Tarikus paused again. ‘You asked a question in the chamber, do you remember? You asked what the renegade is doing here.’

Rafen crouched down, speaking in muted tones. ‘You know the answer?’

‘I have an idea,’ came the reply. ‘You must have seen the tower, up above the ridge. Inside that building there are… chambers. Places of such horror and pain.’ Tarikus’s voice took on a dire timbre. ‘Some of us taken from the cells never return. Others are tortured for days at a time and are brought back as shadows of their former selves. As warnings to the rest of us.’ He took a slow breath. ‘Imagine a gifted child studying the complex weave of a tapestry. He wants to both know it and destroy it. He takes it apart, thread by thread. This is Bile’s game with us, Blood Angel. He dismantles men as if they were puzzles made for his amusement.’

Rafen’s hands tightened into fists. ‘If he is there, then I will find my way to him. We have unfinished business.’

‘Pray that you do not,’ Tarikus retorted. ‘Slow death and debasement are all that await you.’

Rafen glanced at his dirt-streaked fingers, thinking of the crystal vial. ‘I have no choice,’ he whispered.

The other Space Marine continued, voicing his thoughts. ‘We are kept isolated from one another. Months can pass and we never see the face of another Astartes. Bile knows that keeping us apart prevents us from plotting… But I think he may allow us to talk just so he can mock us from his aerie.’ He sighed. ‘No man has ever escaped from this place.’

‘I do not seek escape–’ began the Blood Angel; but then, in the distance, Rafen heard an abrupt rattle of bone on metal. It was coming closer.

‘The guardians approach,’ hissed Tarikus. ‘If they catch us speaking to one another, they will flood our cells with rot-bane and scour our lungs.’ The chemical gas was potent and could kill a Space Marine in large enough doses.

The Doom Eagle spoke quickly, suddenly intense. ‘Listen to me, Blood Angel. You must not sleep! Do not allow yourself to dream! They peer into your mind and forge nightmares… Bile has servants cursed by witch-sight. They exert their will upon us as we rest. Do not dream!’ Tarikus’s voice began to fade. ‘And the food… Cheyne laces it with potent, insidious drugs that soften the will! Find protein elsewhere… The lichen on the iron walls. Some even take the meat of a servitor if desperation comes–’

The sound of clawed footsteps clattering over the tops of the cells echoed loudly, and Tarikus said no more. Moving quickly, Rafen slid across to the flat panel of a sleeping pallet that was the chamber’s only furniture. He drew himself upon it as capering shadows moved past the armourglass window, dwelling for a moment to glare at him before moving on. He could make out only shadows.

Then there was only the howl of the wind, rattling loose rivets in the walls and pushing scours of gritty sand through the passages of the gaol. With effort, Rafen worked to push his thoughts away from the burning, unremitting pain in his breast and tried to find a moment of focus; but he could not.

His mind remained clouded with a churn of emotions, at once eager to find his prey, but sickened by what he had experienced and tormented by the hollow eyes of the others imprisoned with him.

They gathered in the makeshift arming chamber, the hull of the Neimos creaking gently as it knifed through the waters of the sea. They all went unhooded, but only Eigen was without the rest of his wargear; the injured Flesh Tearer was stripped to the waist, his torso wrapped in diagonal bands of bio-active bandages. An auto-doser clung to his bare right arm like a fat brass tick, slowly administering supplemental anti-venoms to counteract the effect of toxins left in his system by the talons of the tyranid kraken. He sat upon an ammunition crate, his gaze scanning the rest of the Astartes.

‘This has not become a democracy,’ Brother-Sergeant Noxx was saying, addressing the psyker Ceris. ‘We are not a petty council of civilians arguing over every tiny decision. This is an order. I am in command, and so will it be.’

Ceris’s face was set in a grimace. ‘I respectfully offer an alternative.’

The cleric-medic Gast shook his head. ‘Did you do so when Rafen was commander of this mission? I saw no questioning of orders when a Blood Angel called the shots. Now it is a Flesh Tearer at our lead, you are unhappy?’

Ceris shot Gast a hard look. ‘Just because you did not see me sound out Sergeant Rafen does not mean I did not challenge him.’ He looked away. ‘This mission is too important to be prosecuted with high emotion. Choices must be made with cold logic, or else we will fail.’

On the other side of the room, Ajir gave a sullen nod. ‘If I have learned anything about my witch-kin brother, it is that Ceris would say these things even if the Lord Sanguinius himself were to command us.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Noxx. ‘And I welcome your input.’ He said it in a way that seemed casual, and yet a threat all at the same time. ‘But I choose not to listen.’

Puluo, the burly, taciturn warrior with the heavy bolter across his back, spoke for the first time since they had gathered. ‘You are certain he is dead?’

None of them spoke for a long moment. Then Ceris let out a slow breath. ‘Certain… is not the word I would use. The ways of the warp do not often lend themselves to certainties. It is the nature of the immaterial realm to forever be in flux.’

‘Then what are you certain of, psyker?’ demanded Kayne. The younger Space Marine came forward in two angry steps, ignoring Turcio as the other Blood Angel reached out a hand to stop him. ‘Tell us!’

Ceris met Kayne’s fuming glare. ‘I sense no hint of Brother-Sergeant Rafen’s mind-trace. In the wake of the kraken’s attack, there was pain and anguish from the animal, and there was confusion after the destruction of Zellik’s psi-gem… When the mists cleared and I had a moment to focus, I could not sense him. Rafen may be outside the range of my awareness, or he may…’ Ceris paused. ‘The oceans may have taken him to the deeps.’ He gestured at the air. ‘I have tried to spread my senses thinner, wider, but beyond there is only a telepathic thicket. The closer we get to the fortress, the more clouded the warp becomes.’

‘Bile’s island is protected from the tyranids by more than material means,’ said Turcio darkly.

‘Nothing new is brought to this,’ said Noxx, his irritation showing through. ‘We talk in circles.’

Ceris shook his head. ‘You must listen to me, sir. Our options close to us. We must contact the Tycho and the Gabriel and advance the kill order. Dynikas V must die. There is no other way open to us now. We cannot risk failure.’

Eigen felt a surge of annoyance. ‘I can still fight! Sove can do the same, if we wake him from his healing trance!’

Gast frowned, uncomfortable at the suggestion. ‘Possibly…’

‘Brother Ceris is not talking about numbers of warriors,’ said Puluo. ‘He’s talking about the mission being compromised.’

‘Explain!’ snapped Kayne.

After the Astartes had driven off the kraken, the Neimos had ventured into a network of canyons along the seabed, masking the submersible’s course at the cost of speed and time; a tactic made necessary by the movement of surface vessels in the area. ‘There’s a chance Rafen could have been captured. A slim one. But still a possibility we should not ignore.’

Kayne’s expression tightened. ‘Brother, do you suggest that the sergeant would be broken so quickly by Bile and his men? You think he would spill his guts to them?’ The Space Marine’s lip curled. ‘He would die first!’

‘This is Fabius Bile we speak of,’ ventured Gast. ‘The master of a million horrors and a high champion of Chaos. We cannot know what dire methods he has at his fingertips.’

‘Our target may know we are coming,’ said Ceris.

Noxx folded his arms. ‘Bile defiled a holy relic of all Sons of Sanguinius and fled Baal after killing our kinsmen. Of course he knows we are coming! Such a crime could never go unanswered. But what if he does? What if he drained Rafen dry of all he knows? It does not matter. Our mission does not change. We must find Bile and kill him, to the cost of all our lives if the need is such. Sergeant Rafen gave that order. I still hold to it.’

‘I do not disagree,’ said the psyker, ‘I only question the means. If this planet is bombarded with cyclonic torpedoes, nothing will survive.’

‘Including us,’ said Ajir. ‘So we perish either way. But if we succeed in a ground strike, then the crews of those two ships will not need to follow us to hell.’

Eigen nodded. If the Gabriel and the Tycho closed to deliver their lethal payloads, both vessels would be ripped apart by the orbital gunskull flotillas and the multiple remote guns dotted across the other island chains. ‘And if we do not, they will bombard the planet anyway.’

Ceris looked in his direction. ‘By then it may be too late. Every moment we delay, we give Bile the chance to prepare an escape. A hidden ship, perhaps, or a warp-gate like the one he used to flee the Vitalis Citadel. We all know the enemy will flee if the chance is given to him. He does not have the stomach for a toe-to-toe fight.’

Noxx walked to the centre of the bay. ‘The coward thief who stole the sacred blood must die, he will die. But this cannot be a sanction taken from three hundred kilometres up, with the push of a button from the far end of a torpedo launcher!’ He raised his gauntlet and slowly clenched the fingers. ‘We send in the ships and that will be warning enough for the whoreson. No, the enemy must be seen to be killed by one of us. The vial recovered or denied to the foe. We must do this. Our honour demands no less.’ He looked at all of them in turn, his cold eyes boring deep. ‘If we do not do this, then everything we have gone through, the defeats and the setbacks, the oaths we swore, the brothers we have lost, the warriors crippled and killed along the way… all of it means nothing!’

‘And honour is more important than life.’ Ceris pitched his words evenly.

‘Are you making a statement, brother?’ asked Turcio. ‘Or is it a question that you ask us?

‘The order has been given.’ Ceris did not look at him, resignation in his tone. ‘Does it matter?’

Noxx turned away, the expression on his face making it clear that the conversation was at an end. He glanced at Kayne. ‘How far now?’

‘A day, no more,’ said the Blood Angel. ‘Our course through the undersea trenches will bring us out close to the location of the enemy’s island fortress. With the blessing of the Emperor and Sanguinius, we will be able to bring the Neimos in upon them before any perimeter defences are triggered.’

The Flesh Tearer’s head bobbed. ‘Then, kinsmen, I suggest we all employ the time remaining to us wisely. Prepare your wargear and yourselves. Look to the rites of battle. Be ready.’

Gast’s eyes narrowed. ‘And Sove? You want him able to fight? He still needs to heal, lord.’

‘I know,’ said Noxx. ‘But we are close to the end of this now, and if I allowed him to sleep through it, he would curse me from here to the Eye of Terror. We need every man, every sword and gun.’

‘Ave Imperator,’ intoned Puluo.

The rest of the squad repeated the words; Ceris was the last to speak.

The words of Tarikus fresh in his mind, Rafen let the catalepsean node implanted in his brain tissue allow him to skate along the borderline between sleep and wakefulness; the effect was strange, but known to him. Time seemed to pass at accelerated rates, hours compacting into moments. Cast through what seemed to be a bullet hole in the high roof of his cell, a shaft of cold moonlight advanced doggedly across the metal floor of the cramped compartment, and the Blood Angel watched it. Behind the moon that reflected that light, hidden from detection, were the strike cruisers of his Chapter and their Flesh Tearer allies. In less than twenty solar minutes they could move from concealment and attack this place from high orbit. He wondered if that would be his fate now, to hear the whistling screams of falling warheads and be consumed in a fusion inferno.

Rafen shrugged off the gloomy thought, momentarily cursing the Doom Eagle as if Tarikus’s morose mien had somehow crossed over to him. The burning pain of the parasite had fallen to a dull background ache now, the throbbing of the maggot-thing’s heartbeat a rattle against the cage of his ribs. He vowed that he would tear it from his own flesh with knife, laser or flamer if that was what it took.

The shaft of moonlight faded away as the cold ebbed from the metal walls and the first weak glow of dawn began to appear. With care, Rafen took himself through the series of mental cues and disciplines that lulled the catalepsean node back into its dormant state, and retuned his brain activity to normal. At its full function, the node implant allowed an Astartes to eschew normal sleep; the organ could partition a human brain in quadrants, resting some elements of the grey matter while others remained active. He felt his body return from the torpor of the not-quite-sleep; the sensation was like rising up through water to the surface, and he gave an involuntary grimace as he recalled his ordeal in the ocean.

Rafen got to his feet and crossed to the centre of the cell. He paused there, breathing silently, listening.

After he had been thrown into this cage and sealed within, the Blood Angel had spent several hours scouring every fraction of its surface; it had been a good way to occupy his mind and ignore the pain of the parasite. Rafen examined every shadowed corner, each weld and rivet joint, each patch of rust and corroded bolt-head, learning the exact dimensions of his confinement and probing it for weaknesses. But the outward appearance of the construction belied a deeper truth. The cells here in the pit were built from cargo pods that were space-hardened, canisters designed to be able to survive the destruction of any carrier vessel, and the extremes of heat and cold in the deep void. The oxide-red slashes of corrosion were only surface blemishes, enough to fool the eye at first glance, perhaps even lull the hasty into false hopes. Rafen wondered if such a thing were deliberately engineered on the part of Fabius Bile. Had he chosen to make these cells seem ramshackle and ill-fit for purpose, just to make the brothers incarcerated inside waste their energy and effort on fruitless escape attempts? The Blood Angel imagined the prison complex like some vast game board and the prisoners within it pieces in play for Bile’s twisted amusement.

He heard movement. Iron feet, thudding along the stone ramp. Pausing. The hiss of pressure and fluid gurgles. Rafen smiled to himself and moved towards the hatchway.

Set into the metallic wall at waist height was a short length of iron pipe. A crust of stale matter caked the open end, and below it there was a discoloured patch on the floor. It was a feed channel, little different from those used to introduce nutrient gruel into stables for grox or equines. Rafen remembered Tarikus’s warning about the drug-laced victuals provided by the splices; but he didn’t intend to partake.

During his rest in the cradle of node-sleep, Rafen had also set another of his bio-implants working. The Betcher glands in his mouth were slightly swollen with venom; like the poison sacs of some reptiles, the glands could secrete a toxic fluid that would work like acid. The process of the glands was not a swift one, but in the right circumstances the acid could be spat into the face of an enemy at close quarters or disgorged on to restraints to burn through metal. The implant’s use was not common in his Chapter – there was a perception among his battle-brothers that to deploy it in single combat was somehow beneath them – but it had its uses in the right circumstances.

Rafen knew he had to use the glands now; his body’s reserves would quickly be spent trying to reject the parasite maggot, and he would not be able to fill them again. The toxin would not be effective upon the locking mechanism of the hatch or the armourglass – but it could loosen the fitting of the pipe through the wall. The Blood Angel retched and spat upon the welded joint, and was rewarded by a sizzle of melting metal.

The clanking steps were coming closer. He estimated that it was a single servitor unit toting a heavy drum of gruel, with three splices guarding it. Wisps of acrid smoke rose from the pipe joint and Rafen tested it. The tube rattled and shifted; this would work.

Shadows passed in front of the hatch, and there was the hiss of a pressure hose connecting to the other end of the feed tube outside the cell. Immediately, thick coils of a grey and stale-smelling paste oozed out, spattering on the floor. The implication was that the prisoner should debase themselves and eat like an animal, denied even the most simple dignity.

Rafen gripped the tube with both hands and gave it a savage jerk, twisting it towards him. The pipe resisted, then gave. Outside he heard a clatter of confusion and guttural howls. The Blood Angel tensed, and shoved the pipe hard, forcing the length of it back through the weld-joint. It slowed as it punctured something doughy, and he twisted it again. The flow of paste coughed and choked, quickly replaced by spurts of blood and machine oil. Satisfied. Rafen dragged on the tube and pulled it back into the cell, this time all the way. The last half-metre of the pipe was livid with gore where it had punched into meat and bone.

The hatch was unlocking. Rafen spun the tube around like a fighting staff and stamped the far end flat, forcing the tip into a makeshift blade edge. The doorway rotated up and away, and through the entrance came three splices; a canine, a horned minotal and an ape-like simian. Each had a crackling electro-scythe, and they raised them in attack.

Rafen gave them no time to take the offensive. Holding the far end of the pipe, he spun it up from the ground and used the sharpened end to slash a deep wound across the face of the simian. The splice shrieked as it lost an eye, clapping hands to its face as blood gouted.

The bull-like minotal bellowed and came at him at a rush, lowering its head to present a set of gnarled horns. He was actually disappointed; such a tactic was an obvious one, and hardly a challenge for the Space Marine. Ducking low, he swept the pipe about and slammed it into the second splice’s gut. The tube buckled and broke with the force of the impact, throwing the minotal off its feet and into a crumpled, panting heap.

Rafen discarded what was left of his improvised weapon, dodged a humming scythe-swipe from his periphery and lurched forward, stamping on the bull-man’s throat with his heel so it would not rise again. He contemplated falling into a drop in order to gather up the minotal’s weapon, but he felt strange, light-headed. The parasite was putting him off his stride, trying to slow him by injecting fatigue poisons into his bloodstream. He shook it off and met the last of the three, the canine, as it barked and snapped at him. The dog-thing was almost as big as an Astartes, and it had a wolf’s jaws filled with dagger teeth. It roared and connected with its weapon.

The Blood Angel snarled in pain as a massive surge of voltage rippled through his torso, and he felt the parasite keen in response. The canine opened its mouth wide, coming in to bite out a hank of flesh from his shoulder. Rafen pivoted, thrusting out his hands, and his fingertips caught the beast’s jaws, holding them open. Using the splice’s own momentum against it, he pivoted and ripped the creature’s head open. Flesh parted with a jagged tearing sound, blood fountaining.

By the time the simian had recovered enough to try an attack, Rafen had an electro-weapon in each hand. He parried high and closed the distance, shoving the ape-man back out through the cell door and on to the stone pathway outside. Nearby lay the cooling corpse of a servitor, in a puddle of blood and paste.

No sooner were the two combatants out than laser fire sparked around them, lancing down from overhead. Rafen was aware of one of the bat-like sentinels circling, and with a hard flick of his wrist he threw one of the curved scythe blades, striking it in the chest. Without losing a second, he spun on the simian and punched it to death with flurry of brutal blows to the head.

The creature dropped to the dirt and Rafen stood there, wet with gore and winded. He was unusually short of breath; the parasite again. He would have to compensate for the drag it was placing on his performance – against common thugs like the splices he would still have the advantage even if he fought blindfold, but there were larger threats here. Rafen looked around and got his bearings; the whole complex seemed oddly silent. There were no sirens, no cries of alarm. Only the steady moan of the winds.

He sought and found the top of the tower, the place Tarikus had seemed so fearful of, just visible over the lip of the crater. He nodded to himself. That was his target. The Blood Angel broke into a sprint, weaving through shadows as he went.

A real foe stood waiting for him at the rise of the slope, just in front of a heavy iron portcullis guarding a tunnel into the hillside. The figure shrugged off a robe of dun-coloured material and kicked it away. Beneath, there was nothing that could be considered clothing as such; instead, the enemy was wrapped in what appeared to be a single long strip of black leather that looped around and around sinuous limbs and a lithe, wiry torso that seemed almost eldar in form. Belts of chain mail and pins made from red steel held the costume together. Webbing hung with small pistols and razor-edged fans dangled across the figure’s chest.

‘Cheyne.’ Rafen slowed and approached carefully. ‘Your prison cannot hold me.’

The androgynous warrior laughed. ‘Your kind are so predictable, Astartes. You all say the same things, and come to regret them. Tell me, is there a special schola during your training that teaches you how to parse such utterances?’ The sexless figure cocked its head. ‘Do your mentors teach you all the ways to sound pompous and portentous?’

‘It’s a gift,’ Rafen replied, with a sneer. ‘And it seems I have tired of your voice as quickly as you tire of mine.’

‘Oh, good,’ said Cheyne. ‘Less talk, then. More fight.’ The androgyne spun in a pirouette and discarded the weapons vest, presenting Rafen with the palms of its hands. It nodded at him. ‘No weapons. Just for the sport of it.’

The Blood Angel’s eyes narrowed. In the centre of Cheyne’s hands there were vertical slits like some strange stigmata. He was still processing this when the wounds abruptly opened and disgorged long, wet daggers of grey bone. Cheyne attacked with slashing, downward swoops and Rafen dodged, hearing the bony awls whistle through the air. He threw out a sweeping kick that Cheyne easily escaped, and the androgyne gave a little gasp of pleasure. It seemed to think this was some sort of game.

‘Enjoy this while you can, freak,’ Rafen spat.

Cheyne pantomimed a hurt expression. ‘Such harsh words. You cut me deeply.’

‘I intend to.’ Rafen stabbed out with his remaining electro-scythe and missed by the slightest of margins. The shock-nimbus creased Cheyne’s shoulder and the warrior wriggled as the charge passed through it. The voltage was high, but the androgyne took it with a hiss.

‘You think you’re a cut above,’ Cheyne said, dancing about him, careful to keep beyond close combat range. ‘But the truth is, your kind is old, Space Marine. I am the new, dear Rafen. I am a New Man.’

‘Man?’ echoed the Blood Angel. ‘That’s open to debate.’

‘I thought your Chapter understood beauty. Don’t abhor me because I am so exquisite,’ it retorted, with a cackle. ‘It cheapens everything.’

Cheyne attacked again and Rafen managed to avoid taking cuts across his torso and arms; but the hafts of the extruded bone blades still slammed into his head, and the impact almost dazed him. The maggot turned in Rafen’s chest, and he resisted the urge to strike at it. The parasite seemed to sense the Chaos champion’s proximity.

‘Your design is outmoded,’ Cheyne goaded. ‘In ten thousand years, the pattern of the Adeptus Astartes has not been improved upon. I, on the other hand, am the product of genius. Not just the next generation, much more than that.’ It gasped again as it threw a strike at Rafen’s legs, the tip of a blade slashing skin. ‘A step up. Astartes Novus Superior. New and improved.’

‘So you say,’ Rafen replied, catching one of the bone-blades in his hand. He punched it with the pommel of the scythe weapon and the bony matter snapped along the midline, eliciting a chug of pain from the androgyne. ‘Not so improved, by my lights.’ He eyed the portcullis; Cheyne was keeping him from it, holding him off. He guessed there were more of these New Men on the way, and realised that this fight had to be finished quickly so he could proceed.

Cheyne’s porcelain-white face was studded with beads of sweat. The broken blade retreated into the palm and the androgyne spun, presenting the other bone-weapon in a duellist’s approach. ‘You are strong,’ it told him, ‘but you’re weak inside.’ It tapped its head, eyes wide and wild. ‘In here. Hollow. You follow empty dogma and the worthless mythos thrown up around a corpse on a throne, because you have nothing left.’ Cheyne tittered. ‘Your world is static, Blood Angel. Derelict and decaying. But mine? Mine looks forward, it grows and evolves. This is the gift of the Master Fabius! He has seen the past and now he builds the future.’

Rafen’s battle rage churned inside him at the affront of this creature. ‘Still you prattle, despite your earlier words. Is that all you can do?’ A prickling fire was building in his chest, spreading from the infection site.

‘Do I anger you?’ Cheyne retorted. ‘It would appear so! If only you could be like me, and fight with a smile upon your lips–’

Ignoring the dull pain, Rafen feinted right and then at the last moment, reversed. He stepped inside Cheyne’s guard and struck. The androgyne reacted, swiftly enough to stop the Blood Angel’s killing blow from reaching its conclusion; but still it was a palpable hit, and the tip of the scythe blade ripped across the New Man’s cheek, opening it wide.

‘You are right,’ Rafen retorted, over Cheyne’s howl of pain. ‘I could never smile so broadly as you do.’ Taking the moment, he advanced and struck at his opponent, slamming it to the ground.

The Blood Angel bent and grabbed a length of the leather wrapping, dragging Cheyne up. They were close to the edge of the ramp, and there was a good distance to the bottom. At the very least, throwing the androgyne off would break many bones, even if it were as hardy as an Astartes. Cheyne tried to stab him, and he caught the other blade, holding it away. Blood flowed where his fingers held on tightly.

Then Cheyne’s cries shifted and became something else. Laughter.

Rafen’s ire returned at the sound of the creature’s mocking tones. ‘You are amused? Make it last, freak! Your future ends here!’

‘Oh,’ gasped Cheyne, ‘I think not.’ When Bile’s warrior spoke again, it was a sound so unholy that Rafen felt sickened to his core. It was, if such a word could be used to describe so abhorrent a noise, a prayer of sorts. A summoning, an entreaty, a litany; but not one to the vile gods that this creature worshipped.

The mantra was for the parasite. At the sound, the maggot erupted into violent life, and suddenly Rafen’s blood turned to fire. Every nerve ending in his body screamed at once, plunging him into the embrace of an agony that shredded all will. He released his grip on Cheyne, everything else forgotten. There was so much pain, such a galaxy of it within him, that Rafen could do nothing but stand in the core of it and try to endure.

He heard howling, and knew that he was the first in the chorus.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The hulking New Men dragged the Blood Angel into the tiered room through a heavy airlock door, and threw him hard to the floor. The hatch slammed closed behind them with a hissing whine and the Space Marine gasped in a breath as his eyes focused. The first thing he saw were the eldritch symbols etched into the grey tiles that spread out all around him, the curse-glyphs, warding runes and eight-point stars. He recoiled from them reflexively, disgust welling up in him, and the New Men laughed to see it.

Rafen tried to moderate his breathing, but it was difficult. The action of the maggot in his chest was turning his enhanced Astartes physiology against him; the functions of the implants in his body warred with his base human biology. He fought to hold off the shaking in his hands caused by cell imbalances in his blood chemistry, blinked and tried to keep himself steady even as his normally perfect equilibrium was disrupted. The thing was pumping poison into him with every heartbeat. He glared at Cheyne, who returned the look with malice, the Chaos champion twitching with pain as the servitor trailing at its heels used bio-wire to stitch the cut sections of its face back together.

Cheyne had done this to him, called the parasite to full potency with that strange mnemonic it had spoken. The pain ebbed and flowed, but only in small increments. Rafen now understood fully the insidious purpose of the implanted larva; it made chains and fetters obsolete. Any prisoner so tainted with one of these things was on an invisible leash; only a word need be spoken, and untold agony was let loose.

‘You wanted to come here, didn’t you?’ slurred the New Man, flecks of blood and spittle issuing from the androgyne’s ruined mouth. ‘Do you like what you see?’

Rafen glanced around, uncertain of why he had been brought into the tower after Cheyne had seemingly done so much to prevent his entry. He was immediately struck by the similarity between this room and the co-opted hospital his squad had found aboard the tau asteroid; there was more light in here, though, and on some level Rafen wished it was otherwise.

Benches and worktables were arranged in neat rows, surrounded on all sides by circular tanks of murky fluids. Objects moved inside the tanks, and Rafen hesitated to peer too closely at them. Where the place of cruelty inside the tau colony had seemed abandoned and disordered, this laboratory was regimented and careful in aspect. A pair of servitors, their faces blank and sealed things with only eyes still open, moved around the edges of the room, performing tasks that Rafen could only guess at.

Light struck from harsh biolume strips set into the ceiling, yellow colour falling upon the tiled floor and the metal-sheathed walls. The illumination glittered on cowled trays of bladed implements that were more wicked than any fighting knife. The warrior wondered if he would be able to make it to them before the pain came again.

Overhead, racks made of clawed iron talons held polymer bags filled with splashes of liquid and matter that could only be human meat. On many of the operation tables, more plastic shrouds hid lumpy shapes made of pasty flesh. The smell of blood was constant; not the stench of a killing field, but the half-masked stink of a sanatorium, a place where death was brushed away as inconsequential.

Rafen shook his head to dispel the dizzy sensation in his skull. His thoughts were like mud, thick and slow. He took a few steps and became aware of a glass disc set into the floor beneath him. He looked down and his gut twisted in response. Through the thick lens, he could see into a misted nest of stringy, mucal matter; dozens of maggots of varying sizes writhed blindly over the top of one another, cilia grasping at nothing. He turned away in disgust, feeling the weight of his own unwanted passenger upon him. Rafen wondered if the parasite was gaining mass or if it were just his misperception. He felt a stab of dread; would it grow to consume him from the inside out? Or would it do something far worse, make his flesh its own?

He forced himself to look again, and this time he saw something else. Down, under the wriggling carpet of maggots, drenched in wet ropes of gel… Something made of bone armour and pasty flesh, coiled in on itself, horribly bloated.

‘A tyranid zoanthrope,’ said a dark, rich voice. ‘At least, it was at the beginning, before I took it, married its flesh with a biovore archetype, altered it to better serve my ends. Now it is both less and more than it was.’

Rafen knew that voice. Knew it and hated it.

He looked up to see a figure stride into the chamber through another hatch on the far side of the laboratory. As tall as any warrior-born of the Adeptus Astartes, the new arrival dominated the room with a black presence that was the very antithesis to warriors of noble character, such as Rafen’s master Commander Dante. The man – although in truth he had long since given up any claim to that appellation – wore a voluminous long coat that hung upon him like a cloak. Leathery and cracked, it was a patchwork thing sutured together from the flesh of the dead. The Blood Angel saw the still-screaming faces of Astartes stitched into the cut of the coat, flesh cut from men who had perished at this killer’s hands thousands of years before Rafen was born.

This mantle was drawn tight over heavy power armour in the style of the aged Maximus pattern, but reforged and remade into something unholy. Once the armour had shown the colours of brilliant gold and imperial purple, but now the tarnished shell was the tint of dark wine, the ceramite sheath soaked in such tides of shed blood that the porous surface had taken on their shade.

At his back, the hulking figure’s silhouette was unbalanced by a large brass construct that clung to him like a giant, predatory scarab beetle. Its claws and talons were hidden away, retracted, but atop it bulbous pipes and glassy tubes arrayed with skulls worked quietly, pumping resinous ichor with wet and breathy murmurs. With a solemn, heavy tread, the new arrival advanced into the light, showing a hard face of deep-set eyes to the Space Marine. White, wiry hair framed an expression of indolent interest.

‘What have we here?’ he said.

This man, this traitor, had once walked the stars as a soldier of the Emperor’s Children, but like the rest of his dishonoured Legion he had taken the coin of the heretic warmaster Horus and embraced the riot of the Chaos Gods. Some held that he had already been on that road even before Fulgrim’s warriors had broken their covenant with Terra, experimenting on his fellow Astartes during his service as an Apothecary. Once freed of any moral codes, those foul deeds had quickly spread wider, as he tormented and experimented on anyone luckless enough to cross his path; and then, even as Horus was defeated and Fulgrim hounded into the Eye of Terror, this twisted genius earned the traitor’s brand a second time, divorcing himself from the corrupted Emperor’s Children to go renegade – and all so he could delve ever deeper into the perverse possibilities of his dark flesh-arts. His catalogue of atrocities touched beings on thousands of worlds.

The pain of the parasite seized at Rafen’s chest, but he ignored it as his rage threatened to ripple over the bulwarks of his self-control. If it had been possible to kill with the venom of words alone, then Rafen would have spat death. ‘Fabius Bile,’ he growled, ‘by the God-Emperor, I name you traitor!’

‘Of course you do,’ Bile replied, unruffled by the sheer force of odium that welled up from the Space Marine. ‘You and so many others. It’s tiresome. I sometimes hope one of you will say something different to me.’ He showed a mouth of tombstone-grey teeth, amused at himself. ‘After a hundred centuries, I yearn for a break in the monotony.’

Rafen took a step towards the tray of medical blades, but Cheyne was suddenly there, blocking his path, licking its lips in eagerness for another combat. Blood was still seeping from the gash on its cheek. The Astartes was aware of the other New Men behind him, taking up battle stances.

Bile studied his minion and nodded. ‘You did that to him, eh? Even with the leech in you. Such fortitude.’

‘I’ll be more than happy to demonstrate my skill to you, turncoat.’

Cheyne giggled at the idea of that, but Bile shook his head. ‘No fighting in here. Not today.’ The twisted scientist stepped down, coming closer. ‘Not yet, at least. Not before my questions are answered.’

‘I will give you nothing,’ Rafen spat. ‘nothing but your ending! You will not escape this time!’

Bile examined him. ‘This time?’ His brow furrowed. ‘Have we met before, whelp? I confess I do not recall.’

‘I was there when you fled Baal, like the coward you are!’ snarled the Blood Angel. ‘You did not even have the courage to face us in combat!’

The renegade showed no sign of recognition, and gave an arch sniff. ‘I have not lived so long by taking on fights I cannot win, not when another avenue is open to me. Your kind, on the other hand, seem to make it a point to engage in battles that are beyond you.’ He gestured around. ‘Hence your internment here, yes?’

‘Send your dogs away, traitor, and we will see who is beyond who.’ Rafen’s eyes flashed, the muscles in his hands tensing.

Bile ignored the retort, glancing at Cheyne. ‘This is the one dragged from the ocean. Such a gift, but I am unwilling to accept it without due consideration. Where did he come from?’

The New Man glared at Rafen. ‘Answer the Master’s question, or there will be pain, Blood Angel.’

Rafen returned the angry look. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t already know.’

‘Perhaps,’ admitted Cheyne, with a laugh. ‘But I want you to say it.’

‘I came from Baal,’ Rafen replied. ‘I came here to kill all of you.’ He looked back at Bile. ‘To give you the punishment you so richly deserve for your insult to my Chapter.’

‘He said he came alone,’ added Cheyne. ‘Aboard the ship of that fool Zellik.’

The Blood Angel said nothing; the androgyne had confirmed what he had known, every word spoken in the prison complex was heard by Cheyne’s spies.

‘Did he?’ Bile mused. ‘A lone Astartes on a quest for vengeance, out to avenge an affront.’ He drifted away, towards another lock-hatch. ‘What could he be so upset about?’ The renegade spoke a whispered code-word and the hatchway ground open. Bile stepped through, gesturing languidly to his second. ‘Bring him.’

Rafen felt a sharp impact in his back and turned to see the other two New Men, halberds with multiple blade-heads raised and pressing into his flesh.

Cheyne followed his master, beckoning Rafen. ‘Come, come. I promise you, Space Marine, there are sights to see here that you would not wish to overlook.’

As much as he hated to admit it, the Blood Angel’s interest was piqued. More than anything, he wanted to release the fires of his Chapter’s gene-curse, the dark berserker potential of the Red Thirst; he wanted to let himself become a whirlwind of death and tear this place apart. But there were the other voices in his mind, the remembrance of words from his trusted mentor Koris and his liege lord Dante. He could not unchain his rage, not yet. There was the mission first.

Grim-faced, he followed Cheyne through the hatchway.

‘You are certain?’ Noxx’s voice was pitched low so that it would not carry across the command deck of the Neimos. The Flesh Tearer leaned in and peered over the Blood Angel’s shoulder at the ornately-framed pict-screen.

Puluo nodded gravely. ‘Wouldn’t speak up if I wasn’t. See for yourself.’

Noxx’s eyes narrowed as he scrutinised the display; the image was of a zone of ocean in the wake of the submersible, a pie-wedge shape filled with rippling lines of grey and black static. It was a sonaric scope, a device that could scry though water using hypersensitive audial sensors that listened for minute changes in the thermocline of the surrounding sea. ‘I don’t see it.’

‘Wait,’ said Puluo. He pointed at a blank sector of the display. ‘Look here.’

After a moment, the screen flickered, and for a split-second, Noxx saw the ghost of a streamlined shape – something like a bullet trailing lines of wire. He froze the image and looked up at the other Astartes. ‘It came back?’

‘It came back,’ Puluo said, with a grim nod.

‘I thought you killed that thing out there.’

Puluo shook his head once. ‘Drove it off. Thought that would be enough.’

Noxx examined the rangefinder dial next to the screen. ‘It’s far behind. Moving slower. Injured.’

‘Not that far behind,’ added Puluo. ‘According to the cogitators, the kraken is more or less matching our speed. If we drop a cog for any reason, it’ll be on us in minutes.’

‘All the more reason for haste, then.’ Noxx went to move away, but Puluo grabbed his arm. ‘What now?’ The sergeant was irritated.

The Blood Angel frowned and tapped the pict-screen. ‘Not done yet. Keep watching.’ He tapped the control tab and the playback went on.

There was a glimmer on the display, this time on the far side of the wedge, and Noxx raised an eyebrow. How had the tyranid moved from one side of the screen to the other so quickly?

The image fuzzed with static and reset itself for another loop of passive scans; and this time the scope presented not one, but five distinct returns. Each the same bullet-shell profile, each trailing streamers of distortion out behind it.

‘It came back,’ repeated Puluo once more, ‘and it’s brought some friends.’

Noxx smiled thinly. ‘Perhaps we ought to be flattered. The bloody horror has to gang up on us just to make a dent.’ He paused, thinking. ‘Tell the servitors to push this tub up to maximum velocity. We need every second ahead of those things we can get, because we’ll have to slow the moment we reach the island.’

‘If we don’t get out of the water quick enough, they’ll be on us,’ said the Blood Angel.

‘Oh, I don’t doubt it,’ Noxx replied. ‘All the more reason for us to take the pace, cousin.’

Puluo nodded again. ‘As if we needed another thing to motivate us.’

He had expected to look upon another chamber of horrors; and in a way, it was exactly that.

Pressed in by the angry shoves of Cheyne’s thugs, Rafen walked on behind the androgyne and its servitor into a long chamber that was more a gallery than it was a room. Set on racks lining the walls or hanging from chains that dangled from the low ceiling, there were trophies upon trophies.

Pieces of ceramite armour, chest plates and pauldrons, gauntlets and helmets, all of them lay mute and broken like so much battlefield debris. On an upper tier, out of reach, there was an armoury of weapons, swords and guns.

What struck Rafen dumb was the fact that everything here was Astartes-issue hardware. It was Bile’s prize room, the spoils stripped from every prisoner he had brought to this secret hell.

He saw the red gauntlet of a Crimson Fist, knuckles cracked and broken; the skull-helm of a Space Wolf; shoulder pauldrons bearing the crests of the Black Dragons, the Salamanders, the Soul Drinkers, and more.

‘This is a lesson,’ said Bile airily, walking towards a bubbling tank of fluid at the far end of the chamber. ‘I like to keep these relics close to hand to remind me of my steps along the road to success.’

Cheyne eyed the Blood Angel. ‘He’s wondering how long this has been going on for. That’s always the first question.’ The androgyne cocked its head. ‘Would it shock you to know that decades have passed since my Master began his work here?’ Cheyne made an amused noise. ‘Now think, abhuman. How many battle-brothers have been declared missing presumed dead in the last ten, twenty, thirty years, hmm? Interesting to consider how many of them might have ended up here, don’t you think?’ It traced long fingers over the cracked, bloodstained brow of an Ultramarines helm.

Rafen tried to find his voice, but he could not. His eyes were locked on a red torso plate that lay as if discarded upon one of the racks. On it, there were wings of gold surrounding a ruby droplet. He moved to it, held it in his hands. For a moment, Rafen had thought the armour was part of his wargear – he imagined everything the splices had stripped from him on the boat had ended up in here somewhere – but cold shock ran through him as he realised this item did not belong to him. With reverence, he turned the plate over and found the roll of honour inscribed on the inverse face. The last among the lists of combat records and warriors who had worn this armour was smudged with soot.

Rafen rubbed the dirt away with his thumb. ‘Brother Kear,’ he husked, reading the name aloud. He did not know the man, but still his anger flared brightly to think that a Chapter kinsman had died in this place before him, alone and forgotten. ‘One more to add to the butcher’s bill,’ he whispered, hoping that his dead comrade’s spirit might still linger to hear him. ‘On my oath, you will be avenged.’ He turned and met Fabius’s sullen stare, his eyes aflame.

‘Look at him,’ Bile said to his lieutenant. ‘So furious, so consumed with rage that he can barely restrain it.’

‘The Blood Angels are known for their reserve,’ Cheyne replied, as if discussing the flavour of a fine wine. ‘Or perhaps it is just a reluctance to fight?’

Rafen drew in a slow and steady breath, imagining the sound the androgyne would make when he strangled the life from it; but still he resisted the urge to attack with tooth and claw. He knew the character of these Chaos-kin; they adored their own arrogance, their convoluted schemes and their inflated sense of superiority. They could not be content with silence or letting their deeds speak for them. Men like Fabius Bile loved to gloat, to twist the knife before the final strike; and as much as he hated to stand here and endure insult after insult, Rafen knew he must if he were to learn the truth behind this hideous place. He quietly added each slur to the tally he would take.

‘I should thank you, Blood Angel,’ said the Primogenitor. ‘You and your foolish kindred. You have helped me advance one of my greatest works by leaps and bounds, and all through the arrogance of one of your battle-brothers.’

‘Caecus…’ The name slipped from his lips before he could stop himself from uttering it.

Bile nodded. ‘A desperate man. Fearful for the future of his Chapter, but proud enough to believe that he alone could save it. Instead, he opened your secrets to me.’ He smiled thinly. ‘He deserves your pity.’

‘He is dead,’ Rafen snarled. ‘Dead by my hand. In the end, he understood the errors he had made. He died accepting that responsibility.’

‘How noble,’ Cheyne tittered.

I will be damned for my hubris. The Apothecae Caecus had said those words. Rafen remembered the weight of his bolter in his hand as he had pronounced a sentence of death upon his kinsman, and the echo of the single gunshot. The Blood Angel wanted to feel hate for the dead man, but he did not. Bile, rot his soul, was right; instead he felt pity for Caecus. In a vain attempt to bolster the numbers of the Blood Angels in the aftermath of the Arkio crisis, the senior Apothecary had dared to dabble in the arcane art of cloning. His failures ultimately led him to make a pact with a biologian who called himself Haran Serpens – fatally unaware that this identity had been usurped by Fabius Bile.

Rafen’s voice was steady but loaded with menace. ‘You stole from us, traitor. You took a piece of our heart. I have come to reclaim it and see you pay for your crimes.’

Bile laughed, and it was an ugly, grating sound. ‘My crimes? They are so many that you would perish of old age before you could list them all. And yet you, a mewling whelp suckling at your Corpse-God’s wizened teat, have the temerity to think you can judge me?’ The scientist’s face stiffened, his eyes glittering like dark gems. ‘Tell me, is this what you seek, warrior?’

A mechanical arm extruded itself from the tarnished brass exo-frame on Bile’s back, and dipped into the churn of the fluid-filled tank. When it returned there was a crystalline phial clasped in the manipulator claw at its tip.

Rafen gasped; the sacred blood! He could almost see the crimson liquid within the tube, the measure of preserved vitae from the Lord Primarch kept alive by the sanguinary priests of his Chapter. His hand came up to reach for it before he could stop himself.

Bile sniffed, and dropped the phial back into the tank, as if it meant nothing. ‘So much value ascribed to something that is, when all is considered, a trivial collection of protein chains, hydrocarbons and base molecular compounds. And yet, in the correct combination, a priceless thing.’ He stepped back and with the sweep of his coat, the rest of the tank’s contents were revealed.

Small knots of flesh hung in suspension, drifting in the sluggish flow. A faint haze of dilute blood marbled the liquid medium, and it was with building horror that Rafen recognised the shapes of the strange organs.

‘You know what these are, yes?’ asked Bile.

Rafen had come to this blighted world believing that the renegade was working some foul plan connected to his Chapter’s genetic legacy; but now he began to understand that the Blood Angels were not alone in this. The objects in the tank were harvested progenoid glands.

Each Space Marine, regardless of Chapter or origin, carried such implants within them after their ascension to full brotherhood. Over time, the progenoids absorbed genetic matter and matured. New gene-seed grown within the organs could then be harvested and reintroduced to a Chapter’s genetic stock, to begin the cycle anew. The progenoids were the very lifeblood of the Adeptus Astartes, the raw material of generations of warriors to come. Some said they were the most precious of treasures, beyond holy relics and sacred lore, because they represented the future.

And here stood Fabius Bile, smugly exhibiting a collection of these priceless elements that he had ripped from the corpses of the warriors he had murdered.

‘I have gathered these for many years,’ he was saying, smiling at the sound of his own voice. ‘At first I stole them or bartered for them from the warriors of the legions that had broken with the Emperor to follow the eightfold path… But I could salvage little. The power of our new gods is so strong that it altered the nature of the Emperor’s Children, the Death Guard, the Night Lords, Word Bearers and all the others–’

‘It corrupted you!’ Rafen spat. ‘Poisoned you!’

‘If you wish,’ continued the scientist. ‘For what I had conceived, admittedly, you might be correct. I needed to find a more… stable source of genetic material. Something closer to the source.’

‘We’ve been collecting for a very long time,’ sighed Cheyne.

Bile went on, in the manner of a teacher addressing a student. ‘It isn’t an easy prospect.’ He walked back towards Rafen, bearing down on him. ‘It’s difficult to appreciate the amount of effort I have put into this work.’

A sickened, horrified sensation built up inside the Blood Angel. Part of him wanted to remain ignorant, to never know the scope of whatever scheme Bile had designed; but this was why he was here, to know the truth. The renegade was enjoying this moment, knowing what Rafen needed to ask even as the question appalled him. ‘What… work?’

‘I have made so many great things,’ Bile said, inclining his head towards Cheyne and the other New Men. In turn, Cheyne made a winsome face that seemed oddly feminine. ‘You were on Baal. You saw my Bloodfiends.’

Rafen shuddered to recall the monstrous vampiric beasts rendered out of Astartes gene-matter. The business of killing the creatures had been hard-fought and bloody. ‘I did. All of those vile abortions were destroyed. We burned every one of them.’

Bile’s nostrils flared with annoyance. ‘Great art so often fails to find an audience with the intellect to appreciate it. Sometimes I am filled with woe to think that no one in this blighted millennum has the wit to see the scope of my brilliance.’ He advanced towards the Blood Angel. ‘I am the Lord of Life, Astartes. Primogenitor and master of the flesh. Not like your silent Emperor, dead-alive behind his army of lesser men, all of them picking at the decayed carcass of the galaxy.’

‘You are less than nothing compared to Him!’ Rafen snapped. ‘You would be ashes and dust if not for His touch upon you! The Emperor made your turncoat Chapter along with all the rest, from the raw stuff of His own flesh!’

‘I have done the same,’ Bile said, his mood shifting again. ‘Built life from fractions into living, breathing magnificence. I brought back the greatest warrior of all time from thousands of years of death…’

Cheyne gave a breathy sigh. ‘Great Horus…’

Bile nodded. ‘I made him anew. Gave life to our warmaster once again–’

Rafen had heard the dark rumours of the Reborn Horus during his time as a Scout Marine, but he had always thought them to be propaganda stories seeded by the archenemy. It seemed he had been mistaken. ‘You created an abomination! A monstrosity so foul that even your own allies could not stomach it to live!’

‘It is a regrettable truth,’ agreed the renegade. ‘That ungrateful thug Abaddon should have welcomed my replicae with open arms… But instead he sent his Black Legion lapdogs to kill it and raze my laboratoria to the ground. He called it “blasphemy”, as if such a thing can exist.’ Bile snorted. ‘Codes, morality, principles, ethics, call them what you will. These things are only abstract constructs invented by weaker men who do not have the courage to forge their own path!’

The Blood Angel turned slightly, stiffening. The renegade was close to him now. He felt a tingling in his fingers as a very real possibility became clear. I can attack him. Another step closer, and Cheyne will not be able to stop me in time. Rafen licked his lips, and his tongue touched the tips of his fangs. What would this fiend’s blood taste like, he wondered?

‘I have known many weak men,’ Bile continued. ‘Many men who believed they had vision, but who were limited by the petty bonds they put upon themselves, of so-called virtue… Your Emperor was one of them.’

‘You have no right to speak of Him!’ Rafen could not help himself; it was impossible for the Astartes to hear his god disparaged and say nothing.

‘No?’ Bile studied him. ‘Unlike you, whelp, I once walked the same ground as your idol. I breathed the same air as him. And I tell you this, without lie or artifice. He never wanted to become what you have made him! He did not wish to be your god-thing. He abhorred such ideals! The slavery of your crippled, blind Imperium would sicken him, if he had eyes to see it.’ He folded his arms across his barrel chest. ‘You may call me traitor, and be right in it, but I have never betrayed what I know to be true. I have never betrayed myself. You, Astartes, and all your kin, betray your Emperor with every moment of your worthless lives!’

‘Your words are worthless to me,’ said the Blood Angel.

Bile continued as if he had not spoken. ‘And yet… He taught me a lesson that for many years I did not understand. In a way, Abaddon brought it back to me.’ The renegade seemed as if he were thinking aloud, almost as if he were alone in the room, voicing his musings to empty air. ‘The lesson is this. The only real crime for those of superlative intellect and great prowess is to allow one’s self to become shackled by mediocrity. The crime is to let your grasp be less than your reach.’ He nodded to himself. ‘To aim low.’

Something in Bile’s tone made Rafen hesitate. ‘What in the name of Terra are you talking about?’

‘I am a patient being. I have worked long and hard, and I know the hardest toil is yet to come, but I embrace it. I know it will be worth the struggle. When I made my New Men, I duplicated the works of Chapter Masters and Primarchs.’ He looked at Cheyne once again. ‘But it was not enough, and so I sought to go beyond that, to clone Horus Lupercal, to echo the work of your Emperor and create a Primarch.’ Bile smiled. ‘But even in that, I was wrong. For, I realised, my destiny is not simply to rise to the level of the Emperor’s skill and duplicate his works, oh no…’ He took a step towards Rafen, and the Astartes could smell rust and the fetor of old, decayed flesh. ‘My destiny is to eclipse him.’

The sheer conceit of the scientist’s words bared Rafen’s teeth in a sneer. ‘Your hubris is vast enough to shroud the sky! And your madness dwarfs even that!’

‘You don’t understand. Of course you don’t. You are limited and without vision!’ He tapped his brow. ‘Think, Space Marine, think! If I could hold the skeins of DNA from an entire Chapter in my hands and mould them like clay, what could I create? A Primarch? Now imagine what I could do with the genetic legacy of not just one, but hundreds of Chapters!’

‘No…’ The beginnings of comprehension crowded into the edges of Rafen’s thought, and he gasped, for the enormity of the ideal was so vast and so horribly monstrous that he could scarcely contain it. ‘No!’

‘Oh, but yes!’ Bile roared, grinning as wide as his wolfish mouth would allow. ‘I am assembling the disparate genetic strains of every single Adeptus Astartes, teasing out the threads of inherited gene-matter that tie them to their Primarchs, and their Primarchs to their creator! The greatest puzzle of them all, Blood Angel! I am going to reassemble the genetic code sequence of the ur-source for all Space Marines! The progenitor of our kind, the father of us all!’

‘The Emperor…’ The atrocity of Bile’s scheme defied dimension. ‘You will build a replicae… of Him?’

‘Can you imagine that?’ Cheyne offered. ‘The most powerful human psychic in history, reborn under the allegiance of the Ruinous Powers!’ The androgyne’s eyes were shining with tears of joy.

‘And you have helped me prepare, Blood Angel,’ said Bile. ‘There are a great many voids in my map of the Imperial genome, but the pure blood of a direct-line son of the Emperor… say, that of the Primarch Sanguinius… will go a long way towards correcting those errors.’ He laughed to himself. ‘And one day soon, when I have gathered enough progenoids and tortured enough of your errant kindred, a child will take its first teetering steps from out of a gene-engine tank, and call me father! A child who will remake the galaxy! A Prince-Emperor free to rule, not hobbled and confined–’

The dazzling magnitude of this horror seemed to dislocate Rafen from the here and now; he felt as if his mind were being pulled away, sucked into the undertow of this gargantuan, hideous concept. The shock of it was almost too much to conceive, as if he were trying to imagine the size of the universe. Could such a thing be done? He had seen much in his service to the Golden Throne, horrors and spectacles of near-infinite scale. Cold crept into his veins as it came to him that of all the minds in the galaxy who might be capable of this sacrilege, Fabius Bile was foremost among them.

The far-distant part of his reeling mind understood this; the more base, animal will within him reacted in a manner in keeping with its nature.

Moving without conscious thought, Rafen leapt at the renegade and slammed into him with such impact that Bile crashed bodily into one of the trophy racks, scattering relics across the metallic decking. Fuelled by a rage as primal as it was potent, the Astartes tore into his enemy, shredding open his skin-coat.

Bile’s hands came up, and the metallic claws of the arcane device on his back exploded outward; but Rafen was already upon his bared throat, his jaws wide. The Blood Angel sank his fangs into the leathery flesh of the renegade’s neck and bit down hard, ripping skin, puncturing veins, crushing cartilage.

A torrent of oil-thick liquid jetted outward in a spray, and Bile’s cry of shocked alarm was a wet, strangling gurgle.

Limbs of flesh and metal stabbed and punched at Rafen’s torso, but he blotted out the pain; all he wanted was the kill, the blood – as foul-tasting and polluted as he had expected it to be – washing down over his chin and his chest. Bile tried to cry out, but his throat was a collapsed ruin.

The New Men were on him now, electro-halberds spitting blue fire that surged agony along his every nerve-ending, but still he ripped at his foe, feeling the meat of Bile’s throat shred to rags in his teeth. The twisted scientist stumbled and lost his footing, crashing to the floor, and still Rafen did not release, slashing and tearing. It was only when Cheyne began to sing the pain-prayer once more that the Blood Angel’s frenzied attack ceased.

The parasite turned over and over, pouring boiling hot agony into Rafen’s chest. Drenched with blood, he screamed and fell away from his prey, doubling up in pain. All the other injuries and hurts topped the dam of his will and flooded in to follow. Rafen reeled and gasped, clinging to the edge of awareness.

‘Get him out of here!’ Cheyne was screaming, its voice pitched high and shrill. ‘Don’t let the whelp perish! He will live to pay for this! Take him away!’

Darkness closed in on Rafen, billowing out from the shadowed corners around him, colour leaching from everything in his vision as his wounds sang with agony. The last image he carried with him into the black was of Fabius Bile twitching and dying, blood still emerging in arcs of brown-red fluids as his ruined throat lay open to the air.

With one last effort, he swilled a mouthful of foul matter and spat it from his lips, ejecting it across the faces of the New Men. The exertion drained him, and he lost his grip, the light breaking into shards that faded like smoke.

CHAPTER TWELVE

A wave of brackish, icy water brought Rafen reeling back to wakefulness, and he spat and flailed, his fists coming up to fight off any attack. Blinking, he could make out only dim shapes. His face was swollen from impact and blood gummed one of his eyes shut.

The mist over his vision began to dissipate, and he determined he was in another of the metal cells, shafts of dull yellow daylight slicing in through vertical gaps in the walls. There were no exits other than a heavy steel door on thick hinges.

‘On your feet, boy,’ said a gruff voice. He heard the clank of an empty bucket as a slump-shouldered figure discarded the container.

‘Vetcha,’ said Rafen, wiping back his unkempt, blood-matted hair. When he looked at his fingers they came away a dirty red. ‘I expected to wake up dead.’

The old Space Wolf gave a wheezing laugh. ‘Thought you’d see the Emperor’s face next, did you? Find yourself in Elysium?’ Vetcha spat. ‘You don’t have the luck, Blood Angel. No man here does. Too easy a way out.’ The blind veteran reached out a gnarled hand and helped him stand. Vetcha’s fingers were bony but strong like rods of iron.

Rafen looked around, his brow furrowing. He could hear a noise coming from beyond the walls of the metal cell; a clashing, banging rhythm of impact after impact. ‘Where have you brought me now, Wolf?’

‘Not I,’ said Vetcha, moving into the shadows to stoop down for something. ‘The New Men dragged you here.’ He chuckled again. ‘My, but you must have angered them to a great degree. I’ve rarely seen them take such delight in kicking a man while he could not fight back.’

‘Aye,’ Rafen replied, hawking up a gobbet of phlegm and blood. He coughed and heard a tinny ping of sound; a broken piece of tooth had gone with it. ‘Did they bring a herd of grox in to trample me?’ He took stock of himself, feeling down his arms and legs with care. Everywhere he laid his hands, Rafen winced with pain from deep, heavy bruising. ‘Why did they not simply slit my throat?’

‘You still do not understand the way of this place, do you?’ Vetcha shook his head, returning with a heavy object wrapped in oil-cloth. ‘No deaths occur on this Light-forsaken island unless they are in order to serve the will or the whim of Fabius Bile.’

‘Fabius…’ Rafen licked his dry, cracked lips, remembering the foul taste of the primogenitor’s blood in his mouth. ‘He has met his end.’

‘Oh?’ The Space Wolf paused. ‘I’ve heard that said more than once, and by men in better shape than you, boy. If I were you, I’d concentrate on staying alive for the next few minutes.’ Outside, the rattling percussion was picking up speed. ‘Just make it to the table first. You’ll know what to do when you get there.’

‘Table? What table?’ Rafen was confused, and the pounding from his head was doing little to dilute the uncertainty.

‘Pay attention!’ snapped the veteran. ‘Listen to me if you want to live!’

Rafen eyed him. ‘You’re my wolf-guide, is that it? But I’ve heard others cast doubt on your motivations, old man.’

‘You are ignorant,’ came the reply. ‘Your edges all sharp, still not worn down… But that will come! Mark my words, that will come to you, if you don’t perish first!’

‘Is that what happened to you?’ Rafen challenged. ‘Did you weaken? One has to wonder how it is you move so freely in this place.’

‘Damn you, I am not free!’ snarled the other Space Marine. ‘Fenris’s Blood, you ungrateful mongrel! I am trying to help you!’ He thrust the cloth-wrapped item into Rafen’s hands with a growl. ‘Here! Take it and be gone!’

The Blood Angel tugged the cover and it fluttered away to reveal a long-handled mass hammer; Rafen knew this kind of implement. It had a specially densified head upon it that could shatter boulders in the right hands – but it was a thing for Chapter serfs and servitors, a tool, not a weapon fit for an Astartes. In his grip, it seemed slight, undersized. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

‘Try not to get killed!’ Vetcha reached into the shadows and yanked at a rusted crank handle; with a groan of metal, the front section of the cell parted and opened out on its hinges.

Rafen’s eyes jabbed him with darts of pain as they adjusted to the sudden influx of light. The Dynikas sun was high in the sky, shining directly down upon him, and he smelled the chemical stink of promethium fluid. The rattling cacophony rose to a peak, and the Astartes saw its origin.

He was on the lowest level of the crater, the curves of the ramped walls rising up around him. On the higher levels, he could see the profiles of the metal cell-chambers ranged like viewing boxes in an amphitheatre. The walls of the cells vibrated in the heat of the day, and he could see window slits open in every one of them. He had an audience of his kinsmen.

But they were not cheering; the clattering sound came from ranks of modificates and New Men lining the floor of the crater all around him. They were beating armoured fists or drawn weapons against their chest plates, the pulse of noise quickening with each passing moment.

He took a careful step forward; in front of the cell was a raised platform made of welded iron plates, and it ended in the chains and cables of a narrow suspensionway – a swinging bridge with barely enough width for him to pass down it. Beyond that, he could see little more than a concrete bunker, its roof torn down and missing.

The stink of stale, decayed fish-flesh was everywhere. This place, he reasoned, must have been part of the old agri-colony’s infrastructure, a section of processing plant involved in the harvest of Dynikas V’s rich bounty; at least, until the tyranid splinter had come and scoured the planet.

He heard a clanking noise and spun to see Vetcha being winched up behind him, dragged away by a crane arm. ‘Don’t wait,’ he called out. ‘The guns are already on you.’

Overhead, the winged sentinels circled, and for the first time Rafen noticed the bright red dots of laser designators moving to and fro across the metal at his feet, tracing up over his legs and torso from the cannons they carried in their claws.

He glanced around, looking for options even as he knew there would be none. There was only one way off the platform – along the bridge. Promethium fires burned around all other avenues of escape, searing blue flames jetting from tank clusters beneath the holding cells. Even if he did make it off, below him was nothing but a crowd of angry mutants. He would take many with him, but in his condition he would not live to take them all.

It was then Rafen noticed another iron cell, another suspended bridge, set off to his right. An identical path, paralleling his. A roar went up as the other cell’s doors opened, and a heavy figure shrouded in robes walked forward with steady, dogged purpose.

‘Now we have some sport,’ said a voice, broadcast in hard echoes across the width of the crater. The words pealed from hundreds of vox horns wired to the misting pillars scattered about the complex.

Rafen spun in place, turning towards the source of the voice, and found another crane-array, this one with a massive iron shovel that had been converted into a mobile viewing platform. Cheyne stood there, the androgyne’s scarred face now forever pulled up in a tight grin, leaning indolently on a double-headed heat axe; but Rafen’s attention was on the figure who stood beside him, laughing with callous amusement.

‘Yes, indeed,’ Fabius Bile leered into a vox relay, ‘now we will have our sport.’

The renegade’s aspect was virtually untouched, the same coat and the hulking shape of the Chaos-forged chirurgeon device upon his back, the same insouciant and superior grin. His throat was shrouded in dark cloth, preventing Rafen from seeing any signs of the wounds he had inflicted, but in the Emperor’s name! How could he still be alive?

The Blood Angel had torn the traitor’s throat open, ripped into him with such violence that another blow might have taken his head from his neck. The vitae he had spilled was enough to drown a man, and yet there Fabius stood, laughing it off. How was it possible? Rafen wondered what foul magicks the renegade had at his command that he could undo such a mortal blow. His fingers tightened on the haft of the mass hammer, remembering the words of his Oath of Moment. He would survive this, and if fate demanded it, he would kill Fabius Bile as many times as it took.

‘Begin!’ shouted Cheyne, and the splices hooted their approval. Rafen saw a flash of motion in the corner of his eye, as the hooded figure on the other platform broke into a run and sprinted on to the swinging bridge.

The Blood Angel threw a look up and saw the sentinels overhead drawing a bead upon him. He grimaced and rocked off his heels, surging off onto the shaking gangway.

The metal bridge swayed and creaked ominously, leaking rains of rusty flakes beneath his heavy footfalls that scattered over the baying audience below him. Rafen was almost at the halfway mark when he felt the cables twang and go taut as extra weight was applied to them. He shot a glance over his shoulder to see a big simian scrambling up after him; and then, the bridge bowed again as two more splices were boosted up by their comrades, tossed high so they could claw over to land ahead of him. The other two resembled some hybrid of man and rodent, pointed rat-like snouts sniffing in his direction. Spindly and thin, they each had forked katar punch-daggers in their clawed hands.

It was not just a race he had to win, then. Without losing an iota of his forward momentum, Rafen spun the mass hammer into a reversed grip and brought it up in a sweeping arc. The heavy head of the tool collided with the base of the first rat-thing’s jaw, smashing it with a wet noise. It stumbled and the Astartes shoved it aside. The assailant tumbled back over the line of the gangway and fell back into the crowd. The second rodentine ducked low and thrust forward the katar in its fist with a sharp hiss. Rafen brought down the haft of the hammer like a baton, striking it hard on the snout. Blood gushed from the splice’s mouth; still moving, the warrior caught the creature’s neck in the crook of his weapon arm and trapped it, dragging it off its feet.

Rafen jerked his elbow closed and snapped the rat-thing’s neck. He slowed a step or so to discard it, and that was enough for the big simian to bound into grappling range.

The crowd roared their approval as the mutant drew him into a bone-crushing embrace, and Rafen’s bruises sang with pain as the pressure came upon him. He felt the simian’s hot, stinking breath on the back of his neck; the thing was easily the size of a Terminator in full battle armour, and the bridge moaned under the weight of the beast’s exertions. Rafen leaned forward, then slammed his head backward, butting his skull into the ape-thing’s face. It cried out and the vice-like grip around him slackened for an instant. It was all the time he needed.

The Blood Angel lurched forward, straining against one side of the swinging gangway, then pushed off in the opposite direction. The suspended bridge flexed and twisted, the footing beneath the simian’s boots suddenly unsteady. Rafen hooked the head of the hammer into a loop of cable and repeated his action; this time it was enough to flip the bridge on its side, and he kicked out, hard.

The ape-thing’s mass did the rest of the work for him. It panicked, surrendering its grip on the Space Marine in order to try and save itself from a fall. Rafen kicked out again, his heel connecting with the impact point of his previous attack. The simian roared with pain and lost balance; in the next moment it too was flailing away, into the furious crowd.

Rafen recovered, clinging to the thick cables, as the bridge rebounded. He sprinted across the rest of the gangway and slid down a shallow, slippery incline, into the derelict blockhouse beyond.

He looked around. He could see no sign of the other runner – his opponent? – but an open hatch on the far side of the bunker was a clear indication of where he was supposed to go. The Astartes moved, and heard the clicks and snaps of oiled metal. A rush of air creased his bare cheek and Rafen instinctively ducked. An armature tipped with a bouquet of spinning blades lashed out and wove patterns in the air where he had been standing. He spun, dodging a second and then a third cutting tool, as rotary blades emerged from slots in the stone walls. Knives cut close, snagging on his dirty tunic; he reeled away before they could slice into his flesh. Jets of fire lashed out from hidden nozzles, the heat threatening to crisp his skin.

He realised he was standing atop a floor of fine mesh, the metal dark and greasy. Beneath there was a channel choked with stagnant fluids, a brown slurry of fatty deposits; a wide blood gutter. Nearby he spied corroded rollers and the remains of a conveyer mechanism; the blockhouse had been another part of the agri-facility, for the flensing and cutting of the day’s catch. The stench of flammable chemicals was even stronger here, tasting sour on his tongue.

Rafen put the hammer to the blades and struck hard, bending them so the retractors would not work, the gears behind them popping off their tarnished guides. He smashed a path through and broke out, feet skidding over the slick decking and out through the far hatch. Next, the race put him through the spinning interior of a massive tumbler array, the curved walls turning and turning. He ran full-tilt, bouncing from frame to frame, his impetus keeping him from falling into the rolling grinders revolving below. Using the hammer like a climber’s pick, he swung it into a vent in the chamber and used it to lever himself up.

The shouting and braying of the crowd met him as he emerged at last from the far side of the blockhouse. A makeshift ramp led up a steep incline to another raised platform; on it, there was a table.

Rafen hazarded a glance to his right. The hooded figure was ahead of him, already sprinting hard up the parallel ramp. The Blood Angel discarded the mass hammer and threw himself forward, his muscles tight with a hundred aches, and raced the last few metres to the top of the ascent. He could feel the parasite flexing inside his chest, excited by the exertions of his heart.

His blood thumped in his ears as Rafen paced his rival and then overtook him. His rag-swaddled feet slammed against the platform as he hauled himself on to it, and there before him on the low bench he saw a scattering of heavy steel components that were as familiar to him as the cast of his own face.

Receiver; barrel; mainspring; magazine. The disassembled parts of a discoloured, ill-cared for Godwyn-pattern bolt pistol lay there in front of him, and to the side stood a single round of ammunition, resting on its base. Schola-trained reflexes made him reach for the weapon parts, even as he looked up to see his opponent across the way doing the same thing. The splices were thrashing their limbs against their chest plates in frenzy now; the race was at its final moment.

Quickly, with care and control, Rafen’s hands busied themselves rebuilding the pistol, each part fitting into the next, the action sliding together, the magazine clicking home. He had done this so many times that the deed required almost no conscious thought on his part; his fingers did the work though ingrained muscle memory.

Rafen was aware of the hooded man, watching him finish the deadly task almost at the same moment. Bolt shells slipped into breeches, slides locked and hammers cocked in the mirror of each other; and then the two of them were aiming across the gap between the parallel platforms, each drawing a bead upon the other.

This was how the race was to end; to the fastest, the kill. To the slowest, the killing.

As he turned, for the first time the other man’s hood dropped back off his head, and Rafen saw a familiar, mournful face watching him from behind the muzzle of the gun.

‘Tarikus?’

The Neimos rose from the dark ranges of the abyssal depths, the prow of the submersible angling upward as if seeking the pale glow of weak sunlight that penetrated the upper reaches of the Dynikan Ocean.

The vessel slowed, following the wreck-strewn seabed, weaving over the remains of scuttled trawler craft and the bones of long-dead cetaceans starved by the extinction of their prey or killed by tyranid carcharodon-forms. To the ship’s stern, a distance behind now shortening with every passing moment, the shoal of kraken came on, driven by hunger and a shared, almost bio-chemical sense of hatred that burned in their xenos blood.

Every system aboard the Neimos that could be silenced was made quiet; and deep inside the hull of the Mechanicus craft, a group of warriors armed themselves and made rituals of combat, counting off the moments until they would face their enemy.

Rafen hesitated, his finger locked on the trigger. At this range, an Astartes could not miss his intended target.

The Doom Eagle’s eyes narrowed, but the other warrior did not fire. His fingers flexed about the pistol’s grip, uneasy and tormented. Down below, the splices hooted for death, angry that they were being robbed of the promise of bloodshed.

‘Do it,’ Tarikus called out, his words carrying. ‘Kill me! I have nothing… I am damned and forgotten! Shoot, Blood Angel! It will be a kindness… Do it!’

‘No…’ Rafen began, the pistol wavering in his hand.

‘If you do not, I will kill you!’ Tarikus spat the words at him with venom. ‘I have nothing left to lose!’

The crowd were screaming and chanting, the noise so loud it was like the lashing of storm waves across a shoreline. Rafen blotted them out, and shook his head.

‘I cannot, kinsman. There is no honour in it–’

‘Honour?’ Tarikus shouted the word back at him. ‘We have been robbed of that, can’t you see? Must I beg you to end this for me? We are in hell, Blood Angel! No one will come for us.’ He punched at his chest, where his parasite was coiled. ‘We are tainted! Death is the only release.’ The Doom Eagle’s face fell, and he seemed to age years in the space of a single breath. ‘I desire only the Emperor’s Peace,’ he husked.

It shocked Rafen to see a fellow Astartes laid so low, his will on the verge of breaking. A memory rose to the surface of his thoughts, something he had once heard his mentor Koris say. Every man has his breaking point, even one of us. Those who say they do not are fools and liars. The trick is to know that truth and to know yourself, and be ready if the day should ever come.

Tarikus’s day, so it seemed, was here. Rafen felt the weight of the bolt pistol in his hand. It was an easy shot; he could put the round right through the middle of the Doom Eagle’s eyes, end him instantly in a blaze of white agony. End the pain of a brother warrior who had been tortured beyond his limits in this hellish prison.

But what would that make him? What line would Rafen have crossed to deal out death to one of his own? It felt like a betrayal – not just of his own moral code, but of his Chapter and his nature, and of Tarikus, who needed brotherhood more than he needed death.

‘Listen to me,’ he called. ‘I will never lie to a battle-brother! And I tell you this, Tarikus of the Doom Eagles. We have not been abandoned! We are not forgotten!’ He held up his free hand. ‘That is the defeat our enemies crave!’ Rafen stabbed a finger towards Fabius and Cheyne, on the far side of the starting platforms. ‘That is the victory you will give to them! We will not break today, you and I!’ He shouted as loud as he could. ‘Trust me!’

When Tarikus looked up and met his gaze once more, for a moment there was something in the Doom Eagle’s eyes that could have been hope. Then he nodded.

Rafen heard the beating of leathery wings, and overhead the shapes of the bat-winged creatures passed in front of the sun, casting swift, sharp-edged shadows. The crowd wanted their blood, and if Rafen and Tarikus would not provide it for them, the flying sentinels would burn down the Space Marines where they stood with laser fire.

Two; they were two, with a weapon and a single round each. Not enough to dispatch a horde of modificates and a flight of sentinels. Would the bolt pistols even fire? Rafen would not have been surprised to discover the whole race was no more than the preamble to a sick joke for Bile’s amusement.

‘Time to find out,’ he said to himself, and turned, coming low, falling into an aiming crouch. He was aware of Tarikus doing the same, following his lead.

The wind had changed direction, and Rafen scented the chemical tang of fuel in the air. The top of a stubby promethium tank was visible just over the lip of the broken-down blockhouse.

Rafen pulled the trigger, and the pistol barked, Tarikus doing the same an instant later. He saw sparks of bright colour as the mass-reactive rounds tore through the container’s protective cowling; and then there was a huge sphere of rippling orange fire, expanding outward, ripping into the ranks of the splices.

A wash of heat-shock slammed into the Blood Angel and it threw him from the platform. Rafen went with it, curling into a ball to ride out the blast.

The Doom Eagle hit the ground in a crouch, still gripping the empty bolt pistol in his hand as if it were some kind of talisman – and perhaps it was, the inert weapon a small reminder of the things he had once taken for granted, the trappings of his life as a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes. He turned it over in his grip, examining the scratched, pitted surface of the gun in the dancing orange light from the fires. The weapon was ruined; if he had presented such a thing to the armoria adepts on his home world, they would have cursed him for such poor treatment of the bolter’s machine-spirit. But still, damaged though it was, it had performed its given function.

‘I will do the same,’ Tarikus said to himself, listening to the animalistic screams of the panicking beast-men. He said the words with more assurance than he felt.

A shadow came through the thick, choking wall of smoke that was rapidly filling the lower level of the crater. The Blood Angel Rafen emerged and nodded to him, offering his hand. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Bile was foolish enough to think we would not be a difficulty to him. He allowed himself to grow lax in this place, but that advantage is now lost to us.’

Tarikus accepted the other warrior’s help and got to his feet. He frowned. ‘What you said, up there on the platform… they were good words.’

Rafen shook his head. ‘I told you only what you already knew.’

‘No,’ said Tarikus. ‘You told me what you believe. And perhaps, a fraction of me wants to believe it too. But you need to understand. I am dead, Blood Angel. It matters little if you pulled the trigger or if you did not. I am already dead.’

The other man snorted. ‘You’re a cheerless one, aren’t you? Well, you may speak for yourself, Doom Eagle, for I am very much alive, and I intend to remain that way for a long time to come.’

He turned to move off, but Tarikus stopped him. ‘Tell me what you meant when you said that we were not forgotten. Were those just the words you wanted me to hear, or were they something more?’

Rafen paused, then leaned closer, speaking in low tones. ‘Know this. I am not alone, Tarikus. A cohort of my brother warriors even now makes its way here through the oceans, aboard a vessel called the Neimos. They will be here soon, I’m certain of it. And when they come, I want this place to be a burning beacon to them.’

‘You came from this ship?’ asked the other Astartes. ‘But how can you know if they are still out there?’ He grimaced. ‘Dynikas V is a death world. The hazards out in the deeps are lethal, monstrous things. You have no way of knowing if your kinsmen will make it.’

‘I know,’ Rafen insisted. ‘I have my faith in them, and that is unshakeable.’ He studied his fellow warrior. ‘You remember faith, don’t you? You must have had it once, for Bile and his torturers to have taken it away.’

Tarikus’s expression hardened. ‘I remember. I have not lost it.’

Rafen seized on his words. ‘Then help me remind all the rest of the brothers here as well!’ He swept his hand around, indicating the ranks of cells up above them. ‘Bile likes to have an audience for his games, doesn’t he? The braggart can only find his pleasure in inflicting pain upon others and then basking in the glow of it. But now we can turn that on him.’ The Blood Angel’s bruised, smoke-smeared face split in a thin smile. ‘Every battle-brother held prisoner in this place was made to watch this cruel little race. Forced to observe because Bile thought to make us another of his “lessons”.’ He took a breath. ‘I know many battle-brothers have fought back before me, and failed. But I won’t. We won’t.’

‘How can you be so certain?’

‘Because every single Astartes in this place is going to join us. Mark my words, Doom Eagle. Together, we will rally these kindred.’

‘They are no longer the warriors you think they are, Rafen! They have been broken by years of unspeakable torture, or else convinced they are forsaken!’

‘Like you?’ Rafen asked. The smile became a feral grin. ‘Come. We need to raise our army, if we are to put this place to the torch.’

In the mayhem that followed the promethium explosion, the splices were in chaos. Some lay dead, consumed in the blast set off by the bolt shells, and more were caught unawares by the swift fires that lashed across the lower levels of the prison complex, propelled by the constant winds.

Of their master, there was no sign, and unknown to them, in a fit of fury, Fabius Bile left his minions to fend for themselves, having ordered his second Cheyne to let the flames run their course and burn out untended. The Primogenitor reasoned that the splices too slow to escape on their own would be stark reminders to those who did flee the fire, reminders that when Bile demanded blood and death, he would not accept anything else.

But still the beast-men were pathetically loyal. Whatever remained of their human identities was long gone, subsumed by a cocktail of genetic reorientation drugs and irrepression surgery. Bile had taken each one and caused dormant strains of animal DNA to reassert themselves; what emerged at the end of such a process was either dead or utterly inhuman.

Their bestial minds were in thrall to their creator, and so it was that in his name groups of them swept through the still-burning, smoke-wreathed wreckage, looking for the inmates who had dared to show defiance.

It was an error they would not live to regret.

Along one sheer wall of the crater, fires burned and gave off tarry smoke where a service channel filled with oily fluids had been ignited by a stray piece of white-hot wreckage. The smoke enveloped a workshack raised up on iron pilings; webbed into the network of pylons ringing the arena-like space, it was the centre of a nexus of old, corroded cables looping away towards the bell-mouthed vox horns.

Nearby, the ape-splice that had survived being thrown from the bridge by the Blood Angel led a pair of stocky ophidians as they stalked through the grey-black haze.

The simian was the first to perish, as Rafen decided to correct his earlier lenience in leaving the mutant alive. The Astartes burst from behind cover and clubbed the splice hard in the base of the spine with his inert bolter. It reeled and tried to spin around, its huge hands grasping at the air – but the blow was so hard it snapped spinal bone and tore nerves. Even as the simian tried to snarl out its anger, pain threaded through it as it lost all feeling below the waist. The beast went to the ground and Rafen followed through by falling hard on his enemy’s throat. A sickening crack, a wet gasp, and it was done.

The serpent-like ophidians panicked and fell back, straight into the path of the other Astartes. Tarikus punched the closest of them to the ground, taking care to pull the blow – they needed one of them alive – then spun and disarmed the second, wrenching a curved short-sword from its grip.

Rafen crossed to the second ophidian, and without a moment’s pause, he gathered up the stocky reptilian and threw it into the burning fluid channel. Soaked in the flammable muck, it screamed and boiled.

Tarikus pointed the stolen sword at the splice he had knocked to the ground. ‘That will also be your fate unless you do as we command.’

The ophidian’s head bobbed on its long neck, yellow eyes wide with fear.

Rafen gestured at the workshack. ‘The vox network runs through there. You will activate it for us.’

The splice broke into a spasm of nodding, and scrambled towards the shack, eager to do whatever it could to preserve itself. Its comrade had stopped screaming, and now a new stench – of sweet, burned meat – joined the others in the air.

When it was done, Tarikus gave the ophidian-splice the gift of a quick and painless death, slicing its throat with a quick pass from the blade. It looked at him as it bled out, a betrayed look in its dull eyes; as if there was any chance they would allow it to live.

Rafen leaned forward over the blinking lights and chiming clockwork of the workshack’s console. Perhaps in another life, this compartment had been a control centre of sorts, but now it was a retrofitted nexus for cabling and conduits that defied the Blood Angel’s understanding. They snaked across the walls and the floor in bunches, coiled over one another like the roots of a giant plant. He wondered what damage might be wrought with a single krak grenade in a place like this; but the point was moot. Even with a blade, one could hack at the cables around them for hours and never cut into anything vital.

He dismissed the thought and found what he was looking for; a honeycomb-shaped vox pickup dangling at the end of a collapsible armature. Rafen saw the power lumes glowing where the ophidian had dutifully activated them. He tapped at the vox and a dull thud sounded out beyond the workshack, resonating out of the speaker horns.

He glanced at Tarikus, who stood watching at the doorway. The Doom Eagle gave him a nod.

Rafen took a deep breath, and began to speak.

So often, the vox horns were used to broadcast sonic tortures, execution commands or the damning sermon-like orations of Fabius Bile himself. Today, they carried different words, in a voice that was strong and clear. Every Astartes in the compound halted, held their breath, strained to listen to the sound of it.

‘Brothers,’ began Rafen. ‘Kinsmen, cousins, Astartes all. Hear me. I have much to say but little time to say it, so I will not waste breath on tricks of oratory or rhetoric.’ Angry shouts sounded from the splices as they understood what was going on; but the voice from the vox was louder than all of them. ‘This place was built to destroy something precious to us, something each of us shares, no matter which Primarch or Chapter we call our own. I speak of brotherhood.’

The Blood Angel’s hand clenched, and he remembered the feel of a slip of parchment between his fingers, an oath-paper lined with words in thin ink-script. ‘Bile has isolated us, severed all but the most cursory of contacts. He sows distrust and suspicion, wears you down with the slow grind of mindless days and tormented nights. The bastard wants you to believe you are forgotten. He lies. I am here to tell you that he lies and lies!’ Rafen’s voice rose, finding its strength. ‘Look within yourselves, brothers, and you will understand. You have been waiting for this day, even if you did not know it. This day, when you are reminded of who you are. My purpose here is the same as yours, to serve the God-Emperor and Holy Terra! Know that each of you is the harbinger of your own freedom!’

From the corner of his eye he saw Tarikus react to something outside; and in the distance he could hear the shouting of his enraged enemies, coming closer.

He could not stop now. ‘I say to you all that this day, we are not Blood Angels, Doom Eagles, Space Wolves, Taurans, Salamanders, Crimson Fists… We are one great legion, one heart and one mind! We are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, the war gods and terrible swift sword of our Emperor! We are His will, and we have always been so!’ Gunfire was rattling off the walls of the workshack now, shells ripping chunks from the walls and blowing out machinery in fat plugs of sparks. ‘You have nothing to lose, Sons of Mankind, and honour to be gained! Even if you doubt all that I have said,’ he shouted, his words coming in a rush, ‘know this single truth! Alone, you are lost. United, we are unstoppable–’

His voice was lost in the screech of an incoming rocket motor. Rafen threw himself away from the console as the short-range missile screamed in on a trail of orange smoke and impacted the workshack with a thunderous detonation.

The flimsy stilt-construction folded as if it were made of paper, the support pillars snapping and the cables strung to the vox horns ripping free to lash at the air like errant whips.

Cheyne stalked forward, into the heaped, smouldering rubble, cursing the New Men who stood around him, hesitating. ‘Find those whoresons! I’ll bite out the hearts of any one of you that fails me!’

A thick-necked New Man in a tattered leather cloak waded into the debris and used his sword to sift through the wreckage. ‘Here!’ he began.

He did not speak again, as his throat was opened. Tarikus exploded out from under a heap of rubble, leading with the curved blade he had stolen from the ophidian, and tore into the New Man, stabbing him over and over in a frenzied, vicious assault. Close by, Rafen staggered up, shouldering aside a flat panel of cracked sheetrock. He was bleeding from dozens of small wounds where chips of broken glass were embedded in his face, but he was panting and high with battle-anger. The Blood Angel shook off a sheen of dust and steadied himself, glaring around for something he could use as a weapon.

‘I wanted to execute you the moment I laid eyes on you,’ spat Cheyne. ‘My master wants you to toy with, but I think I will defy him just this once.’ The androgyne raised a wicked-looking bolt pistol, the muzzle shrouded by a blossom of mirror-sharp knife blades. ‘Your rousing little speech was wasted on these worthless fools, whelp. Don’t you understand? They’re defanged, they have no will to fight. Fabius struck it from them! You Astartes are no better than common men, at the core. In the end, you all break just the same.’ Cheyne’s torn cheek rippled. ‘I will drag your carcass up the ramps for all your blighted brethren to see.’

‘Your error,’ Rafen said, spitting out a mouthful of dust, ‘is that you think your words are as pretty as your face. But neither is true.’

‘Enough talk, then.’ Cheyne aimed. ‘When you see your Corpse-God, be sure to tell him how you failed.’

‘Not today!’ A grey-haired figure rushed from the smoke and shadows, slamming into Cheyne and knocking him off-balance. Rafen saw a rusted length of metal press into the flesh of the New Man’s throat.

‘Vetcha…’ muttered Tarikus, disbelief clear in his voice.

‘Aye,’ said the Long Fang veteran. He ground the improvised blade into Cheyne’s neck. ‘Have your freaks stand down, then put up that gun of yours. And if you even think about speaking a word of that damned agony prayer, I’ll gut you like a rock eel.’

The androgyne forced a crooked smile as blood pooled in the hollow of its neck. ‘What’s this? The blind old Space Wolf has finally gone senile?’

‘I’ve never needed to see you to find you, creature,’ spat the Astartes. ‘I can smell you! Now do as I command, or I’ll bleed you here and now!’

Cheyne glared at the two other New Men, and they let their guns fall to the ground. ‘What has come over you, Vetcha?’ The androgyne changed tack, speaking in a warm, calm tone. ‘I thought you had reached an understanding about this place, yes?’

‘What you thought was that I was your lapdog! What you thought was that I could never be a danger to you!’ snapped the Space Wolf. He grunted in annoyance. ‘Throw the pistol to Rafen! Do it now!’

Cheyne gave a theatrical sigh and tossed the gun, but deliberately so, landing it beyond the Blood Angel’s immediate reach. As Rafen bent carefully towards it, Cheyne kept talking. ‘You know it’s useless to fight us, Vetcha. You learned that lesson. Now you’re throwing away your life just because this arrogant idiot tried to rouse a rabble?’ He chuckled. ‘What have you done?’

‘You know nothing!’ snarled the Space Wolf. ‘If one single Astartes defies the enemies of man, then we all defy them! If you had not been grown in some vat of chemicals, you might understand that…’

‘How human of you,’ said the androgyne. ‘I’m so disappointed.’ With a sudden jerk of the wrist, Cheyne’s hand flicked up and the lengthy bone blade whispered out of the hidden sheath in his palm. The New Man spun and gashed Vetcha across the throat and torso, trying to find an angle to pierce flesh and find the old warrior’s heart. The Space Wolf hissed in agony, and jerked his own weapon forward. The blunt, rusted blade went in through the androgyne’s ribcage and burst from its back in a welter of crimson. Vetcha shoved again and pushed the makeshift knife deeper.

Boltfire rang out as Rafen fired a salvo of shots at the other New Men, and Tarikus went in to finish off Bile’s thugs with his blood-smeared blade.

Cheyne staggered and collapsed, falling to the sandy ground in spasming jerks. Breathing hard, Vetcha hawked up phlegm and spat in the androgyne’s face.

‘I will not lie,’ Rafen told the veteran. ‘I wasn’t expecting you.’

‘Neither were they,’ Vetcha replied.

The Blood Angel eyed the old man’s wound. It was deep and running dark. ‘Are you all right, Long Fang?’

‘It is nothing,’ he was told. ‘I’ll mend.’ Vetcha pulled his ragged prison robe closer about him. ‘Now give me a weapon.’

‘Why the change of heart?’ said the Doom Eagle. ‘You’ve been here for years, old man. The Emperor knows how many times you must have had that chance, to kill Cheyne or Bile, and yet you did not take it. Why now, all of a sudden?’

‘He doesn’t trust me,’ Vetcha said to Rafen.

‘Can you blame him?’ came the reply. ‘So, answer his question.’

Vetcha turned and glowered at Tarikus. ‘I did it because… Because this is the day I have been waiting for.’

The Doom Eagle said nothing for a long moment, then gave a slow nod. ‘Good enough, old man.’ Tarikus pressed a sword into the veteran’s grasp and the Space Wolf grinned as he ran his thumb down its length.

Rafen took a moment to loot the dead for weapons; he came away with skinning knives, bolt pistols and several clips of ammunition. ‘This will do for a start.’

Vetcha made practise swipes with the sword. ‘You meant what you said.’ It was not a question. ‘Are you ready to take those words and make them actions?’

‘This place will be a charnel house by nightfall,’ said the Blood Angel. ‘In the name of Sanguinius, I swear it.’ He hesitated, drawing a device from a pouch on Cheyne’s cooling corpse. It resembled an Astartes auspex, but carved from bone and slivers of crystal.

‘What is that?’ said Tarikus. ‘A control device?’

Rafen gave a nod. ‘For the cells, I’d warrant. A master key…’

‘If you open the cells, Bile will know we have escaped,’ warned Vetcha. ‘He’ll reverse anything you do…’

‘We’ll see,’ Rafen replied, and crushed the device in his fist.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In their current state, the warriors three – Rafen, Tarikus and Vetcha – resembled anything but the noble ideal of the Adeptus Astartes. Robbed of their armour and Emperor-blessed weapons, clad in rags and torn robes, stained with dirt and smeared with blood, an observer would have thought them to be hellish death-dealers from the heart of some nightmarish battlefield, choosers of the slain drawn up from ancient myth to bring murder to all that lay in their path.

Only in the set of their jaw, the intention of their swift gait, did they reveal themselves for what they were. Warriors of single purpose, joined for a common goal. The Blood Angel, the Doom Eagle and the Space Wolf ran swiftly along the ascending ramp of stone and hard-packed dirt, climbing the spiralling levels towards the lip of the crater-prison.

They came upon the iron cell chambers ranged up around them in unkempt piles. The containers creaked and rocked in the endless winds, unsecured hatches caught in the gale banging open. The sun passed behind a wall of heavy cloud and pits of deep shadow grew in the spaces between the cells.

Rafen slowed and carefully peered into one of the open chambers. He fingered the magnetolocks on the doorjamb; they were set in the open position. ‘Well now. It looks like Cheyne’s toy worked.’

Tarikus came closer, sniffing the air. He made a sour face. ‘These cells were not occupied, Blood Angel. I doubt they’ve been used in years.’ The Doom Eagle glanced around. ‘Much of this infernal place lies derelict and empty.’

Rafen considered that for a moment. Had Bile’s fortress once been filled with Astartes prisoners? And if so, where were they now? From what he had gathered from the old Space Wolf, the interned population of the retrofitted complex had to be less than a dozen lost Space Marines. ‘If the locks have been deactivated, then there may be battle-brothers walking free on the upper levels–’

Vetcha sucked air in through his cracked teeth and shouted over Rafen’s words, raising the scimitar-like sword in his hand. ‘Warriors,’ he snarled, ‘I smell company!’

Rafen heard the heavy clatter of dozens of clawed and cloven feet over the tops of the metal containers. He brought up the boltgun he had stolen from Cheyne and panned it around, waiting for a target to reveal itself.

‘Behind us, too!’ called Tarikus. He had a bolt pistol in each hand, aiming them in different directions. Above, there were the canyon walls made of cells, and below, the curve of the rocky slope. Rising up the latter, bearing weapons and stinking of spent promethium, came a cluster of cloaked New Men.

‘Come to succeed where Cheyne failed, no doubt,’ said Rafen. He fired off a trio of shots, breaking up the line of the Bile’s gene-thugs.

‘Splices incoming!’ shouted Vetcha.

Rafen’s gaze snapped back in time to see a wave of beast-things boil over the edge of the cell towers and drop towards them. Once-men with aspects torn from insects, felines, bats, reptiles, canines and simians came rushing down; it was a true menagerie of horrors.

The blind veteran bellowed the name of his primarch in a raucous war cry and became a whirl of violence, swinging the scimitar blade in lethal circuits, wading into the mass of the enemy without a moment’s pause. Rafen heard the old man laughing darkly as he took heads and cleaved bodies; the ill-trained splices had come down bunched up tightly, and Vetcha could smell their odours so clearly he had no need to look upon them to make his kills.

Tarikus opened fire with the bolt pistols, firing both weapons at once. Rafen saw an orange-furred, ropey-limbed simian blown backward with a fist-sized hole punched in its chest, a minotal at its side killed by a round that blasted through its eye socket.

The New Men were closing the gate, however. Rafen eschewed cover and dropped to one knee. A spindly arachkin that made it to him reared up; in return he slashed with the cluster of blades along the muzzle of Cheyne’s bolter and opened the creature’s gut, spilling ropes of steaming entrails across the dirt floor. Kicking the dying splice away, he fired into the advancing party.

Vetcha howled as a canine took a bite from his arm; in turn the Space Wolf cut the dog-thing apart. ‘How many?’ he called out.

‘More than enough,’ Tarikus retorted, gunning down a pair of rat-men. He staggered back, ejecting spent ammunition clips from his pistols, reloading on the move. ‘Has every one of them in this hell-hole come to fight us?’

‘It would seem so…’ Rafen offered, then grimaced as the gun in his hand locked on a fouled round. Cursing the ill-maintained condition of the purloined weapon, he worked the slide as the New Men charged. Ejecting the misfire, he slammed a fresh round into the chamber, but Bile’s gene-formed warriors moved like lightning. Shots went wild as the biggest of them – a man-mountain of flesh in a long mantle of leather rags – struck the Blood Angel with a heavy mace.

Rafen rolled with the impact, letting it knock him off his feet. He landed hard and wheezed. The effort to get back up was burdensome, suddenly twice as difficult as it should have been. He felt the now familiar, unsettling spasm against his ribcage. The parasite was moving, awakening.

‘Mistake,’ said the cloaked warrior, its voice rumbling like an engine. ‘Nothing but pain for you now. Nothing but pain.’

Rafen raised the gun and his finger tightened on the trigger; but the New Man was already speaking, whispering the parasite’s cantrip. Cheyne, so it seemed, was not the only one who knew the words of the agony prayer.

The Blood Angel tried not to scream, but the exhalation burst from him uncontrolled; white-hot jags of torture lashed through his nerves and he stumbled, dropping the gun. Every muscle in his body was aflame, his flesh aching with searing, burning pain. The core of the fire inside him was the roiling, writhing maggot, thrashing within the meat of his chest. He tried to frame a litany of strength, an entreaty to Sanguinius to grant him fortitude, but every iota of his self was given over to the agony. He was an empty vessel, slowly filling with suffering.

The hulking figure’s voice grew louder and louder, the sound reaching Vetcha and Tarikus. They too fell, weapons silenced, as their bodies rebelled against them.

The New Man drew in a deep breath, preparing to speak the terminal stanza of the pain-prayer. These words would stimulate the daemonic parasites within earshot into a fatal frenzy, climaxing in an eruption through flesh and bone that would kill their hosts.

He did not begin. A spear of rusty iron, hastily fashioned from a length of gantry, whistled out from the shadows beyond the cells and impaled the New Man through the throat, silencing him. The rod lodged there and blood burst from the entry and exit wounds in a red tide.

From the shadows came figures in torn robes, warriors who resembled anything but what they were. Some were scarred and beaten, others dazed or hollow of eye as if they moved through a dream; but all of them brought death as their companion. The freed Astartes rushed forward in a tide of fury, ripping apart the splices and storming straight into the lines of the New Men. Every throat that could be cut was cut, every voice of the enemy silenced before a single word of the pain-prayer could be uttered.

The agony abated, withdrawing from his body, and strong hands hauled Rafen to his feet. He lurched unsteadily and shuddered, as if uncomfortable in his own flesh, as if it had become ill-fitting on him. ‘Warp take this thing,’ he grated. ‘Someone give me a blade and I’ll cut it out of myself right now!’

‘That would be a mistake, kinsman.’ Rafen looked up into a craggy, frost-grey face lined with a crosshatching of deep, livid scars. ‘They know when you’re trying to kill them. The cursed things bleed a poison so potent it can shrivel your hearts to cinders.’

‘I… I am Rafen, of the–’

The pale-faced Astartes waved away his words. ‘Blood Angels, yes. We know who you are, Son of Sanguinius. I am Kilan of the Raven Guard.’

‘Well met, Kilan.’ Rafen panted, feeling his flesh retaking control of itself. ‘You heeded my call.’

Kilan looked around at the rest of the unkempt handful of warriors as they performed confirmation kills on the enemy survivors. ‘You opened the doors.’

‘In more ways than one,’ said another Astartes, his tone heavy and weary as he approached. ‘How did you do it?’ The swarthy, shaggy-haired warrior had a bull’s head icon branded into the meat of his arm that marked him as a brother of the Taurans Chapter.

‘Luck,’ said Rafen, ‘luck and the Emperor’s grace.’

‘Ave Imperator,’ said Kilan, bowing his head. When he looked up, he had a feral grin on his lips. ‘I tell you, Rafen, I am almost giddy. So many attempts at escape we have made, so many failures… When the cell doors opened, many of us refused to leave.’

‘They thought it was another of Bile’s mind games,’ said the Tauran. ‘More of his bloody tricks of the brain.’

‘No game,’ said Tarikus, coming closer. ‘Not this time.’

Kilan studied Rafen, the deep red of his eyes boring into him. ‘Those were fine words you spoke, Blood Angel. They stirred a fire in all of us.’

‘I did nothing,’ he replied. ‘I only reminded you of what you already know.’

‘He has a way of doing that, ja,’ said Vetcha, his breathing laboured. The Space Wolf’s words got a hard look from Kilan and the other escapees.

‘Why is this relic still drawing breath?’ spat the Tauran. ‘He’s a collaborator. He should be corpse flesh!’

‘You dare?’ growled the old veteran. ‘Try if you will, runt!’

‘He helped us,’ Tarikus insisted. ‘The androgyne died by his hand.’

‘Indeed?’ said Kilan, his grin widening. ‘Then it appears you chose your moment well, Long Fang. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a Space Wolf showing such slow cunning and restraint.’

Vetcha’s lip curled. ‘Ja. Well. Live a decade inside an iron cell and you have plenty of time to discover a more… careful method.’

‘We have to move,’ said the Tauran. Rafen sensed the man was unconvinced, but he knew that alacrity was more important. ‘Matters of reproach and culpability can be considered after the fact. The fires are burning out. Soon the smoke will dissipate and the sentinels will over fly the cells. We can’t be caught in the open.’

‘The others, the Astartes still up there,’ Tarikus insisted, gesturing at the ramp. ‘No man will be left behind. Today we either burn this place and leave it behind, or it becomes our grave.’

‘Rafen, what say you?’ Kilan turned to the Blood Angel, but the other man was staring into space, as if listening to a voice only he could hear. ‘Rafen? Do you hear me?’

Do you hear me?

The thought-question billowed into telepathic vapour and faded. Ceris blotted out everything around him; the thudding rumble of the Neimos’s engines, the pitch and roll of the submersible’s deck as it rose up through the ocean, the chatter and movement of the crew-servitors at their control stations. He was dimly aware of the others nearby, the Blood Angels and Flesh Tearers gathering their weapons for one final check before they took to the battle.

The Codicier had already prepared himself in a moment of quiet contemplation, finding an empty crew cabin where he could consecrate his force mace with a measure of sanctified oil, blessed by the High Chaplain Argastes himself. The weapon hung at his hip, ready for use, and his bolt pistol, duly cleaned and newly affixed with fresh purity seals, nestled in his holster. Ceris was upon one armoured knee, head bowed and his helmet at his feet. The soft sapphire glow of his psychic hood cast a cold light around him, and he sensed the air of unease it created in his battle-brothers. They kept a distance from him as he worked his magick; even among his kindred, the ways of his psionic arts were forever viewed with distrust.

He pushed out again. Out past the sparks of thought that were his comrades; Noxx, the warrior’s feelings marbled by streaks of darkness and duty; Kayne, fighting down his self-doubts as if they were monsters to be slain; Ajir, unable to let go of the conflicts inside him; Gast, clear and strong like ice; Sove, struggling to hide the pain of his injuries lest he be thought unfit to fight; Eigen, proud and ready; Puluo, caught between nursing his hate and hoping to see his commander again; and Turcio, repeating the litany of weapons, seeking focus in the name of his primarch.

Ceris pushed out, out past the hull of the Neimos, ignoring the flashes of feral xenos hate at the edges of his sensorium, looking, seeking. Finding knots of fear and hope, all tied around one another. Finding… Rafen. He felt a moment of pride to know that his kinsman was not dead.

Do you hear me? Stand fast, brother. We are coming for you.

The squad of canine modificates standing guardian over the dock were skittish and nervous. All of them were given to making low yowls and they constantly fingered their lasguns, their attention being drawn back time after time, away from the featureless ocean they were commanded to watch and over their shoulders to the fortress proper. A ribbon of black smoke emerged from behind the ridgeline, growing slowly into the sullen clouds overhead. Their sensitive ears picked out the noise of gunfire, but no word reached them from the tower. No new orders came, and with every minute that passed, the canines were losing their focus. It was a failing with this breed of human-splice; without a commanding influence on them, they fell into simple action-reaction patterns.

They were unprepared for the invasion from the sea. Breaching the surface like the massive sifter-whales that once thrived in the oceans of Dynikas V, the submersible Neimos arrived in an explosion of spray and churned foam. The bullet bow of the vessel pushed a shock front ahead of it, the wave lashing up to wash over the patrol cutter tethered to the corroded dock pilings. The impulse-drive propellers concealed in fairings along the stern of the Neimos thrashed at the rusty water, hydrojet systems pushing the craft forward at its maximum surface velocity. The stubby central sail rose like a raised axe head, streams of seawater sluicing across striations of still-fresh damage; in places, the broken tips of kraken talons were still embedded in the rubbery anechoic skin of the submarine.

The canines scattered, running in halting loops, then stopping, then running back, unsure of what to do next. Finally, one of the modificates – a splice that had been an Imperial Guardsman in its old life – raised a laser rifle and fired on the oncoming vessel. The rest of the dog-things began to snarl, and they too opened fire. Drawn by the shrieking concussion of the beam weapons, further up on the rocky shore the silent ferrocrete pilings twitched and folded open, the auto-guns within awakening.

Any ship wanting to make dock would have slowed; the Neimos did not. Atop the dorsal sail, a cupola extended from beneath a sealed cowling, presenting a tubular lens array made of etched brass. The weapon was modelled on the shape of an extinct form of Terran selachian, its toothy mouth the muzzle of the energy cannon. Sharp blue-green light lashed out, bursting canines unlucky enough to be caught in its nimbus.

The Neimos rammed the stern of the cutter and a swell of seawater flooded into the open deck of the converted trawler craft as it wallowed. The vessel tilted and shifted to starboard, sinking. Now with only a few feet beneath its keel, the submersible ploughed on, losing a steering vane on a bent curl of iron reaching up from the derelict dock. The last of the canines lost their will and ran for the shoreline, but the invader was already upon them. The craft cleaved through the supports and decking of the ramshackle quay, collapsing it into the churn along with the rest of the guards.

Laser fire, red like hate, lashed out from the auto-guns on the beach, burning great craters in the hull of the Neimos. The vessel would not stop; in answer, the blue-green ray from the top of the sail cast around like a lighthouse beam, scorching a line over the rocky shore, fusing stone and gritty sand into black glass before finding the target. Pulses of emerald lightning flashed and the auto-guns were obliterated in fans of detonation, the servitor brains within boiled alive in their nutrient tanks.

At last the submarine’s thrusters died, but the swell it rode drove it on, up the apron of the coast and on to the rough seashore.

With a shuddering moan of tortured metal, the Neimos came to a halt on a rise of displaced gravel, listing a few degrees to port as the craft settled. Conformal hatches blew open on explosive bolts and spun away. From the interior of the craft came nine figures in armour all shades of crimson, and they raced up the beach in loping steps, making for the site of the smoke plume.

A kilometre or so offshore, the surface of the ocean appeared to boil. In the shallow waters, a cluster of tentacled, furious beasts swam around and about in angry confusion. Cilia beat the water and hooked beaks of chitin gnashed. The prey had vanished into a fog of chaos, merged into a strange barrier of pheromone stench and telepathic anathema that forced the krakens away even as they tried to swim into it. The tyranids were driven back with shuddering force, repulsed like magnetic poles; beyond that, so powerful was the genetic compulsion within them that their own flesh failed to obey the hunger brimming in their thoughts.

Some of the smaller, younger krakens attacked one another in annoyance, their food-need and anger finding expression elsewhere. The older and larger xenos, and the dominant male that had led them here, whipped at the younglings to quiet them. Their simple, bestial predator brains were bewildered, but they were patient hunters. They drew in their tentacles, sleek bodies bobbing in the slow current, and waited.

‘Rafen!’

Vetcha heard the tone in the Raven Guard’s voice and he tensed. The Long Fang felt a tingle along the hairs of his forearms and tasted something greasy and metallic in the back of his throat. He knew that ethereal spoor of old, and his lip curled to be within reach of it. There was witchery afoot, and it was close by. He focused his thoughts on that idea for the moment, using his ingrained loathing of all such sorcery to drag his attention away from the still-burning pain of the wound Cheyne’s knife had inflicted upon him.

‘What is wrong with him?’ asked Tarikus.

The silent Blood Angel gave a sudden gasp and grunted in pain. ‘Ceris…’ he muttered.

‘Who?’ The Space Wolf didn’t know the name.

‘One of my battle-brothers, a psyker…’

Vetcha spat, his suspicions confirmed. ‘A weirdling, you mean…’

‘My brothers are coming for us. Blood Angels and Flesh Tearers. They’re going to attack the fortress.’ The warrior’s voice took on a new strength. ‘The Emperor turns His face towards our endeavours, kinsmen. The time for revenge is upon us.’

‘This… Ceris…’ said the wary Tauran. ‘He spoke with you? In your thoughts?’

Vetcha sensed the nod in Rafen’s words. ‘Aye. With his talents at our command, we will be unstoppable.’

The Space Wolf made a negative noise. ‘Perhaps so, as much as I hate to admit it. In all the years I have been in this place, Bile has never held a psyker hostage here.’

‘How could he?’ said Kilan. ‘There are no walls nor barred gates for a mindspeaker. We can use Rafen’s witch-kin to tip the balance for us!’

‘We must take the fight to the traitor,’ said the Blood Angel, quickening with the pace of the moment. ‘We need to gather the rest of the detainees…’

‘I’ll do that,’ said Tarikus. ‘Kilan, if you will lend me your aid?’

‘Gladly, Doom Eagle.’

Rafen smiled. ‘Find the assault team.’

‘And then?’ The veteran noted how Tarikus and the others had immediately deferred to the Blood Angel’s leadership; the lad had a way about him, all right.

‘Then,’ said the Raven Guard, ‘we’ll bring the wrath of Holy Terra down upon this place.’

‘Indeed,’ said Rafen. ‘Vetcha, if you will lead the way, we will enter the tower and deny Fabius Bile any chance of escape.’

‘Gladly–’ The Space Wolf’s voice died in his throat as he began to speak. The fire from the blade cut was growing in power, and he clenched his hand, feeling the sensation in it as if it were a distant thing. ‘Gladly,’ he repeated, this time with more force. ‘Follow me, you pups, if you think you can keep up.’ Before any of them could question his momentary lapse, he was moving away, the senses of sound and tread guiding him towards the heavy doors that led to Bile’s inner sanctum.

His face turned from Rafen and the others, the old man’s lips moved in a rare moment of prayer. Vetcha mouthed a silent plea to the God-Emperor and mighty Russ. He asked them for a measure of strength. Not for long. Just long enough to see the day to its end. The veteran fought off a shudder. All he needed was enough strength to stave off the warp-venom that had coated Cheyne’s blade.

The approach to the fortress was a maze of gunfire. Las-rounds and bolt shells criss-crossed in the air as Noxx and his strike team pushed forward along the dirt road. Resistance was lighter than they had expected, but still stiff enough to trouble them. Sove laid down a line of krak grenades, showing that even with one arm he could still provide a lethal addition to any assault. Eigen and the Blood Angel Turcio were in cover behind a stalled vehicle, sniping at the shadowy figures appearing in the gun-slots of the bunker.

Noxx fired off a salvo of shots and ducked back behind a stone pillar. The psyker was close by, his crimson helmet wreathed with tiny jags of lightning. ‘Care to conjure a hellbolt for us?’ said the sergeant. ‘We’re in danger of losing our momentum here.’

‘I am afraid my attention is elsewhere.’ The Codicier seemed distant, distracted. ‘Sensing… I am sensing the dimensions of this place. There is a very strong warp energy signature…’ He pointed in the direction of the tower. ‘In there.’

The Flesh Tearer cursed. ‘Tell me you’re not talking about another warp gate! I’ll not blast down the doors to this place to find the stink of Fabius Bile and nothing else!’

Stray lasers chopped chunks from the rock near Ceris’s head, but he appeared not to notice. ‘I cannot be sure. Lord Mephiston gave me a telepathic imprint of the transit-magick Bile used to flee from Baal… This is not the same, but–’

‘Enough!’ Noxx cut him off. ‘If we cannot get to the source of this energy, then perhaps Rafen can. Send to him, guide him to it. Tell my errant cousin that Bile will slip our grasp if he cannot neutralise it.’

Ceris didn’t answer; instead he bowed his head low, and the crystal matrix of his psychic hood glowed brighter.

Noxx chanced a look around the pillar, and a storm of laser fire lanced towards him. He swore again and ducked back, his eyes finding Brother Puluo across the way.

The other Space Marine’s voice clicked in the vox bead in his ear. ‘There’s a high-gauge lascannon in the fire slot, lower right quadrant.’

‘I’m acquainted with it,’ Noxx replied, considering a carbon score-mark across his power armour’s right shoulder pauldron.

‘All units, give me cover,’ continued Puluo. ‘I’m going to kill it.’

Noxx nodded in agreement. ‘Do as he says.’

Puluo hefted the weighty form of his heavy bolter up in front of himself, then broke into a full-tilt run. The second he left his cover, red streaks of coherent light stabbed out at him. Noxx revealed himself as well, firing from the shoulder, and he saw Ajir, Kayne and Gast do the same, all of them giving the enemy gunners a sudden feast of targets to choose from.

An Astartes behind that gun would have concentrated their fire on Puluo, the largest extant threat; but instead there was a moment of hesitation, then sporadic, reflexive fire towards the other battle-brothers.

It was enough for Puluo to close the distance. He swung down the heavy bolter as he ran and squeezed the trigger bar. The gun crashed, the reports from the muzzle echoing off the walls of the enemy stronghold. Too late, the laser cannon traversed back towards Puluo, but the Blood Angel was nimble for his size, and he weathered glancing hits across his armour to come all the way in to point blank range.

Fuelled by battle anger, Puluo leapt up and jammed the barrel of the heavy bolter into the firing slit where the lascannon gunner was hiding. He released a wild burst of automatic fire into the chamber beyond, riding the big gun’s recoil, ranging it around to be sure that everything inside would be killed.

With the lascannon out of operation, the rest of the squad moved up, taking down the remainder of the defenders. Ajir used hull cutters to blow open the portcullis, and together the Space Marines crossed into Bile’s fortress, wreathed in cordite smoke.

The dour Tauran – he called himself Nisos – moved quickly, but he seemed to be always a step behind Rafen as they moved through the corridors of the lower tower, along stone passages laser-cut from the living rock. The Blood Angel paused in the lee of a support and glanced at him. Nisos was watching him carefully.

‘You have something to say to me?’ Rafen pitched his voice in a whisper.

The Tauran tapped his head. ‘You say you hear a voice in your thoughts. This Brother Ceris you spoke of.’

‘Not so much a voice,’ Rafen admitted. ‘More a sense of the man…’ He frowned. ‘It is difficult to put into words. But he is guiding me. Us.’

Nisos kneaded the grip of a lasgun he had stolen from a dead guardian. ‘That does not sit well with me. How do you know it is your battle-brother? What if that presence in your thoughts is some trick of Bile’s? What if–’

Rafen extended a hand and placed it on the Tauran’s shoulder. The edge of fear in the other man’s voice was troubling, and he wondered how long Nisos had been in this prison, and what manner of torments he might have endured to so unsettle him. ‘You must trust me, my friend. Trust that I trust the psyker.’

‘The ways of the warp are the maze of damnation,’ Nisos said quietly. ‘I have seen men touched by the power of the immaterium, good men, and watched them burn in daemonfire.’

‘It is Fabius Bile who will burn this day,’ snapped Layko, a wiry, malnourished Crimson Fist who had joined them on Kilan’s recommendation. He brandished a pair of wicked combat blades. ‘I am eager to give him a taste of my revenge. Why do we delay?’

‘Move with care, Son of Dorn,’ said Vetcha, slipping back towards them. ‘New Men are close by. I smell the foe, all sweat and rotting meat.’

Rafen nodded, half-hearing the old man. He fell silent, allowing himself to lose focus for a moment. Immediately, he sensed Ceris’s presence. The psyker was almost there in the corridor with him, like a ghost at his shoulder. Without words, the witch-kin pressed him onward. A pressure, an ethereal hand at his back, turned him to the right. He peered around the curve of another support and saw two of Bile’s New Men guarding a heavy circular hatch.

Retreating, he turned back to the other Astartes. ‘In there,’ he began. ‘A psionic energy source, likely the power for our target’s arcane warp-sorcery. It must be neutralised.’

Nisos shivered. ‘I feel it in the air. A taint, slick on my skin.’

Rafen nodded. He could feel it too, the telltale greasy texture in the atmosphere, the sense of lurking power like the precursor to an oncoming storm.

‘Two guards,’ noted Vetcha. ‘I expected more.’

Nisos gestured around at the walls; a distant alert klaxon had been sounding for some time. ‘The others have probably been drawn off to deal with the escape, or Rafen’s friends.’

‘We go, then?’ said Layko, battle-need written large across his drawn features.

‘Oh, indeed, we go,’ Rafen replied.

They charged around the corner in a tight wedge, Rafen leading from the front with the barbed bolter screaming. The closest of the New Men was hit and fell, injured but still alive. The second dodged away, sending laser flashes back towards them.

Nisos returned fire with his captured lasgun and scored hits on the second New Man; the gene-freak’s cloak smouldered and caught fire.

Layko came in shouting and beheaded the downed guardian as he tried to rise again. The body fell to the deck, but the Crimson Fist continued to hack at it, shredding flesh and bone into an unrecognisable mess.

With Vetcha covering their rear, Rafen and Nisos sprinted past the massive hatch and bore down on the last guard. The enemy released a fan of laser fire, and had he been clad in his battle armour, Rafen would have dared to wade straight into it and let the ceramite shunt away the lethal flashes of hard light; but he was wounded, ill-prepared, poorly-armed and slowed by the parasite, and such brute-force tactics now would have ended him.

Instead, he threw himself forward, low and close to the ground. Rafen fell into a tuck and roll as Nisos harried the New Man with return fire, and the Blood Angel came up close to the guard, leading with the bolter. He stabbed the blade-wreathed muzzle of the gun into the meat of his enemy’s thigh, and before the New Man could react, he fired. At point-blank range, Cheyne’s gun blasted a massive divot of flesh from the creature and sent it howling to the ground. Nisos swept in, and fired another laser blast through the New Man’s eye; the energy bolt instantly flashed the guard’s brain matter to steam and his skull exploded in a cloud of pinkish-grey mist.

Rafen kicked the corpse away and returned to the hatch. Vetcha had pulled Layko away from his kill; the emaciated Astartes was covered in splashes of blood, his fists as crimson as his Chapter’s sigil. Layko’s face was set in a rictus grin.

Acting quickly, the Blood Angel found the series of iron levers set into an alcove along one of the walls. In moments, the heavy hatch began to groan open, swinging out in thick hinges.

New gales of the psyker-stink gusted out at them as the doorway widened, and with it came another, horribly familiar smell – the battery-acid stench of tyranid pheromones, heavy and cloying in their nostrils.

Rafen cleared his throat with difficulty and took a shallow breath as he moved to cross the threshold; and suddenly, the docile parasite awoke once again. His hand went to his chest, expecting another surge of pain, but this was different. The maggot-thing seemed to be trembling, vibrating inside his flesh. The sensation was nauseating and he felt revolted to his core by it.

The Blood Angel looked up to survey the chamber beyond the hatch and the disgust churning inside him grew tenfold.

Nisos was next, Vetcha and Layko following. All were silent, all sharing the same horror at the sight before them.

The chamber was spherical, and shrouded with metal walls, although these were hardly visible beneath the layers of oozing, gelatinous matter coating every surface. High overhead, above a raised gantry, light seeped in from a circular window. With a flash of understanding, Rafen recognised it as the viewing port he had seen in the floor of Fabius’s laboratory.

The wan illumination cast shadows everywhere, but was not so merciful as to hide the full scope of the monstrosity that dominated the room. Hanging in mucus-encrusted chains from a cruciform support frame was the distended and diseased form of a limbless tyranid beast, shrouded by the softly glowing planes of crystalline psi-baffles.

‘A zoanthrope,’ grated Layko. ‘Throne and blood, it’s alive…’

‘Bile’s pet,’ said Vetcha, with a nod.

Rafen studied the beast coldly. Distended and horribly warped by its massive brain, nearly half the mass of the hydrocephalic tyranid psyker-creature was made up by its huge head, a hammer-shaped mass of blackened chitin armour over pulsating pink matter. A drooling mouth of yellowed fangs hung open, serpent tongues lolling out and dripping thin fluids. Rheumy eye-pits glared back at him from beneath a bony cowl, and even in the alien expression, the Blood Angel could sense a palpable, ready hatred. Beneath the bloated head, a sinuous body barbed with protrusions and strange tusks thinned into a long, barbed tail that hung like a piece of dead meat. Wicked talons the length of a man’s forearm were curled up against the zoanthrope’s torso. Every now and then, they would twitch in palsy.

Alone, this xenos thing was horror enough; but there was more here. Raw-edged wounds filmed with blood that would not clot, seeping from incisions on the alien’s spine. Flays of skin peeled back and held in place by heavy iron spikes revealed a swollen bolus of glistening flesh that hung loose towards the floor. Pipes, wet with ichor, penetrated every part of the alien’s torso. With each laboured, breathy exhalation the creature made, faint traceries of fine dust were drawn up the tubes, away into sockets on the curved walls.

Rafen dared to take a step closer, and the zoanthrope showed more teeth; but the gesture seemed cursory, and without real intent. Peering at the sac, he saw movement within it, and heard a faint keening. Instantly, the maggot in his chest flexed, making him choke. He saw the same reaction from the others. With disgust, Rafen watched the sac pucker, and from it fell a newborn parasite, shiny with wet mucus.

‘They’re everywhere,’ said Layko, almost gagging on the words. ‘Look!’ He pointed with his swords. Concentrating on the shadows, Rafen’s vision grew definite and he saw what the Crimson Fist meant. What he had first thought might be spoil heaps or piles of shed matter were slowly moving masses of the maggot parasites.

‘Little wonder those things Cheyne implanted in us are so agitated,’ said Nisos. ‘They can sense the closeness of these others.’

Rafen paused, turning back to the wheezing zoanthrope. Closer now, and he could see it was weak and sickly. The flesh of the xenos was pallid, and the surface of its chitin armour was pitted and cracked. A fetid air of necrotic decay shrouded the thing. The alien’s head tilted to present him with a jaundiced, milky eye, and he felt a faint wash of telepathic energy move over him. The Blood Angel shuddered, but held fast; the sensation passed as quickly as it had come.

‘A creature like this…’ began the Tauran. ‘It could shatter our minds with a single thought.’

‘Perhaps once,’ said Vetcha. ‘But not now. Bile has made it his slave.’

Rafen nodded. He could see the lines of sutures along the curvature of the zoanthrope’s skull, the places where Fabius’s chirurgeon had bored into the alien’s brain matter and lobotomised it. ‘The traitor shows cunning, as ever,’ he said. ‘Just like this fortress, he has taken what he could find here and perverted it to his own ends.’

‘If this zoanthrope is the breed sow for the parasites…’ began Nisos. He retched. ‘Emperor preserve us! We are tainted by the blood of the alien!’

‘Calm yourself,’ said Vetcha. ‘We’ll wail over who is sullied with what when the task at hand is complete.’ He turned to Rafen, his blind eye sockets blank and without pity. ‘We must kill this thing.’

Rafen nodded. ‘Aye. The beast’s psychic might is at Bile’s command. If he uses it to forge a warp gate, he will be lost to us.’

‘But the protection, the pheromones!’ snapped Layko, pointing at the tubes. ‘I abhor the xenos as much as any Astartes, but if it dies… what then?’

The Blood Angel studied the mechanisms drawing the scent-chemicals from the zoanthrope’s gland clusters. ‘The veil will fall. Any tyranid predators close by will be drawn to the fortress.’

‘So we kill the zoanthrope, and its kindred will come and consume us all!’ said the Crimson Fist.

‘But if we let it live, Bile will flee.’ Rafen shook his head. ‘There is no debate to be had here.’ He raised the barbed bolter and aimed at the alien creature’s head. He tensed, expecting it to lash out, to strike at him in some wild, final effort; instead the zoanthrope folded down its claws and bowed to him, the chains about it slackening.

Nisos hesitated before taking aim with the lasgun. ‘Curious. It must know what we are about to do.’

Vetcha nodded. ‘It’s been a prisoner here longer than any of us. I doubt the arch-traitor’s cruelty was any less towards it for its origins.’ He coughed and looked away.

‘It… wants to die,’ said Layko.

‘A wish we will grant,’ Rafen replied, and fired.

The zoanthrope was the last of the tyranid master clade still living on Dynikas V. The agonies it had suffered at the hands of the flesh-prey that had tormented it were unbounded; the alien’s malleable genetic make-up, the core strength of Hivekind and the key to its victory over the monoforms that infested the galaxy, had been turned against it. The being that had captured it, shackled it, had twisted the zoanthrope with sciences bonded to dark magicks and freakish sorcery. The tyranid became a slave, a breeding machine, little more than a piece of organic hardware meshed into the workings of Fabius Bile’s hidden fortress.

If the xenos could have understood the concept, it might have experienced gratitude, or perhaps grasped the incongruity of its fate. But at the end, only one thing mattered; it wanted death, desired it more even than the great unstoppable hunger that lay at the heart of all of its kind.

And in the seconds before its life drained away, even as the bolt shells and laser blasts ripped it open, it gave voice to a final scream of pain that echoed across the planet.

In the halls of the prison, Brother Ceris cried out and spat blood, flares of bright actinic light flashing about the edges of his psychic hood. He crashed to the stone floor, twitching and coughing, for long seconds caught in the telepathic undertow of the alien’s death cry.

The psionic wave of shrieking, boiling pain flashed out across the island in a radial wave, invisible to the naked eye but blazing sun-bright across the frequencies of the mind. Hundreds of kilometres away, mind-sensitive psi-slaves aboard the boats patrolling the Dynikan oceans were killed instantly, and without them the predators in the water began to drift closer, hunger-lust stimulated by the burst of hate that the scream kindled in their primitive minds.

At the epicentre of the killing, the psionic shock touched every single thing that shared a molecule of tyranid DNA. The clouds of pheromones that had shrouded the island for so long were suddenly robbed of any potency, all power bled from them as the haze of biochemicals quickly discorporated and congealed, becoming a rain of greasy white ash falling from the sky.

The wave of rage expanded, like finding like as every tyranid it touched was abruptly shaken into a ravening, bloodthirsty frenzy. Creatures that drifted or swam or flew were immediately aware of something new and horrible in their midst, as the melange of pheromones and telepathic blinds concealing Bile’s island were instantly dissipated. For the swarms of the xenos, it was as if a colossal malignant tumour had manifested itself without warning in the meat of their body.

All other desires, all other instincts were forgotten. A towering mad fury reserved for the hatred of invaders blossomed across the mind of every tyranid on Dynikas V. They smelled human meat, the spoor of the unlike, and the drives that ruled their species took to the fore.

To attack. To kill.

To devour.

The alien’s death scream cut into Rafen like a ragged knife, and he threw up his hands to protect his ears. But the sound was no sound – instead it was an effect, a field of unseen force rippling about him, through him, into him.

And then came the pain. A fiery churn in his chest that felt like liquid metal pouring down over his flesh, burning him, crisping his skin and bone into blackened gobs of shapeless matter.

The parasite inside him was eating his primary heart; it had to be this. No other agony could be so powerful. The bolter twitching in his cramped grip, he staggered away from the smoking remains of the zoanthrope’s body and fell to his knees. Through blurred vision, he could see the others each in the same condition, every man of them clutching at himself in utter agony.

A thin, high-pitched chorus of squealing reached his ears, filling the chamber with every passing second. The maggots. All around him, the newborn, unimplanted parasites were lashing at each other and writhing with shock, veins protruding from their glossy flanks, fluids chugging out of their lamprey mouthparts.

The zoanthrope’s psychic death throes were killing them; as he watched, struggling to keep himself conscious, the larva-like things burst and shrivelled, vomiting clumps of black cinders into the air. Without the telepathic link to their xenos parent, they were disintegrating as the daemonic elements of their creation were lost back into the warp.

With trembling fingers, Rafen tore open the bloodstained robes across his chest as another sickening roil of repulsion shot through him. He could see the parasite Cheyne had buried beneath his breast, squirming, pressing against the dark clotted matter of scabbed skin where his wound had healed. Then the head of the throbbing, bloody maggot burst from his flesh and hissed at the air, the fronds around its mouth waving. The Blood Angel gagged, but with steely control, he reached up and grabbed the mewling parasite. With a ripping of skin, he tore the thing from him, even as it discorporated into ashen powder.

Rafen spat to clear the taste of acid from his mouth and moved to his comrades. Each of them was stained with the dark powder, their chests bloody and raw.

‘We… are free of them…’ choked Nisos. ‘Free at last!’

The Blood Angel grabbed Vetcha and helped him to his feet, waving a hand in front of his face to disperse the fog of black smoke collecting from the maggot corpses. ‘Bile’s prison had no need of warders, not while those things were inside us,’ said Rafen. ‘He will not live to regret his arrogance–’

‘Above!’ Layko’s shout smothered the other man’s words.

Overhead, where the ring of gantries circled the circumference of the chamber, a hulking shadow was moving, the glow from an open hatchway silhouetting a figure as tall and as broad as a Space Marine.

‘You,’ came a voice, as cold as a curse. ‘What have you done?’

To the tyranids’ insectile senses, the island seemed to come from nowhere, and the shoal of krakens lurking beneath the ocean surface were suddenly assailed by the vibrations and overspill of prey, so close to them that the proximity was almost maddening.

Their bullet-like bodies exploded out of the shallows, tentacles fanning out in all directions to capture anything that could be consumed and converted into biomass. One dithered over the capsized wreck of the patrol craft, spearing through the boat’s internal spaces as it probed for living tissue; others threw themselves on to the hull of the beached Neimos, thick ropes of cilia flooding in through open hatches to feast on the morsels of near-human meat cowering within the metal tube. In concert, their coils strangling the steel, they cracked open the submersible, shattering the space-hardened metals and opening it to the saline air.

When they had picked the craft clean, they shifted their mass and altered the configuration of their forms, dragging themselves up the gravel beach and on to dry land, moving with steady purpose towards the gates of the fortress. They could smell the prey, and there was much of it.

In their wake, the waves along the coastline began to froth as countless clades of lictor-sharks, ripper eels and other hungry forms came hunting for the same meat.

‘Fabius Bile!’ Rafen shouted his enemy’s name with all his might. ‘I name you traitor!’ He squeezed the bolter’s trigger and sent rounds crashing off the overhead gantry. Nisos joined him, stitching laser fire up in a blazing fan of light.

The Primogenitor snarled as he took a glancing round, and threw himself over the rail ringing the gantry. His skin-coat fluttered open behind him as he fell, and he landed hard and ankle-deep in the mass of a pile of dead maggots.

Rafen was already moving, reloading on the go, putting the support frame and the corpse of the zoanthrope between him and the traitor. Bile’s hand disappeared into the folds of his coat and returned with a wicked-looking weapon.

The Xyclos Needler. Before embarking on the Tycho’s mission, Rafen had studied all the records he could find of Fabius’s methodology and combat prowess; data had been sketchy and often contradictory, but on the matter of the traitor’s favoured weapons, there had been a consensus. Bile used a type of archeotech pistol dating back to the Dark Age of Technology, guns whose needle loads could carry a variety of lethal toxins powerful enough to fell even a Space Marine.

The gun chattered and Rafen dodged, feeling the gust of passage as two darts as thick as his finger whispered by his head to bury themselves in the dead tyranid. Beam fire from the Tauran drew the traitor’s attention and Rafen broke from cover, looking for an angle of attack. He sensed Layko and Vetcha close by, waiting for their opportunity to strike.

His eyes narrowed; there was no sign of the massive brass-and-steel chirurgeon device Bile often wore upon his back. The machine allegedly supplied the traitor’s millennia-old body with warp-tainted chemicals to keep him alive, and on Baal some of Rafen’s battle-brothers had learned to their cost that the device had a mind of its own. Still; without it, Bile was denied a key defence, and Rafen would accept every advantage he could get.

‘You Astartes fools!’ Bile was shouting at the air. ‘I wanted to make you part of something great, and now you threaten to destroy everything! Why couldn’t you just be good specimens and know your place?’

‘We are not yours to toy with, whoreson!’ snarled Layko. ‘You’ll die here in this hell of your creation!’

‘Oh, I think not!’ came the retort, followed by a hissing storm of needles.

Rafen ducked and sprinted around a stanchion, careful not to lose his footing in the mass of mucal matter and decayed maggot-skin. He fired two rounds and saw Bile take a solid hit in the shoulder that spun him around; but before he could draw a bead a second time, the Crimson Fist was racing from cover, sword blades a web of bright steel. Layko barrelled into Bile with such force that he knocked the Primogenitor off balance and out of Rafen’s sight line.

‘That idiot whelp!’ snarled Vetcha.

Rafen moved, seeking an angle, as Layko connected with Bile, smashing his swords into the traitor with wild, heedless abandon. The expression on the Crimson Fist’s face was one of madness. He was lost in the need to strike back at the man who had so tormented him.

Cuts opening across his face and his arms, Bile roared back in anger and grabbed at Layko before the gaunt Astartes could disengage. He dragged the other man off his feet in a burst of speed and strength that Rafen would have thought impossible, and threw him bodily across the chamber. The gesture was not random; Bile tossed Layko straight into Nisos as the Tauran took aim, knocking the other Space Marine down into a wet mass of ashen slurry.

It only took a moment to happen, but it was a moment Rafen employed with the perfect clarity born in hard-fought battle. Fabius recoiled from his attack and found the Blood Angel aiming at his head.

‘This ends now, coward,’ said Rafen, pulling the trigger.

The sound of the misfire echoed louder than any bullet. With a dull snap, the bolt cartridge mechanism fouled once again, turning the barbed pistol into little more than an ornate club.

A cold smile creased Bile’s face as he raised the needler. ‘Cheyne never did take very good care of his weapons.’

The traitor’s gun chattered; but suddenly the world was turning around Rafen as a lank-haired figure collided with him and threw him to the wet-slick floor. The Blood Angel landed hard, the old Space Wolf’s weight upon him. Vetcha gasped and choked, a trio of thick silver spines protruding from his chest.

Furious, Rafen banged the stalled bolter against the deck to free the trapped round and rose up with a roar. Before Bile could react, Rafen pulled the trigger once more and Cheyne’s weapon spoke thunder.

The mass-reactive round struck the traitor in the cheek and blasted away a third of his head in a puff of mist. Bile’s legs gave way and he dropped into a kneeling position, black blood jetting from his ruptured face.

Ignoring his target, Rafen bent to see to Vetcha. ‘Long Fang! You old fool!’

The Space Wolf laughed. ‘No way… to speak to your elders, boy…’ The poison in the darts was already blackening the veins visible on the surface of the veteran’s skin, but still he reached up and pulled open his tunic. There, hidden from sight, was the festering wound from a sword cut. ‘Poison was already in me,’ he hissed. ‘Cheyne… on his bone blade. Better this blind wolf spends his last breath of life well, eh, Blood Angel?’

Rafen gave a grim nod. ‘Aye.’

‘Tell them on Fenris,’ choked the warrior. ‘Tell them Nurhünn Vetcha lived to see his enemy die.’ The Space Wolf drew in half a breath, and fell silent.

‘Ave Imperator,’ replied Rafen. He stood up, turning towards Bile. Incredibly, the traitor was still alive, his body twitching as jolts of oily fluid spurted from his injuries. The Blood Angel stepped in, touching the barrel of the gun to the ragged wound his first shot had made. He fired again, and this time Bile’s skull exploded, flinging his headless carcass to the floor.

Still twitchy with adrenaline, Layko approached the corpse, with Nisos warily training his gun on the remains. ‘Is it done?’ said the Crimson Fist.

Rafen looked up, towards the circular window in the ceiling. ‘Not yet,’ he replied.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘There’s no way out!’ shouted one of the warriors, falling back towards the main line of the Astartes as las-fire chased him across the sandy ridge. He was a brother of the Salamanders Chapter, and his ebon countenance was set in a scowl.

Tarikus looked up and glanced at Kilan, who gave him a grave nod, confirming the other prisoner’s words. The gathering of Space Marines were holding cover in the shadows of the cavern where the enemy had driven them, keeping the modificates out, but only barely. With too few weapons and too many warriors far below optimal fighting strength, they were hard-pressed. The Doom Eagle counted less than ten battle-brothers, and given the choice of them he would have taken only half into war. The death-agony of the parasites had freed the prisoners from the control of the New Men, but the shock had left many of them weakened. Tarikus’s hands were still dirty with the blood and ash of the maggot that he had torn from his chest.

‘As Vulkan is my witness,’ continued the Salamander, ‘every splice left in the fortress is marshalling against us!’

‘So it’s even odds, then,’ said Kilan, but his attempt at bravado fell upon stony ground.

‘On any other day, I might agree,’ nodded Tarikus, ‘but we are few, wounded and unfit, and they are many. We can only hold the line.’

Kilan ducked as a laser bolt streaked over his head, slamming into the stone roof. ‘Rot their blighted souls!’ he snarled. ‘We cannot end like this! We are the Emperor’s chosen, and for every wound we have taken, all we have lost, we cannot die cowering in the dark!’ He fired back, killing a serpent-beast slithering in on its belly. The Raven Guard glared at the Doom Eagle, his eyes aflame. ‘The shackles of Bile’s prison are broken! If we end here, we will die without honour!’

Tarikus discarded one of the bolters in his hands, the weapon empty, the barrel warped and white-hot with overuse. He loaded his only remaining clip of ammunition into the other gun and whispered words of blessing over it. ‘Emperor, I beseech you,’ he said quietly, his voice lost in the rumble and screech of the battle, ‘deliver us from this.’

‘What say you, kinsman?’ pressed Kilan. ‘Your Chapter welcomes death, does it not? Shall we go out there to find it?’ He stabbed a finger at the thronging mass of the enemy crowding the cavern mouth.

‘Fate will take us when it is ready,’ Tarikus replied.

‘Perhaps this is that day–’ The Salamander began to speak, only to be cut down by a fusillade of beams spitting from the cluttered entranceway.

Tarikus swore hatred and fired back, killing those who had murdered the battle-brother. He was still cursing them when the pistol breech locked back with a heavy, final snap of metal on metal, the last round expended.

‘So be it,’ he said. ‘Come take me, then, if you dare.’ Tarikus listened to the shrieks of laser bolts slashing through the air about him, the bellow and chatter of the modificates, waiting for the sound of the enemy’s hooves echoing into the cavern; but instead he caught the unmistakable thunder of massed bolters. Peering out of cover, he saw the modificates being cut to pieces by raging torrents of shellfire and the heavy detonations of krak grenades.

Kilan surged forward, sensing the rout of the enemy as it formed, and Tarikus went with him, charging down towards the cavern mouth.

At the entrance, the smoky light from outside was suddenly blotted out by the shapes of figures in heavy power armour, wreaths of cordite vapour clinging to them like cloaks. Tarikus saw the pointed, feral snout of a Mark VII Aquila-pattern battle helmet, the eye slits glowing red in the gloom. Unbidden, a rare grin burst out across his lips.

‘Brothers of the Imperium,’ said the figure in black and ruby. ‘Stand to.’

‘Rafen’s comrades, I presume?’ said Kilan, laughing.

‘The same. We thought you might appreciate some help with this matter.’ The Flesh Tearer kicked at a dead minotal and then glanced around at the survivors. ‘Is this all that remains?’ He removed his helm as he asked the question.

‘Aye,’ said the Raven Guard. ‘A few others with Brother Rafen, but no more.’

‘And the arch-traitor?’ This question came from a Blood Angel who stood nearby. ‘What of Fabius Bile?’

‘Unknown,’ Kilan admitted.

‘I know you.’ Tarikus studied the sergeant. ‘Noxx. It’s been a while since Merron.’

‘Brother Tarikus.’ The Flesh Tearer gave him a wary nod. ‘It has. Still hold it against me?’

The Doom Eagle shrugged off the question. ‘I’ll be generous if you tell me you can take us from this place.’

A figure in indigo armour, his head crested with a psionic hood, moved into the cave, turning a penetrating gaze on every one of the freed warriors. ‘Our conveyance has been destroyed by the tyranids.’ The psyker’s hard-edged glare passed over Tarikus and he felt the Blood Angel briefly turning a spotlight on his soul, seeking signs of weakness and taint. ‘We need to find another way off this blighted rock.’

‘Tyranids…’ echoed Kilan. ‘The scream we heard…’

‘A clarion call,’ muttered Tarikus.

‘They’re coming here,’ continued the psyker. ‘All of them.’

‘Not the deliverance you were hoping for, I’ll warrant,’ said Noxx. ‘My apologies.’

‘On the contrary,’ Tarikus replied, thinking again of his prayer. ‘We are not dead yet.’

Layko levered the hatch open and Rafen stalked through, with Nisos behind him. Climbing up to the gantry level where the traitor had entered, the three Astartes had been ill at ease to leave the Space Wolf’s body where he had fallen; lacking an incendiary grenade, they could not even grant him a funeral pyre. Rafen took a last look down at the Long Fang as the hatch slammed shut behind him. He resolved to find a way to make sure that every Space Marine who had died unremarked in this place would be honoured in one way or another.

On the far side of the chamber, a heavy airlock was visible, bathed in sickly green light; beyond it had to be the place where Rafen had been interrogated by the renegade. ‘We’re close to the laboratory level,’ he said, noticing the reflexive twitch on Layko’s face as he said the words. ‘Just beneath it.’ His breath made clouds of vapour as he spoke. The near-polar chill of the dimly lit chamber leached the heat from his fingers and through the rags binding his feet.

‘What is this place?’ said Nisos, squinting. The occulobe implants shared by the Space Marines gave them exemplary night vision, and by degrees the chamber appeared to lighten as their eyes became used to the dark.

There were open-topped tanks crammed into multiple rows, filled with icy cryogenic slush, and overhead dozens of irregular shapes hung from black chains that vanished towards the ceiling. Rafen smelled the faint odour of blood, attenuated by the bite of the cold.

‘Dorn’s eyes!’ cursed Layko. ‘This is a meat locker!’

The Crimson Fist was not in error. Each of the objects were corpses – or at least, they were the parts of corpses, dangling like cuts of meat in the window of some hive city butchery. Rafen saw gutted modificates of various kinds and things that might have been the raw material for Bile’s monstrous New Men. In the tanks too, there were limbs and organs floating in suspension mediums, hearts and lungs connected to electro-stimulators that kept them beating and breathing without bodies.

‘Astartes,’ said Nisos, in a dead voice. At first, Rafen thought the Tauran was calling them to attract their attention; but he was describing what he saw. Hanging in a line were the legless torsos of figures that could only have been Space Marines, blood still dripping slowly from their opened stomachs into a long fluid gutter below. Visible on the closest of them were the intricate war-tattoos of the Stone Hearts Chapter, each line of text the battle record of the dead man.

Rafen was about to speak, but he glimpsed something that killed his words in his throat. He stepped closer to one of the bubbling tanks.

The air in the chamber was freezing, but what he saw truly made his blood run cold. There, submerged beneath the mantle of slush, Fabius Bile lay naked and dead. His throat was an open, shredded ruin of meat.

‘I killed him…’ Rafen whispered. ‘In the laboratory…’

Layko saw it too. ‘How is that possible?’ he demanded. ‘I saw you blast his head from his neck with my own eyes, and yet there he is… No!’ The Fist shook his head wildly. ‘This is a trick! Fabius Bile is dead!’

Heavy, sullen laughter echoed across the chamber as a shadowy form detached from the depths of the gloom. ‘Am I?’ His patchwork fleshcoat rustling as he moved, the traitor moved into the light. With a hissing, chugging whine, the chirurgeon upon his back unfolded its manifold arms. ‘You are mistaken.’

No sooner had the renegade spoken, but another, identical voice issued out from the far side of the chamber. Another Fabius, almost identical but for the lack of a chirurgeon-construct, stepped out from behind a towering stanchion. ‘Very mistaken,’ said the doppelganger, amused with himself.

Nisos swore under his breath. ‘How many of him are there?’ he demanded, unsure where to aim his lasgun.

Rafen shook off the shock of what he saw, his hand tightening around the grip of the bolter. It made a horrible kind of sense; the manipulation of genetic material, the creation of replicae and mutant forms of life from nothing, all these things were the meat and drink of the renegade who dared to call himself ‘the Primogenitor of Chaos Undivided’. This was a madman who had dared to clone the arch-traitor Horus, who planned to rebuild the gene-code of the God-Emperor of Mankind – by contrast, cutting duplicates of himself, either from raw flesh or by alteration of living beings, would be well within his ability.

‘I have killed you twice already,’ Rafen spat. ‘And if I must, I will cut my way through every single mirror of you until none remain!’ He pulled the trigger and fire blazed. His target moved, and the shot thudded into a tank, letting a spurt of supercooled liquids jet into the air. Where the fluid landed, rimes of ice began to form in ragged patches over the walls and the floor.

‘You know what must be done!’ the first of the duplicates shouted across the chamber to the second. ‘I will deal with these animals.’

The other Fabius gave a harsh chuckle and threw himself at the airlock. Nisos fired, but the renegade-double was too quick, slamming the heavy door shut behind him.

Rafen heard a whining grunt of noise, and saw the pistons on the chirurgeon rattle and shift. Oil-filled pods discharged into Bile’s spine and he released a hiss of pleasure; then, with jerky, birdlike motions, the brass construct detached from the renegade’s back and skittered away on spidery brass legs. It rattled across the metal decking, homing in on the Tauran.

‘Come kill me again, if you can, Blood Angel.’ Bile goaded him, and with a flourish, the traitor drew a lengthy black rod from a scabbard on his belt, brandishing it like a sword.

The enemy moved, keeping the hanging scraps of corpse-meat between himself and his attackers. Rafen fired on the run, bracketing the traitor with each hit, attempting to drive him, knock him off-balance. The Blood Angel glimpsed the Crimson Fist threading low between the shapes of the fluid tanks and fired again, attempting to draw Bile’s attention.

But Layko was too eager, too driven, too wild. The other Astartes burst from cover a moment too soon and struck out with his twinned combat blades, slashing hard and connecting with the traitor’s heavy coat. The leathery, tanned hide split and with it Layko carved through armour and into flesh – but the cut was a shallow one.

Smiling, Bile hit back with the rod-weapon and creased Layko’s temple with the shimmering tip. The Crimson Fist reacted as if he had been doused in acid, throwing himself aside, his swords forgotten as they clattered to the deck. Every nerve in the Space Marine’s body was firing at once, blazing with pain; the smallest caress of Bile’s so-called Rod of Torment could magnify the slightest injury into a maelstrom of agony.

Rafen chanced a look towards Nisos, and saw the Tauran engaged in a running battle with the chirurgeon device as it skittered back and forth, snapping at him with barbed injectors and blade-sharp claws. Then Bile was rushing into him, and he dodged with a heartbeat to spare. As the rod cut through the air past his arm, he felt the skin there go tight and stiff with the proximity of the weapon’s pain-field.

The Blood Angel fired wildly, shots he knew would not connect, but close enough to keep Bile from grappling him. Following through with a spinning kick, Rafen connected solidly with the traitor’s ribcage; but the impact went into a plate of hard armour concealed beneath the flapping coat, doing little more than making his enemy grunt in surprise.

Fabius reacted faster than Rafen expected, and the rod spun around in his enemy’s grip like a baton. The tip of the weapon cut an arc downward and this time he was too slow to avoid the hit entirely. The rod connected with his forearm and he bellowed with pain; it was as if his hand had been plunged into a bath of molten metal. Rafen lost the barbed bolter he had taken from Cheyne; in a disconnected way, he vaguely registered it as it tumbled away, falling into an icy slush pool with a splash. The pain resonated through him, robbing his left arm of any function. The limb hung there on the end of his shoulder like a piece of dead meat, numb and useless.

‘Come, come!’ snarled Bile. ‘I want my chance to kill you the same as all the others!’

Others? Again, Rafen found himself wondering how many duplicates of this creature were stalking the stars. Was this the same man he had faced so briefly on Baal?

He tried to work his arm, but nothing came of it. Nisos had his own enemy to fight, Layko was still struggling to regain control of his body; Rafen alone had to make this kill.

Bile held the rod up, slashing it back and forth in the air. ‘Ready for another taste?’ he asked, circling the Astartes.

A smile as cold as the air in the chamber split the Blood Angel’s lips, as he made a daring choice. ‘Yes,’ he replied, and flung himself at the renegade.

His enemy was taken off-guard, surprised by the frontal attack. Still, the rod slammed straight into Rafen’s gut and flooded his body with a torture beyond his experience. He had endured so many different strains of agony, and each had its shade and colour, each a texture unique and equally dire. The power of Bile’s weapon was nova-bright and blinding, ripping through him like white fire.

Such a hit would have put him to his knees, had he taken it standing. His headlong rush changed the equation; even as he collapsed, his body wracked with spasms, the force of Rafen’s impact against Bile sent the renegade stumbling backward – and there his heavy boots crossed the thick slick of ice across the steel floor. Without traction, Bile’s weight turned against him and he fell backward, shouting in fury. Unable to arrest his fall, the traitor crashed through a thin layer of frost atop one of the fluid tanks and plunged into the mix of sub-zero cryogens swirling beneath.

Bile thrashed at the sides of the container, the rod rolling away across the floor, his extremities turning black as frostbite ate into them. The killing cold enveloped him, the freeze marching up his torso as a fungus would spread over the trunk of a tree. Choking, the traitor wrenched himself forward, desperately trying to drag himself out of the tank.

He met the tip of the rod as Rafen, still shaking, blood trickling from his nostrils, ears and eyes, ran it into Bile’s chest with all the force he could muster. The renegade’s agonised body turned against him and he crashed back into the fluid-filled tank, sinking beneath the surface.

Awareness fled, and the Blood Angel’s mind went dark for long moments. Finally, Rafen felt a hand on his shoulder and blinked back to wakefulness. Ice crystals fell from his face and he looked up from where he had fallen. Layko offered him a hand and he took it. His body ached inside and out, and a fatigue like he had never known lay heavy upon him.

‘Lost you for a while, Blood Angel,’ said the Crimson Fist. He handed him a lasgun and Rafen’s brow furrowed as he registered the weapon.

‘Brother Nisos?’

Layko nodded in the direction of the smouldering remains of the chirurgeon; beneath it, eyes wide open and sightless, the Tauran lay dead, pinned to the deck by a dozen of the hellish machine’s manipulators. ‘He didn’t sell his life cheaply.’

‘He was an Astartes. We never do.’ Rafen began to walk stiffly towards the airlock.

The Crimson Fist gathered up his swords and followed him.

‘This way,’ said Ceris, pointing into the gloom of the rocky corridor. His voice sounded distant and hollow over the vox link.

Noxx shot him a look. Inside the warren of passageways within the walls of the fortress-prison, every hallway seemed much the same as every other. The crimson flashes from alert strobes impact-bolted to the walls lent everything a hellish, otherworldly air, and the keening sirens sounding down the tunnels were the voices of banshees. Every few feet there were hatchways made of dirty steel, and control lecterns protruding from the walls whose functions he could not determine. They had encountered a few of Bile’s New Men here and there, and together they had killed them; but Noxx’s skin was crawling with the ominous sense of a threat nearby, and it made him twitchy not to face it head on. ‘Rafen is still alive, then?’

The psyker nodded, throwing a glance back at Ajir and Turcio as they flanked the rag-tag group of escapees. ‘He is. With the psychic distortion dissipated, I can read him more clearly. He’s angry.’

‘Aren’t we all,’ Noxx retorted. ‘How far?’

‘He’s in the tower.’

‘And Bile?’

Ceris paused, and Noxx could hear the deep frown in his words. ‘Difficult to tell. I sense death, and yet…’ He trailed off.

‘Sergeant.’ Eigen, holding the rearguard, was speaking over the general vox channel. ‘Do you hear this?’

Noxx held up his hand and gave the battlesign gesture for ‘halt’. Immediately, every Astartes froze in place and fell silent. The Flesh Tearer toggled the gain on his helmet’s audial sensors and the noise Eigen had detected became a rushing hiss in his ears. The helm’s simple machine-spirit pinpointed the source of the sound within seconds; behind them, closing quickly.

‘Like water,’ offered Tarikus. ‘Could the sea be flooding the lower levels?’

Noxx drew a photon flash grenade and threw it down the corridor, back along the path they had travelled; set to impact-detonate, it immediately blasted a wave of harsh white radiance that illuminated everything as if it were bright daylight.

The floor was a rippling, chittering wave of dark-eyed shapes, serpentine things with massive jawed mouths slithering across the stone towards them. Cracks in the ceiling were allowing streams of them to slip through, more and more of them cascading into the chamber with every passing second.

‘Rippers!’ shouted Sove, opening fire with his bolter.

‘Fall back!’ shouted Noxx. ‘If we stop to engage them, we’ll be engulfed!’

The Astartes obeyed, but one of the prisoners – a young Ultramarine scout – stumbled and fell. The advancing mass rolled over him and began to feed. Noxx fired and moved, the others staying with him.

‘We can’t outrun these xenos,’ shouted Kilan. ‘Cover me!’ The Raven Guard vaulted to the wall, to one of the control lecterns.

‘Do as he says!’ Noxx ordered, and the other warriors laid down a fan of fire from bolters and lasguns as the Raven Guard worked. Kilan pulled a set of levers and Noxx saw something move along the walls – metal nozzles at ankle-height, folding out of hidden housings. A familiar smell touched his nostrils through his breath filter: promethium.

With a hissing thump of displaced air, the Raven Guard triggered the mechanism and a wall of flame blasted upward, rising to curl along the top of the tunnel. Trapped on the other side, the ripper eels shrilled and died in the hundreds as they were caught by the flames.

Kilan coughed and spat, staggering back to the group. ‘Flame jets,’ he explained, ‘The splices used them to torch the tunnels clean… and to burn the dead.’

‘The fire won’t last long,’ said Tarikus. ‘The tanks that feed the nozzles were ruptured in the breakout.’

Ceris pointed again, along a branching corridor. ‘This way,’ he repeated.

‘Where is he?’ said Layko, glaring into the corners of the laboratorium. Rafen stalked forward, the lasgun held out in front of him. It felt small and delicate in his grip in comparison to the bolt weapons he was used to; he had his doubts it would be enough to kill Fabius.

Kill Fabius. The Blood Angel considered the oath he had made, back in the Chapter Master’s sanctum, the promise to his battle-brothers and the spirit of his primarch. How many deaths would it take, he wondered? How many good and loyal Space Marines murdered and dissected like animals, how many bullets expended and gallons of blood shed? How much would it take to end this?

‘Not here,’ Rafen said, finally answering the Crimson Fist’s question. Casting his gaze across the chamber he saw a hatchway hanging open, weak yellow light emerging from it in an invitation. ‘There.’

‘Another horror show?’ Layko grimaced.

‘A trophy room,’ Rafen explained. ‘Bile’s prizes.’ He frowned and gave the Crimson Fist a look. ‘I know you want him dead as much as I do, but I ask you to hold your temper, kinsman. We must attack together.’

For a second, Layko’s face coloured with annoyance, and he seemed on the verge of decrying the Blood Angel’s demands; then his eyes narrowed and he nodded. ‘Aye, kinsman. Together.’

‘You will not like what you see in here,’ Rafen said, making for the open hatch.

Layko followed him in and halted with a jerk on the threshold. Rafen glanced at the other Astartes and saw a series of powerful emotions cross his face – anger, sadness, resignation, horror. The Blood Angel imagined the same expressions had shown on him when Cheyne and the New Men had forced him into this place.

The two of them picked their way through the rows of prize relics, ready for the next attack. Still, Rafen found it hard to keep his focus. At the far end of trophy room, the liquid-filled container holding the stolen progenoids Bile had so brazenly displayed to him glowed, light shimmering through it. He dared not hope that the crystalline vial the traitor had stolen from Baal was still there too – he wanted to abandon all caution and run to it, rescue the sacred blood. It took a strong measure of his self control not to give in; Bile was laying a route for them to follow, that was clear. Somewhere a trap was waiting for them, and any breath could trigger it.

‘I do not see him,’ Layko whispered, his voice carrying in the quiet. The Crimson Fist moved parallel to the Blood Angel, between racks holding ranks of stolen power armour that stood as mute witnesses to the dishonour of this place. ‘He cannot flee.’ Layko jerked his head up at the roof. ‘This is the upper tier of the tower, and there are no other exit routes.’

Rafen nodded and spoke loudly. ‘My kinsman speaks the truth, traitor. You have nowhere to run. Your xenos pet is dead. The warp is closed to you. Your fortress is about to be overrun. If you can still remember what it means to be an Astartes, show yourself. Meet your fate without cowardice.’

He was close to the tank now. A few steps more, just a few steps, and he would be able to reach inside and pluck the vial from the bubbling froth. Rafen’s hand clenched and unclenched, and he looked around, trying to see in all directions at once. Almost there.

Layko had halted. ‘Blood Angel. Do you see this?’ The Crimson Fist bent to examine something. ‘This is not Astartes issue. The glyphs on the surface… I have seen them before.’ He was studying a canister made of black metal, branded with thick Chaos runes. Through vents in the side of the pod, a stew of emerald mist was visible.

Rafen nodded, his attention on the vial. He was reaching for it. ‘Cover me, Layko. I must recover this.’

Both of them heard the creaking. The sound was a familiar one, the sound of ceramite and plasteel turning upon bearings, the working of bunches of artificial myomer muscles beneath the skin of Space Marine power armour.

With sudden, wild fury, one of the dormant suits that lay at rest upon Bile’s trophy racks exploded into motion, the fierce red eyes of the helmet flashing into life. A mailed power fist, humming with energy, slammed Layko down and Rafen heard the sharp report of snapping bone. Without a moment’s pause, the armoured figure launched itself from the supports and stormed across the metal decking, knocking other cases aside in its headlong rush. Rafen spun away from the fluid-filled tank and brought up the lasgun in his hand.

It was then that he realised the armoured figure before him was clad in the sanguine red of his own Chapter. The wargear was pockmarked by impact hits, battle-scorched and ragged, but it was every inch the holy plate and mail of a Blood Angel. His hesitation froze Rafen’s finger on the trigger, his mind racing. ‘Brother?’ he called.

The harsh laughter echoing from the helmet’s vox grille killed that question in a heartbeat. ‘Not quite,’ said Bile.

Rafen’s rage broke its banks at this, an insult piled atop every other offence the renegade had turned against his Chapter. ‘You have no right!’ he shouted. As Bile crashed towards him, the Blood Angel saw the name of the armour’s true owner etched in gold leaf about the chest plate; Brother Kear.

‘It’s a poor fit, I will agree,’ Bile retorted, ‘but I do not need it for long. I’ll shed this paltry skin as I have so many others.’ He swung the power fist and Rafen ducked, the impact smashing another display cabinet to splinters.

Through his fury, the Blood Angel registered a moment’s sluggishness in Bile’s attack, and he understood the reason immediately. Astartes power armour was not simply a layer of clothes a man could choose to don like a robe or a tunic. To correctly mesh the organic machine of an Adeptus Astartes with the perfect function of his wargear took care, time and hallowed ritual; and if a traitor fiend like Bile attempted such a thing… Rafen imagined that even as they fought, the machine-spirit in Kear’s armour was working against the renegade, struggling to counter his every input.

His enemy’s conceit, his arrogant need for such a grand piece of theatre, could be turned against him. Rafen had an advantage, no matter how slim, and he would use it.

In the next second he was caught by a grazing slap from those heavy, armoured fingers, and he stumbled into a support beam, dazed. Rafen spat thick fluid from his lips and coughed. ‘You… cannot despoil and go unpunished. Every crime you commit is added to the tally! Every offence grants you another lifetime in a traitor’s hell!’

‘Do tell,’ Bile said languidly, gathering up a sword from where it had fallen amid the path of his destruction. He examined it, made a swing. ‘Will you keep spouting this tired old dogma even as you choke on your own blood?’

‘My death will not stop the vengeance of my Chapter!’ Rafen shouted back, blasting laser fire at his enemy. ‘You cannot escape this time! The xenos will rip you apart or our ships will obliterate you! Death is at your throat, turncoat!’

‘Your ships?’ Bile laughed, and to hear that hated voice issuing from behind a Blood Angel helm made Rafen’s stomach twist in knots. ‘How do you think I am going to leave this place?’ He came in fast and swung the blade. Rafen instinctively parried with the lasgun and the sword cut it in two, smashing it away in sparking fragments. ‘What other reason is there for this loathsome masquerade?’ Bile gestured at the armour. ‘Look here. I think you know what this is.’ His hand pulled a device from the wargear belt, a thick rod etched with runes in gothic script. One end sported a crystal that blinked red-blue in a complex sequence.

It was a summoner, an Imperial teleport transponder. Perhaps it had been taken along with Kear’s armour, or perhaps Bile had bartered it from Zellik for some unknown price; it mattered little. The rare archeotech device was encoded with command-level sigils, and correctly manipulated, it could reach through the ether and trigger a ship’s teleportarium to automatically lock on to whomever was its bearer.

‘You hesitated, didn’t you?’ said Bile, pushing Rafen back with the point of the sword. ‘Your brothers will do the same when I appear among them, up there, on your precious starship. Long enough for me to put that to use.’ He nodded towards the canister Layko had discovered. ‘Have you ever seen the effects of rot-bane on human flesh, Blood Angel? It is an ugly, sordid death. I have prepared a special variety, just for your kinsmen. One to which, sadly, they will not share my immunity.’

‘I will not allow it!’ Rafen shouted, turning to attack with his bare hands.

‘You have no say in the matter,’ Bile replied, and ran the sword into him.

Rafen bellowed and clutched at the blade as it went into his shoulder. The renegade forced him backward until the sword’s tip emerged from his back and buried itself in the wall. Bile pinned him there, choking and racked with pain.

‘Damn you…’ spat the Astartes.

Disregarding Rafen, the traitor punched through the tank of fluids and snatched the vial of sacred vitae, ignoring the precious progenoids as they spilled out on to the floor. Bile continued to ignore him and worked a control lever. A hidden hatch in the ceiling yawned open, and part of the roof descended to form a ramp.

Bile gave Rafen a last look and threw him a mocking salute. ‘Remember what I told you before, Astartes. You have failed. If you had listened to me, the shame would have been all you lived with. Now, you will be a feast for the tyranids.’

The traitor turned away and climbed the ramp, up towards the cloudy sky and the promise of escape far above.

Rafen’s blood-slick hands grasped the razor-sharp blade of the sword and tried without success to drag it back through the wound. He gasped, his breath coming in hard, sharp chugs of air. The abuse his enhanced Astartes physiology had gone through in these last few days was a battle campaign’s worth of hurts and injuries, and yet he could not falter, could not rest until his mission was complete. That, or until death itself came to claim him.

And death’s touch felt very close at hand for the Blood Angel. Bile had beaten him, time and again, and with each confrontation Rafen felt as if a part of his soul had been chipped away. Defeat was a poison like no other, invidious and corrosive, sapping the morale of good warriors and turning their will to dust. Rafen felt the darkness of it in him at that moment, polluting his resolve.

No. I will not die here. Not like this.

‘I will not die…’ he whispered, fingers slipping as he tried to dislodge the sword. ‘I will not die here…’

‘Talk is cheap, Blood Angel,’ came a slurred voice. ‘Prove it.’

Rafen felt the blade shift and blinked. Layko lurched closer, the right side of his face and torso hanging slack, blood streaming from his nostrils. With his good hand, the Crimson Fist yanked hard on the hilt of the weapon and drew it out, freeing his comrade.

The Blood Angel stifled a cry and staggered forward, barely keeping his balance. ‘Layko,’ he coughed. ‘I saw the hit… Thought you would not rise again.’

‘Kantor would disown my name if I let such a love-tap fell me,’ managed the other warrior. His words were thick with pain. Rafen saw the misted cast of his right eye; Bile’s strike had broken something vital inside the Crimson Fist’s skull, and Layko had to know it. He thrust the sword into Rafen’s hands. ‘Take it. Must finish this. For Nisos. Vetcha. Others.’

The Blood Angel weighed the weapon in his grip. Not since he had been a youth, not since a fateful moment in the shadow of Mount Seraph during the trials of initiation, had he felt so damnably weak. So drained of energy and strength. It would be easy to fall here, he realised. Simple to let his wounds overtake him, sink to the ground and allow fate to choose how he died. It would be fitting for one who had… Who had…

You have failed. The words echoed in his mind, mocking him. If he did no more, then they would be his epitaph.

That would not stand.

‘Follow me,’ he said, and mounted the ramp towards the roof.

‘Close it!’ shouted Turcio, flinging himself across the threshold of the circular airlock. A pack of lictor-shark hybrids swarmed up the tunnel behind him, their dark featureless eyes glittering with hunger. Kayne and Kilan put their shoulders to the cogwheel-shaped hatch and rolled it shut; and as the door was a hand’s span from sealing, a scythe of barbed claws rushed through the narrowing gap, whipping back and forth, clawing at the black steel.

Ajir fired off a three-round burst and clipped the talons, giving the others the time to finish the job. The hatch locked home, and immediately the mottled surface began to echo and distend with heavy impacts from the other side.

The assembled Astartes, attackers and escapees, paused to catch their collective breath. The tyranids had overrun the lower levels of the fortress and like a rising flood, they were rapidly claiming every corner of the complex for themselves.

Noxx reloaded his bolter, and without looking up he asked the question that was on all their minds. ‘Is this where we will make our last stand?’

Ceris answered, but he seemed distracted. ‘The hatch will hold them for the moment.’

‘Said that about the fire wall,’ Puluo muttered irritably.

‘We are inside the inner sanctum of Fabius Bile,’ said Tarikus. ‘This is his retreat, his laboratory, his house of horrors.’

Gast was moving warily along the metal gangway, peering through armoured viewing slits into chambers that branched off. ‘I see cryo-modules. What may be work platforms and operating theatres… Or at least, whatever the archenemy might consider their equivalents.’

‘We need to find Rafen and the others,’ said Kayne. ‘Perhaps together we–’

‘Can do what, lad?’ Ajir blew out a breath. ‘We’ve exchanged one dead end for another. The tyranids are everywhere, and even if we can last out a siege with them crawling across this blighted place, in a few hours Rafen’s standing orders will come into effect. The Gabriel and the Tycho will blast this place to ashes. Even as we speak, the ships are moving to combat range. Soon they’ll engage the gunskulls and the matter will be done, one way or another.’

Kilan pointed at Tarikus. ‘I thought his Chapter were the ones who spoke of nothing but death and gloom. My belief in the merry disposition of the Blood Angels is destroyed.’

‘Mock if you will, Raven Guard,’ Ajir retorted, ‘but Sanguinius sires pragmatists.’

Kilan rose to the open challenge in his words. ‘Defeatists, more like.’

‘You speak of defeat?’ Ajir advanced on the other warrior. ‘I am not the one who allowed himself to be captured and corralled like a common herd animal–’

‘Do not dare to–’

‘Be silent, both of you!’ snapped Noxx. ‘You forget an important fact. You both talk and act as if you have a choice.’ He glared around at all the battle-brothers surrounding him. ‘Tell me, who here labours under the misapprehension that they will see another dawn? Any of you?’ Silence answered him. ‘You who escaped this prison, you are free, but you are not. We who came to this world in search of a traitor, are free but we are not. All of us share one goal, in this moment. Revenge, and with it the hope we will die well.’ Noxx turned his gaze back to Ajir and Kilan. ‘If you expect to live, then you are greatly mistaken. There is no way out of here. No egress but to death and the Emperor’s Peace.’

Fabius walked to the lip of the sloped parapet and peered down into the thrashing sea of madness writhing far beneath him. The autosenses of the Blood Angel helmet had proven problematic at first, difficult to put under his control, but at last they were doing as he bid. Bile allowed himself a smile; curious how easy it had come to him, recalling the old mnemonic command-strings to operate the wargear’s subsystems. These were skill sets that had lain dormant for ten thousand years, unearthed now and employed as if it were yesterday. The renegade felt a strange sense of disconnection as he tried to frame the events of the deep past in his mind. The memories did not come easily. Irritated, he dismissed his moment of reverie and concentrated on the present.

Far below, all across the central pit of his prison and up around the crater walls, a seething mass of tyranid life was engaged in an orgy of destruction. Whatever was left of his test subjects, his modificates and his New Men, were out there somewhere, if not already torn to shreds by the aliens then within moments of death. Hooting and shrieking and snarling, the xenos were mad with anger; his studies of the tyranid species had shown him that they reacted to an invasion of their territory on an instinctive level with a psychotic degree of violence. Any perturbation in their complex sensoria of pheromones – such as, say, the corruption of their death-scent he had turned to his own ends – drove them to the point of madness. Down there, the myriad variant forms evolved in the Dynikan oceans had come ashore to kill everything they found, and obliterate everything that carried the stink of the non-tyranid.

With the murder of the zoanthrope, the collapse of the aura veil he had laboured so long to construct was the death knell for this secret holdfast. It angered Bile that he was being forced to abandon this place with his work at such a crucial stage. His timetable would be severely disrupted; the project would be set back years, and it would take time to mount a new facility, even using one of the other dozen bases he had concealed about the galactic disc.

But he had long known that the road to conquest was a slow and steady one. Unlike many of the scions of Chaos Undivided, Fabius Bile understood that patience was as much a weapon as brutality and cunning. He understood the need for care and preparation. Why else would he spread his plans so wide? Why else create an army of his own simulacra, each one indoctrinated to believe that they were the one and only Primogenitor? For the sake of patience; to ensure that even if a fortress fell, as it had today, no single act of interference from the minions of the Corpse-God could destroy his great strategy.

He would win eventually. It was only a matter of time. Bile glanced down at the summoner where it hung from his belt. The light code had changed; the device was sending to a ship nearby, the pulses growing stronger as the Astartes vessel drew closer. Bile smiled again, and drummed his fingers on the canister of nerve agent maglocked to his thigh plate. He would enjoy the moment when he arrived aboard the Blood Angels ship, the moment when the gas took the crew and turned their lungs to liquid. Any who were lucky enough to survive that would die at his own hands. Oh yes, he told himself, there will be many kills today.

Then he heard a heavy tread upon the ramp behind him.

Rafen and Layko emerged on to the battlements atop the tower, and into the dull glow of the daylight threading down from the clouds. The Blood Angel drew a breath and brought up the ornate sword that had been used to cut him so deeply.

‘I told you,’ Rafen snarled. ‘I will not let you escape.’

Bile turned, and his shoulders were quaking beneath the armour as he released a callous, braying laugh. ‘By the Eye, you are tenacious little bastards, aren’t you? But, it seems, without the intellect to know when they have been beaten.’ The traitor gave a mocking bow. ‘Come, then. I await your pleasure. If you are so determined to die at my hands, I will gladly accommodate you.’

Layko brandished one of his combat blades; the other would not remain in the nerveless grip of his numbed fingers. The Crimson Fist threw the Blood Angel a look. ‘I regret I cannot do as you asked me before, kinsman. I cannot hold my temper any longer.’ He saluted him with the short sword.

‘Layko, wait–’ Rafen’s words fell on deaf ears.

The injured warrior broke into a stumbling run that was more a headlong collapse than it was a controlled attack; yet the Crimson Fist was pushed on by a surge of fury that burned through from his heart, a need that drove him like a missile towards his target.

Bellowing the name of his primarch, he connected with Bile’s stolen armour and sparks flashed in the air. Layko became a whirlwind of attacks; he spun and sliced, scoring blow after blow across the enemy’s torso and chest.

Bile weathered them all, and struck him again with the lightning-sheathed power fist. Layko’s body folded like the trick of some conjurer, blood bursting from his mouth and nostrils. His killer followed through, extending the blow to project him up and away, over the edge of the tower. The Crimson Fist spiralled down into the raging mass of the tyranids and vanished.

Rafen rode in on thunder, screaming at the top of his lungs. Layko had to know he was dead, his wounds too great to survive. With his headlong, heedless attack, he had bought the Blood Angel precious seconds to draw in behind and take his assault as close as he dared to the traitor.

The sword sang in his hands, and Rafen slammed the weapon into the points between the joins of battle armour he knew as well as his own. Each cut and thrust he aimed at vital bunches of artificial muscle or feeder conduits from the power pack at the wargear’s back. Bile parried with the massive power fist, the blade skipping down the length of the huge gauntlet, tearing gouges in the ceramite, chipping away superheated fragments of plasteel. The Blood Angel ducked beneath the swing of the massive fist, coming as close as he possibly could to the armoured figure, reaching out for him. Ranged against this enemy, for a brief instant he felt tiny, diminished, as if Bile towered over him, as if he were a normal man daring to challenge the death angels of the Emperor.

‘Futile,’ grunted Fabius, and with a swift grab he curled the fingers of the power fist about the sword and broke it along its length. The shock of the blow threw Rafen backward and he tumbled across the rooftop, landing badly.

Bile laughed again and discarded the pieces of the shattered blade. ‘Will you dare to stand up again, Blood Angel?’ he asked. ‘Come, I challenge you. Face me once more, if you can!’

Rafen turned over, spitting blood. He could feel the edges of broken ribs grinding against one another inside his chest. The newly-scabbed wound on his breast had split open and he was bleeding there again. When he took in a breath, it felt like stones in his throat.

‘Nothing to say?’ mocked the traitor. ‘No more battle cries or words of power? How sad. I’ll be certain to tell your battle-brothers how you died before I choke the life from them…’ Bile’s hand went to his belt and closed on empty air. ‘The summoner…’ He stiffened with surprise.

Rafen produced the device from the sleeve of his robe, still gripped in the hand that had snatched it away during his attack. ‘Is this what you seek?’ With effort, he dragged himself to his feet.

The reply Fabius Bile gave was laced with invective of such venom and potency that Rafen wondered if it might be some sort of daemonic cantrip. ‘Give it to me, whelp!’ he demanded.

The summoner vibrated in Rafen’s hand and emitted a soft chime. He dangled it over the edge of the roof as Bile took a step closer. ‘I will drop it.’

‘You want me to die with you?’ spat the traitor. ‘Is that it?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I want something else.’ Rafen nodded towards a pouch on Bile’s belt. ‘You know.’

He heard the grin in his enemy’s words. ‘This, you mean? Your precious relic?’ Bile drew the crystal vial from the pouch. ‘An exchange, is that it?’

‘Aye,’ Rafen managed. ‘Then you may go and do as you will. Today or tomorrow, you will die. But the blood of Sanguinius is eternal. You cannot possess it!’

The traitor nodded. ‘Very well. The vial for the summoner. Here!’ Without warning, he threw the tube aside.

Rafen bolted forward, the rod device falling from his fingers and forgotten. He went into a dive, arms reaching for the vial as it described an arc through the air. Emperor, guide me! The Blood Angel reached out and snatched the crystal tube before it could fall away into the madness below.

Fabius’s harsh laughter rose and rose as the traitor stooped to gather up the summoner where it had fallen. ‘Pathetic,’ he snarled. ‘Look at you, giving up your life for a few drops of liquid. It is worth so much to you, isn’t it? And yet you do not really understand the potentiality of it.’ He walked away. ‘Take it! Take it and pray over it for as long as your life lasts, but know that your precious Sanguinius will not save you, nor will your silent, absent Emperor!’ Bile glared at him. ‘I kept that relic only as a seed for the collection I will rebuild once I leave this place, but in truth it has no value to me. All the data I gleaned from that vitae is in here.’ He tapped a finger against the brow of his helmet. ‘I have no need of it. It is useless.’

The callous grin on the renegade’s face froze as he saw the look on Rafen’s face, a look that promised hate and fury. ‘You are so very wrong, turncoat,’ he replied, drawing himself up. ‘Let me show you why.’

Rafen twisted the vial about its length and from the silver detailing about its end emerged a short, thick needle. His eyes never leaving those of his enemy, the Blood Angel stabbed the vial into his chest and injected the contents into his heart.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Once before, on the field of battle at Sabien, when he had joined with the great Mephiston in the final confrontation of the Arkio Insurrection, Rafen had been granted the boon of an exsanguinator. Injectors loaded with the vitae of the high sanguinary priests of the Blood Angels, the fluid within them was a stimulant and strength-giver, said to grant the user a small measure of the power of their angelic primarch. On that day, the exsanguinator gifted to him by the Lord of Death and blessed by Corbulo, the keeper of the Red Grail, had given Rafen the strength to carry that fateful battle to its conclusion. He remembered with perfect clarity the sudden surge of power that had moved through him, the swell of his heart and his will.

He knew now that what he thought to be a moment of communion with his long dead liege lord had only been a pale shadow of the true glory. The contents of the vial, the holy blood from the Red Grail itself, unfiltered and potent, kept alive for millennia by generations of clerics, coursed through his veins. It was gold and it was fire, it was lightning and sun; it was like nothing he had ever experienced before.

Rafen’s body was wracked with spasms that went beyond pain. Every muscle went rigid, every nerve sang with the power. His very bones resonated like struck chimes, as the song of his primarch shot into his being. Light crashed about him in waves, bright as a supernova. The gene-matter threaded through his body, induced into him during his rise through the ranks from initiate to battle-brother, was awakened all at once. Every Space Marine carried within them the genetic markers of the primarch that had been their master, bonded to the flesh of the common man they had once been. Every Blood Angel had within them a kernel of Sanguinius’s great and majestic power; it lay in the depths of their soul, in the meat of their flesh, there to make them the unmatched warriors of the Emperor’s great armies.

And now like called to like. The sacred blood coursing through him merged with Rafen’s own, and it echoed to the elements of the primarch’s legacy. A unity of power engulfed the Astartes as deep within him, blood mixed with blood as warrior-son and primarch-father were briefly connected across the barriers of life and time.

For one fleeting moment, Rafen knew what it was to be a son of the Emperor; in a storm of sensation and blazing power, he experienced a fraction of that transcendent glory. He went beyond the cage of himself, and into the magnificence that was the bequest of the Great Angel.

He experienced fear; so bright it was, so powerful that he became afraid he would be destroyed by the brilliance of it, like the Terran legend of Icarus voyaging too close to the sun.

Oh fate, what a perfect death that would be. To reach out and touch the face of my primarch.

But even as those words formed in his thoughts, Rafen knew that he could not allow himself to die. Not yet. In the turmoil of the golden, blazing glow, he sensed a truth that was so strong and so clear he could not deny it.

I will not die here. My duty is unfulfilled.

Then he opened his eyes and saw Fabius Bile before him, the traitor cowled in the armour of a good and noble brother, raising his hands to attack.

There was no pain. He felt no wounds, no fatigue. There were no doubts or fears. There was only duty.

‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius! Death! Death!’ Rafen attacked his enemy with a speed and a fury that were unmatched. Bile’s swing with the crackling power fist seemed clumsy and slow, and it was easy for him to drop beneath it and hammer heavy blows into the renegade’s torso.

Time was thick and sluggish, warped through the lens of arrow-sharp senses and bullet-fast reflexes. Rafen felt as if he were speed and power moulded into the shape of a man, unstoppable and untouchable. His bare fists impacted upon the ceramite, each hit coming with all the force he could muster, slamming Bile backward. Cracks in the armour left by previous strikes widened and split, and from within sparks flashed as internal circuitry failed.

Fabius roared with hate and crushed Rafen to him in a lethal embrace, grinding the Blood Angel’s head against his stolen armour. Rafen’s cheek was opened as it was torn by the sharp corners of the winged sigil across the wargear. The renegade triggered a surge of energy from the power fist and blue lightning crackled through Rafen’s flesh, threatening to draw a scream from his lips.

Dizzy with the shock, arms trapped at his sides and his bones cracking with the crushing grasp, the Blood Angel gave a wordless shout and brought down his head upon the brow of the power armour’s helmet. He felt the wet snap inside his skull as his nose broke, felt the hot gush of his own spilled blood; but with it came the crunch of shattering armourglass. One of the helm’s murder-red visor lenses shattered from the impact and Bile cried out as fragments pierced the soft jelly of his eye. The killing pressure all about him was suddenly gone as the traitor released him, shaking his head vigorously to dislodge the shard of glass.

Rafen coughed up a heavy, dark gob of spittle, teetering. He knew that to hesitate would mean death, and so he attacked while he still could. Riding the power of the blood, he leapt up and grabbed the gorget of Bile’s stolen armour with one hand, hauling himself upward, his feet taking purchase upon the legs and abdomen of his enemy.

Clinging to his target, Rafen punched the cracked, damaged facia of the helmet, over and over in rapid succession, blow after blow falling on the same point. Blood streamed from his knuckles and pain rippled along the nerves of his arm, but he went on, beyond reason, beyond endurance, his hand becoming a gory ruin.

He felt the helmet snap and dislodge; driven on, his clawed fingers caught the lip of the helm and tore it free. Beneath, Bile’s face glared back at him, white hair now dark with crimson, one eye a torn and ragged pit.

Rafen brought the damaged helmet down like a bludgeon and went on beating the traitor with the cracked orb of ceramite, beating him and beating him with hard mechanical strikes, one after another after another.

Bile toppled and fell to his knees, clutching for the weapons at his waist and finding nothing. He swung at Rafen with the power fist, but the renegade was almost blind now, and could make out only hazy red blurs through his ruined vision.

Rafen staggered backward, dropping the smashed helm. The power of the sacred blood was ebbing from him, streaming out through the hundreds of cuts and contusions scattered across his body. In moments, the strength that had driven him on would be gone, and he would at last succumb. He had only moments left to fulfil the duty.

He had rescued the blood of his primarch and kept it safe. Now he would kill the thief who had dared to steal it.

‘No…’ gurgled Fabius. ‘I am… Unkillable! You cannot… End me!’

Rafen did not answer; instead he bent and gave all his strength to lifting the armoured figure off the blood-slicked roof, hauling him up over his head.

With a last effort, every muscle in his body screaming in distress, Rafen pitched the renegade forward and threw him from the top of the stone tower. He collapsed to the parapet, hanging over the edge as he watched the figure in red drop away, cursing his name as he fell.

The traitor Fabius Bile, sworn enemy of the God-Emperor of Mankind and the Imperium, fell into the ready, hungry claws of the swarming xenos massing far below.

Rafen watched them rise up in a chattering, screeching wave, the black tide of hideous forms ripping his enemy apart.

My duty… is done. Just to form that thought seemed to drain every last iota of his will.

‘Not yet,’ said a grim voice.

Had he spoken those words aloud? His body was in so much pain, he could barely be certain he was still breathing.

Hands hauled him up from where he had fallen, turned him over. He saw a familiar pale face and dark, dead eyes. ‘Noxx.’

‘The same. Finished him then, did you?’

He tried to nod.

The Flesh Tearer did it for him. ‘At last.’

Other shapes were moving around, casting shadows. He heard Puluo’s dour tone. ‘Throne of Terra. Is he still alive?’

‘He is.’ That was Ajir. ‘Although there seems to be more of our esteemed sergeant upon the stones than in his veins.’

‘The tyranids are inside!’ shouted another, unfamiliar voice. ‘They’re inside the laboratoria!’

Rafen closed his eyes, listening to the reports of bolter fire. Not long now, then. ‘Only in death does duty end,’ he rasped.

‘Not today.’ Ceris’s words seemed to come from a very great distance. ‘Look here. Bile must have lost this in the melee.’

He heard a strange, musical chiming. The summoner. The sound brought a smile to his lips.

‘Close ranks!’ shouted Noxx. ‘To me! If you want to live another day, to me!’

Warmth washed over Rafen’s flesh, and he let the darkness take him down.

From the window of the chapel, through the panes of stained glass, he watched Dynikas V turning away from him, as if it were afraid to show its face. Nuclear firestorms the size of continents crossed the surface, shock-rings from multiple detonations boring down into the mantle and bedrock of the ocean world. The seas were already boiling into void as the atmosphere dissipated, the orbiting gunskulls consumed by the same fires. Within a day, perhaps less, the fifth planet would be little more than a scorched ember, and everything on it just a memory. The taint of Chaos and of the alien had been scoured clean.

Rafen sighed, wincing slightly at the pain the deep breath caused him. So much had been lost down there. Noxx and Ceris and the others had recovered some small fragments of the trophies Bile had kept in his tower to add to the spoils taken from Zellik’s Archeohort – among them the plasma gun that had belonged to the hero Aryon – but so much had been lost. He felt a strong stab of remorse over the destruction of Brother Kear’s wargear; he would say a special tribute to the dead man’s memory in the Hall of Heroes when the Tycho returned to Baal.

There was one loss that he would not mourn, however. The black pall of guilt that had shadowed him since the start of the mission had left him. His duty was done, and his conscience was clear.

Looking away, he bowed and allowed the sanguinary priest to anoint him with the sanctified fluids from the replica of the Red Grail he held in his hands. All of the warriors who had returned alive from Dynikas V had undergone the rituals of cleansing and purgation to undo any lingering mark of the inhuman – but Rafen and those who had been prisoners had more to endure. Each of them had been implanted with one of Bile’s demi-daemon/tyranid hybrids, and the priests and chaplains of the Adeptus Astartes needed to be sure that no lingering stigma remained upon their souls. The brothers had already sworn a pact to keep their silence on the full scope of their imprisonment at the hands of the twisted Primogenitor; none of them doubted that the forces of the Imperial Inquisition would look most harshly upon each one of the Space Marines, perhaps even order their summary terminations. But this was not a matter for inquisitors to decide upon. They would be judged when they returned to their Chapters, by the only authority that mattered – their battle-brothers.

At last Rafen stood, accepting a bow from the cleric. He made the sign of the aquila and stepped away, his robes pulled in tight around his body. Crossing the chapel floor, he paused in front of the altar where the statue of Sanguinius rose high towards the arched ceiling. There, a small brazier atop an iron bowl burned brightly, casting firelight upon the wings of the primarch.

He took a step towards it, but halted as he realised another robed figure was approaching. He pulled back his hood. ‘Cousin.’

‘Cousin,’ said Noxx. ‘Well met. I come to bid you farewell.’ He jerked his chin up at the vast circular window over their heads; beyond it, out in the void the starship Gabriel was turning on spears of thruster fire, preparing to depart on a new warp vector. ‘The Thunderhawk is ready on the landing deck. My brothers and my passengers await.’

Rafen nodded. The Raven Guard Kilan and some of the other escapees from Bile’s prison-fortress were to travel with the Flesh Tearers, to rendezvous with representatives of their own Chapters along the Gabriel’s course back to Cretacia. Tarikus and the rest were remaining aboard the Tycho, and the Blood Angels would do the same for them, quietly guiding them back to their home worlds. Rafen wondered if all of them would be able to recover the lives they had lost to the prison; he had no doubt that many of those captured by Bile’s agents had been declared dead. When they returned to their monasteries alive and whole, there would be questions and challenges. For them, their trials had only just begun.

He took Noxx’s hand and shook it. ‘You have what Lord Seth wanted,’ he said. ‘In the chronicles of both our Chapters, it shall be written that our enemy was slain by the hands of Blood Angels and Flesh Tearers.’

Noxx’s lip curled. ‘We both know that isn’t so. You killed him, Rafen. The honour is yours.’

‘If you wanted it, you could have taken that for yourself. You could have pitched me off that roof, told the survivors yours was the blade to Bile’s heart. No one would have known.’

‘It crossed my mind,’ Noxx said mildly, before nodding towards the statue. ‘But he would have known. And as hard as it might be to believe, I am not without honour myself.’

‘I do not doubt that,’ Rafen replied. ‘Without you and your warriors… your sacrifices… this mission would have failed. Thank you.’

Noxx released his grip and took on a formal manner. ‘The deed is done. This duty is complete. Ave Imperator.’

‘Ave Imperator,’ repeated Rafen, as the Flesh Tearer walked away. He stood for a long moment in the glow of the brazier before he realised he was being observed by another. He did not turn to face the figure in the shadows. ‘Are you here to try my patience once more, Codicier?’

Ceris stepped into the light. ‘No. But I have questions.’

Rafen smiled slightly. ‘Of course you do.’

‘The sacred blood…’ The psyker nodded towards him. ‘Your task was to recover it.’

‘And I did, in a way. It exists still, in me.’

Ceris frowned. ‘I fear Great Corbulo and the other High Sanguinary Priests will not see it that way. There will be consequences.’

‘There always are,’ Rafen replied. ‘I will be called to account when we reach Baal, and I will face it with a clear conscience. I did what was needed. I regret nothing.’

‘That much is certain,’ nodded Ceris.

‘You said you had questions,’ Rafen continued. ‘I would hear them all, kinsman.’

‘An uncertainty nags at me and I must give voice to it. You, Brother Rafen, are the only one who will understand why.’

‘Go on,’ he commanded.

‘I fear that Noxx is mistaken, lord. I do not doubt that the man who came to Baal, who robbed our Chapter of that measure of holy vitae, is now dead. I do not doubt that vital essence lives on in you. But I fear the duty is not done. Not to the letter.’

‘More riddles,’ Rafen said, his mood turning.

Ceris came closer. ‘How many times did you kill him, Rafen? The torn throat. The bolter to the head. Drowned in the ice. The feast for the tyranids. How many of them were him? All of them? None of them?’

Rafen gave the psyker a hard look. ‘Do you know the answer?’

Ceris drew back towards the shadows. ‘No.’

‘Come to me if you do. Otherwise, keep your silence.’

Rafen glanced up at his primarch, at last alone with his thoughts, and bowed low. His bandaged hand reached into his sleeve and returned with a small fold of paper, the creased note he had discovered in the derelict hospital within the tau colony.

Without opening it once again to read the words it bore, he dropped it into the flames and let it burn into dark ashes.

EPILOGUE

On the plains of the Crone World, the agony of the modificates was never-ending. It covered the landscape from horizon to horizon, across the fields of the flesh-farms and the cropping houses, though the slaughter tracks and the meat-works. Overhead, the ever-baleful glow of the Eye looked down over everything, and found it good.

The master of this place moved through the rows, sampling the changed and the mutated in the way that a winemaker would wander a vineyard in search of the best grapes for his next harvest. Thus it was, he halted and became irritated beyond all degree to find a perfect circle among his crops, where the flesh of his most recent captures was spoiled.

Some arcane discharge of warped energies had merged the meat of the men and women there into a mess of limbs and faces. It was a ruin, an utter waste of good samples. The master’s hand vanished into the depths of his great leathery coat and returned with his rod. He brandished it angrily.

‘Show yourself!’ he demanded, the great mechanism upon his back reacting to his anger, pumps churning, blades and splines unfolding into the air. ‘Give your name to me, creature!’

The flesh-mass quivered, and spoke in a dozen breathy, screaming voices. ‘I bring news of value to you, great Primogenitor, first among Chaos Undivided, scion of all–’

He stabbed the meat with the rod and it rippled with exquisite pain. ‘Answer me! How dare you break my wards and come here without invitation! I will destroy you!’

‘Hear me out,’ bubbled the amalgam. ‘Know that your grand plan, one of many I do not doubt for so brilliant a mind, your grand plan upon the death world fifth from the Dynikas star has been ended.’ The chorus voice simpered.

‘Dynikas…’ The rod dipped. ‘The silence from my proxy…?’

‘The servants of the Corpse-God did this, Great Master.’ It keened and whistled. ‘The Blood Angels.’ In saying the name, the morass of flesh vomited with anger.

He laughed coldly. ‘Of course. I knew they would come. It was a bold gambit, after all. I should not be surprised they retaliated.’ The master glared at the daemon-thing. ‘Why do you tell me this? What value does this news have to you?’

‘My lord and master only wishes to see you have success in your endeavours,’ bubbled the fleshy mess. ‘And he wishes to help you overcome this setback.’

‘I need no help,’ came the angry reply. ‘I have many proxies. I will send another. Begin again. No single act of interference can destroy my great strategy.’

‘So true. But do not the fires of anger burn in you, great one? Would you not wish to see these Blood Whelps dead?’

He turned away. ‘I will kill who I will in my own time. Now be gone.’

‘As you wish,’ gasped the flesh-form, the magicks holding it together fading, the skin and tissue melting into slurry. ‘But remember this offer, Fabius Bile, and know that the Warp Prince Malfallax shares your hate.’

BLOODLINE

Inside the walls of the sepulchre, time had no meaning.

There were no windows through which to see the passage of night and day across the distant Chalice Mountains and the great red deserts of Baal, no mark of moments from waxen candles, no clock but the beating of Astartes hearts. Light, soft and oily, fell from lume-sconces in the stone walls, eternal and unflickering. It cast hazy shadows over the figures who moved about the chamber, their voices low and intense.

The sepulchre’s perfume was one of metal and rust, a smell like wet copper; blood by the gallon had spilled in this place over the millennia, so much so that the scent of it had penetrated into the stone itself. In the middle of the chamber was a marble table, the white rock stained pink with the vitae of all those who had bled upon it. A Blood Angel lay there now, stripped of his wargear and clad only in thin cotton vestments. Black chains of tempered steel and manacle rings held him in place, for so great were his exertions that without them he would have broken his own limbs as he thrashed and tensed in agony; and yet the warrior lay not awake, not aware, but in some dreamless non-state that was neither wakefulness nor coma. It was only the pain he felt, his cries muffled by a gag of leather across his cracked lips.

Beyond the voices of the Sanguinary Priests and the rattle of the chains, the stifled cries of the warrior were echoed far above, down through the spiral corridors of the minaret that rose up overhead. Screams and shouts that would chill the soul reached into the sepulchre, from the pitiful ones held fast in the cells they could never be allowed to leave.

This place was the Tower of the Lost, the Tower of Amareo. Here it was that the Blood Angels brought their afflicted kinsmen when the nightmare gene-curses of the Black Rage and the Red Thirst became too much for them. The dark bequest of their long-dead Primarch Sanguinius, the Rage and the Thirst lurked in the hearts of every son of Baal – and only in battle, in the final service of the Death Company, could it be given purpose.

But there were some that ventured down the crimson path to such a degree that not even that honourable end would suffice. The tower was their prison, their asylum, their purgatory.

And now another comrade balanced on the verge of joining them.

Corbulo, the highest of the blood priesthood, watched his brethren orbit the body on the marble table, taking readings with auspex devices and supervising the work of the medicae servitors.

Sensing his scrutiny, Brother Salel, one of the Sanguinary Priests, detached from the group and approached him. ‘Master.’ He gave a shallow bow.

‘Lord Dante wishes to know if there has been any change in his condition,’ said Corbulo, without preamble.

The priest gave a grim nod. ‘Aye, and not for the better. The…’ He paused, searching for the right word. ‘The mixture grows more potent with each passing hour. I confess it is beyond the best of us to retard the process, let alone reverse it.’

‘There must be some way…’ Corbulo fell silent as he saw the slow shake of Salel’s head.

‘What he carries within him is like the distillate of a supernova, my lord. It consumes him, burns him from the inside out.’ The other man sighed. ‘No mortal vessel was ever meant to contain such greatness. This was inevitable.’

‘You will turn him over to me, then,’ said a new voice, one heavy and resonant, thick with old pain.

Corbulo turned to see an Astartes stalk out of the shadows, a Blood Angel in the night-black robes of a Chaplain. About him he wore steel honour chains bound to a book of catechism, and at his belt hung an ebon rod ending in a winged, golden chalice – the Blood Crozius, instrument of office for the Guardian of the Lost and the Warden of the Death Company. Brother Lemartes stared out at Corbulo from beneath his hood, his drawn, sunken face reminiscent of the death’s-head skull that adorned his wargear. Lemartes was one of the few men in the history of the Chapter who had fallen into the embrace of the genecurse and survived it – many said he still lived within the shroud of the Black Rage, but so great was his will that he resisted it day and night. As such, he was amply qualified to lead the Death Company into battle time and again. Salel took a step back, unwilling to stand too close to the Chaplain’s fuliginous aura.

Brother Corbulo studied him for a moment, and felt a curious pang of sorrow for Lemartes. What anguish it must be, he thought, to lead your tormented kinsmen into certain death, and each time remain the last man standing.

Lemartes held out his hand. ‘Give him to me. He will find a kind of peace in the cells above.’

Corbulo shook his head, snapping back to the matter. ‘No. No. Not yet, brother.’

‘Then why bring him to my tower at all?’ Lemartes retorted, showing his fangs. He pushed past the Sanguinary Priests to the marble table. ‘Look at him. Release him, Corbulo! It will be a kindness.’

‘It will be a waste!’ retorted the high priest. ‘You understand what he went through to bring the essence back to us? The battles fought and lives lost?’

Lemartes glared at him and spoke in a low whisper. ‘What I understand is that none of that would have been needed if not for the failures of the Sanguinary Priesthood!’ He leaned in. ‘Brother Caecus was one of yours. His hubris opened our home to the forces of Chaos!’ Lemartes spat the last word. ‘You are responsible for the Red Grail, Corbulo. You allowed our enemies to steal a measure of our Primarch’s holy blood.’ He jabbed a finger at the warrior in chains. ‘You brought this upon him!’

Corbulo said nothing. The hateful truth was, there was damning weight to the guardian’s words. The Blood Angel lying before him had been set on a quest to recover a vial of Sanguinius’s precious vitae, kept alive for ten thousand years – and he had done so, wresting it from the grip of the self-styled primogenitor of the eightfold path, the traitor Fabius Bile. But in doing so, the warrior had been forced to find the one safe place in which to protect the holy fluid: he had injected it into his own bloodstream.

And now it was killing him. The powerful essence was too much, even for the enhanced physiology of an Adeptus Astartes. The warrior had barely made it home to the fortress-monastery on Baal before he collapsed in the throes of a crippling fever. The astonishing potency was destroying the Astartes, consuming his own blood and transforming it into something of incredible, lethal power.

‘Rafen.’ Lemartes intoned the warrior’s name. ‘He is strong, but not strong enough. Soon the Rage and the Thirst will consume him, and he will not return. We must let this run its course.’

‘I believe he can survive!’ Corbulo insisted. ‘Each of us, every Blood Angel and successor is a Son of Sanguinius. Each of us carries the smallest measure of our primarch’s blood within us, gifted during our ascension to Astartes–’

‘The smallest measure,’ Lemartes repeated. ‘Aye! A mere drop, and that alone is enough to make a man into an angel of war! But Rafen has taken a dose a million times more potent! He cannot survive that.’

‘So we take it from him,’ said Corbulo, shooting a look at Salel. ‘We purge Rafen of what he fought so hard to recover.’

‘You… mean to employ the sarcophagus?’ said Salel, his expression stiffening. ‘Can such a thing be done?’

Lemartes shook his head. ‘It is foolish to even consider it. If Astorath were here, Rafen would already have found peace at the edge of his axe blade–’

‘But the High Chaplain is not here!’ Corbulo insisted. ‘His duties carry him far from Baal, and so the matter is left to us.’

Lemartes folded his arms over his chest. ‘What would Lord Dante say of this?’

‘He will endorse whatever path brings us back to equilibrium.’ Corbulo looked down at Rafen’s straining, tortured features, and tried to imagine the raging pain of the god-fire coursing through his veins. He could not let the warrior perish; Lemartes had cut him to the quick, and the guilt the priest felt was all too real. He had failed to protect the holy blood and allowed Fabius to steal it. He would not let the Chapter pay another cost by losing one more of their kinsmen to this matter. ‘Take Brother Rafen to the Hall of Sarcophagi,’ he commanded. ‘Find The Touch of Sanguine Dawn, and place him within it.’

With a frown, Lemartes stepped back from the side of the table and allowed the servitors to gather up the twitching body of the Blood Angel. ‘This will only draw out his suffering and make his death twice the agony. Where is your mercy, priest?’

Corbulo looked the Guardian of the Lost in the eye. ‘There will be no death today, Chaplain. I will not permit it.’

The great chamber was some strange melding of hospice and sculpture garden. Dotted with plinths of stone, each crested with a great orb-like carving of gold and brass, the Hall of Sarcophagi pulsed with a heartbeat like a living thing. Trains of thick cables and fluid-carrying conduits snaked from one orb to another, others gathering in bunches that vanished through gridded iron plates in the floor. Above, life-support nodes extended down from ornate silver racks, threading into openings atop each sphere.

The smell of blood and stone was here as well, but somehow not so coarse as it was in the tower. There, it was the smell of death; here, it signified new life, rebirth.

Many of the golden orbs were occupied, each minded by a sleepless menial constantly at work adjusting the flows of gene-active philtres and the operation of nourishment tubules. Corbulo studied the sarcophagus closest to him; he knew it well. It was Angel’s White Sun, one of the oldest in the Chapter’s inventory, forged in the years of the Great Crusade before the Heresy of Horus ten millennia ago. Like each of the orbs around it, Angel’s White Sun was a master-crafted piece of machinery, so advanced that even the Techmarines under the command of Brother Incarael could not fully fathom the intricacies of its workings. It was as much a work of art as it was a device for remaking men. Inside each of the operable spheres lay a Blood Angel aspirant, their flesh drifting in a bath of amnio-fluids mingled with alterants and accelerants that worked at their genetic structure, rewriting their bodies cell by cell. These mechanisms, combined with the powerful implant technologies created for all Adeptus Astartes, could transform a normal human being into the majesty of a Blood Angel. The aspirants who entered the sarcophagi as men would one day emerge as warriors of Sanguinius – at least, those that did not die in the course of the changing.

Some Blood Angels, when not at their duties or called to battle, would come to the Hall of Sarcophagi and slumber inside the very orb where they had been quickened. Many, Corbulo among them, believed that such periodic returns to the womb of their rebirth, spent connected to the blood-sifts, could cleanse the soul and stave off the eventual encroachment of the Rage and the Thirst. The devices had the power to heal a man as well as to change him.

He hoped such a thing might save the life of Brother Rafen.

Corbulo walked the rows of the orbs until he found The Touch of Sanguine Dawn, a fine example of the most noble sarcophagus, tooled in white gold and platinum, plated in brass and polished glassaic. Like Angel’s White Sun, it too dated back to the days before the Heresy, and it had been in service to the Chapter all that time, lovingly cared for by legions of helots and blood-servitors. Legend had it that The Touch was one of several sarcophagi carried into the battles of the Great Crusade itself, aboard the ships of the Blood Angel fleet.

Salel was supervising the menials; they had set Rafen inside and were almost complete in their preparations. Exsanguinator channels and vitae-guides had been bound into his flesh, blood pumps primed and ready to begin.

The senior Sanguinary Priest ran his hand down the open leaf of the sphere. Inside, the surface of the sarcophagus was etched with countless lines of tiny script in High Gothic, each one the name of a brother who had been quickened within it. He searched and found Rafen’s name there, a way down the roll of honour.

‘It is time,’ said Salel.

Corbulo nodded and looked up. He found Rafen staring at him, in the first moment of lucidity he had seen from the Blood Angel in days. ‘Brother-Sergeant…?’

Rafen’s hand gripped his arm. ‘I see…’ he whispered. ‘I see… him.’

‘And he will guide you,’ said the priest, signalling to Salel to seal the sarcophagus. ‘To life… Or elsewhere.’

Rafen’s eyes glazed over and his hand dropped as the orb folded shut like a closing flower. Corbulo heard the throb of fluids filling the interior, the crackle of metal as pressure within changed sharply.

Salel turned away. ‘What now?’

The Touch of Sanguine Dawn shimmered like a jewel. ‘We wait,’ said Corbulo, ‘and let the bloodline do its work.’

They left the chamber, neither of the priests once thinking to glance up at the gallery above; the thought to do such a thing was plucked from their heads and discarded. Unseen by them or any other, a single figure stood up there, half-shrouded in shadow, watching. His preternatural aura made him a ghost, and that was just as he wished it.

Mephiston, Lord of Death, Librarian and master psyker of the Blood Angels Chapter, leaned forward on the balcony and peered into Rafen’s sarcophagus, listening to the turmoil of the mind within.

He saw fire and pain and the colours of raw agony. The psyker’s hands tensed into claws around the stone balustrade of the gallery, knuckles whitening. Rafen’s psychic trace danced there before him like a stark flame in a hurricane, always on the verge of being snuffed out, fighting back with every spark of energy. Mephiston pushed his mind deeper into the maze of sensation, feeling for Rafen’s conscious thoughts.

Rafen was captured in the throes of a terrible fever-dream, a maddening flood of pain that manifested as baking heat and cloying dust. Mephiston could sense the warrior’s self, reaching the echo of it. He saw a measure of what Rafen saw; an unreal, nightmarish landscape of horror and destruction. He saw a battlefield piled high with eviscerated corpses, awash in lakes of freshly spilled blood.

The Flaw. It could only be the power of the gene-curse, he realised. The darkness within every Blood Angel given terrible freedom by the power of the primarch’s blood. The force of it staggered the psyker, and memories of his own boiled to the surface, threatening to pollute the clarity of his telepathic connection – memories of Hades Hive and his own journey toward the madness of the Rage.

Grimly, Mephiston detached the invisible feelers of his psychic power from the turbulent mind of the younger warrior. He could do nothing to help him now.

As he severed the last link, the Librarian took with him one final image from Rafen’s churning psyche – that of an aloof, winged figure clad in a magnificent sheath of golden armour, observing from a distance. Judging him.

‘Take cover!’

Brother-Sergeant Cassiel heard the cry ring out across the landing bay of the starship Hermia, and threw himself into the lee of a support stanchion just as the crimson-hulled Stormbird fell through the atmosphere shield and collided with the deck. The steel beneath his boots resonated with the impact. He flinched as a howling, rising shriek filled the bay: the Stormbird’s forward undercarriage had collapsed and it was riding on a pillar of fat yellow sparks, cutting a gouge through the decking. The proud winged teardrop of blood on the prow was scarred and wreathed in metal-smoke.

The craft slowed and finally halted, moments later to be swarmed by dozens of legion serfs bearing tanks of fire retardants. Cassiel swore a Baalite curse under his breath and approached the wounded craft. Beyond it, he could see the main hatch sliding shut like a gigantic iris; a sliver of green planet vanished out of sight. That would be the last he would see of the world called Nartaba Octus, the last any man would see of it as it was. The final few drop-ships were being taken aboard as the Hermia climbed up to a high combat orbit. From there, the ships of Task Force Ignis and the Blood Angels aboard them would conclude their work. The orders were clear, ratified by Sanguinius himself and struck with the signet of the Warmaster Horus Lupercal.

All human survivors from the scientific colony on Octus had been recovered; the xenos infesting the planet – a horde of dark eldar that had defied full extermination on the ground – would be shown the displeasure of Terra with a space-to-surface barrage from the flotilla’s laser batteries.

The alien reavers had fought hard, and with great tenacity. Cassiel had faced their kind elsewhere during the Great Crusade and punished them, but it seemed the xenos did not learn the Emperor’s lesson. When they were done here, Nartaba Octus would forever bear the scars of this conflict as a warning to those who defied the Master of Mankind and his Sons.

But for the moment, more immediate matters held his attention. Reaching the Stormbird’s hatch, he levered it open and extended his hand to help a brother exit the smoke-filled craft. He knew his face. ‘Sarga? Are you injured?’ he asked.

The warrior shook his head. ‘No, Cassiel. But we have a casualty… Then the reaver scum damaged the ship with a drone… We barely made it back in one piece.’

Cassiel beckoned a medicae servitor to bring a grav-litter closer as a second Astartes emerged from the ship, carrying another over his shoulder. The wounded Blood Angel wore the white and red armour of an Apothecary, but the ceramite was marred with splashes of dark arterial crimson, still wet from the spilling.

Cassiel saw the source of the wound and almost recoiled in disgust. Through a rent at the waist of the warrior’s power armour a length of something that resembled crystal, or perhaps ice, protruded from his body. Gruesome, sickly light glittered within the fragment, casting baleful colour across the Apothecary’s pale face.

‘He was tending to a civilian,’ Sarga explained, his voice flat with anger. ‘One of the sallow-eyed bastards shot him in the back. I killed it, but Meros had already fallen...’

Cassiel leaned closer. ‘Meros? Brother Meros, do you hear me?’

The Blood Angel’s eyes fluttered and he muttered something incoherent.

‘He fought through a raider squad alone,’ Sarga was saying. ‘Must have thought he’d dealt with them all.’

‘He’s not dead yet,’ Cassiel insisted, although Meros’s corpse-like pallor put the question to those words. The sergeant placed him on the litter and moved with it, out toward the infirmary elsewhere on the same deck. His eyes were drawn to the glassy splinter in the Apothecary’s side once more. Cassiel knew it for what it was: a soul-seeker.

The dart was the war-shot from an Eldar splinter gun, the venomous shard poisoned by conventional means, but doubly so by some monstrous form of psionic impregnation. So it was said, the toxin it exuded would not only destroy flesh, but also disintegrate a man’s very soul.

Cassiel, like every servant of the Emperor’s secular Imperium, paid little heed to such superstitious notions as spiritual ephemera, but he had seen the work of a soul-seeker before, seen it dissemble an Astartes from within… and part of him had been left wondering if the weapon had first killed the man’s essence before it murdered his flesh.

Sarga was at his side, his expression bleak. ‘He will die,’ he said.

Cassiel shook his head. ‘No. There’s still time to ensure his survival. We will purge this from him.’

‘How do you propose to do that?’ Sarga demanded. ‘Any attempt to dig out the round will shatter it–’

‘There may be another way,’ said the sergeant.

It seemed strange to see them inside the steel walls of the Hermia’s hull, in the compartment below the starship’s infirmary. The very sight of the great golden sculptures lying here, set upon the deck plates, was somehow wrong, as if the contents of a familiar room had been upset and rearranged.

The lines on Sarga’s worn, leathery face deepened. ‘The sarcophagus…’

Cassiel directed a serf to guide the grav-litter to the closest capsule. ‘Aboard ship on the orders of Master Raldoron himself,’ he said. ‘Several have been distributed among the flotillas, to serve as critical care centres for the fatally injured.’

Sarga shot him a look. ‘A wound that is fatal to an Astartes is a wound that cannot be survived by any man.’

‘We will see.’ Cassiel had the serfs place Meros inside the closest of the orbs.

‘I cannot let this pass without comment,’ Sarga went on. ‘The shard in his side… It is tainted with alien sorcery! What if that taint contaminates the sarcophagus? There is no way to know what effect the psionic spoil may have–’

Cassiel silenced him with a glare. ‘Sorcery? It is only a strain of poison, virulent indeed, but no more than that. It is not magick. And it will be purged.’ He signalled to the helots to close the petals of the orb. ‘The dark eldar took the lives of our brothers down on that blighted world. They will not take this one after the fact, and I will argue the will of my order with the Warmaster himself, should he see fit to challenge it!’

Rafen was buried in sand. The particles were made of ground bone and flecks of metal, glittering redly in the punishing light of a bloated, hellish sun. With slow, deliberate motions, he dragged himself out of the clinging mass, the powder sluicing from him, pooling in the crevices of his wargear.

He found a bolt pistol and a sword nearby, both rusted and decrepit. He wondered if the gun would survive a pull of the trigger. The blade was a pitted, cracked thing.

The Blood Angel lurched forward, shaking off the last of the dust, and he stumbled; the power armour was sluggish, and he felt the full weight of the ceramite and steel across his shoulders. Heat in shimmering waves rose up all about him, and pinpricks of sweat blossomed on his brow.

Rafen grimaced; every movement seemed like a colossal effort. He felt uncharacteristically weak, as if his vitality was draining away. The Blood Angel set his jaw and drew himself up.

He began to walk across the desert battlefield, across the lines of the dunes against the harsh winds that bore gusts of stinging sand. He placed one foot in front of another, moving like an automaton. The masses of corpses and litter of blood he left behind, wandering into the dust and heat, searching. When he ventured to look back, there was nothing behind him but sand and more sand.

Through blurred vision, he glimpsed flashes of stark light off gold armour; or was that some kind of mirage?

No. The figure was still there, remaining beyond his reach, taunting him with its silence. Daring him to come closer.

Rafen looked away, trying to take stock of his circumstances. He had no recollection of arriving in this blighted, lifeless place, no concept of where he was or what purpose had brought him here. He came to a halt, for a moment losing sight of the golden figure as curtains of red dust whirled around him. He dug deep, pushing into his own thoughts, trying to dredge up the truth.

What is the last thing I can remember? He worked at the question, his sweat-filmed brow furrowing.

He remembered the journey back from the Dynikas system aboard the starship Tycho, the days passing in the wilderness of warp space. He remembered the battle on the planet before that, the dispatch of the enemy and the recovery…

He remembered the vial and the blood. Rafen’s hand instinctively reached up and traced the place on his breast where he had stabbed the injector needle home.

He remembered–

–the vial, the holy blood from the Red Grail itself, unfiltered and potent, kept alive for millennia by generations of clerics, coursing through his veins–

–gold and fire, lightning and sun; like nothing he had ever experienced before–

–fear that he would be destroyed by the brilliance–

–what a perfect death–

Rafen gasped and shuddered. The blood of Sanguinius coursed through him, the psychic power within it churning like nuclear flame. It had been too much for his body to contain; it was too much for him. He was like the ancient Terran legend of Ikarus, voyaging too close to the sun, burning and burning.

‘Is… is this place death?’ he shouted, his words ripped from him by the howling winds. ‘Am I to be… punished for my… hubris?’ Rafen found it hard to breathe.

And in answer to his question, the sand became monsters.

The red dust coalesced into things that bore the shape and colour of Space Marines, but they were hazy, nebulous forms that could not hold fine detail for more than a moment. Still, they were coherent enough that Rafen saw them for what they were supposed to be.

They were Blood Angels, after a fashion, but no stripe of that noble Chapter that had ever walked beneath the Imperium’s light. These twisted phantoms were part parody, part monstrosity, hulking and lumbering things that mimicked the majesty of the Sons of Sanguinius through the lens of horror. Inverted, screaming aquilas decorated their armour, blood oozed from joints, and laughing, fanged masks showed eyes of glowing red. Books of blank verse and babbling skulls dangled from the ends of barbed honour chains. The ghost-Astartes were abstracts, sketches made of sand by an insane artist.

They attacked him, laughing in shrill voices.

Rafen fired the old bolter and it croaked, spitting out shells in puffs of flaking rust; but while the tumbling rounds found their mark, they did no damage. The point of each hit became a concave spattering of powder and the phantoms lost solidity, the crumbling mass-reactive bullets passing straight through without detonation.

Snarling, dizzy with pain and the leeching heat, the Blood Angel went to the broken-tipped sword and met the charge of the ghost-Astartes, swinging high-low for a lethal cut that would have opened any foe to the air. The sword bit, he felt it, but the sand-forms gave along the line of the rusted blade and let it fall harmlessly through them. Rafen might as well have been using a rapier made of smoke.

But, to his dismay, the return of blows was by no means equal. The phantoms shifted their mass, compacting the sands almost to the density of rock, a split-second before landing a swinging punch on Rafen’s jaw. As he was knocked back, a second and then a third granite-hard impact landed on his chest and sternum.

He fell back against the rise of the red dunes, light-headed, as they came at him again; and now the phantoms had no helmets to hide their faces. This time, he saw a twisted mirror of his own features snarling back at him, the image shivering and flickering like a poorly-tuned vid-pict.

Rafen threw himself forward and into the mass of one of the ghost-Astartes. It exploded apart in a torrent of grit before he could close his hands around its throat. The sand ripped at the bare skin of his face and neck, clogging his nostrils and mouth, trying to suffocate him. He flailed around, like a man fighting off a swarm of hornets.

Then he heard gunfire, the hard snapping crashes of a bolter, heard the sizzle of shots passing close to him. The dust ebbed away, retreating in a tide, re-forming, as a new figure crested the closest dune and came scrambling down the rise.

Rafen saw another Blood Angel – solid and well defined, caught in the haze of heat but certainly not one of his phantoms.

The new arrival let his weapon swing away on its tether and unlimbered a break-tooth chainaxe. The axe sputtered and choked, but the teeth still spun, and with quick motions he carved into the ghost-Astartes. Where Rafen’s blade had passed through them like air, the other warrior’s weapon hit firmly and shrieked through the mass of clogged dust and sand.

In moments, the grotesques were dissipating on the constant wind, discorporating until at last there was nothing left of them.

Rafen nodded warily to the other man. ‘My… thanks, brother.’ He saw more clearly now: the other Blood Angel wore the white and the crimson of an Apothecary, although the company colours and unit symbology were strange – not wrong, but somehow unfamiliar. The warrior’s wargear was of an elderly design, the old Mark IV Maximus pattern that few Chapters still deployed. He met the Apothecary’s gaze and saw that the other man was measuring him with a similarly questioning stare.

‘Are you injured?’ he asked, holstering the chainaxe. He walked with a limp, Rafen noted, favouring his side, and for the first time he noted the scarring of a deep wound in the Apothecary’s belly. The warrior hid his pain well, though; he had a strong face and eyes that seemed too young for it.

‘No…’ Rafen began. ‘Yes. Perhaps.’ He shook his head, and the world swam around him. ‘The heat…’

‘Aye, the heat,’ agreed the Apothecary, and that was answer enough. He looked around, eyeing the shifting sands suspiciously. ‘Those… things. What were they?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rafen admitted. ‘My weapons were useless against them.’

‘Fortunate that mine were not, then,’ came the reply. The other man managed a wan smile. ‘I’m cheered to find you, brother. When I awoke in this place, for a while I feared I had gone mad.’

‘We may yet, both of us,’ said Rafen grimly. ‘Tell me, how did you come to be here?’

‘I…’ The Apothecary’s face froze as cold understanding gripped him. ‘I… Do not know.’

‘What is the last thing you can recall?’

‘The battle…’ He spoke in hushed, tense tones. ‘The xenos.’ His hand slipped to the wound on his gut. ‘They gave me this…The rest is darkness.’

Before Rafen could speak again, the other warrior caught sight of something over his shoulder and pointed. Even as he turned to see it, Rafen knew it would be the figure in the gold, watching them.

It stood sentinel, seemingly closer without having moved, briefly more defined in the gaps between the veils of dust that flashed past. Gold armour, an unmoving mask, furled silver wings. Watching.

‘Do you see him?’ Rafen asked.

‘Aye. What is it?’ The Apothecary’s words were hushed.

The sands howled and clawed at their faces, forcing them to look away; when the torrent of dust abated, the figure was gone.

Far beyond where it had stood, in the distance a shape rose out of the shimmer. A pinnacle mountain, impossibly tall and wind-carved from stone as red as spilled blood.

‘An omen,’ said Rafen. ‘An objective.’

They walked on together, side by side through the howling cascade of the sandstorm, the distant tower of stone their only guiding marker in the featureless desert. Whatever the nature of this place, Meros’s pragmatism did not waver in the face of it. The mountain was the only landmark in sight, so they would go to it. There was a certainty in that, a logic that the Apothecary could only feel as right. But quite how he could know that was something Brother Meros would not have been able to articulate.

It was strange: everything about him seemed unreal, detached from truth – and yet Meros felt the sure slip of the baking sands under each footfall, he felt his occulobe tighten to tune his eyes against the hard radiation of the great red sun overhead, he felt the relentless heat upon his face. These things seemed very real.

If only I still dreamed, Meros thought. Then perhaps I would know if this was true or some trick of the mind. But Space Marines did not dream, because they did not slumber – not in any manner that common men would understand. The catalepsean nodes implanted in his brain allowed Meros and his kindred to sleep without sleep, ever waking and watchful even as their minds rested. And so, he had no mark against which to measure his current circumstance.

He glanced at the Blood Angel trudging alongside him. An omen, he had said. The words seemed peculiar coming from the mouth of an Astartes, resonant of old idolatry and superstition. And other things were subtly amiss: the other warrior’s wargear was ornate and oddly proportioned, chased with much detailing, and tapers of parchment dense with lines of text that Meros could not read. All this, and his face was unknown to the Apothecary.

That in itself was not unusual – the IX Legiones Astartes numbered over one hundred thousand men under arms in service to Great Sanguinius, and Meros could not know every single one of them – but there was something about the dark-haired warrior that rang a wrong note in his mind. It was as if he did not fit.

Then again, Meros was just as displaced, stranded in this trackless no-man’s-land with no understanding of how he had come to be here. His hand slipped to the place where he had been wounded. The memory of the shard burying itself in his gut was still fresh and he flinched as he recalled it. A sickening throb rang through him and he swallowed a gulp of dry air.

Meros glanced at the other warrior once more, trying to put the echo of the pain aside. ‘I… never asked you your name,’ he said.

‘I am Rafen,’ came the reply. ‘Of the Fifth Company, under Brother-Captain Sendini.’

‘Wh-who?’ Meros forced the word out, his legs turning to lead, stumbling to a halt. The name meant nothing to him. And the commander of the fifth… He was…

‘Are you all right, brother?’ said Rafen, watching him warily.

Meros began to shiver, his skin crawling beneath his armour. ‘I… I…’ A painful, prickling sensation washed up his arms, burning his skin like the touch of acid. With a trembling hand, the Apothecary pulled at his gauntlet and vambrace, disengaging the armour locks, letting them fall to the sand.

His bare arm was a livid red, veins bulging, flesh twitching. Unable to stop himself, Meros clawed at the exposed flesh and ribbons of epidermis came free, fluttering into the wind. He cried out even as the diseased tissue fell, scattering across the sands. Impossibly, the more he scratched away, the more there was.

The decayed skin-threads danced in the air, and then to his horror, they began to unfold. Clever puzzles of discarded flesh split and divided, weaving into thread-thin lines that knit back into obscene forms; spindly humanoid outlines with elongated limbs and narrow, elfin skulls.

‘The reavers!’ Meros shouted. ‘This is… their poison!’

The meshed threads of skin flitted and danced, and then turned back on the Apothecary, lashing out at him like a torrent of barbed whips.

Rafen recoiled at what he saw, his hand snatching up the rusted bolt pistol from his belt, falling back to gain a span of distance from the motions of the strange flesh-forms. He knew the shape and the dance of them – somehow, these apparitions were dark eldar in origin, flashes of their cruel xenos hate appearing and disappearing in the ghosts of their faces. They looked like animated streamers of cloth, perhaps bandages or garlands, coiling and turning to give the impression of a body beneath when in fact there was nothing there.

Whatever animated these forms, it was abhorrent to the Blood Angel. His erstwhile comrade was right on that matter, at the very least – even through the heavy dust of the air, Rafen could taste the sour tang of poison billowing about the lithe monsters. They were toxic horrors, spinning in a grotesque ballet.

The eldar-things rained down blows on the apothecary, lightning-fast and unrelenting. He tried to fight back with the rust-clogged chainaxe, but each sweep of the buzzing blade-head met only air as the threads parted to let it pass.

Rafen forgot the bolt pistol and drew the broken sword. He did not know the origin of the other warrior, but he could not simply stand by and do nothing.

‘Away, daemon!’ he shouted, wading into the whirling cyclone of whipping threads. ‘Begone from here, or face your end!’

The rusted sword rose and fell, and in each place where the chainaxe’s blunt edge had failed to score a hit, Rafen’s blows cut the skin-matter into shreds. He fancied he heard screaming on the wind, coming from some far distant place.

Angry and vicious in their retreat, the tears of discarded flesh fluttered high into the air, coiling upon one another as if caught in the funnel of a whirlwind, and then vanishing into the unceasing murmur of the sandstorm.

The Apothecary was down on one knee, panting. His face was a maze of shallow scratches, and his bare arm a bloody ruin. He looked up. ‘Rafen,’ he rasped. ‘Thank you, brother.’

‘Brother?’ Now the moment of the attack had passed as swiftly as it had begun, Rafen’s confusion turned to ready distrust. He aimed the damaged tip of the sword at the other warrior’s face. ‘Are you really such a thing, or do you only pretend at it?’ He took a step closer, bearing his teeth. ‘Did you bring me here?’ he demanded. ‘I have fought warpspawn before, and won! I will do so again!’

‘I do not… understand…’ said the white-armoured Blood Angel, holding up his hands. ‘You raise a blade to me? Why?’

‘What breed of daemon tainted you?’ Rafen snapped. ‘Answer me!’

The Apothecary shook his head. ‘These things you say, you speak in riddles!’ He staggered to his feet, glaring at Rafen, his strength returning. ‘You accuse me of complicity…’ He shook his head. ‘Those… those creatures… I have never seen the like. They are the avatars of the poison…’ The warrior broke off, becoming pale. ‘Primarch… It still runs in me.’

Rafen’s broken blade was suddenly at his neck. ‘Then perhaps I should end you.’

‘You would do such a thing?’ An expression of utter disgust crossed the other man’s face. ‘An Astartes, killing an Astartes? Brother against a brother?’ He shook his head. ‘Perhaps it is you that is tainted and false!’ The Apothecary drew the chainaxe, his voice rising. ‘When I came to your aid against the ghosts in the sand, I did not question your honour! Those phantoms had your face, Rafen! But I did not kill you because of it!’

For a long moment, Rafen wavered on the cusp of drawing back the weapon to strike, but then he relaxed his stance and stepped away.

‘I do not know what you are,’ he said. Rafen turned his back and walked on.

Meros followed him; there was little else he could do.

Once, in the time before he had been raised up to join the Blood Angels, when he had still been a child, still human, Meros had heard a mad old seer speak of darker powers and places beyond the understanding of men. The recall of that moment was so far distant that it was barely even a memory anymore. His past life had been smoothed away by the monumental changes that had made him one of the Emperor’s finest warriors, so now all that remained were impressions.

But clear enough to return to him now, enough to remember the fear in the old seer’s eyes. The warp is the sea of souls, he had said. In it, all things can be made and unmade. Everything is mutable, blood and time like sand…

Like sand…

Meros walked behind Rafen, following him up the lee of a steep dune, the constant buzzing dust plucking at him, ripping what moisture there was from his lips and nostrils. Even the nictating membranes over his eyes were gummed with deposits of blown sand, forcing him to blink and brush at his face. His hand came away red with the powdery deposits. Meros lumbered after the other Blood Angel, the only other sound the labouring of the myoma muscle-quads in their power armour.

He reached the top of the ridge and found Rafen standing still. Meros halted and followed the other warrior’s gaze, up and up.

They stood at the foot of the pinnacle mountain, the spire of red rock reaching away into the clouds of dust–

But it was not a mountain. It had never been one. From a distance, the eye had been tricked to believe that was so, the scraps of the shape and image parsed to form what one expected to see.

Laying his gaze upon it all, however, was a revelation.

Rafen and Meros stood at the foot of a great statue, a carving taller than the highest Titan, the base buried in the red sand, the top visible against the shadow of the crimson sun.

‘My liege,’ breathed Rafen, sinking to one knee. Meros did the same, but unlike the other warrior, he did not turn his face away.

Meros looked up. He saw how the rocky crags formed the shape of voluminous robes that ended in a hood, and the carved planes of an infinitely noble face framed there. The patrician, shining majesty of Sanguinius’s aspect looked down on them in judgement, his hands clasped before him, his mighty wings gathered in around his shoulders like a cloak.

‘How can this be here?’ he breathed.

‘Where is here?’ Rafen replied. ‘I fear this is the answer. This place is death.’

Then Meros saw a glitter of gold and raised his arm to point at it. ‘Who is that?’

Rafen raised his head and saw the warrior in golden armour. He stood upon a ridge along the lower part of the massive statue-mountain, a carved line representing a fold in the robes of the primarch. For the first time, the Blood Angel saw him clearly.

About a beatific face-mask, a broad iron halo described a perfect circle. Intricately tooled armour in gold and brass gave the figure a muscular silhouette that mimicked the finery of a Chapter Master’s ornate ceremonial wargear, but where Lord Dante would wear upon his back the engine of a powerful jetpack, this figure grew wings of shining white steel, glittering with the ruddy light of the swollen sun overhead. Great trains of oath-papers hung from his hips, fluttering on the breeze.

‘No,’ muttered Rafen. He saw it clearly and yet did not wish to believe it. ‘You are a myth,’ he whispered. ‘An illusion.’

‘Who would pretend at the glory of our primarch?’ Rafen heard the Apothecary say the words, disbelief equal in his tone. ‘No one has the right to wear the gold…’

‘Sanguinor.’ The word slipped from his mouth. Rafen had heard the tales of the golden guardian many times, the reports of battles so ancient, so far removed from his experiences that they seemed more like fables, like the folklore of the nomadic Tribes of the Blood on Baal Secundus. He had heard these things, and yet he had never truly believed in them.

The galaxy contained many strange sights, many unknowable truths, and Rafen had lived his life in the face of them without credulity. It was how he had been trained by his late mentor, Koris. To see clearly, to challenge everything. The story of the Sanguinor had remained just that – a story. A tale told by the oldest of the veterans in the lulls between battle, a legend meant to steady the will. A metaphor for honour and courage.

And yet it stood before them now. The stories told of this avatar of all that was good and noble in the character of his Chapter, an undying force of pure will that would give its blessing to warriors fighting against the most hopeless of odds. The golden angel of vengeance who would descend from the skies in the moment of greatest need. The eternal and unending warrior.

Rafen had never truly believed, for he had fought at the speartip of wars that shook the pillars of his Chapter’s history, and never seen the face of this legend; and to see it now, in this place, brought a sudden fury to the Blood Angel. He stepped forward, filling his lungs to shout. ‘What do you want?’ he bellowed, his voice rising over the constant winds to echo off the mountainside. ‘Is this your judgement? Show your face! I will tolerate these illusions no more! Reveal yourself!’ He raised the bolter and took aim. ‘Or must I shed your blood to find the truth?’

Meros saw Rafen draw the pistol and he felt the rush of adrenaline flood through him. The figure in gold could only be one thing, one being – for the strictures of the IX Legiones Astartes forbade any but the primarch himself and his personal guard from donning such armour. It could only be the Lord of the Blood, the Great Angel himself; and here before Meros the warrior Rafen was bringing a weapon to bear upon him.

The Apothecary shot forward and grabbed Rafen’s arm, pulling it up and away. ‘What are you doing?’ he snapped. ‘Are you insane? You dare draw a firearm in the presence of your primarch?’

‘Primarch?’ Rafen turned on him, knocking him back with a savage shove. ‘Whatever you see up there, it is not Sanguinius, the Emperor’s Light find him! It is an echo at best, a shadow of his glory released upon the moment of his death!’

Rafen’s words fell like a rain of stones, the force behind them, the certainty, striking Meros with the power of a physical blow. ‘What did you say?’ he whispered. In the next second he was at Rafen’s throat, shaking him, glaring into his eyes. ‘He is not dead! The Primarch is not dead, how dare you speak such lies? I saw him stride the battleground at Melchior with my own eyes. I heard his voice call me to arms!’ Meros was livid with anger and confusion, unable to comprehend what would possess the other Blood Angel to voice such folly.

Rafen struggled against him. ‘Then either the Rage has taken you, or you are a liar and a fool! My primarch lies dead, ten thousand years and gone–’

‘Falsehood!’ Meros’s towering anger slipped its leash and he struck out at the unspeakable lie as it fell from Rafen’s mouth. His blow hit home, knocking the rusted bolt pistol from the other warrior’s grip. The weapon tumbled away down the incline of the dune and vanished into the sandstorm.

Despite the clinging, parching heat, a sudden chill washed over Meros as he found a moment of new understanding. ‘You…’ He pointed a finger at Rafen’s face. ‘You do not exist. You never did! You are the poison, eating at my brain! You are the soul-seeker’s venom!’ It made a horrific kind of sense; Meros knew full well from his decades in service to the Legion’s medicae corps that the dark eldar were masters of toxins, their cruelty extending to the deliberate, mind-killing methods of their tainted weapons. All this, everything around him – Rafen, the sand-phantoms and the flesh-ghosts, the mountain and the desert and the golden figure – all of it was a hallucination.

He was not here. He was somewhere else, perhaps still on Nartaba Octus, bleeding out his last while his mind lay trapped in a prison of dreams.

But Meros would not meet his end without a fight.

With a roar, the Apothecary came thundering back at him, the decrepit bolter across his back tossed away, the sputtering chainaxe in his grip. Rafen saw the look in the other warrior’s eye and knew the colour of frenzy when he saw it. He met the spinning, broken teeth of the weapon with the cracked edge of the sword. Each of the ruined blades ground against one another, spitting thick sparks, metal howling and crackling as it burned.

They were a match, these two. Blade met blade again and again, each time blunting on the defence of the other, each time scoring no better than nicks and cuts, never to the bone, never deep enough to cripple.

In the endless storm, under the unmoving red sun, they fought for hours, shifting back and forth, gaining and losing ground, their lethal dance without conclusion. Attack and riposte; feint and strike; block and advance. Each form in their battle schema met opposition and reflected back upon the aggressor.

Thick, chemical sweat sluiced from their bio-altered glands, mingling with clotted blood. The howling wind was the chorus to the grunts of their effort, the thud and clang of sword and chainaxe meeting, parting, meeting again. The heat and the pain dragged on both of them, dulling their strength.

‘Why…’ The Apothecary spoke through cracked lips as their weapons locked for the hundredth time. ‘Why will you not leave me? You will not have my death…’

‘Your words,’ Rafen gasped, ‘my thoughts, false one…’

‘You cannot reach me!’ he shouted back. ‘Your words mean nothing! You are the falsehood, you are the darkness in my blood! I am Meros, Blood Angel, Son of Sanguinius, and I deny you!’

‘Meros?’ The name cut like a knife across Rafen’s heart.

The break-tip sword dropped from its raised position, and suddenly the warrior’s guard was open, but the Apothecary did not strike. He held the chainaxe high, wary of this new tactic.

‘What perfidy is this?’ Rafen asked, weary and wrathful in equal measure. ‘Is that name plucked from my thoughts? Does my mind turn against me now?’ He turned and shouted toward the golden figure, who had not wavered from his place of observation. The warrior beat his fist against his chest. ‘I know Meros!’ he bellowed. ‘I know him here!’

Rafen pressed the hilt of the broken sword to his sternum, to the very spot where his vital progenoid gland lay deep within the flesh of his torso. The progenoid, a complex knot of genetic material, was the legacy of countless cohorts of Blood Angels, removed at the point of death and implanted anew in the bodies of the next generation. They were the most precious of the Chapter’s bequests, the living sources of the gene-memory passed on from brother to brother, assuring that the Sons of Sanguinius would live on forever.

The progenoid implanted in Rafen’s flesh was such a thing, and he honoured the stewardship of it – just as the warriors who had borne it before him had honoured it until their deaths. Rafen knew the names of every one of them, every Blood Angel down through the passage of ten thousand years and more.

Meros was one of those names. An Apothecary, a warrior of note and record who had fought during the darkest chapter of mankind’s history; the civil war known as the Horus Heresy.

He shook his head. ‘It… is not possible!’ In this place of delusion and dark nightmare, it could not be real. Rafen struggled to understand. The burning blood that even now coursed through him – was this the way it would destroy him, twisting his mind, unravelling everything about him, clawing at the threads of his history?

He turned back toward Meros, his voice rising. ‘You cannot be here…’

The other Blood Angel did not pay him any heed, for his daemons – and Rafen’s – had emerged from the storms to assault them both once more.

They came, and they brought the night with them.

It was as if the crimson sun had never shone upon the red desert; now there was only a sky ink-black and scarred with stars that burned cold, the watcher upon the towering sculpture rendered in shadow and cool, aloof shades of silver.

Meros’s poison attacked, the thread-things weaving about him, ripping into his skin. His armour… his armour was suddenly gone, and now all he fought in were his duty robes, stained with blood and patches of dark sweat. The heat of the day was gone, replaced by a bone-deep cold that sucked the energy from him.

Meros battled with the chainaxe, his questions to Rafen forgotten for the moment. Each hit missed, each blow went wide; his wraiths, however, scored every strike with perfect accuracy.

The sands were trying to murder him.

Rafen brought up his hands to cover his face as a hurricane exploded out of the dust. Darkness and cold flooded in, as if he had been thrown into an icy lake. Distantly he registered that the dragging weight of his wargear had somehow ceased to pull upon him. All he felt was the scratching agony of the whirling flecks of grit ripping through the robes surrounding him, scoring his flesh.

He did not dwell on the changes that unfolded. In this unreal place, all Rafen could do was to cling to what he knew to be true, and draw that close.

The broken sword in his hand turned and rattled through the air, and did nothing. The sandstorm ejected him with a sound like laughter and breaking stones, mocking him as he stumbled.

The wraiths danced away as they toyed with the Apothecary. Meros lurched from his knees and found Rafen beside him. The Blood Angel extended a hand to him and pulled him up. He met the other man’s gaze.

‘Will you kill me, then?’ he asked. ‘Or let them do the deed?’

‘I understand now,’ Rafen replied, nodding toward the silent watcher in gold. ‘Do you not see, Meros? We are here and our daemons are here. Alone, they will kill us.’

Over Rafen’s shoulder, the sands twisted into the form of a monstrous armoured Astartes, feral and abhorrent. It came on, clawed hands raised in attack. Behind Meros, the threads of skin reformed into something resembling a dark eldar Incubi, hollow-eyed and leering. Both shapes were becoming solid, real. Lethal.

‘What is the bloodline?’ Rafen asked suddenly. The words had a ritual, rote quality to them.

‘The eternal bond of brotherhood,’ Meros said, the reply coming to him from nowhere. ‘The will to survive beyond death.’

Rafen weighed the old, rusted blade in his hand. ‘This is my will, kinsman,’ he told him, and gestured to the axe in Meros’s grip. ‘And that is yours. Do you see?’

A smile formed on Meros’s lips. ‘I do.’

‘To the fight, then,’ said the other Blood Angel, ‘if it may be the last.’ He rocked off his feet, leading with the broken sword, throwing himself not at his twisted doppelganger, but at the avatar of Meros’s pain and anguish.

Meros moved at the same moment, the understanding coming to him. He swung the chainaxe at the phantom that screamed with Rafen’s face, turning the blade toward the neck.

Sword and axe found their marks as one, each killing the nemesis of the other; and in silence, the tainted dreams that tormented the Blood Angels were swiftly ended. The ghostly apparitions dissolved into nothing, captured on the winds and blown to the horizon.

‘It is done,’ said Meros, turning to face Rafen. ‘We are freed. Brother.’ He extended a hand to the warrior and Rafen reached for it–

–and time seemed to become fluid, slow and heavy.

The darkness was closing in, and all around the landscape began to ripple and fade as the certainty that underpinned the unreal place came apart. With no threat to make it whole and give it purpose, the desert was crumbling. The statue-mountain became smoke, dissipating on the never-ending winds.

A great, sudden fear reached into Rafen’s chest and clutched tight around his hearts with claws of ice. Meros saw the look in his eyes and his expression begged the question.

‘Rafen? What is wrong?’

So much, kinsman. Rafen tried to give voice to the words, but he could not move. He was frozen there, his flesh ignoring every command he gave it. So much is wrong. If the Apothecary truly was Meros of the Blood Angels, if he truly was the Astartes who lay as no more than bone and ashes in the halls of the dead on Baal, then in some way Rafen could not fathom, the man lived in another time, another place.

A place before the death of Sanguinius. Oh, what glory to live in that moment. And what horror yet to come.

With all his might, with every last moment of his strength, Rafen fought to utter a warning. From his mouth came a single, strangled word. A curse.

‘Horus–‘

Gold shimmered in the darkness. The figure in armour was there, and Meros did not seem to see him. With infinite slowness, a gauntlet of brass and shining amber raised to place a hand over the silent lips of an unmoving mask. The message was without ambiguity, the command unmistakable.

Silence.

Unaware, Meros held out a hand to touch the other warrior’s shoulder. ‘Rafen? We are victorious… What troubles you?’

But then the moment faded, and the sands became as blood, drowning them both.

The Touch of Sanguine Dawn opened and cast crimson liquid across the flagstones of the Hall of Sarcophagi in a steaming tide.

Wet with fluids, Rafen stumbled from the interior of the golden orb and fell to one knee. He coughed and tore the breather tubes from his nostrils, taking ragged gulps of air. ‘I… I am alive…’

‘Indeed.’ The dark voice drew his gaze up. He found himself looking into burning eyes that dared him to break away. The power of Lord Mephiston’s will was almost impossible to resist.

Finally, he released Rafen and the warrior looked down at the tracks along his arms where numerous vitae guides had been implanted. ‘The… blood…’

‘Gone,’ Mephiston told him. ‘The measure of the Primarch’s sacred vitae has been returned to the Red Grail, to its rightful state. Balance, restored at last.’

Rafen slowly climbed to his feet, as blood-servitors swept in to clean and reconsecrate the ancient sarcophagus. ‘Then at last my mission is complete. I feared it would destroy me.’

The psyker-lord looked up, to the ornate stained-glass windows set in the walls over their heads. ‘You have stood at the edge of death’s abyss for weeks, Rafen. Lemartes and many others believed you would perish, and pass unto the Emperor’s right hand. But you defy the odds once again.’ He turned that baleful gaze back toward the Blood Angel. ‘One might wonder if you were blessed. Or cursed.’

Rafen drew himself up. ‘Whatever the Emperor wills.’

Mephiston came closer. ‘A question, Brother-Sergeant. What did you see in there?’

‘Nothing…’ The lie came to him before he could stop himself. He thought of red sands, a golden warrior, a kinsman millennia-dead. Now, as he stood here in this place of stone and steel, what he had experienced seemed like the fantasy of a fevered mind. Rafen’s hand strayed to his chest, to the place where his progenoid gene-seed implant lay dormant. ‘I… dreamed. Nothing more.’

‘Perhaps,’ said the psyker. ‘It is written that the Great Angel was possessed of a powerful psionic talent. Some say that he read the hearts and minds of his warrior sons as if they were open pages of a book. That he saw his own death at the hands of the Arch-traitor. That to him, even the veil of time was a malleable thing.’ He nodded. ‘The power of Sanguinius resonated through his very blood. Even ten thousand years on, we know this to be true.’ Rafen watched as Mephiston crossed to The Touch of Sanguine Dawn and stroked it with infinite gentleness. ‘These great sarcophagi,’ he went on, ‘they were built to his design. They are links to his will. And one might wonder if, after so many centuries of use, if they might not have absorbed some measure of his eternal power.’ He turned back to face Rafen. ‘Do you understand, Brother-Sergeant?’

When Rafen spoke again, the truth welled up in him. ‘I saw something,’ he admitted.

‘What was it?’

‘A myth,’ Rafen whispered.

‘Open it,’ commanded the warrior in gold. ‘Do it now.’

‘My lord–‘ Brother-Sergeant Cassiel tried to object, but a single sharp look was enough to silence his objections. ‘As you wish.’ He threw a nod to the legion serfs crowded around the flanks of The Touch of Sanguine Dawn, and as one they opened the petals of the sphere.

Dark rivers of crimson flowed from the interior, running away into drain vents. Light from the Hermia’s lumeglobes revealed the figure within, a muscled form pale in flesh, breathing hard. With every passing second, the colour returned to him.

Sarga leaned in. ‘The wound has closed. I see no signs of lingering infection.’

‘What about the shard itself?’ asked Cassiel.

Sarga nodded to himself. ‘Destroyed. The sarcophagus disintegrated it, purged all trace of it from his system. He lives.’

‘Get him out,’ said the gold-armoured warrior.

The serfs did as they were ordered to, and moved to carry the Blood Angel to a grav-litter. He stirred, and pushed them away, standing on his own, blinking in the light.

‘We… are freed…’ He whispered.

Cassiel gave him a fresh robe. ‘Meros. How do you feel, brother?’

He gave a nod. ‘I live. Thanks to you.’

‘It would seem so.’

Meros turned to see who had addressed him, and a flash of shock crossed his face. ‘You–?’ But then in the next moment, he composed himself. ‘Forgive me. The golden armour… I thought you were… Someone else.’

‘You know who I am?’ The warrior was a towering figure, resplendent in the master-crafted wargear of a High Sanguinary Guard – the praetorians of the Primarch himself. Dark, shoulder-length hair fell about his gorget, framing a long, noble aspect.

‘You are Azkaellon,’ said Meros, ‘bearer of the Glaive Encarmine and the banner-master. First among the Sanguinary Guard.’ He met the other man’s gaze. ‘What do you wish of me?’

‘I came to see if you would die,’ Azkaellon replied, his voice cold and steady. ‘I learned of your bravery on Nartaba Octus and wished to see the face of a battle-brother who would meet such odds. With those wounds, I expected to witness your passing… but clearly the strength of the Great Angel himself runs strong in your heart.’

Meros gave a shallow bow. ‘I will not die yet. Sanguinius will tell me when that time is at hand.’

For the first time, Azkaellon showed a flicker of emotion; the briefest of smiles. ‘You seem certain,’ he went on. ‘Tell me, Meros. How do you know that to be so?’ He nodded to the sarcophagus. ‘Did you… see something while you slumbered?’

Meros recalled visions of red sands, a golden warrior and a kinsman he did not know. His hand strayed to where his progenoid gene-seed implant lay beneath his flesh. ‘My own fears made manifest,’ he replied, at length. ‘Now banished forever.’

‘As it should be,’ Azkaellon said, with a nod. ‘Now rest, Meros.’ He looked around at Cassiel and the others. ‘All of you, gather your strength and prepare for battle. I have this hour received orders from our primarch. The Hermia and Task Force Ignis are to rendezvous with the rest of our Legion’s ships.’

‘Which flotilla?’ said Sarga.

Azkaellon did not grace him with a glance. ‘All of them. The Legion musters in its entirety for battle and new glory.’

Meros’s brow furrowed. Such an assemblage of the Sons of Sanguinius was unprecedented. For the primarch to gather them all for war, the deed would be of great import. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

‘Our liege-lord’s brother, the Warmaster Horus Lupercal, has given us a duty that only the Blood Angels are capable of,’ said the Sanguinary Guard. ‘We are to bring the light of the Imperium to the worlds of the Signus Cluster.’

REFLECTION IN BLOOD

Epistolary Ceris sensed the arrival of the Knights before they became visible through the oxide mists. He said nothing, only turned his head and raised his gauntlet a degree or two, enough for Sergeant Rafen and the rest of the squad to know that the renegades were close at hand.

Also silent, Rafen gestured to Puluo and Ajir to lower their bolters. The two warriors obeyed, but reluctantly. The sergeant’s own pistol and blade had not left holster or scabbard since the squad had put down on this nameless, barren moon, but the tension of potential battle was there in every move he made, if one knew where to look for it. And while the four of them now made a show of being at peace, in the haze behind them where their Thunderhawk sat, Brothers Turcio and Kayne were concealed with weapons at the ready.

Rafen stepped forward and absently fingered the haft of the standard planted in the moon’s rusty regolith. A simple pennant hung from it, a field of bright crimson bearing the white device of a winged droplet to signify the presence of the IX Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes: the Blood Angels. A ritual thing, the standard was part of the agreement. Its symbology was the implicit covenant that this meeting, in this place, was to be under the banner of truce.

Those with whom he had been sent to parley came from the mist like wraiths of legend, five of them. While their armour marks were of comparable type to those of Rafen’s squad, their wargear seemed somehow older. Not decrepit and failing, but careworn in a way that showed great devotion and constant use. Most of the armour had the cast of pewter to it, but splashes of dark arterial red dominated their shoulder pauldrons, their chest plates and helms. He saw the sigil of their Chapter as it glittered in the directionless sunlight: a white shield over two crossed swords, a drop of crimson upon it.

The Knights of Blood. Once a successor born of Rafen’s Chapter, they had been declared renegade nearly a millennium ago. Their brutality and zeal, dreaded throughout the Imperium, had been such that it was not only the enemies of man that suffered at their hands. The Knights refused to moderate their ways, and so an edict of excommunication had been passed. It was said they still prosecuted their crusade against all foes, the demands of the Inquisition be damned.

‘They don’t look like traitors,’ muttered Puluo over the vox, as the leading Knight planted a standard of his own in the dirt. Another of the cadre stood at his side, subtle battle marks and honour-chains differentiating one from another.

‘They don’t all have tentacles and spit ichor,’ offered Ajir. ‘Be wary.’

Rafen ignored the comments and took another step forward, giving his name and rank. ‘We are here,’ he added. ‘My master Dante granted this. You wish to speak?’

‘Only two sharpshooters,’ said the first Knight. ‘Not enough.’

Rafen resisted the urge to look over his shoulder. ‘More than enough.’

The second Knight chuckled softly and removed his helmet to reveal a dark face crisscrossed by scars. ‘I am Ser Koth. My brother here is Ser Rale. Greetings, Blood Angel.’

‘What do you want?’ Rafen asked, following suit while measuring the other warrior’s aspect.

‘To the point,’ Koth’s faint smile faded. ‘Very well. We have something that belongs to you.’ He waved a hand, and a piston-legged servitor ambled out of the mist carrying a casket in its brass grippers.

Warily, Ceris went to meet it, and the servitor halted obediently. The psyker seemed on edge, looking this way and that for enemies that were not there. After a moment, the Blood Angel cracked the seal of the casket and peered inside. Rafen caught sight of familiar shapes in red ceramite. Broken pieces of power armour.

‘Regretfully, this is all that remains of one of your squads,’ said Koth. ‘But we believed you would wish it repatriated to you.’

Rafen’s hand was on the hilt of his sword. ‘How did they perish?’

Koth sighed. ‘We did not end them, Sergeant Rafen. Whatever our reputation, the Knights of Blood would never prey upon our blood-kindred.’

‘Orks,’ growled the other Knight. ‘Dead now.’

‘Lord,’ Ceris held up a glassy canister containing knots of fleshy matter suspended in life-fluids. ‘They have recovered the progenoids.’

‘Aye,’ Koth went on. ‘The gene-seed of your late brothers. It seemed wrong to allow it to be lost.’

‘Why didn’t you just take them?’ The question spilled out of Ajir, laced with venom. ‘Your kind respect naught. Why pretend otherwise?’

Rafen turned to censure the warrior, but Rale was already speaking. ‘Told you, Ser,’ he snapped at Koth. ‘Just like the rest. A waste of time.’

‘We cannot accept those,’ Ajir insisted. ‘They are tainted by proximity to these traitors!’

Rale moved to advance on Ajir, but Koth put out a hand to stop him. ‘We are renegades,’ he said coldly. ‘Not traitors. An important difference.’

‘You know nothing about us,’ Rale growled.

‘We know what we have been told,’ Rafen replied. ‘We know what is in the history books.’

‘You know what the Inquisition wishes to be known,’ Koth shot back. He pointed at Rafen. ‘Do you know what we have been told about you, Sergeant Rafen? A failed aspirant who cheated his way into the Chapter, whose taint-hearted brother almost turned you against yourselves. Is that the full truth? Or is there more to it?’ He glared at the Blood Angel. ‘Who do we listen to? Outsiders? Or those whose veins carry the power of Sanguinius? Forever blessed be his light.’

‘This is pointless.’ Rale turned away, snatching up the standard. The gesture had only one meaning. The parley was over, and the two groups were now enemies again. All hands went to their weapons. ‘We are not like them, Ser Koth,’ concluded the Knight. ‘They have already judged us.’

Rafen hesitated, struggling with the moment. There was more at hand here, he could sense it. But what? Not a trap… Something else. He strode to the casket and took the canister from Ceris, turning it over in his armoured fingers. ‘The loss of even one progenoid lessens us all,’ he noted. ‘Few would risk death to bring them to safety.’ He turned to study Koth and Rale. ‘For we are within our rights to kill you, renegade. The High Lords of Terra order it so.’

‘You may make the attempt,’ said Koth. ‘And in the deed, prove Ser Rale is correct about you.’

And now Rafen felt he was grasping the edges of understanding. ‘You did not need to come here in person, Knight. You could have left the casket on this world and sent us the location. We had no need to even breathe the same air.’ There was that faint smile again on Koth’s face. ‘Why?’

‘I admit to it,’ said the other warrior.

Suddenly, Rafen felt a cold pressure on his thoughts and saw a glitter of witch-light in Koth’s ebon gaze. At his side, Ceris stiffened and he knew at once: the Knight was a psyker. ‘I wanted to look you in the eye, Blood Angel. That is why we made the demand of Dante, that he send you and your squad.’

Rafen said nothing, allowing the renegade Librarian to read his surface thoughts and know he was without guile. Chapter Master Dante had not seen fit to inform Rafen of the reasons he had been chosen for this mission, and now he understood. ‘You have done so,’ he said. ‘What is your conclusion?’

A shadow passed over Koth’s face and the psyker’s calculating touch retreated. ‘We are all sons of Sanguinius beneath the skin, no matter what the agents of the Inquisition may say. The Knights of Blood wished to know if their erstwhile kinsmen are still so. That question has been satisfied, and so we will turn our rage upon the forces of the Archenemy once more, knowing that Baal remains in safe hands.’

Rafen frowned, realising too late that the true purpose of this entire endeavour had been beyond him from the start. ‘Why not come back with us and see for yourself?’ As the question left his lips, Ajir shot him an aghast look.

Koth barked out a bitter laugh. ‘We are not the Flesh Tearers. Our excesses are not sanctioned by Terra. No, Baal is forever denied to us now. Better that we simply part ways here and return to our battle-brothers with what we have been given.’

The Blood Angel weighed the glass canister in his hand. ‘What have I given you, Ser Koth?’

‘Truth,’ said the Knight, turning away, donning his helmet once more.

‘You’re going to let them leave?’ Ajir questioned.

‘Yes,’ said Ceris, answering for Rafen. ‘Because if we fire a single shot, the dozen other Knights concealed out in the mists will cut us down in a heartbeat.’ The psyker glanced at the sergeant. ‘Forgive me, lord. Ser Koth’s mind is quite powerful. He hid not only his true nature from me, but the existence of his men as well.’

Rafen’s jaw stiffened. ‘I do not like to be played,’ he called, throwing the words after the departing Knights.

‘We are all pieces in the same game, Rafen.’ Koth’s voice echoed back to them as he vanished into the haze. ‘The trick is to ensure the rules are of your own making.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Swallow is best known for being the author of the Horus Heresy novels Fear to Tread and Nemesis, which both reached the New York Times bestseller lists, The Flight of the Eisenstein and a series of audio dramas featuring the character Nathaniel Garro. For Warhammer 40,000, he is best known for his four Blood Angels novels, the audio drama Heart of Rage, and his two Sisters of Battle novels. His short fiction has appeared in Legends of the Space Marines and Tales of Heresy.

An extract from Mephiston: Revenant Crusade.

Frost crawled into the bunker, silvering the heads piled at its centre, clamping their jaws into obstinate silence. Most of them were beyond saving, their fat, black tongues hanging from death-grey lips, smoke drifting from their ragged eye sockets. It was a pitiful scene. Some were still twitching, brutally galvanised by banks of sparking transformers, but none of them were speaking anymore. The heads had become totems, carefully labelled symbols of the curse that had befallen Hydrus Ulterior – contorted, mindless and finally mute.

‘Groti-grosi, zero-one,’ said Magos Calx through a hood full of vox-pipes. ‘Hair, teeth, nails. Nails, teeth, hair. Sifter-zero. Sifter-one.’ With each clipped word he stabbed a syringe into one of the heads, trying to coax out a reply. ‘Putrescible matter. Non-copper. No adulterations. Gliacine-zero. Gliacine-one. Blood-spitting, then silence.’

There was frustration in his voice as he glanced at a shrine in the corner of the bunker. It was rattling furiously in its alcove, spooling reels of data scrolls, as though remonstrating him. ‘Munificent lord,’ said Calx. ‘I will not be defeated by this. Whatever they have become, they will give me answers. The vescend-vibum will yield.’ He forced the needle deeper. ‘Flesh always yields.’

The bunker shuddered in response to distant artillery, coating Calx’s crimson robes with a fresh layer of dust. He cursed and brushed it away, revealing gold needlework running down his floor-length robes – a spiral of cogs and circuitry that proclaimed long decades of study. His legs scuttled beneath him, a claw-fist of mechadendrite talons, clattering on the stone floor as he approached another head.

‘Spool-speak-one,’ he hissed, bending his already hunched frame over the head. The slab of flesh twitched in response and Calx nodded, pleased. The head had been transformed by madness, more beast now than man, blood-splattered and leering. Calx activated the transformers attached to its skull. Light flickered beneath the skin and the smell of ozone and cooking meat filled the bunker. ‘S33331 ineffectual,’ said Calx, attaching cables to bloody sockets. ‘IOH zero coagulated. Neuman acid no longer servative. Bio repeat. Others are inferior and subzanted. Glaciahne or Giacialine. S33336 ineffectual.’

He opened a leather-bound hymnal and recited a litany of invigoration, droning the questions and answers until the head started to respond, rocking and snorting in time to his words, jolting so hard that black clots fell from its nose. Calx took a heavy, brass chronometer from his robes and flipped it open, peering at the spinning mechanism and comparing the measurements to lines he had drawn on the head. ‘S33332 efficacious,’ he said.

He looked closer at his chronometer, then snapped it shut, placing it beneath his robes and peering at the rotting face. ‘Talk to me.’ He adjusted the transformers so that the head shook even more violently. ‘Who stole your mind?’

Calx could hear the mortar rounds hitting with increasing force outside, getting ever closer. His time was almost up. He had to find the answer. How had such a primitive foe breached their thrice-blessed logic engines? How had they entered their minds?

The head rocked back on its stand and spat, showering the tech-priest with red saliva.

Calx gripped the head and forced another syringe home, placing the needle carefully between intersections he had inked on its neck. ‘Tell me,’ he whispered, ‘what am I not seeing? How were you corrupted? What is absit-absens from your head? How was it possible? Daemonolegisari? You were stearated, anointed, antitropic, metal-bodied. You were everything the Omnissiah desires. There was no trace of delirium in you. None. Steel-bound, god-bound, oil-chained in-ab-eterno. What could find purchase in your soul? I examined your hair, your teeth, your nails.’

As though sensing Calx’s frustration, the severed head started to laugh, snorting like a drunk.

The mass of oily cables that passed for Calx’s face recoiled, rolling like a nest of rubber snakes, their mechanical lenses blinking and refocusing. ‘Do you think you can deceive me? I will reorder your consciousness. You will tell me exactly what–’

The head’s expression changed. The transformation was so sudden and peculiar that Calx paused in surprise. He took out the chronometer again and adjusted the settings, winding the mechanism several times and tapping the brass case. Then he looked back at the head.

It was physically unchanged but the mania was gone. It looked around the bunker with cool disdain, then fixed its stare on the tech-priest, studying the chronometer and the symbols stitched into Calx’s robes.

‘So much learning,’ said the head quietly. ‘So little thinking.’

Calx backed away. ‘What? What did you say?’ He glanced at one of the humming devices sunk into its cranium. ‘Which focimeter is that? These are not your words. Who is that? There must be no interruptions. Is this the extant sphygmograph or the piomancies of the twelfth nine? Did I confuse the screed?’ He approached one of the machines and tapped furiously at a flickering gauge. ‘Are you a pollutant? Is there a pollutant in the ore?’

‘The Emperor has need of you, magos,’ said the head, speaking in ornate, archaic Gothic. ‘Meet me on the crest of the dam.’

Calx froze. Then he looked around the bunker, half expecting to see a newcomer in the room. His machines flickered impassively, showing no signs of anyone hiding. A mixture of fear and excitement gripped him. The Emperor? Could this be it? Had help finally come? Had they finally been heard?

‘Who are–?’ he started to say.

‘The crest. Now.’ The head spoke with such force that it rocked on its stand, spilling sparks across the workbench.

One by one, all the heads started to rattle on their bases, snorting and belching. Crimson tears poured down their cheeks. ‘What is here?’ they whispered in unison. ‘What is here?’

Calx raised his power axe. The weapon was taller than him and clad in a bewildering array of esoteric devices, but it did nothing to calm his nerves.

‘I have no time,’ said the heads. ‘The crest. Now.’

Calx backed away, then jumped as someone began pounding on the door.

The heads became rigid and lifeless once more, so Calx turned to the door and wrenched it open, his power axe still raised.

‘Magos,’ said the pale, blood-splattered soldier outside. ‘It’s over. We are defeated.’

Magos Calx clattered out into blinding, bitter cold, followed by a phalanx of helmeted skitarii: vanguard troops, their low-slung radium carbines crackling as they lined up in perfect lockstep behind him. The clamour of battle crashed into them – thudding, hammer blows of artillery and the peevish cackle of arc rifles. Even up here, above the dam, Calx could see how dire the situation had become. Broken phosphor weapons and diagnostic equipment lay discarded around the bunker and mindless skitarii were sprawled everywhere, pleading to the cogs on their armour and gnawing at their bloody fists. Medicae-servitors whirred past – winged drones laden with needles and hacksaws, pallid, slack-jawed faces embedded in their iron thoraxes. They picked at the dying with blank-eyed disinterest, examining some, killing others. All of the soldiers were lacerated and bleeding, but Calx knew the wounds were not caused by the enemy. The men had not been mauled by xenos horrors, but by themselves. Steam filled the brittle air, drifting from their glistening, exposed innards and bloodstained mouths.

The magos paused as he left the bunker, horrified by the cannibalism that had consumed his garrison. To devour their own bodies, to eat the flesh that had been so lovingly improved by their lord, it was tragic in ways he could barely fathom. It was the most obscene form of defeat he could conceive of and it had occurred under his command. He had no doubt what was responsible. Corruption was the constant enemy. The Ruinous Powers. Daemonkind. The creatures of the warp. They had arrived on Hydrus Ulterior and entered the souls of his men. Then he remembered the voice that had spoken to him in the bunker. Even now there was hope.

He leant back as far as his iron-wrought torso would allow, until he looked like an armour-plated beetle, trapped in the sunlight, trying to right itself. Four of his servo-arms sprouted from his rusty carapace up into the air, as he opened his mind to every datascreed he could locate. Binharic code echoed round his head, a barrage of vox chatter from every corner of the valley – trajectories, munitions details, rates of attrition, all listed in exhaustive detail, despite the hopeless situation they described. Calx sifted through the statistics, trying to find an explanation for what had just happened to the heads.

‘Indente-dante, three-six-nine,’ he said, tapping the tubes that snaked through his skull. ‘Affixing one, affixing two.’ More reports hit him, jolting his body like a current. Then, finally, he found it.

He lowered his arms and stood upright, gripping his power axe with trembling fingers, excitement distorting his words. ‘Adeptus Astartes? The Adeptus Astartes are here? And none of you thought to alert me?’

‘Magos,’ replied one of the skitarii. ‘Your work with the heads… You ordered us not to disturb you until exactly–’

The magos pointed his power axe at the trooper. The weapon’s head was a stylised cog, each tooth sharpened to a keen edge. Calx tapped the humming blade on the trooper’s chest, scattering sparks across his grimy armour.

‘Who is it? What have they said?’

‘Magos,’ said the trooper, ‘the gunship only appeared on our auspexes thirteen minutes and seventeen seconds ago. I did not think it right to disrupt your timings until we identified it. A single gunship is approaching the dam, that is all, and it has not yet reached the valley. They have yet to clear the foothills. We have received no communiques. I disturbed you for another reason. The outer defences are…’ His words faltered. ‘We need to know your orders, magos. Things have become much worse.’

Magos Calx was about to reply when another volley hit, closer this time, causing the tech-priest and his guards to steady themselves as the ground shuddered and the air filled with dust.

When the air had cleared, Calx gripped the soldier’s arm. ‘A-contrario,’ he whispered urgently. ‘We have been saved. This is it. Justitia. Now those apes will learn what happens when they defile an Imperial facility. Actiones-secundafidei. This is it!’

He turned away, scuttling towards the steps that led out onto the crest of the dam. It was a grand structure – a powerful sweep of rockcrete, half a mile tall and a mile in length, supported by a majestic fan of buttresses. It barred the valley like a divine fist.

The dam was made even more spectacular by the skeins of electromagnetic power dancing across its crest. Calx muttered to himself as he clattered through the rubble, his head swimming with the scale of his ward. ‘Steel-bound, god-bound, oil-chained in-ab-eterno. I will never lose you to the sweating hands of these groti-grosi beasts.’

As he stepped out onto the crest of the dam, Calx paused, his excitement fading. When he had entered the bunker, the battle had been desperate; now it was a rout. There was an avalanche of scrap metal smashing through his garrison. His once perfect lines of skitarii had collapsed, thrown into disarray by the delirium that had washed through their ranks. The earthworks were overrun, the cog-shaped fan of trenches awash with xenos beasts. His Ironstriders were being torn down like trees, their mechanical legs thrashing uselessly as ork walkers ripped into them. Most of the Astra Militarum Guardsmen were dead. The final bank of trenches was still manned by his red-robed skitarii troops, but even their orderly lines had been torn open, madness throwing them into a shameful jumble of crossfires and foundering scrums. The greenskins had almost taken the whole valley with their lumbering war machines – ugly, iron buckets, propelled by steam-piston legs and laden with guns. This was the result of damnation. It was the only explanation. As his men battled for their sanity and sanctity, the xenos animals had seized their chance to attack. ‘No,’ said Calx, shaking his mane of cables. ‘This must not be. I will not allow it.’

‘We were betrayed,’ said the soldier, waving his gun at the weapons batteries that punctuated the bunkers. They were all in ruins, their walls scattered across the rocks in smouldering heaps.

Calx hissed as he saw that they had been detonated from within.

‘It was Lexmechanic Balkh,’ replied the soldier. ‘This is why I interrupted you, magos. He took every one of our security protocols to the enemy.’

‘Balkh?’ Calx slumped as though he had been deflated. He remembered the face of his old friend. There were few he would have trusted with such information. ‘How could he do that to me?’

The soldier shook his head. ‘His mind was gone, magos, just like all the others. The Dark Powers consumed him. He did not realise what he was doing. We…’ he hesitated. ‘We stopped him, but it was too late. We found his cognition prints in all the systems. He wanted the dam to fall.’ The soldier looked out across the sea of brutal war machines below. ‘He wanted those monsters to tear it down. He wanted–’

Calx held up a hand to silence the man. ‘No, he did not. Absolvo injuria. His mind was gone, as you say. He was no longer Balkh. We must honour the memory of the man he was, not dwell on what became of him. We are all victims of this curse.’

He was about to say more when a new sound cut through the din – a promethium roar of reversing thrusters. Calx looked away from the battle and out across the top of the dam. A gunship ripped through the brittle mountain air, shimmering in its own heat haze as it swooped down towards the rockcrete landing pad, kicking up dust from the ancient stone and scattering troops. Calx scuttled off in the direction of the landing ship, waving for his men to follow.

Calx’s crimson robes flashed blue as he passed beneath the dam’s final line of defence. All along the mile-long lip of the dam, blue-skinned priests had been welded to metal gantries, their limbs shattered and melted into sixty-foot-tall struts. These dangling, iron-fused heroes were the corpuscarii, the electro-priests, their scarred flesh shimmering with a constant lightning pulse. Their eyes had been burned away long ago, melted by the incredible power jolting through their bodies, but the whole dam was alive with their faith. Their canticles roared out over the boom of the landing gunship, each proud word bolstering the edifice beneath them.

Magos Calx whispered a prayer of thanks to the corpuscarii as he rushed past them, humbled by their sacrifice, but his mask of cracked lenses remained locked on the gunship. It had settled onto the dam and its engines died away as the boarding ramp rattled down. Calx waved a silent order at his men and they fanned out behind him, readying their guns.

As Calx neared the ship, the dust rolled away and a robed colossus strode towards him, silhouetted by the dying sun.

‘Where is it?’ demanded the newcomer as he emerged from the glare and towered over Calx. It was the same voice Calx had heard coming through the severed head.

A Blood Angel, thought Calx as he studied the giant. The Space Marine was clad in a suit of ancient, magnificent war-plate – beautiful sculpted ceramite, filigreed with such intricacy that he could only be a great general or captain. The armour was of an odd design: the surface had been worked to resemble raw, peeled meat, and the plates had been lacquered and polished a dark, glossy red. And that was not the only oddity. Calx had never seen a Blood Angel this close before but the warrior’s face was not at all what he had expected. The Blood Angel’s pale features were gaunt, tormented even. And his eyes were as lifeless as those Calx had just left in the bunker.

Calx’s brain whirred and clicked, skimming quickly through the organisational structures of the Adeptus Astartes. The Blood Angel wore a long, ceremonial cloak and an ornate sword at his hip, but it was the death-white pallor of his face that dragged a hiss of recognition from Calx’s mouth. He had seen this living death mask in countless pict feeds and military texts.

‘Chief Librarian,’ said Calx, performing a disjointed, marionette-like bow. Rumour and myth tumbled through his mind. ‘Mephiston-excelsus. Dominus-a-mortis. It is– it is an honour,’ he managed to say.

Mephiston looked past him to the network of bunkers, Administratum buildings and research stations that sprawled out behind the dam. Then he said something.

Calx shook his head. Mephiston had spoken quietly, using a jumble of dialects so antiquated that Calx could not discern the meaning.

Mephiston stared at Calx and the magos realised his mistake. The Blood Angel’s eyes were locked rather than dead. The eyes of an insomniac – staring, unblinking, remote, as though he were watching something no one else could see. The effect was chilling. Calx began counting the striations in Mephiston’s irises, comforting himself with the emollient rhythm of the numbers. Then he began to multiply the numbers, drowning his fear in arithmetic.

‘What is it?’ said Mephiston, speaking more clearly.

‘What is what, Chief Librarian?’

Something rippled across the Blood Angel’s face – a flicker of barely suppressed violence.

‘What happened to the traitor?’ said Mephiston, speaking even more quietly.

‘Traitor?’

Crimson light blossomed in Mephiston’s eyes, a thousand tiny haemorrhages. Calx considered his next answer with care. ‘Balkh?’ he said finally. ‘The lexmechanic?’

Mephiston looked at him in silence.

‘Yes, yes, of course, Balkh.’ Calx tapped the handle of his power axe on the ground in relief. ‘One of my most trusted lexmechanics. He was corrupted somehow. Fallax-maledictione-three-three-twelve. The Ruinous Powers. Damnatio.’ Calx glanced around, sensing that even now, daemons could be waiting to poison his mind. ‘Balkh’s soul was damned and he betrayed us, allowing these xenos thugs to breach our lines.’ He looked past the straining wall of corpuscarii and out at the carnage-filled valley below. ‘This is all his doing. He is… He was…’ Calx found it hard to say the words. ‘His mind was ruined by the Great Enemy. Chaos-taint is everywhere.’ He picked at his robes, as though removing insects. As though he could preserve his soul through cleanliness.

‘This is not the work of the Ruinous Powers,’ said Mephiston, surveying the battle.

Calx had to stifle an incredulous laugh. ‘Not the work of Chaos, my lord? Our minds are being warped and perverted. Even our most iron-bound logic has been debased. I would never have let those xenos creatures near this blessed dam, but Chaos disarmed our souls. It is amongst us. It is common sense, my lord. If you just look at my men, you–’

‘Common sense?’ Mephiston focused on Calx for a moment. There was a quiet fury in his voice. ‘Common sense is a collective unwillingness to think.’

Calx faltered, unsure what that meant, unsure how to reply.

‘Take me to their general,’ said Mephiston. ‘I need to learn the real cause of your defeat.’

‘Take you to him?’ Calx was still looking at the ranks of dying skitarii falling back beneath the onslaught of the orks. ‘Impossible. He’s hidden. In the heart of their army. In the belly of the beast.’

Hurt filled Calx’s voice as he waved his power axe towards the greenskins. ‘Chaos wiped the logic from my men’s minds. It turned them into animals. And now Balkh has given those xenos dogs every protocol and deployment code he could take. I tried everything I could to identify the cause of the corruption, but it’s useless. If I could rip out the root I would. If I could simply lay my hands on the xenos general of course I would cut him down. But we would have to defeat the entire horde to reach him.’

Mephiston looked through the lines of electricity that were shielding them from the orks. ‘Then defeat them.’

Calx laughed. ‘Chief Librarian, I would die before letting xenos claim this dam, but look.’ He waved again at the carnage. The valley was crowded with deranged, dying soldiers. With their weapon silos disabled, and their minds consumed by madness, the skitarii were being butchered. Columns of fire spat up from frozen trenches, spewing broken war machines, showering the landscape with ember and flame.

Mephiston looked through Calx. ‘Sometimes it is easier to die than adapt.’

Calx shook his head. ‘I have followed every protocol.’

Mephiston looked out through the flames again. ‘The greenskin general is in the rearguard?’

‘I suppose so, yes. That’s what my reports say. They took the secondary comms tower, up on Naxilus Ridge. It’s a small galvanic pulsometer. We only ever kept a small force there.’ He shook his head. ‘I never thought an attack would come there. It seems an odd place to strike. But now it’s their base of operations.’

‘And you know the way to this pulsometer?’

‘Of course.’

Mephiston looked from the orks to the tormented priests powering the dam. They were shivering as they channelled their life force through its twisted pylons.

Calx sensed that the Blood Angel disapproved of him. ‘I have given everything to stop them,’ he said.

Mephiston raised an eyebrow. ‘Everything?’ He strode across the dam, drawing a combat knife from his belt as he neared the pylons. He vaulted easily up onto a gantry, his robes snapping in the electric charge. Lightning pulsed through his bones, lighting up his skull, but he showed no sign of pain as he approached one of the priests. Rather, he seemed to grow in stature.

The priest’s song faltered as Mephiston climbed towards him through the inferno.

Calx rushed across the dam, shielding his face as he neared the blazing wall of energy. ‘Wait,’ he cried through the din. ‘Chief Librarian! Do not disrupt the hymn.’

Mephiston gave no sign he had heard, hauling himself up onto another gantry. Without a word, he ripped one of the priest’s arms free from the iron mesh, shedding sparks and blood.

The priest’s song became a howl as Mephiston gripped the broken limb in one hand. Then, with electricity still rattling through his armour, Mephiston jammed his combat knife through the back of his own hand, pinning himself to the priest.

The wall of blue turned crimson, drenching the dam in charnel light. Along the top of the dam every one of the corpuscarii arched in pain, scarlet lancing from their stitched eye sockets.

Calx reeled away from the explosion that had consumed the pylons. ‘No!’ he cried, as the ironworks began to groan and shudder.

Mephiston was barely visible within the wall of red fire, but Calx could just about see him gripping the priest’s hand – he was at the heart of the inferno: a single, stark point of darkness. It looked to Calx as though the Blood Angel had latched his mouth on to the priest’s wrist, but Calx knew he must be mistaken. Why would a noble hero of the Imperium do something so savage?

‘Magos!’ cried one of the skitarii troopers.

Calx whirled around. The soldier was pointing at a network of cracks jerking across the top of the dam. The vibrations were not just coming from the lightning – the whole dam was shaking and shifting.

‘What are you doing?’ cried Calx, trying and failing to break through the inferno.

Even over the electromagnetic howl he could hear Mephiston chanting – indecipherable rhymes tumbled from his lips, forming a red aether that spiralled around his mouth. Blood lashed Mephiston to the priest, whose blue skin blazed with power as he howled in pain.

The dam juddered, filling the valley with a low, mournful groan.

Arcs of electricity fused togaether, forming a single bridge of light across the top of the dam. Then Mephiston dropped back down from the light and walked towards Calx, trailing smoke and sparks. As he walked, strands of electricity tore away from the pylons and attached themselves briefly to Mephiston’s back, flickering there for a moment, like wings.

The dam shuddered again and Calx’s legs had to dance furiously beneath him to stop him falling.

Mephiston muttered into a vox-bead at his collar and Calx heard a crackled response.

‘Chief Librarian,’ gasped Calx. ‘What have you done?’

His words were drowned out by a sound like falling mountains. The dam shifted again and the corpuscarii slumped lifelessly in their iron cages.

The wall of light vanished. A column of water blasted out from the centre of the dam, slamming into the ranks of battling warriors. It was hundreds of feet wide and laden with tonnes of masonry. It smashed through skitarii and ork alike, tearing armour and flesh, thundering through the trenches and shattering the gun emplacements.

Calx reeled in shock as the water carved through the valley, filling the air with blood and dust. He looked at Mephiston in horror. The Space Marine had ruptured the dam. He could not quite grasp the idea. It was so absurd that his mind could not latch on to it.

Mephiston did not even look at what he had done. His gaze fixed on the hulking aircraft that had brought him to the dam, now lifting up from the landing pad with a deafening thruster blast. Mephiston waved vaguely at the distant end of the valley, then, as the gunship banked off through the dust clouds, he strode towards the edge of the dam, dragging Calx with him.

The electro-priests hung lifelessly from their cages, their wall of energy gone. There was nothing to spare Calx from the dizzying truth. The jet of water was growing bigger and more furious. The battle had been transformed. Hundreds of corpses rushed out across the valley as it filled with water, and the front lines of both armies collapsed into a chaotic slurry. Thousands of greenskins were still trying to charge towards the dam, but they were either slipping in the gore or crushed by the blast. The scale of the destruction was staggering.

‘What are you?’ whispered Calx, his face just inches from Mephiston’s.

‘Death,’ replied Mephiston calmly. Then, still holding Calx, he leapt from the dam.

They fell dozens of feet before Mephiston summoned broad, flickering shadow wings and wrenched them into a rolling loop. They soared out over the battle as vapour trails tore past them. A storm of crimson-clad killers was falling from the sky. As the gunship boomed overhead it spewed a lethal rain: Blood Angels, borne by the howling jet turbines on their backs. There were other ships, barely visible overhead, and tiny figures were plunging from those too, guns already blazing as they ripped down through the clouds.

Calx’s heart pounded behind his metal ribcage. Even fear and grief could not suppress his awe. The Emperor’s death angels, come to wreak bloody vengeance. ‘Omnissiah preserve us,’ he whispered.

Mephiston turned his loop into a dive and Calx lost all sense of direction. They hurtled through spume and blood towards the heaving mass of warriors below.

He howled as the ground rushed towards him, but seconds before they hit, Mephiston righted himself and landed with such ease that Calx barely felt the impact. He staggered nonetheless, disorientated from the flight, scrambling like a spider.

Mephiston kept Calx upright as he turned to face the orks. The xenos howled as they pounded towards them. They were grotesque, like oversized apes, so top heavy with scarred muscle that they should barely have been able to walk, but still they thundered across the rocks with incredible speed. Their heads were hung low between absurdly broad shoulders and their faces mostly hidden behind crudely hammered iron – all he could see was their massive, tusk-filled jaws and burning, ember-like eyes.

One of Calx’s limbs was an ancient thermal weapon – a volkite blaster so heavy that it required three of his other arms to lift it. He hefted the antique gun and trained it on the approaching orks.

Before Calx could fire, Mephiston strode towards the orks, blocking his shot. The Blood Angel drew his sword and levelled it at the greenskins, raising his other hand to the sky in a grasping gesture.

The orks shook and staggered, gripped by palsy. Mephiston wrenched back his hand and blood erupted from their mouths. Their bodies jolted and innards burst from their skin. They toppled in a heap.

A bucket-shaped war machine roared into view, bristling with bastardised firearms. Mephiston raised his hand again but, before he could strike, Calx loosed off a shot. The war machine became a wall of flame, taking down a row of orks as it detonated.

Mephiston spoke into his vox and waved his sword at the Blood Angels screaming overhead. Everywhere Calx looked they were slamming down onto the churned earth, unleashing a fierce barrage of bolter fire, toppling wave after wave of the green-skinned monsters.

Calx fired again and raced through the chaos, dodging shots and flames as he scrabbled across the trenches.

Mephiston was just ahead of him and as the Blood Angel advanced through the battle, Calx’s awe grew. The Chief Librarian had not even drawn his pistol. Each time a group of orks lumbered through the fumes, Mephiston simply grasped at the air and ripped blood from their bodies, before striding over their broken husks.

Everywhere Calx looked he saw islands of floating corpses – Guardsmen, skitarii and xenos, pulverised by the force of the water. The dam was crashing forwards, engulfed in flames.

He had the courage to do what I could not, thought Calx. Beyond the valley, the continent was littered with Mechanicus research stations, all under attack. The greenskins would have destroyed them all, but now Mephiston would halt the enemy advance. Calx had been facing a slow, ignominious defeat, but Mephiston had found a route to victory.

Calx painted the air with his volkite blaster, igniting more greenskins as he scrambled on through the carnage. The orks fell back before him, and Calx cried out a staccato stream of binharic, cursing the xenos in the name of the Machine-God.

The battle fumes banked away to reveal a ruined gun emplacement up ahead. Mephiston had climbed up onto the trashed rockcrete to survey the hell he had created.

Calx hurried towards him, wracking his brain for everything he knew about the Blood Angels Chief Librarian. Somewhere in his meticulously organised cerebral cortex, Calx found an image that matched the scene up ahead – his enhanced brain retrieved a centuries-old pict feed. It showed Mephiston, surrounded by slaughter on an unimaginable scale, in a world rent by war and psychic flames. ‘Armageddon,’ breathed Calx, pausing to incinerate another greenskin, staggering under the force of the blast as he immolated the snarling monster. ‘He was born there.’

Calx reached the pile of rubble and clambered up towards Mephiston. As he crested the broken wall and saw the corpse-crowded valley spread out before him, he realised that Mephiston had recreated the place of his birth – Hydrus Ulterior now looked as horrific as Armageddon.

‘You came to save us,’ whispered Calx, glancing at Mephiston with a mixture of dread and astonishment.

Mephiston ignored him, scouring the bloodbath. Blood Angels were slicing through the drowning armies, trailing promethium fumes as their jump packs hurled them forwards. Orks and vehicles disintegrated before their white-hot barrage of bolter fire. Anything not flattened by Mephiston’s destruction of the dam was now being torn down by his assault squads.

‘When did it begin?’ Mephiston spoke softly, despite the din of the battle.

‘My lord?’

‘The poison in the minds of your men – when did it begin? When did they start to unravel?’

Calx was relieved to understand. ‘Twelve days, three hours and twenty-seven minutes ago. The first reported case was a datasmith. I heard about–’

Calx faltered as a shadow dropped through the clouds and hurtled towards them. It was one of the crudely built ork vehicles – a single jet turbine with crooked wings and a ridiculous mass of guns welded to its fuselage.

The aircraft dived straight for them, spewing oil, armour plates and fumes. The pilot had turned a crash into an attack, singling Mephiston out as a final target. Calx’s enhanced optics zoomed in on the ork at the controls. His brutish features were locked in a manic leer as he wrestled with his juddering vehicle.

There was no time to shoot and Calx muttered a prayer.

Seconds from impact, the aircraft froze. The pilot’s grin became a rigid, blood-spattered mask.

The entire battle halted. Blood Angels hung in the air, bolter rounds hovering inches from the muzzles of their weapons. Skitarii troops reached in motionless agony towards the rocket-slashed skies. Even the torrent from the broken dam had paused, a silvery mountain of liquid, thousands of tonnes of water, just hanging there.

Mephiston stood calmly before this strange tableau. He had taken a crystal vial from his robes and poured a single drop of crimson liquid. The droplet remained suspended before his face, shimmering like a ruby.

‘You must be wrong,’ he said, his voice ringing out through the strange silence.

‘Wrong, my lord?’

‘The mind-sickness must have started before then.’ There was a quiet urgency to Mephiston’s words. ‘Think again.’

‘My lord, my cerebral circuits were hand-woven on Mars, in rituals prescribed by the Fabricator General himself. My powers of recall were blessed and re-blessed in the Temple of All-Knowledge until–’

Mephiston loomed over him. ‘The blindness began over a year ago. I had barely left the Ameritus Sector when I felt it.’

‘Blindness? We have not been blinded, my lord. The corruption is spiritual, not physical. De spiritualibus-daemonium…’ His ocular implants coiled back into his hood and he waved at the corpses of his men. ‘It’s more disgusting than blindness. It is a degradation. They turned us into beasts.’

Mephiston shook his head. ‘This has to be the place. This has to be the cause of my blindness. Every one of my auguries pointed here.’ He was no longer looking at Calx, but at the comms tower that barred the entrance to the valley. ‘Even a mind forged on Mars can be mistaken.’

Calx was outraged. ‘My lord, there is no one more devoted–’

‘Ignorance is the mother of devotion.’ Mephiston fixed Calx with a cold stare. Then he turned away, drew a knife from within his robes and inscribed a shape into the ruined wall of the bunker. He flicked the blade with a casual, seemingly thoughtless gesture, but when he stepped back Calx saw that the design he had worked into the stone was intricately wrought. It was a fragment of a celestial map. Mephiston placed a drop of blood onto the design and the delicate spheres and arcs began turning, gliding across the crumbling rockcrete. Even in such a strange form, Calx could recognise the continental shapes of the largest planet.

‘Hydrus Ulterior,’ he muttered.

Mephiston stared at the image, peering intently at each annotated line. ‘Everything points to here.’

He waved the image away and turned back to the droplet he had left hanging in the air. He touched it with his fingertip, breaking the stasis. It splashed down onto the rubble.

Hell enveloped them. Sound, movement and violence crashed through the valley and time lurched forwards.

Calx flinched as the ork jet screamed towards them, but Mephiston dismissed it with a casual wave of his hand. The aircraft crashed down a hundred feet away and the resultant fireball bathed the ruins in light, adding another column of fire to the chaos.

Mephiston hauled Calx on through a shattered archway, striding down a trench that led to the end of the valley.

An ork rose from the filth, lunging at Calx with a guttural roar. It barrelled forwards, clutching a massive chainaxe. The weapon’s teeth whirred and rattled as the ork brought it down at Calx’s face.

Mephiston strode on, not noticing the attack, but Calx managed to raise one of his heavily plated servo-arms in time to take the impact. The ork leant its full weight against him, the chainaxe ripping through Calx’s arm, spitting brass and phenolic cabling.

The ork’s face was just inches from Calx’s. The monster’s foetid breath washed over him as its enormous jaws widened in a teeth-filled roar.

Calx reached to his belt and turned a dial. A blinding charge rushed through his servo-arm and the ork stiffened, its roar turning into a gargle. The chainaxe jammed and the ork’s eyes rolled beneath its heavy brow.

Calx shoved his sparking limb harder against the spasming monster, surrounding them both in smoke and spitting fat. Then, with another click of the dial, he allowed the dead ork to fall away, dropping it back into the water with an explosion of steam.

Mephiston was now a distant figure, but Calx was determined to catch up. The greenskins were about to receive the Emperor’s judgement and he wanted to be on hand to see them pay for what they had done. With the water rising above his thighs, Calx wrenched open a hatch in his neck and shoved a cartridge into a socket beneath his jugular.

There was a whine of servos as the program took effect. The forest of legs beneath Calx jerked and clicked into motion, unfolding a new set of struts that jolted Calx several feet higher into the air. As he continued down the trench, Calx looked even more like an arachnid, swaying on his umbrella of spindly limbs.

Raised above the water, Calx was able to pick up speed and race after Mephiston, rejoining him at the end of the trench where the Blood Angel had climbed up onto a landing platform – a circular disc of rockcrete carried on the shoulders of a crumbling, stone lion. Mephiston was in the process of driving back two ork dreadnoughts, slicing through their can-shaped armatures with a flurry of sword strikes. It was a one-sided fight and the xenos were lying in a heap of smouldering engine parts by the time Calx reached the Chief Librarian.

Mephiston was about to speak when more Blood Angels slammed down onto the platform, sending tremors through the stone lion as it took the weight of their power armour.

Most of the Blood Angels took up defensive positions around the platform, training bolters on the surrounding massacre, but the senior officer strode up to Mephiston. He removed his helmet and pounded his chest armour in salute. His appearance was more how Calx had imagined Blood Angels: shoulder-length, flaxen hair framing refined, imperious features. He looked like one of the exalted saints that crowned the frescoes of Hydrus Ulterior’s cathedrals. However, when he reached them and saw the blood oozing from Calx’s wounds, the Blood Angel’s expression changed. His nostrils flared and the muscles along his jaw tightened, as though Calx had angered him. Almost immediately, the ancient warrior regained his look of cool disdain, but Calx took a few steps back. The Adeptus Astartes were a stranger breed than he had expected.

‘The valley is clear, Chief Librarian,’ said the Blood Angel, casually announcing a victory that had eluded Calx for weeks. ‘Lieutenant Servatus has led his Hellblaster squads around to the east, checking the perimeter. They are encountering only minimal resistance. You have…’ The Blood Angel hesitated, glancing back at the dam. ‘You left us little in the way of opposition, my lord.’

Mephiston nodded vaguely and then gestured towards a slender shape at the far end of the valley. ‘How many at the comms tower?’

‘Something is confusing our auspex, lord, but Servatus estimates only two hundred at most. They are heavily armed and Servatus saw a dozen war machines but…’ He shrugged. ‘A hundred or so greenskins against twenty of us. It will be a quick fight.’

Mephiston nodded. ‘They have a weapon of some kind – the cause of this mind-sickness. They’re using the comms tower to amplify it. Leave that to me.’

The Blood Angel nodded, then filled the air with heat and noise as his jump pack hurled him back into the sky.

Calx expected Mephiston to race after his men, but he remained where he was, watching from the landing pad as the squads of Blood Angels screamed past, spewing bolter fire as they reached the tower at the end of the valley.

Greenskins boiled up from the surrounding trenches.

‘That’s more than a hundred,’ said Calx, as the valley shook with the sound of xenos war cries.

Mephiston was not watching the battle. His head was tilted back and a red film had clouded his eyes. They looked like fresh wounds, gouged into his bone-white face.

‘Chief Librarian,’ crackled the vox in Mephiston’s gorget. ‘You should see this. I think we have found the weapon you mentioned.’

Mephiston’s eyes cleared. ‘Hold your positions,’ he replied. ‘You know the layout of the comms tower,’ he said, turning to Calx.

Calx nodded. ‘It’s a galvanic pulsometer. One of the earliest–’

Mephiston grabbed him by the shoulder and whispered a string of words into his face. The chill deepened. There was something sepulchral about the language but Calx’s pulse raced in response, as though the Chief Librarian had triggered an injection of combat stimms.

As they raced on towards the tower, Calx’s limbs trilled with energy and he found he could run at an incredible pace. In a matter of minutes they had reached the trenches surrounding the tower.

Half of the Blood Angels were still outside the pulsometer, stalled by scrums of muscle-bound orks pouring across the trenches. The Blood Angels fought with a savagery surpassing even the brutality of the xenos, hacking at the orks with chainswords and combat knives in a frenzy of bloodlust. The orks were revelling in the ferocity of the fight, chanting a savage mantra, bellowing and snorting in unison. Their cries were so loud they matched the fury of the gunfire.

Mephiston hacked through the chanting orks, charging for a shattered entrance at the base of the tower with Calx rushing after him, still firing. The doors were clinging weakly to their hinges and Mephiston smashed straight through, shielding Calx from the impact as they landed on the other side, scattering masonry into a vaulted antechamber.

Blood Angels had entered through another doorway and there was a brutal firefight taking place. The scorched remains of Adeptus Mechanicus robots were piled across the passageway. They were kastelans, venerable, armour-plated automata that would have towered over even the Space Marines if they had still been standing, but now they were just a makeshift barricade – hulking, blasted shells, piled with the corpses of skitarii troops.

There was a whole squad of Blood Angels trapped on the near side of the barricade, pinned down beside the chipped remains of the robots. Calx scrambled for cover, diving behind the pedestal of a toppled pillar. Bolter rounds hit all around him, filling the air with dust and spinning shards of stone. The proportions of these Space Marines were even more impressive than the Blood Angels outside.

‘Tacticus armour,’ breathed Calx, awed to be witnessing the creation of his great tutor, Archmagos Cawl. The Blood Angels had painted their battleplate red and adorned it with all the fetishes and battle trophies of their ancient brotherhood, but there was no disguising the work of his masters on Mars. These were Primaris Space Marines, the pinnacle of Adeptus Astartes power. They were goliaths, and their weapons were lethal works of art.

Only a few of the Blood Angels were returning fire. The grand narthex beyond the barricade swarmed with orks, all howling and firing their crudely made weapons, but the Blood Angels struggled to shoot back. Those that were firing were shooting wildly, blasting chunks from the ribbed stone overhead or ripping up the flagstones beneath their boots. Some of the Blood Angels staggered as they fired and others clutched their helmets. The chanting of the orks was deafening. The din was so great that the building seemed to judder in time with their cries.

The orks were changing reality with their chant. The architecture pulsed in time to their war song, becoming a great, slavering maw.

Mephiston stood calmly at the heart of the crossfire, surveying his reeling men with cool detachment. He summoned the magos to his side with a wave of his hand.

Calx did not move. The air was full of bolter rounds and incendiary blasts, but it was not the battle that gave him pause. Each time he moved, the orks’ chant threatened to overwhelm his senses.

Mephiston waved again and Calx’s legs clicked into involuntary motion, scuttling over the toppled pillar towards the Chief Librarian.

Calx clutched his head. This was the thing he had been dreading for so long – the soul-sickness that had taken his men. The pulsometer was the source of the corruption. The cool, ordered reason of Calx’s brain sank beneath a hail of brutal visions. They were all just hunks of torn meat, he realised, tumbling inside a pair of enormous jaws. Their flesh was worthless, a pointless encumbrance; he may as well burn everything down in a blaze of violence.

He laughed as reckless, destructive urges gripped him. The sanctity of this place seemed suddenly absurd. The galaxy was burning, so why not fan the flames?

Mephiston strode through gunfire and staggering Blood Angels, immune to the violence. Not a single shot landed on or even near him. But this only added to Calx’s hysteria. He raised his pistol and aimed at a column supporting the central arch of the narthex. The chanting of the orks swelled in his mind and everything became liquid and distorted, spiralling around the fighting.

The air shimmered with radiation as Calx’s shot tore through the middle of the column, adding more dust and debris to the mayhem. Calx laughed as the explosion threw the whole scene into a whirl of colours and shapes. He was destroying reality itself. All around him, he saw the Blood Angels joining in, tearing at the building in a glorious, riotous frenzy.

The column slumped backwards, tearing the vaulted ceiling, revealing the frigid skies beyond.

The orks chanted louder, raising their weapons in triumph, swarming over the corpses, thundering towards Mephiston.

Mephiston mouthed an invocation and reached up into the air, his fingers splayed. The column froze mid-fall, hanging over them at a peculiar, drunken angle. With his other hand Mephiston trained his pistol on the orks and fired, his hand kicking back with each blast as orks flew from the barricade, their armour torn open by the super-heated plasma.

Calx’s laughter died on his lips as a fierce, cold determination flooded his mind.

‘Mephiston,’ he gasped, as the Librarian’s sentience enveloped his own.

As the Chief Librarian took hold of him, Calx saw that the building was not warping and flowing, but simply crumbling under the weight of gunfire. Neither were the Blood Angels tearing it down – they were actually tearing at their own armour, clawing at their gloriously engraved battleplate. Several had fallen to the floor, twitching and thrashing in the rubble, just as he had seen so many of his own men do. The madness plaguing Hydrus Ulterior even had mastery over the Emperor’s finest. The Adeptus Astartes were not immune.

A Black Library Publication

Deus Encarmine first published in 2004.
Deus Sanguinius first published in 2005.
Red Fury first published in 2008.
Black Tide first published in 2010.
‘Bloodline’ first published in 2010.
‘Blood Debt’ first published in 2010.
‘Redeemed’ first published in 2012.
‘The Fury’ first published in 2013.
‘Reflection in Blood’ first published in 2014.
This eBook edition published in 2018 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Johan Grenier.

Blood Angels: The Complete Rafen Omnibus © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2018. Blood Angels: The Complete Rafen Omnibus, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78030-879-1

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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