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Guy Haley

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WARHAMMER 40,000

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 Imperial Guard 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.

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.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Swallow is an award-winning New York Times bestselling author whose stories from the dark worlds of Warhammer 40,000 include the Horus Heresy novels Nemesis and The Flight of the Eisenstein, along with Faith & Fire, the Blood Angels books Deus Encarmine, Deus Sanguinius, Red Fury and Black Tide; his short fiction has appeared in Inferno!, What Price Victory, Legends of the Space Marines, Tales of Heresy and The Book of Blood, along with the audio dramas Heart of Rage, Oath of Moment and the forthcoming Legion of One.
Swallow’s other credits include the non-fiction book Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher, writing for Star Trek Voyager, and scripts for videogames and audio dramas.

He lives in London, and is currently working on his next book.

To Keith Topping, Peter J. Evans, John Chapman, Mike Clarke and Pete Clarke, for games without frontiers.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2004 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Phillip Sibbering

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ISBN 978-0-85787-095-7

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* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.