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

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

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

PROLOGUE

THE ABYSSAL CURSE

Darkness is running through my hands. I feel its textures. I know its shifting from smooth to granular, soothing to jagged, calm to desperate. The dark has as many moods and faces and songs as any more mundane, more adulterated reality. It is as protean as the warp, but possesses a purity that the daemon-infested empyrean will never know.

I am in something that might be called limbo. I think of it as the embodiment of neither. It is neither real nor illusion, neither consciousness nor sleep, neither moral nor corrupt, neither materium nor warp. I am part of the neither, and I am separate from it. But the darkness is mine. It is in my hands. At any moment that I desire, I can grasp it. And then I can bend it to my will.

When I do, I must face a truth: the dark and the warp are not separate. The warp fuels its potential. The warp fuels me. If I slip, the warp will take me. It will become me. But that has not happened, nor will it. This is what I must believe. If I fail, then I must consider myself damned, and this is something I will not do.

But.

But the reason I travel the dark, the reason I parse its ways and beings, is to discover what it is that I am. I once was Calistarius. He has been dead for many years. I stand in his place, with death in my right hand, darkness in my left, and I would know who this is who bears the name Mephiston. So it is not just darkness that is running through my hands. It is knowledge. And one of the grains may be the one I seek.

The neither is non-space, and yet it has a place. It has an entry point, and outside of the neither, in the realm of the here, the gateway has a precise location. It exists aboard the strike cruiser Crimson Exhortation. It waits, barred to all but myself, in my quarters, in the upper reaches of the tower that rises amidships. My domain in the here is spacious compared to the cells that are sufficient for the needs of my battle-brothers. My quarters are large, but not because of any indulgence. They are large because of the archives. The primary chamber is a repository of banes. Scrolls, books, parchments and more are amassed here, all of them records of knowledge that kills, wisdom that blasts, philosophy that twists. These are dangerous objects. They can kill simply by existing.

I am more dangerous than they are. It may be that I am also more blighted (but not damned, not damned outright). I do not know. I seek my understanding in the neither, and I seek it when I comb through those vaults of black thought. I remain disappointed.

Beyond the archive, up another level, is my meditation chamber. This is a small space. It is empty, a lightless cylinder no more than three metres high and two wide, a coldness of black stone walls. This is the gateway. Pass through it, and space ends. In the liminal zone of the chamber itself, my body waits for my exploration to end. It waits while my mind weaves through the tapestry of the dark. Yet in the dark, I have a body, too. There is no consciousness without the idea of the physical self. I stretch out my hands. I do not see them, but I perceive them in the minutest detail. I flex my fingers, and touch the dark. It pours itself into and through my grasp. I will not find answers today. I know that with a certainty as perfect as death. But I also know, with the same certainty, that I must continue my search. I must seek to understand this thing that I now am. The day that I abandon my quest will be a terrible one indeed.

I must remain wary of the being who touches the dark.

The currents in the darkness become more defined. The slick of the warp spreads its stain. It forms sights, words, sounds, memories. An echo reaches for me: it is the insinuating rasp of M’kar. The image of the daemon prince is also there, fragmented, distorted and multiplied by the crystals of my prison on Solon V. You are of our party without knowing it. You walk the path. Know what you are. Embrace the revel. Enter the palace of wisdom. I denied him. I destroyed him. But his words will not die with him. He has bequeathed a legacy of doubt.

I turn from it. I deny it, though I know I will meet those words again. In its stead, I follow another current, one of more immediate import. This is a flow that gathers strength the further I follow it. It tries to sweep me into its rushing turbulence, but though it wants my surrender, it conceals its nature. I sense its power. I sense that it is hurtling towards a maelstrom of terrible force. I know that there is purpose, but whether holy or corrupt, I cannot tell. There is also a physical destination, and this I can read. All too well.

There is a change in real space, a presence approaching. My consciousness drops from the darkness, back into my body. I turn to greet Albinus. The Sanguinary Priest says, ‘We have arrived.’

I nod. In the back of my mind, I can feel the immense twist of the vortex. It is here. We are deep inside it. We have come to the Pallevon system in answer to the call of one of our own. Everywhere and nowhere, the empyrean is flexing, twisting. The potential is transforming into the inevitable. An event prepares to be born.

I cannot help but wonder if we have been summoned to our doom.

CHAPTER ONE

THE REACH OF THE PAST

The Crimson Exhortation has barely made the transition to the materium when the klaxons sound. Battle stations. We have arrived, and we are at war. Albinus and I reach the cathedral that is the strike cruiser’s bridge. I mount the marble steps to the apse. Here, in the strategium, Captain Castigon, commander of Fourth Company, is surrounded by a panoply of tacticarium screens. Castigon is an exemplar. His bearing is noble. His aquiline, aristocratic features reveal the genetic inheritance of our primarch, and are an expression of the heroic ideal that is the tragic hope of our Chapter. There is nothing of the Red Thirst visible in the paladin that stands before me. I have seen him in battle, though. He is a Blood Angel, and so he is riven by the Flaw. But he is also of that number whose quest for a cure is so determined, it implies a belief that such a thing exists.

So be it. May his hope grant him a measure of peace.

My presence gives him no pleasure. He hides this well, but he deludes himself if he thinks he can conceal anything from me. I am not offended. Mine is a resurrection that does not engender optimism. I am not the embodiment of life’s resilience. I am, at best, the vector of devastation. Coiled, cold and gnawing in the heart of many of my brothers is the fear that I may be something worse. Beyond my actions themselves, I have no answer for them. Or for myself.

Castigon nods to me. ‘Chief Librarian,’ he says.

‘Is it here?’ I ask.

‘Yes.’ He points to a hololith. It is the image of two ships. The magnification is extreme, but the details are still quite clear. The small vessel is a Gladius-class frigate. It is at the mercy of a strike cruiser more than twice its size. I scan the other displays. ‘No exchange of fire,’ I say.

‘A boarding action is under way.’

The cruiser is known to us. It is the traitor ship Destiny of Pain. ‘The Sanctified,’ I mutter. Doubly treacherous Chaos Space Marines, they betrayed first their sacred duty and the Emperor, and then broke from their own foul kin, renouncing the Word Bearers and falling in worship before Khorne. They are vile, but they are not to be dismissed. They will fight to the last warrior, and they have a dark gift: daemons answer their summons eagerly.

The presence of the Sanctified is not welcome, but we will not shrink from their challenge. Instead, we will tear them apart.

What I find disturbing about the displays is not the Destiny of Pain. For that ship, I feel only a pure, blessed hatred. The image that troubles me is that of the Gladius. Its name is Harrowing Faith, and it should not be here. It was lost during the Second War for Armageddon. But now the empyrean has returned our ship to us. I stare at the grainy, flickering hololith, and I have no warmth or love to give the prodigal vessel. Unlooked-for escapees from the lost stretches of time are rarely cause for rejoicing. I know this very well, thanks to the Eclipse of Hope. My brothers should, too.

I wonder what a boarding party will find on the Gladius. I know whom we expect to find. Will he be the same Space Marine who went to war on Armageddon? I am not.

‘There is no resistance from the Harrowing Faith,’ I note. I have not seen a single shot fired from its guns. The life of the Sanctified is being made very easy.

‘There may not be anyone left to retaliate,’ says Castigon.

‘In which case our mission is futile.’

Castigon thinks for a moment, perhaps considering an immediate and direct assault on the Destiny of Pain, leaving the Gladius to whatever end will come. He shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘We received that signal. It was sent by someone aboard, and we must answer it. To do otherwise would dishonour the company.’

‘Are we still receiving the message?’

‘No. But that changes nothing.’

He is right. More right, I suspect, than he knows. There is something waiting for us on Pallevon. We shall meet it whether or not anyone survives on the frigate. The currents I saw in the dark are too strong. Whatever contingent events arise, we shall come to the centre of the vortex.

But Castigon is also correct about honour. What the traitors attack, we must defend. And the Harrowing Faith bears the livery of the Blood Angels. There is no choice in what we must do, but only in how we march down the fated path.

‘We will engage the traitor ship,’ Castigon declares. ‘Draw it off. Provide the opportunity for our own boarding party.’

‘I will lead the squad.’ I would see what has emerged from the warp for myself.

The boarding torpedo cuts through the void. Inside, we are a message of judgement. Through its viewing block, I see the initial steps of the lethal dance between the cruisers. The two ships are leviathans of destruction, ponderous in their movements, their actions unfolding like the shifting of continents: unstoppable and so inevitable as to appear preordained. The Crimson Exhortation strikes the first blow. Its lances slice through the Destiny’s shields. The hits are good. Flames billow from the port side. The traitor ship responds in kind, but it has been caught at a disadvantage, its flank exposed while the Exhortation presents a narrower profile as it storms forwards. The glimpse of the battle well begun is all I am given before we are grinding our way through the hull of the Harrowing Faith.

Our point of entry is very close to the pockmark of a Sanctified boarding torpedo. We do not know where the frigate’s survivors, if any, are. But we can follow the traitors, and dispatch them to their reward. And so within seconds of breaching the hull, we have disembarked and are moving down the corridors. We are a crimson sword seeking the belly of our prey.

The Harrowing Faith was recognisable from the exterior. Eroded, battle-worn, but still a fighting vessel of the Blood Angels. Here, inside, is where the depredations of the warp have made themselves felt. The stonework in the passageways has lost definition. Relief work covers the walls. Created with all the skill of the stone carvers of Baal, the sculptures were inspiring depictions of glorious victory and heroic martyrdom. Now they seem blurred, smeared, as if their reality were uncertain. There are veins in the rock that vibrate in my peripheral vision. The entire ship feels porous. It is rotten. It would take very little for the frigate to disintegrate, to surrender to nothingness. The ship is not a ghost. I have walked the decks of such an abomination, and this is different. The Harrowing Faith is a corpse that has not been allowed to decay. It is dangerous, but also pitiable. And what, I wonder, is so bitterly preserving its existence?

There is no sign of life. We have passed no serfs. We have seen the remains of a few servitors, and they have been dead for a long time. The disintegration of their forms is well advanced. It is not the natural corruption of decay. They are blurring like the ship, and soon the very idea of their existence will have vanished.

The Sanctified have time on their side, and have made good use of it. We found the punctured loading bay that was their breaching point, but the traitors were long gone. They have made rapid progress through the ship. There is no sign of battle. The Sanctified appear to have advanced unopposed.

Albinus is marching one step behind me, ahead of Sergeant Gamigin and the rest of the squad. This is not a standard battle formation, but I will not lead from the rear, and Albinus has fought by my side since before… well… before the thing that I now am came into being. ‘Perhaps there is no one aboard, after all,’ Albinus says.

‘Then who sent the message?’ I ask.

‘A vox-servitor, perhaps, transmitting a recording.’

A reasonable supposition. It is also wrong. ‘The Harrowing Faith exists when it should not,’ I answer. ‘There is a reason for that.’ And as we move towards the awaiting inevitable, I would do so with open eyes, and a forwards charge. I cannot turn away from my own mystery, nor shall I from any others.

Though there are no physical traces left by the passage of the Sanctified, there are other ways of tracking them. I can see their taint, a spoor of corruption that lingers in their wake. It eats a little more at the substance of the ship. I am following a trail of corroding reality.

‘They aren’t heading for the bridge,’ Gamigin observes.

He is right. Nor for the enginarium. The power nodes of the frigate hold no interest for the enemy. This makes no tactical sense. It is, therefore, important. The followers of Chaos are depraved, they are perfidious, and they are malignant, cancerous souls. But most are not insane, much as we would wish it otherwise, and they are not stupid. They would not be half so dangerous if they possessed these flaws. If they care about something other than the control of the ship, then so shall I. Especially now that I realise where the trail is leading us. There is a dark logic to the traitors’ goal. ‘They want the chapel.’ Of course they do. What else would a warband of the iniquitous stripe of the Sanctified be targeting? And where else would we find the particular Blood Angel who summoned us here?

Anger at the thought of the desecration that may already be occurring flares from the squad. I can see the anger. Its aura is a cold, shimmering blue. It is the shade of quick outrage and calculated, careful violence. It is an anger that fuels war, but not madness. It poses no risk for my battle-brothers.

It is not just a psychic colour, though. It is also a taste. I know its every nuance. I feed on it. I am not sure what that makes me.

Is that another twisting hook of doubt that I feel? If so, then let it be the mark of my fidelity that I note it, and use it to walk an honourable path. Let it further be transmuted into an anger of my own, one that will smite the heretic and the traitor.

The Harrowing Faith is a minor vessel. It does not follow from this, however, that its chapel is a small, mean thing. Our sites of worship must be worthy of the Emperor. The passageway leading to the chapel’s entrance becomes wide and high, that it might accommodate the massive iron doors at the entrance to the nave. The doors are strong, designed to protect the sacred heart of the ship in the event of a successful boarding, but against a determined force, no barrier aboard a vessel can do more than delay the enemy. The doors have been broken. They lie like the lids of colossal sarcophagi. Their engravings, chronicles of the acts of Sanguinius and the Emperor, have become uncertain memories. Beyond the doorway, the dim lighting of the chapel is rent by muzzle flashes.

This sacrilege will not stand. The blue anger slides down the spectrum to a more savage, dangerous, nourishing red. I draw my force sword. It is called Vitarus. It is ancient, and it has feasted on an ocean of traitors’ blood. Crimson energy crackles down its length. It is as hungry as we are. ‘Brothers,’ I call. I do not raise my voice. I make it heard all the same, here in the antechamber and even in the chapel, where it insinuates itself between the din of bolter fire. I know the nature of my instrument. I know the effect of my voice. There is the echo of the tomb in it, the coldness of the eternal void. Calistarius’s voice died on Armageddon, as did he. I rose in his place, and my voice is the sound of darkness. Let the Sanctified know: the Lord of Death is upon them.

I am not alone. ‘By the blood of Sanguinius!’ Gamigin roars. The rest of the squad echoes him, and the walls shake with the Blood Angels battle cry.

We race into the chapel, vengeance in our hearts, blood in our eyes. I take in the scene as I cross the threshold. There are nine of the traitor Space Marines. One of the Sanctified lies dead in the nave, his head missing. The blood pooling from the stump of his neck is more substantial than the floor it covers. The dominant red of the Sanctified’s armour is sufficiently close to our own that it is especially galling to see them in this holy place. Their presence carries an extra charge of mockery. I will ram that laughter back down their throats. At the other end of the chapel, a lone figure has taken shelter behind the altar. He is keeping the enemy at bay thanks to the precision of his shots. The altar, an unforgiving block of marble draped in crimson, is the strong point of the space. The warrior behind it will not be removed easily. He is defiant, hurling anathema upon the Sanctified. His language is ornate, savage, theologically rich. It marks him as a Chaplain. Though the distortion of his helmet’s vox-speaker grants a certain anonymity, I recognise the voice. It is the one we expected.

The rest of the squad spreads out behind me. Bolter shells punch into the enemy. The Chaos Space Marines respond well. Two of them keep up the pressure on the altar. They run towards opposite sides of the nave, seeking to flank the defender. The others turn their attention to us, dropping low and shooting back. The wooden pews between us are pointless cover, blasted to splinters within seconds by the crossfire. There are columns on either side of the nave, but our two forces have advanced up the centre. We face each other across open ground. This will not be a battle of attrition. It will be short and savage, the explosion of war for which a Blood Angel thirsts. We are rushing forwards to reclaim the space. Doomed it may be, like the rest of the ship, but I would have it redeemed before it ceases to exist.

Still a dozen metres from our foe, I reach through the brittle surface of the materium to grasp the lethal potentialities of the warp. My will gathers the energy, shapes it, then sends the electric curse into the beings of my enemy. My mind is consumed by a single word: heat. My instincts, unleashed in this moment, turn to a single obsession: blood.

So it is with our Chapter. Blood. Always blood. Our history, our legacy, our name and hope and final doom. In the end, they are all blood.

There is nothing but blood.

Before me, three of the Sanctified begin to scream. I feel my lips pull back in a snarl of satisfaction. For a Space Marine, even a fallen one, to cry out in this way, the agony must be beyond measure or description. I would laugh, but that impulse died with Calistarius. The traitors stumble forwards, then collapse to their knees. Their movements are spastic, barely under their control, and soon will not be at all. They claw at their helms, tear them off. They gasp, as if the air could be of any help. Their eyes are staring wide but blind. Everything they are has become an expression of my will, and I have told their blood to boil. That which is a metaphor for my Chapter’s curse has become literal for these wretched creatures. Their screams choke off into ragged, keening gargles as gore foams and bubbles from mouth and nose and ears and eyes. They die, and I hope their death-pain pursues them into the nothingness.

I have visited a terrible but needed end on three of the Sanctified, but I saw and appreciated only its first moment. I know what followed because it could be nothing else, and in a small corner of my perception I see the bodies and their froth of steaming blood. I am already striking again before the first three are dead. Bolter rounds from the right slam into my armour. The blow might have been enough to disrupt the concentration of other Librarians, but if that is the hope of my attacker, he truly is ignorant of the thing that confronts him. I rush him before he can fire again. He rises to meet me, trying to draw his gladius. He is much too slow. I thrust Vitarus at his neck. To its power is added the scarlet light of my will. The blade slices through the seam of his armour. It plunges into his throat, through the other side of his helmet, and severs his spinal cord. I yank the sword away. The Sanctified stands still for a moment, as if he cannot believe he is dead, and then falls.

Four dead. I turn to seek more victims. I am retribution. Is my hunger for destruction the same thirst that marks my brothers? The very question is disturbing, and I will not examine it now. Nor do I need to, because there is no one left to kill. The rest of the squad has exterminated the Sanctified. My hunger withdraws.

‘Brothers!’ The lone defender of the chapel emerges from behind the altar. ‘You are well met indeed. The Emperor is showering me with his blessings.’ He walks forwards, removing his helmet. ‘I rejoice that I shall have you at my side when–’ He stops. He stares.

So do I, even though I knew what to expect. Each of us sees before him a revenant. ‘Quirinus,’ I mutter.

He speaks the name no one has uttered aloud since Armageddon. ‘Calistarius?’

The name of a dead man.

CHAPTER TWO

RESURRECTIONS

Before Armageddon. Before Hades Hive, the Death Company and the crushing fall of the Ecclesorium.

They were storming an enclave of the Word Bearers. The traitors had established a foothold on Arlesium. Their heresy was a gale blowing over the primary land mass, and reaching out to infect the rest of the system and beyond. The Blood Angels came to purge them, root and branch. The Chaos Space Marines had seized the fortress city of Ecastor. Calistarius stood beside Quirinus in the doorway to the Thunderhawk’s cockpit. They stared ahead at the approaching outer defences. Anti-aircraft fire sought them out. The gunship’s pilot flew through the barrage with deft confidence.

‘A worthy battle lies before us,’ the Reclusiarch said.

The Librarian nodded. The line was something of a ritual between them, an echo of their first engagement as Scouts, many worlds and decades ago. Calistarius’s response should have been, ‘May we always be so blessed.’ Instead, he said, ‘Horus will rue this day,’ speaking words ten thousand years out of place. His tone was furious but hollow, as if his voice were not truly his.

Quirinus gave him a sharp look. ‘Brother Calistarius?’

He blinked. ‘May we always be so blessed,’ he said. He would not remember, until later, his other words. He would not remember, until later, how his mind had slipped in time. Now, he noticed Quirinus’s gaze. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘I hope not.’

I have Calistarius’s memories, but they are not mine. They are knowledge, mere information about a fallen battle-brother. There is nothing visceral, nothing felt about them. They are events from the life of someone else. I was never Calistarius. I do not recognise the self that once inhabited this form.

But Quirinus remembers him. Quirinus has never known Mephiston. Quirinus remembers an old friend who fell to the Black Rage, and played out the final act of his tragedy in the Death Company, dying at the last beneath tonnes of rubble. Quirinus and the Harrowing Faith were caught in a freak warp storm, called into existence by the intensity of the Armageddon slaughter, before Mephiston was birthed from the tomb.

The memories of Quirinus end with Calistarius. To be confronted by his presence is disturbing, as if a fragment of Calistarius were also rising up before me. Quirinus, too, has been transformed by his journey to this point, this meeting. Time in the warp is a protean thing, and Quirinus has seen centuries pass, if I judge the age I see in his face correctly. His armour, a holy relic more than ten thousand years old, has stood the ordeal well, its strength and power to inspire un-diminished. But there is a glint in his eyes, and it is the dull shine of flint. Quirinus has always been possessed of an iron faith, but the fanaticism I see now is, I think, brittle.

So I tell myself, and so I believe. The souls of my brothers cannot hide from my scrutiny, and I have no reason to mistrust my judgement. Except for the fact that I have every incentive to question Quirinus’s.

We are aboard the Crimson Exhortation once more. We are gathered in the captain’s quarters: Quirinus, myself, Castigon and Albinus. Neither the Reclusiarch nor Calistarius served with Fourth Company during Armageddon. Albinus, however, has known both almost as long as they knew each other.

Castigon’s quarters are spare, but large enough for small gatherings of this sort. In the centre of this chamber is a bronze table. A single data-slate and a hololith projector rest on its surface, an exquisite representation of crossed swords surrounded by a majesty of wings. There is also a large occuliport, and through it the four of us are standing witness for the final moments of the Harrowing Faith. I am impressed by Quirinus’s feat. Warp-eroded as the frigate was, it was held in existence by one thing alone: the strength of the Reclusiarch’s faith. Such virtue must be acknowledged, though it is not altogether a surprise. Quirinus was a figure approaching legend before Armageddon, a legend untainted by much of the darkness that is our Chapter’s lot. His disappearance was a hard blow.

Now, bereft of the holy will that held it together, the Harrowing Faith slips towards its end. We are not losing it to the devastation of void warfare. It is not being vaporised by a plasma detonation. It is simply fading out of existence. Its bonds of reality dissolve. It becomes vague, as if seen though a sheen of tears. Its presence falls away, becoming first a vivid dream, then less than a memory. Finally, there is only the faint idea of a ship. Then it is gone.

I feel the gaze of Quirinus against the back of my neck. I turn to face him. His face is hard and filled with sanction. ‘Your death has served you well, Calistarius,’ he says.

‘I am not Calistarius,’ I state. Best that he learn this now. Best that he accept this now. It is unwise for friend or foe to mistake what I am.

‘Mephiston, then.’ I can hear how my name sits strangely in his mouth. ‘The death of Calistarius has served you well.’

‘It has.’

‘And what do you claim to be?’

The hostility of the question is obvious to all present. I let the silence stretch to an uncomfortable length before I answer. ‘I am Mephiston, Chief Librarian of the Blood Angels,’ I say, speaking with calm, frozen deliberation. Nothing more need be said. I am silent once again. I know, in my darkest of hearts, that Quirinus is right to wonder what, exactly, I have become. But I will not have others question and doubt me, not before I have found the answers.

‘Brother-Reclusiarch,’ Albinus puts in, ‘you have not witnessed Chief Librarian Mephiston’s deeds in the years of your absence. They speak for themselves.’

‘So does his presence.’ Quirinus means nothing good by that statement.

Albinus chooses to ignore the irony. ‘Precisely. Mephiston came back to us from the Black Rage. Is that not cause for hope? By the Emperor, we have precious little of that. Or would you have Astorath simply lop off his head as a precautionary measure?’

At the mention of Astorath, the skin at the back of my neck tightens. The Redeemer of the Lost and I have spoken. He has never implied in word or deed that I should be executed. Rather, it is I – or the wary, watchful part of myself – who speculates about the eventual necessity of my execution.

‘Hope must be real,’ Quirinus goes on, ‘not an illusion. By his own admission, Mephiston did not come back from the Black Rage. He replaced Lexicanium Calistarius.’

‘This is sophistry,’ the Sanguinary Priest objects.

‘Is it?’ Quirinus rejoins.

Is it? I wonder, but say nothing. Neither does Castigon. He seems content to let the matter unfold without his assistance.

‘It is,’ Albinus answers. ‘Yes, there has been a transfiguration. What of it? The victories he has won for the Chapter and the Emperor – they are what matter.’

‘Do you believe that?’ Quirinus asks me.

Albinus jumps in again. ‘He is also not the only one among us who has escaped the Black Rage.’

Quirinus brushes off the point with a brusque wave of the hand. ‘I do not find Chaplain Lemartes to be the beacon of hope that so many of you do. He has not overcome the Black Rage. He is able, for now, to direct it in the field of battle. And when not in combat, he is in stasis.’ A pointed glance at me. ‘Not helping shape the fate of the entire Chapter.’

‘I wasn’t thinking solely of Lemartes,’ Albinus says. ‘There is another–’

‘I would be no less doubtful about him. Two abominations are not more acceptable than one. They are worse.’

The corners of my lips twitch. ‘You consider me an abomination?’

‘Was I ambiguous just now?’

‘You were not. Would you care, though, to explain the reasoning?’

‘The Black Rage defines who we are.’ Quirinus speaks with passion and with sorrow. There is nothing frivolous in his condemnation of me, nor is there anything as petty and banal as personal animosity. He does not resent Mephiston for replacing his friend Calistarius. He mourns the loss of the one, but the rejection of the other, I come now to understand, flows from the deepest of religious convictions. ‘It is a foundational fact of our existence as Blood Angels,’ Quirinus goes on. ‘Our contest with it is as constant as the beating of our hearts. If our hearts cease to beat, what are we? Dead. If we overcome the Black Rage, what are we? Are we still Blood Angels? How could we be? You have returned from the country of no return. You have returned from the dead. And what stands before me? Death.’

Is he wrong in what he sees? No. Is this the full truth? No.

Could the full truth be worse?

‘Death,’ I repeat. I say the word with ownership. It is mine.

Quirinus does not appear to notice what I have embraced. ‘There is the shadow of the grave about you, Mephiston,’ he says. ‘We are warriors, bred, designed and trained to bring destruction to the Emperor’s enemies. But surely that destruction is also in the service of something. It is not an end in itself.’

‘You believe that is why I continue to live? For the purpose of indiscriminate destruction?’

‘I do not know what you are, Chief Librarian. But I do know what you are not.’

My lips twitch again, but I do not respond. Quirinus will believe what he will. There is no arguing with him. Much as I would wish to, I cannot simply dismiss his doubts, not even from my own mind. I have changed since last we met. More properly, I have come into being. Quirinus has not been left unscathed by his time in the warp, but his transformation is far less radical. Calistarius would still know this Blood Angel. His memories are his own. He is the product of a continuum of experiences.

Castigon clears his throat. ‘This is, of course, an important debate, brothers,’ he announces. For the first time, I find myself swallowing contempt as I listen to Fourth Company’s commander. I know he finds much to agree with in Quirinus’s position, but he is choosing to be the politician, and so avoids committing himself. ‘We do, however, have the more pressing question of our immediate actions. Chief Librarian, you have indicated to me that there is something of great matter on Pallevon. Reclusiarch, your reappearance would appear to be confirmation of this fact. I would appreciate your counsel.’ He makes no mention of Albinus. I suspect Castigon had him attend as some sort of peacemaker. If the captain is a politician, he is, I will grant, a canny one.

Castigon activates the hololith projector. A display of Pallevon appears, with the Crimson Exhortation at high anchor. There is no sign of the Destiny of Pain. ‘Our assault on the traitor ship was successful,’ he says. ‘Our first blows were mighty, and we inflicted crippling damage. The momentum of battle was against our foe, and he chose to flee into the immaterium.’

‘How unlike the Sanctified,’ I comment. I mean no irony. Retreat is not in the blood of that warband. They fight to the end, and sometimes beyond.

‘Agreed,’ Castigon says. ‘The logical conclusion, then, is that the flight was a strategic retreat.’

‘The ship had nothing more to accomplish in-system,’ I deduce. ‘You have scanned the planet?’

‘Yes. There are many contrails, fading now, all concentrated over the city of Vekaira.’

‘An invasion,’ Albinus says. ‘Their forces have already fully deployed.’

Quirinus’s face is a mask of horror. ‘This cannot stand,’ he says. ‘The Sanctified must be exterminated.’

‘Of course they will be, Reclusiarch.’ Castigon sounds irritated at being instructed in his duty. ‘Did you imagine we would allow traitors to seize an Imperial world without challenge?’

‘I’m sorry, captain. I meant no disrespect. But there is more at stake here than you know. It is imperative that I speak to the company as a whole. Glorious, sacred destiny awaits us below.’

Glorious. Sacred. Words that have no place here. It takes no effort for me to reach out and touch the currents of the warp. They are rushing us to the surface of Pallevon. The pull is overwhelming. There is nothing holy in the cataract down which we are about to plunge. Yet there is no deception in Quirinus. I have scrutinised him as closely as he has me. He is untainted. His faith is legendary. It has always been a model to be celebrated. It sustained him through his ordeal in the empyrean, and now it points him to Pallevon. To Vekaira.

Down the cataract. Into darkness.

We descend on Pallevon. We descend in force. We descend on wings of fury, bearing judgement, bearing destruction. We come to punish, to purge and to cleanse. The atmosphere of Pallevon is torn by a rain of iron and fire. Gunships, transports and drop pods streak to the ground. Their landing is a rhythm: the pounding, rising drumbeat backing to the symphony of war.

‘Brothers,’ Quirinus said, ‘during my exile in the empyrean, I was vouchsafed a vision.’

He spoke in the loading bay of the Crimson Exhortation. Ammunition had been blessed. Oaths of moment had been sworn.

We muster on a great plain just outside the city walls of Vekaira. We gather our strength. We become a most terrible siege engine.

‘Below,’ Quirinus said, ‘there is a shrine. It is sacred to our beloved primarch. It has been hidden from all eyes for millennia, but now it unveils itself. Its existence is a reward for our faith. It is also a challenge to our worthiness. To find the shrine, and to liberate it from the stain of the fallen, that is our mission. That is our quest.’

Very little is known about Pallevon. Our records are sparse, fragmentary, ancient. None, I discovered in the preparation for planetfall, is more recent than five thousand years old. Abandoned by trade routes, ignored by the Adeptus Administratum, Pallevon has fallen from memory. It is an island in the galaxy, contained by a bubble of obscurity. It has been left to stasis or decay for five millennia.

Not long ago, I walked the decks of a ship lost five thousand years ago. I do not see coincidence here. I see design.

We descend. We make ready to march. At no point is there any vox-transmission from any source on Pallevon. Silence from invaded Vekaira is to be expected. But the rest of the world is just as quiet. There are no internal communications. There is no mobilisation of the local militia. There is only the hollow stillness of the sepulchre.

Quirinus affixed the purity seal to Castigon’s armour. Trailing from the seal was the parchment on which were written the litanies for our mission. And with that, our path became unalterable in law as well as in fate. The loading bay erupted in cheers. Quirinus’s words inspired hope in my brothers.

I do not call them fools. I do call them wrong.

Quirinus, Castigon and I stand at the gates of Vekaira. We look down the gradual slope from the wall to the plain, and the brutal pageantry of the Fourth Company of the Blood Angels. Pallevon’s sun is a red giant. Daylight is a perpetual sunset, with the fall of evening marking a receding tide of blood. In the wash of the dying light, our assembled host reverses the ebb of the tide. A storm of crimson is rising to smash all before it. The air is rent by the roar of Thunderhawks, Stormravens and Stormtalons, by the earth-tremor growl of Baal Predators and Land Raiders and Rhinos, and by the unwavering, merciless tramp of ceramite boots.

If there were only the visions of Quirinus calling us to this planet, this city, this moment, then I might consider the size of our deployment madness. But Pallevon has been invaded by a massive force of traitors. Of this truth, there is no doubt. To such a desecration of an Imperial world, there can be but one answer. We are bringing it.

Standard-Bearer Markosius joins us. He raises our banner to the skies as Castigon lifts his arms, bolter in his right hand, chainsword in his left. In this moment, the politician is gone. There is only the warrior, the champion of the Emperor, and there is no doubt that here is the worthy leader of Fourth Company.

‘For the Emperor and Sanguinius!’ Castigon shouts. Vox-casters carry his voice to the far reaches of the host.

‘Death!’ comes the answer. ‘DEATH!’ There is so much power in that single word, such a concentration of collective will, that it is almost enough on its own to batter down the walls.

We advance. We smash the gates aside. Beyond them, a wide parade avenue leads into the deeper precincts of the city. It runs in a straight line for two thousand metres. We move down its length as a single entity, armed with fire and gun and rage. Above us fly the gunships, in formation at first, then splitting off to manoeuvre around the spires of Vekaira. The avenue ends, dividing into narrower streets. We move down them all, the fingers of an immense crimson gauntlet.

We are unopposed. We are not even witnessed. No lights appear in the blind windows of the towers as night drapes the city. There are no curious or fearful lining the street. There is no chanting of hymns and prayers of thanks from the faithful. The narrow canyons resound with the booming refrain of our march. Beyond the reach of those echoes, there is silence. This is not a city – it is an agglomeration of monuments.

A cemetery.

Is that why I feel a kinship with this place? Am I the Lord of Death finding, at last, his true domain? If so, it is a fine one: rich, vast and majestic. Vekaira is not a hive, though it is clear that, before its end, it was approaching the critical mass of density that would push it down the spiral of insect crowding that is the life and doom of a hive. The towers of Vekaira crowd each other, and like the trees of a rain forest, they reach for the sky, attempting to outgrow their competitors and snatch a piece of the near-death sun. Street level is the realm of eternal shadow. As night falls, the towers fade from view. They become presences no less massive for being fragmentary as the lights of our vehicles play over them. They are also heavy with the majesty of antiquity. This is an old city. Its death did not come with the arrival of the Sanctified. Nothing has lived here for a very long time. Stone rises in towering facades. Windows are either no more than murder holes or grand, stained glass rosettes, now filmy and blank in the dark. Vaulted walkways link spire to spire. But the glories are faded, eroded, crumbled. Time has gnawed at Vekaira. The streets are littered with fallen stone. Some walkways have collapsed altogether, blocking routes, forcing detours. The buildings are worn, pockmarked. The lines of the city are ragged. Millennia have passed, with not a single hand raised to counter them, battering stone with wind and rain, hail and frost. Nothing has been repaired since the Age of Apostasy.

For all the decay, for all that Vekaira is slowly returning to dust, it deserves respect. Something destroyed the city. Its death must have been sudden, as there is none of the damage inflicted by citizens descending into anarchic barbarism. The cathedrals stand proud, untainted, undamaged by anything other than time. The vitality of life has been stolen from Vekaira, yet it retains its identity. The city has remained true to the Emperor.

I salute its faith.

The stoic death that we march through is a balm. A needed one. I do not like the reception that Quirinus’s tale of vision has received. The Blood Angels have been hurt by grandiose religious claims in the past. I will not have us fall into that trap again. Our encounter with this city of silent towers undermines unthought enthusiasm. I see, with no small satisfaction, that Quirinus is also being affected by our surroundings. For one thing, he has ceased his prophetic utterances for the moment. He walks in silence, his helmet turning from vacant doorway to empty window to deserted street. He, Albinus and I march in the lead of our column. Castigon has joined the Rhino Echo of Zoran, and leads from this mobile command post two streets over.

Quirinus says, ‘This city is troubling.’ He is as honest as he ever was. There has never been any dissembling in the Reclusiarch. He is not speaking for my benefit. This is not a dialogue. It is an observation.

I respond all the same. ‘Is this death a sign of the Emperor’s blessing?’

‘Is yours?’ he shoots back.

I give him an ironic half bow. I move off to the side, not breaking formation, but embracing the shadows.

Albinus joins me. ‘What do you seek to accomplish?’ he asks.

‘To teach him the value of mistrusting himself,’ I answer. ‘Is that not also the essence of being a Blood Angel? To remember that we are flawed?’

‘You have no faith in our goal.’

‘None. Do you?’

‘I believe that we are moving towards something momentous.’

‘We most certainly are.’ I sweep my arm, taking in the entire city. ‘The barrier to the immaterium is thin here, and it grows thinner.’

‘Might that not be evidence that Quirinus is correct?’

‘It is not. I have warned Captain Castigon that we march towards darkness. We have known this since the Eclipse of Hope.’ That daemon-haunted battle-barge reappeared as a warp ghost five thousand years after its loss. Aboard, I was confronted by a statue of myself and a star chart of the Pallevon system. The mockery of Chaos was palpable. Ever since, I have felt us caught up in the gears of an infernal engine. An engine whose work began, not when we boarded the phantom ship, but at the moment of the real vessel’s death.

‘You have the authority to overrule him.’

‘Yes, but the Sanctified must be crushed. Our hand is forced. We should be wary, however. Not eager.’

‘Perhaps what you saw on the Eclipse was not a dark omen.’

I snort. ‘Since when do you hold with such foolishness?’

‘Since one of the greatest Chaplains our Chapter has ever known speaks of hope.’

‘He is wrong to do so.’

‘There is no hope?’

‘There is duty. There is faith. There is death. That is enough.’

Albinus shakes his head. ‘It is not,’ he says, and moves back closer to Quirinus.

My eyes are on the city. It understands me. If there were still a population here, the people would be prone to mirages of desire. But empty, desolate, the city makes no pretences. It knows how thin the veil of reality is. It has been shorn of illusions.

I am only a few metres away from my nearest battle-brother. The Baal Predator Phlegethon growls mere paces behind me. But the distance between myself and the other Blood Angels is profound. They cannot comprehend the dark-shrouded routes I now travel. Nor will I pretend to leave those paths. They are a reality from which I will not turn my gaze. They are also the source of the power I wield in defence of the Imperium. I will not turn from that, either.

I speak as if I had the choice.

Quirinus calls out: ‘Forwards, brothers! We draw very near the shrine! The touch of the Emperor is at hand!’

As he shouts in triumph, I sense the rapid fraying of the materium. The epicentre of our destiny is almost upon us. At the same moment, I realise that some of the windows in the buildings around us are not as blind as they appear.

Missiles slash the night.

CHAPTER THREE

THE STREETS OF VEKAIRA

The ambush is well chosen. The street narrows here, and bends sharply. Our forces have bunched up, pressed together by the restricted space. The passage between the buildings is an oppressive defile between towering cliff walls. All of this occurs to me in the frozen split second while the lethal light descends upon us. The missiles rain from three sides. It is a perfect crossfire. There is no escaping it.

I throw myself against the Phlegethon as blast waves overlap. Flames replace air. I am swallowed by the maw of a dragon. One rocket strikes the rear armour of the Phlegethon, propelling the tank forwards. It smashes into me, knocking me down. But the injured vehicle provides cover enough from the worst of the explosion. The fire that fills my view is paltry beside the inferno that ignites behind my eyes. I feel myself divide into a binary opposition of war. My lips curl back in rage. I salivate for the blood of my foe. At the same time, the cold of a sunless planet reads the battle zone, and flies back up the line of the rocket attacks. They have come from windows thirty metres up in buildings to our left, right, and front, at the bend in the road. We are in a kill zone a block long.

I will break its hold.

The attackers to the fore are my target. Raging, calculating, furious, detached, I stand and spread my wings. They spring from my shoulders, crimson spans of eldritch energy. Their creation is effortless, so strong is the flow of the warp. A dozen metres behind the wounded Phlegethon, the Predator Intemperate retaliates, firing its main gun at the building to my left. I fly forwards and up, blade drawn, to a window lit up by another rocket flash. I burst through the frame. I am wrath cloaked in annihilating blood, and all must fall before me. There are three Sanctified here. They stand in a chamber that might once have been sleeping quarters, but is now empty, its contents turned to dust by the passing millennia. One of the traitors is reloading his missile launcher. The second, a champion of their foul gods, lunges at me with his chainaxe shrieking. The third is a witch, and I will save him for last.

I refocus the energy from my wings into my blade. I make a horizontal slash. The air where Vitarus passes is cut and bleeds. The sword slices through the shaft of the chainaxe like an afterthought. This traitor is barely worthy of my notice. My consciousness has become three now. It is the rage, it is the dispassionate observer, and it is the blade itself. My will is destruction on the molecular level. Action and thought are one, the grace of purest death, and I decapitate the champion. His head flies backward, bouncing off his brother’s shoulder, while his blood fountains up, showering the room. It gives me my taste. It isn’t enough.

The Sanctified with the missile launcher raises his weapon. Perhaps he is stupid. Perhaps he realises who and what I am, and will not pause before sacrifice. Perhaps both. He fires the launcher, point-blank, in the confined space. His action cannot keep pace with my will. Before his finger has pulled the trigger, I have summoned a shield. It shimmers, a gold as brilliant as the faith of Sanguinius. The rocket explodes against it. The backwash incinerates the room. The traitor is smashed open by the force of the blast. Beneath his ravaged armour, he is turned to coal.

That leaves the witch. The explosion threw him against the far wall of the chamber. He is dazed. He staggers to his feet, whatever daemonic spell he was preparing disrupted. My will seizes him before he can try again. I reach inside. My mental fist clutches his skeleton as if it were a doll. He feels me there. He struggles, his immobilised body dream-twitching. His will is puny against mine, an ant trying to dislodge a colossus. I favour him with the full measure of my contempt. This is what the dark gods of Chaos would have me become? This is the best they can do? With a thought, I lift the traitor from the ground. Suspended in midair, he vibrates with tension. He is a plucked cable. He manages to move his lips. His breath rasps. There are the beginnings of words. He is trying to complete his summoning.

I take a step forwards. Around me, reality and the warp collide and destroy one another in crackling bursts of lightning. The room wavers, its existence bending with the gathering force. It is not a coming daemon that troubles the space. It is Mephiston. ‘I have killed a daemon prince with my bare hands,’ I tell the Sanctified witch. ‘How can you hope to call something worthy even of my attention?’

I squeeze the fist. The chanting becomes a strangled gasp of unimaginable pain. There is a sound like the crushing of dried twigs. It is his skeleton being smashed to dust.

The gasping stops. I drop the ceramite-wrapped bundle of rags and return to the window. The facade that the Intemperate fired upon is a smoking, crumbled heap. From the facing side of the street, the breath of a flamer gouts from the window. I hear the dug-dug-dug of bolters. A moment later, bodies plummet to the street. The ambush is over.

I return to street level. The Phlegethon is damaged, but still mobile. Albinus stands beside the idling tank, waiting for me. ‘What is it?’ I ask.

‘Brother-Sergeant Saleos was killed.’

The Phlegethon’s commander. ‘His gene-seed?’

Albinus shakes his head. ‘I could not salvage it. He took a direct hit.’

A grievous loss. One for which the Sanctified will answer dearly. ‘How many others?’

‘Eleven.’ He slides open the narthecium built into his gauntlet. He shows me six cylinders containing the precious legacy of our fallen brothers. The missiles left nothing of the others to recover.

The mere existence of the Sanctified is enough to justify a war of extermination. Now, they have incurred a special wrath. Their corpses will be the kindling for their own pyres.

We push forwards. We follow the turn of the street, hungry for blood. It will be given to us. The Sanctified have set up a barricade there. The Phlegethon surges forwards as if its machine-spirit were seeking vengeance for its injury. Its front-mounted blade will smash through the barricade, but the tank’s fury will not wait for the impact. The flamestorm cannon gives form to its wrath. The Phlegethon speaks with a voice of fire. The cannon is well named. It is no mere flamer blast that washes over the barricade. It is a horizontal vortex that strikes with the obliterating force of a solar flare. It immolates, melts and vaporises. Power armour is a poor defence. The traitors defending the barricade are blasted to ash.

And beyond the barricade? Beyond, the streets now narrow, twist and split as we enter the older regions of Vekaira. The buildings are more worn and gnawed by age. The roads are patchwork segments. We face an intersection where only the avenue going to the right is wide enough for the vehicles.

Quirinus eyes the choice. ‘If we all go down the same path…’ he begins.

‘We will deserve what happens,’ I finish. Such a concentration of force in so little space would not be able to manoeuvre.

At least the Sanctified face the same restriction.

‘Announce our presence,’ I call out. The tanks send out a barrage of fire ahead of our advance. Facades explode and collapse. Dust and smoke are our heralds, choking the streets. We divide our forces, as before, now getting down to squad formations. Agile, adaptable units of destruction, we race into the warren ahead.

The Sanctified come out to meet us. We fight block by block, building by building. The struggle is vicious, ugly, savage. It would be very easy, in that maze of violence, to lose track of the direction of our advance. But fate will not be cheated. Quirinus drives us towards the centre of the city, his vision pulling him and the company ever closer, with ever more urgency. ‘This way,’ he calls out at each cross-street. I need and accept nothing of his guidance. I can see our path just as vividly, but my vision is a darker one than his. We are caught in a maelstrom of energies, spiralling in until we are smashed to bits on the rocks of tortured destiny. I cannot divine the nature of the blow that awaits us, but I feel its presence. It gathers strength as we approach. Already, I hear the distant echoes of cruel, daemonic laughter.

Why do I fight so hard to reach our doom? Because my brothers do. So many of my links to my fellow Blood Angels have rusted and snapped in the years since my resurrection that we are barely on the same plane of reality any more. Where I exist (I cannot use the word live with certainty) is the realm of imminent death, the perpetual coming-to-destruction. My gift, my strength, is to be an end of things.

So am I now. Metre by metre, doorway by doorway, the battle rages. The ancient city, so majestic in its stilled tragedy, is battered into ruins. Buildings collapse, their foundations demolished by shelling. Streets become mountains of rubble. I slash through a brace of traitors, and I round a corner with my squad. We hit a rare bit of road that runs straight for at least five hundred metres. At the far end, one of our other squads has emerged from the labyrinth ahead of us. As they grapple with the enemy, a fatal explosion hits the base of a tower looming over them. ‘Brothers!’ Albinus yells, but there is no time, and so his cry is not of warning, but of grief. The edifice makes a complete spin around its vertical axis, a valedictory pirouette, as it falls, crushing Blood Angels and Sanctified alike.

We climb over the rubble. Above us, the battle for air superiority rages. The Sanctified have deployed two corrupted Thunderhawks. The gunships are the red of clotted blood, and their form appears distorted by scabs. They are restricted in their movements to the larger gaps between the buildings. From high above the skyline, they rain fire down on our forces. One passes over us while we are out in the open. We dive for the cover of shattered stone as the high-explosive strike hits. It gouges a crater in the mountain of debris, disintegrating Brother Buerus. The rest of us scramble down the other side of the shattered tower, into the canyon of the street. A hundred metres ahead, some twenty Sanctified have gathered. They wait while the Thunderhawk returns for another pass, still high above the rooftops, beyond our reach.

It is met by the Stormtalon Sublimity of War. Our craft are smaller, more nimble, and the Sublimity pops up from between the spires a few streets over, raking the Thunderhawk from below with its twin-linked lascannons. The Sanctified pilot, maddened, pursues the Sublimity down into the thicket of towers. The Sublimity plunges right, towards a massive hab-block, a hulk of a building that appears squat even though it is taller than any of the nearby structures. The two vessels streak in like comets. At the last second, the vectored engines of the Sublimity rotate, their thrust suddenly aimed diagonally forwards. Momentum arrested, the gunship shoots up, its course vertical. The Sanctified craft has no recourse. It ploughs into the tower, transmuted by the alchemy of war into thunder and flame. Burning wreckage and bodies scatter down over the street. And now it is the turn of the Sublimity of War to make its strafing run. It flies low, its side-mounted heavy bolters chewing the Sanctified into pieces.

We do not stop. There is no pause as we and our enemies hammer each other. There will be no end, even if we reduce the planet to a cinder, until the extermination of the foe.

We fight to the death to reach the maw of fate. Yet I know why we fight. The traitors must be destroyed. There is no question, no doubt, about that goal. What, though, do the Sanctified want with Pallevon? Why do they struggle with such ferocity to stop our advance? I sense a ghastly irony lurking at the centre of this war.

Let that be. Before me now is duty, the Archenemy, battle. And the Red Thirst. My brothers think me a being of ice. Perhaps the sepulchral chill has replaced my soul. They are wrong, though, if they think that the Flaw has been purged from my being. I feel it. I know the Thirst. I know the gnawing abyss of the Black Rage. They have not left me.

But there is something else, isn’t there? Beyond the Red, beneath the Black, isn’t there something, a hunger that is darker, older, vaster? One that keeps the others at bay that it might keep me for itself. Isn’t it there?

No. I deny it. I refuse it. I embrace the rage of battle, feeding my hate with the blood of the enemy. I exult in the unleashed holocaust of the warp, a holocaust that is nothing less than my will made into the end of all flesh.

The enemy engages in an act of foolish blasphemy. Sanctified forces have taken up positions inside a cathedral that looms over a square that might once have been grand in proportion to the house of worship, but has been encroached upon over the centuries by Ministorum complexes. The cathedral is a relic, already ancient when Pallevon’s history stopped. It is clearly from an early age of man’s creed. It should be honoured. It is a testament, an expression of faith that has itself become holy. Its desecration is a tragedy beyond repair. The traitors emerge from the parvis, sending forth a hail of mass-reactive rounds. My squad is pinned. Frag grenades land in our midst. Brother Merihem is hit directly, shrapnel piercing his brain. For a moment, we are at bay.

I trust the enemy has savoured this moment. It is his last.

What happens next takes no more time than a death cry. I reach deep into the warp. Arms outstretched, I become the channel of infinite annihilation. A maelstrom forms around me. The air darkens. The twin rods of my psychic hood turn a blinding crimson. Reality is nothing in my hands. It is the plaything of my rage, fit only to be smashed. And so I smash. I unleash the energies. My anger is a colossal, final judgement. The parvis is sundered by empyrean sheet lightning. The real collapses in the grip of my will. The ground wails as it erupts in violet fire. With the thunder of an avalanche, the cathedral falls on its defilers, martyring itself in a final act of devotion. There is a monstrous, incandescent flash of energy. It is no colour of the spectrum. It is the colour of wrath, of pain, of eternal entropy and of terrible, all-consuming hunger.

The light fades with an electrical crackle. The gaping wound in the real closes, but not without leaving a scar. The agonised ruin before us has too much emptiness. Matter has been unmade, its existence seemingly erased from the past as well as the future. The rubble is twisted. Stone has been warped as if it were contorted muscle. Its sub-aural scream is perpetual. Blood, so dark it is black, pools over the surface of the wreckage. It will pool forever.

These are my works.

This is my being.

I feel Quirinus’s gaze upon me.

Baal Secundus. The fortress-monastery of the Blood Angels.

Calistarius was the first to greet Quirinus when he exited the Reclusiam. Black armour emerged from black stone, shadow from shadow. The skull-faced helmet nodded to Calistarius. ‘Brother-Librarian.’

Calistarius bowed low. ‘Reclusiarch.’ He was the first outside the tower to address Quirinus with that title.

Quirinus didn’t answer at first. He stood motionless, and Calistarius felt that his old friend’s eyes were on an interior vista. Finally, the Reclusiarch said, ‘The honour is great, and a great weight.’ A pause. ‘I wonder, can any of us be truly worthy of what we receive?’

‘We are all unworthy of the grace of our primarch and his Great Father,’ Calistarius answered. ‘We are all flawed. It is our duty to accept that, to strive for the impossible, and to accept the roles that fate and our Chapter assign to us in the eternal crusade.’

Quirinus laughed. It was a good sound, the laughter of a warrior at one with the truth of his life. ‘Well spoken, brother. How very ecclesiastical of you. There are times when I think you should be walking this path with me, and not that of a Librarian.’

‘No.’ Calistarius shook his head. ‘I am where I must be. Do not mistake my statement of fact for philosophy. Our titles are not honours. They are descriptions of who we are. “Reclusiarch” is not an address. It is your identity.’

‘Lord of Death,’ Quirinus says. His voice emerges from his helm as a flat, electronic rasp. There is no emotion. The horror resounds, however. There is no missing his theological disgust.

‘So I am named, and so I act,’ I retort. I do not look back at him as I stride towards the devastation. My attention is drawn by something more important. Beyond where the cathedral stood, there are no more towers. There is a gap, revealing the dawn sky of Pallevon. There are no clouds. The light is a tired, ancient red, dim for the moment, but slowly growing in intensity as the giant sun returns. The cold, serene beauty of the sky is cut by a black silhouette. Narrow, tapering, to the naked eye it is nothing more than a deeper darkness. And I know, with icy certainty, that that is precisely what it is.

It is the deepest darkness.

It is the epicentre.

There is a lull on either side of us. The vox-traffic has calmed, too. With the loss of the Thunderhawk and the fall of the cathedral, perhaps the Sanctified are in retreat. Their remaining gunship races by overhead, pulling away from us into the dark, no longer attacking. The enemy must realise that we have a way open to us now. There will be no holding us in the streets of the city.

Quirinus, too, has fallen silent as he realises the significance of what lies before us. Without a word, we make our way over the rubble. We reach the gap. Before us is a scene of dark wonder.

The centre of Vekaira is a perfectly circular amphitheatre. Buildings come right up to the lip of the bowl, and then stop. Some have lost their facades and stand with the interiors exposed, as if they had been sheared open with a blade. The bowl of the amphitheatre is immense, large enough to have been created by a meteor strike, and indeed, the exposed rock surfaces shows signs of shock-metamorphic effects. Something struck the city here, struck it with enormous force. At the same time, the circle is too perfect to be natural. The bowl is symmetrical, and marked by concentric rings. The gradient of its slope is uniform. The bowl is an artefact kilometres wide that was created in an act of sudden violence.

No human technology could accomplish this.

In the outermost ring, I see, at last, the population of Vekaira. What remains of it. Perhaps it is the final vestige of any human inhabitation on Pallevon. These people are fallen. The surrounding city no longer belongs to them. They are barbarians. They number in the handful of thousands. They live in clusters of huts and shacks that are nothing but thrown together bits of rubble. They are clad in rags. Their hair has grown into sorry, filthy manes. Their flesh is coated in a patina of dust and mud. They huddle together in terrified clusters, trembling and howling whether they are looking uphill at us, or down to the Sanctified position. Though vegetation is growing in this ring of the bowl, there is no sign of cultivation, livestock, or any other means of subsistence. I cannot see what keeps these people alive. I am tempted to say that they live on fear. I revise my first opinion. They are not barbarians. They are animals.

Below the rabble, the bulk of the amphitheatre is a vast, frozen battlefield. I am staring at a tableau. Thousands of warriors are locked in unmoving combat. Blades are forever about to strike death-blows. Bolters are raised, eternally in the moment before firing. There is an awful, majestic beauty to the sight. This is war captured at the instant of infinite potential. Every warrior is perpetually seizing victory. None is suffering defeat. The might on display would be earth-shaking were there movement, for the warriors are Space Marines, clad in armour of a make that is millennia old. Though their actions have been arrested, they are not in a stasis field. Time exists for them in a partial way, for their armour has been eroded by the centuries. Markings and colours have been stripped away as if sandblasted. I cannot tell what Chapters are here. Are they Loyal? Traitors? Both? There is no way to tell. There is no identity here, only the endless perfection of battle.

I suspect the warriors are gods for the savages. The people live in the outer ring, drawn to a spectacle of wonder. I see no sign of habitation within the battlefield, however, and indeed, even I feel the aura of the sacred radiating from the stilled majesty. This is a graveyard with the promise of resurrection. It is not to be defiled.

At the centre of the bowl stands the tower. It is a tall, tapering spire, still night-black in the bloody dawn. It comes to a point so fine that it should cut the air itself. It is a stiletto made for an assassin of gods. At its base, the Sanctified are making their stand. They are indeed retreating, their crimson stain receding over the land. They are digging in behind the low wall that surrounds the tower. It is more of a boundary between the space of the battlefield and that of the tower than it is a barrier. The traitors’ position is further reinforced by the presence of their Rhinos. The armoured vehicles were, ten thousand years ago, the pride of the Great Crusade. Now, they have undergone a daemonic transformation. Bristling with spikes, daubed with blasphemies, they crouch low to the ground, their engines growling like feral beasts.

I find it interesting that the Sanctified have chosen this as the site they would defend. The cover is not ideal. They have surrendered the high ground. They have wilfully given themselves serious disadvantages. The tower must be of extreme importance for it to be worth such clear tactical mistakes.

Quirinus has been staring at the tower with rapt attention. The skull of his helmet conceals his emotions. The vocaliser flattens and distorts his tone. Yet when he speaks, there is no mistaking the adoration in his voice. ‘That is our destination!’ he shouts, over speaker and vox. ‘Brothers! There lies our goal! Before you stands a shrine most holy. We must reclaim it from the abominated traitors. To see them before this sainted place is to witness the most grievous offence to the honour and glory of our primarch! Purge them from existence! Soak the ground with their blood! Then shall we march into the most magnificent celebration of our faith!’

I look again at the tower. There is nothing about it that suggests it was built to honour either Sanguinius or the Emperor. I see a work of jagged precision. I see the shape of a weapon. I see no disjunction between it and the Chaos warriors who guard it. I wonder again about its importance to them. Quirinus believes it holds a special significance for us. It makes little sense that the Sanctified should risk so much merely to insult the honour of the Blood Angels.

I open a private vox-channel to Quirinus. ‘And those immobile combatants,’ I ask, ‘who and what are they?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Are they part of the holiness you say awaits us?’

‘I do not know that, either.’ He pauses for a moment. ‘They must be part of the great plan. They are too remarkable a feature to be an accident.’

Of course they are part of the great plan. But whose? How is it great? A Black Crusade has its own form of greatness. It is not one we can embrace. I say nothing of this to Quirinus. He has not been open to an alternative argument since he emerged from the warp. His rigid dogmatism kept him alive during his ordeal. It could prove to be the death of us all, now. ‘You are very sure of what you say,’ I tell him.

‘Do not doubt me, revenant.’

I brush aside the insult. It is beneath me. I am surprised that Quirinus stoops to such pettiness. His intemperance is not a good sign. He is not thinking rationally about either the tower or me. He forgets my rank. But I am not concerned with slights. I am concerned with the path on which we are engaged. ‘I do not doubt your conviction, Reclusiarch,’ I answer.

‘Nor can you doubt the truth of what I say,’ he retorts. He gestures at the tower. ‘If you cannot sense the power of the shrine, then you are unworthy of the title you bear.’

Again, I ignore the offence. I am not interested in exchanging pointless barbs. Quirinus is correct. To deny the power of that structure would be to engage in deliberate blindness. It is the eye of the warp storm I have been following. Energies are gathering there, building second by second. That is the centre of the maelstrom. It is the point to which Fourth Company and I have been led since we arrived in the Supplicium system and encountered the ghost ship Eclipse of Hope. Our free will has been reduced to a sad mockery. Our every step has been planned by an outside force, a force that has nothing to do with our venerated primarch. As I gaze at the ancient tower and the immobilised Space Marines, I know that this moment has been approaching for thousands of years. Quirinus, one of our most storied Chaplains, celebrates this manifestation of the inevitable.

He is a fool.

And I? I have a duty. I have an oath. I have a mission.

I have no choice.

And truly, even without Quirinus pushing us forwards, there would be only one path to take. Traitors stand before us. They must not be suffered to live.

At the lip of the bowl, the strength of Fourth Company comes together once again. Yet it must restrain itself from using its full destructive might. Our mission is to capture territory, not smash a world. Even as Castigon begins to speak to the tank crews, Quirinus intervenes. ‘The tower must not be damaged,’ he says.

I do not believe it could be, not by something as mundane as artillery. But lacking certainty, we must act as the Reclusiarch directs. I am also struck by unease at the thought of high explosives landing in the mist of the frozen warriors. Though I do not know their allegiance, the possibility of desecration is real. I will not be a party to that. Nor will any of my brothers.

Castigon confers with Quirinus, with me, with the sergeants. An idea is born, grows into strategy, becomes action. The attack will come from two directions. Castigon will lead the frontal assault. I will lead the other.

We shall strike from the air. We shall be a most terrible rain.

CHAPTER FOUR

ICON

Our primarch had wings. He was alone among the Emperor’s twenty sons to bear such a mutation. Only he could fly unaided by any technology or psychic force. We who take to the skies to bring Sanguinius’s wrath down upon the forsworn do not have that gift, but we have the genetic memory of it. The nature of our attack, then, is a form of worship. We are the echo of our primarch. His noble fury resounds down the millennia. His vengeance for the Great Betrayal shall never cease, not while a single Blood Angel lifts blade or bolter.

Or flies.

Castigon and the bulk of Fourth Company attack first. They descend the slope of the amphitheatre, a crimson spear aimed at the heart of the Sanctified. Crimson is the colour of justice, and it is the colour of wrath. Where we are concerned, there is no distinction to be made.

There is little room for vehicles to move between the ranks of the frozen warriors. Only the luxury of time permitted the Sanctified to drive their Rhinos down the circuitous path to the tower. I note that the traitors were just as careful as we are not to disturb the combatants. The significance of this fact is, for now, a mystery to me, and of little interest to my brothers.

I come in with two assault squads. They fly with jump packs, flaming comet tails marking the arc of their attack. I spread my blood-red wings again, and in their creation I feel the hand of Sanguinius. My primarch guides my flight. He guides my hand. He is at my shoulder as I descend on the enemy. His wrath is in the death I bring.

The Sanctified see us coming. Our advancing ground forces unleash a storm of bolter fire their way, disrupting their response. The shots that reach up for us are too scattered to divert our purpose. Even so, we lose Brother Kimeres when well-placed rounds punch through his jump pack. It explodes. Wreathed in flame, he plummets to the ground. The blast does not kill him. The fall does not, either. He lands badly, though, and wounded. The traitors do not give him the chance to recover.

We come down between their lines and the tower. We send death ahead of us with our guns. The assault teams rake the enemy lines with their bolters. Caught between perpendicular lines of fire, several of the Sanctified can do nothing except die, their bodies and armour cratered by shells. My mind reaches out before me. I grab the very space behind the nearest Rhino. I tear the real wide open. The immaterium pours through, a shrieking vortex. These traitors have pledged their allegiance to Chaos? Well, then, let it have them. Existence twists and shatters. Energies that do not belong on this plane flash hungry, devouring and dismantling. The vortex drags the Rhino out of position. It crumples the rear of the vehicle, distorting the very being of the machine. The real and the imagined, the actual and the impossible, meet in one object. The paradox is too much. The Rhino explodes. Armour peels, armour shreds, armour spins through the air as giant shrapnel. The blast is huge. It is the collective death cry of munitions and promethium. The area is bathed in fire. The toll is savage. The hole in the materium closes, leaving surreally mangled, incinerated bodies in its wake.

I land, wreathed in electric crimson. I refocus my psychic flow, channelling it into Vitarus. The blade’s glow is blinding, like blood from the heart of the sun. I plunge it through the faceplate of the traitor charging at me. The sword pierces armour as though it were not there and liquefies his brain. The power necessary for that kill has come effortlessly. The nexus of energies here is massive. I feel as if I could tear Pallevon’s moons from the sky and hurl them to the battlefield.

And there is the anger. That is present here, too. It is gigantic. It fills me with its dark ecstasy. The Red Thirst stirs. It would take nothing to unleash that, to become a maddened, indiscriminate destroyer. The violence of the traffic on the vox tells me that my brothers experience the same phenomenon. We are dangerously close to a mass frenzy.

The enemy’s lines become a cauldron. Hatred clashes with rage. This is close-quarters combat, the bloody meat that feeds the maw of our Chapter’s hunger. We fight as independent units, damaging the foe from within until the main force joins us. I strike out first on one side, then the other. The enemy is all around me, a cornucopia of targets. I welcome them all to their end. The power of the warp crackles lethally through my every slash. I fire my plasma pistol with a steady rhythm, heedless of the risk of point-blank shots, exulting in the star-heat that swallows my foe. Armour and flesh melt together, and I extend the reach of death’s kingdom.

Something hits me. The blow is giant. It could smash walls, but the hammer is without substance. I stagger, spent energy dissipating around me. There is a smell in the air: ozone mixed with blood. I keep my feet and round on my attacker. Before the Sanctified witch can ready another energy blast, I seize the being of his skull. I crush it to dust.

The traitors fight hard. They fall back into close formations, compact fists of ceramite bristling with guns. They have staked a claim on the tower. They will not relinquish it easily. But the numbers and momentum are against them. Our aerial assault has disrupted the coherence of their lines. When the main body of Fourth Company hits them, it does so with the force of a tidal wave. Castigon is at the forefront, leading the charge over the wall. ‘For Sanguinius!’ he calls, his voice echoing off the tower.

Quirinus is right behind him. ‘For the Emperor!’ His shout is praise, hymn and exhortation. It is a weapon in itself. The violence of its faith is a reminder of Quirinus’s greatness. Whatever our differences, I will never deny the power he brings to battle.

And following Quirinus’s call comes the response. ‘Death!’ my brothers shout. ‘Death!’ All of them, a choir of doom. ‘DEATH!’ A chant, a beat, a march of the unstoppable. There is nothing that can withstand such a force.

And nothing does. The Sanctified do not retreat so much as they are pushed back. They fight to the limits of the possible, but the impossible is beyond them. They must withdraw. And so they do, killing with every lost metre of ground, but, in the end, pulling away up the north slope of the amphitheatre.

We do not pursue. Just as the Sanctified stayed with their prize, so do we now.

‘Give me a perimeter,’ Castigon orders. ‘Shame the enemy with its might.’ We use the same wall as foundation, but our barrier has the strength of numbers and righteousness. We are a fortress of iron blood, and we are unbreachable. The need to remain with the tower is primal. I feel it myself. I still do not believe the location to be holy, but I am fully determined to make it ours. I know the effect is a result of the confluence of energies. My awareness of its nature makes it no less powerful.

The Sanctified retreat beyond the reach of our guns. The Stormtalons harry them until they melt into the streets of the city. I see, over the skyline, a guttering, tumbling flame: the traitors’ other Thunderhawk dies. We have time now to consolidate our position, to fix our grip firmly on the tower.

But I do not know why we should wish to do so. I do not know why we are mimicking the behaviour of the Sanctified. It disturbs me that this is what we are doing. Another realisation: the traitors used their Rhinos only as defensive barriers. They never fired the vehicles’ guns. They would have been able to hold us at bay for much longer had they done so. It is as if they were as reluctant to damage the frozen battlefield and its warriors as we are.

I have never known the forces of the Archenemy to be worried about desecration.

What is this thing that we have won?

The dust of combat settles. With it, the rage loses its intensity. Our company has weathered the storm of our savage instincts. Or, rather, most of it has. As I take in our current dispositions, I see that a disturbing number of battle-brothers have succumbed to the Black Rage. Albinus is being called upon to perform the grimmer duties of his calling. Quirinus accompanies him on his dark rounds, murmuring litanies as the lost brothers are restrained and sedated before being transported back to the Crimson Exhortation. Their induction into the Death Company lies ahead, and then their end – in the final glory of a last charge, or at the edge of Astorath’s axe.

There are also brothers for whom there shall be no redemptive battle. They are too deep into the Red Thirst, and shall never surface. For them, what lies ahead is only a shuttered cell on Baal, in the Tower of Amareo. They are not reliving the glorious defence of Holy Terra. They are maddened, rabid. Their mouths are coated with the blood of their fallen enemies, and quenching that thirst is the only instinct that remains to them. They howl for blood, and it does not matter whose. The prayers Quirinus intones at their side are the most mournful. These warriors have fallen to the most cruel facet of our Flaw. They have become the embodiment of the worst of our natures. They are what the rest of us must struggle against being. To descend to that state is an indignity beyond the tragic.

No one has yet crossed the threshold of the tower. I do Quirinus the courtesy of waiting. This is his vision we are fulfilling. Let his be the honour of leading the way inside. Or the humiliation. While I wait, I examine the exterior of the tower. It is not what I had supposed it to be. It is an extraordinary construct. It appears to be built entirely of weapons. The ancient and the modern are joined, made one. Swords, axes, flails, maces, rifles, pistols, power fists and more: they are all here. They lock together with the perfection of artificer armour. The tower is made of war.

It is impressive. I have never seen the like. But where is the connection to the Blood Angels? There is no trace of the hand of Sanguinius in this construction. So that must await inside.

When the rites and care due to our brothers fallen in battle or to madness have been discharged, Quirinus leads the way to the tower door. The entrance is enormous, worthy of any cathedral. The gothic archway towers over us. The door is massive. Its construction is one of layered paradox. It appears to be made of wrought iron, but the metal is something far more dense and heavy. And yet, it appears much lighter. It makes one think of soaring. The design sculpted into the metal creates this effect. At first, it seems to be intricate crosshatching, representing nothing. But after studying it for a few moments, I see feathers. And then I see wings.

Quirinus stops a few paces from the door. ‘Look, my brothers,’ he says. ‘Oh, look.’ He speaks barely above a whisper, but that whisper carries through the silence that has fallen over the company. Even those too far away to see the detail of the entrance have been caught in the spell of reverence that has come upon us.

For my part, I feel no anticipation. I feel a deep unease. I remain as convinced that a trap has been prepared for us as Quirinus is sure that we stand before a holy shrine. I am alone in this. Castigon and Albinus, helms removed, have some of Quirinus’s reverence in their expressions as they stare at the door.

Quirinus takes a slow step forwards. Then another. He reaches out to touch the door. There is no hurry to any of his movements. It is as if he is reluctant to end this final moment of anticipation. Is it, I wonder, because some part of him suspects that he is about to be proven wrong?

I examine my own motives. Do I want Quirinus to be deluded? No, I do not. It is not vindication that I seek. I know what I read in the currents of the warp. I know what I experienced aboard the Eclipse of Hope. With its statue and its star chart, the ship was a lure of the most mocking kind. Yet here we are, having been forced to bite down on the hook, and smiling as if we enjoyed it. We are caught in an obscenity, and its full measure will be revealed when Quirinus opens that door.

Quirinus places his hand against the metal. His simple touch is all it takes. There is no struggle to shift what must be a great mass. There is no lock to defeat. It is as if our journey here were struggle enough, and now we are to be rewarded with the object of our quest. The narrative is too perfect. I refuse to believe in it. Yet the door opens. It divides along an invisible seam and the two halves swing apart, admitting us to the centre of the maelstrom. We cross the threshold.

I cannot credit what I see.

The interior of the tower is a single chamber reaching what appears to be the entire height of the spire. There are no windows visible from the exterior, but they must exist, concealed somehow in the folds of the architecture, because light streams in from the upper half of the walls. The red light of Pallevon’s sun is filtered, as though through stained glass, and fills the chamber with downward slanting beams in all the shades of red. Each of those shades in turn is but a variation of flame or blood: the dull glow of dying embers, the blinding incandescence of the firestorm, the nuances of fresh blood, old blood, arterial blood, corrupted blood. Spiralling diagonals of red, all focused on what lies on a massive marble dais in the centre of the chamber.

And what, by the Sanguinary Chalice, is on that dais? It is a statue of gold and silver and a stone with the resilience of marble but the appearance of ruby. It is Sanguinius, depicted in the final moments of his martyrdom. The accursed Horus is not here, but the presence of his death-strike is, as our primarch is captured in an eternal fall. The statue is life-size. Its detail is extraordinary. None of us was alive the day Sanguinius fell, but our genetic heritage is encoded with memory, and I know, we all know, that we gaze upon a perfect recreation. That is Sanguinius. The features are the very incarnation of nobility. Every detail of his armour, of his carnodon robe, of the fold of his wings, the lie of the feathers – it is all beyond comprehension. I am wrong – this is not perfection. This is something more. This is reality. This is that most terrible moment in our Chapter’s history, the moment that is the birth of the Black Rage, transmuted from event into art.

The sight of the statue is a blow of a kind and degree that none in Fourth Company has ever experienced. It is shattering. The silence with which we approached the doorway is as nothing compared to that which envelops us now. The entire company files into the chamber, the tramp of boots somehow being swallowed by the colossal, reverential stillness. It is as if we have come to the end of words, and nothing shall ever be spoken again.

That is an illusion, of course. It is a lie. There will be words. And I will not accept the truth of this display. It cannot be what, in a voice of gold and silver and blood, it proclaims itself to be.

For Quirinus, there are no doubts. He has reached the pinnacle of his life’s work. He spreads his arms wide. It falls to him to break the silence. He does so as befits a Reclusiarch of the Blood Angels. He does not whisper. He answers the silent thunder of the statue with thunder of his own. ‘Brothers of the Fourth Company of the Blood Angels,’ he cries. ‘Behold Sanguinius!’

He falls to his knees.

‘Sanguinius!’ All the voices are one. All emotions are one: a collective, total rapture. ‘Sanguinius! Sanguinius! Sanguinius!’ The zeal of the cry could shatter worlds. Then the company, in unison, follows the example of Quirinus, and kneels before the statue.

I do not shout. I do not bend the knee. I am not unmoved by the statue. I feel the same blow as my brothers. I am shaken. But I have seen false miracles before. I am conscious of every doomed step that has brought us to this moment. Our path has been drawn for us by gods dark and false. The warp energies are so powerful that reality is thin as gossamer, brittle as dying parchment. There is obscene falsehood here.

And so I stand alone among my brothers in an act of refusal. I know what I know. I will not be swayed. But the doubt. Oh, Throne, the doubt. If I am wrong, then behold two moments: the passion of Sanguinius, and the damnation of Mephiston.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE DARKNESS OF VENERATION

‘There stands the truth of Mephiston!’ Quirinus proclaims to the company at large. To me he says, ‘You are no Blood Angel.’

I check the rage that would have me blast Quirinus where he stands for such an outrage. There are too many dangerous unknowns at play here, and I will not let the situation escalate. But I have my honour, too. ‘You will withdraw those words, Reclusiarch,’ I tell him. A fraction of my anger escapes my control. My words are the hiss of wind on a glacier. For a moment, a rime of frost spreads out on the stone floor before me.

‘If they had been intended as an insult, I would,’ says Quirinus. ‘They were not. I seek only to strip away dangerous illusions.’ He stands on the statue’s dais, almost touching the figure, but keeping a few reverent centimetres before it. The rest of my brothers remain kneeling, most with their heads bowed. A few, Albinus and Castigon among them, look back and forth between Quirinus and where I stand at the tower door. They say nothing. Quirinus goes on, his voice almost gentle, solicitous of my fallen state. ‘You must see what has happened to you,’ he says.

‘Tell me.’ I must know exactly what he believes.

‘You are soulless, Chief Librarian.’ He puts the full strength of his ecclesiastical rank behind that pronouncement. ‘You defeated the Black Rage. You do not respond to the holiness of the icon in this chamber. These are symptoms of the same condition.’ He spreads his arms to take in our worshipful brothers. ‘What is it to be a Blood Angel? It is to suffer the Flaw. It is our tragedy, but it is also our identity. Consider the nature of the Flaw, brothers.’ He is no longer addressing me directly. He is soaring into a sermon. ‘Were it limited to the Red Thirst, we might regard it as no more than a curse, a genetic shame that threatens our Chapter with a humiliating destruction. But there is also the Black Rage, and by the blood of Sanguinius, is this not also a blessing? To be one with the memories of our primarch. Is there not something within each of us that welcomes this dissolution? The Black Rage will be our end, but it is also our most vital link to our progenitor. It keeps the fires of righteous vengeance forever burning in our hearts.’ He pauses, drops his arms, and looks at me. The skull of his helmet is accusatory. ‘You are immune to the Black Rage, Mephiston. And so you have shed the defining feature of our Chapter. You cannot know, any longer, what it means to be a Blood Angel. You have proved this. You are unmoved by what stands behind me.’

‘Immune?’ I am outraged by the presumption.

‘You fought back and conquered the Black Rage. That amounts to an immunity.’

Can Quirinus really be this foolish? Can the Chaplain whose erudition was so respected by Calistarius be so ignorant? His time in the warp has rotted his judgement. His argument is not theology. It is not philosophy. It is nonsense. Quirinus expounds upon the Black Rage, but he has not known it himself. Of all the Blood Angels here present, only I have experienced that fate. And though I fought my way back, I did not do so without cost. Yes, Quirinus, your friend Calistarius is dead. But do not imagine that Mephiston has no memory of the struggle beneath the rubble, of the desperate fight to reclaim self and rational thought from the fatal grip of the Flaw. I am at war with the dark tides of rage every second of my existence.

My respect for Quirinus snaps into brittle shards.

And yet…

And yet, I do not express my outrage. I do not even feel it in unadulterated form. Though he could not know what he struck, Quirinus has hit upon my doubt. There are the questions whose answers it may be for the best that I never find. My loyalty to the Blood Angels is not a question. But my identity? That is a question, one hidden from all but myself. What am I? What is the thing that stirs inside me? Am I truly a Blood Angel still?

Yes, I am. I will believe this. I must believe it. The ever-widening gulf between myself and the rest of the Chapter is a source of doubt, but it is not proof.

It is not proof.

Quirinus is wrong, too, to think I am not affected by that statue. Unlike the rest of the company, however, I am resisting the artefact’s emotional gravitation. There is no point yet in trying to pull my brothers away from the icon. Its hold is too powerful. Any attempt on my part to break it would simply confirm, in the eyes of all, Quirinus’s worst surmises about me. It is growing more difficult, however, to quell my anger. Instead of frost, green fire crackles around my feet, scarring the surface of the stone, gouging lines as if with claws of diamond. I cannot stay here. If I do, Quirinus will say something, and one of us will do something that we shall regret. I turn and stride out of the tower.

I am not pleased by the sight that greets me here. With the retreat of the Sanctified, the degraded population of Vekaira has returned to its normal life. Or what passes for normal on this world. The miserable wretches approach the tower on their knees, throwing up their hands in prayer. To whom do they think they are praying? Sanguinius was worshipped on Baal before the arrival of the Emperor, but this is not Baal, nor is it a world that somehow doesn’t know of the Emperor’s existence.

After a minute, I am joined by Castigon. He is here, I know, out of respect, not friendship. ‘What are your intentions?’ I ask him, before he can utter a peacemaking platitude.

‘We consolidate and hold this position, then destroy the Sanctified when they return.’

I share his conviction that there will be a counter-attack. But we still lack a reason for the traitor’s interest in this site. ‘And the statue?’

‘Once Pallevon is secured, we will take it to Baal.’ He pauses. ‘We will use all due caution,’ he says.

From the entrance comes the sound of our brothers’ voices raised in a hymn of praise. Quirinus has begun a service of thanksgiving.

Castigon is unapologetic. ‘We have been blessed with a decisive victory, and the Reclusiarch’s vision has proven true.’

‘And you see nothing ominous in the links that have brought us from the Eclipse of Hope to here?’

‘I did not say that. But what would you have me do, Chief Librarian? Should I ignore what we have found inside this tower? Can I? Can you?’

No. None of us can. There is too much truth in that depiction of Sanguinius. Somewhere in that truth, however, is a lie. That, or a terrible truth that seeks to wound our Chapter.

I shake my head, once, and Castigon moves on to organise the defences. Inside the tower, there is a pause in the chanting. In that moment of quiet, I hear something that, at first, I think is an echo of the service, rolling back from the top of the amphitheatre. I listen, and in the next interval between stanzas, I hear the sound again. It is not an echo. The intonations and rhythms are correct, but the voices are too thin, broken, mortal. I look up the slope of the bowl, puzzled. A few metres in front of me, standing beside the Phlegethon, Sergeant Gamigin is gazing in the same direction. I walk over to him.

‘Do you hear it too, Lord Mephiston?’ he asks.

‘I do. Come with me.’

We leave the tower and make our way slowly up the bowl of the amphitheatre, weaving our way through the motionless warriors, observing the crawling humans. Many of them have left their decrepit village to engage in worship. They are not the source of the echo. That sound comes from the top of the bowl. But as we pass each one, I can hear a whispered prayer. These savages, too, are mimicking the prayers of my brothers. The imitation is a blasphemy. The sounds are similar, but the words are gibberish. Every worshipper is ranting nonsense, and each worshipper is ranting different nonsense. I choose one subject and examine him more closely. His eyes are glazed with desperate passion. He ignores me, his attention focussed on the tower to the exclusion of all else. His knees are a gory mess as he crawls on, reaching out for something. I doubt that he even knows the nature of his desire. The words spill from his throat in an avalanche of pleading need, yet are barely audible, as if constricted by holy fear. His emotion has shattered language with its strength.

But what is his need? What is it that torments him? His face is as dull as it is frantic. Any true comprehension fled long ago, if it were ever there at all. I turn from him to the woman a pace away. She is no different. These people are not sentient. Their need and their worship are vestigial. The intensity is there. The meaning is dead. I wonder what killed it, and when. I suspect the moment of the amphitheatre’s creation.

‘Are they mocking us?’ Gamigin asks.

‘No. They hear the sounds of worship and imitate them because they come from the object of their veneration.’

We reach the village, following the sound of the grotesque parody of prayer. It is even more pitiful than I had thought. Not one of the shacks is recent. Many of them are collapsing, held up only by the chance of walls leaning against each other. The first two I look in are abandoned. It would seem that these people have lost even the cognition necessary to seek shelter. But the third is different. It is larger than the others, and in better condition. This is not because it has been repaired. It was built more solidly, that is all. It is windowless. It is rectangular, with actual doors at one end, and is at the centre of the cluster of huts. Its position and size suggest a feasting hall or a church. And it is from here that the chanting emerges.

‘The smell,’ Gamigin says.

‘Yes.’ It grows stronger as we approach the building. It is the stench of corruption, as if the hymn itself were rotting. Gamigin raises his bolter as I open the door.

I was right. It is feasting hall. And a church. And it is still in use.

Old, rotting blood pools around my boots and oozes towards the entrance. Daylight penetrates no further than the first third of the space, as if ashamed to go further. I see well enough with my augmented vision. I see what the Vekairans are eating.

Each other.

This is a charnel house. I cannot say the bodies are butchered, for that is too neat a word for what is done here. The victims are dismembered, torn to pieces by hands, the flesh ripped from the bones by teeth. There is a chimney in the centre of the ceiling, and below it, the archaeological trace of a fire pit, but no flame has burned here for centuries. Bones, spoiled flesh and half-eaten organs are piled high in heaps of waste. The culture of Vekaira comes together for me, the scraps of evidence forming an obscene portrait. This is a population of cannibals, devouring itself faster than the birth rate can renew it. Though the city once held millions, it is astonishing that there are any people left here at all. But that is a wonder I will not pursue. There is no point. The Vekairans have nothing more to tell me.

But they try. There are dozens of people here, chewing on flesh both new and old, and chanting their idiot mimicry of holy rite. I do not know if they are giving thanks or begging for favour. I doubt that they know, either. Those near the door cringe back. They gaze at us with stupid, feral eyes. The lowest ork has more dignity than these creatures.

‘You are not worth saving,’ I tell the humans.

They do not respond, other than to continue cowering, eating and chanting. Gamigin and I walk back outside and close the doors. We look at each other. ‘They are beyond the light of the Emperor,’ I say. Gamigin nods. To think we rescued these worms from being fodder for the heretical rituals of the Sanctified. It is surprising that such material would have been a sufficient sacrifice for the traitors’ ends. Perhaps it was not.

‘We should have a flamer,’ Gamigin says.

‘We’ll manage,’ I reply, but before we can begin the purge, I see Albinus making his way towards us. I wait. He pauses a few metres away. He removes his helmet. His eyes are still shining from the glory of the statue, and that is enough, it seems, for him to ignore the noises and the stench. He has been in the presence of the sacred, and the grime of mortals is beneath his notice. I know he is going to plead with me to return. The air temperature around us drops precipitously. When Albinus says, ‘Mephiston,’ his breath mists.

I cut him off. ‘Go in there,’ I say, pointing to the hall. ‘Then we will speak.’

He obeys. When he returns, some of that glow has left his eyes. Doubt – healthy, necessary doubt – has taken root.

‘Imagine,’ I say, ‘that we had arrived here unguided by Quirinus’s visions, and the Sanctified were not present. Imagine that all we saw were these debased creatures and the spectacle before us. What course of action would we have taken?’

Albinus does not hesitate before answering, and this gives me hope. ‘We would destroy everything.’

‘And yet we do not.’

‘Because we would have been wrong. We would not have stopped to discover what is in that tower.’

‘Surrounded by the obscene, how can that thing not be more of the same?’

‘Did you not see it?’

‘I did.’

‘Truly? I think not. That is Sanguinius, in every detail. I know, with as much certainty as I know the blood that flows in our veins, that I have at last gazed on the true resemblance of the primarch. You have, too, Chief Librarian.’ When I do not answer, he insists, ‘You have.’

He was honest with me. ‘Yes,’ I admit.

Albinus sighs. ‘Then…?’

‘I have seen a resemblance. The work is extraordinary. And? That tells us nothing about the provenance or nature of the statue. The appearance of sanctity and its reality are very different. Our Chapter has learned this lesson most bitterly. We should know better than to be taken in by a false idol yet again.’

‘The situation is different. There is no counterfeit possible in that statue.’

I want to argue, to shake Albinus from this delusion, but I cannot. I know, at a level most disturbing, that he is right. There is a truth in that tower. But it is a partial one. It must be. I turn from him in frustration and confront the festering village once again.

‘What would you have us do, Chief Librarian?’ Gamigin asks.

I point to the church. ‘We will destroy this filth.’ I grit my teeth. ‘And then we will complete our mission.’ I will not countermand Castigon’s plans to preserve the statue. Quirinus would fight back, and a schism would be inevitable. I love the Chapter too much to visit another such nightmare upon it. And the Sanctified must be destroyed.

With grenades, with bolter fire and with my frustration transmuted into scouring lightning, we level the church. We scrape the land clean of these animals. And still we walk down the path that has been prepared for us, further and further into the shadows, where something is waiting.

And laughing.

CHAPTER SIX

PYRRHIC

The Sanctified renew their campaign at the end of the day. It takes them that long to regroup. By that time, we are more than ready behind our defences. We have brought our tanks into position. They surround the spire. We have taken care not to disturb the peace of the frozen warriors. Precisely why we treat them with a care approaching reverence, I am not certain. We are conscious of these stilled presences, but we do not discuss them. The shroud of mystery that hovers over them is woven of the sacred, the cursed and the familiar. We do not know who these warriors are, but somehow, we are as reluctant to desecrate their rest as if we were faced with a graveyard of Blood Angels. We will do them no harm. But why, the question lingers, did the Sanctified show the same care?

So when the traitors come, they face cannons able to blanket the top of the amphitheatre with high-explosive shells. We have heavy armour, air superiority, and sheer numbers. We hurt the Sanctified badly in the initial clash. It would take an act of madness, or a special sort of desperation, for them to attack us.

But they do. Against all sense, they come. What drives them, I wonder, as the Phlegethon and its brothers commence their punishment of the foe. There is no possible strategic value in Vekaira, or the Pallevon system as a whole. There are no weapons here. There is only the statue, and it can have no meaning for the traitors beyond the blow to the morale of the Blood Angels that its loss would represent. Such a paltry form of victory would not compensate for the massive loss of warriors and materiel.

And yet they attack.

Sunset on Pallevon, when the world drowns in blood. The already red tinge of daylight becomes a deep crimson. A high, wounded tide fills the amphitheatre, a perfect stage for the carnage that now begins. While the tanks tear the enemy apart at the ridge of the bowl, the rest of us wait, holding back on the charge.

The shelling strikes the collection of shacks. This is no loss. It is a necessary burn. The barrage scatters chunks of Sanctified and cannibal over the landscape, the traitor mixing with the debased. The Sanctified do not retaliate with what heavy armour remains to them. The preservation of the tower seems to be of paramount importance to them, and now that we know what lies inside, this mixture of obsession and restraint is even more mysterious.

‘What are they doing?’ Castigon says. ‘This is madness.’ He sounds offended.

We are standing together beside the Phlegethon. We witness the Sanctified charge through the shelling and down the slope of the bowl. Our bolter shells pummel them. They seek no cover. They barely dodge our shots. Half a dozen well-placed rounds hammer a traitor to the ground, and the warrior behind him barrels over his body without hesitation. He is hit in the shoulder. He doesn’t alter his course. He keeps coming until he, too, is shot to pieces. That is the behaviour of orks or tyranids. They are simply rushing towards us with all speed. It is a tactic that is not unlike the one we used to take the tower, but for two significant differences. Their assault troops come in on their jump packs at the same time as the tactical squads. And they are grievously outnumbered. They cannot overwhelm us.

They are running to a slaughter. Their own.

‘I have never known traitors to be suicidal,’ I say. ‘Have you?’

‘No.’ His bolter sends a stream of mass-reactive shells into a single target. Castigon’s precision is peerless. The rounds pulverise the traitor’s helmet, and then his skull.

‘Then there is a reason behind their actions. We should be wary of that which is too simple.’ Yet even as I speak, lightning streaks from the tip of my sword. It plunges deep into the carapace of one attacker, fries both his hearts, then leaps to his brother behind him, and kills again. The traitors’ fingers twitch, and each warrior fires a few more shots even though he is already dead. Then they fall.

‘What would you have us do?’ Castigon asks me. ‘Hold our fire?’

‘No. But we should question the worth of what we are defending. Captain, the warp currents here are extremely powerful. We are standing in the centre of a vortex.’

‘And here we shall stand until the last heretic dies. Gaze on that icon once again, Chief Librarian. That will assuage your doubts.’

Leaving a wake of their dead, the Sanctified draw closer. They are numerous enough that we cannot cut them all down from a distance. They are firing back, but we have cover, and their accuracy is compromised by the speed of their rush. The bulk of their forces are almost upon us. I feel the anticipation build for the close-quarters clash of rage.

‘This is not war,’ Castigon growls. ‘This is stupidity.’ He is more than offended. He is angry. The most basic aesthetics of conflict have been violated, and he will not let such an insult stand. I can sense the rage gathering in the rest of the company. The air is taut with an approaching storm. The passions of war are about to slip their leash.

Rage is the fuel of Blood Angels at war. It is our danger, but it is also the medium of our lethal art. But this rage is coming too soon, too easily. We are rushing down the predestined road.

The storm breaks. The bulk of the Sanctified are well into the field of eternal combat, and their forwards elements are nearly at our defensive line. ‘Sanguinius!’ Castigon shouts, with more emotion than I have ever heard before.

‘SANGUINIUS!’ our brothers roar. Joy and rage are present in equal measure. When have we ever had something so precious to defend? When has an enemy offered himself so eagerly to our vengeance? But these questions are not asked. There is little space for conscious thought. The time is now for the savage instinct of war, and the Blood Angels thunder out from cover to grind the enemy into the ground.

The rage infuses my sword, and I attack with the energy of hate. The traitor before me trains his bolter at my face, but I cut off his hand before he can fire. He lunges forwards, seeking to run me down, but I take a step back and bring Vitarus down in a two-handed, overhead swing. I slice down through the top of the Sanctified’s helmet, bisecting his head and his neck, and cutting down into his chest. Deeper yet, stealing precious seconds to feed the thirst for violence. I do not stop until the Sanctified falls to either side of me. Ahead, more enemies rush to meet the death I bring them. On my right, something splashes me: blood from a traitor shredded by the chainaxe of Techmarine Phenex. His servo-arms dismember the corpse.

When we took the spire, the Sanctified fought back hard. Their fury then is nothing compared to what animates them now. They attack as if possessed, their anger a match for ours. Reclaiming the tower means more to them than any consideration of tactics or survival. They are willing to die recklessly for their goal. I have never seen such behaviour in traitor Space Marines. But if this is their wish, so be it.

We smash into them like a gauntlet through glass. We have a two-to-one advantage over them, and we make full use of it. Bolter rounds hammer armour, while chainblades snarl through limbs. The world is now red to the core: the red of light, of clashing armour, of gouting blood and of vision distorted by rage. Over the din of gunfire and clashing steel, the savage cries of the combatants coalesces into a single, unified, all-encompassing howl of war. The collective expression of rage has a perfection to it. The sound is a concerto of murder on a vast scale, an orchestra of weapons with a choir of hate. I become aware that some larger whole is being created. The battle is a means to something other than the ends of either party.

I cannot stop it. I cannot even remove myself from its creation as I fight and kill alongside my brothers. I share Castigon’s disgust with the Sanctified. I hunger to see them punished for their treachery. I feel the rising thirst for their blood. It is not enough to kill them. They must be devoured. A traitor lunges at me, swinging his chainaxe at my neck. He is fast, and the blow is a hard one. I lean back, and the revving blade misses my throat by a whisper. My will takes his skeleton and blows it apart. I shatter him with such force that fragments of bone shrapnel escape through the joints in his armour. His scream is brief, but satisfying. It is also insufficient. I turn to my next opponent with my blade searing the bloody twilight with its power. I slash down, carving a diagonal through the Sanctified from left shoulder to right hip. I channel so much of the warp’s destructive energy into the sword that it cuts as though there were no armour, no flesh, no muscle, no bone. Blood washes over me, and at its taste, I feel an old madness stir.

No.

I step back from the edge. If I fall into this trap, then there is no hope for the company. I am too submerged in the close-quarters fighting. I need to see more, so I gather my warp wings and fly straight up. Fifty metres in the air, I see the broader pattern of our struggle. Near the tower, the war of Blood Angels and Sanctified is a roiling mass. Though my brothers still block the Sanctified from the tower, the defence of the structure has given way to the slaughter of the foe. Armour slams against armour, and I hear relatively little gunfire. This is a battle of blades and fists, and of wading through the enemy’s blood. In the brief moment that I watch, there are three decapitations. Free of that frenzy, I see what I had missed, and should have looked for from the beginning. I see the anomaly. A small group of traitors has remained at the lip of the bowl. They are not firing weapons. They are doing something far worse.

They are conjuring.

There is a glow in their midst. It is not of part of the ocean of red light that has drowned the world. It is not truly light at all. It is a condensed ball of the immaterium. It is growing. It is not a colour of the spectrum. Red may be the colour of rage, but that orb is coloured in rage. Its appearance is impossible and absolute. Its existence reveals a terrible logic behind the nonsense strategy of the Sanctified. They have not been waging war. They have been performing a ritual. Their sacrificial charge is part of that rite, and so is our response. We have been acting as predictably as clockwork mechanisms. The ritual might as well have been our own, so eagerly have we performed our assigned role.

There is still a question: what do the Sanctified hope to gain?

The answer will have to wait. I streak towards the witches. All their concentration is on the sphere in their centre. They do not see me coming. They have no consciousness of me until I have begun to kill them.

I do not act as a psyker in this moment. I will not risk feeding the orb. No matter. I have other ways to kill. There are four witches here. None are wearing helmets. Their psychic hoods are no defence against a plasma pistol. I fire as I land, and vaporise the head of the nearest traitor. Now there are three. One does not react. He remains focused on the orb, his hands outstretched towards it. His face, a relief map of ritual scarification and branded runes, is frozen in ecstatic concentration. The other two come at me.

They do not hold back. They attack from either side, lashing out with bolts of dark energy. The crystals of my psychic hood pulse once, and neutralise the bolts. My lip curls in contempt. I raise my pistol. As I pull the trigger, a bolt hits the barrel, knocking the weapon from my hand. The two traitors close with their power blades. They know their sorcery is no match for mine.

The battle regresses to an ancient form. We fight with swords. They continue their simultaneous attacks. I parry their blows, but am kept on the defensive. They are skilled. They do not give me a chance to retaliate. Warp energy haloes their blades. I keep mine in check. It is still a match for theirs. It has killed for so many tens of centuries that it is peerless at its task. It hungers for the blood of the traitors, but its opportunity does not come. The witches slash at me with mechanical precision. I cannot block all the blows. Neither can my armour turn them all.

The orb is growing. It has a gravitational pull. It would be easy to trip and fall into this monstrous creation.

I must bring this stalemate to an end. The traitor to my left thrusts, and I let him make the hit. The sword pierces the seam of my armour beneath my arm. The blade sinks into my flank. I make the wound mine and slam my arm to my side, trapping the sword. The witch tries to yank his weapon out. He fails, and instead pulls me forwards. He doesn’t have time to realise his mistake. I plunge my sword into his throat, then twist it back and forth. The Sanctified gurgles, blood frothing from his mouth and nose.

The other strikes while he thinks my attention is diverted. He is wrong. I used the execution of his brother as bait. He aims his blow at my head, but I crouch as I slide my sword from the dead traitor and slash to my right. The edge of the sword is so keen that, even without the power of the warp, it can cut through ceramite if it strikes with enough force. I swing with both hands, and sever the traitor’s right leg just below the knee. He topples. He is easy to finish off.

I turn from my prey to the last of the Sanctified witches. The orb has grown in the last few seconds. I realise that I have continued to feed it. I tried to kill dispassionately, but that was a delusion. I hated the warriors I have dispatched. The shedding of their blood was an anger-soaked pleasure. I struggle and struggle, yet still I am a pawn in this game, playing out my role to the end. Though faced with this truth, I will not cease my resistance. I cling to the faint hope that I will end the game if I kill the last witch. I want to believe that I am not too late.

As I approach, the traitor breaks his fascination with the orb. He turns his head to look at me. He smiles. Before I can kill him, he plunges his head into the orb. His legs stamp and tremble. The fingers of his right hand twitch once. Then his headless body falls to the ground. The orb pulses and begins to rise. In desperation, I seek to touch the thing with my will. I try to take it apart. What I encounter is a concentration of rage that has been building for five thousand years. The entire history of Pallevon’s fall can be read here in its passions. The terrible worship of the spire ensured that all of the furies released in the self-murder of a population flowed to this spot. Our struggle with the Sanctified has been the capstone of this dark work, the final, necessary, harvest of rage.

And still the full nature of the work is hidden from me. The meaning of that statue is a lethal obscurity.

My attempt to dispel the orb founders. There is too much strength here. The collective psychic strength of billions hurls me back. The violence is such that the force of the blow is physical. I stagger. Blood pours from my ears. I know that the thing in the shadows is laughing at me. There is nothing to be gained by false restraint now, and I roar with frustrated anger.

The orb continues to ascend, gathering speed, and still growing stronger as it feeds on the conflict below. It flies to the top of the spire. In its final seconds, it accelerates into a streak. It strikes the tower.

There is a sudden end to the sunset. Night arrives, but it does not fall. It emanates from the tower. Darkness erupts from the tip of the spire. It climbs to the sky, a twisting, surging rope of black, and it screams with the anger of ten billion murdered souls. At the height of the clouds, it spreads in every direction, staining the firmament until the world is held beneath an obsidian dome. For a few moments, the reign of the abyssal night is absolute. The only light is from muzzle flashes in the bowl. Then illumination returns, now as a poisoned chalice of Chaos. The air begins to split. Cracks form in the materium. Fire gouts from them. These are not true flames. They are fragments of violent thought given flickering form. They do more than burn. They corrupt what they consume, dragging souls further into the embrace of the warp, fuelling themselves on agonised consciousness.

At the same moment that the cracks appear, there is the sound of a tolling bell. It is accompanied by the distinct sensation, inaudible but huge, of clockwork gears, long frozen, engaging at last. On the battlefield, after millennia of suspension, time moves forwards once again.

The frozen warriors are frozen no longer.

CHAPTER SEVEN

BROTHERHOOD

Click. Click. Click.

A rhythm in my mind and soul. It resonates in the ground, the air, my frame, unfelt by any but myself.

Click. Click. Click.

The beat of the inexorable, of the gears turning against each other and grinding all hope to dust. The machine is at work, as it has been since the Eclipse of Hope vanished five millennia ago. The mechanism advances, indifferent to any attempt to arrest it.

Click. Click. Click.

The sound, too, of fragments snapping together, bit by bit, obscenity by obscenity, until the full mosaic appears. I do not see it yet, but I sense the approaching revelation. Let it come. I retrieve my pistol and plunge back down into the amphi-
theatre, throwing myself headlong into the gears. I will arrest the inexorable.

The battlefield was a cauldron before. How to describe it now? The turmoil has the frenzy of warring insects, and the destructive tragedy of hurricane waves breaking on rocks. Battle formations disintegrated following the initial moment of clash. Contests between individuals or small groups scattered through the field, separated by the motionless warriors. Suddenly, there are three times as many combatants, and there is no more order at all.

The ancient Space Marines are berserkers. Inarticulate baying howls from their helm speakers. Their movements are huge, rapid, explosions of offence. There is no defence at all. They strike without distinction, attacking whoever is nearest, whether Blood Angel or Sanctified. A few briefly continue the duels that had been held in suspense for so long, but after clashing arms a few times, they turn on the new arrivals. There seems to be no thought to their actions, only instinct, and a seeking out of prey. I see firearms mag-locked to their armour, but they use only their chainblades. Swords and axes wreak deadly havoc, their motors somehow working after so many centuries inactive, the register of their snarls high pitched as though hysterical from hunger after so long.

I enter the storm of battle. Before me, Albinus and Brother Ronovus are struggling against four of the returned warriors. Ronovus empties a bolter clip into the chest of one foe. At point-blank range, the shells punch through the armour and burst out the Space Marine’s back, trailing mummified flesh, petrified bone and blood black with age. The wound does not slow the berserker at all. It is as if Ronovus were fighting the armour itself. But then the warrior’s helm speaker unleashes a howl of pain and a stream of incoherent, yet clearly articulated, invective. The being inside the armour is somehow alive, even though it has been withering away for tens of centuries. The warrior swings its chainaxe down on Ronovus, who blocks the blow with the barrel of his gun. The axe smashes the bolter in two.

I strike the warrior’s limbs and head with a strobing, writhing blast of occult energy. I reduce the abomination to pieces. It collapses, destroyed. Blood is pounding in my ears. I hate the thing I have killed. I would kill it again. I would exterminate all trace of its existence.

The vox-feed is little more than snarls. Rage breeds like a plague over the battlefield. I hear Albinus roaring. He follows my murderous example and pulls out his chainsword, though he still has his bolt pistol at hand. And now that gun is pointing at me. I don’t have time to form a question in my mind before he fires. The rounds sing past my left ear. I hear the sharp crack of impacts behind me. I whip around, sword out and flaming, and cut off the head of the one who would ambush me. It was a Sanctified. I turn back, blood from the traitor running down my armour, and am in time to see what I do not have time to prevent. Albinus holds one warrior at bay. Their blades lock and grind against each other. Ronovus has drawn his chain-
sword, but still another revenant has appeared behind him. It clutches its blade with both hands and stabs downwards, as if gutting a sacrifice. The teeth chew through Ronovus’s power pack, armour, and then spine. The berserker forces the sword down until Ronovus falls, dead, then withdraws its weapon.

As it turns its attention to me, a terrible thing happens. Ronovus rises to his feet. He joins the other warrior and closes on me.

Click. Click. Click. Implications fitting the mosaic pieces together.

‘Albinus,’ I shout. The Sanguinary Priest has just severed the right arm of his opponent. ‘Left!’

Albinus throws himself to one side and down as I lash out with a massive burst of transformative power. I do not target the berserkers themselves. I strike something with no will, no sense of identity that might resist. The force we fight has torn the air. I do the same to the ground. The earth flashes, then splits with a scream of rock. The energy I have unleashed collides with the reality of matter, and mutual annihilation occurs, releasing star-heart heat. Stone becomes molten. The warriors fall into a pit of lava. They sink quickly, struggling to the end to reach me. I watch, feeling the purging sear on my face. The thing that was Ronovus disappears beneath the surface of the incandescent rock, his vocaliser issuing a torrent of blasphemous rage. The light and heat fade, leaving only a glow and troubled stone where the berserkers had stood.

There is a momentary lull in the battle around us. Albinus stands beside me, looking at the patch of ground that has swallowed our brother and our other attackers. We are breathing hard, fighting back the Thirst. It comes upon us so easily. It withdraws so reluctantly. But after a moment, Albinus can speak. ‘What monstrous sorcery is at work here?’

‘The same that froze the battlefield and then unleashed it on us.’

‘But how is this possible?’

I shake my head. ‘What matters is that it is happening. We can seek answers later.’

‘And Ronovus,’ Albinus says. ‘His gene-seed…’

‘It was lost to us when he rose,’ I answer. His dark resurrection marked his progenoid glands as corrupted. We can do nothing for his legacy.

Albinus nods, and then the whirlwind catches us again as more berserkers attack. Above us, another fissure in the air opens, like a sword wound in flesh. Flames reach down for us, eager for the fuel of combat. This sorcery challenges my own, and I accept the thrown gauntlet. I seize the flames, make them mine, and direct the fire onto our attackers. I pull the crack in the real wider, and the fire becomes a torrent. The area explodes with uncanny light. A pillar of immolation consumes our enemy. I release the fire, and it remains in place, feeding off the detritus of its victims.

‘Mephiston,’ Albinus says.

‘I know.’ I saw the armour worn by two of the berserkers I just destroyed. Our ranks are thinning. The enemy’s are growing. Though the Blood Angels will never surrender, this war is moving towards a single possible outcome.

I will not permit such a defeat. I will free us from the path, and I must do so now, because at last I can see the end, and it draws very near.

The tower is the key. It is the source of everything. I point to the darkness that even now continues to erupt from the spire. ‘Is that the work of our primarch?’ I ask Albinus. ‘Is that the light of our Emperor?’

‘It is not,’ he admits.

‘No. It is not. Neither is what lies within.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Whatever I must.’

‘You will act alone.’

Even now, when it must be clear to all that the tower is not worth defending, the statue retains its hold. Its authenticity is too powerful, granting it immunity from the doubts of my brothers. ‘So be it.’

‘Do not damn us,’ Albinus warns.

‘Consider how close we already are to that state,’ I tell him, and take my leave.

I could fly over the field of battle to the tower. Near its base, a contingent of the Blood Angels and Sanctified still grapple, though the war has now spread over a wide swath of the amphitheatre. I do not fly. The Rage and Thirst are barely submerged, and they demand violence upon the enemy. So I run down the slope of the bowl, sword before me. I am an engine of destruction, gathering momentum and fury. Warp energy surrounds me, but it does not become wings. I am a meteor, a being of force and blood-red fire. I slash through the warzone, incinerating and dismembering. Everything I see pushes me closer to the edge of paroxysm, and it would be so easy to lose control, so easy to become the walking apocalypse. But my will is the source of my power, of my control over the warp, and by that will I stay just this side of blood-hazed mindlessness.

The effort of control is massive, though. What release I feel in the devastation I unleash is barely enough because of what I see. It is not just the dark turn in the tide of battle that outrages me. It is not just the monstrosity of our fallen brothers rising again to turn on us. There is another detail that is apparent to me now, as I pass, a wind of fire and blade, through the thick of the fighting. The true nature of the ancient berserkers is becoming apparent, and I long to wrap my hands around the throat of the being responsible for this horror. Weathering had eroded any Chapter markings from the armour of the ancient warriors. But as they fight and kill, a gradual transformation occurs. As if absorbing the shed blood, their armour is taking on colour. The shade is a familiar red. On their left pauldrons, the heraldry of a winged drop of blood has appeared. They are Blood Angels. I do not know how this can be, but it is the horrific truth. They are us, us at our worst. They fight with enraged savagery, then feast upon the gore of their victims. They are the Chapter as it might become. Perhaps here lies the solution to the dark resurrection. Time and destiny have been sheared in this place, and death is the threshold to a fallen future. If I do not end this madness now, all of Fourth Company will be of the berserkers’ number before the crimson dawn.

I reach the tower. Our tanks are still manned, but the guns are silent. There is no order to the battlefield any longer, and any heavy weaponry is as likely to kill one of our own as the enemy. Storm bolters spit shells into the darkness, but the defensive line is otherwise calm. There is no siege. I doubt there ever really was. We were lured to this place for the purposes of slaughter and conversion. I suspect the Sanctified have been pawns as well, only partially aware of the game being played. Many of their bodies litter the amphitheatre. None have risen. They have served their purpose, but we are the true targets. The tragedy is ours.

I enter the tower. I am not surprised to find Quirinus in the great vault. For a moment, I wonder if he has been guarding the statue during the entire battle, but then I see that I do him an injustice. He has been in the thick of the fighting. He is covered in blood. His armour is disfigured by gouges and burns. The tabard hangs in tatters. His purity seals are intact, but their scrolls are so begrimed and torn that they resemble ragged bandages. He stands before the statue, legs apart and braced, crozius at the ready. His helmet is lowered, as if he were a grox making ready to charge. ‘I saw you coming, Chief Librarian,’ he says.

So. For once, Quirinus and I are of a like mind. What will transpire in this vast chamber is more important than the battles beyond the tower. ‘And do you see what I have come for?’ I ask him. He must have. The vault is filled with blinding light. Its source is the statue.

‘I do.’ His tone is reverent.

He sees only what he wishes to see. He witnesses light from a statue and feels holy awe. He is blind. Sanguinius is brilliant. It is difficult to look at him without squinting. That light, though, has nothing sacred about it. It is sharp, fanged and eager. It is the foul companion of the darkness rising from the spire. It is the light of a supernova, the burning, enormous illumination that means destruction. All of the gathered warp energy has come to this point. It is the key to the endgame, our very personal doom, and Quirinus will defend it to the last.

I try one more time. ‘Reclusiarch,’ I say, ‘remember the duties of your high office. Destroy false gods. Guide our Chapter through the thickets of the Archenemy’s illusions.’

‘I do,’ he answers. ‘I am.’

I take a step forwards. I do not raise my sword, but nor do I sheathe it. ‘Really? Where, then, is your theological rigour? You are being fooled by a cunning lure. Look at the horrors that surround this graven image. It is the source of these horrors.’

Quirinus shakes his head slowly. ‘You mistake your own blindness for mine.’ He pities me. ‘The blasphemies outside these walls are not spawned by the icon. They are an attack on it. You are part of that attack, and I wonder just how unwitting you are.’ His helmet is unmoving. I know he is watching me closely, waiting for an attack. Without turning his head, he points up and behind to the statue. ‘You tell me to look, psyker. Do so yourself. Gaze upon the glory of our primarch’s martyrdom. Find your soul, Mephiston, or learn now if you still have one.’

I do as he asks. I will engage with him as far as reason and too-precious time permit. I do not want to come to blows. I have too much respect for the Blood Angel he once was, and that he still believes himself to be. So I turn my gaze to the statue. Without my willing it, it fills my consciousness. Its perfection is overwhelming. It is majesty and tragedy. It is the heart-rending moment when the future of our Chapter turned to ash. It requires an extraordinary effort on my part not to fall to my knees.

‘Why do you resist?’

I hear Quirinus’s voice. I do not see him. The radiance of the statue is the only sight in the universe.

‘I see you straining, Mephiston. Why? What is the daemonic influence that turns you against our primarch? You see the truth now. I can tell. Show me that there is still hope for you, that you are not forsaken.’

The questions strike home. The statue reaches into the deepest recesses of my being. I resist it. I will not have it there. But Quirinus asks why and suddenly all my answers seem tainted. The doubts that have gnawed since my struggle with M’kar twine like serpents around my soul. What is it within me that fights against this icon? Is it the daemonic that struggles against the holy? Why do I wish to turn from this light and drape myself in darkness?

Quirinus says, ‘Calistarius.’

The sky was black with smoke. Smoke from burning vehicles, ruined buildings, high explosives. Flesh. It had been necessary to raze Ecastor. The Word Bearers had done more than occupy the fortress. They had made its population their own. There had been nothing to save, and everything to destroy. The Blood Angels had visited the judgement of the Emperor upon the heretic and the traitor. Perhaps elsewhere on Arlesium there would be those who had not turned their faces away from the Emperor’s light. But not here. Ecastor and all within its walls had been put to the sword. The fortress itself had been shattered. Not a single wall still stood. On its plateau was now a field of rubble. From where Calistarius sat on a pile of rockcrete, the landscape of heaped and shattered grey stretched for kilometres in every direction. Here and there, an arm emerged from the wreckage. Some hands were limp, others were splayed in perpetual pleading. Beneath the remains of the fortress were thousands of lost souls.

‘You seem pensive,’ Quirinus said. The Reclusiarch strode towards him over the wreckage like the triumph of faith itself.

‘The mutations were severe.’

‘You mean there were many psykers.’

Calistarius nodded.

‘You have fought many such contingents before.’

‘But ones so large?’

‘You were tested,’ Quirinus observed.

‘I was.’ He was exhausted. He had been forced to discover the limits of his power by slamming up against them repeatedly.

Quirinus removed his helmet. ‘The smell of burning heretic is strong,’ he said, apparently changing the subject.

‘Better that than the stench of living heretic.’

Quirinus laughed. ‘Well said, brother.’ He looked off at the smoke-blurred horizon. ‘Now tell me what is troubling you.’

Calistarius smiled. ‘Do you never tire of being my confessor?’

‘If I did, I could not admit to it.’ Quirinus turned back to the Librarian. ‘Out with it.’

‘The heresy took root here so quickly,’ Calistarius said. ‘And it spread so quickly too. This world was a loyal one only a few years ago. I do not understand how a people could fall from faith with such ease.’

‘That is the essence of temptation,’ Quirinus responded. ‘Ease is what lies at the core of heresy. Chaos seems to demand nothing and give much. If one is weak, such a combination is impossible to resist. Faith, Brother-Librarian, true faith, is difficult. It demands everything.’ His voice suddenly took on a sharp, probing edge. ‘Has the warp been speaking to you?’

‘No more than usual. Whispers, promises of infinite power, visions of becoming the ultimate defender of the Imperium...’

‘…and then its ruler.’

‘Precisely. Have no fear, Reclusiarch.’ There was still a novelty to using that title. ‘I know these lies for what they are. They have no appeal for me.’

‘Perhaps not now. But if there is no temptation, then you have yet to be truly tested. The day may come when such power will seem necessary and justified.’ Quirinus paused. ‘During the battle, the Thirst and the Rage, you were able to keep them in check?’

‘Yes.’ The turn of the conversation made Calistarius uneasy. He thought again of that moment on the Thunderhawk during the approach to Ecastor, when two different time periods had overlapped in his consciousness. ‘I am not slipping away,’ he reassured his old friend.

‘See that you don’t,’ Quirinus replied, with more command than confidence. ‘The struggle against the Black Rage is difficult, and will always grow more difficult. Remember your faith, and remember its nature. The struggle is eternal. Beware of ease, and know that its presence is always a lie.’

‘Calistarius,’ Quirinus repeats, ‘is there anything of you still there?’

The use of that name is his mistake. The Reclusiarch is calling out to the dead, and so revealing how the quality of his thought has degraded. He believes Mephiston to be a shell built around the core of Calistarius. He is wrong. But his use of the name dredges up one of the dead Blood Angel’s memories, one that is useful. Quirinus was right all those years ago. True faith is difficult.

Belief in the statue would be easy. Therefore it is a lie.

And this is the hard, but simple truth: we have been led here by the forces of Chaos. There really is no other consideration. No matter what the statue appears to be, it is the daemonic that brought us here. That one fact negates any appearance of the holy.

The spell is broken. Full consciousness returns to me. I look away from the statue. I know it is a lie.

And yet…

No. The pain I feel in turning away is the pain of truth. I face Quirinus. ‘You have forgotten your own teachings,’ I say to him.

Either he does not hear me, or he chooses not to. ‘You are lost to us,’ he says. Though he speaks with sadness, I hear an undercurrent of satisfaction in his words. He will not forgive me for existing instead of Calistarius. He welcomes the chance to believe in my damnation.

‘No,’ I tell him, and walk towards the statue. ‘It is you who is stepping into the abyss.’

‘Come no closer,’ he warns. He braces. He will shield the statue from me. I think now he would even shield it from my unbelieving gaze. His grip on the crozius tightens. He will use it against me. The war of brothers, that tragedy that has repeated itself time and again down the Imperium’s history, is here again.

‘Move aside,’ I answer.

He raises the crozius. ‘In the name of the Emperor and Sanguinius–’ he begins.

I cut him off, anger drowning what pity I might have felt. ‘Do not speak their names,’ I snap. ‘You forfeited the right to do so when you began believing the visions that led to this accursed place.’

He is silent for a moment, stunned by what he interprets as temerity. He has no idea how much restraint I have shown towards him. His crozius wavers. Perhaps he is capable of doubt after all. ‘What are you doing?’ he asks.

‘Putting a stop to this monstrousness.’

‘No.’ The weapon rises again. ‘No.’ The helm vox-speaker does not convey emotion well. I hear his desperation nonetheless.

‘Your time in the warp has twisted your reason,’ I tell him. ‘I pity you, but I have had enough of your delusions. Step away from the statue. Now.’ I continue to stalk forwards. I still do not raise my sword. Even if our conflict is inevitable, I shall not precipitate it. But my patience is exhausted, and so is time. Outside the tower, war is an eternal roar. On the vox-network, grim determination mixes with desperate strategy. There is no limit to our brothers’ valour and skill, but they fight against impossible odds.

Quirinus does not move. ‘You walk to your death, daemon,’ he says. He sounds more desperate yet. He does have doubts, then. He responds to them by shoring up his false belief with greater lies. He would rather I be the worst agent of Chaos than face the fact that he has been tragically mistaken.

‘You are choosing ease over truth,’ I tell him with real sorrow.

He does not listen. The skull of his helm faces me, concealing his eyes and expression. I do not need to see them. I can read his thrumming stillness. He is working very hard to maintain his conviction that he is walking the path of the righteous. The effort makes him think he has made the hard choice. The comfort this decision gives should tell him it is the wrong one.

I stop before him. Less than an arm’s length separates us, yet we are more distant than that weak vessel Calistarius could ever have imagined. This is the last moment before one of us makes the gesture that will forever bury the memories of a past friendship. ‘You have been deceived,’ I tell him. ‘There is no dishonour in that. The shame lies in deceiving yourself.’

He hears me. I know he does. He was once a giant among our Chaplains. The mind that made him so, the mind that had the strength to survive that measureless time in the warp, still lives, however clouded. ‘I…’ he says, and hesitates. He looks back at the statue. And seals his fate. The brilliance is too great. How many Chaplains could resist such a culmination of their faith? How many Blood Angels could shun this manifestation of the primarch?

Here and now, on this planet, just one.

Quirinus turns back to me. By the set of his shoulders, I know I have lost him. I say nothing more. I move around him and set foot on the dais. ‘Stop,’ he says. I do not. I raise my sword to strike the statue. Now it is my turn to hesitate. I know the icon must be destroyed. But to smash an image of Sanguinius is an act of such enormity that it gives me pause.

Quirinus seizes the moment. Cursing my existence, he swings his crozius.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ICONOCLAST

My peripheral vision catches the movement. I shift my stance, bracing at the last second. The weapon strikes my armour in the midsection, a sacred relic clashing with a holy work artificed for me alone. The force of the blow knocks me across the chamber. I slide along the floor and slam against the wall to the right of the entrance. The metal of its construction shrieks. Bits of mortared weapons fall around me. Quirinus charges. ‘Desecrator!’ he yells. He is upon me in the blink of an eye. He aims his blow at my skull.

I bring my hands together. The sound is a thunderclap. The shockwave is directed. It lifts Quirinus off his feet and hurls him away. He lands with a crunch of ceramite on marble at the base of the dais. I stand, and am suddenly at a loss. I have never fought without lethal intent before. Quirinus has no such compunction. His bolter is out and he fires as he rises. I barely have time to conjure a shield. I stand behind a flashing, crackling shimmer in the air. Shells collide with it and ricochet around the vault. Quirinus jerks as a round punches his left pauldron. Others should be hitting the statue, but it has its own protection, and they vanish in a burst of light just before striking.

Quirinus has me on the defensive. He keeps firing. I stand motionless, concentrating on the shield. He runs at me, ignoring the stray hit. His clip empties just before he reaches me. His crozius comes in from my left side, the swing powered by the momentum of his charge and by his frantic faith. I try to block it. I am not fast enough. The blow is massive. Pain explodes on my flank. I am flattened against the assemblage of war.

My armour floods my system with pain-dampening drugs, but not before the injury transmutes restraint into rage. Quirinus thinks he knows what he is fighting. He thinks he can use the tactics he would against a common psyker: overwhelm through incessant, multiple, changing attacks; disrupt concentration; prevent any move to the offensive. This is sound strategy, and the Reclusiarch is a fierce warrior. But he does not know me. At so many profound levels, he has no idea what I am. And now his ignorance tires me. I have had enough. I sink my will into his own with the force and speed of a venomous serpent. He staggers away, clutching his head, his weapons forgotten.

‘You feel it, don’t you, Reclusiarch? You feel your mind and your body wrenched asunder. Struggle, claw at your helmet as if you could reach into your skull and pull me out of there. Savour these few seconds, the last of your control over your own movement. And now they are done. Stop.’

He stands still. There are now two statues in the vault. There is a mental scrabbling, like a small animal beneath the palm of my hand. It is his mind, struggling to escape my grip. His outrage and disbelief are palpable. He has never imagined he could be vulnerable to such an attack. The faith of a Chaplain is an iron shield against most mental assaults, and his has always been of an exceptional nature. But today, it is a false faith, an obsession clung to in defiance of the truth. It will not help him, especially not against me.

‘Mephiston!’ a voice calls from the entrance.

I turn. Albinus has followed me here.

‘What?’ I ask him. ‘Did you think I was going to kill him?’ When he does not answer, I snort my disgust and send Quirinus over to the Sanguinary Priest. Quirinus walks with stiff, jerking motions, like the marionette he is. ‘Hold him,’ I tell Albinus.

‘What are you going to–’

‘Hold him,’ I command, and Albinus obeys.

I release Quirinus. He begins to struggle immediately. Albinus has him contained for the moment. Quirinus may break free, and perhaps Albinus will let him go when he realises what I am about to do, but I have the seconds I need. I leap onto the dais. I channel such energy into Vitarus that its light is a crimson brighter than the brittle white emanating from the statue. Nothing will shield the icon from me, not even my own instincts. Because still, in this final instant, the awful spectre of damnation falls over me. I do not hesitate. I attack the statue as if it were a living foe, bringing my sword down on the neck. Horror fills my soul. This fragment of time, as my arm completes its arc, is stretched almost to infinity. I see and feel and hear and taste every nuance of this irrevocable act. There is all the time in creation to wish away what I am doing. There is no time at all to prevent it. There is a sudden flare as my blade pierces the statue’s shield without slowing. And then I murder my primarch.

I know the object is no ordinary statue. Even so, my expectation has been that I would be cutting through some warp-simulacrum of stone and precious metals. Instead, my blade sinks into the neck as if it were flesh. The texture of the skin, the degree of resistance, and the nature of the wound are all familiar in the most ghastly fashion, because I have killed in this way thousands of times, across hundreds of worlds. I do not know the act of decapitation with the same intimacy as does Astorath, but I know it well enough. Ice reaches up my arm and stabs me in the chest. In the eternity that has enveloped me, I know the worst of myself. I know that M’kar’s most poisonous insinuations were the truth. I know that I will bring darkness to the Imperium until I am destroyed.

I know all these things, and then the statue vanishes, and with it, everything else. False matter becomes infernal energy. My sword is a conduit, sending everything into me. Power that has been building for five thousand years courses through my blood. I cannot see, for the light is coming from me. My mouth opens in a tendon-tearing, silent howl of ecstatic agony. The scream is silent because the power is too great. There is no room for anything else. From my throat, my eyes and my hands come searing beams of pure warp energy. They are absolute potential, and at the next act of will, they will become a destruction no less absolute.

I cannot scream, I cannot see, I cannot hear, I cannot move. But I am capable of understanding. I have little choice. Epiphany is too weak a word to describe what I undergo. Knowledge floods me, answering questions unthought, creating new ones. The energy is encoded with the memories of the being for whom it was gathered. There are so many, too many, cascading through my mind in such an avalanche that I can retain only fragments. They are from five thousand years ago, and ten thousand, and more, back and back and back, before the Heresy, before the Emperor, before the Age of Technology. Throne, there are thoughts from the Age of Terra, almost forty millennia ago. How old is this being? It is not xenos. The earliest memories are all of humans, all on a Terra so ancient as to have passed beyond all record.

Then all these questions, all these fragments, vanish under the weight of a single memory. It falls upon me, complete and perfect in clarity and horror. It is the secret that lay behind the statue. No, I am wrong. It and the statue are one. The representation of Sanguinius was so true because it was not the work of an artist. It was a memory given form. It was a memory of a being who was present when Horus slew the angel.

A memory. And a celebration.

At this last revelation, I do not find my voice, but I find something more powerful. I find my rage. It is not the Black Rage, and surely any of my brothers would have fallen to that curse had they been exposed to that memory. But as agonising as the experience is, I have known it before. I suffered the Black Rage; I lived Sanguinius’s death. Scars have reopened, but the madness does not take me. I have known the primarch’s death twice now, once through his eyes and once through those of a dark witness. The rage I feel is directed at that witness, and the rage does not belong to Sanguinius. It belongs to me.

I use it.

My anger gives me focus. It has targets. So much power has flowed into me that I am on the verge of dissolution. I must purge the energy. I create a channel. With the will granted me by rage, I shape the charge as best I can, and then I unleash a force to shatter history.

The explosion is massive. Its light is the deathly white of the statue mixed with the crimson of my hate. It begins as an expanding sphere of the inchoate. With a slipping grip on consciousness, I am able to isolate Albinus, Quirinus and myself from the pure disintegration. The sphere strikes the limits of the vault. With a roar of falling gods, the tower flies apart. Every blade and gun and club that made up its walls is launched on its own trajectory. The spire becomes a swarm of weaponry, raining war upon the land. Our tanks and gunships are sent tumbling end over end, leaves in the wind. Beyond the tower, the destruction takes the shape of my rage. The sphere becomes electric streams, the claws of my talon. They slash across the battlefield, swallowing the berserker Blood Angels and the remaining Sanctified, blasting them apart, reducing their blasphemous existence to smoke. My will is a spear, impaling all that is unclean. It is a fire, scourging the land. It is a monster, devouring all of its kin. I experience the destruction of each foe. I revel in it. My thirst can never be slaked, but it laps up the enormous kill. And when the dragon of rage has feasted, it finally dies.

The light fades. The boom echoes off the towers of the city, falling to a distant rumble, and then… silence? No. Nothing so blessed. There is a low, pulsing hum, almost sub-aural. It is so deep, so powerful, that my spine and chest vibrate to its rhythm.

I have fallen a few metres from the dais. I am drained, hollowed out. Oblivion would be welcome, but the hum is insistent. It beats at the frame and at the mind. It will not be ignored. It will not let go. I struggle to my feet. Where the statue stood, there is now a wound in the materium. Darkness still holds sway over Vekaira. The dome of black has not dispersed, and the only illumination is from the fires still licking through the rips in the air. The tear in the real before me is of an even darker black. Its form is irregular and shifting. Tendrils of the warp twist at the edges, serpents the colour of nightmares and madness. Submerged within the hum, but leaking now into my awareness, I can hear an infinite choir of screams and moans. Those are not the cries of the tortured and the murdered. They are the songs of torture and murder themselves. The worst dreams of our species have a life, and they are moving on the other side of that rift.

A howl of rage makes me turn. Albinus is struggling with Quirinus. The Reclusiarch is on the ground. Albinus is behind him, pinning both his arms. Quirinus thrashes. I open my mouth to tell Albinus to release him. There is nothing left for him to defend. He can do no more harm. Then I realise that he is shouting in High Gothic. He is not cursing me, but Horus. The Black Rage is upon him.

Though I protected the two Blood Angels from the worst of the blast, I could not spare them entirely. Their armour looks as if burning claws have raked it. Albinus’s shoulders slump. He is exhausted. I can barely walk, but I join him. I hold Quirinus’s legs, keeping him immobilised while the Sanguinary Priest speaks to him. Albinus calls his name. He entreats Quirinus to remember who he is, when he is, and to come back to his brothers. Albinus recites the Litanies of Sanguinary Intercession, praying for Quirinus’s deliverance from the temporal fugue.

Around us, the remains of Fourth Company gather. It is a diminished force. The losses have been great. No warrior walks unscathed. Drawn to the source of horror, the Blood Angels are confronted by a fallen Reclusiarch, a world still in the grip of Chaos, and the fact of a sacred icon’s destruction. Captain Castigon, his Iron Halo battered, his armour scorched of its glory, kneels beside Albinus and takes over restraining Quirinus’s arms. He meets my eyes briefly. I see exhaustion in his gaze. Worse: I see uncertainty. Though there has been a victory in the destruction of our enemies, he wonders at the cost. He suspects a greater loss. Despair is on the heels of that uncertainty.

Albinus removes Quirinus’s helmet and his own, that his words might reach the afflicted more easily. The intonation and rhythms of his ritual chanting were lost through the distortions of speakers. Still, there is little he can do. Albinus’s spiritual duties concern the Red Thirst. It is the Chaplains who guide their charges through the finality of the Black Rage, and we have no Chaplain. Dantalian, who preached to Fourth Company, died on the Eclipse of Hope. And now we are losing Quirinus. He believed not wisely but too well. The shock of the truth has destroyed him.

Then, his eyes clear. He blinks at Albinus. His raving stops.

‘Have you returned to us, brother?’ the Sanguinary Priest asks. ‘Do you see us?’

Quirinus looks at me. ‘I see you,’ he says. It is an accusation.

‘Have you returned?’ Albinus repeats.

The question is not idle, nor rhetorical. It requires an answer. That answer requires the sufferer to be self-aware. Quirinus’s face is contorted with effort. His lips are drawn back in a grimace of strain that could easily turn back into rage. He hangs over a precipice, his grip tenuous. He takes a great, shuddering breath before he speaks.

‘I will not return,’ he says. The words fall upon the company like the peal of the Bell of Lost Souls.

He is not addressing Albinus. He is speaking to me. ‘Why?’ I ask.

‘I will… lose too much.’ His fight is perverse. He is struggling to remain sane long enough to curse that sanity. Another breath. ‘I will not be a monster.’

That is his farewell. With his final rejection of the path I walk, he releases his hold and falls into his personal abyss. His eyes see another time, another threat, and his mind urges him to fight the Battle of Terra. Albinus deploys his narthecium, injecting Quirinus with a massive dose of sedative. We will add another name to the roster of the Death Company.

I stand back as Albinus tends to Quirinus. The Reclusiarch has remained true to the conclusions of his beliefs to the end. He who withstands the Black Rage is without soul. Perhaps he is right. Perhaps I am something worse yet. But which of us stands for the Chapter? Disgusted by his weakness, I turn my back on him.

I face the rift once more. We have allowed ourselves the luxury of a few minutes to deal with the fall of a legend. We have been liberated of our physical foes. But this opening to the warp might yet spell the end of Pallevon, and perhaps of us. I do not know if we can close it. I do not know the nature of the blackness that covers Vekaira, and whether it can be crossed.

I do not know, in this moment of honesty, what I have done.

Castigon stands nearby, eyeing the rift. ‘And so, Chief Librarian?’ he asks. What he means is, You have no answer, do you?

‘The game is not over,’ I mutter.

‘No,’ comes the answer from beyond the rift. ‘Well played, Blood Angel.’

CHAPTER NINE

THE PUPPET MASTER

The speaker is not among us yet, but the words inflict another wound upon the materium. There is a sudden, torrential rain of blood and ash upon the scattered remains of the tower. The voice is resonant with power and millennia upon millennia of violence. It sneers with the special malevolence that comes not from being born to evil, but from choosing that path and rejoicing in the destiny that follows. The voice is as deep and bone-shaking as the hum of the rift, but it thunders, too, like a million drums of war. And it rasps. It is claws scraping the inside of a skull. It is teeth gnawing the bones of hope until they snap. It is the laughter of genocide.

The blood keeps falling from the vault of the black dome. The warp-screams grow louder. The cracks in the air erupt with sudden gouts of flame, and from them comes a new army. They are not soldiers. They are vermin. Their twisted horns sprout from elongated heads. Their legs are backwards jointed, giving them a mocking, prancing gait. They are the bloodletters of Khorne, and they plagued us aboard the Eclipse of Hope. The sensation of a hellish circle at last being closed is sickening.

The daemons stalk towards the exhausted company. We are surrounded. The Blood Angels respond as if fresh to the battle. Defiant, Fourth Company forms a defensive circle. There is no cover. The tower has been reduced to bits no larger than a metre or two. But the wave of daemons will break upon crimson rock.

Castigon joins the circle, exhorting his warriors to a heroic effort. ‘Now comes the true enemy!’ he proclaims, his voice as strong and as eager for battle as when we first stormed the gates of Vekaira. ‘Now, at last, we have the blight of Pallevon in our sights! Sons of Sanguinius, we shall teach the forces of Chaos a lesson in humility this day. They shall learn, to their sorrow, what it means to invoke the wrath of the Blood Angels!’ And the lesson begins. Mass-reactive destruction pours into the ranks of daemons.

I remain outside the circle. I ignore the bloodletters. Whatever danger they represent, they are still a distraction. I confront the rift, waiting for the arrival of the commander of this horde. He speaks again, his voice effortlessly drowning the stutter of guns. ‘Oh, the words, such fine words. Do they give you comfort, you playthings? Do you not tire of mouthing and hearing these tiny posturings?’ The voice is monstrous. It uses sound and words to savage its listeners. I force myself to concentrate past the assault and analyse what I hear. I will do what lies within my power to take the measure of the coming foe. I note the facility with language. There is something, however debased, of the human in the speech patterns. The jagged mosaic of memories impress themselves upon me once more. I have no doubt that they are the memories of this being. This creature, who witnessed the death of the primarch, who is eras older than the Emperor Himself, was once human.

‘Do not answer,’ I vox Castigon. ‘Do not give this abomination that satisfaction.’

‘The satisfaction of what?’ comes the scraping response. There is no urgency to the voice, no acknowledgement of the pitched battle that has erupted at my back. ‘Would you deny me your rage? It is too late for that, Brother Mephiston. Far too late for that.’

The use of my name and the assumption of kinship plunges me back to the caves of Solon V and the lies of M’kar. I bristle, but do not answer.

‘You have denied me nothing,’ the voice continues, with the awful ring of truth. ‘You have given me everything. You have been the tools of my vengeance against your Chapter. You have opened the way to my dominion.’

‘There shall be no more games!’ I shout, and move forwards. I will throw myself into the rift if that is what it takes to close the wound. I must, for the appearance of this doorway is the terrible answer to the mystery of the incarnate memory and why we have been lured here. In destroying the statue, I completed my final, assigned steps in the dance. I released the enormous build-up of energy. I tore open the materium.

I unleashed what is coming.

‘No more games,’ I repeat.

‘Agreed,’ says the voice.

I stop moving as I see a shape coalescing in the rift. ‘Let us put an end to games. Let us put an end to everything.’

The arrival of the nightmare is sudden. There is the suggestion of a presence. There is a sound of agonised reality breaking. And then the being is among us. He is immense, towering over us all, and I wonder how such a thing could ever have been human.

But then, so was I. Once.

I behold a daemon prince.

Of the man, only cruelty remains. The head is framed by two long, forwards-curving horns. The face is reptilian. The eyes are narrow, and from their deep pits of blackness, tiny slits glimmer with terrible knowledge. The maw, which could bite the head off an ork, is filled with needle-thin teeth. The daemon prince strides towards us on legs the size of Space Marines. His claws are gladius-long. His hide and his armour are the red of coagulating blood, and it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. The knee-plating takes the form of a horned, daemonic face. The eyes blink. The jaws of the relief sculptures open and close in hunger and savage amusement. On each of the monster’s pauldrons, a human writhes, surrounded by skulls emerging from a pool of blood. Only the upper half of the tortured soul is visible. At first I think this is because the unfortunate has been torn in two, but then I see the truth is more terrible yet: the body submerges into the unholy plate. The skulls bob and sink. That is blood, that is a deep and noxious pool, and yet it is armour. From the daemon prince’s back, two curved spikes rise, on which are impaled the mummified heads of Adeptus Astartes. Symbols are carved into their foreheads. The monster carries a gun. It looks like a form of bolter. It is engraved with death’s heads. Its barrel is as thick as my arm.

The earth shakes with the daemon prince’s steps. He pauses a few metres from me. He spreads his arms wide. ‘I am Doombreed, Blood Angels, and you belong to me. Now, kneel, and together we shall feast on the blood of the galaxy.’

Doombreed. Click. Click. Click. Logic and machine advancing together, moving towards a picture both coherent and final. Doombreed, leader of several Black Crusades. Five millennia ago, he fell upon the Imperium. He was defeated, and the archives of Space Marine Chapters are filled with records of glorious victories. Ours among them. The histories are also chronicles of unspeakable atrocities, the annihilation of entire planetary systems, and wounds that bleed to this day. I recognise the symbols on the trophy heads of the Space Marines now. They are the liveries of the Warhawks and the Venerators, two Chapters extinguished utterly, lost to the dark dream unleashed by the being that stands before me.

The only answer to Doombreed’s speech is the continued shredding of his minions. How the daemon prince could imagine the Blood Angels would betray the Emperor beggars the mind. The presumption is laughable. Such treason is impossible.

Such conscious treason, I think. I try to suppress the thought, but it is there, nestled amongst my doubts. Click. Click. Click. The questions I have about my darkness. The identity of the berserkers. Doombreed cocks his head, the reflecting dark of his eyes trained on me, amused. ‘I thought you were tired of games, Chief Librarian,’ he says. ‘Isn’t it long past time for pretence?’

‘It is,’ I snarl. I walk towards him. ‘It is time for reckoning. I taught your accursed ship to fear me before I destroyed it. I shall teach you to scream.’

‘You disappoint me,’ Doombreed begins. I believe he thought me drained of energy, and perhaps I am, but my will to fight such horrors is unbounded, and the warp bends to my command.

I send a burst of scarlet light into his face. It is hardly more powerful than simple pyrotechnics, but it is dazzling and distracting. He takes one step back, blinking, and I seize the opportunity. I thrust my blade through his armour. Simple metal will not harm this being. I cannot stab him to death. But the power that was absent from the light show is in Vitarus, and I strike him with a fire fit to rip souls in two.

Doombreed’s roar shatters the air. More chunks of the real fall to the ground, releasing greater bursts of warp-flame. The monster bats me away with a fist half my size. The blow would crush a tank, but I anticipated it, and an immaterial shield absorbs the worst of the impact, transforming the force into kinetic energy.

I fly in a high arc, gain control of my flight and land near the top of the bowl. ‘You have been freed only to meet your final end!’ I taunt.

Enraged, Doombreed pursues. He thunders across the amphitheatre, away from the battle between my brothers and the bloodletters. I want his focus on me. Without his help, his army will be annihilated, leaving only him for Fourth Company to fight, should I fall.

But I will not. I freed the monster. I will destroy him.

I cannot say that I have drawn first blood. Doombreed has been striking at us since the Eclipse of Hope. But I have drawn blood, and infuriated my foe. Wrath gives strength, but unthinking wrath births errors. Doombreed charges. He wants me spitted on his horns. Good. My own snarl builds. I owe him a great agony, and he shall be repaid. Anger, directed anger, courses through my blood. Command of the warp flows with it. I gesture, conducting reality. I focus on Doombreed’s path, choose my spot, and strike.

As before, stone is rendered molten by the heat of my rage. The daemon prince plunges his left leg deep into the sudden pit of lava. He stumbles, but does not fall. Instead, he deliberately steps fully into the trap. He stands there, submerged to the knee in boiling rock, and smiles. He scoops up a handful of lava, lets it drip through his fingers. ‘Yes, little brother, yes,’ he says, resuming his most insidious attack. ‘You fight like a true son of Khorne. But you have so much to learn.’ He spreads his arms, palms up, and gestures as if lifting the earth.

The entire upper third of the amphitheatre erupts. I am knocked skyward by a titanic geyser of lava and flame. Boulders are hurled like wheat in a gale. The heat would consume me. I survive in a bubble of force, but the blaze still reaches through that shield and my armour, the pain as piercing as it is enveloping.

The wings of my primarch fly me higher, above the reach of the eruption. At this height, I see a second eruption, this one at the centre of the bowl. The rift is tearing wide, spreading the poison of the warp over an ever-greater area. Reality bends and melts into abstractions of rage. Somehow, the ground on which my brothers are fighting remains stable, but elsewhere rubble howls its anger and fangs sprout from nowhere.

I retreat into the city. I must fight Doombreed on different terms. There is something that feels like inspiration scratching at a door in my mind. I must open it. I seek a moment’s respite at the base of a hab-tower.

The daemon prince will not give me that chance. He pursues me with fire and thought. He is advancing up from the amphitheatre, laying claim to all of Vekaira. The city bleeds as he tears open the roadways, transforming them into arteries of incandescent rock. The city burns as the intense heat ignites combustibles, fanning the fire wide and high. The city twists as the flood of unreality spreads. In the distance, I see towers waver and crackle, while flame suddenly becomes rigid. And snaking through the growing holocaust is Doombreed’s voice, travelling the paths of warp energy, pounding at me as if it were the grinding call of the planet itself. I cannot escape it, and it leaves no room for thought.

‘Do you flee, Chief Librarian?’ The words are mocking, probing, seeking. ‘How unworthy. I thought better of the one for whom I have waited five thousand years. Yes, Mephiston, I have foreseen your coming. When your kin used the very power of my fortress to imprison me, held in the warp but staked to this miserable planet, they yet could not keep my mind in this cage. I have journeyed far along the threads of fate. I have seen you. I know what you are. Do you not wish to know also?’

I do not answer. I try to think strategically, to plan how to ambush and destroy him. And though I know words are a weapon in the daemon’s arsenal, and that he will say anything, I am cursed in this moment by my own insight. I know when I hear the truth, and I am hearing it now. My foe’s questions will not be denied, and I think, I do know what I am. My actions are what I am. That answer does not satisfy me, and Doombreed catches the scent.

‘Oh, the nobility of the Blood Angels. See how they bear up under the tragedy of their fate by aspiring to be the most perfect heroes of the Imperium. What a waste. See how they diminish themselves for the glory of their corpse-god. They resist their true nature. They resist their potential and their destiny. You have seen what it could be.’ The words are pythons. Doombreed is using truth to give his lies more suffocating power. ‘The Blood Angels who trapped me here, they learned to see things differently. Wouldn’t you agree?’ Click. Click. Click. The final pieces of the black mosaic are falling to their places. ‘Yes,’ says that voice, a tectonic whisper, ‘they trapped me here, at the price of their own freedom. They left their empty ship for me to play with, and their souls for me to enlighten. They saw the truth, in the end. They became your Chapter’s destiny. And do you not see it? Do we not, in the end, wear the same armour? Blood for blood, Mephiston. Blood with blood.’

And with that, he thinks he has found me. The rockcrete of the avenue vanishes as a glowing crevasse opens up in the road before me, an arrow pointing at my feet. Doombreed rounds the corner a moment later. Once again, he pauses, and I have time to wonder why he does not attack at once. ‘Kneel, Blood Angel,’ he says. ‘Kneel and be victorious.’

Is my conversion really so important, I wonder, that he will refrain from killing me? The goal of his campaign has been my surrender far more than it has been my death. And now another possibility occurs to me. Perhaps it is not that he does not wish to destroy me. Perhaps it is that he does not think he can.

If so, then he is correct. He stands framed by the stone canyons of Vekaira. He has not found me: he has walked into my ambush. ‘I do not kneel,’ I tell him, ‘and yet I am victorious.’ I launch my attack. I tear open the materium on either side of the daemon prince, at the bases of the towers closest to him. Miniature storms of murdered reality spring into being, whirling vortices of uncreation. They destroy the foundations of the towers. The buildings fall, kneeling in my place. They slide forwards off their ground floors, remaining vertical for the first seconds of their doom. Then structural integrity is lost. The majestic gothic vaults of the windows close like blinded eyes. Flying buttresses fall, arms suddenly limp. All shape is lost, and Doombreed is buried under falling mountains.

I do not imagine that my foe is destroyed. I start pulling the two vortices in through the mountain of rubble. I will pass them back and forth, devouring all until they have feasted on the body of the monster. His voice has fallen still. I will silence it forever.

The front slope explodes outwards. I stagger back, battered by the hail of wreckage. Doombreed bursts from the rubble. He roars once more, and now his roar is never-ending, his anger unleashed until he devours the flesh of his enemy. He fires his bolter. I try to deflect the rounds, but it is like fending off a meteor storm. I do enough to avoid being reduced to a biological slurry, but I am punched through the wall behind me. Chunks the size of fists have been torn out of my armour.

I rise, shaking off the stun, but Doombreed is already here. He bursts through the wall and grabs me. He hurls me to the ground, hard enough to gouge a crater in the marble floor. He picks me up again and smashes me against the exterior wall, creating yet another hole. Outside, the warp plague has arrived, and the city is echoing the daemon prince’s snarls of rage. Fire and architecture become indistinguishable. The crevasses are maws. The lava has hands. The air is burning and bleeding. Colours smear and wash from object to object, and everything that pretends to exist is turning into the howl of blind rage. Doombreed lifts me high, holding me up as a sacrifice to a sky of roiling black. In answer, the black opens a roaring maw. Inside it, existence and oblivion are locked in combat. Creation and destruction are one and the same, an endless dragonfire outpouring of all-consuming energy.

‘He will not yield!’ Doombreed shouts to his dark god. ‘He and his fellow vermin are unworthy of your blessings. So let him be devoured!’ The sky draws near. No. We are rising. A column of lava is lifting us towards the zenith maw. I will meet my end hurled into the jaws of raging Chaos.

Only I will not. The warp is mine. Darkness is mine. Destruction is mine. I am the Lord of Death, and I hold illimitable dominion. Doombreed’s claws are crushing my body within my armour, but they do not hold my will. I reach out into the chaos. I see something that is not the formless, polymorphous abyss of anger into which Pallevon is falling. It is directed rage. It is hard enough to shatter adamantium. It is pure. It is sacred. It is the rage of the Blood Angels. As they make war on the bloodletters, they are the source of a tremendous, perfectly shaped energy of anger. It is so strong, so consistent in its nature, that it is holding the battlefield’s reality stable. Doombreed used it against us, his sculpted memory of Sanguinius absorbing the power like a battery until it destroyed the barrier between warp and materium. But that rage did not belong to him. He did not know it as I do. It is mine by birthright, yet I am distanced from it. I understand its nature. I have wrestled with its most devastating incarnation. But I stand apart. The thing that I am, that holds me separate from my brothers, lets me see the rage from the outside. I can see the shape of the collective fury of the Blood Angels. I grasp it.

I wield it.

Doombreed shrieks with pain and disbelief. He releases me. I fall, then rise again on wings whose light of glory is so intense they make the daemon prince shield his eyes. Smoke rises from his right hand. There are fires that will burn even the likes of him.

On his column of lava, he makes for me, reaching with claws to tear me apart, an aura of unspeakable energy gathering around him. But between my hands is my answer. Fuelled by the rage of Blood Angels at war, the gift of our tragic inheritance, it is a sphere of coruscating blood, and it is the manifestation of my infinite will.

‘For Sanguinius!’ I roar. These are the wages of Doombreed’s game. This is his repayment for the blasphemies that he has wreaked. This is my most perfect act in the service of my primarch. I unleash the orb, and all of creation vanishes in the holocaust of my power. All is blood, boiling blood, the blood that is summoned by the death of all things.

Summoned by the Lord of Death.

EPILOGUE

THE ABYSSAL GIFT

Dawn bleeds over the bones of Vekaira. Day comes, after a fashion. The dome of night has not been dispelled. Rather, it is now ragged. The flaming wounds in the air have been joined by the rips in the darkness. It is a shredded curtain. Through the flaps of night comes the light of an ageing star. The city is stable once more, but is frozen in the configuration of its madness. The towers of Vekaira became solid matter while they danced with Chaos, and their new shapes were structurally unsound. They have collapsed, all of them, leaving behind the twisted skele-tons of malformed giants.

These details are irrelevant. Soon even those traces will be gone, because Pallevon is to be subject to an Exterminatus bombardment. The rift is no longer virulent, but it is still there, slowly pulsing the poison of the warp. There is only one solution. The Crimson Exhortation will smash Pallevon with cyclonic torpedoes until the planet cracks apart. Nothing must remain. Doombreed will never have a base here again.

The bloodletters are destroyed. Of the daemon prince, there is no sign. I no longer feel his presence. I heard, at the last, in the blood apocalypse, a bellow of pain, one that did not fade. It was cut short. Still, I will not entertain the illusion that I have done more than banish him from the materium.

For now.

The battered company begins the process of embarking on Thunderhawks and Stormravens sent down from the Exhortation to return us to orbit. The pilots of the gunships will not have to make many trips. Almost half the company is lost to death or the Flaw.

I watch Albinus accompany the bearers of the sedated Quirinus into the Stormraven Bloodthorn. He has fallen to what I resisted. In the end, he chose to fall, declaring my strength the greater curse. He is wrong. He was misled. I was not. I–

I freed Doombreed. He is banished, but no longer imprisoned.

The thought is toxic. So are the words of kinship that the monster spoke to me. The doubts coil and twist. There is no escaping them. There is no quieting them. Nor will I quiet that other hunger, the one that exults in my terrible strength, and longs to unleash it again.

I follow Quirinus’s cortège, for that is what this procession has become. Induction into the Death Company will let him die with honour, but in truth my brothers are already mourning the loss of a great hero of our Chapter. Let that be so, and let the destruction of Pallevon be his pyre.

Quirinus walked in the light, and burned. For all that he embraced our Flaw, he could not truly see how it might lead to a greater strength.

I do not know what lives within me. I do not know how this hunger might grow. This I know: I hold darkness in my hands. It is mine. And this is my vow: it is, and shall always be, the darkness of holy extermination. For the glory of the Blood Angels. For the Emperor.

For Sanguinius.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Annandale is the author of The Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos. He also writes the Yarrick series, consisting of the novella Chains of Golgotha and the novel Imperial Creed. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2013.
This edition published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Cover illustration by Hardy Fowler.

© Games Workshop Limited 2013, 2014. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-78251-755-9

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