The Chapters Due

by Graham McNeill

  He saw the billowing red cape of Sicarius to his right, and though they had never been friends, Uriel recognised the greatness of his fellow captain. Hearing of his incredible victory at Corinth had served to remind Uriel how fearsome a warrior Cato Sicarius really was.

  He returned his attention to the ground, adjusting his descent with a twist of his shoulders.

  To reach the desired landing point was no mean feat, especially when launched from so high and so fast a vessel. Uriel angled his descent to send him arcing towards his Chapter Master, twisting his body around so that he was falling feet first.

  This was as dangerous a combat drop as he had ever attempted, and the shrill warning in his helmet told him he was leaving it dangerously late to fire his jump pack. The warning rune was blinking furiously as he triggered the jets at his shoulders and his rapid descent was brutally arrested in a blazing eruption of jetfire.

  Uriel slammed onto the surface of Talassar with a stone-cracking thunder of broken rock. Smoke wreathed his landing and the stone beneath his feet vitrified in the intense heat. His sword leapt to his hand as monstrous creatures with blunt, tapered skulls and curling ram’s horns threw themselves at him. Thudding impacts nearby told him the warriors of the 4th and 2nd had joined the fight, and the battle for Talassar rapidly changed character.

  Uriel cut his way through the horned daemons with wide sweeps of his sword, aided by roaring blasts from Pasanius’ flamer and deadly accurate bursts of Learchus’ bolter. Uriel’s command squad fought with a fresh sense of purpose and cohesion, welded into a tight-knit fighting unit by the battles on Calth.

  Any normal foe would have been broken by so sudden an attack, but daemons were no normal foe. They fought with as much fury and vigour as ever, unperturbed by the sight of nearly two hundred armoured Astartes landing in their midst and two enormous starships overhead, so close it felt like you could reach out and touch them.

  Uriel saw the Thrice Born looming over Lord Calgar and leapt to his Chapter Master’s defence. He threw up his sword and turned aside a sweeping blow that would surely have disembowelled Marneus Calgar. The daemon lord turned its searing gaze upon Uriel, and he felt the awful power of its ancient malice. It had dwelled in rage for ten thousand years, sustained by its hate for the worlds and warriors of the Ultramarines.

  He now understood the core of that malice, for he knew his Chapter history as well as any warrior of the Ultramarines. He knew of the cowardly attack of the Word Bearers Traitor Legion on Calth in the days of the Great Betrayal of Horus, the battles fought by Roboute Guilliman and Captain Ventanus to save that world after its sun was poisoned for all time.

  What the legends hadn’t related, what none of the Chapter had known, was what had become of one of the Word Bearers’ mightiest Dark Apostles, a dread figure of dark legend named Maloq Kartho. Though no trace of that warrior’s former appearance now remained within the body of the Thrice Born, Uriel saw clearly how Maloq Kartho’s dark patrons had rewarded his hateful deeds on Calth.

  That had been Captain Ventanus’ last gift to Uriel: the true name of M’kar.

  The daemon that had once been Maloq Kartho of the Word Bearers loosed a soul-hungry bellow and swept its clawed arms down to lift Marneus Calgar from the ground. Lord Calgar struggled in the grip of the daemon lord, but he was powerless to resist being drawn up towards its blazing fangs. Uriel saw the Thrice Born had cast off any notions of a grand victory here, and was contenting itself with the murder of the warrior who represented its most hated foes and had thwarted its insane ambitions for centuries.

  Uriel snatched the flint-bladed dagger from the sheath at his side.

  “I name thee Maloq Kartho!” he shouted. “Your true and mortal name!”

  The daemon lord threw back its head in pain as a paroxysm of rage shook its body from the tip of its blackened horns to its splay-clawed feet. The dagger grew warm in Uriel’s hand, as though recognising a target for the lethal malice bound within its blade by unknown smiths of long ago. A shudder of unadulterated terror passed through the M’kar as it turned its gaze upon Uriel and saw the glinting dagger he carried. Its eyes widened in recognition.

  “The shard of Erebus!” cried the daemon lord.

  As much as Uriel wanted to strike back at the daemon lord for all the suffering and death it had caused, he knew that was not the role fate had assigned him.

  He was the Sentinel of the Tower, not its Master.

  Uriel hurled the dagger, hilt-first, towards Marneus Calgar.

  The Chapter Master caught it deftly, the slender weapon absurdly small in his mighty gauntlets. But just as the Gauntlets of Ultramar were capable of great destruction, so too were they capable of feats of great dexterity. Held less than a metre from the daemon lord’s face, Lord Calgar lunged forward and plunged the ancient dagger into M’kar’s throat.

  The effects were instantaneous and incandescent.

  Blazing starfire spewed from the mortal wound dealt to the daemon lord, a flood of immaterial energy that raged in the air like a slick of polluted light. M’kar released its hold on Lord Calgar, who landed heavily on the ground before the dying daemon lord. Uriel ran to the wounded Chapter Master and, with the help of Pasanius and Learchus, dragged him away.

  “What was that blade?” gasped Marneus Calgar.

  “I do not know,” said Uriel. “It came from the tomb of Captain Ventanus.”

  “Ventanus? The Lost Chapter?”

  “The same,” confirmed Uriel.

  The fighting in the valley had ceased as the daemon lord wrestled with its undoing, fighting with the last of its strength to withstand the alien sentience of the ancient dagger. Against the craft of its unknown makers and the revelation of its true name, there was nothing it could do, and every attempt to maintain its existence was for nothing.

  All around them, the daemon host howled in mindless rage as M’kar drained them of their essences in its attempt to fight its own dissolution. One by one, the daemons disintegrated as their hold on the material world was broken and they were cast back into the warp. Within moments, the valley was empty save the for defenders of Castra Tanagra.

  M’kar’s form shrank, its outline blurring and compressing as every shred of its existence was consigned to destruction. This was true death: oblivion and the terror of non-existence. And the daemon lord knew it. With a last shriek of terror, M’kar’s body exploded outwards in a wash of light scraps and horrified awareness of the nothingness that awaited it.

  In the same instant, the vertical tear in the fabric of the world disappeared with a thunderclap of displaced air. The darkness obscuring the mountaintops and snow-shawled valleys of Talassar was dispelled, and the sun shone down on a world freed from the clutches of the daemonic. A cleansing wind blew down from the eastern peaks, carrying with it the promise of new days, fresh hope and the sweet beauty of lives lived on the edge of death. No sun was brighter, no wind as fresh and no day would ever be as memorable.

  “It’s over?” said Pasanius, looking at the scorched rock where the daemon had met its end.

  “Yes,” said Uriel, his heart lighter than it had been in many a year. “It’s over.”

  THE BATTLE-BARGES Octavius and Severian completed the victory on Talassar, destroying the Indomitable in a series of furious barrages from their bombardment cannons. Volleys of torpedoes from the combined Ultramarines fleets hammered the corrupted star fort, tearing it apart in thunderous blooms of fire-venting plasma. Smaller vessels added their own broadsides to the assault, reducing the once-mighty structure from a miracle of engineering to a twisted mass of molten wreckage.

  The star fort’s warp core collapsed and its reactors went critical as systems already on the brink of failure finally gave out and turned the Indomitable into a miniature supernova. Blasted from its position in the heavens, the star fort fell from orbit, spiralling lower and lower until the gravitational pull of Talassar ensnared it and dragged it to its final doom.

  Like the brightest star
falling from the heavens, the Indomitable plunged through the atmosphere, trailing scads of molten metal and burning oxygen. All traces of its corruption were burned away as it plunged downwards, gathering speed and growing in brightness until the skies above Talassar were shining with its dying radiance.

  The victors of Castra Tanagra watched it fall, silent in the face of such an awesome sight.

  The remains of the Indomitable plunged into the sea of Talassar, sending up a kilometres-high plume of water. The impact created a monstrous tsunami, but such was the scale-defying vastness of Talassar’s world-ocean, that it was little more than a series of harsh breakers by the time it reached the cliffs of Glaudor.

  As Uriel watched the Indomitable vanish over the horizon, a memory of words spoken by someone impossibly distant and unimaginably old surfaced in his mind.

  His destiny is woven into the tapestry of a great hero’s death, the fall of a star and the rise of an evil long-thought dead.

  It was a memory he knew did not belong to him, and Uriel recognised the sensations of his link with the Newborn, the boy Samuquan. He would never know where those words had been spoken, but as Uriel felt the ghostly shade of a dark-armoured figure at his side, he knew whose death had been foretold.

  His name had been Ardaric Vaanes.

  IT TOOK ANOTHER six months to completely purge the taint of the Bloodborn from Ultramar, the last remnants of the invading armies fighting to the end even though their infernal master was no more. Uriel led assaults on Quintarn alongside Galenus of the 5th and fought alongside Sicarius in numerous strikes against enclaves of Bloodborn corsairs that had gone to ground in the forests of Espandor. Many were the battles fought to carve the last traces of the Bloodborn infection from the flesh of Ultramar, and only when Marneus Calgar led the last assault on Tarentus against a coven of Bloodborn cultists alongside Varro Tigurius and Severus Agemman was the invasion finally ended.

  It had been the most devastating attack on Ultramar since Hive Fleet Behemoth, and many were the names to be carved in gold upon the slabs of Formaskan marble in the Temple of Correction. Across the Chapter, three hundred and forty-seven Ultramarines had fallen in battle with the armies of the Thrice Born.

  Their memories were honoured at a ceremony held six months to the day after the final defeat of M’kar on Talassar.

  THEY ASSEMBLED IN the shadow of the great primarch, every warrior of the Ultramarines declared fit to stand by the Apothecarion. Six hundred Astartes gathered before the shimmering form of Roboute Guilliman, enthroned within his golden sepulchre and held in stasis for all time. The golden doors of the temple had been shut to the thousands of pilgrims beyond, for this was a ceremony for the Chapter only, a private affair, though some non-Ultramarines were accorded the honour of being present.

  Inquisitor Suzaku was one of the few mortals in attendance, the soldier of the holy ordos having survived her ordeal in the depths of Calth. She had yet to fully recover from the grievous wounds she had suffered at the hands of the Blade dancers and Honsou’s Iron Warriors, but she had graciously welcomed this opportunity to remember the dead. Magos Locard and Commander Trejo of the skitarii stood at her side, these servants of the Adeptus Mechanicus honoured for their part in the defence of Calth. Both wore golden “U” stamped medals to forever remind them of their friendship with the Ultramarines.

  Captain Aethon Shaan of the Raven Guard stood next to Uriel, symbolically taking his place alongside the 4th Company of the Ultramarines. A number of black flags, each one a dead son of Corax, were placed in line with the ranked-up warriors. For their service to Ultramar, these heroic warriors were granted a place of honour in the battle formation.

  Marneus Calgar stood on a plinth of dark marble below the father of the Ultramarines, his armour restored to its former glory by the very best of the Chapter’s artificers and hammered anew in the Dreadnought forge of Techmarine Harkus. The Chapter Master was now a solemn figure, one of greater humility than before, yet one uplifted by the courage and honour shown by his warriors and people in the defence of their home.

  Gold-armoured Terminators flanked him and an honour guard bore flickering torches that bathed the interior of the Temple of Correction with a warm glow that made its vastness seem somehow smaller, more intimate and more personal.

  Lord Calgar lifted his voice so that all could hear his words.

  “They shall be pure of heart and strong of body, untainted by doubt and unsullied by self aggrandisement. They will be bright stars in the firmament of battle, angels of death whose shining wings bring swift annihilation to the enemies of man. So it shall be for a thousand times a thousand years, unto the very end of eternity and the extinction of mortal flesh.”

  Uriel’s heart stirred at the ancient words of Roboute Guilliman, words that had stood as the bedrock of the Adeptus Astartes since the earliest days of the Imperium.

  “Comrades, we have won a great victory and we gather here to honour the dead, to remember the sacrifices they made and ensure their legacy is not forgotten. It has been a long and painful fight, with much blood shed in the defence of our way of life. We are unique in Ultramar: we are a brotherhood of warriors and mortals, bound together by chains stronger than adamantium. But Ultramar is more than just the strength of its blades. The strength of Ultramar is humanity, and the strength of humanity is Ultramar. If one turns from the other we shall lose all that makes us strong.

  “Three hundred and forty-seven Ultramarines lost their lives in this war, but this victory is theirs, for what is the terror of death? That we die with our work incomplete. The joy of life is in knowing that our task is done.”

  Calgar nodded to each of his company captains, and Uriel bent to lift a cloth-wrapped bundle at his feet. The captains of battle marched from their companies towards the gleaming black walls of the temple as the Chapter Master spoke again.

  “The warrior who acts out of honour cannot fail. His duty is honour itself,” said Lord Calgar as Uriel unwrapped a rock hammer, a chisel and numerous sheets of gold leaf from his bundle. “Even his death is a reward and can be no failure, for it has come through duty. We remember the dead, but we are Adeptus Astartes, and we do not waste our tears. We were not born to watch the world grow dim, for our lives are not measured in years, but by our deeds.”

  Marneus Calgar lowered his head as each captain knelt by a blank area of the marble slabs and began to carve the names of the fallen.