Black Tide

by James Swallow

  Ceris nodded. “And no man in this crew would defy you if you did.”

  “But I cannot…” hissed Rafen. “Look around you, brother. We have nothing. Our last lead, wasted on that tau madhouse. And Fabius knows it. He’s out there, laughing at us,”

  “The Chapter Master would not have charged you with this hunt if it were a simple matter.”

  Rafen made a negative noise and angrily stalked away. “This is not some great and noble quest we can take a century to prosecute! It is an assassination! Time is ranged against us. Every moment that Chaos bastard holds a single droplet of sacred blood, he works his evil. Every hour advances his corruption. We must end this with swiftness, or we are lost!”

  Ceris was silent for a moment. Then he threw a nod towards the copper doors and the chapel beyond. “Why are you here, sir?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The chapel, brother. The rest of the squad returned to the arming chambers to doff their wargear and undergo the rites of cleansing. But you came straight here. You did not even take your orders for the shipmaster to the bridge.”

  Rafen frowned. “I came here… For the peace of it. I find clarity in the quiet.” He allowed himself a sigh. “Perhaps I hoped to find some insight.”

  Ceris looked at the statues at the far end of the chapel, the God-Emperor and his son Sanguinius standing like stone titans, offering only their steady and unswerving aspects. “Then you already have your answer, sir. You already know where our remedy lies. Have faith in the Emperor, brother-sergeant, and the Emperor will provide.” The psyker began to walk away. “It would be an even greater crime if Fabius were allowed to take that too from us.”

  “Indeed.” Rafen found himself nodding. Through his boots, the Blood Angel sensed a subtle vibration in the Tycho’s decking, and he moved to one of the stained glass windows in the cloister’s alcoves. Through the diamond-hard tiles of colour, he saw a flash of light from a launch tube on the warship’s flank. Sleek cylinders of metal, pressed forward on white spears of fire, looped away from the vessel, tracking, swarming together. He followed their course, looking ahead of them, and found the murky shape of the asteroid colony caught by the light of distant stars. Without another word, Rafen turned away and walked into the chapel; his anger, for the moment, held at bay.

  Silent, hard flashes of refracted illumination reached out after him as the Tycho’s weapons did their work, and undid that of the traitor.

  * * *

  In coarse robes dyed grey and rust-red, there were rank upon rank of warrior-kin. They stood in lines across the sun-warmed flagstones of the great central courtyard, the air dry upon their upturned faces, the glow of the distant Baalite sun a red disc at their backs. Corbulo stood out from them, his robes cut in much the same fashion as theirs, but dressed with panels of white. The brash detail of his gold honour chains blinked as the sunlight crossed them. He walked the length of the warriors, his steady, clear voice carrying far, echoing off the walls formed by the surrounding buildings of the fortress monastery. His hood was rolled back, so that he could look each one of them in the eye.

  “There will come a day,” he told them, “when you will ask yourself a question. Who am I? You will ask yourself where you came from, you will ponder on this and seek an answer.” Corbulo’s craggy face pulled in a slight smile. “And then you will remember what I am about to tell you, and think no more of it.”

  The sanguinary high priest paused in the shadow of the great statue in the middle of the courtyard, the winged shape rising high above him. He spread his hands, taking in all before him with a single gesture. “Where you were born. The tribes in which you grew to manhood. The worlds you called home. The leaders you once gave fealty to…” He looked into different faces, and saw stiff attention, in some perhaps the odd hint of anticipation and awe. “These things are what made you who you are. But you stride beyond them now. Each of you has been tested to breaking point and emerged the stronger for it. You have fought through the trials and been judged. A great gift is now yours. You have earned the right to live and to die, not as a mere human being, but as an Adeptus Astartes. A Son of Sanguinius. A Blood Angel.” He nodded to himself. “That is the only answer you will ever need. And be certain in the belief that there are many who envy you. Many who cherish and honour you. But still more, a myriad more, who hate you for what you have become. And against them, every day you still draw breath is a victory.”

  Corbulo reached inside his robes, his fingers closing around a bag made of blood-crimson velvet, sewn with threads of gold and platinum, bedecked with rare gems from a hundred conquered worlds. “You are a victory made of meat and bone and blood. You are kings of war and the battle-lords of all you survey. You stride the stars in one unity of purpose—to fight in the honour of humankind, for the grace of Holy Terra and in veneration of the God-Emperor of Man and the Primarch Sanguinius.” From the robes he drew forth the relic that was his sole charge, an object cleansed and sanctified and made pure as no other artefact could be.

  He turned it in his hands, hearing the collective gasp from the warriors arrayed around him. It was flawless and perfect, without any outward sign of the great affront that had been perpetrated against it only months ago. Corbulo refused to allow himself to dwell on that moment of darkness; he held the Red Grail high, and let the incarnadine sun shower it with colour. The same old, giddying elation, the same undimmed sense of power surged through him and, at the sight of the relic, the robed Astartes went as one to their knees. “In His name, brothers,” said the priest.

  They echoed his words in a roar that raised to the sky.

  “In His name,” whispered Dante, speaking the litany along with them. His hands rested on the balustrade of the stone balcony, the glassy black basalt there polished by his fingers, by the actions of countless such moments when he had stood here and looked down upon his warriors and his Chapter. His keen, hawkish eyes studied the faces of the warriors far below, each of them fully-fledged battle-brothers now and no longer initiates. He mused on Corbulo’s words, wondering after the origins of these new Blood Angels. The majority were the intake from the tithes of Baal’s two desert moons, but a fair proportion were assignees from the successor Chapters that had elected to bring the Chapter’s numbers up to full strength. How many of them had been recruited by the Angels Encarmine, the Flesh Tearers, the Blood Legion or any of a dozen other brother-Chapters? He pushed the question away. Corbulo had been correct. Who they had been mattered not; who they were now was all that mattered. All of them, Sons of Sanguinius.

  “New blood,” said a familiar voice, from behind him.

  Dante nodded. “Aye.”

  Mephiston, master psyker of the Chapter and Dante’s strong right arm, joined him at the balustrade and cast his glacial gaze across the crop of recruits. The chief Librarian of the Blood Angels was clothed in a combat tunic and fighting breeches; he had come from the training halls to the presence of his master without summons, and it was a testament to their decades-long friendship that Dante did nothing more than raise an eyebrow at the other warrior’s somewhat casual attire. Few Blood Angels were granted the latitude to enter the Master’s chambers without first donning all the requisite robes and decorations of fealty; but there were times when such trappings of ceremony and ritual were important, and times when they were not. This moment was one of the latter.

  Dante had not been aware of Mephiston’s approach, and to admit that was to say much. In over a millennium of service to the Golden Throne, those who could enter Dante’s presence without his knowledge could be counted on the fingers of one hand—and of those, three had been killed by the Chapter Master himself. But far from being concerned by such a thing, Dante was pleased by it. If Mephiston was still a mystery to him, after so long, then to his enemies the Lord of Death would be a ghost, unknowable and lethal.

  “I make it a rule never to miss this moment,” Mephiston offered, jutting his sharp chin towards the recruits, as far below Corbulo bid
them to rise. “To see our kindred and the grail together…” He trailed off, his voice soft with reverence.

  “You may see the Red Grail whenever you wish, brother,” noted Dante. “Such is your rank, no sanguinary priest would ever dare to deny you entrance to the great chapel.” He nodded towards the spherical nave atop a distant tower.

  “It is so,” said the psyker. “But this is different. When Corbulo shows them the relic, and their hearts rise in its glow…” Mephiston sighed. “I feel sorrow for you, my lord, that you cannot perceive the colour and play of their emotions as I can. The sense of our battle-brothers and their auras at this moment is… almost transcendent.”

  “I feel a measure of that,” Dante noted. “Perhaps not as you do with your witch-sight, but still the power of it rings in the air. It reminds me that even after eleven hundred years, I am not so jaded that I cannot still be awed.”

  Mephiston nodded. “Just so. We live in a time of wonders, my Master. It is hard to believe that just a season has elapsed since our Chapter stared into the abyss. We faced the spectre of dissolution, but with the grace of Holy Terra, we have dispelled it.”

  Dante folded his arms and drew in a slow breath. Unbidden, his mood began to shift and darken. Mephiston sensed it immediately and glanced at him, measuring him with that ever-unblinking gaze. “Curious,” said the Chapter Master. “How strange it is that I can at once have such pride in my heart, but also the shadow of something bleak. Something closer to fury.”

  And the source of that fury did not need to be given words; both of them shared the same stony ire, the same slow-burning hate at the violations done to their Chapter and their home world.

  “It is often the nature of men to be two things at once, in direct conflict with themselves,” mused the psyker. “When the God-Emperor, His light unbound, first forged the Adeptus Astartes, He ensured that we would keep that duality. It is just and right we do so.”

  “Indeed,” Dante replied. “Better to remind us not to stride too high above the common people we protect. What becomes of those of us who eschew their humanity?”

  Mephiston’s face grew a sneer. “Perhaps that is a question I will put to Fabius Bile when we capture him.”

  Dante’s reply was cold iron. “There will be no capture. Despite what the Ordo Hereticus may wish, there will be no trials and imprisonment, no process and public excoriation. Fabius will die wherever he raises his benighted head.” He turned away from the balcony and walked back into the chamber, irritated at himself for allowing his black mood to come to the fore. The pleasure of seeing in the new tithe faded by the second, and that too built upon his hard, precise anger.

  Finally, he stopped in the middle of the room and turned a hooded look on his battle-brother. “You have seen the most recent communiqué from the Tycho.” It was not a question.

  The other man nodded. “I have. It is… disappointing.”

  Dante gave a gruff chug of humourless laughter. “A moderated way of describing the situation, if ever there was one. That xenos colony was a solid lead, but like all the others, it has turned to ashes in our hands.”

  “Our agents still seek new indications,” said the psyker. “Every battle-brother listens out for any fraction of information.”

  “And what have we learned, Mephiston? What have we gathered but acres of useless data, nothing but hearsay and the ghosts of rumours?” He gestured to an ornate desk in the corner of the room, where a gas-lens viewer scrolled through pages of data in gothic script. Parchments and pict-slates littered the surface of the console. “I vet this tide of noise myself and pick nothing from it. It is static, and little else. Worthless.”

  “Fabius Bile has been sighted,” noted the psyker. “Those appearances are being researched by our cogitators and a contingent of my best epistolaries.”

  “If we were to believe all that we are told, then it would seem that the accursed renegade is active in dozens of places all across the galaxy, all at the same time.” Dante’s voice rose in annoyance. “During the Festival of Ultimate Piety, observers place him in the Eastern Fringes, the Sabbat Worlds and the Damocles Gulf. Which of them is right? To which place do we send our warriors?”

  The fact that Mephiston did not offer to supply an answer to his question made the Chapter Master’s point for him.

  Dante’s lips thinned. “I could dedicate the whole Chapter to the chase and it would still not be enough, damn him.”

  “We knew the traitor would not be easy prey when we embarked upon this course of action,” said the psyker. “He has eluded the forces of the Imperium for lifetimes. It may take that long to exact our full vengeance upon him.”

  Dante gave a terse nod. “And that may be so, but there is the matter of… of the sacred blood.” The warrior’s gut twisted at the thought of it. “And in that, we cannot tarry.” He walked back towards the other man, and when he spoke again, his voice was low. “Old friend, what robs me of my peace, what keeps me awake in the dark of night, is the question. The question that torments me.”

  “What does Fabius want with the blood of our primarch?” asked Mephiston. “I dread to know the answer, lord. I truly do.”

  “And more than that, I wonder if the atrocity he perpetrated against us was some part of a greater plan. Some scheme in which the Blood Angels are but a single element.”

  Mephiston eyed him. “How so?”

  “What do we know of this bastard?” snapped Dante, allowing himself to give full voice to his thoughts. “This so-called Primogenitor, who cuts and stitches the meat of life into patterns that offend all who lay eyes on them? A traitor among traitors, once a sworn Adeptus Astartes of the Emperor’s Children before they took the coin of Horus and turned heretic. A genius Apothecary, twisted by his fealty to the Eightfold Path of Chaos. A being of towering cruelty without interest in power or dominion—”

  “Only arcane, forbidden knowledge,” said Mephiston, with a nod. “I have seen the horrors he has wrought and then released upon the battlefield. His freakish ‘New Men’, things that walk like humans, each the equal of an Astartes.”

  “Bile has no loyalty, not even to the daemon prince Fulgrim, Emperor blight him, or the rest of his turncoat kindred.” Dante stalked away, his anger animating him. “He slips through the shadows, prostituting his skills to any Chaos warlord who will pay for them.” The Chapter Master came to a halt and drew in a deep breath, forcing down his building anger. “This is the traitor we must find and kill.” He looked away. “If only we could.”

  After a long moment, Mephiston spoke again. “There is another reason I came to you today, lord,” he began. “In the throes of my battle-meditation, a vision came to me. An inkling. A sense of import.”

  Dante watched his comrade intently. The workings of the psyker-mind were a mystery, even to those who had been steeped in their ways for centuries, and yet the Chapter Master knew Mephiston well enough to recognise the import of what the Lord of Death was about to say. “You… saw something? In the warp?”

  “The skeins of past and future are open to some. In rare moments, I have been blessed to be one of them… Although some might think it more a curse.”

  “Tell me what you sensed.”

  Mephiston hesitated, and in that instant there came a hard rapping against the chamber door. The Chapter Master gestured to one of his helots, and the servitor stepped forth from its charging alcove to answer the entreaty.

  A Blood Angel in full wargear, the golden helmet of an honour guard in the crook of one arm, entered and went down on one knee. “My lord, forgive the intrusion.”

  “What is it, Brother Garyth?” Dante failed to keep an edge of irritation from his voice.

  “An urgent machine-call from the dock station in high orbit. They relay a message from Brother-Sergeant Kale.”

  Dante nodded; Kale was currently serving aboard the cruiser Dario, a warship assigned to the picket force that patrolled the rim of the Baal system. “Go on.”

  “Kale is inb
ound, sir. He brings with him a courier vessel that exited the warp just beyond the outer defence ring.”

  “A messenger,” whispered Mephiston, his gaze turned inward.

  “Aye,” said the honour guard. “The craft bears the pennants of the Flesh Tearers. They claim to have come bearing a message of utmost import, from Chapter Master Seth himself.”

  Dante looked to the psyker. “This is what you saw?”

  He got a nod in return. “A swift galleon moving through endless night. On its sails of black sackcloth, a serrated blade touched with a single drop of blood. In its hold, the sound of a voice, whispering a name. Gabriel.”

  The Chapter Master walked to the doors leading to the balcony and stood on the threshold, looking up onto the rust-red sky. “Grant them passage,” he told the honour guard. “I will hear what my honoured cousin has to say to me.”

  The Aquila-class shuttle dropped like a falling hawk from the low dust clouds and made a leisurely banking turn over the tallest spires of the fortress-monastery, before angling in for a landing on the southern approach. The shuttle settled with a dull thud of compacting hydraulics, fumes and dust swirling around it before the low winds caught them and dragged the haze away.

  Mephiston’s eyes narrowed to slits as he peered at the craft, pressing through the commonplace metals and plastics of the hull, reaching for a sense of the passengers inside. He found what he expected; warriors of character, intent and focused on their missions at hand.

  The psyker stood at his Chapter Master’s side, the pair of them joined by a trio of honour guards; aside from the mindless machine-slaves that skittered out to connect up the refuelling conduits and stabilising tethers, the landing pad was empty. Mephiston knew that as a matter of course, scouts armed with modified Zaitsev-pattern long-bolters were ranged in the upper towers bracketing the platform, watching for any signs of trouble; it was one of many additional security measures that he himself had initiated in the wake of Fabius’ infiltration of Baal.