Rafen could not believe what he was hearing, the open scorn in Arkio’s voice. ‘Brother, what has driven you to this?’
Arkio fixed him with a level gaze. ‘I have had my eyes opened, Rafen.’
‘By Stele? By Sachiel?’ He tried and failed to keep a mocking tone from his voice.
The Blood Angel gave a snort of derision. ‘Rafen, you are transparent to me. Now I see why you falter at these ideals – it is not your will that prevents you, it is your pride. Your… rivalry with the priest runs deep, yes? Neither of us will forget that it was he that almost cost you your chance to become a Chapter initiate.’
‘You are right,’ Rafen admitted. ‘But it is not just my dislike of Sachiel that colours my words. I implore you, brother, do not follow the counsel of the priest and the inquisitor blindly–’
‘Blind?’ Arkio repeated, his mood turning stormy. ‘Oh no, Rafen, it is you who refuses to see.’ He paused, moderating his annoyance. ‘But still we have time. I keep you close, brother, because you remind me that no path is the easy one. I question and you question me. You are the devil’s advocate.’ Arkio gave him another brilliant smile and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Thank you.’
Rafen watched him leave, the hand around his bolter’s pistol grip as rigid and immobile as cast iron.
In the silence of the Sanctum Astropathica aboard the Bellus, Ulan drifted in zero gravity, a weave of mechadendrites and brassy cables snaking from slots on her skull to banks of murmuring cognitive engines. The psyker’s mind was spread as thinly as she dared, the energy of it dispersed into a wide net. Her concentration was paramount; if she were to let her thoughts drift further for even an eye-blink, what little there was to call her personality would be picked apart on the winds of the empyrean. She was a spider now, settled at the nexus of a web she wove from her own psy-stuff. Ulan lurked there, sensitive to any perturbation in the rolling non-matter of the warp, looking and watching for patterns.
There were things out there. She was careful not to let her attention turn directly upon them, cautiously watching them only by the wakes they left in passing, the shimmers as the anti-space stretched under their weight. Ulan kept her terror for these things under the tightest control of all; they liked the taste of fear. Even the tiniest speck of it could call them across the void like sea predators scenting drops of blood in the water.
Then they were gone as quickly as they had arrived. Ulan was listening again, watching, waiting.
And there was her target. Very distant but approaching quickly now, cutting through the immaterium like a sword blade. A man-made object, swift and deadly in aspect.
Ulan smiled and gathered herself back together. When she had recovered enough of her potency, she focused on her master and sent him a single word.
Soon.
It was late for Firing Rites, and so the range was deserted. Rafen was inwardly pleased; he did not feel like company for the moment, and the questions and comments of his brethren would have not been welcomed. He loaded a fresh sickle magazine into the bolter and took aim with the naked eye, releasing a series of three-round bursts into the rotating target stands.
He frowned at the results. His weapon had been knocked off true when it fell from his hands in the manufactory. With care, Rafen adjusted the pitch of the foresight. The simple, disciplined action gave him focus away from the churning concerns in the back of his mind. Intent on the work, he realised too late that someone else had entered the chamber.
Rafen looked up and scowled.
‘Here you are,’ said Sachiel, with false lightness. ‘Your new armour fits you well, brother.’
He returned to his bolter, unwilling to waste breath on pretended pleasantries with the Sanguinary High Priest. ‘I will strive to be worthy of it.’
‘I am pleased to hear you say that. The Blessed was quite concerned that you be returned to duty status. Arkio... It appears he has a greater degree of lenity for a blood relative, than for other men.’
Rafen reloaded the bolter and slammed the magazine home with force. ‘Do not play word games with me, Sachiel,’ he said sharply. All at once, his tolerance for the conceited priest vanished. ‘You have come here to say something to me? Speak and be on your way.’
Sachiel’s face reddened but he kept the annoyance from his voice. ‘Your bluntness could be construed by some as insubordination, Rafen. I would pay it mind if I were you.’ He leaned in to speak in a low, loaded whisper. ‘The Blessed may have reason to endure your dispute of his divinity for now, but I would not test him further, brother. A wise man would do well to heed a warning and keep his silence.’
‘Your words could be construed by some as a threat, Apothecary,’ said Rafen, mimicking his tone.
‘They might at that,’ Sachiel agreed. ‘If you continue to challenge Arkio, there will come a time when his favour will wane. And when that moment comes, it will be my pleasure to see you branded a heretic.’
Rafen angrily rose to his feet in a rush from his firing stance, the bolter still hot in his hands. Sachiel was caught by surprise and backed away a step. ‘Your counsel is appreciated,’ Rafen said coldly, shouldering his weapon. ‘But if you forgive me, I have duties to attend to aboard the Bellus.’
‘What duties?’ demanded the priest.
‘The memory of the dead, Sachiel. I must pay my respects to the fallen in the ship’s great chapel.’ He pushed past the Apothecary and walked away.
‘Take care, Rafen,’ Sachiel called out after him, ‘lest you wish to join them too soon.’
CHAPTER THREE
Rafen felt the pull of Shenlong’s gravity lessen as the Thunderhawk rose out of the forge-world’s atmospheric envelope. He glanced through the viewport – the dun-coloured sky beyond had faded to a dirty purple and now it was the black of space. Craning his neck, he could see the curvature of the planet, a blanket of rusty pollution over the industrial landscape.
The transport rocked as it changed course. Rafen knew the interiors of these craft as well as he did the words of the Chapter hymnals, many was the occasion that he had been crammed into the heavily armoured cargo deck of such a vessel, shoulder to shoulder with other Blood Angels. The vibration of the floor beneath his feet never failed to kindle a faint anticipatory thrill in his chest. It was so often the precursor to battle, but not today. The Thunderhawk carried only munitions on this journey. Rafen had half-expected not to find a flight back to Bellus’s anchor at high orbit, but by luck one of the barge’s auxiliaries had been preparing for lift-off. The transport was taking advantage of the forge-world’s full stocks of shells to rearm the warship, ferrying case after case of missiles where it might normally have loaded Rhinos and Space Marines for ground assault. The warheads filled the hull spaces, leaving scant room for anything else.
Rafen was not the only passenger. Personally supervising the cargo was the battle barge’s second-in-command, Brother Solus. Rafen could not recall ever having seen the man outside the bridge of the Bellus before. Solus seemed more like an extension of the will of the ship’s commander, Captain Ideon, than a person in his own right.
Solus threw him a cursory nod as he passed through the cabin. ‘We’ll dock soon,’ he noted. The Space Marine paused and gave Rafen a questioning look. ‘I was not aware you had been ordered to return to the ship.’
Much of the Bellus’s crew had been granted planetfall leave in a gesture of magnanimity by Inquisitor Stele, following his assumption of the brevet governorship of Shenlong. In the wake of the Word Bearers invasion, the forge-world had declared a celebratory holiday and Chapter serfs and commoner crewmen had been only too happy to join the festivities. The carnival mood Rafen had glimpsed in the Ikari district was everywhere, all of it alive with the worship of Arkio. The pressure of that and the knowledge that Sachiel was surely watching Rafen’s every move had driven him to look for solace somewhere – anywhere – away from Arkio. A spell aboard the quiet corridors of Bellus would give Rafen time to think, he hoped. None of this, howev
er, he confided in Solus.
‘My mentor, Brother-Sergeant Koris,’ said Rafen. ‘He lies in the grand chamber aboard the barge. I wish to pay my respects to him, and enter his name in the Book of the Fallen.’
Solus nodded. The ritual was typically performed by a Sanguinary Priest, but often men who had served closely with those who died would carry out the rite as a personal farewell, writing the dead man’s name in their own blood as a lasting salute. ‘I did not know him. From what I saw of him, he seemed an… outspoken warrior.’
‘Indeed,’ Rafen agreed, ‘he was that.’
‘A pity he did not live to see the Emergence,’ Solus continued. ‘A great many of our brothers fell for that piece of dirt.’ He indicated Shenlong with the jerk of his chin. Even though he was Astartes to the core, Solus still had a spacer’s dislike for planets.
A hatch hissed open to admit a bondman in flight crew gear. He bowed quickly to Solus. ‘Lord, we are receiving an alert from Bellus.’
‘To what end?’ the Space Marine demanded.
‘A starship is approaching the planet. Our cogitators believe it to be the strike cruiser Amareo.’
Rafen straightened. ‘One of ours.’ He felt his pulse quicken. The arrival of another Blood Angels vessel could mean only one thing: the clandestine message he had sent using Sergeant Koris’s vox-net transmitter had got through to Baal. ‘Is it known who is in command of the cruiser?’
The serf nodded. ‘Yes, lord. The pennant of Brother-Captain Gallio flies from the Amareo’s bridge.’
‘Gallio…’ repeated Rafen.
‘You know him?’ said Solus.
‘Only by reputation. He was a contemporary of my late commander, Captain Simeon.’
Solus considered this for a moment, then turned to the crewman. ‘Contact Bellus. Inform Captain Ideon that we are diverting to intercept Amareo. Protocol requires that a ranking officer welcome Gallio to the system.’
The serf saluted and returned to the bridge. Rafen watched him go. ‘Lord, should not the Amareo be received by a quorum of senior Space Marines?’
Solus nodded. ‘Correct, Rafen, but with much of the crew planetside for the celebrations of the Ascension, I doubt Ideon could find others to be spared.’ He beckoned him to his feet. ‘You and I will have to suffice.’
The Thunderhawk’s engines throbbed and the light through the window shifted as the ship changed course. Rafen looked out and saw a splinter of silver and red hanging in the dark like a thrown knife; his search for respite would have to be postponed.
Ulan’s warning brought a thin smile to Stele’s bloodless lips. Seated cross-legged in the centre of the bloodstained death room, the inquisitor’s dark grox-hide coat pooled out around him like spilled ink. In the dim half-light, he appeared to be some sort of strange extrusion growing out of the patches of dried crimson. Stele gave a quick look at the door; if he were disturbed, if his concentration was broken, then all of this would be for nothing. There was a shock-ward attached to the inside of the hatch, primed and ready to deliver a massive electric charge into anyone foolish enough to try to open it from the outside.
He reached into one of dozens of secret pockets in the coat and retrieved two vials of bright, fresh blood. Stele had drawn the fluid himself, from the necks of the merchant’s wife and daughter as they had lain spent at his feet, compelling them into death so that the liquid might teem with the vital essence of their brutal, potent murder. Uncapping the vials, he licked his lips as the smell of the liquid reached him. Gently now, it was important not to waste even the smallest drop.
Stele closed his eyes and jerked his wrists; the contents of the vials flickered into the air in a wet arc, tracing precise lines that bisected one another. In that moment, the gloomy, meat-wet room quivered with the psychic fingerprints of agony, and Stele slipped his mind into the non-space at the edge of the warp. To the layman and the untrained, Ramius Stele appeared to possess formidable pskyer talents, but in truth he was a man of only middling mental power in comparison to many of the Imperium’s telepathic agents. Stele’s talents lay not in the brute force application of his psychic ability, like those of his servant Ulan, but in his subtle use of them. Stele’s mind was less a sword, more a scalpel, but still utterly lethal when used correctly.
The inquisitor ignored the thrilling warmth of the energies around him, resisting the urge to dip into them like a welcoming ocean. His resolve firm, Stele let his abhuman senses map the space around Shenlong in shades of psionic force. Up above, where Bellus lay, was the faint ember glow of the latent minds aboard her. Flickering and wavering among them was Ulan’s bright and dangerous psychic imprint. She was a firefly in a bottle, her power bouncing off the walls of the inhibitor coronet he forced her to wear. Had Stele chosen to channel his mind through hers, what he did now would have been far easier, but her erratic character was too unpredictable for something that required so delicate a touch.
He passed further out, ignoring the dots of light on a small craft suspended mid-way between Bellus and the new arrival, letting his spirit-self approach the Amareo. A dart of indistinct fear rose and fell in him as he sensed the clear, steady glow of a psyker mind on board the starship; on some level, he had been concerned that the arch-telepath Mephiston would be the first to come and confront Arkio. For all his arrogance, Stele was not so foolish as to think he could match wits with the Lord of Death – at least, not at the moment. But as he predicted, the Chief Librarian of the Blood Angels had sent a proxy in his place, and it was this trained psyche that glittered before him. It had none of the random, freakish coloration of Ulan’s mentality. This was a keen, acute mind born of the psykana librarius.
All the more reason to tread carefully, Stele reminded himself. The inquisitor raised his hands so that his ghost-fingers barely touched the corona of the psyker’s aura and let the surface details of the Librarian’s mind reveal themselves. The Blood Angel was without his psychic hood for the moment, a piece of good fortune that would make his task easier. The inquisitor’s subtlety was his greatest skill, his target would never suspect that Stele’s dark touch was spreading over his mind like some dark sheen of oil.
‘Your name…’ Stele said aloud to the dank air, ‘You are Brother Vode, Epistolary to Mephiston. He has sent you… Sent you to taste Arkio’s mind…’ And there it was, drifting inside Vode’s thoughts, perhaps even too faint for the Space Marine to know himself, the cold splinter of doubt and suspicion. Stele made a low chuckle in the depths of his throat. Mephiston had dispatched the best of his Librarians on this mission, but in doing so opened Vode to the thought that he would be venturing into the souls of heretics. Stele laid his hands upon Vode’s nascent misgivings and began to massage them, working them deeper. Even at such a distance, the taint of the Blood Angels psyker’s loathing for apostates leaked into the mind-space like black ichor.
With ghostly pressure, Stele nurtured Vode’s doubts, sweat beading his bald brow with effort and concentration.
Brother-Captain Gallio entered the cruiser’s training gallery and found Vode immediately. The Librarian was in the midst of a series of regimented kata, a complex dance of advances, parries, and blocks. In his hand, the psyker held a formidable-looking force axe, a full half of Gallio’s height and forged from bright steel made in the foundries of Luna. The axe head quivered in the light, the crystalline blade flickering with the witch-fire of psionic energy.
The captain’s eyes seemed to slide off the metallic curve, as if his vision could not hold the shape of the weapon in his gaze. Gallio, like most Adeptus Astartes, held a powerful distrust of anything that bore the mark of the psyker. To him, those who had this aberrant curse were to be considered a danger, or at the very best, to be pitied. It was through the lens of such minds that the first gateways to the warp had been opened, and with them the lurking powers of Chaos that made the immaterium their home. This was the fear that lay at the heart of the psychic ‘gift’; those who were weak in spirit would find themselves seduced by
the raw energy of the warp space. Such souls could become conduits for daemonic intelligences, flesh vessels for creatures that were hate incarnate.
Gallio approached Vode carefully, watching the precise ballet of the psyker’s fighting style. There was no wasted movement there: each simulated blow of the axe was economical and clear-cut. Every iota of Gallio’s battle instinct was keyed to the war against Chaos, and on some level he believed that such witch-minds deserved only death. And yet, here was a psyker who bore the mark of the Blood Angels. Before him stood a man that embodied both the magnificence of a Space Marine and the dark potential of a monstrous psychic. The duality of the matter perturbed him.
Vode came about and halted, the humming force axe hovering between the two men. Vode had eyes that were so pale as to be almost grey. Gallio resisted the automatic surge of revulsion in his gut as the faint glow from the weapon drew all the moisture from the air.
‘Honoured captain,’ said Vode quietly, showing no concern at Gallio’s expression. ‘I am prepared. What is your bidding?’
The Librarian was nothing like his master, the notorious Mephiston, Gallio noted. The Lord of Death was a gaunt, imposing figure in red-gold ceramite, where Vode was a rugged fireplug of a man with skin the colour of dark wood. ‘A transport approaches from the Bellus. We must be prepared to receive them.’ Unlike the rank and file of the Blood Angels, Librarians wore armour that was blue in coloration, with only a single crimson shoulder pad. It was another factor that set them apart from the rest of their brethren, thought Gallio.
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