Then Arkio said the words that Rafen feared the most. ‘I am beyond Dante’s authority now.’
‘Heretic!’ The curse exploded from Vode’s lips, his dark skin shading with rage. ‘The hand of Chaos hides here. You are impure!’ The Librarian’s words sent a shock through the chapel, and white lightning crashed across the floor. It happened so fast that Rafen saw only a blur of blue and yellow. Vode sprang at Arkio, his force axe flaring with psy-flame. The curved blade met the gauntlet of the gold artificer armour and deafening thunder assailed his ears.
CHAPTER FOUR
Vode’s mind was drowning in thick streams of glutinous hatred and black, oily darkness. At first, in that moment aboard the strike cruiser, he had thought nothing of the brief contact that had wafted over his psychic senses, passing like a diaphanous veil. There one breath, vanished the next. The mind-space about Shenlong was still dirty with the passage of the Word Bearers, their disgusting mental footprints like profane scars only visible to a psyker such as he. The bright purity of his force axe was a comfort to him. It was a talisman, a badge of the Space Marine’s charmed life in the Emperor’s service.
Vode listened to Rafen’s words as they approached the Ikari fortress, outwardly fixed on the Blood Angel’s face, but inside, his preternatural intuition buzzed like a warning siren, louder and louder in his ears as they came ever closer to the chapel. The Librarian tried to hold on to the sensations, to cup them in his hands and make some sort of sense to them – but it was like trying to pick out the perfume of a single black orchid through a sea of charnel house stench. And then in the chapel, he laid eyes on the golden armour and knew instinctively that he had found his way to the epicentre of this great skein of corruption. The Blood Angels psyker had faced this breed of witch-kind before: outwardly flawless, perfect and beautiful. Within they were rotted corpse-flesh, maggoty hearts pumping spoiled blood through bone voids.
He struggled to banish the image, blinking it away. For a second, everything seemed to shift and waver, and part of him cried out, No! Deceit laced the air. He glimpsed the man from the Ordo Hereticus across the stone floor, half-clad by shadows. For an instant, it seemed as if he, not the winged one, was the source of all the darkness here. Confusion creased Vode’s brow; he had to be sure.
Then, as quickly as it was there, the impression fled and the hissing pressure behind his eyes returned in tenfold force. Vode looked at Arkio as the armoured figure spoke in silky tones to Captain Gallio. The psyker saw two visions of him, one over the other, each warring for prominence in his mind’s eye. There was the Reborn Angel, a new Sanguinius glorious and unblemished in his holy perfection, radiant as the Throne of Terra itself, and there was the other.
It turned his stomach to see it. The gold armour was scarred and dull, black with shed blood. There were no eyes in the face of cracked, white porcelain, only pits of empty space; and the wings, foul things flensed of skin and barbed with hooks and broken razors. It spoke and the noise made Vode’s bile rise to his throat. ‘I am beyond Dante’s authority now,’ it jeered.
If the others in the chapel saw Arkio as he did, then they were either struck dumb by his awfulness or else bewitched by the apostate’s illusory beauty. From the corner of his eye he saw Stele twitch, but the surge in hate that flowed through him at the same moment made the inquisitor seem immaterial. If no man here could or would act, then it was only Vode that could end this parody of the primarch’s majesty. The thunderous heat of the black rage came upon him and the Librarian sent it crackling into the haft of his force axe. He shouted his malediction at the top of his lungs. ‘Heretic. The hand of Chaos hides here. You are impure!’
Vode’s weapon moved as if it were guided by the hand of the God-Emperor himself, cutting a flashing arc toward the skull of the pretender. Every ounce of mind-power from his Quickening channelled into the force axe. ‘Hell spawn!’ he spat. The crystal blade struck Arkio’s wrist-guard with a roar of rended air. Like water pouring off a glass dome, the blue-white psy-fire fell away from the axe head, streaking around Arkio in harmless rivulets. An invulnerable sphere of crimson and gold danced around him at the edge of perception, the halo blunting Vode’s attack into nothing.
Sachiel’s reductor was in his hand as the Librarian struck, dancing, searching for a target. All about him, Arkio’s golden-helmed honour guard brought up their weapons on reflex, and he glimpsed Gallio’s retinue doing the same. The Amareo’s captain was crying out, reaching with one hand, his other skimming toward the butt of his holstered bolt pistol. A voice was shouting from the chapel doors, an indistinct red man-shape turning in the grip of a black figure; all this in a heartbeat.
Arkio’s other hand came up and punched Vode away. The epistolary flew backwards, boots scraping across the stone as he struggled to keep his balance. With an eyebrow arched, Arkio reached for the force axe where it rested, lodged between plates of gold. The Blessed removed the weapon and, with a tightening of his fist, broke the axe handle in two.
Vode screamed and threw a curtain of lightning at him, racing back to leap at Arkio’s bare throat, fangs flashing. Again, the Quickening parted around his golden form and he shot out a hand. Arkio’s dart-sharp fingers impaled the ceramite chest plate of Vode’s power armour and buried themselves to the knuckle. The Librarian’s bolter was in his grip, and, even as blood bubbled from his mouth, Vode let shell fire crash out and flare across the room.
Unaimed, heedless bolts skipped close to Sachiel and the shock brought him to action. He lunged at Gallio with the reductor, clipping the Blood Angels captain’s scalp. No word of command was uttered, but with the priest’s gesture a tiny hell was unleashed in the chapel. The Blood Angels of Arkio’s honour guard and Gallio’s detachment alike opened fire on one another, burning rounds lancing back and forth across the room in a screaming web of death.
‘No!’ The cry was Rafen’s, but it sank unheard under a tidal wave of gunfire, and with strength that belied his age, the Chaplain Delos shoved him back from the fray.
Arkio flicked Vode’s corpse from his hand like a discarded piece of meat, aloof as bullets keened and hummed off his golden ceramite chest. Gallio’s troop, outnumbered two to one by the honour guards, danced and spun as multiple bolter shells tore through their battlegear and cut them apart. Gallio was the last to fall, thick arterial blood running in rivers from every joint in his armour. His pistol dropped from nerveless fingers and the captain sank to his knees, eyes glazing.
Arkio came to him and cupped Gallio’s chin in his hand. ‘You have brought my worst fear to life,’ he told the dying man. ‘You will not be the last to perish.’
The captain gasped out a final breath, and with that it was ended; the entire exchange had lasted hardly a tick of the clock.
Rage filled Rafen and he punched Delos, turning the black-armoured Chaplain with the blow. He forced his way through the ranks of gold-helmed men and down to the blood-slick mosaic floor. Suddenly among the dead, he felt like weeping.
‘What…’ He could barely speak. ‘What have you done?’
Arkio looked him squarely in the eye and Rafen’s veins filled with ice. ‘These men,’ said his sibling, casting an offhand wave at the steaming corpses, ‘they were here to destroy us, kindred. I knew it from the moment they entered the room.’ He glanced up, addressing every Blood Angel in the chapel. ‘Hear me, brothers. We have been forsaken. These men came to condemn, not to know me.’
‘There was to be no question of truth.’ said Sachiel, taking up the call. ‘Gallio’s psyker was an assassin. Dante fears the Blessed Angel, he fears the threat that Arkio represents.’
‘You have killed our battle-brothers,’ Rafen said in a dead voice.
Arkio shook his head, a flicker of hurt in his eyes. ‘No, Rafen. None of these men were brothers to me, or to any of us. In their blood I see the real truth of it. Dante denies me.’
From the altar came a strangled choke, and Stele stumbled forward, his face drawn and wet with perspiration. His
eyes bulging with effort, the inquisitor gasped for air. Rafen felt the same actinic tang of psyker-taint in the air, just as he had when Stele tortured the Word Bearers prisoner they had captured on Cybele.
‘Lord.’ Sachiel said. ‘What is wrong?’
‘The ship…’ Stele choked. ‘May be more of Vode’s kind… More aboard the ship… don’t let them…’
Sachiel met Arkio’s gaze and the figure in gold gave him a sharp nod. ‘I will not put any more of my brethren at risk.’ Arkio cocked his head and spoke into a hidden vox pick-up at his neck. ‘Bellus, heed me.’
The shock of his brother’s intent startled Rafen. ‘Arkio, you cannot–’ Sachiel interposed himself between the two siblings, blocking Rafen’s outstretched hand.
Arkio glanced at him. The weight of ages glittered in his eyes. ‘Bellus,’ he said, his voice instantly carried to Captain Ideon aboard the battle barge, ‘Captain Gallio and his men have revealed themselves as traitors to the way of Sanguinius. We shall not suffer the Amareo to live.’
Rafen’s breath caught in his throat, and for one moment of hope he believed that Ideon would refuse such a command; the brother-captain was a veteran warrior, not a zealot so easily swayed as Sachiel.
Then that hope guttered out and died. ‘Your will, Blessed,’ said Ideon, his voice distant and mechanical through the vox.
High above them, the battle barge’s starboard side rippled with activity as cannon hatches irised open and guns ran out on firing cradles. Missile batteries, lances and lascannon twisted in cupolas and turrets, finding the blade-like profile of the rapid strike cruiser Amareo in their sights. In allied space, with no threat to be determined, the cruiser’s commanding officer had placed no power to the ship’s void shields and so Amareo was naked to the unleashed fire of a ship that dwarfed her by fifty magnitudes of tonnage. Ideon did not flinch from the order; the concept of such a thought never once entered his mind. He had seen Arkio with what remained of his own eyes, tasted the coruscating power of his aura through the sensor web of the Bellus. The brother-captain had no doubts, and he fired.
It was a small mercy, perhaps, that the men aboard the other ship never saw the attack coming. They died without knowing where the blow had come from, lives snuffed out in an instant. Amareo exploded beneath a hellstorm of energy, and once again the battle barge was alone in the skies over Shenlong.
Rafen sat at the edge of the chapel chamber, on the shallow steps leading down to the mosaic floor, and he found he could not move. A distant flash of memory returned to him as he sat there, eyes unfocussed and shoulders hunched. As a boy, when his journey to Angel’s Fall was still a dozen cycles away, Rafen had become separated from the tribe during a migration. As a sandstorm had descended on him, the child had become disoriented and lost, wandering through the stinging dust clouds until at last he beached himself on a rocky outcropping and waited for the end to come. Hours passed as he stared out into the roiling storm, and the lad had known then what it was like to be dwarfed by the force of things larger than he was. Against the storm, his flesh and bone were ineffectual; the realisation of his own powerlessness had sobered him. Rescue had come, eventually. His father Axan emerged from the clouds and carried him to safety – but Rafen had never forgotten the hollow knowing that the storm had forced upon him.
Here and now, with the stink of spent cordite and spilled blood still lingering in the air, he felt that sensation all over again. For all his prowess, all the strength and fortitude granted to him as a Space Marine, Rafen felt powerless and weak as events rumbled on over him, crushing him beneath their passage. He looked but did not see the bodies of Gallio, Vode and the others. The Blood Angel felt empty inside, like the tin icons he had seen in the street urchin’s box. It was his audacity that had summoned the Amareo to Shenlong, his daring to send the secret message to Commander Dante, and now his own warrior-kin were dead. If I had kept my silence, these men would still be alive, his inner voice tormented, their blood is on my hands.
Sachiel summoned a gaggle of servitors. ‘Take these traitors and put them to the torch,’ he ordered. ‘They shall not soil the presence of the Blessed one moment longer.’
Arkio knelt on one knee close to Gallio’s remains, studying the shattered face of the dead man. ‘Wait,’ he said quietly. His words were almost a whisper, but they carried like a thunderclap. ‘Priest, you will harvest the progenoid glands of these men and see them preserved with our fallen aboard the Bellus.’
‘My lord?’ Sachiel blinked. ‘But these recreants have proven themselves unworthy of your beneficence – they opposed you.’
Arkio’s face was downturned. ‘In life, yes. But perhaps in death they can be born anew to the will of Sanguinius.’
Stele mopped his brow with a delicate kerchief. ‘You truly are the Angel’s Son, Arkio. Even in the face of a turncoat, you show forgiveness…’
The figure in gold armour raised his head; tears glittered on his face. ‘I weep for the destiny lost, Lord Stele,’ he told him. ‘These men might have stood beside us if they had been granted the choice. Instead, Dante has indoctrinated them with his fear. Fear of me.’
The inquisitor spied the silent Rafen from the corner of his eye, but he continued on to Arkio. ‘Blessed, it is as I had expected it to be. While the will of the God-Emperor would make our species masters of the galaxy, there are those who turn his words to their own selfish ends…’ He hesitated, breathing hard. The effort Stele had expended influencing Vode’s mind had left him weakened. ‘The noble purpose of the Imperium is smothered under the prejudice of men with limited vision… and you, you are the embodiment of a threat to that.’ He gestured to the dead. ‘Here is proof of it.’
‘What does this mean?’ Delos voiced the question on the minds of all the Space Marines in the room. Each of them having seen the miracle of Arkio’s Emergence themselves, they had no doubts about rallying to his side, but the bloody line they had crossed this day gave each and every one pause. Like the Chaplain, they looked to Arkio for guidance.
Sachiel spoke for him. ‘It means there is a schism in our Chapter, brothers. Commander Dante sought not to learn from the Blessed, but to judge him as wanting and put him to the sword. Dante denies the Ascension, and he must be forced to see the error of his ways.’
‘I have met the commander,’ said Delos, ‘and in his eyes I saw a man not easily swayed. If he will not recant and join the banner of Great Arkio, what then?’
Sachiel scanned the room, meeting the eyes of every man there – all except Rafen. ‘All those who oppose the dominion of the Reborn Angel are faithless, and they do not deserve to bear the hallowed legacy of Sanguinius. The only reward for those men is to share in the fate of Gallio and his assassins.’
Another Space Marine spoke up. ‘What you suggest…’ he was hesitant and afraid, ‘it is tantamount to civil war. We would be forced to turn against those of our own Chapter.’
‘Look around you, comrade brothers,’ Stele broke in. ‘Your hand has been forced. You have already done that!’ The inquisitor stabbed a finger at the broken remains of Vode’s force axe. ‘They came to kill. They came to murder Arkio in order to preserve Dante’s command of the Blood Angels.’
‘But Vode was a decorated warrior,’ said Delos. ‘He would not simply–’
‘Brother,’ said Arkio, and the Chaplain instantly fell silent. ‘The psyker looked upon me and saw nothing but murder.’
Delos gave a slow nod. ‘Forgive me, Blessed. As you say, so it is.’
With an abrupt flash of movement, Rafen came to his feet. ‘So what now, my brothers? Do we declare a holy war against our own kind? Shall we take up arms and lead an invasion to Baal, or perhaps even to Terra itself?’
‘Be careful, Rafen–’ Sachiel began, but Arkio silenced him with a look.
‘No, no, priest. Rafen’s questions deserve answers.’
‘We must not follow this path, Arkio.’ Rafen’s voice was desperate. ‘Turn back and reject it. We cannot have war a
mong the Blood Angels – if we fight amongst ourselves, we will be destroyed as surely as if our enemies wiped us from existence.’
Stele took a shuddering breath, watching the two men carefully. The future came to a balance point here in this moment; the inquisitor’s delicate plans were caught like a fly in amber. Arkio’s response to his blood brother would either release them or shatter Stele’s careful machinations utterly.
‘As ever, my elder kinsman cuts to the heart of the matter, and for that I am grateful.’ He shook his head. ‘No, Rafen, I do not wish to sow insurrection among our Chapter. This matter must be resolved before more blood is shed. You are right, we must strive against war.’ Arkio turned to Sachiel. ‘Dante’s proxy wished to bring me in chains to Baal where I could be prodded and toyed with like some addled mutant. I will not submit to that.’
‘What do you suggest, Blessed?’ the priest replied.
‘Select a location in neutral territory,’ he ordered. ‘Find a world where we can meet face-to-face, on equal terms. Send Dante a message that I wish to resolve this division between us.’ He glanced at Rafen, eyes afire. ‘I would not have embraced the glory of the Deus Encarmine only to see it spent turning Blood Angel against Blood Angel.’
‘Your will be done,’ Sachiel bowed. ‘And what of our followers among the commoners?’
Arkio came up to his full height and strode toward the ornate glassteel doors that led to the chapel’s balcony. ‘I will address the people and my Warriors of the Reborn. They deserve to understand what has transpired here today, and to where it may take them.’ Honour guards opened the doors as he approached. ‘I shall take my thousand with me,’ he declared, ‘and then on to Baal.’ Arkio stepped out into the wan sunlight of Shenlong’s day and the adulation of the crowds blotted out all other sound.
Rafen watched his sibling bask in the glow of their reverence. ‘Do you seek death?’ said a voice close to his ear, and he turned to face Sachiel. The Sanguinary High Priest was standing at his shoulder, his face red with restrained anger. ‘It would be my pleasure to provide it to you, if that is what you wish.’
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