Mephiston ran a bare finger over the tough, rubbery petals of the white flower, the serrated edge of it drawing blood. Instantly, capillaries in the petiole began to absorb the fluid, turning the plant scarlet. ‘The flower’s roots mesh with those of the others that surround it,’ the Librarian said, ‘it shares the bounty it gathers.’ In a bloom of crimson, the coloration spread across each of the plants in the cluster. Mephiston’s fingers closed around the flower in his hand and crushed it, spilling a trickle of his own vitae on the rusty soil. ‘Like us, one gives strength to all. But if that unity is broken…’ He paused, cocking his head. ‘We have company.’
Dante turned at the sound of the airlock opening. A spindly messenger servitor ambled over on clanking mechanical feet. Once it had been a human being; now it was a device in service to the Imperium, mind wiped of any personality, a featureless automaton made of flesh and implanted steel. Its blank face swung left and right, finally locating the Blood Angels commander. ‘With your permission, Lord Dante. A message from Shenlong arrives. Your attention only.’
‘Speak,’ he demanded.
‘Via the astropathic duct Ulan aboard the battle barge Bellus, Brother-Captain Ideon commanding, protocol omnis octo,’ it recited, relaying the trance-speech from the monastery’s own psychic communicators. ‘The Sanguinary High Priest Brother Sachiel, chosen of the Blessed Arkio, requests an audience with the Lord Commander Dante on the shrine world of Sabien in nine solar days, on behalf of the Reborn Angel.’
‘The Reborn Angel,’ Mephiston repeated the title with a sneer on his lips. ‘This whelp has no need for modesty, it seems.’
Dante was lost in thought for a moment. ‘Sabien. I know it well. There was a Blood Angels garrison there, in the worst days of the Phaedra Campaign.’ He frowned. ‘Many of our kindred shed blood for every metre of that blighted planet.’
‘An abandoned monument world,’ said the psyker. ‘An ideal location for an ambush.’ He got to his feet, fire dancing in his eyes. ‘Lord, this is so transparent a trap.’
‘Of that, we may be certain,’ Dante agreed. ‘But this priest Sachiel, if he truly speaks for Arkio, knows only too well that I am forced to agree to the meeting.’
Mephiston’s eyes narrowed. ‘Commander, you cannot think to accept this so-called “request”? If Arkio wishes to meet, he should come here to Baal.’
‘He will not,’ Dante retorted, ‘and I will not risk more lives to bring him under force of arms. No, we must seek the truth about Arkio and determine if he truly is Sanguinius reborn or an impostor.’
‘To do that, I would need to turn my gaze upon him, lord.’
Dante nodded. ‘And so you will. You will attend me at Sabien and I will have this Arkio answer for his deeds.’
Mephiston shook his head. ‘I cannot allow that.’
The Blood Angel gave the Librarian a sharp look. ‘Do you defy me now as well?’
‘Forgive me, great Dante, but you are the sworn commander of this Chapter. Your place is here, at the throne of Baal. I shall meet with this Arkio, alone. As your second, I cannot allow you to place yourself in such danger.’
Dante went red with annoyance. ‘In eleven hundred years I have led my men from the front! Now some child presumes to the godhead over my Chapter and you demand I stay behind?’
Mephiston’s iron-hard gaze never wavered. ‘If it pleases the lord commander, I am best suited for this endeavour. For all your greatness, you do not possess the warp-sight as I do. My vision will see the heart of this pretender as plainly as day, and I will not flinch from his execution when the moment comes.’ He placed a hand on Dante’s shoulder, a gesture of familiarity that no other Blood Angel alive would ever have dared to make. ‘My lord, when the men learn of this Arkio there will be questions. They will look to you for guidance.’
‘And so I must be here to answer those questions.’ Dante frowned. After a long moment, he spoke again. ‘Very well. Your counsel has never failed me yet, Mephiston, and I will accept it now. On my orders, assemble a force of your most senior brothers and take command of the battle barge Europae. I grant you full power to speak on my behalf and that of the Blood Angels.’
The Lord of Death tapped his balled fist to his chest and bowed his head in salute. ‘For Sanguinius and the Emperor,’ he said.
‘For Sanguinius and the Emperor,’ repeated Dante.
Rafen entered the chapel unseen and moved from the shadows to the altar. He had barely taken a step when Arkio’s crystal-clear voice called to him. ‘Rafen. I see you.’ His sibling stood up from prayer and beckoned him forward. ‘Come now. We are alone.’
The Space Marine walked into the dimly lit transept. ‘They say that tomorrow Sachiel will choose the thousand and consecrate the Blood Crusade.’ His voice was tight with emotion.
Arkio nodded. ‘It shall be thus.’
‘And how many will die?’ Rafen demanded. ‘How many more Blood Angels and innocents will perish?’
‘Only those who stand against the will of Sanguinius.’
Rafen faltered for a moment. ‘Brother, I beg of you. Go no further. I implore you, in our father’s name, do not do this! You will lead the Blood Angels into self-destruction.’
At any moment, he expected Arkio to turn on him in anger, to strike him down for his presumption, but instead the golden figure gave him a sorrowful, pitying gaze. ‘No, my kinsman. I will free them. With your help, and Sachiel, Stele, all of us, we will begin a new era for our battle-brothers.’
‘Arkio,’ Rafen felt his voice catch. ‘Can you not see the bloodshed that lies ahead?’
His brother turned away, returning to his prayer stance, dismissing him like some irrelevant vassal. ‘I am the eye of the infinite, the Deus Sanguinius. If there is blood to spill, then it shall be spilt in my name.’
Rafen found no more words and fell silent. He turned his back on Arkio and walked away.
CHAPTER SIX
In the confines of the makeshift arena, their war had raged for days and nights without respite. Some of them had been soldiers in the Shenlong Planetary Defence Force, desperate to regain a little honour after failing so miserably against the Chaos invaders, others were just citizens, dispossessed by the Word Bearers, lost and purposeless in the ashes of their city. All of them had spirits that were wanting, great voids in their hearts that could only be filled by one who could offer them hope.
This Blessed Arkio did; the Shenlongi had believed themselves abandoned by the might of the Imperium. Their prayers for salvation had gone unanswered, and as the Traitor Marines subjugated them, the vile demagogues of the Word Bearers cult mocked them for their loyalty to an Emperor that had turned his back on them. Those were the darkest days. Some had broken under the yoke of oppression and taken their own lives, others casting off their fealty to Terra and embracing the bloody way of the archenemy. The people had faced their fate with gloom, convinced that rescue would never come.
Arkio changed all that. On wings of sacred fire, he fell from the skies and smote the Word Bearers with his Holy Lance. In less than a day, the Reborn Angel and his cohorts swept Shenlong clean of the enemy and liberated her people. They were all too willing to cast aside whatever devotion they had given to a distant ghost atop a throne a million light-years away; all too willing to bend their knee for a god that walked like a man, passing among them in a vision of golden light. Arkio was their rescuer, and they loved him for it.
When the Blessed’s priest Sachiel gave word that Arkio was to draw an army from the people, untold numbers of men and women rose to the call. They would be proud to lay down their lives for their new saviour, taking any chance to stand a little closer to his magnificence. There would be a choosing, Sachiel said, the conscription of a thousand souls to join Arkio on his Blood Crusade. Those so ordained would become the Warriors of the Reborn, and for their hearts and souls the reward of life anew was theirs. The penitents spoke in whispers of the far-off world of Baal, the birthplace of the Blessed, where legends sai
d normal men could be transformed into avatars almost as great as he – the Adeptus Astartes. There was no shortage of volunteers.
In the great plaza on the steps of the Ikari fortress they fashioned an arena from fallen buildings, and inside those who dared to aspire to warriorhood took up arms against one another. Only the strongest, the most ruthless would be selected for the thousand. They began their little war, corralled there beneath the mountainous tower, and they fought and fought. Life by life, hour by hour, their numbers dwindled, the survivors nearing the thousandfold as day followed night followed day.
Alactus and Turcio opened the gate as the Sanguinary High Priest approached, the dawn light gleaming off the white gold on his armour. Within the arena, the melee had grown quieter and more infrequent as the massed battles of the early days had given way to attrition. Hundreds of commoners had perished in those first confused free-for-alls, gallons of shed blood turning the flagstones brown beneath them. Some of the weapons were crude – clubs, axes, huge steel spanners stolen from the factory cathedrals – while others were more deadly. A few of the applicants had projectile weapons, flamers, even lasers, the guns looted from the corpses of war dead and brought here to turn against one another.
As Turcio watched, the Blood Angel could see a firefight in progress between two men, one barely able to carry the heavy stubber in his hand, the other snapping shots back with some sort of small-bore lasgun. The figure with the stubber gave out a war cry and tried to rush his enemy, but the weapon was too bulky, too heavy for an unarmoured human to manage. He stumbled, and the figure with the laser stitched him with hot fire. He sank to the ground, his corpse catching alight.
Sachiel paused at the arena gate and spoke a whispered command into his vox. In reply an air raid warning siren keened from a high balcony somewhere on the side of the fortress tower. The lowing shriek settled over the plaza and silence fell after it. This was the pre-arranged signal; the trial was over. All across the arena fights staggered to a halt and weapons were lowered. Those who could still move emerged from cover, into the open space in the centre of the battlefield. In the makeshift grandstands erected along the walls of buildings bordering the arena, people boiled forward in unrestrained eagerness to see who would be selected.
The siren shut off and Sachiel basked in the quiet. It seemed as if every eye on Shenlong was set on him. The Blessed had charged the priest with the task of making the final choices, and it was a duty he was only too eager to perform. He entered the arena, with Turcio and Alactus at his sides. Sachiel’s gaze ranged over the faces he saw around him, all of them bloody and dirty with the effort of fighting. In their eyes was an unquestioning readiness to do anything that he ordered, and the realisation of that made him swell with power. These men would follow Arkio into the jaws of hell and never question.
To think he had harboured doubts about the raising of this army; now it seemed ridiculous to him. Of course, these were only mere men, no match for the might of a Space Marine like him, but still this helot battalion would have its purpose on the field of conflict. The fact alone that commoners were willing to sacrifice their futures for Arkio spoke volumes for the power of the Blessed. When the Blood Crusade began in earnest, the ranks of the Warriors of the Reborn would swell to ten, twenty times this size. His shook off all thought of his previous hesitancy. Who was he to question the wisdom of the Blessed?
A movement caught his eye and looked down to see a straggle-haired female as she tried to rise to her feet. She could not do it; livid, weeping wounds along her side had opened her to the air. Sachiel studied the injury with a practiced eye. A Space Marine might have been able to survive such a cut, but a normal human would have no chance at all. The woman met his gaze, and there in her eyes was an entreaty so pure and heartfelt it gave the priest pause. He stooped over her.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘Muh-M-Mirris,’ she coughed. ‘Mirris Adryn.’
Sachiel noted the remains of a small pennant badge on her shoulder. The Shenlongi had a tradition whereby the cadre and rank of a citizen would be displayed through a set of knotted ribbons on their clothing. The woman wore the colours of a mother of three, a teacher. ‘Mirris,’ he said gently. ‘Your children are proud of you.’
‘Yes.’ She forced a smile, tears streaming down her face. She knew death was coming, and that she would never fulfil the dream of joining Arkio’s cohort.
‘Let me give you a gift,’ began Sachiel, and he drew his reductor from his belt. ‘Do you desire the Blessed’s Peace, Mirris Adryn?’
‘Lord, the offering of the reductor is only for Astartes–’ said Alactus, his face a grimace.
Sachiel silenced him with a look. ‘All those who serve the Reborn Angel shall share in this.’
Mirris’s eyes shone, accepting the benediction. ‘Yes, lord. I wish it.’
He gave her a gracious nod and shot her in the heart. The blunt-headed titanium bolt was designed to punch through the hardened ceramite and plasteel of a Space Marine’s power armour and pierce the bone cage projecting the organs within, it was the final, honourable solution for a battle-brother too close to death for recovery. Against normal, unenhanced flesh it blew a cavity in the teacher’s chest as big as Sachiel’s fist. With care, he closed Mirris’s eyes and stood, wiping away the backwash of her blood from the device. ‘Even in death, the thousand will serve the Blessed as a monument to his righteousness,’ he said, his voice clear and hard as it carried across the arena.
Turcio stared at the dead woman, the faint smell of her cooling blood reaching his nostrils through the grille of his armoured helmet. The tang of the scent-taste touched a deep and primal chord inside him. Battle would be coming soon.
Sachiel stepped forward boldly, holstering the reductor and spreading his hands wide. He moved through the crowd of bedraggled and worn fighters, touching some on the shoulders, nodding to others. Each one that he indicated bowed in return, and those around them shrank back to see the greatness in their midst. Man by man, Sachiel chose the thousand. Those that fell short of the benediction watched in mute silence, others breaking into tears. Alactus saw two men place guns in their mouths and end their own lives rather than accept the failure.
In the middle of the arena was the gutted hulk of a Word Bearers Land Raider, a burnt box of warped metal and bony protrusions killed in the opening salvoes from the Bellus. He climbed atop the ruined vehicle to address the people before him.
‘Your lives are over,’ he told them. ‘Whatever you were before this moment, whatever your words and deeds before this day, now they are nought but vapour. You are dead and you are reborn. You are the thousand.’
A ragged cheer erupted from the men in the arena, quickly picked up by the watchers in the stands and the streets beyond. The sound carried like a wave, and Sachiel fancied that he could hear the whole of the planet crying out. ‘You are the first to bear the honour of the Warriors of the Reborn, the chosen of Arkio the Blessed, the servants of the New Blood Angel. Your names will be carved into history alongside the legions of Sanguinius, alongside the name of Arkio himself!’
The thousand rattled their weapons and sent shots into the sky, a clattering clarion of thanksgiving. ‘Mark this day well,’ he told them, ‘for it shall never come again. In the ages, men will look back to Shenlong and see you all as a beacon of principle and loyalty. They will know you as I do – as heroes of the wars to come.’
The roar came again, and this time it split the air like rolling thunder.
A wry sneer formed on the inquisitor’s lips as the noise penetrated the stained glass windows of the chapel. The shouting had such force that the ancient panels vibrated under each exultation, and the priest’s rhetoric made the sound rise and fall like a conductor directing an orchestra. He considered Sachiel with cold amusement; all men bore weaknesses, even such preternatural superhumans as the Space Marines, and the key to manipulating them was to isolate and exploit those defects. For men such as the late Sergeant Koris,
it had taken more application than others, and with Rafen the effort had almost killed him – but he fully expected to hear of Arkio’s brother soon, perhaps to be found dead in some dingy corner of the city after taking his own life.
Stele had been forced to drive Rafen into the depths of his own despair to control him, but Sachiel was a different story. A supremely arrogant man among an arrogant breed, the priest’s touchstone was his self-superiority. Stele discovered that in his youth, Sachiel had been born into the closest thing that Baal Primus had to aristocratic nobility. A highly-placed warrior tribe with many dominions on the First Moon, he viewed his ascension to the hallowed ranks of the Blood Angels as a matter of course, and Stele had no doubt that Sachiel imagined a future with his hand on the command of the Chapter in the centuries to come. Stele had worked carefully to cultivate Sachiel, over the years of the Bellus’s mission into ork space to recover the Spear of Telesto, teasing out the thread of vanity that lurked inside him, feeding it and nurturing his pretension. He had allowed Sachiel to advance quickly in rank and in turn gained a trusting ally. Combined with the priest’s fanatical devotion to the cult of Sanguinius, Stele had an agent who would willingly further his plans without ever considering the true motives behind them. As long as Stele kept his purpose cloaked in the mantle of the primarch’s rebirth, Sachiel would follow him unflinchingly.
He looked away from the window. Arkio was not present, and to his irritation, the honour guard stationed at the gate to the inner crypt refused to let the inquisitor enter. The young man was in there once again, communing with the Holy Lance. In truth, Arkio’s affinity with the archeotech weapon was a source of some concern to Stele. He found himself wondering what secrets the device held, secrets that only someone with Astartes blood would ever be able to unlock. The Blood Angel was meditating in the sanctum, hoping to catch some fragment of his primogenitor’s soul from the weapon Sanguinius had once called his own. Stele gave a silent entreaty to the Ruinous Powers that he would find no such thing. If Arkio began to exhibit signs of dangerous independence, all Stele’s carefully-wrought plans would be for nothing.
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