Another lusty roar brought his attention back to the crowds below. Sachiel was building to a crescendo now, unleashing a blazing tirade.
In his hand the priest held the copper chalice that was the symbol of his high office. He thrust it aloft, and the dawn sun glittered off the replica of the great Red Grail. It held Sachiel’s gaze for a moment. One day, he told himself, I will carry the true Red Grail itself, even if I have to wrestle it from Corbulo’s dead fingers. The naked avarice in his thoughts sent a thrill through the priest. It was a hidden desire, something he would never have dared to speak of openly – and yet suddenly he felt empowered by it, the daring of such dissension making him bold. The thousand bowed their heads under the shape of the chalice.
‘The Blood of ages flows through us all,’ he said, phrases from the Book of the Lords bubbling up inside him without conscious thought. ‘The Sons of Sanguinius will rise to take the galaxy from all those who oppose order and light.’ They cheered him on, frenzied and wild. ‘The Blessed lights the path, we must lead the way along it and welcome those who praise his name!’
‘Arkio!’
‘Arkio!’
‘Praise him!’
Voices all around were raised in adulation. ‘We bring light to those who see the truth, and all-consuming fire to those who deny.’ Sachiel slammed the grail to his breastplate, tapping it to his hearts. He was shaking with raw emotion. ‘Heed me. I am the right hand of the Reborn Angel. I give you all his call to glory. Take up arms, Warriors of the Reborn, take up your weapons and make ready for war.’ Sachiel threw back his head and bellowed to the sky. ‘This day the old order dies. This day we are all reborn anew. This day we begin the Blood Crusade!’
‘Arkio! Arkio! Arkio! Arkio!’ The chant went on and on until it filled the air.
Despite the brightness of the morning, Rafen could see only shadows. From the roof of the fortress he watched the priest continue his bombast, a tiny figure in red and white he could blot from his sight with the thick of his thumb. There was no silencing his voice, though, every word Sachiel said was being broadcast through the vox network of the Blood Angels and the telegraphs of Shenlong’s city-sprawls.
‘Those men who seek to control us, we disavow them!’ came the priest’s cry in his ear-bead, the sound of his voice on the wind reaching him a split-second later. ‘The Imperium is choked with petty bureaucrats and debased fools, weaklings who corral the destiny of mankind laid down by the Emperor. Sanguinius knew this. He died in the war with the arch-traitor Horus so the Emperor might live!’ Rafen’s lip curled in a sour sneer; Sachiel was warping the truth to suit his sermonising. The priest continued, working himself and his audience into a frenzy. ‘But now the Pure One has returned to us, and his sight is unfailing. He came to us because this plague of deficiency has stretched across the stars, even to poison the very highest office of the Blood Angels themselves. We cannot stand by any longer and allow the will of our Chapter, our species to be dictated by impotent men. Now is the day for action, in Arkio’s name!’
The crowd roared his brother’s name, sending a shudder through the rock. Rafen glanced down at the knife in his hand, still stained with his own dried blood. Hours ago he had been within a heartbeat of taking his own life, and now he was again, but this time it was by his own choice.
‘We abandon the rule of these so-called Adeptus Terra!’ Sachiel bellowed. ‘We deny the dominion of Dante. We find him wanting. From now on, we answer only to the command of the Blessed!’ The crowd boiled around the priest and the thousand, demanded answers, begging him for a mandate. They wanted to be told what to do, they would not be complete without an edict to follow. ‘Warriors, I charge you. You will stand as cohorts to the Blood Angels aboard the Bellus, the sacred flagship of the Blood Crusade. Together we will face Dante and excise him so that Arkio may take his rightful place as master of the Chapter!’
‘Vandire’s oath…’ Rafen felt the impact of the words like a physical blow. He had never doubted that sooner or later he would hear such heresy uttered, but still when it came it made him feel like vomiting. Sachiel stood there advocating murder and sedition, and to Rafen’s eternal shame there were battle-brothers who took up the call. All at once he felt tarnished and humiliated, ashamed to admit that he shared blood with these addled turncoats.
‘Baal shall come to our fold,’ Sachiel roared, reaching a climax. ‘All Blood Angels and successors will bend the knee to Great Arkio, or face oblivion.’ The answering cry blotted out everything, and Rafen’s hot shame cooled into an icy anger. Could none of these blind fools see it? As clear as the day, it was there before them, masquerading in comrade’s clothes, appealing to their baser natures, their fears and secret hopes.
‘Chaos.’ Rafen spat the word from his mouth. The hand of the eightfold star moved Sachiel and the others like mindless pawns across a vast game board, marshalling them for ill deeds so huge they were beyond the reckoning of these blinkered, misguided fools. ‘Curse me, but I will not let this go any further.’
‘Brother?’ said a voice behind him, and Rafen spun about abruptly. He was caught unawares, his own dark thoughts and the rage of the crowds distracting him. Lucion approached him, a questioning look on the upper half of his face where it protruded over the half-mask of his breather plate. The Blood Angels Techmarine paused, his arms at his sides but the mechanical servo-limb on his back still twitching with concern. ‘What did you say?’
Rafen glanced from the knife in his hand, back to Lucion in his armour of red ceramite and cog-tooth gunmetal trim. ‘Arkio is no messiah,’ he told the Blood Angels Tech-priest. ‘My poor brother is an oblivious catspaw.’
Lucion’s face went white with shock. ‘How can you say such a thing? You, of all men, the sibling of the Blessed.’
‘How?’ Rafen repeated, advancing on the Techmarine. ‘I say it because I am the only one on this desperate world with eyes still clear enough to see.’
Brother Lucion backed away toward the service platform running the height of the Ikari fortress. ‘No, no,’ he waved all three of his limbs in the air before his face, as if he could banish Rafen’s utterance like a nagging insect. ‘You are mad.’
Rafen produced his bolter and aimed it squarely at Lucion’s forehead. ‘On the contrary,’ he told him. ‘I fear I am the last sane man.’ The black tunnel of the weapon’s maw never wavered. The Space Marine felt an odd kind of calm sweep over him as the final parts of his plan fell into place. Since the day this madness had begun there on Cybele, a slow-burning certainty had been building in Rafen’s soul. In the marrow of his bones he knew the rightness of it, and now it had come to a head. The fear, the constant dark fear that it would be by his hand that Arkio would perish was swept away. As he studied the confused face of the Techmarine, Rafen decided that he would take his own life, and that of every wayward mortal and deceiver that had strayed from the path of light. ‘The beating heart of this fortress, the core. You have spoken with its machine-spirit.’
Lucion gave a slow, wary nod. ‘Only in the most cursory fashion. I do not fully understand the ways of the reactor-spirit, but–’
He gestured toward the elevator platform with the gun. ‘You will take me to it, or I will kill you where you stand.’
They descended through the interior of the conical tower in the open metal cage of the lift. Lucion whispered a quick litany over the controls and, with a squeak of iron on iron, the platform began a controlled fall past level after level. Rafen kept the Techmarine in his sights, never allowing his bolter to shift from a point targeted at Lucion’s skull.
A memory flashed through Rafen’s mind, of a similar elevator in the planetary defence bunker on Cybele. He and Lucion had been there as well, Arkio and Sachiel too, dropping into the dark with vengeance on their minds. It seemed like so long ago, as if years and not weeks had passed between then and now. For a moment, the weight of his weariness threatened to come upon him like a heavy cloak, but Rafen shook it away with an angry blink of his eyes
.
Lucion was talking to himself. At first Rafen thought he was praying, or worse, using his vox to call for help. ‘It’s a test,’ the Techmarine was saying aloud, giving voice to his thoughts, ‘This is a loyalty test. The Blessed is testing my devotion.’
‘Would you do anything he asked?’ said Rafen.
‘Of course,’ Lucion replied instantly, as if the answer were as plain as the service stud on his brow. ‘He is the Blessed.’
Part of Rafen felt hate and antipathy for his battle-brother as he listened to Lucion’s answer. Perhaps, in the weaker minds of ordinary men, it was unsurprising that the commoners took up the cause of Arkio’s supposed divinity, but to see it so readily accepted by the rank and file of his own Chapter sickened him. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, brother, that you make a grievous error in venerating him?’
‘Why would I think such a thing?’ Lucion retorted. ‘By the grace of the Omnissiah, Sanguinius has been restored to us.’
All the anger that had been building in Rafen for weeks suddenly found an outlet and he snarled at the Techmarine. ‘He sprouts wings and suddenly he is a god-prince? Are you so credulous that you cannot see past the glitter of the gold armour?’
They had been travelling down in near darkness for several minutes, and so Rafen could only see glimpses of Lucion’s face. Conflicting emotions danced there for a moment before he nodded to himself. ‘A test,’ he repeated. ‘I will not be found lacking, you may carry my word of that to the Reborn Angel himself.’
With a clatter of metal, the elevator halted. ‘Fool,’ Rafen said under his breath, and motioned to the door. Unconcerned that he still had a gun trained on him, Lucion opened the wire-mesh and walked forward into the sub-level of the fortress. A spotlight mounted on his shoulder snapped on, and Rafen followed the bobbing blob of sodium-white glare.
The Techmarine carefully removed a ring of prayer beads from a rotary lock and powered open a series of thick steel hatches. Inside, there were consoles and panels of such diversity and intricate workings that Rafen was instantly reminded of the Bellus’s bridge deck. ‘A question,’ he said to Lucion. ‘Which one of these does the machine-spirit for the power core inhabit?’
Lucion frowned, then pointed at a large, ornate module. ‘Here. Although the spirit-programme extends itself out through the entire reactor system, tending to the fusion heart, the cooling factors, the regulatarium…’
Rafen didn’t understand most of the tech-priest’s terminology, but he grasped enough for his purposes. He drew in a breath. ‘The power-spirit. I want you to kill it.’
Lucion blinked. ‘Did I mis hear you? Rafen, perhaps you are taking this test too far, but I cannot–’
He shook his head, raising the bolter. ‘No test, priest. Do as I say.’
The Techmarine’s face drained of colour. ‘What you ask is madness, brother. Even if I could, such a deed would enrage the fusion core. It would reach critical potentiality in moments and detonate with enough force to punch a hole in this planet. We would all be destroyed!’
‘Arkio, too?’
At last Lucion understood what Rafen’s intentions were. ‘Oh, Holy Terra, no. Brother, please! I will have no part of this.’
He began to babble and Rafen tuned him out; the tech-priest would not assist him any further. He nodded at the console. ‘This one, yes?’ Without waiting for confirmation, Rafen raised his gun and unloaded a full clip of bolt-rounds into the device. Lucion screamed, his voice lost in a sudden clarion of whooping sirens.
The Techmarine staggered forward, shaking his head. ‘Wha-what have you done? What have you done?’
Rafen reloaded his weapon, slamming a fresh clip home. He was trying to find an answer for the priest when the rush of metal-shod feet signalled the arrival of more men. Figures in red armour appeared at a hatch on the opposite side of the room, visible through the smoke from the console and the strobes of warning lanterns.
‘We heard gunfire–’ one of them shouted.
‘Traitor!’ howled Lucion. ‘Rafen has turned against us!’
The automatic reaction of the Space Marines was to raise their weapons and fire. Rafen wheeled away, letting off a trio of wild shots as he went through a tuck-and-roll out of the access hatch to the lift shaft. Stabbing streaks of tracer cut through the control chamber and Lucion was hit in the crossfire. He spun in place and stumbled against the wrecked console.
Rafen made it to the metal cage as the other Space Marines dived out of the hatch after him, bolters chattering. Pushing away all thoughts that his targets were fellow Blood Angels, he fired back. Return fire blazed over his head and struck part of the lift’s cabling, severing it in a blare of noise. Rafen expected the cage to drop suddenly into the stygian dark at the bottom of the shaft, but the opposite happened, the bolts cut into the counterweight control, and suddenly the lift platform shot upward, trailing streamers of sparks. The acceleration threw Rafen to the deck and pinned him there as the lift raced headlong toward the circle of light above him.
Inside the chamber, Lucion inched himself forward, using one hand to keep his intestines and preomnor organ from spilling out of his belly wound. Here, surrounded by the lights and sounds of the Omnissiah’s most holy creations, the Techmarine felt alive even as his blood leaked from him in brilliant red runnels. He took his other hand and tossed away his gauntlet, so that his last sensation would be the touch of his flesh against the sacred technology. Lucion gripped the thick switch rod beneath the rune that read: ‘Emerg. Scram.’ in the old tongue and turned it. With a sullen flicker, the lights inside the fortress winked out as Lucion cut off the fusion reaction before it could become critical.
‘No victory for you, turncoat,’ he gasped, ‘no victory…’
The tech-priests insisted on re-consecrating the room before they would set to work in it, and that took the better part of the day, but as Shenlong’s feeble sun began to dip beneath the horizon, the Ikari fortress and the district around it erupted with light and power once again, and the people cheered for Arkio’s beneficence in saving them from the darkness and cold.
Their idol did not hear their thanksgiving through the veil of rage that shrouded him. ‘Answers!’ he thundered at Sachiel, the sheer momentum of his anger rocking the priest back on his heels. ‘I demand answers. What warpspawn filth could it be that would dare to enter my fortress and render it impotent? Tell me.’
Stele smoothed his formal robes as he entered, giving a cursory bow. ‘I shall do so, Great Arkio, but I must warn you. The news is hard.’
‘Hard?’ he spat, turning from Sachiel to stalk across to the inquisitor. ‘You think me some child you must keep insulated from the ills of the world? Tell me, Stele, or I’ll rip it from you.’
The force of the youth’s words actually made Stele stumble for a brief moment. The awful light of the black rage danced in Arkio’s eyes, turning the patrician, handsome face into that of a fanged, angered god. Arkio’s aspect mirrored the sacred tapestry of Sanguinius in his blood-thirst that hung in the cloisters on Baal. ‘Lord, I have prepared a shuttle to take us both to Bellus. It is not safe here on Shenlong for you any more,’ Stele began, recovering his poise. ‘You will understand my reluctance when I explain myself.’ He gestured at the photon candles around the room. ‘The cowardly saboteur in our midst, the viper at our breast attempted to smother the will of the machines that empower this edifice. Had he succeeded, he might have caused a catastrophe.’
‘Explain, lord inquisitor,’ Sachiel ventured, earning himself a leaden look from Arkio.
Stele continued, finding the meter of his performance. ‘Were it not for the selfless courage and sacrifice of Brother Lucion, the machine-spirit would have become turbulent, perhaps to unleash the fire of the atom from its heart.’ He took a calculated pause. ‘The Ikari fortress and all living things for six kilometres in every direction would have been immolated in a nuclear firestorm.’
‘Who did this?’ Arkio hissed. ‘A rogue Word Bearer? One of
Iskavan’s host that escaped the net of our execution squads?’
The inquisitor bowed his head sadly. ‘No, Blessed. It sickens me to say that a Blood Angel was the culprit.’
Arkio froze like a statue, his wings snapping rigid. Behind him, Sachiel took a cautious step closer. ‘And his name, Lord Stele?’ asked the priest.
‘I suspected there was an apostate in our midst when the mind-witch Vode arrived with Gallio and his other assassins,’ Stele sneered. ‘I have since learned that the vox of the late Brother-Sergeant Koris was used to send a message to Baal to summon them. They came only because the betrayer in our midst called out to that fool Dante, and bid him send killers to end you, Great Arkio.’
‘A man still loyal to Dante, to the old order, here?’ Arkio’s voice wavered, incredulous, so sure of his own majesty. ‘After all the miracles I have enacted?’
Stele nodded. ‘But graver still is his identity, Blessed.’
‘Name him.’ Sachiel snapped. ‘Name this treacherous bastard and I will have my personal honour guard hunt him down and tear him apart like a prey beast.’
The inquisitor wanted so badly to smile; but that would have spoiled the act. ‘My lord, the traitor is your brother. The traitor is Rafen.’
The roar of inchoate anger that erupted from Arkio’s throat struck like an elemental force, echoing across the city zones in baleful thunder.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The street was alive with gunfire, shots clipping at Rafen’s heels, whining off the cobbles to punch craters in the walls. The Blood Angel made a daring move, leaping off a low wall to launch himself behind the cover of a cargo pod. He snap-fired a burst at his pursuers, not expecting to do any more than make them keep their heads down.
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