‘What is this?’ Irritation bubbled out of the fleshy avatar, steam popping from blisters all across its skin.
Stele gulped air and turned to face Sachiel, shrugging out of the restricting cloak about his neck. ‘You conceited imbecile,’ he hissed, the effort of anger trying him to the limit. ‘I said no interruptions.’
Sachiel tried to make his mouth work, but nothing seemed to come. He could not look away from the intricate folds of parchment across the daemon’s heartless, monstrous face. In a crushing blow of realisation, the priest suddenly understood what he had stumbled into – Stele, the trusted servant of Arkio, was in league with the Ruinous Powers. The thought galvanised him into action. He had to escape, to get away and warn the Reborn Angel that a viper far more venomous than his errant brother lay in their midst…
‘Kill it,’ rippled the daemon, the words hidden in the sound of fanning pages.
‘No,’ Stele grunted. ‘I need him alive… He is useful to me.’
The priest brought his gun to bear and his finger tightened on the trigger, but he made the mistake of meeting Stele’s baleful gaze and abruptly all function in his muscles ceased. ‘Nnnnnn–’ Sachiel’s mind flashed to the moment on Cybele, when the inquisitor had held a Word Bearers sniper in a similar mind-lock. With every gramme of his will, the priest pushed against the pressure in his mind.
‘Ah,’ Stele managed, eyes watering. The effort was hard on him, coming so soon after spending his abilities on the Blood Angels mere days earlier. He wavered, and felt the phantom grip begin to slacken.
Pages of ancient dogma, documents filled with arcane scripture and illuminated proofs, rustled past him, shifting and reforming into shapes that might have been men, might have been beasts. ‘You wish to preserve this manling?’ asked the creature, breaths of polluted air gusting through its manifested form.
‘Yes, great Malfallax,’ Stele bit out. ‘We need him.’
‘Very well,’ said the daemon, and the papers spun around Stele in a narrow typhoon, their edges slicing hundreds of tiny cuts in his bare skin. From its beating heart still floating in the depths of the empyrean, Malfallax projected a concentrated portion of itself into the open gate of Stele’s corrupted mind. A black pearl of raw warp briefly entered the inquisitor – and suddenly all his weakness and fatigue melted away, replaced by a giddy psychic head-rush. ‘A gift,’ the creature whispered.
Colour returned to Stele’s face and his teeth bared. ‘You are most gracious, Spiteful One.’ His eyes bored into Sachiel’s, flaying his mind open to the psyker’s dark will. ‘Kneel, priest,’ he commanded.
Sachiel found he had no resistance within him, and he did as he was ordered, the reductor in his hand falling to the tiled floor. His head swam with a sickening roil of recall, as his recent memories replayed in flash-frame blinks of pain – Stele spun though the Sanguinary Priest’s thoughts as easily as he might the pages of a book.
Stele gave a grunt of laughter, reading his intent. ‘You came to tell me Rafen was dead? Such trivia is hardly worth my notice.’
It was as if Sachiel were kneeling on the edge of a bottomless abyss. The priest’s mind fluttered like an insect caught in setting amber, teetering on the brink of a horrific realisation. Stele is tainted by Chaos, and if that is so then everything he has touched has also been sullied by corruption. By the blood of the primarch, what have we done? I am tainted. The Warriors of the Reborn too? The Spear? Even the Blessed Arkio…
Stele shook his head. ‘Cease,’ he said, halting Sachiel’s thoughts with a gesture. ‘No, priest. I cannot have you venture down that road. Your role is yet to be completed.’ His eyes glittered, and the inquisitor threw an ephemeral dart into the Blood Angel’s mind. Sachiel screamed as Stele unfolded his psyche and deftly excised his memories, painting blackness over them from the moment he had entered the sanctum. A drool of fluid issued out of the corner of Sachiel’s mouth.
‘Frail little men-beasts,’ Garand’s latest avatar said with a grimace, flakes of dead flesh falling from it with each word. ‘Its mind may break beneath your ministrations.’
‘I think not,’ retorted Stele, withdrawing the needle of his psychic power from a blank-eyed Sachiel. ‘He will remember nothing of what he saw.’
Rough laughter crackled through the singed papers. ‘Ah, Stele. You grow ever distant to your human roots and closer to us with every one of your gestures.’
‘It pleases me to hear you say that,’ Stele said, with a forced smile. In his mind’s eye, Malfallax’s dark seed of potency was lodged in his soul, glistening with the eightfold star upon its surface. ‘And while it gratifies me to accept your mark, Great Changer, perhaps it might be better for you to withdraw it for now–’
The pages gave an angry wasp-swarm vibration. ‘Keep it, my friend. It will be important in the days to come.’
‘We shall begin, then,’ grated Garand. With a shrug of broken bones, the Word Bearers Warmaster withdrew from his mouthpiece and let it die.
Gently, the ripped shreds of paper began to drift apart as Malfallax retreated from the material realm, leaving the inquisitor with only a decaying corpse and the silent priest for company. Stele watched the pages settle, at once refreshed and newly afraid of the boon his monstrous master had given him.
The dock was alive with noise and motion, men swarming like ants around the iron wharves and gantries. Dozens of ugly, bullet-shaped orbital tenders waited at rest on vertical rails, plumes of vaporised liquid oxygen hissing white clouds into the air. Cargo pods, normally crammed full of munitions crates and warheads, were being loaded with human freight instead. Hundreds and hundreds of men, a rag-tag army clad in cloaks and scavenged armour, filed solemnly into the modules. Here and there, tall figures in red armour could be seen, calling out orders and directing the erstwhile soldiers to their departure points.
Rafen watched from his vantage point in a burnt-out building, studying the ebb and flow of the crowds, watching the ordered procession with a practiced eye. He kept his vox on the same channel as the Blood Angels on the docks, listening to their terse communications as he rested, tending to his injuries. In the sewers, the explosion of the warehouse had forced a plug of filthy water into a floodhead and carried Rafen along with it, tossing him like a piece of debris. Sealed inside the airtight frame of his power armour, the Space Marine was forced to ride out the shock wave as each impact against the tunnel walls threw him closer to unconsciousness. The headlong surge along the pipes was a blur of rushing noise and blunt pain, but eventually the flood spent itself and deposited him in an overflow chamber on the lower levels of the factory city. Rafen flexed his arm, grimacing. His skin was marred with broad purple-black bruises where he had suffered impact after impact and the limb was slack where it had been dislocated. Carefully, he gripped his wrist and tugged; with a dull click of cartilage, the joint popped back into place. He shrugged off the pain that came with it.
Using an abandoned chimney stack, Rafen had climbed until he found his current hide. He took stock of his situation, examining his weapons and what little he had in the way of supplies. The Blood Angel considered himself behind enemy lines now, and conducted his battle drill accordingly. He had no idea how long he would be able to go unnoticed; certainly it might be days before the rubble of the store yard was picked through and the bodies of the dead men counted. He had a window of opportunity, but it would close quickly.
A roar of rocket exhaust drew his attention back to the dock. With a clang of steel on steel, a launch gantry fell away and one of the tenders threw itself into the dull sky on a plume of yellow flame. Fins folded out of the craft as it ascended and Rafen watched it go, disappearing into a sickly glow as it vanished through the low cloud cover. Another fifty or more men for Arkio’s helot army were on their way to Bellus. There was a flurry of orders over the vox. The next launches were almost fuelled and ready to lift off. Legions of zealots, all of them adorned with the crude halo-and-spear symbol of the Warriors of the Reborn, shift
ed back and forth, eager to board the ships that would take them to be with their messiah.
Arkio was aboard the battle barge; Rafen had caught a cursory mention of ‘the Blessed’ and pieced together the meaning. With his brother on the Bellus and the army Sachiel had raised from the Shenlongi joining him in their droves, the situation was clear. The Blood Crusade was beginning, and soon the massive warship would be departing. Rafen replaced the gauntlet about his arm and re-sealed his wargear’s links. Twice now he failed to bring this travesty of the Emperor’s will to an end. Alone with Arkio in the fortress, it had been his own weakness that had stopped him from ending his sibling’s life; and in the reactor core, blind chance had prevented the destruction of the tower. If Bellus left without Rafen, then Stele would be free to manipulate Sachiel and Arkio to whatever ends the inquisitor chose. The Space Marine’s mind returned to the vision he had seen in his makeshift retreat, as it had many times in the past few days. He held his combat knife in his hand once more, then slammed it into his boot sheath with grim finality.
Beneath the dock platform was a web of supports extending into the dry mud of the riverbed. Orange knots of rust clustered at every giant bolt and weld, releasing rains of ruddy fines with each rumbling blast of exhaust from the tenders launching above. Rafen made his way through broken catwalks and bent spars and selected a pad on the southern edge of the dock where spindly Sentinel walkers had just completed the loading of a brace of cargo pods. The Blood Angel emerged directly beneath the gaping maws of the ship’s engine bells, which twitched and hissed as the pilot-servitor in the nosecone ran through the final countdown sequence. The modules packed with soldiers were sealed shut – they would only be opened when the tender had safely landed in an airtight bay on Bellus – so Rafen could not enter there. The cockpit, high above him at the tip of the rocket, would not suffice either. Too small, too filled with arcane machinery and Adeptus Mechanicus complexity.
There would be only one route for a fugitive to board the battle barge. He could not chance accompanying other Blood Angels aboard a shuttle or Thunderhawk. Even with the dirt smeared across his armour, he could be seen and recognised. Once aboard Bellus, it would be a different story, the vast starship had many places for a careful soul to conceal itself. Rafen grabbed a maintenance ladder and hauled himself up it, into the nest of pipes and feed channels that poured promethium fuel to the engines. As the rockets hummed into life about him, he pushed his broad form into the open framework and found a vee-shaped stanchion that would accommodate his armour. The thunder of the engines built into a deafening crescendo, even through the noise-dampening protection of his helmet. Rafen gave a last look at the life-support monitor gauge on his wrist; all the vacuum seals on his armour were intact. With effort, he dug his ceramite-hardened fingers into the girders and wedged himself in place. Rafen closed his eyes and began a prayer to Sanguinius as gravity laid into him.
Clinging to the underside of the tender, Rafen hung on in grim determination, as the dock, the city and then the cloud-shrouded landscape of Shenlong fell away beneath him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
In the darkened corners of the landing bay, where only the blind rat-hunter servitors would dare to venture, Rafen was concealed. With care, he rubbed away the thin patina of ice that had formed on the outer shell of his armour, the rimes of frost tinkling as his gauntlet brushed them away. The beating of the Blood Angel’s heart was loud in his ears as the organ worked to supply additional oxygen to his bloodstream, counteracting the lingering side-effects of the trip through hard vacuum. Rafen’s armour had protected him well, but still the incredible cold of space had leached the heat from him, and the Space Marine’s muscles were tense. Typically, a Space Marine would have luxury of a chemical sacrament before venturing into the void. The philtre granted by the Chapter priests stimulated the Astartes mucranoid gland, turning their sweat into a complex compound to protect the skin against such punishing extremes of temperature. Rafen had no such defence, however, and the kiss of the airless dark had touched him with its full force.
The machines and men in the landing bay moved in synchrony as each new transport arrived. The shuttles paused just long enough to disgorge their loads of helot troopers before overhead gantries lifted the ships into refuelling sockets or directed them back out to be launched on a return course to Shenlong. Each new group of Arkio’s zealots was herded away toward the bilge decks by a clattering servitor or a Chapter serf. The serfs held shock-staves to keep the more curious members of the Warriors of the Reborn in check. Rafen used the magnification functions of his helmet optics to watch the motion of the bondsmen; now and then a battle-brother would intervene, overseeing the activity.
Inwardly, Rafen felt uncomfortable and conflicted. He was in every sense past the point of no return. It felt wrong, alien, to be in the midst of his brethren yet also in the thick of his adversaries. Every fibre of his being rebelled against the unwelcome, gut-sick sensation. Like all his kind, Rafen had come to know the camaraderie of his fellow Blood Angels as an extended family, a brotherhood in all senses of the world. By rights, Bellus was supposed to be a sanctuary, a place where he should have felt safe and content – instead, it was a danger zone as lethal as any field of melta mines or bio-web. As long as Sachiel thought him dead, then surprise was on his side, but he had to be careful not to squander his only advantage. Too many men aboard this ship knew his face, so to go unhooded would be an instant death sentence. Even with his armour sealed, if he freely moved among the other Astartes it would only be a matter of time before someone questioned him. Rafen needed to find somewhere that his presence would not be challenged.
He shook off the chill as another cargo lighter rumbled past him, the bullet-shaped vessel settling into a landing cradle with a heavy bump and a shower of orange sparks. The brass and cast-iron rig folded up around the transport like a gripping hand and turned the vessel to present it to a debarkation ramp. Rafen moved out of his cover and balanced on the balls of his feet. As with many starships in the service of the Empire, the Bellus’s tech-priests encouraged the battle barge’s machine-spirit to lower the gravity in the docking bays so that cargo could be manipulated more easily. Rafen felt light here, and he prepared himself for the necessary change in his gait. A cloud of white vapour belched from the lighter’s dorsal vents, momentarily occluding the ramp and the cradle. Rafen sprang out of his hiding place, using the mist to cover him. In the long, loping steps that he had been taught, the Space Marine crossed beneath the slow-moving ship and emerged at the foot of the ramp, as if he had been meant to be there all along. The cargo transporter touched the ramp edge with a hollow thud, and all across its hull gull-wing hatches opened.
Men boiled out of the ship in a ragged wave, all of them shivering and trembling, some from the cold and others from awe. Rafen saw a couple of them drop to their knees. At first he thought they might have been injured, but then he realised that they were kissing the deck, genuflecting in honour of the ship they saw as Arkio’s sacred vessel. All of the conscripts had weapons, after a fashion. Some had guns, others swords, spears and other bladed things that had a makeshift look to them. Many of them wore armour fashioned from metal junk, although a few sported dark ballistic mesh tunics. Planetary Defence Force hardware, Rafen noted; the wearers were either former members of Shenlong’s PDF that had survived the Word Bearers invasion, or else they were opportunists who had looted the bodies of the dead. The Space Marine’s expression soured. Either way, they were not worthy to set foot on a fighting ship like Bellus – even the lowliest of the Chapter serfs were nobler than this rabble.
The warriors came to a stumbling halt as they saw the Blood Angel standing there before them, cowed by his presence as much as by the incredible sight of the cavernous starship interior. Rafen would warrant that hardly any of these men had ever left their birthworld before today. He scanned their faces and found some with the vacant, transported look of a true fanatic, while others were brutal and crude, the mo
st vicious of Shenlong’s dregs. Why Sachiel had selected these men was beyond Rafen’s understanding; none of them would ever measure up to the standards of the Chapter. All they were good for would be to die on the point of an enemy’s weapon and clog the muzzles of guns with their corpses. He suppressed the urge to sneer. Such tactics were base and ignoble, better suited to the traitor-kin of Chaos than to the Sons of Sanguinius.
‘Lord?’ A serf approached him with a questioning look on his face. ‘How may I assist you?’
Rafen glanced at the bondsman. ‘You are to escort these men below, correct?’
‘Yes, lord. Is there some problem?’
He shook his head. ‘No. The priest Sachiel has ordered that I accompany this party… He wishes me to oversee the transfer.’
The serf nodded. ‘As you command, lord.’ With a wave of his shock-stave, the servant directed the soldiers from the ramp.
The shabby figures filed past him, some of them averting their eyes, others studying him with a bald mix of hate and fear. Among the men, a single face suddenly leapt out at Rafen – a sallow, drawn complexion atop the remains of a PDF officer’s uniform. The man bowed his head as he passed and Rafen watched him go. He had last seen the soldier inside the Ikari fortress, after Sachiel’s honour guards had gunned down a group of innocents as repudiation. The man had actually thanked him for the ‘murdergift’ given to his sister who died in the crossfire, as if it were some great blessing. He seemed drained of all spirit now, a hollow shell stained with blood and driven only by belief in Arkio’s divinity.
Rafen followed the group along the echoing corridors of the ship and into the open caverns of the dark lower levels. To call them ‘decks’ would have been a misnomer: the hull spaces resembled a stygian canyon with plates of fungal growth extending from the steep walls. Sections of decking jutted out here and there, never broad enough to meet the vast skeletal ribs of the ship’s inner hull. Webs of cable, nets and rope-bridges looped them together. The warriors made themselves places to live and sleep from jury-rigged hammocks and discarded cargo pods. It was like a series of broken bridges arching over a valley so far below that the floor was lost in utter blackness.
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