And if not, there was still one more card Stele could deal, one more player he could deliver to the field.
Rafen brought the power sword to arms and held it at his chest, the blade pointing at the sky. He gave his brother a grim salute.
In return, Arkio’s eyes drew into narrow slits as he let the Spear of Telesto slide along his fingers to its full length. Sullen flickers of yellow-amber lightning crackled around the blade and the golden icon of Sanguinius carved in the hilt.
Both men stood for a moment; the battle balanced on a breath of silence as they watched for the sudden flood of muscle movement, the smallest telltale that would signify their opponent’s actions. Warrior-to-warrior battles like this were commonplace in the wars of the Imperium, where conflicts were often fought with champions on either side engaging in single combat. Like every Adeptus Astartes, Rafen and Arkio were trained to fight alone, as an army of one; in years past, as initiates, the siblings had sparred on many occasions. Then, they had known each other well enough to counter every attack, neutralise every defence – but time had altered both of them.
Rafen surrendered himself to the moment, allowing his mind and spirit to flow together, merging into a single engine of action and movement. Arkio watched him, impassive and unmoving, a gold statue among the colourless debris of the city square. Rafen’s focus narrowed until it was only his brother he saw before him, only the shape of a man. An enemy.
And suddenly he was in motion, a snarl ripping from his lips, fangs baring in fight rage. The power sword sizzled around him in a punishing arc of liquid silver. Arkio reacted, sweeping the spear down in a sharp gesture of defence, falling for Rafen’s feint. With his other arm, Rafen brought up the blunt, brutish ingot of his bolt pistol and followed through with a three-round burst of shell fire.
Arkio recovered with frightening speed and turned the glowing lance like a propeller, the humming shaft making a gleaming disc in the air. The bolt rounds whined and screamed as they were shredded by the flickering shield. Rafen extended through his initial attack and spun on his boot, slashing down with a low cut of the sword. The blade sliced through air as Arkio slid away over loose-packed dirt. In a blur, he turned the spear back at Rafen.
His brother spied the infinitesimal loss of balance off Arkio’s back foot and advanced, cutting a web of figure-eight lines toward him. The spear tip met the power sword and spat violently, bursts of fat, angry sparks hissing like fireworks as the weapons met and parted, met and parted, met again.
Arkio fell back step after step, unhurried and emotionless. The fan of light from the spinning lance was everywhere that Rafen’s sword blade fell, halting its savage attacks, blunting each stab and cut with a flashing parry. To the untrained eye, it seemed as if the figure in the golden armour was on the defensive, fighting off an endless salvo of strikes. Some of the Warriors of the Reborn made harsh catcalls until the loyalist Space Marines commanding them gave out violent censures. Arkio let Rafen spend the energy of his assault in a flurry of blows, at the same time using the minimum amount of effort to counter. He had expected better from his brother.
Rafen was no fool. If he extended the attack a second longer, Arkio would turn it on him and strike back. He lunged forward, an easy move calculated to look like the action of a fighter frustrated and desperate. Arkio took it at face value and blocked the strike, opening a window of opportunity along his left side for an eye-blink. The winged Space Marine was powerful, undoubtedly, but he lacked the experience of his older brother. Rafen would never have fallen for the feint – but Arkio did.
The bolt gun came from nowhere, suddenly there in front of Arkio’s face, the barrel still warm and hot with the stink of ozone discharge. Rafen’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Arkio reacted with preternatural speed. His folded wings exploded open in a flare of brilliant white and he shot into the air, flashing out of Rafen’s line of fire. The golden figure described a swift, graceful arc up and over his brother’s head, spinning and turning toward the ground seven metres distant. Rafen rotated in place, tracking Arkio with the gun. He fired a quartet of shots at the swooping shape, leading the target but missing with each bolt by the merest fraction.
The ground rumbled and rippled as Arkio touched down, the impact causing a shock wave in the centuries-old detritus around them. A grimace marred his perfect features as he whirled the spear to present the glowing teardrop blade to Rafen. Golden effulgence and sparkling particles gathered into a humming sphere of energy at the weapon’s tip. Unable to dodge, Rafen saw it coming and raised his hands, gun and sword crossed over his face like some desperate invocation of the Imperial aquila.
The jet of unearthly power detached from the Holy Lance and ripped across the distance between the two men, splitting open and turning into a dancing fence of yellow flame. As it engulfed Rafen, he felt his skin searing; he remembered the Word Bearers, their bodies reduced to ash in the depths of the Shenlong manufactory. For one heart-stopping moment, Rafen thought his world was at an end, but then the flames flicked away, leaving him injured but still alive. He pawed at his face, shaking off a fine layer of ash where his epidermis had been flash-burnt.
‘Sanguinius be praised,’ he heard Mephiston’s voice. ‘The Spear of Telesto knows the soul of his Sons! He turns his holy fire from Rafen!’
The Space Marine nodded to himself – of course, the weapon was gene-coded. It could only be used by men who carried the genetic template of the primogenitor within them, and it would not harm those who bore the same mark in their blood. Rafen saw a brief glint of annoyance in Arkio’s eyes – he would not be able to do away with him in such a showy display of power as he had the cursed Traitor Marines. It was fitting – the fight would be won or lost on martial prowess, not strength of arms. Snarling, Rafen threw himself at Arkio once more, leading into him with the hissing edge of the power sword’s blade.
Arkio bit back an angry curse, rebuking himself for forgetting the weapon’s gene-code failsafe. Instead, he dropped the haft of the spear into a two-handed grip, holding it like a quarterstaff. He blocked Rafen’s attack, the sword blade bouncing as it struck off the unbreakable shaft of the weapon. He forced Rafen off-balance and shoved him back, reversing the ploy his brother had used only moments earlier.
Broken drifts of ferrocrete fragments and stone shifted beneath Rafen’s feet and he dug in, refusing to let Arkio knock him back. Blade and spear came together, each weapon pressing back to the fighter’s breastplates, hot flashes of light flickering over them. The brothers were toe-to-toe, pushing into one another with all the force they could muster.
‘Yield, Rafen,’ snarled Arkio. ‘Yield to me and I will end it cleanly.’
‘I will not yield to corruption,’ he gasped. ‘Brother, there must be something of the man I knew still in you, some piece of your soul that still remains pure?’
‘I am purity itself.’ Arkio’s skin was taut across his face with anger, his fangs bared. ‘Ignorant fool, you oppose your very lord. I am the Deus Sanguinius–’
‘You are a dupe!’ Rafen bellowed, howling the words, ‘You’re nothing but a clockwork toy for that ordos whoreson. He did this, warped you into this mutant obscenity.’
Arkio’s threw back his head and roared. ‘Liar. Traitor. Coward.’ With a massive, vicious surge of motion, the winged Space Marine brought the spear about and slammed the blunt end into the centre of Rafen’s torso with a thunderclap of force.
The impact struck the Blood Angel like a cannon shell and Rafen was blown backwards off his feet. He flew through the air, releasing snap-fire shots from his bolter that went wild, deflecting off broken rock and keening away from indirect hits on Arkio’s armour. Rafen landed with a crash of rubble, sending a roil of brick dust up into the air. He struggled, his feet slipping below him.
Arkio became aware of his name on the wind, a heartbeat pulse of chanting from the Warriors of the Reborn as they sensed the end was near for his opponent. Blood as hot as molten iron engorge
d his body with murderous power, the unchained potential of the black rage unfolding to envelop him. Arkio let out a wordless scream of absolute and utter fury, throwing himself into the air on the great curves of his wings. The spear buzzed and hummed in his hands, twitching like a distressed mount, but he forced it to turn toward Rafen. The lance tried to face itself away from his target but in his ire Arkio would not allow it.
At the top of his arc of flight, Arkio spun about and raced back down into the arms of gravity, wings cupping the wind, diving like a hawk upon prey. The teardrop blade flashed in the dimness.
His bones still ringing with the impact, Rafen forced himself off the ground to confront the attack; the glittering gold shape blurred at him, the lance aimed at his heart. Rafen’s eyes met Arkio’s and the Space Marine leapt into the air to meet him early.
The instant stretched like melting tallow. Turning, spinning, the lance struck poorly and deflected off Rafen’s shoulder in a sizzle of sparks. The Space Marine moved, slipping under Arkio’s guard, the two of them passing in mid-air less than a hand-span apart. Rafen’s sword led the way, and the crackling power blade found brief purchase. The weapon cut a wound in Arkio’s wing, red blood exploding in a crimson blossom, stark white feathers raining about him like falling petals.
Both men landed hard, but only one bled. Rafen turned the sword so that he could see the fluid that kissed the blade. It was wine-dark and sluggish like tar, it was polluted.
‘First blood!’ shouted one of Mephiston’s men, but the cry was lost in snarls and roars of Arkio’s loyalists.
‘No…’ The word was small and plaintive, a childlike denial of something the eye saw but refused to believe. Sachiel’s hands came to his face and it was only then that he realised the voice had been his. A great splash of crimson disfigured Arkio’s immaculate golden wargear and the sight of this offence burned into the priest’s vision like a brand.
The sharp, tearing agony of the wound seemed to be instantly translated to every member of Arkio’s retinue – the sheer shock of seeing their liege lord injured by a mere Space Marine hit them with a physical force. For a long second all of them were stuck dumb by the enormity of it.
Sachiel could smell the blood. As a Sanguinary High Priest, the scent of living vitae was as distinct as the bouquet of a fine wine or the aroma of a delicate flower. Sachiel had known blood all through his service as an Apothecary to the Chapter, and he had tasted a thousand strains and touched a thousand more in his duties. On battlefields he had seen great lakes of it shed by enemy and ally alike, he had witnessed it gushing in red fountains from the arteries of men screaming for the Emperor’s peace. Sachiel knew the scent of his own blood, and that of Sanguinius himself as it lay captured and preserved in the Red Grail on Baal. The stench of what leaked from Arkio struck his senses like a mailed fist. He sensed corruption, black and ruinous, some foul seed of pollution swarming and writhing inside the Blessed’s veins.
Sachiel’s stomachs threatened to rebel and throw their contents on the ground. It was impossible. The priest scrambled inside himself for some explanation and found none – his senses had never betrayed him before and they did not betray him now. Sachiel turned away, blocking out the sight even though the smell was wrapped around him in invisible wreathes. His gaze fell on Stele; the inquisitor was growling some order at his hooded psy-witch. Stele caught his sight for a fractional instant and Sachiel saw him start.
‘You,’ Sachiel managed, the word bubbling up from a deep, hidden place. ‘You…’ Like glass breaking, the compulsions Stele had placed in Sachiel’s psyche aboard the Bellus suddenly shattered. Perhaps it was the shock of Arkio’s injury, perhaps some last fragment of Sachiel’s honourable self rising to the surface, but in that instant the priest was freed of the psyker’s hold on his will.
Sachiel’s world, so perfect and so rationalised, so carefully assembled to serve his ego, came crashing down about him. Floodgates of denied, forgotten memories disintegrated and the priest was knocked to his knees by the force of them, wailing. Every line he had crossed, every choice he had made in order to aggrandise himself, and Stele had been there to help him do it. Sachiel’s gorge rose as the stink of mutation filled every pore of his skin, contaminating him and choking the air. ‘Oh lord,’ he wept, bitter tears falling from his face. ‘What have I done?’ He looked up at Stele and saw the inquisitor staring down at him, an expression of utter contempt on his cruel lips. ‘What have you done to me?’
Stele knelt and whispered in his ear. ‘I gave you the tools to destroy yourself.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The rains came from the darkening sky, a whisper of falling droplets spattering across the grey landscape of the dead city-shrine. It hissed over the forms of the rag-tag warriors as they surged forward, rushing to Arkio’s flanks.
Amid their lines, the priest and the inquisitor faced each other. Sachiel’s tears were lost in the rush of the downpour, his fingers clenching clods of mud where he crouched on hands and knees. The chill, dirty rainwater washed over him and with it, it carried away the scales of willing blindness from the priest’s eyes. Sachiel’s perfidy was revealed to him with sudden, shattering clarity. No denials could assuage it, no words were strong enough to halt the tide of utter self-loathing that engulfed him. ‘I… am… corrupted…’ he breathed, damning himself with his own words.
Stele looked at him with complete disregard. Any familiarity or comradeship the inquisitor had shown to Sachiel now fell from his expression, and he understood that Stele had never, ever considered the priest as anything more than a tool. He was something to be used and discarded.
‘I had intended to retain you for a while longer,’ Stele’s voice was low and only Sachiel could hear it, ‘but it appears you have outlived your usefulness to me.’
The priest struggled to get to his feet, but his body felt like it weighed hundreds of tonnes. The burden of the sins he had committed were pressing him into the rubble. ‘Does Arkio know? I would never have followed you…’
Stele laughed. ‘How typical, priest. You think of your own reputation before the fate of your Chapter!’
‘You did this to me!’
‘You allowed me to. You secretly welcomed it, Sachiel, coveting the Red Grail, nurturing your resentments… You were ideal, your obsession with yourself blinding you to all the pacts you made!’ He let out a harsh laugh. ‘Fallen Angel, look how far you have tumbled from your perch.’ Hellish light glinted in Stele’s vision and the priest felt the sickening caress of his mind-touch. You were not the first, said the voice in his head, the hiss of snakeskin on bone, and you will not be the last.
The awful magnitude of the grand scheme of Chaos became clear in Sachiel’s mind, and it turned his hearts to ice. ‘No…’
‘Oh, yes,’ replied Stele, and through the open, bleeding wound self-inflicted on the priest’s psyche, he sent a quicksilver hammer of mind-force.
Sachiel’s scream merged into a howl of thunder and blood gushed from his nostrils, and wept in runnels from his eyes. Die! Stele ripped him apart within, breaking his mind like matchwood. Perish, Sachiel. I compel you, die for me.
The body in red and white ceramite collapsed in a puddle of thin pink fluids, death tearing away his last breath on the wind.
Stele masked his smile and fixed a disguise of righteous anger in its place. ‘Murderer,’ he bellowed, stabbing an accusing finger at Mephiston. ‘See, the Librarian has killed our brother Sachiel. He burnt the will from him with his witch-sight.’
The fierce mood of the mob army and the loyalist Space Marines took voice and weapons were turned on Mephiston and his Blood Angels. They were on the verge of an adrenaline-fuelled frenzy, and all it would take would be one word from Stele to tip them over the edge.
He gave it. ‘Attack. Destroy them all, in Arkio’s name!’
The rabble was a living, breathing entity, a war engine made from flesh and bone and ceramite and steel. It moved so fast that Rafen was caught off-guard,
the figures in their red cloaks emblazoned with the spear and halo flooding around Arkio’s imperious form in a headlong rush. There were loyalist Space Marines in the mass as well, bolters spitting hot fire.
Mephiston’s men opened up into the Warriors of the Reborn, scything them down in gouts of crimson. Gunfire and screams merged into a symphony of destruction, raised high to the rattling fall of the rain. Rafen swung and parried with his sword as the mob reached him, cutting him off from his target. He lost sight of Arkio as the golden figure leapt into the sky and cut back toward the edge of the square, then he was fighting hard, his attention on the myriad adversaries upon him. His bolter pistol ran dry and he used it like a club, too far into the thick of the melee to spare the time to reload it. The power sword rose and fell, cutting a path through chattering men who died with the name of his sibling on their lips.
For the first time in what seemed like an age, Rafen felt the familiar tingle of battle lust inside him, the shadow of the black rage. He culled the zealots, losing count of the dead, but Arkio’s thousand still had the weight of numbers on their side. Nearby, he caught the crackling hum of a force weapon. Blue lightning licked at the low clouds as the Lord of Death joined the fray.
All about him combat seethed and boiled, yet Stele stayed untouched, his lexmechanic whimpering in a cowering heap at Ulan’s feet while the mutant psyker draped her nullifying power about them. The inquisitor examined the chalice in his hand; he had ripped it from Sachiel’s belt as the light faded from the priest’s eyes, flinging away the velvet bag to reveal the replica of the sacred Blood Angels artefact. He smiled. This simple trinket was the seed of Sachiel’s undoing. The Apothecary had always dreamed of becoming the Keeper of the Red Grail, ascending to the highest office in the sanguinary clergy. He had nurtured bitterness toward Corbulo, the battle-brother that held the posting on Baal, and that had been Stele’s gateway into manipulating him. With a shrug, he tossed the copper cup away. It was worthless litter now, with as little value to the inquisitor as Sachiel’s cooling corpse. He nudged the dead priest with his boot-tip. Stele was glad to be rid of the self-important dullard, one less loose end to dispose of.
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