Deus Sanguinius

by James Swallow

  Ulan grunted in pain. ‘Uh… difficult…’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘Mephiston’s sight… stronger…’ A line of purplish blood ran from her nostrils.

  Stele made a dismissive gesture. ‘In a moment. Where is Arkio?’

  ‘Conflicted…’ Ulan managed, nerves in her face jerking. ‘He seeks… reassurance…’

  ‘We cannot lose the momentum of the attack,’ he growled. Already, things had deviated from Stele’s carefully engineered plans with the sudden revelation of Rafen and Arkio’s wound through a foolish moment of inattention. ‘Attend me,’ he demanded.

  The thin, pale girl stumbled toward him, the lexmechanic mumbling fearfully in dozens of different tongues. ‘Lord…’ she said thickly. ‘I… am at my limits…’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he retorted, ignoring the agony that radiated off her aura. ‘Here.’ He grasped her face and let his fingers find the ghost-metal contacts under the polyflesh scabs on her skin. Ulan tensed as Stele corralled and used her haphazard power to augment his own warp-sight. At once he detected the hidden clusters of wild minds on the edges of his sensorium, visible only to him because he knew where to seek them. ‘Garand,’ he intoned, his voice slicing through the warp. ‘It is time.’ Stele released the woman with a jerk and her head lolled backward. Ulan’s blind eyes showed only the bloodshot whites.

  The inquisitor turned in place as he heard the first screams of rocket motors. From concealed hides scattered throughout the ruins, spat from beneath rubble and the protective sheathes of camo-cloaks, salvos of missiles looped in over the edges of the debris-choked square and fell on rods of orange smoke.

  Every Blood Angel knew the sound, and they took cover – but the pressing knots of Arkio’s zealots made rapid movement impossible. The warheads streaked into the square and struck a dozen points at once, throwing up red-black fireballs. Three of Mephiston’s Thunderhawks were instantly crippled or destroyed, and a handful of men were blown apart when the rockets fell short and landed in the melee.

  The Lord of Death raised his free hand to shield his eyes from the glare. Hot flame crackled as the rain sizzled into steam, the sudden glow underlighting the grey clouds. ‘And so they spring their trap at last. I wondered how long we would have to wait.’

  ‘Indirect fire from the south, west and east quadrants!’ the Techmarine reported, fending off a zealot with a punch from his servo-arm. ‘Weapon signature does not match Blood Angel munitions.’

  ‘Of course,’ Mephiston snapped, bringing up the sword Vitarus. ‘And what new player has joined this sorry performance?’

  The veteran sergeant nodded to the west as he slammed a fresh clip of ammunition into his bolter. ‘I can smell them from here, lord. Horned braggarts by the cartload.’

  Mephiston saw figures dropping from the upper tiers of ruined buildings or emerging from concealed trapdoors over rubble-filled basements. They wore armour in a stringent shade of ruby, bedecked with chains and smoking lanterns. Horns sprouted in riots from their helms and heads, and as they came on their voices were raised in blasphemous hymns. ‘Word Bearers. The design of this infamy becomes clearer…’

  ‘But the scouts,’ said the Techmarine. ‘The scouts reported no contacts.’

  The Librarian threw the sergeant a grave look, and a grim understanding passed between them. ‘Our scouts are all dead,’ said the veteran.

  From the instant he had spoken of traps and double-crosses to Commander Dante in the monastery’s arboretum, Mephiston knew this moment would come; yet as it happened, his ire was not lessened. A guttural snarl bared his canines. ‘Blood Angels!’ he shouted. ‘To arms!’

  Vitarus sang high and drank deep from the enemy about the psyker.

  ‘Confirmed,’ droned the servitor. ‘Multiple discharges on the planetary surface, evidence of small-arms fire and medium-yield tactical detonations. Vox traffic intercepts concur.’

  Captain Ideon released a slow, metallic growl from his mechanical throat. ‘More betrayal,’ he snarled. ‘Great Arkio was right to suspect the Lord of Death. He has eschewed the hand of peace in favour of attack.’ Ideon made a grunt that was his immobile form’s equivalent of a nod. ‘So be it, then.’

  Solus frowned. ‘We cannot be sure who fired the first shot. It may have been a mistake...’ The words seemed weak as they fell from his lips.

  ‘Mistake?’ Ideon rattled, his synthetic voice buzzing like hornets in a tin can. ‘Mephiston does not make mistakes, Solus. This is a declaration of war!’ The captain’s stoic face twitched and the mechadendrites protruding from his skull whispered against one another. ‘Prepare to engage the Europae.’

  ‘Europae is turning,’ called the sense-servitor, ‘adopting battle stance. Detection transients indicate multiple weapon bay activations.’

  ‘You see?’ Ideon husked.

  Solus found his words dying in his throat and he turned away. At the same moment, his eyes fell on the hololithic chart in the tacticarium. Warning glyphs were streaming through the ghostly green light. ‘There’s someone else out there,’ he said aloud.

  Sabien’s debris ring was a mixture of broken stones as tall as mountains and great drifting lakes of frozen ice. Dense with heavy ores, to the eyes of a starship’s machine-spirit the belt of asteroids was a confused swathe of garbled, reflected sensor returns. On the surface it seemed like the ideal place to hide a vessel, but no captain would ever have been so foolhardy to attempt such a thing. The blanket of confusion that seeded the ring also made navigation inside its confines virtually impossible. Both the Bellus and the Europae saw the belt as a natural hazard, just another element of the orbital environment. Neither vessel expected the chilling sight of a starship emerging from the shaggy morass of tumbling stones.

  Under power from a hard thruster burn, the Desolator-class battleship extended out of the Sabien Belt like a red blade punched through a torso. The jagged prow dipped like the snout of a hunting predator, moving inexorably to bear on the Europae. Asteroids battered into the craft as it moved from the debris ring, punching rents in the hull; the captain of the vessel was willing to allow men on his outer decks to die so that the ship could complete its manoeuvre, weathering the damage. The crewmen aboard Mephiston’s flagship sounded alerts and charged their torpedo tubes, gangs of Chapter serfs hoisting warheads as big as watchtowers into the open maws of launchers. The monstrous Chaos craft continued to turn, the target scanners of the bow guns briefly crossing the shape of the Bellus. Not one of the weapons released its warshot toward Arkio’s battle barge; the battleship crew had their orders, on pain of lengthy and horrific torture, to concentrate all their initial attack on the Europae.

  Solus saw the lance batteries wink at him like blinded eyes as the ship turned onward, coming to bear on Mephiston’s vessel. ‘They… they did not fire on us…’ he breathed, hardly able to believe what he had seen.

  ‘Aggressor identity confirmed,’ the mechanical chatter of the servitor in the detection pit clattered forth. ‘Vessel is the battlecruiser Misericorde, line warcraft in service to the Word Bearers Legion and the Ruinous Powers.’

  ‘Vandire’s oath!’ spat Solus. ‘What is this madness?’ The Blood Angel’s mind raced through the possibilities – could the Chaos ship be some sort of ally to the Lord of Death? Dare he believe that Mephiston, or even Dante himself was consorting with the scum of the Maelstrom?

  ‘Status of Misericorde,’ Ideon demanded. ‘Are we their target?’

  ‘Negative,’ came the reply. ‘All guns on the ship are coming to bear on the Europae.’

  ‘A third force?’

  There was a smile in Ideon’s artificial voice as his eyes flicked at Solus. ‘An unexpected piece of good fortune! The hand of Sanguinius protects us…’

  ‘But we cannot simply ignore a Chaos capital ship!’ Solus blurted out. ‘It is our duty to–’

  ‘You dare speak to me of duty?’ Ideon snapped, his voice cracking about the bridge cloisters like thunder. ‘I, who have served our Chapter for two hu
ndred years from this very throne?’ The captain’s words dropped to a low rumble. ‘Know this, my errant battle-brother, when fate’s tarot deals a hand of swords, use them. You know the oath we take.’

  Solus repeated the litany by automatic rote. ‘To the ship, the Chapter, the primarch and the Emperor.’

  ‘Yes, and while the Misericorde is the enemy of the Emperor, the Europae is the enemy of our primarch and our Chapter. Mephiston’s extermination takes precedence.’ In response to a mental command, pict-screens at Solus’s station flickered to display long range images of the fighting on Sabien. ‘You only have to view the battle unfolding below us to know the truth of that.’

  ‘Misericorde is firing,’ said the sense-servitor. ‘Europae’s void shields are holding.’

  ‘Let’s show those corrupted fools how it is done, eh?’ said Ideon. ‘The order is, target the Europae and fire.’

  Solus hesitated.

  ‘Did you not understand the command, Solus?’ There was a razor-keen warning in the captain’s manner.

  ‘Open fire,’ said Solus, in a dead, toneless voice.

  The square was a cauldron of inferno as figures in shades of red clashed across the rubble and the stones. Arkio’s thousand-strong helot army in their terracotta robes and the loyalist Space Marines who fought with them clashed with Mephiston’s Blood Angels, and they drew fire and laid weapons to bear upon the Word Bearers swarming into the broken arena. There was no plan of battle here, no careful tactics to rout and defeat the enemy – instead each side engaged in the grisly attrition of hand-to-hand fighting. The square became a mass of fire and screams as men and traitors came together to kill or be killed.

  In the thick of it, Rafen was a whirlwind of destruction, the power sword running hot in his hand as he tore apart zealots and ripped open Chaos Space Marines. In equal measure the dark glamour of the battle repelled and excited him, the burning flood of adrenaline coming upon him like some ghostly caress. The raging fight was already spilling over the cracked and fallen walls of the plaza, into the surrounding streets. Some of Mephiston’s men – veteran assault troops with their characteristic helmets of sunburst yellow – bobbed up on jump packs. They carried plasma weapons and heavy flamers, seeking out the missile shooters still hiding in the ruins and dousing them in liquid fire. On the winds came the smell of cooked meat and the bone-snap of superheated ceramite.

  Daggers and work implements turned into clubs rang noisily against Rafen’s power armour as a cluster of Arkio’s warriors tried to surround him and beat the Space Marine to the ground. Rafen let out a cruel laugh at their idiocy; he pitied these fools, willingly blinded by the dogma spouted by Sachiel. In quick and economical moves, he used every part of the sword to dispatch them, breaking skulls with the flat of the blade and the pommel, cleaving torsos with the keen edge, smashing ribcages with the spiked guard about his fingers. If these imbeciles wanted to die in the name of their false messiah, then Rafen would be more than willing to accommodate them.

  The fight ebbed and flowed, moving like an ocean swell. Figures were caught up in the morass, the press of flesh and steel sending Rafen staggering. Somewhere along the line he had lost his helmet. Several times he was forced to halt and seek his direction, and more than once he barely pulled a killing blow before a Space Marine from Mephiston’s contingent. Rafen had already ensured that he would not suffer a similar error by burning off the spear and halo design on his shoulder pad with a discarded hand flamer. The dirty black scar on the side of his wargear paradoxically made him feel cleaner, as if the kiss of the burning promethium had purged the taint of Stele and his corruption.

  Rafen’s boot rang against a hollow shape and it caught his attention. There at his feet, where the spilled blood and grey rain had turned drifts of dry brick dust into tar-like slurry, a body in white and red ceramite had been abandoned. The corpse was pressed into the mud, twisted and broken by a stampede of helots, but Rafen knew it instantly.

  ‘Sachiel…’ While the fight had drifted back and forth, the dead priest had remained where he fell, the spotless and immaculate armour he once wore now ruined with bloody footprints and smeared with gore. The Apothecary’s eyes were open, blankly staring up into the hissing torrents of rain. Rafen had never had anything other than antipathy for his arrogant rival, but now as he looked upon the expression of horror and despondency frozen on the dead man’s face, he felt only pity for the priest. However unwittingly, Sachiel had placed his own quest for glory beyond his loyalty to the Chapter, and here in the dark mire he lay fully paid for that mendacity.

  Rafen smacked away another attacker with the butt of his bolter and took a moment to reload. He glanced around as he did, finding his bearings by the actinic glow of blue mind-fire that blazed about the Lord of Death. Steam wreathed the Librarian in white streams where the rainwater flashed to vapour around him. As Rafen watched, the ethereal lightning that haloed Mephiston congealed around the upright spars of his psychic hood, coiling into rods of energy that seared his eyes to look at. Twin horned skulls at the tips of the ghost-metal psy-wave conductors flashed with barely controlled power, and the Librarian swelled beneath his blood red armour, drawing the lethal potential into himself.

  Colours and shades that had no place on the plane of the living came into being, the air itself shimmering and bending like a phantom lens. Rafen saw Mephiston’s target – a squad of Word Bearers Havoc Space Marines, bristling with heavy weapons. The Lord of Death turned his face to them and his eyes flashed. On the battlefield, Rafen had seen other Blood Angels psykers use the skill they called the Quickening, a blanket of power that could turn the user into a tornado of destruction, but Mephiston was the master of another psionic force, one that dwarfed the talents of the Librarians and codicers who served beneath him. The power of the Smite was unleashed, a blaze of insane geometry cut from liquid light fanning out into a teardrop of pure and undiluted annihilation. The witch-fire engulfed the Havocs and set them alight; ammunition packs detonated and armour split. Rafen instinctively joined in on the great cheer of approval that came from Mephiston’s Blood Angels.

  He waded forward to meet the psyker commander, saluting with the power sword as the Chief Librarian caught sight of him. ‘My lord!’

  ‘Rafen,’ Mephiston growled, ‘You live still, yet so does your errant sibling.’

  ‘The zealots cut me off from him before I could–’ Rafen began, but the rest of his words were drowned out by a roar from Arkio’s ragged warriors. The slave army, driven on by some shouted command from the back of their lines, rushed forward. Rafen thought he heard Stele’s voice on the wind, but then his attention was on the men tearing at him. At point-blank range he unleashed the bolt pistol, popping heads like overripe fruits, punching holes as big as his mailed fist in cloaked bodies. ‘They fight like they are possessed!’ he grated, the press of the charge forcing him to Mephiston’s flank.

  ‘Indeed,’ replied the Librarian, his force weapon slashing a wide arc of blood and entrails. ‘They rally to their “Blessed One”.’

  Rafen ran through a Word Bearer as it emerged from the pack, taking him from jowl to bowel, emptying a nest of blackened, stinking organs on the dirt. ‘Lord, my task lies undone. Give me permission to disengage and seek out my brother.’

  Mephiston eyed him. ‘You wounded him and he fled. What kind of messiah is that?’

  ‘He will return, my lord. I know the conflict inside him, but if I do not strike now, Arkio will return and lay waste to this place. I must find him, while his guard is down!’

  ‘You understand what will occur if you fail, Rafen?’ The Librarian’s voice was low and hard. ‘Even as we speak, my battle barge is engaged in a fight for its survival in orbit. I have left orders with the brother-captain commanding her that if Arkio’s loyalists tip the balance, then Sabien is to be targeted with cyclonic torpedoes. Better this shrine world become ashes then this schism be allowed to spread further.’

  ‘I can stop him,’ Rafen insisted.
‘It is what I came here to do.’

  Mephiston gave him a nod. ‘So be it, then.’ He turned aside and called out. ‘Techmarine. Bring Brother Rafen a jump pack, quickly.’

  ‘A jump pack, lord?’

  ‘Arkio has wings. We must give you wings of your own, lad.’

  ‘Stele! What abortion have you created now?’

  The inquisitor whirled, Ulan clinging to his arm, as a knot of Word Bearers punched their way through the helot lines, with Garand at their head. A loyalist Space Marine foolishly turned his gun on the Warmaster, stepping forward to protect Stele and his retinue from the threat. Garand angrily spat acidic venom and decapitated the Blood Angel with a single sweep of his bane-axe.

  ‘Lord Garand,’ Stele said, deciding not to bow. ‘Welcome.’

  ‘My patience with this ridiculous scheme of yours is at an end, human.’ Garand menaced him with the humming axe. ‘You know the bargain! Bring these mewling Blood Whelps to the Banner of Change or forfeit your life.’

  ‘Don’t push me, Word Bearer,’ Stele shouted, emboldened by the heat of the battle raging around them. ‘My orders come from Malfallax, not you! It will be done, but by my design, not yours.’

  ‘Your design!’ Garand spat again. ‘Pathetic weakling, with your schemes and your little performances, none of that matters now. In Lorgar’s name, the battle is joined. These men-prey will stand with the eight or they will perish.’

  ‘No!’ Stele roared, and Garand blinked in surprise at the vehemence of the human’s denial. ‘I have come too far, paid too much for this moment. It is mine, and you will not usurp it, creature.’

  ‘You dare.’ Garand’s eyes narrowed and he marshalled his psyker potency to chastise the ranting inquisitor – but there was a null void surrounding him, a thick weave of poisonous non-space issuing from the mind of the female trailing at the inquisitor’s heels. ‘Bah,’ snorted the Warmaster, recoiling. ‘Have your petty game, then.’ The Word Bearers lord brandished his axe and called to his men. ‘Pick your targets and cull the Blood Angels. Collateral kills…’ and he smiled, ‘…at your discretion.’