There was pain there, of a kind Rafen had only ever seen in the eyes of sinners and turncoats fallen to the law of the Inquisition. Before, he had never questioned it, but now he saw it for what it was. Regret, so powerful and so heartbreaking that the emotion could barely be contained by a human will.
‘What have I done?’ Arkio rasped, holding his brother’s gaze. ‘I have broken every compact and promise… I have turned my back on what I am and embraced the void…’ He shuddered and wailed. ‘Oh, Lord Emperor, I have betrayed all I hold dear.’
His hate-rage ebbing, Rafen found only one answer in the echoing chasms of his heart. ‘Yes.’
The humming of the spear gently rose and fell in the fading rhythm of Arkio’s secondary heart. Each peak and trough grew longer as life ebbed from him into the stones and the rain. ‘I was weak…’ he managed. ‘I thought I could protect myself from this–’ he gestured feebly and his wings jerked in response, ‘–from falling from the path. My arrogance… I… I believed I was… believed it…’
‘I am sorry, Arkio,’ Rafen said, silent tears falling from his eyes, drawing lines in dark smears of blood and soot on his cheeks. ‘I am sorry I was not there to stand with you, turn you from this corruption.’
‘No,’ Arkio whispered. ‘You share no burden with me, kinsman. I will bear this stigma…’ He shivered, a drool of blood escaping from his lips. ‘My error. I was weak…’
‘Arkio, no… You were… human.’
He forced a wan smile. ‘Fear not, Rafen. This is our fate. Both of us saw it.’
Rafen gasped. ‘You knew this would be by my hand?’
‘Yes. And so it was.’ His ruined fingers crossed Rafen’s chest plate and touched his brother’s cheek. ‘You weep for me? That is all I ask, kinsman. The Emperor will damn me for my folly, and I accept that without question… But you… I ask you to forgive me. I recant, Rafen. Please forgive me, my brother.’
‘I forgive you, Arkio. On our father’s grave, I swear it.’
Arkio gave a shallow, final nod of thanks. ‘That is mercy enough.’ His eyes fluttered closed, and the spear fell silent.
Rafen knelt there for an age, no sound in his ears but the rush and thunder of the rainstorm, no feeling inside him except the raw despair of loss. Finally, his heart brimming with its grievous remorse, Rafen came to his feet with his brother’s body in his arms, the Holy Lance excised from the dead man and there at Rafen’s shoulder. The warm, mellifluent light of the spear illuminated the ruins about him, and he held Arkio high. He seemed to weigh so little now, as if the burden of his tainted change had run away with his shed blood.
In the near distance, Rafen saw the firefly sparkles of bolter discharges, and on the wind came gunshots, screams and the chants of the Word Bearers. The Blood Angel’s face set in grim determination and he advanced toward the fighting. He left nothing behind him but his doubts.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Curious, thought Mephiston, how the passage of time became elastic in the throes of conflict. He skewered a Word Bearer and the helot soldier behind him with one swift thrust of the mindblade Vitarus, the force sword immolating them both in gusts of blue flame. Flicking the remains away, he frowned. How long had he been fighting? Crashing thunder bellowed overhead, announcing the flashes of sheet lighting that illuminated the writhing fighters in the square. Rain pelted everything, sluicing off the blood of enemy and ally alike, churning the brick dust and dirt on the ground into a muddy brown quagmire. It was difficult for the Librarian to know exactly how long the battle had been raging; every sword blow and bolt shell seemed to pass in its own small bubble of time, one single instant in the huge cacophony of wanton slaughter. Minutes, hours… it could have been days for all the Lord of Death cared. He was in his element here, an engine of destruction fuelled by the holiest of causes.
He caught the sound of a man’s scream, suddenly truncated by the ripping of flesh and sinew. Mephiston whirled to see the golden helmet of a Blood Angels honour guard – one of Arkio’s loyalists – sent flying by the blow of the veteran sergeant who had accompanied the pskyer from Europae. The Space Marine staggered back, shaking gore from the clogged blades of his chainsword. He caught Mephiston’s eye and spared him a grim nod.
The Librarian did not need to employ his psychic skills to read the Blood Angel’s mind. This was a sorry, dismal business, being forced to take up arms against men who were battle-brothers. The Lord of Death was sickened by what he and the others had been forced into, and he cursed Arkio and Stele for bringing it to pass. It was enough to purge the galaxy of turncoats and traitors, but to face men who had willingly forsaken their oath to Dante and Baal in favour of some pretender child made Mephiston weary and hateful. For each errant Blood Angel he slew, the psyker spoke a short prayer to the Golden Throne. He did not forgive these men their misjudgements, instead he tallied them as crimes to lay at the feet of Ramius Stele, the architect of this madness. However fate unfolded on this day, Mephiston vowed that the accursed Hereticus fool would not leave Sabien alive.
The sergeant fell back a dozen steps as he reloaded his bolter, before firing again into the mass of raging zealots. ‘Bah!’ he spat, taking three men with pinpoint head shots. ‘These fools don’t know the meaning of the word “retreat”. We cut them down like wheat and still they come.’
Mephiston strode forward, Vitarus ending lives in sweeps of bright power. ‘The wheat dares not oppose the scythe.’ For every one of the Warriors of the Reborn trampled into the mud and earth, there were two more behind him, desperate for the glory of death in their messiah’s name – or just loathsome enough not to care. Here and there he saw Word Bearers in tightly drilled units, and those he could not see he heard, their foul demagogues spouting dirges and songs of unhallowed praise to the Maelstrom. The Chaos Space Marines took their fury to the Blood Angels, attacking Mephiston’s men and Arkio’s loyalists alike, ignoring the helots unless the humans were foolish enough to block their lines of fire.
‘Red foes, red friends,’ snapped the veteran. ‘Who is the enemy here, lord?’
‘Everyone,’ the psyker replied, burning down a dozen more wayward souls with his screeching plasma pistol. ‘This is not battle, this is chaos.’
Mephiston’s Techmarine thrust his way through the morass of dead and dying, stumbling into ankle-deep pools of fluid. He killed a helot armed only with a sharpened spanner, punching through his ribcage, and threw the dead body aside. ‘Lord!’ he called as he approached. ‘Lord Mephiston.’
Bolter fire in careful, targeted ranks ranged down on them from the middle of the enemy throng, where Word Bearers were marshalling a concerted effort. The Librarian threw back the power of the Smite, a psychic tornado ripping across the square to dismember them.
The Techmarine blinked away the after-glare of the blast and gave a jerky bow. ‘My lord, we have but two Thunderhawks remaining and neither can make lift-off. The Word Bearers have six squads pinning them down. I spotted Havoc troopers in their number, although they have not attempted to destroy the transports yet.’
‘They want the ships for themselves. What news from orbit?’
Gunfire drew their attention and all three of them fired back at a group of helots armed with civilian hunting lasers. ‘Communication is intermittent at best,’ continued the Blood Angel. ‘High levels of radiation in the ionosphere prevent clear vox transmissions.’
‘Radiation?’ growled the sergeant. ‘From what?’
‘Bellus has been destroyed, lord,’ the Techmarine said dispassionately. ‘A fragmentary vox from Europae appears to confirm that the loyalist’s ship was obliterated in the crossfire between our barge and the Misericorde.’
Mephiston shook his head angrily. ‘Such waste. Such foolish, pointless waste.’
The Space Marine gestured with a signum, complex lines of data glyphs and warning runes marching across the device’s rain-slick screen. ‘We are outnumbered on the ground. Force disposition of the loyalists is weak but they over
match us with the reinforcements of the Word Bearers.’ To his surprise, the Lord of Death accepted this dire information with a clinical smile; he was unfazed by the sensor’s divination. On the contrary, he seemed to expect it.
‘With Bellus out of the picture, we can forget calling reserves from Europae,’ grated the sergeant, shaking rain off his visor. ‘They’ll have their hands full with the Chaos ship, won’t even be able to risk ’porting us more men. We’re on our own down here.’
‘As it ever was,’ Mephiston added. ‘So be it.’ The psyker toggled a control in the collar of his arching hood and spoke into one of the bone-white skulls that decorated the throat of his armour, where a vox-unit was concealed. ‘Blood Angels, rally!’ he snapped, the command filtering out to the ear-beads of every man from the Europae. ‘Your previous orders to contain this rabble no longer apply. Join the fray and leave no foe standing.’
‘Aye. Aye!’ came the replies over the channel.
Mephiston threw himself into the throng, leaving behind the hillock of rubble and stone he had defended to wade deep in the gore of his adversaries. He showed sharp fangs and eyes of fire as death rained down around him, red floods of it flashing in the air.
‘Terra and God-Emperor,’ breathed the veteran, as he watched the Librarian shred the unwary foes. ‘He’s not a man, he’s a storm with a sword.’
Elsewhere in the morass, the pell-mell melee moved and shifted like a viral organism, swallowing up those that did not go with the army’s flow, killing those that defied it. Delos waded through a sea of angry faces and weeping wounded, all of them merging into one pale orchestra of ghosts, eyes upturned to the grey raging sky, crying to their Blessed. The Chaplain moved among them, a black shining shadow with a grinning skull head. They flinched and recoiled from his crozius as he waved it before him, some of them automatically genuflecting toward an icon of Sanguinius, others hissing in pain as if the sight of it hurt their eyes.
A tinny rattle about his head announced the passage of a metallic servo-skull and Delos knew he was close. There, just a few lengths away, Inquisitor Stele stood in on the crest of a subsided stone dais. At his feet, shivering under a wet, matted cloak, his lexmechanic rocked back and forth, constantly babbling a endless string of words in thousands of Imperial dialects. Delos caught something of his speech when the wind changed for a moment, bringing it to his ears.
‘–demnos, dannavik, dorius, delenz, dorcon, daemon, dethenex, dynikas–’
The inquisitor’s servo-skulls continually described a lazy orbit around him, occasionally pausing to lance a laser bolt into a target they deemed a threat to Stele. The woman was there as well, never more than a hand’s length from him, the lines of her face hiding beneath a voluminous hood. The habit she wore was cut like an astropath’s, but she was anything but one of those. Delos was not cursed with the warp eye of psykers but he didn’t need to be to smell the stink of the empyrean on the girl. He shook the nauseating perfume of it from his head. Odd how he had never noticed that about her before.
Gripping his crozius arcanum firmly, Delos forced himself up to the dais, his skull-helmet’s sneer matching Stele’s. ‘Inquisitor,’ he demanded. ‘By the Blessed, I demand you account for yourself.’
Stele arched an eyebrow. ‘Chaplain… Delos, isn’t it?’ He wiped a patina of rain from his bald skull. ‘Leave me. I must prepare–’
‘For what?’ Delos shouted, startling himself with his own forcefulness. ‘Tell me my eyes deceived me, Stele! Tell me it was but a mind-trick of Mephiston’s!’
‘What trivia are you chattering about?’ Stele retorted, his attention elsewhere. He glanced at Ulan. ‘The boy, the boy! Where is he?’
The psy-witch shook her head, her mind full of razors. ‘Difficult….’
‘I saw you and the Word Bearer.’ In a blink of lightning, Delos saw something shadowing Stele’s face; not a wraith or a spirit, but a haze of lines crossing and re-crossing. Eight arrows arranged in a ring. ‘It is true,’ Delos said, ‘you consort with the corrupted!’
Stele grimaced and fixed him with a glare. ‘First Sachiel and now you? This conflict is taxing me too much. Things are slipping through the gaps–’
‘Traitor!’ Delos roared, bringing up the crozius to strike the inquisitor.
‘Better that than a fool.’ Stele raised a hand and a column of pressure shoved Delos in the chest, pushing him back, knocking the power weapon from his grip. The air around him became dry and greasy, the rain fizzing away. Invisible tendrils of psychic force coiled about the Chaplain and slipped through molecule-thin gaps in his armour to touch his bare skin.
‘The twisting path,’ Stele said, leering at the kneeling Blood Angel. ‘Take the path, Delos. Take it.’
His mind flayed open and Delos screamed, clawing at his helmet, tearing it from his head. The Chaplain saw his world fall apart around him; he watched a mirror of his life to come as he tore off his allegiance to the Emperor (I would never do such a thing!) as he slaughtered Dante and burned Baal’s cities (No! No! This is not true!) as he fell, laughing with cruel abandon, into the embrace of Chaos (No!).
Stele broke off the mental assault and spat on his twitching victim. ‘Never question me,’ he growled. The inquisitor grabbed at Ulan’s arm, pulling her to him. ‘I won’t ask again! Where is Arkio?’
‘Dead.’ She drew the word out into a howl.
The inquisitor’s face went purple with rage. His jaw worked but no words came to him. Anger robbed him of a voice, and instead he struck out with a balled fist, backhanding the psyker-slave. Ulan stumbled and dropped to her knees, the hood about her head falling to her shoulders. Her pale and hairless pate with its tarnished brass sockets glittered dully. Overhead, the silver skull drones popped in tiny explosions.
Stele gave an incoherent roar of annoyance, the muscles in his neck bunching in tense ropes. ‘That worthless, stupid fool. It wasn’t enough that he could accept the gifts I gave him, he had to bury himself in the part.’ He pulled at the skin of his face, barely able to contain the quaking rage inside him. ‘All of it ruined by that pathetic whelp. My plans are ashes now, my greatest performance destroyed by his arrogance!’
‘But… but that was why you chose him…’ Ulan spat out blood and a broken piece of tooth. ‘You wanted a man who could be Sanguinius–’
‘I wanted a figurehead,’ snarled Stele, ‘A gaudy token messiah, not a corpse.’
Ulan shakily got to her feet. ‘Perhaps he gave you a martyr instead…’
‘Martyr…’ The word whispered through the inquisitor’s lips, a benediction, cooling his burning ire. ‘I will not fail now, understand me?’ he growled. ‘Not now, not in the moment of my greatest triumph. I have made it my design to turn these Astartes freaks to the Banner of Change and I will not be denied!’ Stele stripped the grox-hide battle coat from his shoulders and dashed the garment on the ground, dragging his ornate laspistol from its concealed holster. ‘Plans must be accelerated,’ he said. ‘The turning cannot wait! It must be here and now!’
‘But we are not ready…’
He ignored Ulan’s warning and pressed the muzzle of his gun to the palm of his other hand. ‘Open your mind to the Spite Lord, witch. Bring him. Bring him now!’
Stele jerked the trigger and the pistol blew a burning hole through his flesh, vaporising three of his fingers and setting his cuff aflame. The inquisitor screamed and clutched at his ruined hand, forcing the jetting blood from his severed veins to spatter about him in the sacred pattern he knew by heart. The geometry of the unhallowed circle came together even as he drew it.
Ulan hesitated. Stele had instructed her on the rituals that would open the conduit to the Malfallax’s realm, but now the moment came to do it she found herself afraid. The psy-witch had been a slave since birth, a laboratory experiment before that, and disobedience was not part of her makeup, yet still she balked at this most dangerous command. Stele turned on her and saw the indecision in her eyes. The inquisitor snarled and grabbed her
robes, dragging her close to him. The bloody meat of his hand clutched at her neck. She felt warm fluids pulsing over her skin.
‘Lord, no…’ She managed a weak denial.
‘Open the way,’ Stele shouted, and with a thrust of his arm, the lacerated fingers sank into the flesh at Ulan’s collar. The pallid skin rippled like water and Stele merged his barbed digits into her bone and cartilage. The woman resisted, for what would be the first and last time in her life. It made little difference, as the inquisitor brought his undamaged fingers to her cheeks, the tips scraping away the false scars that hid the blemishes of psy-tuned metal contacts. Ulan could not scream; she could not breathe; she could only hold on and try not to die as Stele used her as a lens for his own psyker talent, magnifying his black will to cut a way into the writhing core of the Eye of Terror.
Inside the no-space of the immaterium, the creature Malfallax had been waiting, floating and circling the man-filth Stele in the manner of a sea predator scenting prey in distress. Unseen by the denizens of the material world, the realm of the warp was constantly surrounding them, a layer of unreality laid across the sordid, crude matter of their wastrel worlds. The forms the live-things called Chaos, in their limited little ways of perceiving the omniverse, swarmed and thrived in this infinite ocean of mind and emotion. The daemon moved with Stele. Waiting, waiting and watching for the moment when the thrashing and chattering of the quarry was at its peak. Only then would it strike, lapping up the absolute perfection of its fear, sinking in rending teeth, tearing it to soul-shreds.
Now the prey called to him, through the conduit of the mutant abortion created by the corpse-god’s science. His instrument Stele cried out for the poisoned hand of Malfallax. The warp daemon teased itself with the anticipation of the shift; it was so infrequent that the beast could find itself a vessel strong enough to contain its essence for more than a few hours. Most flesh-things in the other reality were gossamer constructs of wet, weak meats. They would burn or inflate or explode if the Malfallax issued even an iota of itself into them – but it had worked hard to prepare for this day. Malfallax, Monarch of Spite, Heirophant of Vicissitude, was weary of partial manifestations, of animating the inert or the mindless to hold a ghost of his full and awful potential. It wanted to step freely into the plane of men and run it red with their bloody terror. Malfallax missed the feel of it over there beyond the veil; it was time to return.
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