‘Name it.’
‘I ask for mercy, lord. Grant clemency and compassion to my battle-brothers who strayed, those who followed my sibling unwittingly.’ He thought of Turcio and Corvus as they had been brought aboard Europae stripped of their wargear and in manacles. ‘Their only error was to be blinded by their belief in Sanguinius. Their faith was turned against them and misused. They are not to blame.’
Mephiston considered his request. ‘There are rites of cleansing and purification that might be employed… They are quite arduous. Many would not survive.’
‘They will,’ said Rafen, ‘and their faith will be twice as strong for it.’ He got to his feet and approached the altar. As Mephiston watched, the Space Marine reached into the mag-field and ran his bare hand over the haft of the spear. He gripped the lance and for a moment, Rafen felt the weight of it in his hands once again. He peered at the teardrop blade – the metal seemed to run and shift in the light, glistening with the blood of the dead upon it.
‘What do you see?’ asked the Lord of Death.
Rafen saw dark red there, and he knew that it was his brother’s blood upon the blade, glittering and then gone. ‘Great Angel, hear me,’ he whispered. ‘Take my brother Arkio to your side, bring him to the Emperor’s right hand. Forgive his folly and forgive mine. This I beseech you.’ He bowed his head. ‘My life and my soul for the God-Emperor, for Sanguinius… For the Blood Angels.’
He closed his eyes, and there in the depths of his soul, he felt the mark of his liege lord, indelible and bright as a golden sun.
In the blackness, Misericorde limped onward, gushing gas and vital fluids into the vacuum of space, slowly bleeding to death as it crawled ever closer to the Maelstrom and the lair of the Word Bearers. Garand smacked at the chirurgeon-servitor attending to the damage on his arm and stood up. The writhing energies of the ship’s teleporter had turned the Warmaster’s limb into a distorted mess of bone and muscle. He had already killed the serf responsible for the error by feeding it to the two-headed monstrosity that had been three of his best Space Marines… At least, before the botched beam-out from Sabien.
At his feet, Garand’s personal vox-servitor cowered. He had allowed the slave to keep some measure of its personality when he had taken it for his retinue. It made little sense to the Warmaster to have servants that could not be afraid of him. ‘What?’ he demanded of it.
‘A signal from the Eye, your darkness,’ it chattered. ‘The burning psy-mark upon the message bears the loathsome sigil of his most foul and hateful self, the Despoiler of Worlds.’
‘Abaddon,’ Garand said, suddenly weary. He ignored the squealing of the servitor as he openly uttered the High Warmaster’s name. ‘Of course.’ The Word Bearer laughed with harsh, brittle humour. ‘And what am I to say to him? Tell me, little man-slave, how I shall phrase my words to inform the Despoiler that the allies promised him for the Thirteenth Black Crusade have been denied? With what sweet lies do I conceal the failure of the Malfallax and Stele… and myself?’
‘I… I do not–’
‘Silence!’ roared Garand. ‘I alone survive. I alone must take the blame!’ As quickly as it had arisen, the Warmaster’s anger subsided. ‘Bring my death-shroud. I will have need of it.’
The formless realm of warp space could turn a man insane at the sight of it. The frothing mass of alien energies defied the minds of organic lifeforms. It was a raw landscape of twisted emotion, peaks and troughs cut from the stuff of nightmares. In this small pocket of the immaterium, in the churning and unknowable hell that was the nest of the dread Malfallax, screams and shrieks of anger built cages of hate from the psychoactive matter. The disembodied consciousness of the daemon, wounded by the brutal severing of its link to Stele’s host-corpse, hooted and howled its pain to the endless mad vista. Its towering fury would last for uncountable ages – but then in the warp, time had no meaning and correlation to other realities.
There would come a moment when the Malfallax would calm enough to begin conceiving of revenges both subtle and gross, nursing an anger that only the most inhuman could contain. An anger directed at one man, at the single being who brought its complex schemes to ruin.
One day, there would be a reckoning for the costs of the Malfallax, and every Blood Angel would pay a thousand times over for the daemon’s defeat at Rafen’s hand.
About The Author
James Swallow is an award-winning New York Times bestselling author whose stories from the dark worlds of Warhammer 40,000 include the Horus Heresy novels Nemesis and The Flight of the Eisenstein, along with Faith & Fire, the Blood Angels books Deus Encarmine, Deus Sanguinius, Red Fury and Black Tide; his short fiction has appeared in Inferno!, What Price Victory, Legends of the Space Marines, Tales of Heresy and The Book of Blood, along with the audio dramas Heart of Rage, Oath of Moment and the forthcoming Legion of One.
Swallow’s other credits include the non-fiction book Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher, writing for Star Trek Voyager, and scripts for videogames and audio dramas.
He lives in London, and is currently working on his next book.
For The Tech Crew
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