He drew the bolt pistol and thumbed off the safety catch, and for the second time that day he heard the voice from the shadows.
‘Rafen.’ From ahead, a broad-shouldered figure was framed against the glow of the alert lights. Astorath advanced with urgency, and he had the Executioner’s Axe in his hand.
‘My lord.’ The Blood Angel’s hand tightened on the pistol grip. If the High Chaplain had come to take his head, Rafen would not go easily.
Astorath did not seem to notice the gun. ‘My vox is nulled. Yours?’
‘The same.’
He nodded gravely. ‘They must have done something. Blanketed the zone with a jamming field.’ He looked back the way he had come. ‘I did not think there were any of us on this level. Follow me.’
But Rafen did not take a step. ‘They?’ he repeated.
‘You have been here all along.’ Astorath sounded it out. ‘Of course. Word did not reach you.’
‘I do not understand.’
The High Chaplain’s cold eyes studied him. ‘We are under attack, brother. I suspect that they came in under the cover of the razorwind storm.’ He looked away. ‘Raptors, brother-sergeant, by the hundredfold. Sent by the traitor Sons of Lorgar.’
‘The Word Bearers?’ It seemed like blasphemy to say the name of the Chaos warband aloud. ‘Here, on Baal? They would not dare to strike at our homeworld!’
And yet, even as he said it, Rafen knew that such a deed was not beyond them. He had fought the Word Bearers and seen the fury and insanity that drove their freakish, corrupted zealotry. But such an attack would be suicidal, and any gains they made would be wiped out once the shock of the surprise assault was dispelled.
‘I have heard no gunfire… and how could they reach our soil? Our battle barges are in orbit, our defence platforms fully manned…’
‘There is more than one way to thread the labyrinth,’ said the High Chaplain darkly. ‘Extreme-range teleportation from a stealth vessel in far orbit, a warp gate conjuring… an entire planet can never be completely secure.’
Rafen thought it through. Attacking the Regio from without was madness. The Raptors would dash themselves against the battlements and perish under hails of gunfire from the weapons at the walls…
Unless…
Astorath nodded again, pre-empting his train of thought. ‘They may already be inside. The doors may have been opened by treachery.’
A cold rush spread through Rafen’s blood. ‘Then the Word Bearers have come to loot this place, not to hold it. They must want–’
‘The spear, aye. No doubt to assuage the hurt that was done to them.’
Rafen’s heart was hammering in his chest. That could not be allowed to happen. ‘We have to protect the weapon. We have to get to the reliquary.’
Astorath beckoned him. ‘The inclinator is this way.’
The platform was in place in the throat of the shaft, and Rafen cast around as they crossed to it, looking for signs of life. Despite glimpsing the Chapter serfs moments earlier, there seemed now to be no sign of them. Perhaps they had gone to ground in one of the other chambers. He wanted to be sure, but the High Chaplain urged him on.
Astorath moved swiftly to the control podium on the far side of the platform, and Rafen looked up. The inclinator shaft stretched away above, rings of warning lights growing progressively smaller as they receded. He set his helmet’s audial sensors to maximum perceptive range, trying to filter out the sirens. Rafen listened for the sounds of combat, for gunfire or detonations, but he detected nothing.
‘We should try to find Brother Krixos,’ he said, turning back to the other Blood Angel. ‘If he-’
The rest of his words were lost in the flat report of an explosion, as a blast of smoke, fire and noise erupted out of the inclinator’s controls. Astorath caught the discharge at point-blank range and it blew him back across the wide elevator deck, ceramite screeching on metal as the High Chaplain skidded and tumbled.
Rafen ran toward him, just as the platform gave off a howl of tortured metal. One of the roller guides stuttered and slipped, and suddenly the deck was canted at a steep angle. Untethered cargo modules spilled across the inclinator, and Rafen threw himself aside, narrowly avoiding a collision with a hulking steel crate the size of a Dreadnought. Grabbing at a guide rail for purchase, Rafen moved as quickly as could toward Astorath’s prone form. He saw the High Chaplain move, heard him groan. The chestplate of his armour was smoking but the damage seemed minimal.
Then all at once, the guide rollers holding the platform in place slipped their moorings, and the inclinator shuddered and fell. Rafen lost his grip and rolled out across the decking, slamming into a quad of heavy storage tanks. The decking vibrated like a drum skin and Rafen could not regain his balance or his footing. He experienced the giddy, vertiginous rush of the headlong fall, strings of warning lights flashing past, racing away as they plummeted into the deeps of the Regio. He saw the tier counter rotating wildly, wooden ticker slats turning inside a brass cage, moving so fast he couldn’t read them.
The autonomic brakes finally snapped on, but it seemed to do little to slow them. Instead, great fountains of yellow sparks gushed from the smouldering rollers and the hot stink of burning metal filled Rafen’s nostrils. The platform crashed through ancient barrier plates erected to seal off lower levels, obliterating them in its headlong plunge. Some part of the Blood Angel’s mind was marvelling – how deep could this complex go? The indicator lights ceased, the last ring of them pulling away, and the inclinator dropped into a black chasm.
Then the impact. Rafen was thrown into the air, spinning through the darkness in the midst of the crash of splintering metal. His head smacked against the inside of his helmet and, mercifully, he fell again, this time into a different kind of void.
He dreamed of rain on his face.
Rafen dreamed of a ruined cathedral on a mausoleum planet, under weeping skies slashed by stark lances of lightning. He dreamed of falling without motion, of shadows and pain.
The scent of blood brought him slowly back to wakefulness. His cheek was wet, and he could feel fluid pooling. Rafen blinked, scanning the visible glyphs across the line of his field of vision. His helmet had been damaged, along with some of the actuators in his legs, but the cowl of ceramite and steel that surrounded him had taken the brunt of the crash.
He took stock of himself, feeling for injuries. Some minor breaks in his bones, contusions and the like, things that would have been deadly to a common human but little more than an irritant to a Space Marine. Rafen sat up and cast around. The preysight setting of his helm was non-functional, so with an exasperated grunt he removed it and secured it at his waist. The wetness on his face was blood from a wound across his temple that even now was staunching itself as the gene-engineered cells from his Larraman implant scabbed over the injury. He wiped the excess fluid away and peered into the gloom, shifting spars of twisted metal that had fallen across him. ‘Chaplain?’ he called into the shadows.
‘Here,’ said a voice close by.
Rafen rose to find Astorath standing behind him, his pale face corpselike in the dimness. ‘How long…?’ He winced at a jolt of pain from his scalp.
‘You can walk,’ said the High Chaplain. ‘So we walk.’ Astorath removed a chemical lumen stick from a pouch on his belt and waved it before them. ‘Look, there.’ He indicated a tunnel mouth not far from the wreckage of the inclinator platform.
Rafen took a step and then halted, looking up. Wreaths of smoke and wedges of debris made it hard to see far up the ascent shaft, but he estimated that they must have fallen several kilometres before colliding with the end of the passage. ‘What happened to the controls? The explosion?’
‘My armour protected me,’ said Astorath. ‘It was a small charge, less powerful than a frag grenade. Concealed inside the podium.’
‘Sabotage?’ Rafen scowled at the word.
‘It would seem so.’ The High Chaplain pushed past him. ‘Come. This way.’
The command came with such force of authority behind it that Rafen almost obeyed immediately and without question, years of ingrained training leading him to default to the orders of a senior officer. Almost.
He halted. ‘We should hold here. This is where our brothers will search for us.’
Astorath did not turn back to look at him. ‘This is where the Word Bearers will come looking when they learn their trap was sprung.’
The mention of the traitors made Rafen reach for his bolt pistol. By the Emperor’s grace, the gun was there and still intact. ‘Where are we?’ he wondered.
‘The deeps,’ Astorath replied. ‘The lowest levels of the Regio, isolated and left derelict.’
‘How do we get back?’ He looked up again.
‘As I told you,’ said the other warrior. ‘This way.’
Reluctantly, Rafen fell in step behind the High Chaplain, following him into the tunnel as his unease grew.
The warrens were cut from the living rock of Baal itself, reinforced by pillars of ancient ferrocrete that had become cracked and shot through with rust over countless centuries. The air was full of agitated dust particles, kicked up by the concussive arrival of the inclinator, and they filled Rafen’s mouth with a taste like bonemeal, sapping the moisture from his lips. Astorath deigned to give him one of his lumen sticks, and together the two of them navigated the aged corridors by the weak greenish light of the chemical lamps.
The walls were thick with oily lichen that seeped out of every crack, and in the midst of the fungal masses he saw tiny grubs writhing. There were shapes that fled before the edges of the lumen-glows, into boltholes and broken pipeways, and here and there thick curtains of web dangling from the ceiling, woven by fat, pale arachnids. An entire food chain of scavengers existed down here, living in the gloom.
The tunnel emptied out on to a rusted metal gantry and Astorath halted, sniffing at the air like a hunter canine.
Rafen eyed him. ‘You know where you are going. How is that so?’
The High Chaplain spared him a glance. ‘The accessways are all linked, Rafen. There are exhaust shafts sunk into the desert that reach down this far. All we need do is find the closest one and ascend… If we do not tarry, we could make the surface by daylight.’ He moved to walk on.
‘You are well informed, my lord,’ Rafen added.
Astorath made a noise in his throat that might have been a growl of irritation. ‘I was not always Astorath the Grim, brother-sergeant. There was a time, before my calling took me to other duties, that I served the Chapter as a line warrior in a tactical squad.’ He gestured at the walls, the lumen stick in his hand casting warped shadows. ‘I stood upon the battlements of the Regio as a sentry many times. I learned of its lore and history from men like Krixos.’ He gave Rafen a hard look. ‘By all means, if you wish to question everything I say, continue to do so. But you may find my answers become sparse as I direct my attention towards our egress.’ He strode away and did not wait for Rafen to go after him.
The Blood Angel grimaced and fell in step again. The shock of the alarms, the fall, all that was fading away now, and in its place remained Rafen’s growing disquiet. He could not shake a sense of wrongness about everything that was happening around him.
They navigated fallen sections of the rusting gantry, collapsed by the weight of time and neglect. In places where the path was broken, Rafen was forced to leap into the dark, praying to his Emperor for the certainty of a platform on the other side. Astorath navigated the hazards in silence, with only grunts of effort as he helped Rafen shoulder aside rubble or slice away debris with a swing of his axehead.
But for all his indifference, the High Chaplain was not ignoring Rafen. In fact, the reverse was true. Rafen slowly realized that the other warrior was scrutinising him at every turn, but taking great pains not to be seen to do so.
When a moment of pause came, as they stood at the bottom of a catchshaft damp with brackish moisture, Rafen’s patience reached its limit. ‘What do you wish to say to me?’ he demanded, squaring off before the High Chaplain. ‘I grow tired of your pretence.’
‘Do you?’ The reply was hard and brittle. ‘Perhaps I should ask if that blow you took to the head knocked the respect out of you, sergeant. Remember who it is you address.’
‘I know who you are,’ Rafen shot back. ‘There is no Blood Angel, no Son of Sanguinius that draws breath who does not know the face of the executioner!’
Astorath’s eyes narrowed. ‘That is my burden. And if you dare to think you could judge me for it, I will bleed you for your audacity.’ He pushed past and kept moving, stepping up on to a walkway that circled the inside of the vertical shaft like the thread of a screw.
Rafen’s temper flared. ‘Answer me! It was not fate that brought us together in this! Why else would you have been down on the habitat levels? Were you there for me? Or for some other reason?’
‘Do not ask questions you do not wish to have answered.’
The catchshaft joined an angled tunnel that rose up at a steep slant, and they began to ascend. Rafen advanced after the High Chaplain. ‘This is about the weapon. The spear.’
It was a long moment before Astorath replied. ‘It is so much more than that.’
‘I have nothing to hide,’ said Rafen.
When the High Chaplain spoke again, there was a challenge in it, his words severe. ‘You took the Spear of Telesto. You, a common Adeptus Astartes. You took up a weapon forged for a primarch’s hands and made it live. Such a thing should not have happened.’
‘It did,’ Rafen admitted. ‘I do not know how.’
‘A lie,’ snapped Astorath. ‘Who held the weapon before you, Rafen? What was his name?’
‘Arkio.’ He let out a sigh. ‘My blood-sibling.’
Astorath snorted, throwing a look over his shoulder. ‘Arkio the traitor. Arkio the corrupted. A puppet of the Ruinous Powers, created to cause a fatal schism in our Chapter!’
Rafen’s hands contracted into fists and his anger smouldered, but the High Chaplain was right. Arkio had betrayed his Chapter, he had been tainted by Chaos. ‘True enough. But I forgave him.’
This time Astorath gave a mocking laugh. It was an ugly, chilling sound. ‘You did? How generous of you. Was that before or after you ended his life?’
‘He knew of it,’ Rafen bit out the words. ‘I sent him to the Emperor with that.’
‘If there is justice in this universe, then He Upon The Throne sent your errant kindred’s soul into the hells.’
Rafen’s jaw stiffened but he refused to rise to the bait. They walked in silence for a few moments before Astorath spoke again.
‘Very well. Here is what I wish to say to you. It is a question, and if you do not answer, what I suspect will be proven true.’
‘I am not afraid of your words, executioner!’ Rafen snarled.
The High Chaplain looked back at him. In the lumen-glow, he resembled a monstrous apparition from some ancient fable, come to claim the Blood Angel’s immortal soul. ‘What happened when you wielded the spear, Rafen? What did you feel?’
Powerful, heady memories flashed in his thoughts. He felt the divine radiance of the spear on his face again, the light shining off the blade. ‘I…’
‘I know,’ Astorath growled. ‘The spear can only speak to the Black Rage and the Red Thirst. You touched that darkness within, didn’t you? That primal force Sanguinius left behind in all of us. You cannot deny it was so! It was the only way to activate the weapon!’
Rafen lost himself in the moment and he saw–
–the scarlet path unfurling about him in a storm of seething crimson, a fog of bloodlust madness descending upon him. The raw energy of his primarch a flash-fire in his veins, the traces of Sanguinius’s genetic code engorging with preternatural power–
Astorath nodded coldly. ‘I have seen hundreds of my battle brothers hollow of eye and fallen within. Are you any different from them?’
Rafen’s hands curled as if the Spear of Tele
sto lay across them, and he saw–
–golden fire, shards of lightning dazzling like fragments of suns, ripped from the air, collecting at the hollow heart of the teardrop blade–
He closed his eyes, and in the depths of his soul, he felt the mark of his eternal liege lord, indelible and bright as a star. ‘My life and my soul for the God-Emperor, for Sanguinius,’ he whispered. ‘For the Blood Angels.’
‘Your life and your soul,’ repeated the High Chaplain. ‘Are you ready to pay that price, Brother-Sergeant Rafen?’ Astorath rounded on him, and prodded him in the chest with an armour-clad finger. ‘Tell me, does the echo of that fury still resonate in you, even now? The gene-flaw overwhelmed you when you fought Arkio on Sabien, for how else could you have defeated him? My duty is clear, if any brother should fall to the Rage, then I–’
Rafen’s shout thundered down the tunnel. ‘I did not fall to the Rage!’ He shook his head. ‘You do not understand! The spear… it protected me.’
Astorath’s expression made it clear he thought little of that explanation, and he turned away, continuing along the tunnel. ‘How convenient.’
‘There have been those who looked into that abyss and did not end their days in madness,’ Rafen insisted. ‘Lemartes, who you yourself gave authority to live on and fight for the Chapter! And Mephiston, the Lord of Death!’
‘You compare yourself to them?’ grated High Chaplain. ‘Such arrogance. You are a pale shadow of the Guardian of the Lost, boy. And as for the Librarian… Mephiston may have spoken for you at Master Dante’s side, but I am not swayed by the words of a witchkin, even one as great as he!’
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