Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  Horus rubbed his chin. ‘The Sword Argus and the Crimson Spectre, I think. Their Army platoons can garrison here, make sure the nephilim cult is dead and buried. If all goes well, they will disengage and reconnect with my expeditionary fleet in a few months.’

  The winged primarch glanced up into the sky. ‘I fear we have not seen the last of these creatures.’

  ‘The Khan hunts their birth world even as we speak. He will finish what we started here today.’

  ‘I hope so. The technology the aliens used, the ease with which they infiltrated the minds of these civilians... It’s troubling. We can’t allow it to go unchecked.’ Sanguinius looked back at his sibling. ‘So, where next for you?’

  ‘The Ullanor Sector. A dozen systems have gone silent, from New Mitama all the way out to Nalkari. I suspect another xenos incursion.’

  ‘Orks?’

  ‘Likely. I could use your support, brother.’

  Sanguinius smiled again. ‘I doubt that. And I could not oblige even if I wished it. My astropaths have been agitated for days, divining messages from our scouts in the Perseus Null. Compliance is sorely needed there, I have been told.’

  ‘Father’s great plan… It does not often allow us the chance to cross paths,’ noted Horus. His brother thought he sensed a thread of regret beneath the words. ‘How much glory did we share this day? Not enough.’

  ‘Agreed.’ There had been a moment when the primarchs had met during the engagement, when a horde of nephilim grey-skins had rushed at them with ear-splitting barrages of noise radiating from the glass spines growing out of their limbs. The brothers stood back to back and weathered every blow, cut down each attacker. The moment had been the fulcrum around which their victory had turned. ‘I confess I would relish the opportunity to share the battleground with you again,’ Sanguinius went on. ‘And not just that. I miss our conversations.’

  Horus’s frown deepened. ‘One day we will be done with all this.’ He gestured at the desert sands and the debris of the battle. ‘Then we can talk and play regicide to our hearts’ content. At least until the next crusade.’

  Something in his brother’s tone gave Sanguinius pause. There was a meaning buried in there, a moment that he could sense but not grasp; something that perhaps even Horus himself was unaware of.

  The chance to examine the thought was lost when a figure in crimson armour came running up the low hill. ‘My lords. Forgive the interruption.’ Raldoron bowed and shot Horus a wary look before turning to his primarch. ‘The Angel’s presence is required… elsewhere.’

  ‘Is there a problem, First Captain?’ Horus asked the Blood Angels officer.

  Raldoron’s expression was unreadable. The warrior had a gaunt, solid face beneath a high queue of grey-white hair, and he betrayed nothing. ‘A Legion matter, sir,’ he said. ‘It requires my lord’s personal attention.’

  Sanguinius fixed his captain with a hard stare. He was one of his most trusted men and carried many honours alongside his stewardship of the elite veteran company, hard-won through decades of war in the Emperor’s name. Raldoron was equerry to the primarch and held the new honorific ‘Chapter Master’, serving in a similar role to the warriors of Horus’s advisory cadre, the Mournival. He was not a man given to impulsive and ill-considered actions, so his intrusion here was cause for concern. ‘Speak, Ral.’

  There was momentary pause, so tiny, so fractional that only someone who knew Captain Raldoron as well as his liege lord did would pick up on it. But it was enough to signal that something was amiss.

  ‘One of our brothers has been… lost, sir.’

  Sanguinius felt his face become a mask, as cold seeped into his veins. ‘My brother, please excuse me.’

  He never registered Horus’s reply; he was already moving, following Raldoron out through the mist of battle-smoke wreathing the darkening desert.

  They did not speak, not as they walked, not as they boarded the land speeder that Raldoron had secured for the transit across the warzone. Sanguinius retreated inside his own thoughts and prepared himself for the worst as the First Captain piloted the flyer out across the eastern flank of the conflict area. They moved in the nap of the earth, rolling up and down shallow inclines, skirting the remains of blasted praise-towers and fallen battlements. As the grav motors slowed and they neared their destination, the primarch saw that the matter had been contained exactly as he had wished it to be. Raldoron, ever the planner, had made sure that a wide circular area was secure, a barrier of Blood Angels legionaries standing face-outwards in a wide combat wheel hundreds of metres across. None of them looked up as the speeder passed over their heads and dropped down to settle in the courtyard of a bombed-out empath-chapel.

  ‘In there.’ Raldoron’s grim words carried over the low hum of the idling engines as he jutted his chin towards the ruin. ‘I isolated him the moment I was certain.’

  Sanguinius felt the cold in his blood spread to his hands as they walked towards the slumped shape of the building. The walls had listed to the right and the ceiling had come down, forcing the oval church to sink into the sands beneath. A second, smaller group of legionaries stood around the black maw of the entrance; they were from Raldoron’s honour guard, and they also did not face the site they were guarding nor react to the presence of their primarch.

  ‘His name?’

  ‘Alotros,’ said Raldoron. ‘A battle-brother of solid, if unremarkable service. From Captain Tagas’s command, the 111th Company.’

  ‘What does Tagas know?’ asked Sanguinius.

  ‘That Brother Alotros is dead, my lord.’ A figure in gold armour emerged from the dark doorway and saluted. Azkaellon’s severe expression spoke volumes as to what had gone on. ‘Killed by the xenos, atomised in an explosion. A noble end.’ The Sanguinary Guard deliberately stepped into the path of his commander and halted, glaring at Raldoron. ‘You should not have brought him here.’

  Raldoron opened his mouth to speak, but his primarch talked over him. ‘That is not your place to decide, Guard Commander.’ Azkaellon paled slightly at the force behind Sanguinius’s hard, even tone. ‘Now step aside.’

  Azkaellon did as he was told, but he could not remain silent. ‘This should be dealt with by us, sir. Quietly.’

  ‘Quietly?’ echoed the primarch, his voice suddenly distant. ‘No, my son. No Blood Angel will ever die in silence.’

  Inside the fallen alien temple, the stink of fresh blood hung in the air, powerful and metallic. Sanguinius licked his lips; he couldn’t stop the reflex reaction. His omophageaic membrane tasted several different varieties of human vitae, analysing them as instinctively as a vintner would know the ages and textures of a wine’s bouquet. There was alien blood spilled here too, the acrid tang of the nephilim among it all.

  He found the golden boots of his warplate casting ripples out across a pool of dark fluid that had formed a small lake in the gloomy interior of the chapel. There were many, many dead in here with him, arranged around the edges of the chamber as if they were an audience watching the stage of a theatre in the round. Smashed fragments of nephilim neuro-tech – synapse sinks, empathic matrices and the like – littered the ruin. But none of the violence wrought here had come from the battle fought through this day. No, the scene here was not one of war, but of madness.

  He saw Alotros the moment he entered the temple, the thermal form of him clear to the primarch’s bio-augmented vision against the cold bodies of the dead. The Space Marine was crouched down on one knee as if in a gesture of fealty. With careful, steady actions, Alotros sat in the middle of the lake and mechanically cupped handfuls of the dark fluid, one after another, to his lips. He drank silently, unhurried.

  ‘Look at me,’ ordered Sanguinius. His heart tightened in his chest and a very specific kind of sorrow gripped him as Alotros slowly obeyed.

  The Blood Angel’s armour was badly damaged; fibre-bundle musculature ripped, ceramite cracked. It appeared that the chestplate had been torn open across the sternum and a brutal wound
opened beneath it. The primarch recognised the hit pattern of a nephilim shriekpulse, and looking closer he saw the trails of dried blood visible from Alotros’s nostrils, his ears, the corners of his reddened eyes. Such a hit would have boiled the brain matter of an ordinary human, and even for a legionary the impact should have crippled flesh and torn at neural pathways. Alotros was pallid and in obvious pain, but he seemed detached from it. The warrior had taken a point-blank strike from one of the alien weapons and survived, a rare happenstance; but, Sanguinius corrected himself, he had not survived. Not really. At this very moment, somewhere else on the battlefield, Captain Tagas and the men who had been Alotros’s squadmates were making their peace with his death.

  His lips, his chin, the exposed flesh of his neck, all were wet with the blood he had been patiently drinking, mouthful by mouthful. Alotros looked at his primarch with bleak, animal eyes. Sanguinius saw a hunger there, the same hunger he had seen before in other eyes, in other places. At first only rarely, but now with a grim regularity.

  Alotros released a deep, rumbling growl and slowly came to his feet. His hands tightened into talons and he showed his teeth. Fangs flashed in the gloom. In another time it would have been said that his soul had been usurped by some hellish phantom, that his blood was poisoned, that he was possessed. But such ideas were fantasies. The warping of this good warrior came from something within him, not from a mythical, otherworldly external force.

  Sanguinius knew that it was already too late, but he could not go on without trying. He offered his hand. ‘My son,’ he began. ‘Step back, if you can. Step back from the abyss and return to us. I will save you.’

  Alotros blinked, as if the words were foreign to him and their meaning difficult to grasp.

  ‘This is my fault,’ said the primarch. ‘I am to blame. But I will amend this, if you help me.’ He took a step forwards. ‘Will you help me, Alotros?’

  It was with a father’s hollow regret that Sanguinius saw his words fall upon stony ground. A feral intent, an impulse drawn up from the very deepest bestial core of the warrior, emerged on the Blood Angel’s face, and finally whatever was left of Brother Alotros of the 111th Company simply went away.

  In a berserk, furious rage that exploded out of nothing, the legionary tore across the empath-chapel in great splashing bounds. The primarch hesitated; with power sword, glaive-blade or infernus pistol, it would have been no matter for him to draw a weapon and end the battle-brother’s life before he came within arm’s reach. But something stopped him.

  Perhaps it was hope, hope that Alotros would be the one to break the cycle and not do the same as those before; or perhaps it was guilt that stayed his hand, some measure of punishment inflicted on the self to see this horror up close, to know the dying moment of it.

  Against all reason, against all possibility of survival, Alotros attacked his gene-father. He was screaming, babbling in fragments of the technomad dialect of Baal’s Low Mesa clans. The warrior wanted only one thing: to bite deep into living flesh and drink his fill of the rich crimson fluid within. He was truly lost.

  Sanguinius held Alotros at bay, the warrior’s maddened blows ringing harmlessly off his battle armour, the fires of his rage not fading but burning brighter with every passing moment. The cocktail of blood-fumes on his breath clogged the primarch’s senses, and Sanguinius understood.

  He knew where this crimson fury, this red thirst sprang from. He could sense it, coiled like a poisonous thread inside his own genetic helix. A dark bequest that he had passed on to his kin. A recessive death-mark.

  ‘I am sorry, my son,’ he told Alotros, in the last heartbeat before he broke the legionary’s neck.

  Alotros’s snarls ended with a guttural hiss, and at the end there was some brief measure of peace in his eyes. His body fell into the shallow pool; the Blood Angel’s pain was at an end, a final mercy granted to him. But now the darkness in the gloomy alien church seemed shades deeper, heavy with the weight of what had been done there.

  For the second time that day, Sanguinius sensed the presence of his brother.

  He wheeled, turning to glare into the dimness as a massive shadow broke away from a slumped support column and stood stock-still before him. ‘Horus...?’

  ‘What did you do?’ His brother’s face caught the light and the ghost of shock was etched upon it. ‘What did you do?’ The sound of his own voice seemed to jolt the other primarch out of his stasis and he rushed towards the fallen warrior. ‘You… killed him.’

  In a strangely protective gesture, Sanguinius stepped in front of the corpse, bringing Horus up short. ‘You followed me?’ His tone betrayed anger and surprise, shame and regret and a hundred other emotions. ‘Spied on me?’

  It was taking all of Horus’s monumental self-control to stay where he stood, the confusion on his face shifting, changing. He was grasping to comprehend what he had just witnessed, and failing. A primarch executing one of his own sons… The thought of such a thing was terrible to contemplate.

  ‘You should not be here,’ Sanguinius told him, echoing Azkaellon’s reproach. ‘This was not for the eyes of outsiders.’ His words were dead, bled dry.

  ‘That seems so.’ Horus gave a glum nod. ‘But I am your brother. I am not an outsider.’ He raised his head and met the Angel’s gaze, challenging him. ‘And I do not understand why you have committed such a hateful deed.’

  Sanguinius did not bother to ask how Horus had made it past Raldoron’s guards without raising any alarm; he was a primarch, after all, and the Emperor’s sons had always been adept at going where their will took them.

  When Horus looked at him, it was not with anger and disappointment, but with a terrible kind of empathy. ‘I should not have come here, but your reaction when the First Captain spoke… Brother, what I saw in your eyes at that moment gave me cause for concern.’ He stepped around and knelt over Alotros’s body. ‘And now I see I was right to think so.’ Horus studied the dead legionary with a clinical eye, and raised his gauntlet to tap a finger upon his temple. ‘Tell me there was cause. What was wrong with him? Did the nephilim do this, did they cause some great damage to his mind?’

  The lie caught in the Angel’s throat. Yes, he could say –

  A terrible tragedy. This is the work of the foul xenos. I was forced to take a regrettable action–

  ‘No.’ The falsehood crumbled before it was fully formed. He could no more lie to his sibling than he could chain Melchior’s sun and pull it from the sky. Horus and Sanguinius knew each other so well that to lie to one another would be a monumental undertaking, a pretence of ultimate artifice. He could not conscience such a thing. ‘No, Horus. This is my fault. The blame lies with me.’

  For a long moment, there was only silence between them, and the Angel could see his brother’s train of thought there in his expression, the questions he was asking himself, the answers he found wanting.

  At last, Horus stood and placed a hand on his brother’s shoulder, the stony lines of his face etched in disquiet. ‘If you wish it, I will leave this place now and never speak again of the matter. Your Legion is your concern, Sanguinius, and I would never question that.’ He paused. ‘But I am your brother and your friend, and it cuts me to see the sorrow in your eyes. I know you are a compassionate soul, that you would not do such a thing unless it was your only choice. But you have a great burden, and I would help you carry it, if only you will let me.’

  The Blood Angel’s eyes narrowed. ‘You ask much.’

  ‘I always do,’ admitted Horus. ‘Speak to me. Make me understand.’ He was almost imploring. ‘I swear to you, on the honour of my Legion, any words spoken here will never pass beyond these walls. I will keep your confidence from all.’

  Sanguinius met his gaze. ‘Even from our father?’

  The other primarch said nothing for a moment; then at last, he nodded.

  With great care, Sanguinius gathered up the body of his fallen warrior and carried him from the pool of shimmering dark to a stone pedestal.
The platform had been home to a crystalline devotional statue of a nephilim, but now all that remained of it was a shallow drift of broken shards that crunched underfoot. The primarch arranged the body of the dead legionary in repose, restoring the dignity that his madness had stolen.

  At length, Sanguinius turned to face Horus. ‘We were made to be perfect,’ he began. ‘Tools of war. The supreme princes of battle.’ He slowly spread his hands and the white wings curled at his back. ‘Do you think that father succeeded in his design?’

  ‘Perfection is not a state of being,’ Horus replied. ‘It is a state of striving. The journey is all that has meaning, not the goal.’

  ‘Did the Phoenician tell you that?’

  His brother nodded once. ‘Fulgrim may be a peacock, but when he spoke those words he was right.’

  Sanguinius laid a hand on Alotros’s stilled chest. ‘We give so much to our sons. Our aspect, our will, our fortitude. They are the best of us. But they carry our flaws as well.’

  ‘So they should,’ said Horus. ‘So we should. To be human is to be flawed – no matter what we are or where we came from, we are still human. We share the same ancestry as the people we defend.’

  ‘Indeed. If we lost that connection… If we truly were beyond humanity, then the Emperor’s sons and the Legiones Astartes would have more kinship to xenos like them–’ Sanguinius gestured towards the corpse of a nephilim blue-skin ‘–than to the children of Terra.’ He shook his head. ‘But for all that we are, we cannot escape what is within.’ The Angel pressed his fingers to his chest. ‘I have bequeathed something dark to my sons, brother.’

  ‘Speak plainly,’ Horus demanded. ‘I am not Russ who would judge you, or Dorn who would not listen. You and I, we have no need for pretence.’

  ‘I believe that there is a hidden flaw in the genetic matrix of the Blood Angels gene-seed. Something in my own bio-type. I have looked within myself and seen glimpses of it, brother. A murky core, a trait that lies buried and waits to be awakened.’

  Horus’s gaze fell on the dead warrior. ‘This is… the fury that I saw in him?’