Fear to Tread

by James Swallow

  ‘We have a mission,’ he told them. ‘One that only our Legion can follow to its completion. My brother, the Warmaster, has entrusted us with a duty vital to the future of the Imperium.’

  He relayed the orders that Horus had given him, grimly revealing the return of the old xenos adversary, the facts of the nephilim’s invasion and likely conversion of a densely-populated Imperial dominion. ‘In the Signus Cluster, the light of illumination has dwindled to the smallest of embers. Those among those worlds that still hold true to Imperial Truth and their federation with Terra most likely think themselves abandoned or without hope. This cannot stand, my sons.’ His noble aspect became stern and uncompromising. ‘Once before we faced the nephilim and fought them unto death. We believed that they were cast down and destroyed, but like a canker, they survived and have grown to plague humanity again. This is not a universe of mythology and false truth!’ The primarch’s hand rose and closed into a fist. ‘We do not cower in the darkness in fear of ghostly powers and metaphysical phantoms! We do not give worship to false gods! There is only reason and enlightenment, and we are the light-bringers.’

  Throughout the fleet, legionaries raised their mailed fists and slammed them against their breastplates in salute, giving voice to their assent with a roar. Aboard the Red Tear, Meros and the others joined in; the clamour was so loud it carried up through the halls of the battle-barge.

  Sanguinius heard them, the sound of so many upraised voices resonating across the decks, and he gave a smile of acknowledgment. All around him on the flagship’s command deck, the human crew serfs stood by their stations at steady attention, while Commander Azkaellon and his Sanguinary Guards bowed their heads. At the master’s throne, Admiral DuCade mirrored the stance of her men, as rigid as if she were carved out of marble.

  The primarch appraised them with a look, gauging them for the battle to come. Just as he expected, he did not find them wanting. The hololithic plate holding him in its glow rendered every tiny movement of his wings, his face, his armoured form. Sanguinius looked forwards and spoke as if he were talking to each warrior of his Legion as an individual.

  ‘My sons. This will be a hard-fought campaign, have no question in your hearts. The nature of this foul alien enemy is well known to us, and we will not claim victory with ease. The nephilim are cornered and they will fight to the bitter end to resist extinction. Some of us may never see the sands of Baal again, but we will all fight knowing that this mission cannot fail. Horus has called upon our Legion to carry out this battle and we will answer him with victory! For the future of mankind, the nephilim must be ended… and as we defeated them once before, we shall defeat them again. These creatures cannot be allowed to live on. Their horrors must be put to the sword, their slaves liberated.’ He trailed off and drew his wings close to him. ‘We will do these things. We are the Blood Angels, and we fear not. We are proud sons of the Imperium and the protectors of mankind. We are the Angels of Death and the Emperor’s Wrath!’

  The shouts came again, and this time it was almost as if the Red Tear were shaking with the force of so many warriors joined in martial zeal.

  The primarch nodded and turned away from the hololith, the relay fading out. Raldoron was there at his side, the First Captain’s face set in a severe mask.

  Sanguinius stepped closer to his trusted officer. ‘You do not join your voice to the affirmation, captain? Should I ask why?’

  When Raldoron spoke, it was in a low tone that was shared only between the warrior and his warlord. ‘I affirm,’ he said. ‘But these orders – and the deeper truth beneath them – trouble me.’

  The Angel’s smile faded away. He had revealed some of the message sent by Horus to his closest confidants, to those who knew the sorrowful matter of the lost. Now, for a moment, he wondered if he had been wrong to do so. ‘Speak your mind, Ral,’ he told him.

  ‘I would not presume to go against your orders, my lord,’ said the officer. ‘But this mission, and the… the resolution that may await us in the Signus Cluster. Must we still conceal this from your sons?’ Raldoron looked away. ‘Master, you may think less of me, but I swear to you the burden of this knowledge weighs heavy upon me. It always has.’

  ‘I know.’ Sanguinius nodded once. ‘So too it does for all who share it, and none more than I. But this is not the time, my friend.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Raldoron demurred. ‘But that time will come, my lord. And it will not be at a moment of your choosing, unless you make it so.’

  He nodded again. ‘This too is clear to me. You have my gratitude, Ral, that you are here to remind me. Trust me when I tell you, we will defeat our adversaries.’ He smiled again. ‘All of them, without and within.’

  The primarch turned back to the central operations dais to meet Admiral DuCade’s waiting gaze. ‘What is your command, my lord?’ she asked. ‘All ships report ready to translate to the immaterium. We await your word.’

  ‘The word is given,’ Sanguinius told her. ‘Light the drives and take us in.’ He pointed out through the armourglass windows that stretched across the length of the flying bridge as Raldoron stepped up to his side. ‘All speed to Signus.’

  The gates of reality broke open and the fleet surged into the immaterium. Hundreds of Navigators, chaining their thoughts together into a web of subsumed egos, guided the Blood Angels starships out of the darkness of the void and into a very different kind of abyss. The screaming madness of non-space embraced them. Some among the Navigators, the most experienced of their number, sensed a shift in the transit. Something subtle, something so vague it barely registered.

  Warp travel was never a thing of ease, and given the recent rise of storms and psychic turbulence in the immaterium, the forecast for the deployment was guarded. It was not unknown for ships to be torn apart simply by the act of translation; punching a hole in space-time was not just a matter of opening a doorway, but an event of great violence and power. In dimensional transition these tragedies happened, and it was an accepted part of the voyage, a necessary risk. The greater the skill of the Navigator, the less likely it would be, but in a fleet as large as this one, in a mass translation event, there was a good chance that some craft would be damaged or even destroyed.

  There were none. Not one vessel of the Blood Angels fleet suffered even the smallest iota of warp-effect harm. It was as if the immaterium had welcomed them with the ease of a blade slipped into water.

  Aboard the Dark Page, the Acolyte Kreed felt the brief whisper of communion as the Word Bearers ship translated with the Blood Angels fleet, and he chuckled. The touch of the immaterium upon his soul was like nectar, and the loss of it immediately brought a ripple of sorrow as it passed on, fading.

  One day he would feel that touch and it would stay with him, Kreed told himself. One day, he would be blessed beyond all measure.

  The Acolyte turned away from the churning crimson sky beyond the windows of the wide sacellum chamber, and moved back into the centre of the chapel-like room, glancing at Captain Harox. While Kreed had removed his armour and returned to robes of office, Harox, resplendent in his ascended livery, the etchings of text upon his battle plate corrupted and broken, forming new words and symbols that spelt out a blasphemous litany. And if the light shone upon Harox just so, one could see what appeared to be a complex net of octal stars buried in the sheen of the plate.

  The Acolyte’s smile deepened and he pulled back the hood of his robes. As he approached the figure lying in a heap across the middle of the chamber floor, Kreed allowed himself to think about his future, and the promises he had been given.

  Kreed licked his lips and dared to wonder what it would be like to live with the touch of the warp within his flesh every second of every day. The thought of it aroused sensations in him that he could not quantify, but did not wish to cease.

  The woman Sahzë looked up at the Acolyte from beneath the crook of her arm and whimpered. She was crying black tears and shivering beneath the gossamer shift she wore. Absently, Kree
d remembered that humans found temperatures such as those in the sacellum chamber discomforting, but he was not inclined to address the matter.

  ‘Up,’ he told her, beckoning Sahzë to her feet. ‘Quickly now. You must make the connection before the transit is complete, or else the other astropaths in the fleet may sense it.’

  Sahzë climbed unsteadily to her full height, listing as if she were drunk. The woman touched her belly. ‘It burns me,’ she told him. ‘How much longer must I carry this burden, Kreed?’ The astropath sounded out his name, turning it into a keening, feline yowl.

  He studied her. The warp flask implanted in her flesh was eating her from the inside, and the agony was intense; but she had much yet to do and he told her so, ignoring Sahzë as her weeping began anew. ‘Let me speak to him,’ Kreed commanded.

  The astropath shuddered as the flask opened inside her. Without the need to pretend in front of the Word Bearers, the woman shrieked in pain and vomited up ectoplasm in puffs of white vapour and the pink mist of spittle and blood. Sahzë stumbled back down to her knees, her cries becoming growling and guttural, and Kreed listened to the crackle of her joints as her bones locked against one another in spasm.

  A face formed in the smoke, and it resembled Horus Lupercal. A mouth opened, cloudy lips moving. ‘Report,’ it demanded.

  ‘We are underway,’ Kreed said, bowing low. ‘The assemblage is great, Warmaster. Almost all of the IX Legion heeded their primarch’s call.’

  ‘The rest we will cull when this is done,’ offered the face. ‘Baal will burn again, and this time for good.’

  ‘Sanguinius has accepted your words as the truth,’ continued the Acolyte. ‘He has committed his sons to the battle and they follow him without question.’

  ‘Of course.’ The smoke-face shifted, becoming hard-edged and planar. ‘He trusts me. The greatest weapon, given freely.’ A curl of cold amusement appeared and disappeared. ‘The ease of this… Once one moves past the horror of betrayal, it is so very potent.’ Suddenly, the face turned and Kreed was beneath the full power of its scrutiny, undimmed by the great distances between them. ‘You understand, Word Bearer, Sanguinius is loyal but he is not a fool. If… when he suspects, he will become the most dangerous enemy to our endeavours.’

  Kreed stiffened. ‘He has no reason to do so. The Blood Angels believe to a man that they go to face the xenos. By the time they understand that the reality facing their Legion is quite different, it will be too late.’

  ‘See to it,’ the face told him, dissipating into icy haze.

  Kano’s cell was roomy, as such chambers went, easily large enough for a pair of neophytes to call it home. It was a hold-over from his previous duties in the Librarius, a compact and spare cabin on the ventral decks of the Red Tear with walls of heavy iron, a good pallet and an arming rack erected in the far corner. Before the Decree of Nikaea had prohibited psychic warfare among the ranks of the Blood Angels, men like Kano – the Lexicania, Epistolaries and Codiciers – had been granted the use of cells like this one. Inside, they could meditate and hone their gifts in a place of relative serenity. Such a sanctum, as small as it was, had great value and while others without Kano’s gifts could use them as well, they did not connect to the peace they instilled in quite the same way. After the edict, many of the former psykers now shared the same dormatoria as their non-operant battle-brothers, but the use of the meditation cells was still open to them.

  Kano had no doubt that the Wardens watched closely whenever a former member of his select kindred came to the cells. As he sat there, moderating his breathing, part of him wondered if even now Annellus or one of his kind was being alerted as to Kano’s appearance. He dismissed the idea; the opinions of Yason Annellus were not his concern.

  He disconnected from the events of the past few days. Kano closed his eyes, allowing his implanted catalepsean node to negate any need for sleep. He entered an alpha state, and there in the halls of his calmed mind, he reached for a zone of tranquillity

  In the days ahead, he told himself, he would need to remember such a moment of calm, so he might focus and bring the full power of his warrior’s wrath to the xenos.

  This was the mantra circling through his thoughts when the deck beneath his boots broke apart like brittle ice and he fell through into a footless hall of black air.

  Gravity claimed Kano and dragged on him with invisible chains, while stinking winds buffeted his body. The air currents reeked of slaughterhouse odour, pulling violently at his robes as if they wished to strip him naked and then to the bone.

  He was falling forever, and the crack in the deck that had swallowed him up was gone. Now there was nothing but the yawning, howling darkness and a torrent of ashen flecks that hung suspended like snowflakes in an updraft.

  A fragment of Kano’s mind – a faraway piece of him, as distant to this experience as his body was to the far-flung deserts of his birth on Baal – knew that he was dreaming this. He was in the throes of a vision, wrenched out of his flesh and projected into a realm of spirits and symbols; but one no less real, no less lethal.

  It was the warp. Inside the starship, despite acres of adamantium and the power of protective Geller fields, regardless of his own innate mental barriers, the sheer psychic force of the immaterium was dragging Kano back into himself. The touch of it forced his mind into places he had denied, made him re-ignite fires that had burned out and become cold embers.

  He struggled, desperate to disengage and revert to the meat-and-blood reality of the waking world. The dream would not let him go.

  The ash-flecks melted into drops of scarlet and Kano continued to fall, faster and faster now, beyond all true velocity, becoming a comet of flesh through the dark. Instinctively he knew that somewhere below there was an ending to this, an immeasurable surface upon which he would smash like a doll made of porcelain. He would be shattered.

  But he could arrest the fall with a thought. All he needed to do was break the edict. Let the fires of his mind burn again. Kano could hear that thought coming from outside his head, so powerful it was. It echoed through the darkness, offering him hope and escape.

  And if he did… what then? He swore an oath to deny his preternatural powers, and the echo of that vow was still strong, buried just below the surface of his thoughts. He could not betray it, he would not allow himself to show weakness.

  The rumble of air around Kano shifted in tone, becoming louder, deafening. The fall was ending. He was very close now. It would be over soon, and he would die there, trembling on the floor of the iron cell, dashed against the walls of his own mind. To die in the dream was to perish in the real.

  In those last moments, he saw a shape. A human figure, or something that attempted to be so. It was coming up out of the darkness, straight towards him, and it was screaming.

  The figure was a man, a warrior in heavy armour that glistened with wet crimson and hellish red radiance. Blackened hair trailed from his head, and he was surrounded by a halo of giddy, coruscating lightning that threw off sparks of sickening false-colour radiation. He was buoyed on the poisonous windstorm, raised aloft by a pair of massive wings unfolding from his back, and they were drenched in vitae. Every feather was dripping with purple fluids, and Kano knew it was tainted blood, spilling from the veins of the screaming, red-stained angel.

  The shrieking cadence from his lips pierced Kano’s soul, reached inside his mind and hammered at his reason. They were spiralling towards one another, heartbeats away from collision; and in that instant, their gazes met. He saw fear in those eyes, fear and hate and other, darker things.

  Then the screams became his own and his hands came up to shield his face as the blurred figure filled his vision–

  Kano awoke.

  He rolled over, sweat slick across his dark skin, the aftershock of adrenaline coursing through his trans-human form. The walls of the meditation cell came into sharp focus and he blinked, regaining some sense of where he was.

  ‘Brother Kano,’ said a languid,
flat voice. He turned and found a hunchbacked servitor standing in the doorway, one of the maintenance helots that worked the chambers on this tier. It regarded him with idiot eyes. ‘I was alerted by sounds of distress. Are you unwell? Do you require a medicae?’

  ‘Get out,’ he barked at it.

  ‘Compliance,’ said the machine-slave, with no variance in tone. It ambled around in a circle and wandered away.

  With care, Kano got to his feet and moved to the refresher unit, taking some water to wash his face and then cup to his mouth to drink.

  He found it curiously hard to look up into the mirror, and when he did, he saw nothing untoward; but the vivid dream-vision he had seen lurked behind his eyes and was not easily dismissed.

  A red-stained angel of pain. What was the meaning of this image? Was his mind trying to process some fragment of warp echo that had crossed into his thoughts? Had he experienced some omen of ill-fate?

  Kano snorted and tried to reject the image. Omens and portents were the remit of primitives and religionists, not a rational warrior of the secular Imperium. They were…

  They were…

  He blinked and looked at his reflection again, as something returned to him from the dream-vision.

  The eyes. The eyes were known to him.

  ‘Stiel,’ called the battle captain. ‘To me! Or do my words have little merit to you?’ The words were harsh and full of broken fricatives, the combative tongue of Fenris lacking the glossy rhythm of standard Imperial Gothic.

  The seer looked away from the patch of dull metal bulkhead that had been occupying his sight and met Redknife’s gaze. ‘Forgiveness, jarl,’ he said. ‘My thoughts were disturbed by our passing into the ghost-realm.’